Spiritual Critiques

Satanic Front

introduction

Many evangelical and fundamentalist Christians see the New Age movement as another attempt by Satan to dominate the world. According to these Christians, the New Age movement is a front of seemingly innocuous people who are really being used by Satan. “The rise of the New Age movement,” Neil Anderson and Steve Russo say, “is just another facet of his [Satan’s] effort to seduce and control an entire generation.”[i] Constance Cumbey goes even further, saying the New Age is the vehicle for the Antichrist. “It is the contention of this writer,” Cumbey says, “that for the first time in history there is a viable movement — the New Age Movement — that truly meets all the scriptural requirements for the antichrist and the political movement that will bring him on the world scene.”[ii]

The Christian evidence that the New Age movement is a Satanic front can be divided into three general categories. First, that New Agers say they are God. Second, that New Agers have many similarities to the Nazis. Third, that New Agers engage in human sacrifice and other nefarious activities.

New Agers say they are God

The first charge against the New Agers is that they teach that the individual is God, and this teaching is the same as Satan’s temptation of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. “The New Age teaching,” Constance Cumbey says, “are the same old lies that have been about since the snake beguiled Eve in the Garden of Eden: ‘Thou shalt not surely die . . . and thou shalt be as gods.’”[iii]

New Agers have many similarities to the Nazis

The second charge against the New Age movement is that it is similar to the Nazis because both groups are concerned with occultism such as crystals, channeling and meditation, and both groups embrace pantheistic paganism. Constance Cumbey first made this attack in The Hidden Dangers of the Rainbow. In this book, Cumbey claimed that the New Age movement is exactly like Nazism, and Satan is using it as a front to take over the world. Cumbey says that the New Age is “a movement that parallels Nazism in every grotesque detail.”[iv] According to Cumbey, outsiders get fooled because “they fail to see that point-for-point the program of the New Age Movement has complete identity with the programs of Hitler.”[v] Some Christians go even further and say the New Age movement will be even worse than Nazism. Referring to the New Age movement, William Garrison says that “we must not be ignorant of a modern-day plan for a purge that will make even those shady events of World War II seem like a Sunday School picnic.”[vi]

New Agers engage in human sacrifice and other nefarious activities

The third set of Christian charges against the New Age movement are even more farfetched than the first two. Garrison says that prominent symbols or facets of New Age include the swastika, unicorn, pyramid, yin and yang, and “the number 666, sacred to the movement.”[vii] Neil Anderson maintains that movies like the Field of Dreams are promoting evil because through these movies “Satan [is] subtly promoting in our culture nice little spirit guides that will resolve all our problems.”[viii] Randall Baer says that many children’s toys and cartoons actually lead children into Satan’s realm. “Children’s cartoons,” Baer says, “toys, and games increasingly are infested with subtle-to-overt darkness . . . A child’s mind is corrupted in a subtle manner . . . Occult symbols and violence guide a child’s imagination into the world of Satan.”[ix] According to some Christians, even cuddly, purple dinosaurs with their own TV show are part of Satan’s plan. The Christians have been claiming that Barney is “a herald of the New Age movement and a potential hazard to the spiritual health of children.”[x] Barney is Satanic because Barney asks kids to imagine themselves in certain situations, and this kind of visualization supposedly exposes kids to evil, occult influences. Vegetarianism also, according to Tal Brooke, is demonic. Brooke maintains that the Bible teaches that vegetarianism is promoted by the demons and so vegetarianism will emerge in the end times.[xi] Pat Robertson, the popular televangelist, claims that “the New Age religions, the beliefs of the Illuminati, and Illuminated Freemasonry all seem to move along parallel tracks with world communism and world finance. Their appeals vary somewhat, but essentially they are striving for the same very frightening vision.”[xii] The scariest charge against the New Agers is offered by Paul de Parrie and Mary Pride. They charge that real New Agers consider violence and human sacrifice necessary for the next step in human evolution.[xiii] Parrie and Pride assert that since the New Age movement has appeared our society no longer has an ethic of compassion for the old, sick and handicapped. Instead, it now has an ethic of cutting costs and neglecting the medically dependent. Parrie and Pride think the New Age movement is the cause of this neglect because New Agers encourage human sacrifice, just as the pagans did.[xiv] Parrie and Pride claim the New Agers hate the sick because they believe they are gods, and thus have a “gut-level hatred of anything that reminds them of mortality.”[xv]

The general claim that the New Age movement is a front for evil will be analyzed first. A major problem with this claim is that the Christians continually see any one who differs from their beliefs, even other Christians, as a pawn of evil. For example, Calvin saw those who attacked child baptism as evil, and the fundamentalists at the turn of the century were sure the Pentecostalists were evil. Nowadays, Pat Robertson believes the Masons are a major source of evil. This continual drumbeat from the evangelical and fundamentalist Christians that their ideological opponents are evil loses its force over time and causes their charges to lose some credibility. The trouble is not that the Christians believe in evil forces, but that they have a simplistic vision of how these evil forces work. Everyone who does not agree with their beliefs ends up being called a pawn of evil, while those who agree with their beliefs are said to be good. Unfortunately, being safe from evil is not as simple as agreeing with some religious or political line. These Christians miss the psychologically subtle way that evil can work through people no matter what kind of religious beliefs they have. Furthermore, the Christians also ignore the evil that can result when one group demonizes its opponents, and thus imagines itself as pure and free of faults.

Problems with the christian evidence that new agers are a satanic front

overview

Even on the Christians’ own terms of worrying about evil fronts, New Agers could make the case that the Christians themselves are better pawns of evil than the New Agers. For by persecuting and killing those who disagree with them through the Crusades, the Inquisition and the witch hunts rather than loving their enemies, most New Agers would agree with the Enlightenment Deists’ critique of orthodox Christianity and say that the Christians have perverted Jesus’ message. In this way, the Christians have spread much more evil than the New Agers.

Another problem with the credibility of these Christian critics of the New Age is their shoddy scholarship. Even their own colleagues are critical of them on this point. Irving Hexham, an evangelical Christian, castigates his fellow Christians for their poor scholarship.[xvi] Hexham says that evangelical Christian works on the New Age are simplistic, reductionist and have limited range.[xvii] Ted Peters, a Christian professor of systematic theology at Pacific Lutheran Seminary, says that Christian writers are “embarrassing the Christian tradition”[xviii] by not understanding properly the statements the New Agers make. An example of shoddy scholarship is the way some Christians see everything in the New Age as paganism, pantheism or Hinduism. In this vein Norman Geisler is horrified by the Star Wars movies because “Once again, the cosmic sponge of Hinduism makes its presence known on American’s screens.”[xix] Unfortunately for Geisler, Star Wars is based on Chinese Taoism and not on Hinduism. Unfortunately Geisler is not an isolated case but just one example of a widespread Christian tendency to not be careful in understanding the New Age movement. The third group of ridiculous charges that New Agers encourage human sacrifice and revere the number 666 are examples of this shoddy scholarship.

New Agers say they are God

The first Christian charge is true; some New Agers do maintain that they are God. Nevertheless, this claim is not as widespread in the New Age as the Christians maintain; this claim certainly is not the foundation of the movement as some Christians charge. Only some New Agers (whom the media focuses on because of Shirley MacLaine’s influence) make this claim. A much more common conception of God among New Agers is panentheism: God is in everything, but God is not identified with the world. Furthermore, the claim “I am God” is an integral part of the long religious tradition of India. This claim should not be understood as someone claiming their ego is God; it is claiming that one’s inner soul or Atman is the same as God or Brahman. One can only maintain that this claim is the result of evil forces if one also asserts that the foundation of much of Indian religion is the work of evil forces.

New Agers have many similarities to the Nazis

The second Christian charge concerns the New Agers’ similarities to Nazism. This claim is much more serious because the New Agers do share the Nazis’ interest in occultism, and even some New Agers worry about the similarity.

1. Scholars agree that many Nazis were involved with crystals, meditation and power objects. Because they were involved with occultism, James Webb, a historian of the occult, says that “in pre-Nazi Germany the Age of Aquarius was sometimes timed to coincide with the arrival of the Thousand Year Reich.”[xx] Hitler also had qualities admired by people in the New Age movement. After suffering a mustard gas attack in 1918, Hitler had a bout of blindness, and during this time he had a supernatural vision in which he heard a voice summoning him to save Germany.[xxi] One New Age scholar says that Hitler “was a trance medium.”[xxii] The influential historian of Fascism, Ernst Nolte, maintains that “there should be no doubt as to the mediumistic trait in Hitler. He was the medium who communicated to the masses their own, deeply buried spirit.”[xxiii] Hitler also said that “man is becoming God . . . Man is God in the making . . . Those who see in National Socialism nothing more than a political movement know scarcely anything of it. It is more even than a religion: it is the will to create mankind anew.”[xxiv] Nolte says that Hitler even intended to make the world vegetarian.[xxv]
2. Many Germans are themselves worried about the similarities between the New Age movement and Nazism. In the seventies and eighties, there was widespread concern in Germany over the many Germans who surrendered their will to the guru Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh and accepted him as their Fuhrer. From a wider perspective, the scholar Peter Kratz in his book Die Gotter der New Age, maintains that the New Age movement in Germany serves as a front for the return of the neo-Nazis. Kratz claims the New Agers and the neo-Nazis both share many characteristics, and they are united in a campaign against the German left.[xxvi] Furthermore, Kratz cites many prominent German New Agers making Nazi-sounding statements. Rudolph Bahro, a prominent Marxist philosopher who became a disciple of Rajneesh, says that “in reality there is a call in the folk soul [Volkseele] for a Green Adolph [Hitler] . . . This is the German Moment in the green movement.”[xxvii] Another prominent German New Ager, Rainer Langhans, says that “spirituality in Germany means Hitler . . . We must take up the inheritance of our elders . . . in the sense of a rediscovery of what Hitler tried.”[xxviii]
3. Some statements coming from some New Agers or their leaders do sound very similar to statements of the Nazis. Satya Bharti Franklin, the ghostwriter and editor of many of Rajneesh’s books, asserts that Rajneesh was profoundly anti-Semitic, and he said that “Jews are so ugly … His adulation of Hitler was disgusting. He used to boast . . . that he’d succeed where Hitler failed.”[xxix] Franklin said he would praise Hitler in his talks but she would edit these statements out of his books.[xxx] According to these followers of Rajneesh, Rajneesh even wanted to take over the world.[xxxi] Nor is Rajneesh the only prominent New Age guru who admired Hitler. Believing destruction and killing were part of God’s lila or sport, Swami Muktananda considered Hitler a divine instrument. For this reason, Muktananda said that “Bangla Desh and Hitler are only instruments for killing a certain number of people whose time has come.”[xxxii] In America, J. Randolph Price, a New Ager who helped to popularize the power of visualization to promote world peace, says people with “lower vibratory rates” will be removed from the planet in the New Age.[xxxiii] The people with “lower vibratory rates” are presumably those with lesser consciousness who are not attuned to higher spiritual energies; the Christians interpreted this phrase as meaning them.

Despite the fact these quotes come mostly from Indians and Germans — citizens of countries which are not noted for their racial tolerance — New Agers themselves worry about the movement’s similarities to Nazism. Morris Berman says that New Age gurus and movements like “est” are akin to Nazism because they both involve blind devotion to gurus or leaders. Furthermore, according to Berman, in both the Nazi era and our time, myths, symbols, occultism, the “natural,” and the nonrational are all deliberately cultivated as antidotes to our artificial, over-intellectualized, bureaucratized way of life.[xxxiv] Berman maintains that the Nazis co-opted this type of energy and channeled it into a destructive form and that we should be concerned about the possibility of the New Age also being co-opted. Another prominent New Ager, David Spangler, also worries about the similarities between the Nazis and the New Age movement. Spangler, like Berman, thinks that our times are similar to the period in Europe between the World Wars when the ecological spirit and the desire for transcendence was channeled into Nazism. For this reason, Spangler thinks that we need to understand the similarities between the two times because an understanding of these similarities can prevent the tragedy from reoccurring.[xxxv] Spangler even maintains that using the term “New Age” can promote evil: “I don’t use it much anymore in lecturing. The danger is the tendency to create an attitude of division, ‘old age’ versus ‘new age.’ Worse, there can be an unwillingness to deal with history at all.”[xxxvi] In the seventies, Co-Evolution Quarterly which was read by very many people involved with or very sympathetic to New Age ideas, had an article which worried about the similarities between the New Agers and Germany’s wandervogel or pre-Hitlerite youth groups and how these groups welcomed a leader when Hitler arrived. FN There was even speculation in the New Age circles of the seventies of who would play the part of Hitler – with Werner Erhard of est usually considered the most likely candidate.

conclusion

The New Age movement and the Nazis have some similarities, not because they are both a front for evil, but because both synthesize Enlightenment values and Romantic values. The Nazis took Romanticism’s concern for the volk, intuition, nature, feelings and the occult and combined it with the Enlightenment’s love of business and technology. Nevertheless when we look at the two movements, there are at least two major differences that made the Nazis such a virulent source of evil: the cult of violence and racism. The New Age eschews both of these things very strongly. So while the New Age may share an interest in the occult, nature and paganism with the Nazis, there is no reason to think that it would make a good front for Satan the same way the Nazis did. For the New Agers do not privilege their race above any other and do not advocate violence.

For all these reasons, it is not an adequate explanation of the New Age movement to claim that it is a front for Satan.

Copyrighted 2009

footnotes

[i]Neil T. Anderson and Steve Russo, The Seduction of Our Children (Eugene: Harvest House, 1991), p. 58.

[ii] Constance Cumbey, The Hidden Dangers of the Rainbow: The New Age Movement and Our Coming Age of Barbarism (Shreveport, Louisiana: Huntington House, 1983), p. 7. The page is unnumbered.

[iii]Cumbey, p. 62.

[iv]Cumbey, p. 16.

[v]Cumbey, p. 56.

[vi]William Garrison, Holocaust II: The Truth About the New Age Plan (Tulsa, Oklahoma: End Time Ministries, 1985), p. 3.

[vii]Garrison, Holocaust II, p. 30.

[viii]Neil T. Anderson and Steve Russo, The Seduction of Our Children (Eugene: Harvest House, 1991), p. 25.

[ix]Randall N. Baer, Inside the New Age Nightmare (Lafayette, Louisiana: Huntington House, 1989), p. 155.

[x]“Barney Labeled ‘New Age’,” Christianity Today, May 16, 1994, p. 47

[xi]Tal Brooke, Sai Baba: Lord of the Air (New Delhi: Vikas Publishing House, 1979), p. 379.

[xii]Pat Robertson, The New World Order (Dallas: Word Publishing, 1991), p. 185.

[xiii]Paul de Parrie & Mary Pride Unholy Sacrifices of the New Age (Westchester, Ill.: Crossways Books, 1988), p. 26.

[xiv]Parrie and Pride, pp. 54-6.

[xv]Parrie and Pride, p. 56.

[xvi]Irving Hexham, “The Evangelical Response to the New Age,” in James R. Lewis and J. Gordon Melton, ed., Perspectives on the New Age (Albany: SUNY Press, 1992), p. 161 & p. 324, n. 45.

[xvii]Hexham, p. 161.

[xviii]Ted Peters, The Cosmic Self: A Penetrating Look at Today’s New Age Movement (San Francisco: Harper SanFrancisco, 1991), pp. ix-x.

[xix] Norman L. Geisler and J. Yutaka Amano, The Infiltration of the New Age (Wheaton, Ill.: Tyndall House, 1989), p. 7-8.

[xx]James Webb, The Occult Establishment (La Salle, Ill.: Open Court Pub. Co., 1976), p. 454.

[xxi]Morris Berman, Coming to Our Senses: Body and Spirit in the Hidden History of the West (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1989), pp. 280-1.

[xxii]Berman, p. 282.

[xxiii]Ernst Nolte, Three Faces of Fascism: Action Francaise, Italian Fascism, National Socialism, trans. Leila Vennewitz (New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1960), p. 292.

[xxiv]Adolf Hitler, as cited in Berman, p. 253.

[xxv]Ernst Nolte, Three Faces of Fascism, p. 291.

[xxvi]Peter Kratz, Die Gotter des New Age (Berlin: Elefantin Press, 1994), pp. 9, 31, and passim.

[xxvii]Rudolf Bahro, as cited in Peter Kratz, Die Gotter des New Age (Berlin: Elefantin Press, 1994), p. 107. My translation.

[xxviii]Rainer Langhans, interview in “taz” 12 April 1989 as cited in Kratz, p. 123.

[xxix]Satya Bharti Franklin, The Promise of Paradise: A Woman’s Intimate Story of the Perils of Life with Rajneesh (Barrytown, NY: Station Hall Press, 1992), p. 324.

[xxx] Franklin, p. 107.

[xxxi]Franklin, p. 324.

[xxxii]Swami Muktananda, Satsang with Baba, vol. 1 (Ganeshpuri, India: Shree Gurudev Ashram, 1974), pp. 24-6.

[xxxiii]J. Randolph Price, as cited in Randall N. Baer, Inside the New Age Nightmare (Lafayette, Louisiana: Huntington House, 1989), p. 169.

[xxxiv]Morris Berman, The Reenchantment of the World (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981), pp. 287-92.

[xxxv] David Spangler, Emergence: The Rebirth of the Sacred (New York: Delta, 1984), p. 159.

[xxxvi]Spangler, Emergence, pp. 158-9.