The Shocking Reality of 'Faith Healing' - My Amputee Experience

Oh, fan of pain. Please don't watch that video and then tell me I just need to pray and it'll be better. Most Christians are where they would like to be healed, but you know what? They can make it without it. We've got the American Disabilities Act. Americans have become so that we can accommodate it. I don't get sick. I don't believe in getting sick. And some of you, I don't have any control over getting sick. That's the reason you're sick. He died to produce physical healing in your body. And if you are suffering with sickness and disease, you are leaving something, a gift that Jesus purchased at great expense for you, and you're leaving it on the table. I've only got one party trick. You can expect me not to use it at the intro of basically every video. Well, hello there, my beautiful, lovely internet friends. Welcome back to my channel. Hi there. So sorry to interrupt so close to the beginning of the video, but I realized in editing that I did a terrible job of setting this up. So brief explanation of what we're actually talking about today. Leo, can you stop trying to eat me? I'm trying to work. Today, I want to talk about faith, healing, and my own personal experience with this. I am someone who has been in physical pain and dealing with surgeries and chronic illness since the age of 15 onward. And I'm going to talk about my history in this, but the reason I'm making this video is because recently, I have seen a large uptick in comments on my channel like these. People telling me that they are praying for me, which I always appreciate whether or not I ascribe to a faith myself. Someone is still offering a kind thing. So I'm grateful for that. But when it is followed up by these kinds of statements, I am praying. And if you have faith, you will be healed. I'm praying for you. And our Lord Jesus Christ is healing, waiting for you. You just have to accept it. I am praying that you will be fully restored and made whole, as in my leg growing back or all chronic pain being completely eliminated. And this hits on a really big nerve for me, because having lived through years of being in the charismatic Christian church, which is all about faith, healing, miracles, speaking in tongues, I wanted to explain why this way of thinking and speaking, especially to strangers, is really damaging. Now, as you listen to my experience with this, I want to make one thing really clear. I'm not angry at God. He or she has never done a gosh darn thing to me. Whether or not a God or something divine exists is something I have yet to figure out in my own life. What you will pick up on in this video is that I have a lot of anger towards the weaponized theology of certain people. If you don't know, I used to be extraordinarily Christian. I was raised in a conservative Christian family, but I really took that on as my entire identity. Throughout high school in my early 20s, I was so deeply involved in church communities. But beyond that, it wasn't about religion for me. It was about a personal relationship with Jesus, right? Like with God. This is something that was genuinely the entirety of my identity. Everything about me was based around submitting to God's will, feeling his love, sharing that with other people. And in my late teens, I found myself in a pretty charismatic side of Christianity. This also coincided with the time that I began experiencing very serious physical issues around migraine, very bad chronic pain, continual ankle surgery, and just being in a lot of pain. And I kind of stumbled into this charismatic community. And I truly and deeply believe that God was the ultimate healer. He wants to heal. He wants to restore. And so as I began experiencing very intense medical issues and pain, the message around me was, God has healing waiting for you. He died to produce physical healing in your body. And if you are suffering with sickness and disease, you are leaving something, a gift that Jesus purchased at great expense for you, and you're leaving it on the table. He did that for you because he loves you and he wants you well. And yet we tolerate things that Jesus died to forgive us of, to set us free of. That's not good. That caused lasting damage in how I viewed myself because I was told over and over and over again that it was my fault that I was in pain. That it was my fault that my body was broken because God is a healer. The healing God has waiting for you, Joe. He is a healer. He wants you to be made whole. And here's the fun part. All you need to do is have faith and accept it. Some instances where he didn't heal everybody, but not because he willed it. It was because they refused it. It was because of their unbelief. When you tell people, if you have faith in the name of Jesus Christ, you will be healed. There is one very clear implication. If you don't have faith, you won't be healed. And that is what you are often told. Sometimes it's ascribed to like, well, maybe the people around you when we were praying didn't have enough faith. They didn't truly believe it was going to be healed. So it didn't. You can get healed off of somebody else's faith. Not completely. You have to have some degree of faith. Then come in the insinuations of, well, why aren't you accepting healing? He wants you well. And yet we tolerate things that Jesus died to forgive us of, to set us free of. That's not good. Most Christians are where they would like to be healed, but you know what? They can make it without it. We've got the American Disabilities Act. Americans have become so that we can accommodate it. Do you want to be sick? Do you want to be hurting? What sin in your life is unconfessed? Another big favorite of mine. I also have a lot of anger towards the arrogance of thinking, oh, fan of pain. Please don't watch that video and then tell me I just need to pray and it'll be better. I also have a lot of anger towards the arrogance that you often find in this way of thinking because they believe they are the only people who have found the true translation of scripture. And this is an issue that I have with a lot of the ways that Christianity is presented here in America. There are like, I don't know, 40,000 different denominations of Christianity worldwide. And yet the majority of them believe that they have found the correct way of reading the scripture. I understand that. I understand where it comes from. But when you then take those concepts, see them as divine truths and place them on other people, either being unaware or not caring about the consequences of those actions and what mentally that could do to someone. God wants to heal you, but he needs some cooperation from you. You need to cooperate. That is very troubling to me. Leo's good with it, though. He doesn't care as long as he gets his treats and his food on time. It's not dinner yet. I'm so sorry. But you know what I did instead of sitting there and saying, oh, no, I got arthritis. I said no in the name of Jesus. And I bet you I put that lid on and turned it off a hundred times saying in the name of Jesus, I'm healed. You can't make me have arthritis. There's also this like hierarchy that starts building, right? Because if you are a sick person or a hurting person and you haven't been healed, it's sort of like a mark against you, right? Like there's not a hierarchy in Christianity. But if there was, the people who are not willing to accept the healing God has for them because they just don't have enough faith, they're not going to be viewed as faithful as the other nice faithful Christians, right? It is seen as a mark against your character that you won't accept healing. Think of how broken that way of viewing things can make someone who is in pain. Some instances where he didn't heal everybody, but not because he willed it. It was because they refused it. It was because of their unbelief. When you have been taught that anything that is painful is your fault, there is a lot of self-hatred that develops. There is a lot of unhealthy ways of viewing yourself and also self-destructive behaviors that often come from that. Because I saw my pain and my suffering as my own deficiency as a Christian, I experienced judgment from other charismatic Christians that I hadn't accepted healing yet. And that leads to a way of thinking that honestly makes it kind of difficult to seek treatment, right? Because if you're seeking treatment, that's already a failure of your faith. This amazes me. People will put themselves through stuff with doctors. Doctors are a poor excuse for being able to use your authority and walk in health. Like I genuinely have believed that everything wrong with my body was straight up my own fault for many years, but it is a concept that continues to sort of follow me in my subconscious and something I have to continually work through. I'm going to try to talk about this delicately, but there has never been one single recorded instance of an amputated leg growing back from faith healing. In fact, there is a whole website I remember from when I was a teenager. I think it's www.WhyGodDoesntHealAmputees.com and it kind of breaks down a lot of faith healing theology and mindset. I know that I sound upset, not by the idea that there is healing and restoration out there, not by the idea that there is a loving or a Christian God. I am so upset by the way that people use this language and I don't think they know what they were doing. Hi, I just wanted to clarify that when I say that I don't think these people knew what they were doing, I'm not talking about the guy I've been showing clips from, Andrew Womack. I am certain he knows and or does not give a shit about the effect it has on other people. That guy makes my blood boil. He was very, very instrumental during this whole period of my life. Everyone worshipped him and idolized him. He lives very close to me. Yeah, that like past does not go for him. One of the reasons I wanted to make this video is because when I was that person, right? I was that person. I said that stuff to other people and not for a single second. I think that that was damaging someone. I thought that I was saying and doing the right things. I thought that I was helping to heal people, to help them experience God's love and compassion and healing. I told people these things. I was a part of these prayer nights, you know, praying that people be healed and having the belief and having the faith and, you know, praying for hours over somebody and telling them like, yeah, you do like like it's waiting for you. You just have to accept it. And it was never from a malicious place. I wasn't looking to hurt or control someone or create a complex in them where they now believe anything bad that happens to them or any pain that they are feeling is a personal moral failing for the next decade of their life. I thought I was doing a good thing. And I am not at all trying to convince anybody out of any sort of faith that they have, but rather say the way that you talk to people about it is really, really important. And I would urge you to pay attention to the undertones of what you're saying. I would be remiss if I did not mention the fact that I do have, I think, heartbreak, especially for like the teenage version of myself, for such strong false hope. All I wanted was to be better. All I wanted was to be free of pain, a good Christian, to serve my community, to serve my faith. Most of the people in my life were telling me, you're going to be healed. You're going to be healed. You just got to believe you have to hold on to that. You better truly believe it. And so I gave myself over to this hope in every way I possibly could. I remember one specific moment when my friends and church group were praying over me before, I think it was when I went in for the ankle fusion, and I had this moment of being like, oh my God, I truly believe this. I accept it. It is done. In the name of Jesus, it is done. In that moment, fully and totally, I accepted it. Obviously, it didn't happen. This might be too strong of a word, but it feels a little abusive to convince people in vulnerable places who are hurting or sick that this is going to happen for them, regardless of what you do or do not believe, the vast majority of the time, if ever, that does not occur. You are actively giving people false hope, and then penalizing them if they do not believe in that is mean. It is just really mean. And I speak not just from my own experience. Being connected with the disabled community, which is a massive community of very diverse people, right? Anyone who has chronic medical issues, who has any kind of disability, visible or invisible, this is a really common thing that so many of us have run into. Like, there have been situations where I have been approached in public for someone to, like, pray over me and you will be healed. That's a really common thing for people who have visible disabilities. And there's this other line that's often used, that God wants to restore you. You know, you walk up to someone who's in a wheelchair, living their life, rolling around campus, going from class to class, and you tell them, God wants to make you whole. Which, again, in and of itself, that sounds like a nice sentence. But if we think about it a little bit deeper, what you are telling someone is that they are broken or not whole. Like, when people say they want my body to be restored to wholeness, they're just pointing out that something is wrong and abnormal. There are a lot of disabled people that I know who have told me, you know, given the chance of it all being taken away, they wouldn't even want that. And yet people still talk to them as if they are desperate to be made whole, to be made normal, when that's not what we are asking for. I remember one situation in particular that, looking back, it's bizarre because I am in such a different mental space than I was back then. I remember I went to the Elephant Bar in Colorado Springs, which has since closed. That's not an important detail. We all went out after church and got some food. And our waitress had an arm and a cast. And one of the leaders of this little house church, which was a very tight-knit community of people, believing very specific things, one of the leaders asked if he could pray for her arm to be healed. And she said no. And he was very frustrated by that. After that interaction, I remember this guy being like, God, I should have just done it anyways, you know? I should have just been like, bam, in the name of Jesus Christ, you're healed. Her arm would have been better. Like, what a violation and how arrogant. Be like, I asked this woman if I could pray for her arm to be miraculously healed. She said no. But I'm going to do it anyways, just to prove her wrong about her own body and her own life and her own choices. Like, he was mad at her because she didn't want the healing of God. How many times did you actually heal a broken arm, Mike? Zero. The answer is zero. In conclusion, I remember being taught in college never to say in conclusion in any kind of speech or presentation. Yes, I failed my professors. I believe that faith can be a beautiful thing. It is a source of strength, of comfort, of community for so many people. It is something that has been intensely painful in my own life because of the way that I believe things, the way that I was taught things, the way that it was manipulated and used to abuse and harm me in a variety of ways. And that's something I'm still working through. I don't have anger towards God. I have a lot of anger towards the way that people use his name. Because I think at my core, I still have a lot of reverence for the ideas that I was taught. Whether or not I believe in a specific sort of God, the way that people will take pieces of what they believe to be his holy scripture and use those in a way that they see fit with complete faith that their interpretation is the right way. And then they will do things to 15-year-old girls, like convincing them that any pain that they ever experience is their fault because they don't have enough faith. When faith is the only thing that matters to that 15-year-old girl. So not only is she in pain, but now she is also a failure on the only thing she cares about. That stuff sticks with you. That stuff leaves a deep scar. So if you are a person of faith, I think it's a lovely thing if you are offering to pray for someone or telling them like, I'm going to be praying for you. I'm going to be thinking of you. But as my own personal request, please do not tell me that if I have enough faith, I will be healed. That all I need to do is believe in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ and I will be restored and made whole. I would be really interested to read people's thoughts and stories. Whether you agree or disagree, wherever you find yourself on this spectrum, let me know in the comment section down below. I will be reading comments and responding to as many as I can. A huge thank you to all my patrons over on Patreon for your continued support. To you, I feel like I should like gesture more with my with my nubbin. To you watching this video right now, thank you so much for spending a few minutes out of your day here with me today. You could be anywhere else in the world doing anything else, but you chose to sit with me for a few minutes and listen. I truly appreciate that. I love you guys. I'm thinking about you and I will see you in the next video. Bye, guys.