Forever Changed Never Being the Same Again Testamony
"I Did Not Die. I Did Not Go to Heaven."
How the controversy around a Christian bestseller engulfed the evangelical publishing manufacture—and tore a family autonomously.
Kevin and Alex Malarkey were alone together when the accident happened. It was Nov 2004, and the Malarkeys had moved to rural Huntsville, Ohio, from suburban Columbus just weeks earlier. The family was struggling financially, and Kevin and his wife, Beth, wanted to pursue a quieter life. Beth had given nascency to their quaternary child a few days before. Vi-year-old Alex was the oldest of the bunch. He and his father went to church that Sunday morn, merely the two of them.
On the bulldoze home, Kevin answered a phone call on his cellphone just as he approached an intersection with a blind spot that locals knew to fear. He didn't see the other car coming. Kevin was thrown from his vehicle but was unhurt. Alex was taken in a helicopter to Columbus Children's Infirmary. (The occupants of the other automobile were non seriously injured.) Alex had suffered an "internal decapitation"—his skull essentially separated from his spine. His injuries were and so serious that the coroner was called to the scene of the crash.
Half dozen years later, a book was published that would become a awareness. The Male child Who Came Back From Heaven—with Kevin and Alex listed on the cover as co-authors—tells the saga of Alex's improbable survival. But information technology wasn't that medical miracle that launched the story to fame. In the volume, Alex claimed he had spent time in heaven after the accident, and connected to exist visited past angels and demons after he emerged from his coma 2 months later. He wrote that he traveled through a bright tunnel, and was greeted past five angels, and and then met Jesus, who told him he would survive; later, he saw 150 "pure, white angels with fantastic wings." Heaven has lakes and rivers and grass, the book says. God sits on a throne almost a scroll that describes the End Times. The devil has three heads, with red eyes, moldy teeth, and pilus fabricated of fire.
The Boy Who Came Back From Heaven sold more than one 1000000 copies and spent months on the New York Times' bestseller list. Information technology was also on the leading border of a boomlet of "heaven tourism" stories in Christian publishing, including Heaven Is for Real, a memoir most 4-year-old Colton Burpo's feel that came out later in 2010 and was eventually adjusted into a picture starring Greg Kinnear. Time magazine published a encompass story in 2012 titled "Rethinking Sky," opening with Burpo's story—even more detailed than Alex'south—about seeing a rainbow horse and coming together the Virgin Mary. Other such books included xc Minutes in Heaven (2004, car accident), Flight to Heaven (2010, plane crash), To Heaven and Dorsum (2012, kayaking accident), and Miracles From Heaven (2015, fall into a hollow tree, made into a Jennifer Garner film). Afterwards the Malarkeys' success, "all Christian publishers were looking for the next heaven volume," said Sandy Vander Zicht, a quondam editor at Zondervan, a large evangelical publisher based in Michigan.
Until things came crashing back to earth. The cover of The Boy Who Came Back From Heaven calls the book "a true story." But the boy himself at present says it was not true at all. Four years ago, Alex sent a letter to a conservative Christian blog dramatically renouncing the book. "I did non die. I did not become to Heaven," he wrote. "I said I went to heaven because I idea it would get me attending. … People have profited from lies, and go along to." Alex's retraction also became a sensation, with reporters unable to resist the sudden, hilarious perfection of his last name: Malarkey.
Although The Boy Who Came Dorsum From Heaven has been off shelves for years now, yanked by the publisher subsequently Alex'southward disavowal, the drama around information technology has quietly continued to roil. Last year, Alex filed a lawsuit against Tyndale House, a major Christian publisher based in suburban Chicago, accusing the visitor of defamation and exploitation, among other charges. He'due south seeking a payout at to the lowest degree equal to the book'south profits. Alex, who recently turned 21, now lives with his mother. He was valedictorian of his high school, just he has been a quadriplegic since the accident and requires full-time care. Kevin and Beth divorced last year, and Beth says she has no idea what happened to the money Kevin earned from the book. The adapt alleges that she and Alex are "on the verge of beingness homeless." Alex was a pocket-size when the book was published, and claims he was not a party to the contract. (Tyndale says in court filings that Kevin entered into an agreement on his own and Alex'due south behalf, and that while Beth was not party to the contract, she "consented every bit a matter of fact" to the volume's production by helping to conform interviews and supplying family photos.) A judge has dismissed most of the lawsuit's counts. The next court date is in Baronial.
Co-ordinate to Alex and his mother, information technology was Kevin Malarkey who turned an injured boy'due south murmurings about angels into a complex story of a journey to heaven and back. Equally Alex's lawsuit describes it, Kevin "concocted" the story that Alex had gone to heaven. Though Alex was billed as the book's co-writer, he told me he has never fifty-fifty read the total contents of The Boy Who Came Back From Heaven, let alone knowingly contributed to it. He said that some of the passages under his name were drawn from conversations with his male parent, but he didn't realize they were intended for a book. "I didn't write it," Alex told me. "I have no idea what'due south in it. I don't know what I said." He knows enough nearly the book, however, to feel certain that it doesn't represent what really happened.
No i spoke up to defend the book later on Alex recanted his version of events. Tyndale caved rapidly, not only taking the book out of impress but also announcing information technology was "saddened to learn" that Alex now claimed to have fabricated up the story. In the years since, the volume has come up to seem to nigh people like a straightforward case of fakery and exploitation. Kevin Malarkey, who had been the book's master promoter, stopped giving interviews the day of his son's disavowal. He has not spoken to the press in more than 4 years. He disappeared so completely that the Washington Post reported last twelvemonth that he was dead. Until recently, on a weekend afternoon, he finally decided to tell his version of the events that rocked the Christian publishing industry and tore his own family unit apart.
Even when Alex was still in a coma, the family saw their story as nix short of miraculous, Kevin writes in the book. Their son had defied the odds by surviving at all, and presently his recovery was cartoon people together and strengthening the religion of strangers. A family friend ready up a website, prayforalex.com, to coordinate volunteers for meals, kid care, and prayer. The site is now defunct, but some of its pages can yet be retrieved via the Wayback Motorcar, and I was able to acquire an boosted stack of printouts of diverse posts and comments; all of this now reads like a fascinating, real-time first draft of Alex's story and the rapturous way readers responded to it. Prayforalex.com became a customs for people who were invested in Alex's recovery, including many who had never met him. Strangers and new friends posted prayers and stories virtually the means they saw God moving in their own lives. "In that location is no incertitude in my mind that Alex and this family unit are anointed with the power of Christ placed on them," wrote i commenter.
The family unit's faith fed their optimism. Kevin writes in the book that later the car accident, he was consumed past guilt for months, but that Alex forgave him completely shortly later on he was able to speak. When Alex had a bad breathing episode, Beth wrote on the site in Jan of 2005, she suspected "Satan knew that I was a little downwardly and he tried to bother me more." Beth saw Satan's influence in her own burnout and discouragement; she and Kevin oftentimes put out calls for emergency prayers to foil his plans. "[Our family's spiritual battles are] very existent and I sure wish that information technology was just a fictional account," Beth wrote when she sensed Satan was trying to demoralize Alex in his recovery. The family's church, Bellefontaine First Church of God, taught them that the Holy Spirit was actively working in the world, battling demonic forces in real time. The family's pastor at the time, Gary Brownish, told me that he and a friend once felt inspired to drive to the Malarkey family home and walk a circle around the house praying for the family unit's immediate spiritual protection from some kind of demonic force. "The war was very real," he said of that time in the Malarkeys' lives. "The spiritual warfare was very real."
Alex's recovery was slow, simply he was able to communicate more as the months wore on. According to his parents' posts on the website, he began to share details with Kevin and Beth near his trip to sky at the accident scene, and his ongoing encounters with angels and demons. Kevin and Beth both posted on prayforalex.com about the stories Alex told them nearly his supernatural encounters. Beth put a note by Alex's infirmary bed, informing visitors that when his oral cavity was open up wide, that meant angels were in the room. On Valentine's Day, Beth posted a lengthy entry nearly what Alex had told her about sitting "in the lap of Jesus" at the blow scene: "Jesus told him he that he would breath merely did not say when." Readers devoured the stories nearly Alex'south visions. "I love to hear about our home in sky," one frequent poster wrote. Some other reader sent the family a painting of Alex in his infirmary bed, surrounded by 3 angels.
People effectually Alex were having their ain supernatural experiences, besides. A volunteer who stayed with Alex overnight at the hospital wrote that she heard the faucet in his room plough on and off iii times, even though no one else was present. "After that, I had the distinct feeling that I was in the presence of Angels," she wrote. The angels she envisioned were holding Alex'due south cervix, and she could sense bones being realigned and nerve passages reopened. She recalled that 1 angel spoke to her, saying, "At that place is more to do, but this is all for at present." Kevin wrote on the site that he felt God tell him at church one day: "He will walk." The license plate on the family'southward 15-passenger van, a souvenir from a local church, read "WIL WALK."
He didn't. Alex came domicile from the infirmary in February 2005. Four years later, he underwent a procedure known equally "the Christopher Reeve surgery" to allow him to breathe without a ventilator. He received some local news coverage at the time, because he was the youngest patient to have had the complex procedure. After an Associated Press reporter mentioned offhand to Kevin that he should write a book, equally Kevin explains in The Boy Who Came Dorsum From Heaven, Kevin met an agent and signed a contract with Tyndale. At the time, the book was tentatively titled Angel Boy: The Boy Who Spent 7 Weeks in Heaven. The main text is written in Kevin'due south voice, but the book's offset nine chapters include separate sections written in Alex's voice, with titles similar "Angels Helping Me" and "I Still Visit Sky." Several sidebars are attributed to Beth. Just what happened after Kevin signed that contract is at the heart of the conflict still swirling effectually the volume: Who wrote what, and what did they really believe about what they were writing?
Volume publishers don't normally fact-cheque books. They'll run sensitive material by lawyers, simply otherwise information technology's on authors to make sure their work is accurate. Generally, this works out fine. Sometimes, information technology does non. When books like James Frey's A Million Little Pieces and the Holocaust chronicles Misha and Angel at the Fence were exposed equally being at least partly made, information technology toll the publishers both expense and embarrassment. Memoirs, which often rely on a unmarried person's account of an extraordinary drama, are particularly vulnerable to this kind of spectacular collapse.
"Truth" in memoir is a knotty question to begin with, but at evangelical publishing houses, there'south an extra layer of complication. For these publishers, the Bible itself is presumed to be true, and their corporate mission is to accelerate that truth—and sell books in the process. Tyndale, which was founded as a Bible publisher in the 1960s, has self-professed "core values" that include "dependent on God," "trustworthy," and "anchored in the Bible."
"Equally Christians, we believe in miracles and believe in angels, only you take to make certain the source is credible," said Vander Zicht, who retired from Zondervan concluding year after 33 years. As an editor, she says, she vetted spiritual accounts by whether they came through a reputable literary amanuensis, and by talking with authors to get a gut sense of their trustworthiness; occasionally she asked theologians to appraise books for biblical correctness. She said she wouldn't accept rejected a sky story out of paw. But Vander Zicht said she once turned down the opportunity to acquire a similar nonfiction business relationship of a heaven story with a immature kid at the heart. "I felt the volume shouldn't exist published until the boy was old enough to tell it himself," she said. "I suspected it would exist a bestseller, but I was uneasy."
"You didn't have to be a theological whiz to immediately see problems with these books," said Justin Peters, a conservative independent evangelist who has been critical of the heaven genre, and who is friendly with Beth and Alex. Peters previously saturday on the board of LifeWay, a publisher and (at the fourth dimension) a major concatenation of Christian bookstores. He says he had tried unsuccessfully to convince LifeWay to stop selling sky books and others he deemed theologically problematic.
No ane I spoke with suggested that Tyndale might have known Alex wasn't on lath with writing a story that only he could've told. But in hindsight, at that place were signs of trouble. A ghostwriter hired to polish the book told me he spoke with Kevin often and interviewed other sources, including doctors who had been involved with Alex's intendance. But he found it odd that his requests to interview Beth were brushed off by Kevin. The ghostwriter never spoke with Alex either. In the end, his draft was rejected by Kevin through Tyndale. The draft that was published was written past Kevin himself. (The ghostwriter asked to remain bearding because he continues to work in the Christian publishing industry.)
Tyndale also commissioned a brusk documentary to be sold equally a DVD accompaniment to the volume. Though Beth allowed the filmmakers into her home and sat for interviews with them in the spring of 2010, they told me that she and Alex proved elusive every bit subjects. Alex, they were surprised to find, was unwilling or unable to echo the stories about his encounters with angels and Jesus. "We expected him to requite us some version of what was in the volume," the film's co-editor and managing director of photography, Mark Schlicher, said. "That was obviously the money interview." The crew came back a 2d day to endeavor to coax Alex into speaking more than openly and still got most zilch, although Kevin was in the room encouraging him to talk. "I almost got the thought he was resistant to anybody putting words in his oral fissure—even at his immature historic period," said Ken Carpenter, the director. Schlicher and Carpenter both remember some kind of conflict between Kevin and Alex over Alex's unwillingness to open upwardly on photographic camera.
Alex and Beth are clearly still wary of having their story told. When I spoke to them on the telephone, their lawyer sat in on the call; my requests to speak to Alex individually were denied. (They are represented by a firm headed by prominent religious-liberty lawyer David Gibbs 3, who represented Terri Schiavo'southward parents in their attempt to keep her on life support confronting her husband'southward wishes.) Together, they described years of feeling manipulated and railroaded by Kevin, who they claimed put the book before the family unit over and over, fifty-fifty though they had only a hazy thought of what he was working on.
Alex told me that in reality, he doesn't think annihilation nearly the accident, and the whole idea that he saw angels started equally a mix-up: He awoke solitary in his night hospital room, and looked groggily into the brilliant hallway, where he saw his father talking to someone. "I thought it was an angel, because I thought I was expressionless," he told me. "I don't know why I thought that, but I did, and that'due south what I recall." He has said he told those supernatural stories every bit a kid because he thought information technology would get him attention. The whole thing "got blown out of proportion," he told me. Aye, his begetter would enquire him questions and write things down, but he had no thought why. "I thought he was writing down something to talk nigh at church or something," Alex said. "I didn't even know it was going to exist a book." Beth, meanwhile, now says she was opposed to the project from the start. Most of the brief sidebars in the book attributed to her were taken from her posts on prayforalex.com without her permission, she said: "I never approved of the book, and I never cooperated with it." Beth recalls that she'd told Kevin at least once in a tense medical moment, "You'd better non put that in your book," to no avail. She says that her theology dorsum when she was writing posts on prayforalex.com "was not every bit audio equally it is at present"—she was more open to believing in about-death experiences—and she was "grasping at whatsoever signs of hope that I could find."
After the book was published, and as the family relationship deteriorated, Beth and Alex turned to contacting outsiders. In August 2011, Alex left a annotate on a Facebook fan page for the book, calling it "one of the most deceptive books always." The comment was deleted, co-ordinate to a 2015 written report in the Guardian. Beth started writing to Tyndale the next year to complain virtually the volume, though information technology's not clear she raised specific objections about the truth of Alex'south supernatural encounters. Tyndale offered to run across with her, but she declined, citing Alex's wellness. She left comments on Christian blogs, and she told a radio show that Alex was opposed to the book. She also reached out to bourgeois writers who were publicly skeptical of the heaven genre on theological grounds. Several of them, and the pastor of Beth and Alex's current church, have connections to the ministry of John MacArthur, an influential conservative California pastor who is critical of the charismatic theology behind phenomena like religion healing and out-of-body experiences. In 2012, Beth reached out to his ministry afterwards his website posted a slice titled "The Burpo-Malarkey Doctrine" that chosen immediate accounts of heaven "simply untrue."
None of these attempts to discredit the book stuck. In 2013, Beth wrote a 7,000-give-and-take post on her (at present offline) personal blog; as an attempted exposé, the post, which I also read via the Wayback Machine, is confusing. It does not mention Kevin or Tyndale by name, does not mention angels or Alex's heaven stories, and is bogged down past thousands of words of medical details. Beth's master objection seems to be that she did not want her words to exist included in the book, that Alex'south health was depicted in the book every bit more stable than it really was, and that the book is theologically incorrect. The post concludes: "I will practise whatever I can to finish the exploitation of my son and the twisting of God's truth." (In response to specific questions about Alex'southward conform and the book'southward origin, a representative from Tyndale offered a statement: "Tyndale has the deepest sympathy for this swain's circumstance, and we pray for him and his family regularly. Nosotros also note that Tyndale obtained proper consent to publish the volume and paid everything that was owed under the contract. Since the litigation is still pending, Tyndale cannot annotate farther.")
Eventually, Alex himself emailed a rabble-rousing conservative blog, Pulpit and Pen, that had been sharply critical of the mainstream Christian publishing manufacture for insufficient theological rigor. The blogger, J.D. Hall, a pastor in Montana, asked him if he would publish an open up letter on the site. Hall said he called Alex on the phone every dark over the form of weeks, writing and revising a statement in which Alex disavowed the book completely. Hall posted it on January. thirteen, 2015. Finally, it was over: Tyndale pulled the book from apportionment, and subsequently a frenzy of rubbernecking publicity, the earth moved on. A few months afterward, LifeWay announced it had stopped selling all "experiential testimonies nigh sky," dramatically reducing the marketplace for futurity stories like Alex's.
I emailed Kevin Malarkey near the end of my reporting. I had heard he was quick to anger, and I knew he hadn't spoken to any reporters since the book's collapse. One source called him a "mean guy," and said Kevin had warned him to stay off his belongings. Beth described him as intimidating, and said he had abandoned her with no warning last year and had rarely spoken to her and Alex since. I didn't think Kevin would talk to me at all.
Kevin wrote me back on a Saturday morning time. He was at his son's baseball game, he said, simply if I wanted, I could call him dorsum and attempt to explain what I was working on. By the fourth dimension I did, the game was over, and his youngest son was in the auto; Kevin asked him to put on headphones so he wouldn't hear our conversation. When nosotros first started talking, Kevin said he would but speak to me off the tape. But a few minutes into our phone call, he inverse his mind. He said he had prayed about whether or non to speak to me, and received an answer: "Talk to her." We spoke that afternoon for near two hours.
Kevin Malarkey didn't disappear from the public middle because his lies had been exposed, he told me. He disappeared because God told him to be silent, considering annihilation he would say publicly would further injure his family. "All information technology would do was make Alex look worse, make Beth look worse," he said. "Alex either lied when he was 6 or when he was 18." Kevin said that Alex spoke openly and ofttimes about his encounters with angels and demons for years, and that they worked closely together on his portions of the book. (Beth said that "a little boy who had simply come out of a major coma" couldn't be expected to sympathise that he was collaborating on a volume.) Couldn't Alex accept just been trying to please his father with those stories, I wondered? He was too immature to fake it so assuredly, Kevin insisted. "I nevertheless believe it today," he said. "I absolutely believe everything in that book."
The Boy Who Came Back From Heaven insists that it is an inspirational volume, but reading it now is heartbreaking. The family's financial stress is a abiding theme. As early every bit Page 2, Kevin writes that the family'southward new insurance plan didn't cover the new baby'south hospital nativity; 2 pages subsequently, he mentions a missed mortgage payment. He reminds himself: God will see our needs. Meanwhile, he returns over and over to the problems in his wedlock, writing nigh his and Beth'south anger, irritability, and distance. "Our relationship suffered great trauma," he writes, "non just during Alex's kickoff weeks in the infirmary, but too for years after the accident."
Kevin and Beth commencement met when she moved in side by side door to him, Kevin said, and Kevin "led her to Christ" and baptized her. Kevin told me the relationship was contentious near from the commencement. (Beth described it as "dysfunctional.") Alex was born three years into their union, and past the time of the accident the Malarkeys were a family of six. The friction in the marriage was obvious to their children. In a 2005 post on prayforalex.com that Kevin said he posted on Alex's behalf, the boy wrote to his thousands of followers: "Please pray for mommy and daddy to make it less figts." Kevin slept in a guesthouse on their property for the last few years of their spousal relationship. By that time, he said, Beth did non speak to him or admit him when he entered the room. In Kevin'south recollection of that contentious DVD filming at the house, the conflict was not betwixt Alex and himself, but betwixt himself and Beth: "[Alex] probably felt in the centre of his parents, unfortunately."
Kevin and his oldest son had been close before the accident, and it is articulate from the posts on prayforalex.com that Kevin spent significant time with Alex at the hospital. After Alex came dwelling house, in Kevin's account, Beth took over Alex's care and Kevin took charge of the three younger children, while he continued to work full time. He said Beth substantially cut him off from Alex, always finding an excuse to be in the room or to whisk him off to government minister to him. Kevin and a family unit friend he put me in touch with, Jami Mosgrove, both said they suspected Beth would use Alex's demand to accept his legs manually exercised every bit an excuse to shoo others out of the room. (Beth told me that Kevin "never engaged" in Alex's care. Kevin, meanwhile, said he was intensely involved in Alex's medical care in the early years later the accident, just that Beth eventually stopped updating him virtually Alex's care.) By the time Alex disavowed the book in 2015, his relationship with his male parent had deteriorated, which Kevin attributes to Beth'due south influence. But Kevin remains injure by the fact that his son didn't come to him commencement. "Alex never told me he made the volume up," he said. "I establish out when it was in the national news."
Ane reason Kevin says he nonetheless believes in the book is considering he is accustomed to having intense spiritual experiences himself. In one case, Kevin wrote in the volume, Alex told him he would encounter an affections named John; that evening, while taking out the trash, Kevin felt an unseen presence "[speaking] to me in my spirit," offer specific words of encouragement that he raced within to write down. These days, he prays early on every morn and takes notes in a journal virtually what he perceives he is hearing from God. He acknowledges it can exist hard to sort out God's intentions from his own, merely he figures if the message is uncomfortable or difficult—like a control to forgive someone, or to act confronting his own interests—and so information technology'south likelier to come from God. Sometimes the directions are specific. At a speaking engagement at a church earlier the book fell apart, he says he received an instruction to set aside his notes and just pray. In his own church recently, God told him to give a message to a adult female he didn't know well. He'southward comfortable with the fact that this may sound foreign. "The other mean solar day, when I was praying, I felt like he was maxim to me, 'I have no interest in you understanding your ain life. I have an interest in you following me,' " he said. "I was like, 'That sounds like something you would say.' "
Kevin says he'd hoped the book would be nigh the "church building being the church": a positive story about Christians rallying around a family in crisis. But he knows that it was Alex's heaven stories that secured him the contract with Tyndale. "It'due south an absolutely wonderful story that should be told," he recalls his agent, Matt Jacobson, saying. "Because there was a heaven experience, information technology volition be told." (Jacobson declined an interview asking.)
Those close to Kevin express frustration that he stayed silent so long about a book whose story he nonetheless believes. "[We've] been urging him to say something," said Paige Gutheil Henderson, a family doctor who runs the medical group that hosts Kevin'south current counseling practice. Kevin estimates that he earned almost $ane million from the book, including a $500,000 accelerate. The money is gone at present, he says. He was the family'southward sole breadwinner, and Alex'due south medical expenses were high. Yes, he signed the contract on his own and Alex'due south behalf, merely in that location were no provisions for Alex to be paid separately, he said; Alex was a small-scale, and the book proceeds went to his food, medical intendance, and other family expenses. Just Kevin also says that when he received the advance, he fabricated improvident—what some might call impulsive—gifts to Christian charities and individuals in his church building. At one point, he claims, he wrote a check for $xxx,000 to his church building. (The church building did non reply to requests for comment.) He lost more than that when he invested in a friend'south failed startup. When he and Beth divorced, she and Alex kept living in the house, and he moved into a modest rented house, he says, furnished through garage sales and curbside discards.
I reached out to Beth and Alex to ask if we could speak once more, to give them a chance to answer to the specifics of Kevin's business relationship. I too asked if I could speak to Alex alone. They denied my asking through their chaser, who said Alex did not want to "stir up additional difficulty with his father." When I then sent a detailed listing of statements and questions to the chaser to again give Beth and Alex the chance to respond, he told me that Alex was in the infirmary. "Alex and Beth are busy dealing with the consequences of the physical damage Kevin did to Alex," the attorney later wrote. "For that reason, they are not currently in a position, personally, to address the impairment that Kevin did through the publication of the book and the mishandling of the money Kevin made from the book." But more than a calendar week later, Beth sent an electronic mail with brief responses to some statements through her attorney, disputing, for example, his assertion that she cut him off from Alex's care: "Simulated," she wrote. "He removed himself."
Aaron Malarkey, one of Alex's brothers, is xviii years old now; he was 8 when the volume was being written. He says he felt betrayed when his brother recanted the story. "There's been a lot of fake testimony and lies—apartment-out lies—in the public eye nigh my dad," Aaron said. He describes his older blood brother as a quick thinker, charismatic, and "one of the funniest people yous'll meet." Just it makes him sad that in large function thanks to Alex, his father is now viewed by so many as a charlatan.
Aaron and his two younger siblings chose to live with Kevin after their parents' divorce. He struggles with bitterness over the way his begetter was "thrown to the wolves," and abandoned by fellow Christians who had so eagerly consumed his family'southward story. He sees his mother and brother in one case a week and emphasized that he loves them deeply.
Aaron says he was in the room while Kevin and Alex worked on the book. "I remember very clearly, my dad would enquire Alex, 'Are you lot admittedly sure you lot want me to put this in the book?' There were times he'd say yes and times he'd say no, and my dad would follow." It was obvious his mother was unhappy with the project, he said. Only at the time, what made a bigger impression on Aaron was his brother'south apparent communication with the spirit realm; in the middle of conversations, he would stop and announce at that place were angels in the room. Of course, our memories of what happened when we were eight years old are hazy, and young children are hardly impartial observers of complicated parental dynamics. But Aaron believed his blood brother'southward story completely, and however does. "Even when my faith has been iffy," he said, "I never doubted it was true."
Information technology was always piece of cake, perhaps too piece of cake, for secular skeptics to mock The Male child Who Came Back From Heaven. Just criticism from bourgeois Christians was more than searing, because it implied the volume had done real harm. "The idea that someone could go to heaven and come up dorsum with visions and dreams and we should take that seriously is equally far from historic evangelicalism as it's possible to get," Phil Johnson, the executive director of the ministry headed past MacArthur, the California pastor and author whose ministry building Beth reached out to in 2012. "To me, one of the real signifiers that modern evangelical Christianity is badly astray and in serious jeopardy of even existing 50 years from at present is the ease with which evangelicals purchase into stories similar this." To Christians of Johnson'south theological bent, it's a problem that books like the Malarkeys' claim to exist new, specific revelations from God, and they contradict the Bible in obvious means. (The Bible says God the Father cannot be seen by humans; Alex describes his body.) Other problems should be obvious to anyone: The diverse books' descriptions of heaven are inconsistent with each other.
The Malarkeys' stories are inconsistent, too. Kevin and Beth are so antagonistic at present that they can't even agree on how exactly their antagonism developed. In the middle of it all is Alex, the boy—now a man—whose story well-nigh a trip to heaven disintegrated into a very specific kind of family hell: a series of lawsuits, an ugly divorce, physical suffering, anger, loneliness, imperfect memories, mistakes, coin struggles, lingering resentments and heartbreak in all directions. This is painful, decidedly earthly stuff.
Yet Alex's story—the one he says never happened—gave thousands of people hope. It promised that God is existent, that nosotros volition see our lost ones once more, and that later nosotros will live forever in peace, somehow. His disavowal of that business relationship may have squashed the market place for those detail kinds of stories, just it's hardly surprising that there are nonetheless plenty of successful books with a distinct echo of the aforementioned genre. There was the 2017 memoir The Incommunicable, which tells the story of a mother'south desperate prayer for her son'southward "resurrection" later on an blow; the moving picture version of this "miraculous truthful story" took in more than $40 million in theaters this spring. Jesus Calling, a 15-year-old devotional written in the voice of Jesus by a woman who said she received "personal messages from God," is one of the most successful Christian books of the millennium and remains a bestseller. There volition always be an appetite for stories that are not just besides skilful to check, but literally incommunicable to verify. The whole signal of faith, after all, is that it requires assertive in what ane cannot entirely see—but what others may have been blessed enough, on occasion, to witness.
Prayforalex.com, the site where Alex's supporters gathered to receive updates and share stories, has been offline for years. Withal, those posts now read like a powerful exhibition of why so many millions of readers are and then eager to buy books near living people who claim they take seen heaven with their ain eyes. "This gives me and then much personal strength," an early on reader wrote, in response to a post from Beth nigh meeting someone else who had a visit to heaven like to Alex's. "My dad built the most beautiful things out of woods, I but wonder if he has a hand building our mansions [in heaven]. I now wonder about the music and everything he is experiencing. When Alex tells what he saw, it brings such peace to this pitiful time." Another reader added that she got goosebumps reading Beth's post. "Home," she wrote. "It volition be so nice to ane day be there."
Source: https://slate.com/human-interest/2019/07/the-boy-who-came-back-from-heaven-christian-book-scandal.html
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