Blog: Bryce Crawford Needs the Real Jesus. Part 2: Personal Testimony and Faith Healing.

Last week, I wrote a post talking about GenZ street evangelist Bryce Craford’s connection to pastor Todd White and why that is concerning. If you haven’t read that post yet, I highly suggest that you do since it will help you understand this part of the story which deals with Bryce’s personal testimony that deals constantly with how God delivered him from his struggle with anxiety and depression and how God will (supposedly) do the same for you if you become a Christian, a message that, though sounding good, is something that is extremely detrimental to any development of faith. Let’s get into it.

First of all, let’s talk about Bryce’s fight with anxiety and depression by first defining what those two things mean from a psychological standpoint. The DSM-5 defines depression (or Major Depressive Disorder) as having five of the following symptoms for two weeks in a row or longer:

1. Depressed mood most of the day, nearly every day.
2. Markedly diminished interest or pleasure in all, or almost all, activities most of the day.
3. Significant weight loss when not dieting, weight gain, or decrease or increase in appetite.
4. Insomnia or hypersomnia nearly every day.
5. Psychomotor agitation or retardation nearly every day.
6. Fatigue or loss of energy nearly every day.
7. Feelings of worthlessness or excessive or inappropriate guilt.
8. Diminished ability to think or concentrate, or indecisiveness.
9. Recurrent thoughts of death, recurrent suicidal ideation without a specific plan, or a suicide attempt or a specific plan for committing suicide.

Anxiety, on the other hand, is harder to define since it’s used as an umbrella term to define a whole bunch of different mental disorders, such as OCD, PTSD, panic disorders, phobias, etc. However, the general definition of it (once again sourced from the DSM-5) is any condition characterized by excessive fear or worry that is difficult to control and interferes with daily activities. Its symptoms are:

1. Excessive anxiety and worry (apprehensive expectation), occurring more days than not for at least 6 months, about a number of events or activities (such as work or school performance).
2. The individual finds it difficult to control the worry.
3. The anxiety and worry are associated with three (or more) of the following six symptoms (with at least some symptoms present for more days than not for the past 6 months):
   • Restlessness or feeling keyed up or on edge
   • Being easily fatigued
   • Difficulty concentrating or mind going blank
   • Irritability
   • Muscle tension
   • Sleep disturbance (difficulty falling or staying asleep, or restless, unsatisfying sleep)
4. The anxiety, worry, or physical symptoms cause clinically significant distress or impairment in social, occupational, or other important areas of functioning.

While we can argue day and night about the validity of the DSM-5 and how these things are diagnosed or how they even started, the reason why I’m using these definitions is to show how vague the terms used to define these things often are. While I’m not denying that true anxiety and depression suck (I’ve seen my mom go through it and have periodically had symptoms myself), nowadays, anyone can be diagnosed by this criterion by a therapist or by themselves, even if these feelings are brought on for a legit reason, such as the death of a loved one or a messy breakup. This has unfortunately made claiming to have anxiety/depression very common online, to the point where the line has become blurred between sadness and an actual disorder of thought. Though I don’t know Bryce and could be wrong, it would make sense that he could be lying to be seen as relatable by the people he’s trying to reach (something that I’ll talk a bit more about in part 3).

It doesn’t help, either, that he’s said in an interview on Todd White’s podcast that when he was younger, he would often seek attention, something that hasn’t seemed to change given what he posts on YouTube. The reason I mention this tidbit of information is because, once again, claiming that you have/have had anxiety, depression, or some other mental issue will draw a lot of attention online, boosting interaction and views, giving him even more incentive to lie. However, even if he’s not lying, the precedent that he’s setting when sharing his testimony still disturbs me, which leads me to my next point….

One of the things that Bryce loves to talk about is how, when he became a Christian, God set him free of his anxiety and depression and will heal you as well. Though – as I’ve pointed out before – this sounds nice, is this true? What does the Bible actually say about this?

Contradictory to popular belief, the Bible does not actually guarantee that God will take away those things from you. What it does do is encourage you to trust in God for strength. There are many famous examples of this throughout the Epistles, Psalms, Isiah, etc. The one that I think of the most is found in 2 Corinthians 12:7-10, which says: “Therefore, in order to keep me from becoming conceited, I was given a thorn in my flesh, a messenger of Satan, to torment me. Three times I pleaded with the Lord to take it away from me. But he said to me, ‘My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.’ Therefore I will boast all the more gladly about my weaknesses, so that Christ’s power may rest on me. That is why, for Christ’s sake, I delight in weaknesses, in insults, in hardships, in persecutions, in difficulties. For when I am weak, then I am strong.”

While it is unclear whether or not Paul was speaking of something like depression or something else like being in jail for the millionth time, notice how he doesn’t say that God immediately took his suffering away. God will often allow us to go through bad things to help us grow. Though we can cry and yell at God to fix the situation, we cannot force him to do anything. He will do things that fit His time frame and his plan. We are finite; he is infinite. He has a plan that we can only see a tiny bit of, and He will not give us more than we can handle. If he wants to heal us, he will. If he doesn’t he won’t. This a fact of life that isn’t always the most comforting thing to hear in the moment, and definitely isn’t the flowery message that Bryce seems to be putting out there.

Furthermore, if you’re going to share something like that when giving your testimony to someone else, I strongly believe that you should caveat it by saying that that’s your personal experience. It’s subjective. God may not do that in their life though He’s done it in yours. Telling people that God is going to heal them of those types of issues if they become Christian is a sure-fire way to lead them to deconstruction once they’ve been disappointed that God didn’t heal them. You all of a sudden have turned Christ from being the Savior of the World, the Son of God, the Lord of Lords, etc. to being just another medication or meditation technique for them to use to deal with whatever they’re going through. Once that stops working, they’ll ditch it, if they even took it somewhat seriously in the first place. And God forbid they mix Christianity with some other spirituality if they stay with it.

However, what makes me the angriest about all of this is that I’ve met people with actual mental and neurological disorders that haven’t been healed. At my last church, one of my best friends had a condition called ACC, which left him with the mental capacity of a 9- 10-year-old even though he was 17. At my current church, the son of a family friend of ours has a severe form of autism to the extent where he still lives with his parents though he’s in his 30s. My mom has been dealing with chronic nerve pain in her face brought on by severe anxiety for close to 2 years now. And, if you want to look at history, Charles Spurgeon, the famous preacher from the 1800s, struggled with depression throughout his life brought on by various physical illnesses, criticism, overwork, and personal losses. Every single person I’ve mentioned here are Christians. If Bryce’s promise is to be taken seriously, then how come God didn’t spare them that pain? How come He didn’t heal them?

This also applies to Bryce openly endorsing and being active in the faith healing community, claiming that by praying for people, God will automatically heal them. In his interview with Todd White, he and White both “claim” healing from Jesus for various supposed ailments in affecting Bryce’s family. In the video that I linked at the end of Part 1, Bryce claims to have healed a psychic’s hip through prayer and even though she claims that her hip no longer hurts, she quickly leans over onto the chair to get her weight off of it. And that’s not the only example of this. Just look through his YouTube Shorts reel and he has tons of similar videos.

Another reason why this angers me so much is not just because it’s heretical, but also because Bryce’s audience is very clearly supposed to be GenZ and Gen Alpha, the two sickest, most confused, and most overly diagnosed and medicated generations in recent history, the two generations that most need the Gospel. Bryce obviously has appeal to this demographic thanks to his engaging and fast paced videos and the fact that he’s using that to spread a bastardization of the Bible that he’s been taught by people like Todd White and to promise things that are never promised is disgusting. This teaching will not only lead to deconstruction and living in denial (which is never healthy) down the road, but it is also being used for his own glory, not God’s.

Until next time,

M.J.