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There’s a video that’s been making the rounds over the past few days of a man who was in a coma, went to Heaven for (an oddly specific) 18 days, met Jesus, then came back to tell everyone about it.
Fox News, of course, is talking about it as if it’s a major scoop.
Gabe Poirot spoke with host Kayleigh McEnany recently to explain what happened to him… and how big and manly Jesus is:
MCENANY: 18 days you were in that coma. You had this experience. You came face-to-face with your Savior. And then you woke up. How has your life been different since that experience?
POIROT: Yeah. Now, with every single person I meet, I tell them of the love of Christ, and that He did it all for them, and He died and rose again.
And also, I love how, you know, all these other testimonies, they didn’t meet a female Jesus. They didn’t meet a soft or a passive Jesus. Jesus is a man.
And especially in America, He’s been misrepresented. And especially, even, you know, there are so many cultural things that present Him as if He is some just tolerant guy. It is not the Jesus I met. He’s a lion. But He’s not a lion angry against me. He is a lion angry for me. He is a Mustang on my behalf. He did it all for me.
MCENANY: And what did He look like when you saw Him?
POIROT: Pure fire. He was 5’11”, like 6 feet, yet as tall as eternity. Like an ocean of love. Yet His eyes were burning white and red at the same time. And, I mean, talk about testosterone, like a Mustang. I’m telling you, He’s the Lion of Judah, and there’s a roar within His voice.
No wonder there are rumors about Grindr going down whenever conservatives gather. These guys fantasize about big burly men and assume they’re in Heaven. But not every wet dream deserves to become a book. (Poirot’s is naturally titled “18 Days in Heaven.”)
Forget the contradictions about how Jesus (even at 5’11”) is probably no more than a couple inches taller than Poirot yet “as tall as eternity”—whatever the hell that means. Or how Jesus is an “ocean of love” who’s also very intolerant. Or how Jesus is some hybrid of a lion and mustang. Or how Poirot’s response to his experience is to basically do the exact same thing that the most annoying Christians do all the time.
It’s truly funny that this man claims to have met Jesus, and yet learned jack shit about caring for the poor or helping the least of these. All he remembers is that Jesus was physically and emotionally masculine. As if any of that would matter even if true.
The actual story here is that Poirot, in 2021, was riding his skateboard without a helmet when he crashed into the pavement. (“I actually died,” he falsely claimed in an earlier interview.)
Jesus apparently couldn’t be bothered to protect him from the accident.
Poirot also told McEnany that he witnessed dead babies waiting for their grieving parents to join them. And he only came back to life because a friend of his prayed for him.
Fox didn’t offer any evidence that his story checks out. All we ever saw were some vague x-rays that are meaningless out of context and pictures of Poirot on his hospital bed.
So why was he telling this story? His book actually came out earlier this year and—wouldn’t you know it—McEnany interviewed him back then, too.
The more recent clip comes from a couple of weeks ago.
When they chatted earlier in the year, Poirot just talked about the awe he had when meeting Jesus; now, the focus is on His manliness. It’s a weird shift, but less so when you consider that Poirot is a YouTube evangelist who needs a way to stand out from the crowd at a time when some liberal Christian politicians are suggesting Jesus is about love, not war. (Some on the right are already using Poirot to push their own narrative against Senate candidates like James Talarico and Adam Hamilton.)
But let’s not pretend his story is unique. Christians have run this particular grift before, where they say they met God or Jesus after a tragic accident, and then sell a book where they get into details (that are either so vague as to be useless or so specific that their stories contradict each other).
Colton Burpo was the three-year-old subject of the 2010 book Heaven is For Real, in which his father laid out the visions his son had during an appendix surgery. Alex Malarkey and his father also co-authored a 2010 book called The Boy Who Came Back From Heaven. After a car accident that occurred when he was just six, Alex was in a coma and supposedly experienced the afterlife. In 2015, however, Alex announced he made everything up:
I said I went to heaven because I thought it would get me attention. When I made the claims that I did, I had never read the Bible. People have profited from lies, and continue to. They should read the Bible, which is enough. The Bible is the only source of truth. Anything written by man cannot be infallible.
His publishers soon announced they’d stop selling the book. Colton Burpo, meanwhile, insisted he was still telling the truth.
Still, both of those books sold a ridiculous number of copies and were turned into movies. The narrative is hard for many believers to ignore because it tracks with their own wishful thinking about the afterlife. If you experience a tragedy and overcome it, all you have to do is pretend Jesus was along for the ride if you want bags full of cash. None of the gullible believers are ever going to do any fact-checking—and neither will the publishers. (In Poirot’s case, the publisher is Harrison House, a Christian outlet that releases a never-ending flow of religious bullshit.)
Plenty has been written about why near-death experiences, even if they feel profound to the people who have them, aren’t worth taking seriously. For starters, they always seem to confirm whatever the person already believed. People like Poirot absorb the religious imagery surrounding them and then mistake their own regurgitations for revelation. In this case, all he’s offering is emotional blackmail, telling parents their dead kids await them in Heaven and assuring Republicans that Asshole Jesus is the Manly Man they should revere.
It’s no longer enough to believe in Jesus. You have to believe in the Jesus who has a lot of testosterone. They’re done separating Christians from everyone else. Now they want to separate liberal Christians from True Christians™.
Poirot didn’t have a revelation. He had a marketable story, propped up by Christian publishers and amplified by conservative media. No one should fall for it.
𝐻𝑒 𝑤𝑎𝑠 5’11”, 𝑙𝑖𝑘𝑒 6 𝑓𝑒𝑒𝑡, 𝑦𝑒𝑡 𝑎𝑠 𝑡𝑎𝑙𝑙 𝑎𝑠 𝑒𝑡𝑒𝑟𝑛𝑖𝑡𝑦. 𝐿𝑖𝑘𝑒 𝑎𝑛 𝑜𝑐𝑒𝑎𝑛 𝑜𝑓 𝑙𝑜𝑣𝑒. 𝑌𝑒𝑡 𝐻𝑖𝑠 𝑒𝑦𝑒𝑠 𝑤𝑒𝑟𝑒 𝑏𝑢𝑟𝑛𝑖𝑛𝑔 𝑤ℎ𝑖𝑡𝑒 𝑎𝑛𝑑 𝑟𝑒𝑑 𝑎𝑡 𝑡ℎ𝑒 𝑠𝑎𝑚𝑒 𝑡𝑖𝑚𝑒. 𝐴𝑛𝑑, 𝐼 𝑚𝑒𝑎𝑛, 𝑡𝑎𝑙𝑘 𝑎𝑏𝑜𝑢𝑡 𝑡𝑒𝑠𝑡𝑜𝑠𝑡𝑒𝑟𝑜𝑛𝑒, 𝑙𝑖𝑘𝑒 𝑎 𝑀𝑢𝑠𝑡𝑎𝑛𝑔.
So, how deep is his closet?
Ever notice how the "I Met Jesus in Heaven" crowd never stay in Heaven? They always come back. ALWAYS.
Heaven must be pretty crappy.