Some years back, Christian bookstores made a mint with heavenly tourism books. These books claimed to offer not only PROOF YES PROOF of life after death, but also evidence for Christianity itself. For years, they made money. And then, the entire genre collapsed. Today, let’s talk about the rise and fall of heavenly tourism, why Christians loved this genre so much, and what its former popularity tells us about their faith.
(This post first went live on Patreon on 12/31/2024. Its audio ‘cast lives there too and is available now!)
Defining heavenly tourism
Around this time of year, it might be natural for people’s thoughts to turn to the big transitions of life: birth and death. It might also come naturally to humans to contemplate what happens to us after we die. (We’re a little less nervous about where our consciousness is before birth, for some reason.)
Almost all religions make claims about life after death in some way. Some have people reincarnating. Others have people making long journeys, getting judged against feathers, or becoming food for angry gods. Christianity has fervent, faithful adherents enjoying an eternity in Heaven, though as we’ve seen they rarely agree on exactly what Heaven will be like for them.
Perhaps it is that exact gauzy, imprecise understanding of Heaven that made heavenly tourism so appealing to Christian consumers.
Heavenly tourism is a book genre offering apparently real glimpses of Heaven. (An evangelical, Tim Challies, has claimed to have created the name; here’s a pic archive in case the infographic doesn’t reproduce.) As you might guess, these glimpses take the form of near-death experiences, or NDEs. Almost always, the person claiming to have had the NDE is already Christian. When they are revived, they reveal what they saw in those moments of totes-for-realsies death.
For the most part, the Christians who most love heavenly tourism are evangelicals. We’ll see exactly why in a few minutes here. As well, evangelicals were and are largely the ones condemning the genre and loudly wishing nobody would write that dreck.
Sidebar: A note about NDEs
Obviously, NDEs are not actually evidence for any kind of life after death. They’re reliably produced through excessive G-forces produced during the testing of fighter jets, for example—which are in no way lethal in those situations.
No, once someone’s dead, they are really dead. An NDE might have someone coming uncomfortably close to death, but that’s not death. The brain doesn’t die during an NDE, and you’re only mostly dead till it dies. Once your brain is dead, you’re really completely dead. Nobody comes back from real death to talk about cotton candy clouds and sitting on Jesus’ lap and petting lions.
Perhaps making matters worse, the people claiming to have had NDEs tend to see whatever their culture or personal faith leads them to expect to see. In the case of heavenly tourism, Christians expect to see Christian-ish imagery. And so that is exactly what they claim to see, and what they write about.
Heavenly tourism is supposed to fill the flocks with awe and joy and hope. In this way, they are quite different from the subgenre hellish tourism, best exemplified in 23 Minutes in Hell by Bill Wiese. We’ll get to hellish tourism in a minute.
The heavenly tourism genre made authors and Christian bookstores a lot of money between the 2000s and the mid-2010s. And then the entire house of cards collapsed. Hopeful Christians still write heavenly tourism books, of course. After all, no fake claims that enter Christianity can ever truly leave it. But the genre isn’t anything close to the juggernaut it was in its heyday.
How heavenly tourism became popular…
In 2010, Alex Malarkey and his dad Kevin published The Boy Who Came Back from Heaven. That same year, Colton Burpo and his dad Todd published Heaven is for Real. Both centered around these boys’ claims of NDEs. Just a couple of years later, Eben Alexander, a neurosurgeon, published Proof of Heaven, which concerned an NDE he claimed to have had. All of these names and books will become relevant shortly.
There were other books in the genre, of course—many others. But these three were the big blockbusters. In fact, Burpo’s story got made into a Hollywood movie!
As they soared to their heights, though, these stories divided Christians in a very serious way. Hardline evangelicals in particular got very upset about them even before the huge scandal that more or less ended the genre’s already meager credibility. When Alexander’s story got ripped apart in 2013—in Esquire, no less—it didn’t faze Christians much. The neurosurgeon hadn’t peddled a strictly Christian view of Heaven anyway.
But Alex Malarkey’s book certainly did.
So when Malarkey’s account fell apart, that mattered a lot more.
Well, it did a few years later at least.
…And then fell apart under the weight of its own lies
Not too long after his book was published, Malarkey withdrew his claims of having seen and visited Heaven. His mother helped him get the word out to the Christ-o-sphere. However, the Christ-o-sphere seemed at first to be very reluctant to accept that the book was pure bunkum. It took several years for the retraction to gain momentum. (In 2018, Malarkey—then 20 years old—even sued the publisher of his book.)
In 2015, though, the Christ-o-sphere exploded. Everyone pretended that Malarkey had just revealed the ruse, rather than trying desperately with his mother for years to alert people to it. Lifeway, then a major chain of brick-and-mortar evangelical-run bookstores, withdrew the book from its stores. Malarkey’s publisher, Tyndale Books, withdrew his book from publication.
More than that, though, various sellers declared they’d no longer stock any heavenly tourism books at all. Meanwhile, posts streamed forth from Christian blogs to condemn heavenly tourism. It’s almost like nobody had dared say a word while they were popular—or else nobody had any suspicions at all about their veracity until they couldn’t avoid knowing they were all fake. Here are a few notable posts:
- It Is Written, February 2015: “Heavenly Hoax“
- Building Jerusalem, March 2015: “Heaven Tourism is bunk & how can we be sure if God is speaking“
- Dispatches from the Shadowlands, March 2015: “Heavenly Tourism or the Kingdom“
- Gateway News, December 2015: “Visits to Heaven and Back — Are They Real?” (It’s a short review of a book by Mark Hitchcock examining heavenly tourism accounts.)
Overall, Christians criticized heavenly tourism stories because they are suspiciously varied in content—and worse, they disagree with the Bible in key places. Perhaps worst of all, these stories’ popularity betrayed a suspicious lack of faith in the Bible’s sufficiency as a faith sourcebook.
But somehow, none of those criticisms had mattered to vast numbers of Christians just five years previously.
After 2015, the entire genre collapsed. I know of no popular book in the genre printed since then. Rarely have I seen such a popular trendy genre implode like that!
Why Christians loved heavenly tourism…
I can see why so many Christians loved heavenly tourism. As I said, Heaven is a very gauzy, clouded, indistinct concept to almost all of them. Indeed, there seem to exist as many shapes of Heaven as there do Christians!
Alas, literally nobody has ever ponied up any evidence even for the very basic concepts underlying the Christian Heaven. I’m not even talking about it being a gold Borg cube or whatever (as Revelation 21 describes). No, I’m talking about all the claims that precede the gold Borg cube:
- A meaningful, conscious existence after death
- Pleasant and unpleasant destinations for our post-death consciousness…
- …That cannot be changed posthumously…
- …But rather depend utterly upon choices made during life
- Those destinations matching Christian claims in any way
- Obedience to Christian leaders being the only way to access the only pleasant posthumous destination
Nobody’s ever found any objective support for even the first of those claims. So yes, I can absolutely see Christians glomming hard onto anyone claiming to have visited Heaven. Heavenly tourism must make the place seem far more real to pew-warmers.
…While their leaders hated it…
That infographic from Tim Challies (relink) contains all kinds of quotes from high-ranking evangelical leaders who all condemn heavenly tourism. They’re not the only ones who dislike the genre, either.
In 2020 and years after the genre had died, an evangelical pastor complained about heavenly tourism and stoutly declared, “The Bible is enough. Amen.” He advised Christians to read their Bibles to figure out what Heaven is like. Yeah, we did that last week and it was hilarious. The verses he lists in his post aren’t descriptive in the least. The verses that are descriptive, though, make Heaven sound preposterous—like an obviously apocalyptic, allegory-loaded fever-dream.
Dude’s like my first Pentecostal pastor—one of those we’ll figure it out once we get there types—and he can’t even imagine why some Christians latch onto anyone who offers them a teeny bit more substantial information than the Bible provides.
More recently, this past March Josh Buice, a Calvinist hardliner evangelical, blamed the entire genre on “charismatics” within evangelicalism. Aww, someone doesn’t like evangelicalism’s fusion with fundamentalism! But I can promise him that my old tribe of Pentecostals wouldn’t have had anything to do with heavenly tourism. New ones? Maybe. But the old-school ones I was with? Nope. Nope nope nope. It would have been a hard pass. Back then, we’d have seen that fusion as evangelicals trying to half-ass literalism and inerrancy while avoiding all the messy emotionalism of fundamentalism.
…And why the flocks didn’t need hellish tourism quite as much
As I mentioned, sometimes a riff on a publishing genre makes an appearance. We might call this one hellish tourism. It involves either a lapsed or non-Christian who experiences an NDE about the Christian Hell. This NDE always persuades the storyteller to adopt Christianity. Strangely, though, there aren’t that many of these accounts. Wiese’s 2006 book 23 Minutes in Hell might be the only big seller in that subcategory. This little subcategory also contains the 1996 book Beyond the Darkness by Angie Fenimore and 2000’s My Descent into Hell by Howard Storm.
If you’ve never heard of either book, join the club.
It’s possible that Christians never bought huge numbers of hellish tourism because they’re a lot more clear on what Hell will totally be like! Their Dear Leaders have been creating and polishing Hell’s imagery since their religion’s earliest years.
Nor must Christians buy books to scare themselves into Hell-belief. For Hell-believing Christians, their entire world is saturated with threats of Hell. For Christians who rightly reject that evil doctrine, these books’ contents must seem absolutely ridiculous and made-up.
(They are both ridiculous AND made-up! See also: Journey Into Hell, a series that describes how Hell evolved and changed as Christianity itself developed and grew.)
The problem wasn’t ever heavenly tourism, but rather Christianity itself not stopping lies from flourishing
In 2015, right after Alex Malarkey’s confession gained prominence, Brian Smith at Verse by Verse Ministry fretted that heavenly tourism books might taint his religion’s brand:
[T]his [meaning Malarkey’s confession?] has the potential to be seen as a mark against the truth of Christianity. The world’s newspapers and websites are all over this breaking story, some, no doubt, happy that this negatively reflects on Christianity.
It’s very late, I know, but I’d like to offer him some consolation:
Anyone with critical thinking skills already knew Alex Malarkey hadn’t seen Heaven for realsies. Nor had Colton Burpo, Eben Alexander, or any of the others making those claims. We also know that wingnuts with stories will blossom forth in every group.
What the group does about those wingnuts and their stories is what matters.
Here’s a case in point: After Malarkey’s confession, Colton Burpo drilled down harder on his own NDE story. His more recent words indicate that he’s getting tired of maintaining the façade his parents helped him build when he was just a kid. But PureFlix sure doesn’t seem to question it at all.
The problem isn’t that Malarkey’s confession reflects poorly on Christianity. It’s that Burpo’s story is still accepted without any questions.
What allowed the entire genre of heavenly tourism to exist is what reflects poorly on Christianity: that core of misplaced protectiveness that overrides honesty and ethical behavior—and punishes anyone who threatens the group’s power, income, and self-image.
That’s what reflects negatively on Christianity. The same drives that lead Christians to defend these idiotic, obviously-made-up books also lead them to cover up sex scandals and abuse crimes. Worse, these same drives make it almost impossible for Christians to question—much less reject—false miracle claims and doctored-up testimonies.
So it’s good that Christian bookstores aren’t stocking these books anymore. But it’s bad that it took years to bring to light the recantation/confession that made it happen. It doesn’t speak very well for Christianity’s veracity—or for its followers’ discernment and credibility.
NEXT UP: It’s the end of an era! Hal Lindsey, who helped popularize another dumb evangelical publishing genre, just died. And he died as he lived—as a failed prophet. We’ll check out his story next. See you soon next year! <3
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