Ghost Cars

After an amazing prayer meeting, a group of Pentecostals is heading home late at night.  Unknown to them, a man a few miles down the road is leaving a bar.  He is very drunk, but he gets into his pickup truck and heads home.  He is weaving wildly all over the road.  Just as the Pentecostals near the top of a hill, they see the headlights of the truck driven by the drunk driver as he crests the hill in the wrong lane and heads directly toward them. 

 

There is no time to react.  The Pentecostals scream out, "Jesus, help us!" as the truck lurches toward them.  But then there is a confusing moment in which they seem to see machinery and car parts.  They smell car exhaust, gasoline, and oil . . . and then they are at the top of the hill with empty road ahead of them, and the pickup truck is behind them driving down the hill.  They realize that their car passed right through the pickup truck and emerged on the other side completely undamaged.  Unharmed and rejoicing, they continue on their way.

This story is a great example of a typical Pentecostal Protection Myth.  It has all the elements required for a Pentecostal to believe themselves protected from all harm:

 

(a)  The car is full of Pentecostals (the more, the better)

(b)  They have just been to a prayer meeting and so are all tanked up on praise and prayer and have presumably recently confessed their sins

(c)  They use the "Jesus name" incantation when they see the danger approaching

 

Pentecostals want to believe that they are supernaturally protected by the spiritual powers that they call upon, and therefore, myths such as this one are widely accepted.

 

 

Similar stories (though usually not quite as dramatic) are also widely in circulation, including many stories about people getting delayed for a few minutes before leaving church and then seeing an accident on the way home and realizing that, if not for the delay, they would have been the ones in the accident.  This is completely illogical, of course.  Accidents happen in seconds and there is no way to know exactly when someone would have had to leave in order to be involved in any particular accident.