Launch Team; Do You Believe in (Forrest Frank) Miracles?
Join the launch team for The Myth of Good Christian Parenting! Get an early read, join live conversations, and help us get the word out. Also, let's talk a little more about that back injury...
We are officially less than a month away from the release of The Myth of Good Christian Parenting: How False Promises Failed a Generation of Evangelical Families (which you can order at a 40% discount at that link).
My co-author, Marissa Burt, and I invite anyone who is interested in the book to join our launch team. A launch team helps us get the word out and reach new readers leading up to release, so if you’re someone who has connected with our research and writing on the history of Christian parenting literature and the underlying theology of popular parenting teaching, we would love for you to sign on.
You’ll get early access to the book, and we’ll be hosting live conversations and sharing additional content with the team.
It’s only open this week (9/15-9/19). At the link you’ll find more information about everything launch-team related: bonuses, access, timeline, etc.
Writing About Miracles
If you are an online Christian, you have probably encountered content related to musician Forrest Frank’s back injury and subsequent healing, which Frank described as miraculous. The 30 year-old lofi/hip-hop musician says he fell off his skateboard and fractured two vertebrae. Then two weeks later, he told fans on social media, “I have complete healing in my back.” He even shared photos of x-rays and video footage as evidence.
This is the kind of story that I normally wouldn’t cover. Why not? You might ask. It’s a miraculous healing involving a Christian musician! Isn’t that newsworthy?
That’s fair. Frank is arguably the most successful Christian artist in the music industry at the moment. And two weeks is shockingly fast recovery time for a back fracture. (I’ve struggled with lower back pain for much of my adult life. After one injury while I was pregnant with my second child, I couldn’t hold my one-year-old daughter or sit upright without pain for months.)
This is a very online story. A famous and influential Christian artist shared a really compelling narrative on social media over the course of weeks, producing new music and a lot of spin-off content. His follower count is bigger than the readership of any article I write, so just covering what Frank says online is basically a slight signal-boost for him. But covering the online responses to his story makes some sense, especially as the story grew, evolved, and got a little weird and awkward.
I did end up writing about it. Here’s the article.
I hesitated to write this story because miracles are not independently verifiable — at least, not for journalists. I posted a video about this last week, and I received a number of comments like, “isn’t the x-ray of the healed back enough?” or “you could verify it by reaching out to his doctor.” I understand why this seems obvious to some people, but we have to be really clear about what medical documentation does and doesn’t confirm.
I could request x-rays showing Frank’s fractures, and the second set showing the absence of fractures. I could even get on the phone with Frank’s doctor and ask a bunch of questions. Even if that conversation confirmed that the fractures in the musician’s back are gone, we wouldn’t be able to confirm that God intervened, miraculously, to supersede the natural processes or medical interventions that usually bring healing. The most I can say is, “Frank said he experienced healing,” or “Franks’s doctor said it seemed like a miraculous healing.”
Frank himself identified that there are multiple options here: “either I have the fastest-healing bones ever, or we just witnessed a miracle.” As a journalist, I don’t get to determine which of those options is closer to the truth.
On the one hand, isn’t every healing sort of miraculous? That our bones and skin can repair themselves, even along an expected timeline, is a wonder. When a family member goes into remission after undergoing radiation therapy, Christians thank God for working to bring healing, even though that healing was mediated through a difficult medical treatment. Augustine of Hippo wrote about how turning water into wine was only miraculous to those who forget that God “does this every year in vines,” and that “extraordinary actions” were not uniquely miraculous, but rather, they are God’s movements to “rouse people as from sleep to worship him.”
How does one confirm that God reached in and decided to heal someone more quickly than they would have recovered with rest and/or medical intervention? Doctors have long documented and puzzled over unexplained medical recoveries. Even misdiagnoses sometimes result in joyful revelations that seem like a miraculous healing or intervention to the people receiving them.
Even if there seems to be no other possible explanation for a fast healing, a miracle simply isn’t something that we can confirm.
Someone suggested to me, “the Catholic church verifies miracles.” This is true. The Catholic church does have institutional processes for investigating miracles. The Catholic Church, however, is a religious institution, not a news publication.
When a Catholic reporter writes about the Eucharist, they are compelled by journalistic standards to say something like, “the Eucharist, which Catholics believe miraculously transforms into the literal body and blood of Christ,” even if the reporter herself believes this personally.
Answering the question, “was this a miracle?” is a spiritual matter. The Catholic Church, naturally, is an institution that seeks to answer spiritual questions and make spiritual claims.
Here’s an example that might help explain this in a different way. When a new pope is chosen, the Catholic Church teaches that God appointed him; that the Holy Spirit, not a conclave of Cardinals, has chosen a new pope. Faithful believers understand the papal conclave as a as a divinely-guided process. But when the New York Times reports that there is a new pope, the headline reads, “Cardinal Prevost was elected pontiff,” not “the Holy Spirit chose Cardinal Prevost as the new pope.”
This isn’t because the editorial staff doesn’t believe in God; this would be the case even if the reporter were a faithful Catholic who personally believed the Holy Spirit is the one responsible for choosing the new pope. Such a reporter would know that Catholics see the election as God-ordained, but would still choose to report on only what can be verified by an organization charged with gathering and accurately reporting information.
What I want to say to commenters who insist that I could verify a miracle if I really wanted to, is this: I don’t think we want news organizations trying to verify miracles. It seems odd to me to suggest that reporters should be vetting evidence of eucharistic miracles or healings. This speaks to me of the modern impulse to scientize everything, even the supernatural. People of faith (Christian and otherwise) seem torn. On one hand, they want to believe in miracles, or magic, or a New Age transcendent force that defies nature and science. But on the other hand, they want to produce concrete, empirical proof that the miracles they believe in are actually scientific, and can be verified using a version of the scientific method.
We want to be people of faith. But some of us also fantasize about finding archaeological proof of the Genesis flood or the Exodus. Apologists refine arguments, searching for the perfect, irrefutable defense of Christianity.
Sometimes, our faith leads us on a hunt for the thing that will make our faith obsolete: certainty.
Forgive my tangent here; I’m now very far afield of the Forrest Frank saga. I have been talking out loud to myself about this for over a week now. I’ve been practicing different ways of explaining why I, a Christian journalist and writer (who is even sympathetic to the idea that Frank did in fact experience miraculous healing from God), can’t verify a miracle in a news publication.
I don’t believe perfect journalistic objectivity is possible, but isn’t being choosy with what one can verify exactly the kind of strenuous, uncompromising objectivity so many of the media’s critics claim is absent from journalism today?
I think readers’ suggestion that I should try to verify Frank’s miraculous healing is evidence of their own discomfort with the fact that they themselves can’t confirm his reports, but they like him and want to believe him. This is an incredibly popular musician and successful content creator who has managed to turn this episode into really engaging, viral content. Understandably, some followers want reassurance that this guy is for real. They don’t want to be taken for a ride by a grifter. It’s as if they want someone to give them permission to believe him.
That’s the risk we take when we allow ourselves to become fans of a Christian celebrity. Parasocial relationships with Christian influencers are, in some ways, more fraught than those with wellness or style influencers because there are additional layers of trust required for those relationships to work. One layer of trust is interpersonal, and another layer is spiritual.
You might trust a wellness influencer because you like their content-delivery style, or because you want the physique they have. A Christian influencer wins trust through their persona or lifestyle and their online performance of faith. Followers have to put their faith in the influencer’s faith.
Forrest Frank’s fans believe and trust him for a number of complicated reasons. He seems sincere. They like his music. He is a master of content creation and understands the mechanics and incentives of platforms like Instagram and TikTok. He is good at holding their attention.
I think it’s good, actually, to feel some discomfort in navigating one’s personal response to a Christian celebrity’s claims. The discomfort is a sign of awareness that there is no IRL, reciprocal relationship there, and that putting faith in someone else’s faith is precarious, especially when that person profits off your attention.
I have no reason to think that Frank isn’t being truthful with his millions of followers. I believe in the same God he does: a God of miraculous healing and resurrection. But in at least one post, Frank refers to his followers as his “flock,” which suggests to me that he plans to use his platform for more than music promotion. He’s cultivating spiritual influence.
A miracle is one possibility. But so is misunderstanding, and so indeed is deception. The best I can do, as a journalist, is report as accurately as I can and provide information that will help readers as they consider whether to put their faith in someone who publicly claims a miracle.
Thanks for reading! As always, here are some recommended reads and listens:
This week, I’m finishing Harriet Brown’s book, Body of Truth: How Science, History, and Culture Drive Our Obsession With Weight—And What We Can Do About It. It’s been a fascinating and heart-wrenching read. Brown spoke with so many people whose relationships with food and their bodies have been deeply damaged by diet culture. It’s been a great help as I research for my next book on how the wellness industry sells diet culture to Christian women.
I’m teaching the course Death and Dying this semester, a first for me. Last week we were focusing on what it means and requires to be present for someone who is dying. It was a heavy week. We read this essay in The Christian Century, “Luminous at the End: My Sister’s Last 40 Days” by Anthony B. Robinson. It’s been a challenge to get students enthusiastic about thinking/talking about death. To be honest, it’s hard for me to engage with some of our readings. But it’s rewarding, and I’m trying to help orient us toward hope, wonder, and peace.
A couple of weeks ago, I got to speak with Naomi Raine of Maverick City Music for an upcoming profile. She has a new album out, Jesus Over Everything (Live in Las Vegas). Personally, I could listen to her sing anything; that voice is unreal. I’ll share the profile when it comes out next month, but for now, enjoy the album!
You are the smartest.