The New Age Rage

Several weeks before I moved to California to attend seminary, I was advised by a well-meaning friend to read a book called The Seduction of Christianity and its sequel, Beyond Seduction. As I recall, these books represented a response to the New Age/Eastern thought that emerged from the counterculture of the 1960’s and emphasized meditation, religious tolerance, and world peace. Fearing that unsuspecting Christians would be unduly influenced by such pernicious ideas, the author of the “Seduction” books penned his grim, two-part warning.

I was directed to these works because they contained some rather disturbing information about Golden Gate Seminary. According to Beyond Seduction, nefarious agents of the New Age movement had infiltrated this once-proud institution and begun teaching a form of “shamanism” to its impressionable students. But after arriving on campus, I could find no evidence of New Age inroads into the curriculum, though surrounding Marin County had no shortage of gurus, psychics, and meditation centers. I soon became accustomed to references to crystals, karma, and role of “The Universe” in supplying all our needs.

(Note to evangelical readers: When dealing with New Age folk, refrain from smart-ass comments about “The Universe” stepping up its efforts in sub-Saharan Africa, or you might be told that the same could be said of the Christian God. Some of these New Age-types are cagier than they look.)

To help us understand this local phenomenon, one professor finally brought the New Age to Golden Gate during my last year of seminary. Dr. S, my favorite theology professor, offered a new class called “Responding to the New Age Movement,” which I eagerly signed up for. And not content to erect straw men, Dr. S soon had us reading popular New Age texts like The Aquarian Conspiracy and writing papers that identified the positive attributes of the movement as well as the negative ones.

And I had to admit that it wasn’t difficult to spot a few parallels between the New Age movement and Christianity. The Aquarian Conspiracy defined the movement as a loose network of activists who transformed the world without resorting to traditional structures like political parties—a description that could easily have applied to Christians in the days before Focus on the Family got its congressional scorecard down to a science.

Of course, there were clear differences as well. New Agers were less interested in getting to know Jesus than in getting to know oneself. Transformation was achieved through becoming mindful of your own mind, leading to a paradigm shift that, when experienced by enough people, would redefine every social structure from politics to medicine. Crystals and the channeling of spiritually evolved beings were also deemed helpful to the process.

In the end, it all struck me as a harmless blend of pop psychology and junk science. It’s not like New Agers were starting wars, grabbing for political power, or imposing their values on everyone else. Now that would really be scary.