You're Wrong About - "Heaven is for Real" with Adrian Daub

Episode Date: August 11, 2026

If your four-year-old told you about a trip to heaven, would you believe them? For a pastor named Todd Burpo, the answer was yes. In 2010, his book Heaven Is For Real—co-authored by Lynn Vincent—became a runaway bestseller. This week, Sarah tells In Bed with the Right co-host Adrian Daub the story of this strange little book, and how it reveals more about us than it does the afterlife. Digressions include Shakerism, The Big Lebowski, and the ongoing debate around pets in heaven. Send your submissions for our Halloween Listener Spectacular (scary stories or Halloween nostalgia) to [e-mail] before August 31st! More Adrian Daub: http://www.adriandaub.com Adrian’s new book What Tech Calls Governing comes out August 18th Listen to In Bed with the Right Produced + edited by ⁠⁠Miranda Zickler⁠⁠ More You're Wrong About: ⁠⁠Bonus Episodes on Patreon⁠⁠⁠⁠ Buy cute merch⁠⁠ ⁠⁠YWA on Instagram⁠ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Well, God wanted to make an angel look like what your son would expect and not one that's continuously on fire, as described in the literature of your religion. Welcome to your wrong about. I'm Sarah Marshall, and today we're talking about the 2010 book and runaway bestseller, Heaven is for real. And yes, it was published as nonfiction. We were talking about it with Adrian Dobb, co-host of the In Bed with the Right podcast. Adrian also teaches comparative literature at Stanford, and he also has a new book coming

out called What Tech Calls Governing. It's out on August 18th, and this critic is calling it the nonfiction horror hit of the summer. If you want to listen to our bonus episodes, we have a new one coming out this month where I do a little book club with our beloved friend Jamie Loftus, and we talk about Mary Jo Badafouca's memoir, which is called Getting It Through My Thick Skull. We talked about it a little bit in my lightning round episode with Chelsea last month, and after I bought it up, I knew that it was time to read it. And if I want to understand anything better, then the best thing for me to do is talk about it with Jamie. And so we did. I also wanted to tell you that later on in this episode, at about 56 minutes, we talk a little bit about pregnancy loss as it pertains to the

story in the book we're discussing. And that conversation goes until about the hour mark. and then we're back talking about Christian movie making and inevitably Kevin Sorbo. So if that's something you want to skip, that is where you can skip it. Also, we have another listener special episode coming out in October, and we're asking for your Halloween memories and your scary stories for it. You can send a voice memo about three minutes or less to sloppy and alive at gmail.com, and I will tell you my favorite Halloween memory, which is, that when I was in, I think, first grade, I was going to go as a monarch butterfly.

I had been given some butterfly wings, I think, by one of my brothers. And I wanted to wear a black body suit so I could be a beautiful, sleek monarch butterfly. And because it was late October in Oregon, we were going to be trick-or-treating after dark on a houseboat morage. My mom, I think reasonably at this point in my life, wanted me to wear a black ski suit instead so that I could stay warm. and somehow I got my way and got to wear a Unitar and be what I felt to be a theatrically appropriate butterfly.

And the thrill of getting my way that night is something that has never entirely left me. So that's my Halloween memory. We want your scary stories. We want your not so scary stories. We want to just hear your memories of Halloween. And so if you have some, you want to share with us and perhaps here in our Halloween episode, send them on to us at sloppy and alive at gmail.com, S-L-O-P-P-P-Y-A-N-D-A-L-I-V-E at gmail.com. And if you haven't watched the Stepford Wives, which is the movie of the book that that quote is from,

then that's my recommendation for your Halloween viewing too. I know we're a little early, but it's Halloween in my heart. Thank you for being with us. Thank you for listening. Thank you for continuing through these lazy, hazy, crazy days of summer with us. And now here's your episode. Adrienne, how are you doing? Doing good, doing good. We had a couple of cold days in San Francisco, but now it's beautiful out.

And I'm feeling summery and ready to embark on a journey with you that I'm not entirely sure where we're going. Yeah, I'm bringing you in for a surprise topic, aka I wasn't sure which. idea I could commit to in the time I had to prepare. And I'm bringing you a total surprise today. And I hope you like it. I'm excited. I feel like it's also, it's suddenly just now occurring to me that you might have talked about it on your own show. But it's too late to worry about that now. And what is your show by the way? I'm not worried. My show is in bed with the right. Which is a very triggering title. Yes, it's true. By the way. I co-hosted with the Indomitable, the Amazing Moradonigan. The luminous.

We usually talk about sex and gender and right-wing conceptions thereof and how those conceptions really continue to fuck up our lives. And it's a lot of fun. And you've been on it a couple of times. And each time we've told you you don't have to prepare. Yeah. And I had such a good time. And every time I've been on your show, I've come like super prepared.

And so this is new for me. And I'm not handling it altogether well. I can be talking about it. I love to freak people out on this show. Well, okay, well, let me, should I guess tell you or should I give you a hint? Which would you like? No, no, just tell me. Just tear off that band-aid. I'm like, just so I can, if you don't want to guess to have a nervous breakdown live on air. Okay, Adrian, do you remember perhaps being in an airport or Barnes and Noble in the year of our Lord 2010, even more so 2011, and seeing a book with a smile. smiling toddler on it and the book was called,

Heaven is for real. Oh my God. Yes, I do and I must have made. I haven't thought of it since 2011. Like I have a brief moment. I was like, oh shit, I haven't. And then I'm like, no, no, no, no. Yes, it's coming back.

I can picture the cover. You probably saw it while on your way to a destination wedding that took place in a barn. In a barn, probably Poconos or Cat Skills. We were obsessed with getting married in barns back then. I think it was in response to the Great Recession, as so many of our trends are as millennials, we're like, well, let's get married in a fucking barn. But not in like a cool rural area, but in like a rural area where you're like, why are we here?

Where you're like giving your friends the deliverance experience. Yeah. There should be more wedding-related horror movies. It's a very under-exploited corner of the market. It is true. It is true. Sort of a midsumar, but with like more corduroy pants. Yeah.

Midsomar is pretty wedding-y. Yeah. But okay, this is a book I've been thinking about for a while. I first read it in I think 2019 and I was kind of considering it as a show topic. And I remember thinking like, okay, but isn't this like a bit thin for a show where it's a book called Heaven is for real and your argument is what, that we're wrong about that Heaven is for real? And I kind of nagged myself out of it.

But revisiting it now. Big of true. Huge of true. And who can say is the thing? Apparently this kid allegedly. But when I was just thinking about like stuff that I felt sufficiently passionate about and had thought about enough in my life to talk about with you today and also trying to narrow it down to like something kind of like the Hitler Diaries, which we talked about when you came on not too long ago is like a hoax memoir and a narrative that people really like had a strong desire for and a desire to be real. this really came to mind.

So this is basically Michelle remembers in brackets heaven. Yeah. It is very much like Michelle remembers. That really struck me a couple times revisiting this. And one of the reasons is that the publisher has this approach of like, well, you know, I believe that the people who are talking to me, in this case, this kid who's 11 when the book comes out, his name is Colton Burpo. And I'm not going to make fun of that name. No. But it's hard to say it in a way that doesn't make.

it sound like I am, but I'm going to do my best. Because it's just like, it's just cute. It can't help but be. But it's the Burpo family. They live in Nebraska. They live in like the southwest-ish corner of Nebraska where you're basically in Colorado. And it's just like, you know, a lot of fields. Yeah.

A lot of grain. And they live in a town of about 2000. And Colton's dad, Todd, is the author of the book. along with a kind of co-writer, ghostwriter, Lynn Vincent, who at the time, probably her biggest book aside from this, was Sarah Palin's memoir, Going Rogue. Wow. Okay. Another time capsule.

Wait, can I just ask you, so now that when you said Todd Burple, I was picturing Greg Kinnear, was this made into a movie? Yes, it was made into a movie, and it was Greg Kinnear. Fuck, because I have seen this. I remember it was sort of in my world as a curio, like in bookstores, you know, on bookshelves at airports. I'm sure I saw people reading it. But like, yeah, like, I don't think this is one of those books where anyone was like,

oh, you got to check it out. Like, even like someone's parent. Right. And yet it also did sell by a lot of word of mouth because maybe not, you know, the word of mouth that you and I were experiencing at the time. Nobody told me to read it. And what was I reading in 2011? I was in an MFA program, so I was reading a lot of Flannery O'Connor and Raymond Carver.

Of course, got to. Or Flannery O'Carver, as a friend of mine called them, and was learning to write great short stories about, you know, a preacher stealing a girl's wooden leg. You know, that's the world of literary fiction. And some figures for you. This book was published in November of 2010. It had an initial print run of 40,000. and it was published by a Christian publisher, which may make you think, it made me think that, you know,

this is probably like some small underdog press. No, there are some pretty big Christian publishers. Oh, yeah. The way that Heaven is for real becomes a book is that Todd is connected through a friend to a Christian literary agent who works at a Christian agency. And this is just something that my brain hadn't computed. But Christian publishing was,

in 2024, an $820 million industry. Oh, wow. And then another figure I have is that in 2025, according to publishers' weekly religion books, which is in the United States is mostly Christian publishing, was a $926 million industry. So very close to a billion. And do you want to guess what the total sales in 2025 for print books were in the United States? For all of them? Yeah.

Or, you know, for like trade print books. basically. Yeah, no idea. $762 million. Oh, wow. Okay. So a smaller market than religious publishing and a smaller market than Christian publishing specifically based on that previous figure. So Heaven is For Real comes out with an initial print run of $40,000 and how many copies do you think it's sold by 2014?

It's published in late 2010. I mean, given what you've just told me about the Christian bookmark and what I know about the Christian book market, that all... books I've never heard of, like weird parenting manuals by James Dobson or whatever, sell millions of copies. And also the fact that I think a lot of this stuff is bulk buying by mega churches. Very good point. Yeah, there is a lot of that. I'm going to go for five to 10 million. Does that sound right? Yeah, it's 10 million. Oh, okay. So there you go. Yeah. I mean, I think that I think there's something about, you know, the copies of these kinds of books that you encounter in the wild

tend to be not the money makers. I think it's very frequently like these institutional buyers, like a lot of right-wing publishing. And, you know, the same way that the movies sort of tend to do well. Like, I think the movie also did well. And I think the movies tend to do well because people are driven there by their congregations. It's not like individual ticket buyers being like,

should I watch Final Destination 5 or whatever would have been out in 2011? Or Heaven is for Real? It's like, no, like we're going as a group. like our church group is going or the youth pastors taking the youths, so whatever. Well, and yeah, and with this idea that like there's a culture war going on and so you have to right. Yeah, organize in that sense as consumers.

And I think there was also, I think it was a combination of that of kind of organic word of mouth and also, yeah, what you're talking about, the sort of like cultural astroturfing that churches and mega-churches and a lot of Christian cultural institutions take part in. Yeah, basically like people like, like, go to these movies to make a point, which is that like, heaven is for real, is, uh, you know, a godly movie, but then like, you know, Jack Ryan Shadow recruit or whatever else came out like 2014. It's like, it's too woke or it's like too secular in its energy.

Right. So you're also trying to make a point sort of pushing that up in the charts. Yeah. And there's, there's an interesting, well, I mean, there's a lot behind its appeal. And one of them is that there are actually a ton of books written by people who claim to have gone to heaven briefly. I was this going to ask you that? Because I feel like I can't name one, but that feels like a genre I've encountered before.

Yes. Well, do you read a lot of kind of like religious, you know, grifting around the bubble of grifting type literature? Only if it's highly political for the podcast, but not otherwise, yeah. Not for your leisure time. No, no. Not usually a near-death experience kind of guy. I mean, I'd be open to it, but I just don't read much about it.

No, me either. And I'm surprised by this being such a big subgenre, I guess, really. And so this is a list of titles from a New York Times book review article by Robert Gottlieb in 2014. These are all heaven books. Heaven is for real. Proof of Heaven to Heaven and Back. Nine days in heaven. 90 minutes in heaven.

A glimpse of heaven. My time in heaven. That just sounds dirty. I'm sorry. 90 minutes in heaven just sounds dirty. Well, yeah. now that you say that. 90 minutes, honey.

When will the heaven begin? I like that one. Waking up in heaven. Afterlife, what you really want to know about heaven, the hereafter and near-death experiences, a vision from heaven, my journey to heaven, flight to heaven, appointments with heaven, hello from heaven. Oh. The boy who came back from heaven, revealing heaven.

And then he goes on others who's talking. titles don't include the H word. I saw the light, saved by the light, embraced by the light, and so on and so forth. There's a secular version of this, too, our attempts to kind of secularize this. One book I do remember, which also I think was adapted into a film, is what dreams may come. Oh, yeah. Right? Yeah. Who was that by? Oh, Richard Matheson. Yeah. Yeah, I love Richard Matheson. I still haven't seen that one. It's not good. Yeah. Like, I think the attempt to, like, they probably don't go far enough. to de-theologize the book and end up with this kind of absolute tear-jerker.

Yeah. Well, and so, and this line between secular and religious entertainment is very interesting in this book, which is like a crossover mainstream success, right? Like, it's put out by a religious publisher, but it really, it makes a big splash and it's adapted into like a legit movie made by people who know how to operate their cameras and sound equipment, and it doesn't even have Kurt Cameron in it, which is a big splash. It's hard to get him to not be in your movie, I feel like, especially at this time period. It's true.

And makes over $100 million. So, you know, pretty good. $100 million? Yeah, around $100 million or a tiny bit over. I saw 101 was the figure. Jesus. Wait, that's like, is that normal for these movies or is this the most ever? That's like the second highest grossing Christian movie, according to one review I read.

After the Passion of the Christ, I'm guessing, if that counts. Oh, I don't, yeah, I couldn't actually find the number one. And then I wonder how that's classified based on which studio made it and stuff. But, like, yeah, I certainly hope it's classified as a religious film. Haven't seen that one. I like the Saw movies, but I have my limits, you know. So who's in this thing? Well, the movie has Greg Kinnear, as discussed.

Yeah. And as Todd Burpo. It also contrives a storyline as Todd Burpo. and it contrives a storyline as well where there's like some conflict, which there isn't really in the book. And so the basics of the book are that Todd's son Colton has appendicitis. He has a burst appendix, which is misdiagnosed initially for quite a while. He's three years old. Another anxiety of a parent.

Yeah. And so by the time it's, I mean, it's like, it's a horrifying story because by the time he's correctly diagnosed, I think it takes several days for the right diagnosis. So he's, you know, according to the book and the same. completely credible to me. The medical staff, where he's being treated, have extremely low expectations of his survival and are not trying to give the parents, you know, really any hope, according to Todd. False or otherwise, yeah. Yeah, exactly. Right, because it's because the, you know, the situation is, is extremely dire. And yet he does survive. And months later, according to Todd, he starts gradually talking about going to heaven while he was being worked on by

doctors. And he initially says that he saw himself being worked on by doctors. And he saw Todd and his mother Sonia, Colton's mother Sonia, in two different rooms. And Todd is, according to the book, immediately amazed by this, because how could Colton know that they were in two separate rooms and that Todd was praying at the time? And a lot of these things, this happens like probably 30 times in the book where Colton will say something and Todd will be like, there's no way he could have known that or no way he could have guessed that. And I'm like, well, there are some ways that he could have guessed that. Yeah.

A pastor praying during a high pressure situation. Like, yeah. Right. Like the odds are actually very good on that one. Yeah. Right. And this gets back to the satanic panic because and to Michelle remembers because there's this idea and Michelle remembers and in this book, put forth by its publisher of like, well, these people seem like

good, sensible people, and they clearly believe what they're saying. So, uh, and then when people want to defend it more than that, the approach is to say, well, you know, this is a pure innocent soul who visited heaven and clearly is telling the truth and couldn't possibly be lying. So we have to trust this account as the truth. It's interesting that the sort of pure, simple person argument gets applied to both a three-year-old boy and a woman in her 20s in the case of Michelle remembers, but you know, whatever. Yeah. But it's also, you know, it gets described by Todd gradually in the book as sort of something

that gives comfort to people once they start to hear about it as proof that heaven really does exist, that it really is for real. And that's what the book is sold on. And the book basically details. And it's like, and Lynn Vincent is good at her job. Like she, according to a New Yorker piece, I read about her by Ariel Levy, she learned from James Patterson to make every scene into its own chapter. And so the book is like 35 really short chapters. Oh, wow.

Where something interesting happens every chapter. And you're like, well, I might as well read another chapter. Yeah. And according to Lynn in that article, you know, she's had fans come up to her and tell her, you know, my husband read your book and he's never read a book before, you know, because it's just like it's extremely accessible. in that way. And it gets to the point immediately or pretty immediately. It also, I mean, like the idea of having, like, or a book sort of telling you that its own message has all these salubrious effects and that's why it needs to be told, right? Right. The hearing of the stories of being included in it, it's a real, it's a real

feature of self-help stories and of self-help books where it is like, you know, And I told him this simple fable and then he turned his life around. Now I'm going to print it for you and you can buy it 10 million times. Yeah, it is pretty, it's kind of, it's self-helpy, right? Because it's like you will read this book and this book will have a function in your life. And in this case, it's to teach you that heaven is real. And, you know, the response to the book really gets into this as it goes out into the world and people read it. And also as, you know, some Christians read it and begin to push back on it.

And, you know, Todd Burpo is an event. evangelicals are like, well, you know, a lot of what your son is saying is not actually in the Bible. Like he mentions angels having wings and angels actually don't have wings in the Bible. They didn't start having wings in our depictions of them until I think about the fourth sanctuary. Oh, did not know that. Of the common era, I think. And at that same time, it was just as common, if not more common, to show demons with wings. For a while, it was a while. It was kind of like an equal opportunity, AkutraMat. You might recall that Pizzou, who is the guy who caused all that trouble in the exorcist,

is a, he's a little winged guy. Oh, yeah. With a big penis. Gotta have that. You got to have wings. So you can, you know, you can. Swing brain. That's what demons are really up to, you know.

They're not really trying to cause that much trouble. They're just rude, probably. But yeah, wings have not always been like a particularly godly thing to have. You can just as well have them if you're like a demon of the wind. But then, you know, they become something that we now totally associate with angels. And of course, you know, you'll also recall that we have like kind of different descriptions of biblical angels, right? Like they can show up and give you news. But they're not depicted as like cute baby-faced human beings typically.

they don't have wings, they use ladders. And as far as I know, they're not ever depicted in the Bible remotely the way that we kind of now make them an ornament and trick it form. And yet, you know, you have a child who has seen this version of angels coming back from heaven and talking about seeing angels that way. And so people rightly point out as a matter of faith, hey, you know, that part's inaccurate. And according to the Bible, this thing and this other thing. And there are people who get really into the technicalities of it, like as believers. which I think is meaningful and kind of... Yeah, oh, yeah.

I don't know. It would have been nice if that got more attention at the time. It's different from the satanic panic too, which really had a kind of yes and energy where it just felt like, sure, why not, right? And like it's good when I always like it when evangelicals get prosnickety and they're like, or Catholics too, for that matter, right?

Where they're like, the point of order, that's not, literally that's not canon. and literally that's not what it says and quit making things up. Right. I mean, if you've learned that much about something, it's kind of painful to see someone openly misunderstand it on such a grand stage.

And something that people also point out is that we shouldn't actually need a child's testimony to prove that heaven exists because surely the tenets of the religion you follow should be enough. Right. and your faith should be enough. And that's a really interesting thing that didn't occur to me until I was thinking about it to talk about with you, that like this book was such a huge bestseller.

And I think we, I certainly saw it at the time as like, well, you know, there's a lot of fairly right-wing Christians in the United States, which is who I was assumed was mostly buying it. That has to be a very good-sized chunk of the audience, you know, and people who, you know, just are interested in faith-based literature in a way that I'm not was how I saw it. And what occurs to me now and having read it a couple times is that this is actually sort of performing a really interesting function and successful for, you know, many reasons. But I think one of them is that maybe this reveals that this was a moment when a lot of people really were struggling with faith and needed a book that just in very clear, slightly convincing terms was like, yes, no, please keep believing. I promise you, it's, look, we have this kid and he went there and he saw it and he said some stuff.

So there you go. And the fact that people needed that is very interesting. Yeah, but I mean, it does, I mean, I think you're right that it does contradict the very nature of faith, which is, you know. Yeah. It's a little bit like when very religious people sort of point to the fact that their health benefits to their prescriptions and prescriptions. And you're like, no, wait, hang on. Like, even if this made you very sick, if God commands it, surely your faith would tell you to do it, right? And like, that's what faith is.

Like, I think it's Sir and Kierkegaard who sort of always points to. to the Akeeda, the binding of Isaac in the Old Testament, to say that's the essence of faith, right? Like, if God asks you to do something that's easy and comes easily, like, it's not actually that interesting a moment of faith. The moment of faith is the one that is stupefying in and of its, by itself without the element of faith. You almost can't account for outside of the religious element

or the religious conviction behind it. And, yeah, like the whole, like, don't worry, guys. here's an MRI that shows it's real, feels like you're misunderstanding the very nature of faith. I can see why theologians were being a little annoyed at this. Right, because it is. It's sort of, I don't know. It feels like a very American instant gratification kind of approach.

It's also like, I mean, not too, like, obviously, like, I am thrilled that the boy was okay, but also like, who went to heaven and made him sort of the boss messenger, right? Like, the Lord did, Adrian, you silly goose. Well, I mean, that's, I'm sorry, but that's like, not to play the sacralic, not to play the S-card here, but like, isn't that kind of sacrilegious? Like, surely with 8 billion people on the planet, like, chance visits to heaven where someone's like, oh, sorry, we got, we got mixed up, like, go back, would be somewhat frequent. And, like, so why, this kid, who I'm sure is nice, but, like, just because, what, God knew his dad? Yeah, it was a nepotism thing.

Yeah, yeah. This is how Zosha Mamet ended up in girls. I think Zosha Mamet. However she got there, she certainly earned her place at the table yet. Oh, yes. So how does the movie handle heaven? What are we going to get there? So I haven't watched the movie to prep for this.

I wonder if people would want to. We could maybe like do a bonus episode talking about it or do like a commentary track. But so what's interesting. thing about the movie is that it adds a plot element where this happens, you know, in the book and in reality, as far as we know, that it's this gradual process for Colton to start talking about heaven and what he saw there and his dad starts asking him questions. And Todd claims many times in the book that he, you know, was very careful to ask questions where he did not lead his son. And then you will immediately see him asking a very leading question. And you're like,

well, you tried. Another satanic panic alert, yes. Yeah, but yeah, exactly. Exactly. It's the very much satanic panic DNA. And early on, he's like, so Colton, when you were in heaven, what did it look like? And it's like, yeah, well, do you see how that's a leading question and that you're presupposing and reinforcing this earlier claim that he was in heaven? And this is now the opening premise of your question. And he has to like, you know, he's starting with that. And I mean, what questions would you have for this and the credibility of this story? I don't even know how I'd begin to assess the credibility of it. Right, because you're kind of like, well, it's, I don't believe any of it even a little bit. So why, where, what detail do I begin with? Well, also, I mean, like, the fact that his dad is in the biz, right? Yep, he's, he's a pastor. He's a pastor.

And also a garage door salesman guy. Oh, well, look, this is a one-stop shop. You can find out heaven's for real and, you know, get that weird thing fixed where the garage kind of jams, right? before it closes. Yeah, I think one of the problems is, of course, that, like, famously, Christians have not agreed on visions of heaven and have, in fact, kind of killed each other over, like, what heaven is going to look like or does look like. They love that move. It's wild. And so, yeah, I mean, so it would feel like if Mr. Burpo would do then reveal, like, actually, we were wrong about some parts of this and, like, I don't know, the Mormons had it right or

something like that. And like, okay, then I'd be like, well, that's interesting. That's not, That's an unusual thing for a man like that to say. But if I had to guess, with that kind of Christian entertainment, you get one of two things, right? Either they abstract so much from anything specific in order to make sure that it can be seen by any kind of congregation, right? Even though it might have a very specific bend. That's an interesting point. To kind of, right, the wings might well be on the angels just because, like, it's what everyone can sort of agree on. And they're like, well, God wanted to make an angel look like what your son would expect and not one that's continuously on fire, as described in the literature of your religion.

And then the other thing, of course, that I would expect is that, like, it's much more likely is that it all sort of conforms very closely to whatever narrow vision of the afterlife this particular branch of Christianity has, right? Completely. Yeah. That's something that I feel like we see so much in the satanic panic that, like, there's a kind of specificity. to do the imagination that actually sort of like belies its theological foundations and shows that like people had seen the exorcist. Oh yeah. Michelle certainly had seen the exorcist. Yeah. So that this is essentially like what you're getting is religion as filtered through or as melded with American pop culture. You're not getting what I don't know, Hildegarde of Bingon or St.

Teresa Avila would have seen, right? Like, you know, scripturally versed and based mystics. Right. You're getting like a hamburger. aggregate. Yeah. Yeah, right. And that's another thing, too, is that there have been a lot of, like, cool mystics in history. And it was like a great job for women in the Middle Ages, if you could get it, especially. And it's interesting that this is the person who people responded to. And it does remind me of talking about the spiritualist movement with Chelsea Weber Smith and a topic that they bring up a lot is that the spiritualist movement also really benefited women because it allowed them to claim that they were channeling men, which then meant that people would listen to the

them because they were like, well, I'm listening to a man. Yeah. And that, you know, a woman was so pure vessel and so kind of like, you know, had so little brain activity according to this view of gender, you know, like Fry and Futurama, that she wouldn't interfere with like the spirit that was trying to talk through her. And that that way that we sort of choose mediums who we don't believe to be capable of inventing anything is interesting. Yeah.

And that's true here too, where we're talking about a toddler who's, you know, three, when he has this near death experience, which is extremely traumatic for everybody in the family. And then is four when he starts to talk about sort of this idea of having seen himself being operated on and then of having visited heaven. And, you know, his dad, according to the book, you know, they keep kind of talking about it every so often and his dad will ask him questions and he always has an answer. And why don't we look at some of that dialogue, if you will? So the book is just to just to I as a literal. professor can, like, I should mention maybe also that in my day job, I'm a literature professor,

so I'd love to, like, this is set up as a, as a dialogue throughout, or is it just like they're, it's kind of told. It's throughout the book. Yeah, that they kind of keep, you know, and that is also something that I think you could use to claim that it is either more or less credible, that they keep coming back to this topic over a period of like a couple of years. And Colton is, you know, 11 when, when they publish it. I also like, Like, when I read this a few years ago, I was really aghast. And then when I started reading it again to talk about it with you, I was like, oh, maybe I was too hard on it.

And then I'm going to share with you a section that I got to that made me go, no, I was not too hard on this book. And I'm going to have you start reading underneath the pink line. Okay, yeah. All right, let's hear it. Back downstairs, Colton was still on his knees bombing aliens. I sat down beside him. Hey, Colton, can I ask you something else about Jesus?

He nodded, but didn't look up from his devastating attack on a little pile of X-Men. What did Jesus look like, I said? Abruptly, Colton put down his toys and looked up at me. Jesus has markers. What? Markers, Daddy. Jesus has markers. And he has brown hair, and he has hair on his face.

He said, running his tiny palm around on his chin. I guess that he didn't yet know the word beard. And his eyes, oh, dad, his eyes are so pretty. As he said this, Colton's face grew dreamy and far away as if enjoying a particularly sweet memory. What about his clothes? Colton snapped back into the room and smiled at me. He had purple on. As he said this, Colton put his hand on his left shoulder, moved it across his body down to his right hip, then repeated the motion. His clothes were white, but it was purple from here to there. Another word he didn't know, Sash. More?

Yeah, let's keep going. Jesus was the only one in heaven who had purple on, Dad. Did you know that? In scripture, purple is the color of kings. A verse from the Gospel of Mark flashed through my mind. His clothes came dazzling white, whiter than anyone in the world could bleach them. And he had this gold thing on his head, Colton chirped on enthusiastically. He put both hands on top of his head in the shape of a circle. Like a crown? Yeah, a crown. And it had this diamond thing in the middle of it.

And it was kind of pink. And he has Markers' dad. My mind reeled. Here I thought I was leading my child gently down this conversational path. Yeah, I bet. But instead, he'd grab the reins and galloped away. Oh, blame the toddler. Yeah. Images from Scripture tumbled through my mind. The Christophany or manifestation of Christ in the

book of Daniel, the appearance of the King of Kings and Revelation, I was amazed that my son was describing Jesus in pretty much human terms, then amazed that I was amazed, since our whole faith revolves around the idea that man is made in God's image and Jesus both came to earth and returned to heaven as a man. I knew by heart all the Bible stories we'd read him over the years, many from the Arch series Bible story books I'd had as a child, and I knew, are church's Sunday, school lessons, and how simplified they are in the preschool years. Jesus loves you. Be kind to others. God is good. If you could get a preschooler to take away just one three or four word concept on Sunday mornings, that was a huge accomplishment. Now here was my kid

in his matter of fact preschooler voice telling me things that were not only astonishing on their face, but that also matched scripture in every detail, right down to the rainbow colors described in the book of Revelation, which is hardly preschool material. And as he babbled, Colton asked me, his pastor dad every so often. Did you know that? And I'm thinking, yeah, but how do you know it? Thoughts. Yeah.

So first of Mr. Burpho is doing, he's doing biblical exegesis on what his son is doing, isn't he? The same way that in a sermon, you'll do kind of, at least, you know, I think in a lot of sort of what we're familiar with from evangelical pastors, do kind of an almost associative reading of a passage where you're like, oh, well, that doesn't seem like strictly what this passage means.

Don't you sometimes feel like pastors can be, it's kind of like being an op-ed writer or like a, you know, like being David Brooks or having like a weekly column where you kind of have to think of like something to say every week, but it doesn't, you might, you sometimes just don't have anything. And sometimes you're like, you know, the loaves and fishes are like this thing I saw at the DMV. And it's like, are they? Yeah, I always think of that line in the big Lobowski where, where Walter Solchukes, trying to make a connection to Vietnam. And when the dude calls him out and he's like, well, maybe not a literal connection.

Then the dude says, face it, Walter, there's no connection. I was like, yeah. Face it, pastor has no connection. Right. It's like you can just say pass this week. Yeah. Yeah. So there is that.

The other thing is he's definitely leading this boy on, right, in ways that in this case, frankly, are pretty benign. But like, you know, in the McMarton trial. became much less so, right? Like, this is the way you do not talk to a child who's been through something traumatic if you care about the truth. Yeah.

Right. If you care about whether what they're going to give you back is genuine experience or what you and your anxieties and your projections are putting into their heads and onto them right now. The third thing I'd point, point out is there's something here.

You know, I'm a, I'm the father to a child that is a little bit older than this boy. But there is also, of course, a moment at which your kid knows things and you don't know how they know it. And that's kind of an uncanny moment. There is really an experience of like early childhood where if they say something, you know, like kids do say the darndest things. And when they say it and people sort of look at you in astonishment, you're like, oh, she got that from or he got that from, right?

And then there's a moment when that stops being possible, and it is a profoundly uncanny moment. I do also think that the way, you know, the good reverend sort of tells the story here, it does occur to me that like maybe a in Christian fundamentalist circles that moment arrives later because they expose their children just to a whole lot less, you know, they do tend to protect them quite a bit.

So like they may still be able to say like, I mean, when he says, like, I knew everything that he'd ever been told at Sunday school, like, well, okay. Do you know everything he's talked to with his friends and like their friend's parents, his friend's parents, et cetera, et cetera. And the answer, of course, is possibly maybe it could be that it's a very restricted world that these people circulate in.

But sooner or later that moment comes in the life of a parent where they're like, where the fuck did this come from, right? And sometimes it's cute and sometimes it's really not, right? Like sometimes it's deeply uncanny. And it seems like on some level, like this is what he's encountering here, that like his child's, you know, spiritual life, such as it is for a, you know, very young kid is clearly shaped by his own religion, but also has gone beyond that, right? And is to some extent a universe of Colton's own.

Yeah, and I found, yeah, I found that so interesting what you're talking about, this idea of, you know, I mean, so much within that of this current culture war that we're in, culture wars, whatever it is, being, you know, partly, I think so much about the idea of parents wanting to control the kind of information that their children can access and thereby to control or to believe that they can control the forms of identity that their children have access to. And this idea also that, yeah, that also really struck me as odd when I read this, that a child who, you know, whose dad is a pastor and whose mom is also very involved in their church and whose whole world really revolves around Christianity and around church duties as well and who's, you know, just like in that

world spiritually as well as just in terms of time and like time in church, time in Sunday school, time with his dad. It's so interesting to sort of to have to kind of thread this needle narratively between, you know, we're in this like, we had built this life that was very focused on our religion and on ministering to people and teaching people about Jesus. And also my son could not possibly have known this very obvious thing about Jesus. Because one of the main arguments he makes is that his son said that Jesus had markers and that what he meant by that. And this is also very satanic panicky where you like hear something that kind of sounds

like something and you're like, draw a very specific conclusion from it. Yeah. And he sees it as, you know, nails and stigmata and decides that his son could not possibly have seen a crucifix or a depiction of Jesus on the cross. and therefore it's proof that he went to heaven and actually saw that. And I mean, I feel like the first thought of me and you and a lot of people is like, I feel like he would have seen that in his day-to-day life. And it's incredible to me that a person would argue that he hadn't.

But there's also a fantasy of control and of innocence here, right? That like, he's like, I know what he's seen in his life. Yeah, that's such a good point. I'm sorry. Your house must be by the, by dint of the job that you have besides. a garage door salesman, a wash in religious imagery. And if your house isn't,

then like other people's houses are, you have older female relatives, surely. You know, we all have seen white Jesus. Which books have, has he pulled off the shelf because he's interested? Which picture books has he checked out at the... Well, I guess you don't let him go

to the public library, but like, you know, I mean, the church has a library, you know? But yeah, it's like a really interesting fact of just, you know, the way the world is now that by the time you're four years old, you are encountering media that your parents aren't aware of and you're seeing things that they don't know about. And also, you know, just as crucial to this, you have a whole life of the mind that they can't necessarily interpret. And I think that freaks people out as well. Yeah, I mean, this child seems almost like his sock puppet, right? Like he's repeating back what his dad says. And as far, I mean, I'm sure I don't want to impugn his love for this kid. But at the same time, he does give him awful little

credit, right? Like, this could have been a moment of like, I guess I won't know, right? Like, is this a genuine experience that the kid had or a sign of just how varied already his religious experience is at this age? But no, it has to be like, what goes on in that little head of his is mine to know and cannot exceed that. And it's like, I have some bad news for you by children, my friend. They exceed what we put into them and what we can account for.

pretty, pretty early. And also, that's really, it's good news in disguise, right? Yeah, no, totally. Well, maybe not to that kind of person. I do think that, like, I mean, Tal Avon has, like, done such a great job on, like, in that new book about Christian, what is that called? Wild Faith, where the argument really is that, like, the Christian right really has this emphasis on children reproducing their parents and, like, really, like, any kind of

difference being almost violently, like, extirpated. And I think that there's something, like, this is not a violent book, what I just read sounds to me like a little daffy, but perfectly innocent, except in that one thing, which is like that he really seems to not be able to countenance this kind of, the fact that kids are different, that that's beautiful, right? Like, he doesn't think that that's beautiful, right? For him, deviance from parental fiat is a threat, is a threat. is dangerous, right?

Yeah, right. And that's kind of, yeah, returning to this book and thinking about, you know, being in the United States in 2011, the feeling that I had after Sarah Palin very narrowly, well, depends on, I guess, electoral versus popular vote. I feel like those are pretty different. But where Sarah Palin seemed to be coming pretty close to getting in the White House and then didn't. And I remember this feeling personally of like, talk to bullet.

And then the sort of eerie silence from the Tea Party. right. And I remember at a certain point, I was like, what happened to that? What happened with all the Sarah Palin stuff? Surely that didn't evaporate, did it? And no, it did not? And I feel like there's something eerie about reading something that is, you know, I think from everything we know, from the contents of this book and from, you know, the media appearances that they've made and, you know, everything that I've been able to find these are, you know, this seems to be, it's like a perfectly lovely, loving family who are very sincere about their religion and who, who, you know, seem to totally believe the story and have never recanted any of it.

And who also appear to be making, like, a pretty good living on it after all these years. And that doesn't mean that that was their goal. But it did happen. And it happened for a lot of other people who, you know, who published this book, who sold this book. It made a lot of money for a good number of people. And is that good or bad? I don't know. One of the things that comes up in the book is that this being American,

after Colton has this near-death experience where, you know, it's everybody in the family goes through this incredible trauma of, you know, not knowing for days whether he's going to make it. And, you know, having a child who, you know, had such a serious health emergency that was misdiagnosed for a sexual long time and having, feeling like the very near brush with death that comes from that, they then, you know, come home to realize that they need to find $23,000 somewhere because of all the bills that they have and the work that they've missed. Oh, God. You know, and that's not to accuse this book of having a financial motive, just to say that everyone in America has to have a financial motive most of the day or else, you know, we're not going to make it. Especially after a health crisis.

Yeah. And during. Yeah. Yeah. You got, you got. It's like when they were like, wow, Ruth Bader Ginsburg is working after, you know, having. treatment for her cancer while she's in a bed in the hospital. Isn't that inspiring? And I was like, no, no. What could be more American than that? Yeah. What could be more American than a very old

woman who must keep showing up to her work because if she doesn't, then all hell will break loose, just like Doris down at the quick trip. It's like a very low friction story. It's basically kind of Todd keeps talking to his son about what heaven is like and Colton keeps saying answers and Todd keeps being like, well, I'll be. I don't know how you would have heard of rainbows, except from the book of Revelation. And it's like, I fear rainbows are quite popular. Yes. And I don't, I don't know. I don't want to be mean to these people specifically. I want to be mean to the larger industrial, cultural forces that they are enriching and, you know, serving as kind of a sign of the times of the cultural takeover that we're now living in. But I think,

Yeah. You know, I can't tell people what to believe. This is a good point in time for me to say that my own personal belief about the afterlife, and this is just like something I felt, is that when you die, you have a three-week walking trip where you kind of, you get a little packed lunch and you walk over to death. And I don't know what happens after that. But that's what I think happens for the three weeks after you die. And I realize that sounds over the top.

I would not, you know, put a lot of energy into defending it. It's not a logical idea. It's just a feeling that I've had in my life. And it brings me a lot of comfort. And I'm not going to try and impose it on anybody. Yeah. Do you have afterlife feelings? Have you ever met God or anything?

No, not really. I've been, it's always fascinated me. At the same time, it's the question of imposing it on others where my understanding, my comprehension really just kind of falters. It's like if you have this kind of conviction that's wonderful and it's beautiful, if you have an experience that sounds really transformative, at the same time it feels like telling other people about it and expecting them to care change their lives based on it.

Well, care, okay, they might care that you had this experience. Yeah, maybe a little. but it's like telling someone about a dream that you had. Exactly, right? Yeah. Where you're just like, what am I supposed to do with this, right? Like, there is always a chance that it's not true, you know, in which case it's just, you know, you're using people or you're making them listen to this stuff for personal gain or whatever.

Or it's super personal and like there's no way to do it justice, right? to be like to treat it with the seriousness that it deserves in the teller's own mind. And it's like, well, I just feel like I'm going to be an asshole here. Not because of how I am. We've reached the asshole time of our conversation. And then on Fox News, they can have a story that says, Lefty Thornback, Mark's toddler. Right, exactly, right?

But the thing is, like, how else are you supposed to react to this story, right? Like, you can either be like, okay, cool, right? And just kind of swallowed hookline and sinker or any kind of like, okay, I don't know what to do with this is basically like, well, you're cheapening it, like compared to what it feels like to the person who's experiencing it, you know? Yeah, that's a really good point. Feels the same with like alien abductions. It's very clear that people have their lives changed by these experiences.

And then you're like, well, like, how am I, like, what's the generous way of dealing with this? isn't one, right? And I mean, I am interested, like, I mean, you say that you don't blame these people, you blame, or you get, you are a little annoyed at the people who make money off of them. Yeah, or, you know, I blame the whole industry, really, I guess, the industries of Christianity. And I'm, I'm interested in, like, like, one of the virtues of the way Colton's story seems to be told from what we've just looked at in the book is that it's not particularly dramatic. Like, there are no bad guys here, right?

Like, it's just, and I can't imagine this is a super long book. If I can just venture a wild guess. No, it's quite short and it's already pretty padded at the length that it is. Yeah. Something about airport bestseller told me that. Well, yeah, I mean, you've got to finish it before you touch down in Albany. Yeah. And so basically, I think that there's a, the structure of what we just got where, like,

Colton says something and then his dad says, Gzooks, like, that's in Daniel, right? Like, it's inherently undynamic. And that's fine, right? I mean, like, in fact, the fact that it is so undynamic sort of makes it a religious text. I mean, it's not told to you as a thriller. It's told to you as a religious kind of revelation, which, as you said, like, telling someone your dreams is far more fascinating to the person doing the telling than the person being

told to. But now I'm wondering, like, what the fuck did, like, the movie do with this? And, like, that feels like the moment when, like, you have to invent, like, I don't know, Adastardly like CNN host who doubts it all or like... They did a little bit. Or a parishion who was like the doubting Thomas. And you're like, I'm happy you're so sincere about this. But like, why do you have to invent enemies to get mad at in order to experience that sincerity?

It's a very good question, Adrienne. Why? What is that about? What is that about? To me, this is the Sully problem. Like, I have never seen the Clint Eastwood movie about the miracle on the Hudson. Oh, yeah. But, like, the trailer made me so mad because, like, in the trailer, it's very clear that, like, the, what are they called?

The people who do the airline investigation, the FAA, that the FAA basically is cast as the villains who, like, try to bring, like, heroic Sully down. And I'm like, what the fuck are you talking about, Clint Eastwood? Like, everyone was falling all over themselves, like, justifiably so over the freaking miracle on the friggin' Hudson because, like, we were all pretty blown away by what had happened. And also, why must we turn this into a story about? federal deregulation. There's that, but also, like, why do we need to have people to be mad at, right? Like, if you're really impressed with what Sullivan did, fine. But, like, yeah, you're going to make a somewhat boring movie where a guy does his job

for two and a half minutes or however long it was, does something pretty incredible. And then nothing, I guess, right? But, like, no, you had to invent villains. And it's the villains that, like, confirm your priors is the same people that everyone's always mad at, right? like, yeah, the evil feds, the evil bureaucrats, the deep state, blah, blah, blah, blah. Right? And it's like, okay, Clint Eastwood, like, if I were like an FAA agent, I'd be like pretty

pissed at that and be like, we fucking like glad handed this guy. And now we're like here in like a pretty big movie getting like, you know, shot on by Clint fucking Eastwood. Right. And like, I'm just going to go out on a limb and assume that like there is going to be something like that in this movie because like the movie has to movie somehow. Right? Like being like, tell me more, Colton.

I mean, that's a cool, like, experimental film. And I'm sure, you know, South by Southwest would like a word. But if this thing made $100 million, like, there's a doubting Thomas here. There's a bad guy here, right? Yeah, there's got to, right. There's got to be like the part 20 minutes from the end when you're like, oh, no, things are bad. Yeah. Yeah.

It's, uh, this also reminds me, I probably have even said this on the show before this year. But I, because I'm such an evangelist for this movie, ha, ha. But I really loved the Testament of Anne Lee, which is about Amanda Seifred founding the Shaker movement. It's great. I loved it. Yeah, yeah. And I was really expecting there to be a part where someone was like, you've taken things too far, Anne Lee. Your founding a religion has made you overly confident in your own ideas.

Like, that never happens. It's just like she starts a religious sect. Some people don't like it. It's not her problem. The end, basically. Like, she just does a great job. And there's never a part where it's like, has success spoiled Anne Lee? It's like, no.

I mean, she's got to deal with, you know, with like various, you know, colonial violence in terms of shakers being conscientious objectors. If such a term could be said to exist back then. You know, but the idea that someone can, that someone's life can be meaningful and heroic if they don't have to like defeat somebody. And also the Testament of Anne Lee was directly. by an Norwegian director, which made me go, of course, no American could possibly conceive of not having a part where someone's like, you're drunk with power, Anne Lee.

You've made too many chairs. It used to be about the love, and now it's about the chairs. The chairs. My mom loves shaker furniture, so I was taken to a lot of, like, shaker sites when I was growing up. So it was like a very nostalgic experience of that movie.

And now I love shaker furniture. Yeah. Because, and also, Shaker design is very ADHD friendly, I think, because you can see all of your stuff. That is true. But anyway, so in the Hollywood version of Heaven is for real, they have to kind of invent this final act that people start hearing about Colton and people are coming to the town. And the church tries to oust Todd, I think. And he has to give like a really rousing sermon.

He has to just pastor like he's never pastored before and it works. and the end, you know? So it's like, it kind of, in a way, it also is based on giving him something to do as opposed to just, you know, talking to his son. Oh, and the other, there's another thing, too, that the book argues is very convincing. And this relates to pregnancy loss. And it's that previously to, before they had Colton, the burpos lost a pregnancy. And Colton comes down and says, I met my sister, a brother.

that he has two sisters. And they say, no, you have one sister. And he says, no, I met my sister in heaven. And the parents are, you know, very, very moved by this. Oh, God. And I feel, and again, there's this sort of return to this idea of, like, there's no way that Colton could have found out about this any other way, but going to heaven.

And again, I return to my own doubting Thomasness. And I don't take offense at that. If the leader of my, the movement I'm in says that he's come back from the dead, I want to stick my finger inside of whatever wounds he has to offer. I need to be sure. And I'm not... You're like doubting Thomas here. May I?

I'm fine with that. Yeah. Someone's got to do it. You don't mind, right? Just ask for consent first. He's like, no, it's cool. I've been through worse this week. But in this case, I feel like, you know, my response to that is, you know, that there are

some ways he could have heard about it, you know? He could have kids, you know, And this is with, you know, another satanic panic parallel where there's this idea of how could my child have heard about this thing, either, you know, from parents talking or about the media or conceived of these images, if not through this very specific scenario that we're trying to confirm. And the answer is, you know, that little pictures have big ears and kids hear a lot. And they see things. Yeah. A million ways is the answer. A million ways.

And even if you don't tell them about things, other people will and other adults will, other kids will. other family members well. But I feel like this is probably a section of the book that readers really responded to. And my own kind of personal feeling and opinion about it is that this was, and the language of the book does touch on this, that this was a loss that they had kind of felt that they had already dealt with

and then having Colton talking about a sister made them able to sort of bring their miscarriage back into their idea of their family. I think. Yeah, yeah. And to sort of have this kind of healing experience of grief. And I guess that's kind of one of the big things that separates this as well from the satanic panic literature is that, you know, everything we see is a positive outcome.

You know, once it becomes this big publishing phenomenon, you could argue, and I probably would, that like this kind of helped push the needle into us as Americans not wondering on a larger cultural scale about facts. and not asking the questions that we needed to be asking. You know, because when this book starts, you know, selling millions of copies, it becomes kind of this genuine news story, how well it's doing, is something that was published without really conventional publicity, at least of the secular variety. And so there's this very odd interview on The Today Show where Matt Lauer is talking to

Todd and Sonia and Colton and, you know, is in this very odd position of saying, So Colton, when you went to heaven and you saw your grandfather, what did he look like? And it's like, why are we framing the interview like this? Why is, you know, because there's, I think that perhaps as a country you can't come back from a major news outlet, multiple major news outlets and secular outlets, treating his documentary truth and account of a religious experience simply because it's a bestseller, I guess. what do you think about the idea of that Matt Lauer interview existing? It's a very strange thing to see. Well, I mean, in a previous episode that we did on the D&D panic, like we talked about a 60 Minutes interview where like basically...

Why do I have such high expectations of these people? They're always disappointing us. Well, but I mean, like, but I think you're right that like there is an original sin here, right? There is an element, like, the fact that like people are talking about something and something religious is motivating and moving people. There has to be a very careful way of framing that. And I think that like stipulating to too much of that experience is, especially in a country as vast and as, you know, religiously diverse as the United States, it's like going

to get you into these weird situations where you're sitting across from someone who is either grifting you or very likely delusional or trying to push a partisan agenda and you're kind of unprepared for it. You're, you're, like, you probably shouldn't be in the position where you either have to be, you know, confronting a kid with his account of a near-death experience or go along with something that's essentially Christian propaganda, right? Yeah, and you end up in this impossible position, similar to the satanic panic, right? Whereas you were kind of hog-tied as a major news outlet because you had to, you know, it, like, required too much nuance to get into in a 90-second spot.

And even if you had that kind of time as a, you know, a member of the media or someone with some kind of expertise, it was so difficult, I think, for a lot of people to say, now I'm taking child abuse very seriously, but I guess have some grave concerns about whether this kind is actually happening or not. Right. Can I ask who directed the movie? You said it was pretty well directed. Well, so I haven't watched it.

So it might, you know, but I mean, it's. But I mean, it's like it's a movie movie. It's not, you know, because I'm consistently annoyed by the quality of filmmaking, right, and stuff like left behind and God's not dead where it's like, if you're going to glorify God with your filmmaking, shouldn't you learn how to do it better? I don't know. Yeah. Like stop using a camcorder to record these people.

Yeah. Learn how to color correct, something. Get someone other than Thomas Hayden Church or something like that. Thomas Hayden Church is in this movie. Oh, my God. the way. Yeah. Jesus.

Although Kevin Sorbo to me is the real, you know, aside from Kurt Cameron, who of course is the... Yeah. He and Jennifer Garner have become the Kevin Sorboes of the post-God is not dead. That is like a funny thing to do is to watch like a mainstream or like, you know, A-list or former A-list actor kind of like sidling into a very Christian movie like, hey, no one's going to notice I'm in this thing, right? Or possibly, I am very serious about my faith and I don't feel worded.

at all. You know, who's to say? Probably a mix. Okay, the director is a guy named Randall Wallace. Oh, that's interesting. Oh, do you know of his? Oh, wow, and he directed great, wait, wait, wait. No, he's the writer of, he's the, Randall Wallace is the writer, is a very frequent

Mel Gibson collaborator. He's a writer of Braveheart, I believe, nominated for an Oscar at the time. He also did Secretariat. Oh, yes. He did, what else did he do? Oh, he did that Mel Gibson Vietnam movie. We were soldiers or we were heroes or something like that. This is incredible recall.

He may have made that DiCaprio Man the Iron Mask movie too. Yeah, I remember that one. That was disappointing if you were a DiCaprio had when you were 12, I have to say. I know. And see the Titanic at the box office, I think. And you're like, for this. Anyway, but so like that, he's a, like, so he's not a journeyman. He's a Gibson ear.

Yeah. Yeah, I don't know much about him, but I think it's filmography to me always read sort of John Millius-ish. Like this is a, this is not a guy who is just chasing a paycheck, like, you know, the way Peter O'Toole was in the, in the, well, fuck, what's the painter of light name? Oh, Kincaid? Was there a Thomas Kincaid movie with Peter O'T? Yeah.

It's not like Peter O'Too, it's not like Peter O'Too being in the Thomas Kincaid movie, where it's just like, you know, this is what dipsomania and money problems will get you. This is, I think, someone who I think makes like very deliberately right-wing-coded choices. And I believe, like, I think he's supposed to be writing the resurrection of the Christ. Mel Gibson's follow-up. Oh, they're going to do a sequel to the Passion of Christ. Because you know he comes back, right? It should be called the...

Don't spoil it for me. It should be called the Passion of the Christ, colon, the morning after. That's right. Or arguably just the hangover. Too Passion to Christ. Tokyo drift coming any minute now. The Passion of the Christ, too, Electric Bugaloo, the inevitable. Yeah.

Electric Boogaloo joke. I think that those have been out of style for just long enough that we can start making them again, actually. I'm going to bring back electric boogalus. Yeah. So, yeah. So, you know, it just becomes, by the time it's a movie kind of a media juggernaut. And it's interesting to see something that, you know, if you can compare it to Michelle

remembers, there's a lot of commonalities. And, you know, you have someone saying, pretty general things and having someone who has a lot of interest and a lot of knowledge and assumptions taking fairly ambiguous descriptions and using them to confirm an extremely specific worldview. And then what's interesting too is that this, you know, before it's a book, which we'll get to in a second, you know, they have this, you know, these ongoing haven dialogues within the family that it seems like are a really meaningful experience for this family and for the people in it. And then it kind of becomes near the end of the book, Todd seems to see it as an

opportunity to kind of, you know, while protecting his son and caring about that. And there's also kind of repeated this idea of like, despite these things, we're a pretty normal family. And it's like, no, you are a normal family. But anyway, but, you know, I think that he also kind of sees Colton as a resource for like taking people's questions about what heaven is like based on what he's seen. And so it sort of becomes like less sort of this broader spiritual experience than like a chance to get facts, you know? Yeah, yeah. And so they have an FAQ page on the Burpo website, which I've pulled up for us. Is it burpbo.com?

Their URL is heavenlive.org. as Heaven is for Real Ministries, founded in 2011. So I'm going to read some of this to you. Questions about heaven. How big is heaven? Answer, a four-year-old does not have a great understanding of measurement, but Colton describes heaven as a city that keeps getting bigger and bigger. What does heaven look like?

Answer, heaven is a very beautiful place with lots of intensely bright colors. More details are included in the children's book. Heaven is real for kids. Always be closing. What type of animals did you see? Colton saw many different kinds of animals. It seemed to him that most all of the animals we have here on Earth are also in heaven. Did it appear to Colton that the dogs in heaven had once belonged to someone?

Colton remembers playing with animals but doesn't know how they got there or who they were connected with. How big is Jesus? Colton describes Jesus as being of normal human height. Gabriel is about one and a half times as tall. as a man and Michael is at least two times taller. Even though these angels are taller than Jesus, according to Colton, Jesus is way more powerful. Huh. So I don't know.

I just, I think that putting that kind of pressure on a toddler is a bit much. I think that's probably my takeaway here. Yeah, I also think that according to Colton, according to Colton, according to Colton, becomes like, I know they still make the rounds. I think I once saw a YouTube video advertising that they had an interview with the two of them. But it's like you're defined by this thing that you said at age four and that by now must be fuzzy in your mind.

I probably was fuzzy in your mind at the time and has since gotten fuzzier. And you kind of locked into that. It's on the one hand, I'm glad that this family was able to make out like bandits. It doesn't seem like anyone got hurt. But it does feel like, you know, yeah, you've turned your son into a kind of figurehead for this kind of culture war. Yeah, which is impossible to do safely. Yeah.

There's going to be that for quite a sudden. He's going to be that probably for the foreseeable future. Yeah. And it is also in a more prosaic way, kind of the influencer parent dilemma where it's like if you use your child to sort of create a career or a life. style for yourself, then, like, you know, by definition, they can't consent to or understand that, maybe even more importantly. And, you know, this book comes out when he's 11 and it becomes this bestseller over the years and his picture is on the front cover. And, you know, it, we don't really know very much about what his life is like, which is good because we shouldn't. Yeah, yeah.

But that's a strange thing to think about growing up with. Yeah. And so the postscript to this is that one of the books I mentioned in the many, many books that I mentioned that are other memoirs of people who say they've gone to heaven and checked it out and then are coming back to tell us about it. One of these books, which is called The Boy Who Came Back from Heaven. Yeah. Is written allegedly by and about this boy named Alex Malarkey, whose name everyone brought up in a punchline inevitably when the story came out. who was in an accident when he was six,

a car accident that left him quadriplegic. Oh, God. And who said that he had been to heaven and his parents, especially his dad, kind of ran with that. And that ended up becoming a book. And Alex and his mom both recanted that story. And Alex made a post on his own blog saying that it was malarkey, basically.

Oh, wow. What made them do that? I mean, it seems like that's the thing, like you can just keep going with this. Did they just grow tired of it? Well, that's, yeah, that's the problem. Well, I think it was something that it seemed like Alex's dad was kind of the driving force in his parents' marriage disintegrated at a certain point. Oh, yeah.

And, you know, he and his mom also found themselves in like pretty dire financial straits, having been involved in a book and credited with a book that had made a lot of money. for a lot of people, you know? And that's another aspect of this, is that if you create a story that can make money for people, then that won't necessarily keep you safe. And in fact, it probably won't. Yeah. Oh, wow. So Alex writes on his blog, I said I went to heaven because I thought it would get me attention. I did not die. I did not go to heaven. When I made the claims, I had never read the Bible. People have profited from lies and continue to. They should read the Bible, which is enough. Yeah, I mean, hard to argue with that.

He's 16 when he writes this. Yeah, that's, that's more growth than a lot of people in America these days. But yeah, that's, so, I mean, yeah, I mean, I think that's, that's the fundamental question I sort of started with, when you first reminded me of this book, like, why is it necessary? If you do believe in it, someone having gone there just raises questions, of this kind of silly nature, like, you know, how big is heaven? Like, come on. Like, you're going to have a heaven FAQ. How tall is Gabriel?

Well, he's one and a half times. He's 1.5 times the height of Jesus. Yeah, it just feels, I mean, like, I can see that why people of faith would have been just offended by this. So, like, why is it necessary? It will not, it will not convince, you know, the non-believers. And it, it sort of risks cheapening belief for the believers. So there's something kind of rotten at the core of that project.

I guess the only way I can think to justify it is that, you know, they sincerely believe this. And that like it's just a shared kind of experience that they don't want to put too much pressure on. But like, I mean, I think that like a 16-year-old saying, don't read my thing, read the Bible. Yeah, that strikes me as a gift. But don't listen to that kid. Listen to the other kid with the shorter book. Yeah, yeah. He's got a movie and everything.

Yeah, that other kid, he didn't get a movie. So, you know, when you think about it, yeah, print the legend. Yeah, and it also, it's, I find it interesting to think about just the number of people who were drawn to this story for, I'm sure, a lot of different reasons. And also, I think maybe the hair I'm trying to split here is that, like, I, you know, I don't want to mock anyone's beliefs. Unless, you know, they're like pretty terrible people, in which case I will make fun of them. But, you know, the line is wobbly. But I also, I think there's something, there's like two different things happening here, right? There's having kind of like a mystical experience.

And also in this, this Robert Gottlieb article in the New York Review of books talking about heaven memoirs also touches on a piece by Oliver Sacks talking about basically his argument being that hallucination is like a natural part of. of the processes of the human brain and that when we have an out of body experience or a near-death experience, that feels real to us because it's using the same parts of the brain as our perceptions of reality are, you know? And then it is real to us in the sense that hallucination is part of what the brain's capabilities are,

I guess, is my summary of that, which makes sense to me. And I think that there's, I think, like, something we keep coming back to with like talking about religion, talking about the satanic panic, talking about, you know, I don't know, varieties of religious experience is the question of, can something be meaningful if it's an experience you have that doesn't point to a documentary truth outside of your experience of yourself? Yeah. And I think that it can be very meaningful.

Yeah. But I think a lot of people think that it's very insulting to say that, you know, they didn't literally see the angel Gabriel and he was nine feet tall. Right. Yeah. It seems to me that, like, you know, it's a lot of... There's something about this kind of genre where like, it's why mysticism is just such a hard thing to do in modernity, because it's not like entirely clear which genre a mystical experience falls under and what people are supposed to do with it, right?

Like that is, I think, a sense that we've just historically lost about like why it would be interesting, suggestive or even instructive to hear what is either someone's, right? like the big question around medieval mystics, right? It's either someone coming into contact with a divine or being seduced by Satan or, you know, tripping balls on some ergot or whatever, right? And the whole point is it's undecidable. And like in the Middle Ages, this was something that people took great interest in.

It's not that there's no inherent literary value or no inherent value to it. It's just that it's really hard to figure out in what register to make people care about it and what you're expecting an audience take away from it and bring to it. And yeah, I don't think this book, it doesn't sound like this book really solved that problem.

It more like put a gigantic exclamation point behind it. Yeah, and possibly made us sillier as a nation, I worry, although a lot of things were working on that. But I think. Yeah, yeah. I mean, Sarah Palin, for one. Yeah, she certainly did a lot more work in that regard. Yeah, but it's, you know, it's also just,

it's another testament to the fact that we need to care about what kids are talking about when they're not confirming our worldview for us the whole time. Because the second they stop saying things that we can use to prop up the ideas that we want to be true, and the second we can stop treating them as oracles of the things that we want to believe, we kind of start ignoring them, you know, and I think that kids deserve better than that. Is your child texting about the undiscovered country? Here's what the abbreviations really mean. I mean, I also, I think that, you know, when people tell stories about, you know,

oh, my kid said something uncanny or my kid said something really creepy or my kid said something to suggest that, you know, he'd been to heaven or he'd had a past life as a ice delivery man or something. You know, I always think like, well, sure, maybe. But also, don't you think that little kids just say off the wall stuff constantly every day and it's just kind of what they do and it's sort of one of the most charming things about them is the stuff that they say to you. were like, what are you talking about?

And where did you get that? And also, where did you get this casual understanding of death from exactly? And then you're like, cartoons. Yeah. Well, I mean, also as a parent, as a, you know, I, I've spent, I spent a lot of time around my child for a long time. And, you know, you're dealing with someone who, as you say, says a bunch of off-the-wall shit.

And they're often the person you're talking to, I mean, regularly the person, you talk to the most in a day. Sometimes there are no adults you talk to in a day. You talk to them, meaning you're going to fall back into attributing meaning the way you would if that was your neighbor or your spouse or a work colleague or whatever. But that is a wrong way to look at it. Yeah. They're testing things out.

They're trying stuff out. They're learning how to use language. They're repeating things, but also giving them their own spin. And there is a lot of subjectivity there. There's a lot of creativity there. There's a lot of creativity there. There's a lot of personality there already. But it's not yet the way that we as adults communicate.

And I think it can be easy to, you know, when you focus strongly on your child, which is commendable and which I'm sure this family did right after he'd gone through this harrowing experience, like you can slip in the register you're communicating in, right? And you can sort of have them say things that are far more, they have import, right? what they say is important, but it's not important in the way that if an adult said the same thing to you, right, would be important. Right. Yeah, I guess that it's important in a different way where you're kind of, you're learning about

their inner world, but they're still learning how to describe the world as it's happening around them, maybe partly. Yeah. So ultimately, that you're wrong about in this, in case anybody was worried, is I'm not going to tell you that you're wrong and heaven isn't. for real because that is above our pay grade and we could not possibly comment on it. But there is one last funny or wrong about, which is that Colton didn't actually die. He just was under anesthesia.

Oh. Which I think is a really neat trick to get past that because he usually has some sort of, well, he flatlined or he was dead on the table. We thought we'd lost it. But then we had him back. That never happened. He just was being operated on. It was very, you know, people were passive.

mystic. It was pretty touch and go. But they encountered this problem in the book. And Todd is like, well, who am I to say that he can't get to heaven without dying? Whatever. He, he, I'm not going to stand in the way of that having happened. Then we guess move on. Okay. That's big. That's very, that's very broad-minded of him. And as to whether pets are in heaven, this remains a very hotly contested topic. Obviously, if heaven exists, the pets are there.

And that is my closing statement. Adrian, thank you so much for joining me on this strange journey. I love everything that you make and do. You do a great show. Have you written any great books lately? Well, I have written a book. It's coming out right around now. On August 18th, my book, What Tech Calls Governing, is coming out.

And, you know, it's about a very different thing. somewhat less death and less afterlife, but some theology in it, because it's about sort of what our tech overlords mean by being in charge of all our lives. We all know they're in charge, but what do they actually mean by that? And that actually ends up with questions of political theology more often than you think. Like a lot of times, right, when they start to describe both the future they envision the future they fear or the way they kind of justify their own authority, you're like, wait, this is. is no longer a political theory. You're just talking about God now.

Well, I love horror, so I'll read it. Yes. I'm very excited. And like Heaven is for real, it is also very short. It's, let me check. Actually, I don't know. It's 124 pages. So it's shorter. I shouldn't have ragged on that poor family. That's much shorter than Heaven is for real. Yeah. So my apologies. And I'm sure that you perhaps have even more ideas in it. I will say that it has 0% of the conversations with toddlers compared to Heaven is for real. You should have a toddler dialogue in your next book, though. That's a good, you know, if you're testing out a theory, you need to get the toddler vote. Maybe, yes.

So if that is what you're in the market for, this book may not be for you. I'm sorry. But otherwise, it probably is. Otherwise, pick it up. What is something like a fact that you learned while writing or research, it that you just like want to tell people. Just the regularity with which these, you know, free speech absolutists in the tech industry like sue people for defamation and, you know, like come after people who like were mean

to them on Twitter. It's it's very, very funny. I mean, like it won't come as a surprise to anyone, but it's pretty. The intensity and the dedication to the bit did kind of shock me. I'm like, seriously, again, this time for that? It's hard to believe that a person could be that embarrassing, and yet there are so many of them, and they just keep doing it. There's a new guy every week that's like that. Well, thank you for writing about topics that I find very scary and also very necessary to learn about, because if we don't understand these people, then, you know, we're more likely to get absorbed into a cloud one of these days.

And I like being right out here in the sun. Yeah, or, you know, walking towards the pearly gates, hand in hand, two podcasters. You know, joined. Going to find all of our pets. Going to find our pets and find out how large an archangel is. And then coming back and telling you the audience all about it. Yeah, the people deserve to know. And that is our episode.

Thank you to the people who help make this show. Miranda Ziegler is our producer and editor. And Nicole Ortiz is our administrative assistant. We'll see you in two. Thanks.