QUESTIONER: “I keep deleting more and more ex-new agers. Many seem to become mind-numbingly stupid after being saved. Confusing rigidity for holiness, they seem to have zero feel for nuance in any given situation. What is going on? In all seriousness, doesn’t stuff like this denote a cult? Not being allowed to read anything except the sacred scriptures. Not being allowed any personal sovereignty or you’re shunned. Emotional manipulation. Etc. Or are people just stupid? And what do you think of people saying they have been ‘saved out of the new age?’ As far as I can tell, Jesus saved me from sin & death!”

MY RESPONSE: Dear ——, I can understand the deleting. I’ve been doing it myself because one can only take being confronted with so much nonsense. 🙂 So why does this happen? I think it is necessary first to understand the history involved. Bear in mind that people usually get into all that New Age stuff in the first place because they are already very damaged, to a greater or lesser degree. That’s why they were New Agers. Of course, the modern New Age scene is not the same as the New Age scene thirty or forty years ago. Back then, when there was no social media or internet it was mostly folks who wanted to bring in the “Aquarian Age” — heaven on earth. They tended to be into theosophy and Alice Bailey. It was very much caught up with pushing for the “Great Shift” and “Ascension” and was a hybrid between New Thought, Theosophy and Eastern Mysticism. Essentially, it was occultism dressed up in the ‘angel of light’ trappings of “white Magic” and it tended to attract middle to upper-class intellectuals who thought they were changing the world. It was all nonsense, of course, but it didn’t provide as soft a featherbed for damaged people as it does today.

Today, New Ageism has expanded into all the pretended therapies and other trendy quack-experiences which provide the perfect method for damaged people to psychologically bypass their unresolved issues. Just get blissed-out on a soundbath or whooshy music with sea breakers, synthesizer and panpipes or meditate yourself into a state which you think simulates ‘enlightenment’. Or become a fortune-teller with ‘angel cards’. Or flatter your ego by being told you were an Indian princess in a previous lifetime. Or get some myths about yourself from your alleged Akashic records. Above all, you can make yourself out on social media to be super-spiritual (the lie) rather than emotionally disturbed (the truth).

Now, the Church has always been flooded with damaged people. It attracts them naturally. As it should, in a way, so they can be healed by the Holy Spirit. But the problem has always been that a significant number (maybe most? 🤯) do not really undergo, in their alleged conversion, a genuine spiritual transformation but only have a psychological experience in some “hot” meeting which has been manipulatively designed for that purpose. They “make a decision” on the spot, without understanding the implications, but they have merely switched allegiance outwardly, intellectually, emotionally, but not inwardly, spiritually. They are still damaged and radiating all the narcissistic baloney in which they have been steeped over the years, in one guise or another, to cover up their damage. As a result, the Christian scene is overflowing with folks who have taken on the pietistic fanaticism of Christian zealotry (which is actually their new form of bypassing) but who do not really have the Spirit. There is no grace there. Grace is what is lacking. That’s why untransformed New Agers who have come into the Church so often become like the Christian Nazi Youth Brigade and are so puffed up with their little bit of (mostly false) theology, especially hyper-freewillism, living an Old Covenant lifestyle, a hyper-literalistic approach to Scriptures, watering down challenging Bible truths such as ‘the second death’, etc. — imagining that their ignorance is knowledge. Then they start to accuse even seasoned genuine believers that they are heretics! Really, it’s extraordinary. I’ve had some of them blow me off because I teach about Divine election and predestination and preach against so-called “deliverance ministry”. They seem to have no understanding whatsoever of what was rescued from oblivion in the Reformation and what has been real mainstream theology down through the ages. This is because genuine theology and teaching seems so alien to them that they think it is false teaching. It is all so bizarre. They have professed to be “Christians” (well, ‘New Age to Jesus’) for five minutes and they think they now hold the truths of the century. And to justify their wacky stances they cite various ‘odd-bods’ in church history who appear to support their truncated version of Christianity — ignoring completely the fact that the majority of believers down through time have not adhered to their theological novelties. Or they go the other way and become so “Thoroughly Reformed” that they become intolerably narrow, fanatical and intolerant, upholding the letter rather than the spirit of the Scriptures.

These people have often become puffed-up because they have been preyed on as trophies by churches which peddle false teachings about deliverance, the gifts of the spirit, and about the Christian life and which have no idea about what it means to live under the New Covenant. Living off the ego-boosting kudos which they receive from their alleged “testimonies” about how they went “from New Age to Jesus” just confirms the narcissist framework of their new uniform. Their whole “Christian” schtick is just a new cover for their damaged personalities and residual narcissism. But a personality disorder is just another sinful response which becomes enmeshed in one’s soul. I think I need to explain that, because many would say, “How can a personality disorder be a sinful response? Surely, it is just a manifestation of damage caused by someone else which is not their fault”. I would certainly agree that it is “a manifestation of damage caused by someone else which is not necessarily their fault”, but it is not just that. For the way in which those manifestations exhibit themselves are somehow always sinful: Irrational aggression, over-defensiveness, continuous fault-finding, narcissistic delusions of grandeur, being manipulative in relationships, sodomy, sexual deviance and perversion, attention-seeking, victim-posturing, continuous need for validation, religious delusions, being triggered uncontrollably, etc. The truly UNsinful response to trauma is to say with sincerity, “I am damaged goods, please help me move on”. But to act out in the ways above is sin and it needs mortifying rather than encouraging.

As the world slides ever closer to its big denouement, the visible church just becomes an increasingly rocky horror show of nuthouse nuances of one sort or another — an unbeautiful barrage of damage-control bandwagons. Just like the rest of the world. Hold tight! It’s a bumpy ride.

You ask if all this “denotes a cult”. Yes, it iscultish. The rigid caricature Old Covenant mentality cultivated in such circles is perfect for creating cultists. To set up meetings and studies based on the idol of human freewill and fanatically flushing out anyone who believes in what used to be called “the doctrines of grace” on the entirely unfounded notion that they are the unique invention of what they say is “an evil ‘heretic’ called John Calvin”, or to ostracise anyone who actually believes what the Bible really teaches about the Second Death and who doesn’t water it down with lily-livered annihilationist nonsense, is cultic to say the least — especially if these people start attacking and ostracising mature disciples of Christ who proclaim beautiful, healthy teachings of which these new upstarts are entirely ignorant and are unable to support.

However, one cannot create cultists if one adheres to the New Covenant, in which there Is a true experience of freedom of which many professing Christians seem to have no real grasp. Recently, I put a link to an article I had written about the difference between Old and New Covenants on a “New Age to Jesus” Facebook group and within a brief time it was deleted. There is absolutely nothing in that article for anyone to have apoplexy about. But there is an extraordinary ignorance about such teachings.

When so many alleged new converts come from a background like New Ageism, they are pretty soon inveigled into a variety of selections from a whole smorgasbord of typical off-beam teachings and practices, such as seeing the modern secular state of Israel as the centrepiece of everything, celebrating Old Testament festivals, buying prayer shawls and shofars, upholding Old Covenant laws about what materials should be worn or avoided, spouting about a pretrib. rapture or millennial nonsense, obsessively and triumphantly proclaiming hyper-freewillism, maintaining the anti-biblical concept of a losable salvation, etc.

Thus, many of these folks become rabidly condemnatory towards you because, for example, you join a secular table-tennis club, go to a dance workshop, listen to classical music, read books other than the Bible or “Christian” literature, engage in harmless activities with non-Christians, and so on. They thus become quasi-fundamentalists on steroids acting in an obscurantist manner who have no understanding of what it means to be a New Covenant disciple of Christ. They are like the “Christian” equivalent of the kids in Orwell’s “1984” who reported their parents (or any others) who were not 100% politically correct.

Maybe some readers will want to defend these folks and say to me, “But these are just baby Christians so you can only expect that they would be lacking in knowledge and understanding. You are therefore being unfair. You are the one who is at fault. You need to be less demanding”. If that is what they want to say to me, then I think they have not understood what is going on here. A genuine “baby Christian” does not rebuke mature Christians for holding to the teachings of the faith which was once delivered to the saints and which most have believed down through the ages. A genuine “baby Christian” does not assume that they already have all the knowledge they need. A genuine “baby Christian” does not become a carping, censorious, fundamentalist bigot. A genuine “baby Christian” does not take pride in what are essentially deceptions and false teachings, imagining them to be the real teachings of the faith. A genuine “baby Christian” does not infuse quasi-New Age thinking into their Christian repertoire. A genuine “baby Christian” does not immediately run around giving their over-hyped “testimony” all over the place with pride and then write a book about it as if they were the only ones who have trodden that path. At one time the hallmark of a “baby Christian” was not merely a lack of knowledge and understanding but a real humility in acknowledging that lack of knowledge and understanding, together with an acute desire to learn and know more from wise elders. Thus, a genuine “baby Christian” quietly seeks out those who are older in the faith then defers to and learns from them. That is what being a genuine “baby Christian” is all about. Therefore, the folks who want to defend those they are (falsely) calling “baby Christians” have failed to understand that those “baby Christians” have none of the signs of being a genuine baby Christian! This is the disturbing issue that I am addressing here. For these “baby Christians” (so-called) are actually developing a new faith of their own and have little understanding of the historic Christian faith and, worst of all, they sneer at those who hold to it.

I know of a number of former New Agers who have been so harassed by these zealots that it has frightened them off social media and made them question what the whole Christian thing is all about. Frankly, I don’t blame them. The whole show seems like a madhouse!

Regarding your observation that so many go on about being “saved out of the New Age”, all that seems to me to be a way of gaining notoriety. As you rightly observe, we are saved, rescued and delivered from sin and death and however that manifested in our lives as “the dominion of darkness” (Colossians 1:13). That dominion of darkness manifests in many different ways, according to our life situation and to what we have access. Some people’s darkness manifested in a lifestyle of porn and degradation. Some people’s darkness manifested in a life of crime. Some people’s darkness manifested in living a totally self-centred existence, to the detriment of others. Some people’s darkness manifested in a hatred of God. Some people’s darkness manifested in playing at being nice and thinking that being a philanthropist would get them into heaven. Some people’s darkness manifested in gambling and leading a dissolute life. Some people’s darkness manifested in being smug and arrogant. Some people would be any combination of the above. But somehow former New Agers seem to think that they are a special case and they never stop bragging about it, revelling in giving their testimony.

I remember when I first came into the Christian scene in the mid-1980s after years of involvement with mysticism and neo-Gnosticism (mainly Alice Bailey and other theosophists — the real New Age stuff), people were always going on about it and trying to turn me into some kind of trophy. It was downright embarrassing. Yet, I know folks who quietly came to Christ without any ballyhoo or razzmatazz — no ‘Damascus Road experience’, just a quiet inner knowledge that they have been redeemed. No one puts them on a pedestal. Yet their being saved and rescued from the dominion of darkness is just as valid and equally significant as all these supposed New Agers who all gang together like a special cult. I say “supposed” because a lot of what folks call “new age” is not the genuine heavy New Age stuff involving deep channelling from discarnate entities and trying to bring in the “great shift” but is just getting involved with trendy health remedies with a bit of disguised witchcraft thrown in (using the law of attraction — another trendy middle-class activity). No need to make a special case out of it. We are all in the same boat and did stupid stuff, whatever our background — all of us saved from being under the dominion of darkness. But now the “New Age to Jesus” bandwagon has assumed an almost cultlike status. I have observed so many of these folks basking in the limelight and constantly bragging about being “saved out of the New Age”. To them, I say this: “Dahlin’, you weren’t saved out of the New Age, you were saved out of being under the power of Satan, like everyone else who comes to Christ. So, stop thinking you are some kind of special trophy over everyone else”. The lives of Christ’s disciples before they were saved all involved being deceived. All of them, in one way or another. None of us is anything special in human terms, though for God we are all special — “a chosen people, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people for God’s own possession, to proclaim the virtues of Him who called you out of darkness into His marvellous light” (1 Peter 2:9).

So that is my response to your heartfelt questions. People need to forget about obsessing over their former lives and quietly go about leading a new life in Christ, growing in grace and a knowledge of the truth, without seeking the limelight as if they were a special case above all others.

© Copyright, Alan Morrison, 2023
[The copyright on my works is merely to protect them from any wanton plagiarism which could result in undesirable changes (as has actually happened!). Readers are free to reproduce my work, so long as it is in the same format and with the exact same content and its origin is acknowledged]