Visiting Heaven and Hell: A Look At "Heavenly Tourism"

"Heavenly tourism" books are serious business. Don Piper’s 90 Minutes In Heaven has sold 6.5 million copies in 46 languages; Heaven is For Real has been on the Evangelical Christian Publishers Association's bestseller list every month since it hit the shelves in 2010;  23 Minutes In Hell (which I guess falls under the category of 'hellish tourism'?) spent several weeks on the NYT best-selling list after its release in 2006 and continues to be influential.

This popular genre relies on the testimony of those who claim to have had either visions or near death experiences (NDE’s). There has been enough documentation about NDE’s that it’s hard to deny that people experience something when by all medical reasoning they shouldn't.  NDE’s offer fairly compelling support for the existence of a mind or soul – that is, something distinct from our physical biology – but I would be hesitant to claim anything beyond that.  Making an argument for the supernatural is one thing; making a claim to supernatural revelation is quite another.

Christians and Halloween

As a child, I was raised in a Mennonite community that did not observe Halloween. From its roots to its current form, we saw nothing compelling or good about it. We gave treats to oddly arrayed children on our doorstep, but we never dressed up, never went out, and did our best not to support the holiday financially or emotionally. I didn't really care; my mom didn't let us kids eat much candy anyway.

As a young adult, I learned more about the holiday from people who had done more than dabble in the occult. Whatever you might think of the legitimacy of their attempts to connect with the dark side, they were pretty serious about what they hoped to accomplish. Halloween was their Christmas and Easter rolled into one. They approached it with a sense of mission and purpose.

I later moved out of that community and for the first time came in contact with a lot of sincere Christians who viewed Halloween as just another holiday. They experienced it as an exercise of imagination, a sort of exorcism of the spirits of fear from which we Christians have been freed. God had not redeemed us so that we would cringe in the face of evil, so they boldly subverted Halloween with a freedom foreign to my upbringing.

These very different experiences have given me plenty to ponder over the years. Though I have more to understand, I have several observations that I hope contain wisdom.