by Texe Marrs
Wives, too, phone and write, their voices sometimes cracking with emotion as they explain how their husbands have become entangled in a New Age cult and how it has wrecked and harmed their marriages.
In Woman’s Day magazine, writer Claire Safran recently wrote an insightful article entitled, “Today’s Cults Want You” in which she stated: “If you are mid-life or older, feeling a little vulnerable and have some money, you are a candidate for a cult. And if you don’t think you’d ever fall for such nonsense, read the stories of three very normal women who did.”
The three women profiled in the Woman’s Day article are not at all the kind of people that you or I might imagine a potential New Age cult member to be. They were neither “spacey” nor youthful. One was a woman who could properly be called a “Super Mom.” Yet, somehow, one day she found herself amidst ritual candles while a Buddha-like cult leader in a gray business suit flattered her by claiming to be the channel for messages especially designed to meet her needs from “Lao-Tsu,” the ancient Chinese philosopher and founder of Taoism. In another life 2500 years ago, the voice of “Lao-Tsu” told her, this woman was his favorite sister, the one who had helped him write his mysterious poetry.
Soon, this lady, whom her family and friends had assumed to be a normal, respectable, suburban wife, declared to her family that she needed “some space.” She promptly packed her bags and was off to follow her guru to a distant state. Just a few months later, disillusioned, she phoned her husband and begged him to take her back. Today, she simply cannot believe her stupidity and lack of judgment.
The stories of the other women profiled by writer Claire Safran are similar. “Cults have gone mainstream,” Safran observed, “and their new targets are middle aged and older women.” The article added, “Today, the cults realize that parents may have more assets—homes, cars, bank accounts—than their children.”
This is indeed true, for in my own experience dealing with the New Age cults, I have found that some of the people lured into these cults are willing to pump tens of thousands of dollars into cult coffers. Some are even enticed to sell their home, their cars, their jewelry and clothes, and all of their belongings and donate it to the guru or spiritual leader who promises them self-fulfillment, a share of the “divine essence,” or initiation into the higher mysteries.
In a special report entitled the “The New Victims of Cults” in the Ladies Home Journal, writer Diane Salvatore warned: “If you are worrying that your teenage children could be lured into joining a cult, your fear may be misplaced. Today, the most vulnerable member of the family may be your aging mother—or yourself.” Salvatore gave graphic examples of elderly people who have been bilked of all their assets by New Age cults. Alarmingly, Salvatore reports that:
Cults today are expanding their membership through a new pool of recruits: the elderly, the middle aged, and church going Christians. And, while in the past cults attracted equal numbers of males and females, today more women than men are being drawn in.
Who is Vulnerable to a Cult?
Men and women who are drawn into the New Age are not ignorant nor stupid. Often, some of the brightest people imaginable can be persuaded to believe in the most incredulous and outrageous practices and doctrines. Studies on the cults have found that these groups especially prey on people during periods of extreme vulnerability. A man or a woman going through a particularly stressful time in their lives is a prime target; for example, the death of a loved one, losing one’s job, moving, going away to college, an extended illness, confinement in prison, being away from home due to military service, divorce, or the emotional state which some amusingly call “the middle age crazies"—anyone of these stressful periods may render a person susceptible to the influence of New Age cults and religions.
Cult recruiters especially like to pick on women in their 30s, 40s, and 50s returning to college or those whose children have grown up and recently left home, creating what is often called “the childless nest syndrome.” Men and women experiencing marital distress are also often victimized by the New Age recruiters. For example, a couple experiencing marital problems may unwittingly go to a psychotherapist or a psychiatrist steeped in New Age doctrine. By the second or third counseling session, they find that they are involved in extended group therapy in which the leader has influenced them to become enmeshed in the reading of New Age and unchristian “self-help” books and literature. The therapist may also use subtle messages to attack the couple’s traditional views and values so he can gradually replace them with newer values more amenable to the New Age.
In addition to the lonely and insecure and those suffering temporary emotional stress, the New Age also preys on the naive. Unfortunately, most of our schools today teach such unwholesome curricula “innovations” as values clarification, secular humanism, situational ethics, and relativism—philosophies made to order for New Age cults and religions. Led to believe that anything is possible for those who think positive and have the right mental attitude, and brought up to reject traditional Christian values and morality, most young people today are ideal targets for the New Age. Many lack absolutes and are tossed like a shipwreck on the seas whenever a glib-talking or physically attractive person of the opposite sex confronts them with smooth and deceptive new ideas. Unsure of their own convictions, they are extremely susceptible to what is presented.
The cults capitalize on what are often very real and unmet spiritual needs and unfilled longings. The cultists do not usually waste time on a person who demonstrates a solid knowledge of the Bible or conveys a firm faith in Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior. However, for those whose “faith” is second-hand and inherited from parents, the situation is quite different. Most people today are not grounded in Bible doctrines, even though they may have been raised in Christian churches. Such persons find the New Age cults and religions attractive precisely because they offer feelings, experiences, and the possibility of meeting deep human needs while suggesting that these desired objectives can be obtained through quick fixes. The New Age promotes the mystical rather than the rational; it suggests there is a way to “know” and “become.” The lure is that a person can become wise, happy, fulfilled, and successful through some type of magical formula or series of new and exciting, or mysteriously ancient initiations.
The New Age has attracted the majority of its participants from aging Baby Boomers. These are the children of the 60s who still have not found the answers they have been looking for. They believe that by searching and sorting out through the multitude of cults, sects, religions, and teachings of the New Age, someday they will be rewarded when they find that one teaching or one leader who can finally give them the key to instant enlightenment and/or illumination. These individuals have rejected Jesus Christ and the authority of the Bible but they realize that material happiness is insufficient to meet the deep inner needs of the human heart. So they seek and seek among the many New Age offerings, but their appetites are never satisfied.
Chapter 10: Reaching Out to New Age Believers
Ronald Enroth, a professor at Westmont College in Santa Barbara, California, and author of the excellent book The Lure of the Cults and New Religions, explained in Moody Monthly magazine a few years ago some of the reasons why the New Age has made such deep inroads in our society and attracted so many. Enroth points out that, “It is important to remember that most people are attracted to cults for nontheological reasons.” He goes on to explain:
Few Mormons joined the Mormon church because they were drawn initially to the Book of Mormon. Not many Moonies became members of the Unification Church out of early fascination with Sun Myung Moon’s Divine Principle. Theological considerations are nearly always secondary.
The appeal of the cults is quite simple. Cults lure people that are successful because they are meeting basic human needs: the need to belong, to have fellowship, to have a sense of identity and purpose, to be affirmed as a person, to have answers for life’s enduring problems.
R
onald Enroth gives us a means to reach the cultist with Christ and help the person discover the Truth. As Christians we should not view those in the New Age only as gullible, deceived adherents of false doctrines which need to be refuted. It certainly is true that we must be defenders of the faith, but we must remember that those trapped in the New Age are people just like us. We, too, once were in need of the Truth and were separated from God. New Agers are our next door neighbors, our loved ones, or the friend at work—men and women created by God whom we should be concerned about and reach out to with a pure desire to assist the person to discover true joy and happiness.
We know that this can be attained only through Jesus Christ; what we must understand and ever keep in mind is that these people are victims of propaganda. They are people who often firmly believe that they have found the truth; they may well consider the message of historic Christianity inferior to the new doctrines or special revelations they have obtained through some “inspired” channel of truth. Still, if we can better understand the individual’s human and social needs, possibly we can reach that person.
The significant thing to remember is that few New Agers start off initially on an unholy quest to wreck and destroy the Christian faith. Many in the New Age are idealistic, even altruistic and humanitarian in their worldview and perspective. Moreover, when first approached by cult members and invited to participate, many are in the throes of loneliness and insecurity. They succumb because they are temporarily vulnerable. Surely, we can sympathize with such men and women though we can not help them if we compromise our own principles and faith in the process.
Not too long ago I read a remark made by a woman named Jeanne Mills. Her words touched me deeply and caused me to reflect on the plight of those involved in the New Age. Mills stated:
When you meet the friendliest people you have ever known, who introduce you to the most loving group of people you have ever encountered, and you find the leader to be the most inspired, caring, compassionate, and understanding person you have ever met, and then you learn that the cause of the group is something you never dared hoped to be accomplished, and all of this sounds too good to be true, it probably is too good to be true! Don’t give up your education, your hopes and ambitions, to follow a rainbow.
What makes these words so very poignant is that Jeanne Mills is a former member of The People’s Temple. Jeanne was not in Jonestown, Guyana, on November 18, 1978 and was not one of the 911 adults and children who were brutalized and eventually murdered at the instigation of Jim Jones, their New Age “Christian” leader. Subsequent to these murders, Jeanne was interviewed by a number of television and newspaper reporters and was able to explain the reasons why so many had agreed to become part of The People’s Temple cult. Angered by her public renunciation of the cult, a year after the Jonestown incident Jeanne Mills was assassinated by surviving but disgruntled and vicious members of the cult who still believed in their dead cult leader.
It is so important that we thoughtfully and prayerfully reflect on the most effective way to witness to New Agers. Though many are brainwashed and unable to discern reality, it is vital that we who are of Christ recognize the incredible extent to which those in the New Age are victimized by fraud and deception. In a perceptive poem, which he called “This is It,” poet Carl Sandburg gave us this keen insight into the mind control techniques of the cult:
Repeat and repeat till they say what you are saying.
Repeat and repeat till they are helpless before your repetitions.
Say it over and over until their brains can hold only what you are saying.
Speak it soft, yell it and yell it, change to a whisper, always in repeats.
Come back to it day on day, hour after hour.
Till they say what you tell them to say.
To wash A, B, C out of a brain and replace it with X,Y,Z.
Sandburg’s poem should touch a chord in the minds of many in the New Age. It is, in fact, the goal of almost every New Age cult, religion, sect, or organization to convince the individual that he or she is suffering a delusion and that only through the initiation process or the enlightenment available through the New Age group can a person be freed from illusion in which the whole world—as well as that individual—is trapped. For example, A Course in Miracles stresses that the student is to judge his or her surroundings and all of reality as mere illusion—what the Hindus call maya. Instructors of A Course in Miracles suggest that the student refuse to accept the reality that confronts them and instead relinquish all their beliefs about reality itself. Lesson 132 of the course encourages the individual to make this affirmation: “I loose the world from all I thought it was.”
It is therefore an astonishing thing for a New Ager, after being a member of a New Age cult or religion and being brainwashed for a number of years, to come out of such a group and realize the extent to which he, or she, voluntarily, through the prodding of his captors, gave up the real world. L. Ron Hubbard, founder of Scientology, once called his religion the “total road to happiness.” Instead, the frightening truth is that Scientology and all the other New Age cults and religions are pathways to imprisonment and confinement.
Though they promise a bright new life and a radiant new aeon, the New Age cult groups deliver only a murky, dim world of partial truths and mega-lies. Promising to help people become sane, they then proceed to assist the individual to enter an insane asylum of his or her own doing—an impoverished place of mental and spiritual confinement where the mind and the senses cease to logically process information and distinguish facts from fantasies.
Chapter 11: The Danger of Cults
The greatest danger of a cult is that the individual will lose the opportunity to come to know Christ Jesus as Lord and Savior. There is not one—no, not one—New Age cult or religion which truly exalts Jesus Christ as Lord of all. Thus, a person who becomes involved in the New Age is not able to recognize the truth of Philippians 2:9-11:
Wherefore God also hath highly exalted him, and given him a name which is above every name: That at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, of things in heaven, and things in earth, and things under the earth; And that every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.
Because they reject the indisputable biblical teaching that all of us are “dead in trespasses and sins” (Ephesians 2:1), those in the New Age cannot find salvation unless they turn to the Truth of the Scripture. They must realize who Jesus is, and call on Him in true repentance. While many in the New Age join a particular’ cult or religion to meet personal or social needs, the fact is that at least tentatively, these men, women, and youth do believe in what they are being taught in the New Age. As long as they maintain spiritual fellowship with those who worship the “God of Forces” (see Daniel 11:36-39), they will be unable to recognize the Light. As Paul was inspired to write in Ephesians 5:1, 11: “Be ye therefore followers of God, as dear children...And have no fellowship with the unfruitful works of darkness, but rather reprove them.”
Many in the New Age operate under the assumption that they can go to their Christian church on Sunday and during the week attend a New Age study group or fellowship. Nothing could be further from the truth. We are told to have no fellowship with the unfruitful works of darkness. We are not to yoke ourself with unbelievers through spiritual fellowship. To imagine that we can maintain one leg in each of these two opposing camps is a serious error and places a person’s soul in grave jeopardy.
Many are also in real physical danger through involvement in the New Age cults. Pete Slover, reporter for the Knight-Ridder Tribune News Service, last year reported on a tragic situation. A New Age teacher in Dallas had convinced a very educated man—indeed a professor of business at one of America’s top learning institutions—and his wife that they were gods and goddesses in previous lifetimes. He was told that he was Jupiter, she Venus. Now the couple is dead. They eventually committed suicide. Subsequently, it was determined that a total of nine o
thers had attempted suicide after heeding the false claim of their “spiritual guide” and becoming involved in spirit communications.
Almost every day my ministry receives letters from anxious people whose loved ones are caught up in the New Age trap. They say that after the joining a New Age group or becoming fascinated with New Age occult literature, the loved one’s lifestyle changed dramatically. Often, they report, the individual eventually lost his or her job, and sometimes suffered debilitating health problems because of an unsafe dietary regimen prescribed. Mental depression and suicidal manias are also commonplace among those in the New Age.
It is ironic that men and women who join New Age groups for what initially appears to be for the best of reasons—personal development, to save the whales, end world hunger, clean up the environment, ensure world peace, or help children—soon find that none of these goals can be obtained through what the New Age has to offer. Instead, distressed, worn-out, and having sunk into a valley of despair, the person finds that years of his or her life has been wasted. But it is at that moment, and most often at that moment only, that the person begins to realize that there is an answer to his misery. That answer is found through Jesus Christ alone.
Part II: New Age Cults and Religions
“In the mid-1960’s, a Jewish, atheist psychologist named Helen Schucman, a professor from a university in the state of New York, claimed that a spirit entity began to send her visions and speak to her... Asked who this spirit was, Schucman revealingly exclaimed,‘It said it was Jesus.’”
Chapter 1: A COURSE IN MIRACLES
It is called A Course in Miracles. It comes advertised as a new “bible” dictated by none other than “Jesus.” It has taken the United States by storm and is now reaching out its silkily deceptive and slippery tentacles to every country on the globe. Already some 500,000 copies of this new bible have been sold and as many as four million people have studied the Course. Gene Keefer, in Critique magazine in 1989, reflected on the amazing popularity of A Course in Miracles when he wrote, “To say that A Course in Miracles is catching on is to make one of the great understatements of the decade, maybe the century. Less than 25 years ago, it was only a vortex of energy, whirling around... Today, it seems to almost be everywhere.”
