The Preposterous Power of Peter Popoff

Jesus and Peter Popoff both set high expectations of miracles for their respective audiences, with Popoff carefully adding qualifiers to define away the possibility of failure. However, this says nothing about the actual success of their miracle performances. Whereas this series has analyzed several of Jesus’ miracles, we now turn our attention to those of Popoff. He and his associates claim that Popoff can perform miracles, but have never shown an example by which neither the means nor the end is necessarily miraculous. This becomes quite apparent from a cursory look at the types of events that Popoff foists onto his followers as miraculous. 

Popoff’s miracle evidence usually takes the form of swooning, monetary windfalls, lifestyle changes, and supernatural healing [1]. If the reader has any experience with previous articles in this series, this evidence should immediately stand out as troubling. Swooning in response to a religious experience is a known phenomenon, but lacks any evidentiary substance. The act of fainting hardly requires a supernatural cause, and there are a plethora of reasons as to why an individual may faint. Similarly, there could be any number of reasons why an individual experiences a monetary windfall. In fact, all of the means Popoff’s believers cite as the source of their financial blessings are explicitly associated with human financial systems. That is not to say that God could have caused those in power to make choices amenable to the believers, but such an occurrence is indistinguishable from human agency. Just as with Jesus, the best evidence for Popoff’s miracles resides in events that are beyond natural circumstances. As fate would have it, the substance of Popoff’s power resides largely in the claims of supernatural healing.

Eyewitnesses of Popoff’s ministry often allege that the televangelist achieves miraculous feats in a manner that is strictly unsound. First, consider what Popoff’s associate, Larry Skelton, had to say about his friend’s miracles. When interviewed by GQ about about the miracles, Skelton said that 

“I’ve seen people with a short leg that had, for a while, a six-inch buildup on one of their shoes, You could see, there was no fakery to it. All of a sudden, that leg began to grow out to the same size as the other.” [2]

Larry Skelton on Peter Popoff

From this description, it appears that these people had what is known as Leg Length Inequality (LLI). Intuitively named, this is a condition in which a patient’s legs do not have the same length. According to University of Washington Orthopaedic, limb lengthening can cause bones to grow at “approximately 1 inch per month” [3], dramatically slower than the visible limb growth recounted by Skelton. If this event really did happen, it would be strong evidence that Popoff could/can perform miracles. However, less than three percent of the population has a 15 mm or greater difference in their leg lengths [4]. Popoff’s patient in this case had more than 10 times that length difference. How did Popoff manage to find someone with such a rare condition?

Frankly, the very situation Skelton describes is beyond extraordinary. The average individual has a LLI of 5.2 mm with a standard deviation of 4.1 mm. For context, if you sampled a million people, only four with discrepancies greater than 1.17 inches would be found. Popoff is alleged to have healed multiple people that had about 4 times that LLI. The odds that any such patient ever existed are effectively zero*, making the problem itself supernatural. On an evidentiary level, this is a noted departure from the two miracles defended in this Miracles of Jesus series.

When we look at the various miracles that Jesus performed in the gospels, we find they were solutions to problems grounded in common human experience. Physical illness, mental illness, and transportation are common issues people faced in Jesus’ day and continue to face in the present. Skelton’s description seems as though it belongs in the same category, but it does not. It is statistically impossible for an individual to have a LLI of 6”. Evidence for a miracle is strongest when there is a comprehensible phenomenon that is achieved by incomprehensible means. Skelton doesn’t give an explanation for how these patients existed, but presumably it is meant to be a natural interpretation. Nevertheless, if such patients did exist, it would still be possible for him to observe a half foot LLI or shoe buildup. The issue is that Skelton could have easily misjudged the buildup thickness, or been fooled by the patient shifting their gait to accommodate the length difference. Despite this, Skelton takes the position that Popoff is “the real deal”.

Even though Skelton believes in Popoff’s supernatural abilities, he still alludes to Popoff’s faked miracles in the 1986 scandal. Ultimately, this incident casts a dark shadow over any other analysis one could apply to Popoff’s alleged miracles. His willingness to create a pretense of the supernatural warrants deeper scrutiny on the claims attributed to him. Popoff could quite easily convince his audience that his patient was healed just by proclaiming it to be so, as he has numerous times on television. His strategy has not fundamentally changed since James Randi first exposed his earpiece trick. In essence, the means have shifted from technology to human psychology. Popoff’s career in the supernatural is littered with stories of deception coincidence. It seems highly unlikely that there is any reputable claim of a truly miraculous encounter with Peter Popoff. 

Sources

1. Peter Popoff – Jesus Does the Healing. (2009, March 6). Retrieved January 18, 2020, from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uZipJkv5y4c
2. Oppenheimer, M. (2017, May 26). Peter Popoff, the Born-Again Scoundrel. Retrieved October 6, 2019, from https://www.gq.com/story/peter-popoff-born-again-scoundrel.
3. UW Medicine. (n.d.). Limb Lengthening & Shortening. Retrieved January 18, 2020, from https://orthop.washington.edu/patient-care/articles/childrens/limb-lengthening-shortening.html
4. Knutson, G. A. (2005, July 20). Anatomic and functional leg-length inequality: a review and recommendation for clinical decision-making. Part I, anatomic leg-length inequality: prevalence, magnitude, effects and clinical significance. Retrieved from https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1232860/

Additional Reading

The Gait Guys. (2012, September 8). leg length discrepancies and shoe lifts. Retrieved from https://www.thegaitguys.com/thedailyblog/leg-length-discrepancies-and-shoe-lifts