This piece argues that shared faith and belief in miracles can bridge political divides, highlights dramatic survival stories from public figures and physicians, and makes the case for allowing spiritual care in medicine while urging mutual respect across partisan lines.
Most Americans identify with a faith and that shared spiritual ground offers a rare opportunity for commonality in turbulent times. Miraculous recoveries cut across party lines and remind us that some things are bigger than politics. When a community rallies around someone saved from the brink, the usual labels fall away and people reconnect as neighbors and fellow humans.
Take the high-profile moments when athletes or elected officials survive life-threatening events; those episodes awaken something deep in us. Damar Hamlin collapsing on the field shocked the nation and shifted attention from rivalries to rescue. Events like that show how fragile life can be and how quickly fear gives way to gratitude when recovery happens.
I wrote about these experiences in my new book, “The Miracles Among Us,” and one of the most vivid examples involves Representative Steve Scalise. After being critically wounded in a shooting, his surgical team said the combination of procedures and transfusions amounted to the most miraculous event of their careers. Scalise’s own description of faith during recovery is unmistakable and must be carried exactly as he put it: “I never felt fear. Once I put my life in God’s hands, an unbelievable calm and ease came over me. My mind went to a different place. Whatever was going to happen that day was up to God, and he got me through, and I felt Him throughout my recovery.”
Doctors who witness these recoveries often speak of something beyond medicine, and that language matters in how we care for patients. For many clinicians, seeing a patient regain life after a dire prognosis is not just a technical success but a spiritual moment. A physician’s willingness to acknowledge that dimension can change how treatment is delivered and how families heal emotionally afterward.
Dr. Robert Montgomery experienced multiple cardiac arrests before receiving a heart transplant, and he has described a profound inner experience surrounding those moments. He recounted it in his own words and I keep that account intact: “In these experiences, I feel a connection to a vastness, a connection to something much bigger than my experiences on earth. I start becoming aware of my own breath, and at first, I’m not sure what the sound is. And just before the moment when all my thoughts and memories are coming back, I am conscious of transcendence that’s way beyond anything that’s human or of this planet Earth we are on. I feel calm and serene. I feel my soul right before I am in my body. As I am waking up there is this overlap of awareness of this vastness and then knowing that I am a living being.”
Those encounters changed how Montgomery practices medicine and how he connects with patients, and that is an important point for any health system. Treating a person as a bundle of organs misses the moral and spiritual aspects that matter to them. Physicians who pray with or for willing patients do not undermine science, they acknowledge the full humanity in front of them.
Neuroscience even shows overlap between the brain circuits that process political identity and those that engage spiritual belief, suggesting these parts of life are not so separate. When politics becomes our religion, it hardens people and narrows their view. But when faith becomes a way to look outward to a community, it can soften the edges of anger and competition.
There is a practical case for loosening strict rules that force religious doctors to act as if belief must stay outside the clinic. Why would a devout physician set aside the compass that guides their care when compassion and hope can help patients recover? Respectful spiritual expression, when appropriate and consented to by a patient, can be part of sound medicine and human comfort.
My father, now 102, has shrugged off near-impossible odds because he had reasons to keep going and a temperament that avoids needless fights. He told me plainly how he kept living: “When someone throws a punch, I duck.” That simple rule reflects the humility and patience faith can encourage, and it is a lesson for public life as well as private survival.
Belief in miracles does not erase differences, but it creates pathways to mutual respect and reduces the impulse to demonize opponents. If we let shared spiritual commitments remind us of our common humanity, we might find more room for civil conversation and better care for those in need. In the hospital and in the country, the willingness to see patients and neighbors as whole people can open a space where healing feels possible.
