Warning Of New Age Threat

From the San Francisco “Chronicle” Wednesday, April 25, 1990

Chronicle Poll: Last of Two Parts

Warning of New Age ‘Threat’

Traditional churches decry ‘glorification of self, not God’

By Don Lattin

Chronicle Religion Writer

From the halls of the Vatican to radio stations across the Bible Belt, Christian leaders are warning their flocks to stay away form forms of mysticism, occultism and meditation that do not keep Jesus Christ as the undiluted center of religious contemplation.

Last January, from the podium of the National Religious Broadcasters convention in Washington, D.C., televangelist Pat Robertson stood before 1,500 leaders of the Christian Right, looked into the 1990s and issued a dark prophecy.

“There is something coming from the East,” said Robertson, lowering his voice to a whispery warning. “It’s a modified version of Hinduism. It’s called the New Age. It’s seeping into American businesses, the classrooms of American, infiltrating into Europe. It’s even in the Soviet Union.”

Several months later, from the podium of the Bankers Club atop San Francisco’s Bank of America skyscraper, pollster George Gallup Jr. told a “Business of God” luncheon that church leaders should be concerned about the pervasiveness of New Age thinking in this part of the country.” He called it “a serious threat to Christianity.”

“It appeals to those who have little religious grounding but are looking for meaning in their lives,” said Gallup, an evangelical Episcopalian and longtime pulse-taker of the American religious scene. “Its methods — such as meditation — are fine. But its ends are the glorification of self, not God. Christianity and New Age cannot possibly exist side-by-side.”

According to a Chronicle Poll on changing religious beliefs, however, Christianity and New Age _do_ exist side-by-side in Northern California. In fact, they often exist side-by-side in the souls of individual believers.

Although it is considered heresy by the their church, nearly 3 in 10 Roman Catholics believe in reincarnation, while nearly a third believe in astrology. Overall, about 25 percent of Bay Area residents who identify themselves as “Christian” believe in reincarnation — roughly the same as the general population.

More than a third of all residents of the nine-county Bay Area practice some form of yoga or meditation at least weekly, and nearly four in 10 believe they can contact the spirits of the dead.

Northern Californians are just as “religious” as other Americans, the Chronicle Poll found, but they ar more independent and open-minded about matters of the spirit. Nearly nine in 10 of those surveyed “believe in God or some transcendent spiritual force,” but only 30 percent “attend church or any organized spiritual service, seminar or workshop” on a weekly basis. Forty-two percent of Americans surveyed in a 1988 Gallup Poll said thy had attended church or synagogue within the previous week.

Almost eight in 10 Bay Area residents say religion or spirituality is an important part of their lives. Thirty percent say its importance has increased in the past five years. Only 7 percent say its importance has declined.

While Bay Area residents are looking for new ways to explore their spirituality, church officials are tightening the theological reins. Resurrection and Reincarnation

During Easter week, for example, the National Association of Evangelicals felt it necessary to issue a press release explaining the difference between resurrection and reincarnation. The conservative Christian organization blasted the New Age movement as a “shallow pop-psychology of self-indulgent affirmations, a synthetic blending of half-truths from a spirit world it doesn’t understand.”

Just before Christmas, the Vatican’s Sacred Congregation for the Doctrine of the Fath warned Catholics against practicing certain forms of yoga, Zen Buddhism and Transcendental Meditation, saying they could lead to “moral deviations, psychic disturbances and degenerate into a cult of the body.”

Evangelical publishing houses have issued a spate of books in recent years calling the New Age movement everything from self-centered to Satanic. Outmoded, Paternalistic

Meanwhile, leading New Age personalities are becoming more pointed in their critiques of the Judeo-Christian tradition, which they blast as outmoded, paternalistic religion that oppresses women and provides divine justification for ecological doom.

Much of what is now called “New Age” is actually an “archaic revival” of shamanism, goddess worship and the polytheistic “mystery religions” of ancient Greece and Rome. It is the same pagan, nature-based spirituality the early Christian church battle against nearly 2,000 years ago.

“We have a different approach to nature,” said Terence McKenna, an outspoken New Age leader from Sonoma County. “The Judeo-Christian ethic is that man is the lord of creation and can do as he wishes. The pagan, archaic-revival point of view is biological, ecological and stresses co-adaptive relations. We are in a global, suicidal crisis — and Christianity has a lot to answer for.”

According to the Chronicle Poll, Bay Area residents are still making up their minds about the New Age movement. Twenty percent have a favorable view and 28 percent an unfavorable view, while the majority (52 percent) said they “don’t know.”

Some 42 percent agree with the statement that “what is misguided about the New Age movement and Eastern mysticism is that people worship themselves rather than God.” Disagreeing are 31 percent, while 27 percent “don’t know.” Satan at Work

About one in four Bay Area residents say they believe that “Satan, or some demonic power, is at work behind a lot of the New Age movement and Eastern gurus.” Sixty percent disagree with that statement.

The Chronicle Poll, a telephone survey of 600 Bay Area adults, was conducted March 16-19 by Mark Baldassare and Associates. It has a margin of error of 4 percent.

Robertson — who mounted a failed bid for the 1988 Republican presidential nomination and heads the influential Christian Broadcasting Network — condemns the New Age movement as “blatant demonism.”

“Young people are the target,” he told the National Religious Broadcasters convention. “We can either give over them the crack dealers, or give them over to the pornographers, or give them over to the New Age — or we can move in with the fresh power of the Holy Spirit and win this world for Jesus Christ.”

Robert Bellah, a University of California at Berkeley sociologist and leading observer of American religion, said the New Age movement could replace Communism and “secular humanism” as the great satan of the Christian Right in the 1990s. Fundamentalist Paranoia

“The fundamentalist mentality is prone to paranoia — they have always had a lot of enemies,” said Bellah. “For 45 years we have been locked in a struggle with the Evil Empire, and the collapse of that is really something to think about. Now the worl d isn’t doing too good, and we’re not sure who to blame.”

Rather than condemning the New Age movement, Bellah said, mainline churches should look at why Americans are gravitating toward meditation, divination, Eastern mysticism, shamanism, mythology, humanistic psychology and other spiritual practices outside the Judeo-Christian mainstream.

“Mainline churches are bland,” Bellah said. “People want something more interesting — like channeling or getting in touch with spirits.”

Some mainline churches are trying to meet the challenge.

Churches across the spiritual spectrum are finding a place for ecology in their theology. They are expanding their retreat programs and weeknight workshops from traditional Bible studies and prayer groups to encompass Zen meditation, dream analysis workshops and the teaching of the late mythologist Joseph Campbell.

At Community Congregational Church, a Protestant church in Tiburon, members praise Jesus on Sunday and get in touch with “the Tao” at Saturday morning tai chi classes.

At Holy Names College, a Roman Catholic campus in the Oakland hills, Native American spirituality, dance therapy, witchcraft, eco-feminism and Christian mysticism all find a place in classes at the Institute in Culture and Creation Spirituality.

At Grace Cathedral, the Episcopal Church has a program called “Quest,” designed to cultivate ” the art of living spiritually.” This weekend, Quest is offering a “pilgrimage” program with several leading mythologists, an exploration of women’s spirituality and “healing arts,” and a jazz concert to commemorate a 1965 Duke Ellington appearance at the cathedral. ‘Confused Revolt’

“We are seeing a revival of the sacred, a recovery of something we have lost,” said the Rev. Alan Jones, dean of Grace Cathedral, the seat of the Episcopal Diocese of California. “What seems ‘New Age’ is really a new constellation of old things. It’s all part of a confused revolt to insist the world is a sacred place. Modernity defined the world as a place that is not sacred, and that world view is being challenged.”

Jones said Grace Cathedral is “trying to build a bridge” to the New Age movement.

“What saddens me is the church’s failure to share its own treasures and mystical tradition,” he said. “What are emerging as ‘new myths’ are deeply rooted in the Judeo-Christian story. Americans have such an impoverished view of what Christianity is all about.”

Nevertheless, some the ideas behind “New Age” thought, humanistic psychology and Eastern mysticism are at odds with orthodox Judeo-Christian teaching. Many adherents of New Age spirituality see the divine in their own “inner Self” or think of God as an amorphous energy force buzzing about the universe — not the Biblical God who issues commandments and judges humankind. Original Sin

Most followers of the New Age and human potential movement have also rejected or radically reinterpreted the Christian doctrine of original sin, the idea that human kind has been in a fallen state since Adam and Eve entered the world.

On perhaps the most basic test of Christian orthodoxy — the divinity of Christ — the Chronicle Poll found Bay Area residents less orthodox than other Americans.

Sixty-four percent of all respondents, and 82 percent of those calling themselves “Christian,” believe Jesus Christ is God, or the Son of God. Some 25 percent — and 12 percent of those identified as “Christian” — prefer to think of Christ as “another religious leader like Mohammed or Buddha.”

Only 4 percent of Christians — and 9 percent of all respondents — surveyed in a recent national Gallup Poll put Jesus on the same level as Mohammed and Buddha.

San Francisco Archbishop John Quinn said he is “very concerned” that people calling themselves “Christians” would equate Christ with Buddha. ‘Not the Real Christ’

“You can’t put them on the same level. That would be absolutely wrong and reprehensible,” Quinn said in an interview. “That is not the real Christ — the Christ of the gospels or the Christ of the church. It’s a false idea, without foundation.”

Quinn agreed that the church “could always do more” to clarify its doctrines and offer Roman Catholics more opportunities to explore the mystical realms within their church.

“We have a long mystical tradition, spanning 20 centuries,” said Quinn, who recently completed his own 30-day silent retreat. “We have seen phenomenal growth in the retreat movement in the United States. These programs all have waiting lists, and there is a great proliferation of prayer groups and programs of spiritual direction.”

Some New age leaders say Christian doctrine has become irrelevant to the needs and spiritual aspirations of men and women in the modern world and closed off to science and other systems of thought. ‘Mary’s a Nice Girl’

“Christian mythology is defective,” said Robert Bly, the Minneapolis poet and New Age workshop leader. “It provides no place for the divine woman, other than Mary, who’s a nice girl. That’s very different from the great female beings of India.”

“I call myself a Christian, but it’s as if I had to go to mythology to find what really moved me and explained things to me,” said Bly, who was raised in the Lutheran church. “Your religion should be your mythology and your cosmology.”

Jones, the Grace Cathedral dean, separates himself from conservative evangelicals who condemn New Age as satanic but nevertheless has his own criticism of the movement.

“They are degenerating religion into a private, leisure-time pursuit of the 90s,” he said. “People into channeling, karma and reincarnation can easily go of on private trips. People seem to use it in a way to be indifferent to the poor and homeless. Those people are just working out their own karma. They’re all just following their own destiny.”

The Chronicle Poll Results:

The Chronicle Poll was conducted by Mark Baldassare and Associates. The survey of 600 Bay Area adults was conducted March 16 to 19 and has a margin of error of plus or minus 4 percentage points. Bay Area regions are: East Bay (Alameda, Contra Costa), North Bay (Marin, Napa, Solano, Sonoma), San Francisco and South Bay (San Mateo, Santa Clara). Results may not add up to 100 percent because of rounding. U.S. figures come from various Gallup Polls conducted during the 1980s using identically phrased questions.

# How important is religion in your life? Very important…………….46% Somewhat important…………32% Not important……………..22%

# Compared to five years ago, how would you describe the importance of religion or spirituality in your life today? Stayed the same…………..63% Increased………………..30% Declined………………… 7%

# Which of these religions do you follow? Protestant……………….31% Roman Catholic……………27% No religion………………18% Other Christian…………..12% Other religion…………… 7% Jewish………………….. 3% Orthodox………………… 2%

# How frequently do you attend church or any organized spiritual service, seminar or workshop? Weekly………………….30% Less than annually……….29% Less than monthly………..25% Monthly…………………16%

# Do you think Jesus Christ was God or the Son of God? Bay Area………………..64% U.S. …………………..84%

# Do you think Jesus Christ was just another religious leader like Mohammed or Buddha? Bay Area………………..25% U.S. ………………….. 9%

# Do you think Jesus Christ never lived? Bay Area……………….. 2% U.S. ………………….. 1%

# How do you feel about the statement: ‘There are clear guidelines about what is good or evil that apply to everyone regardless of their situation’?

Agree: Bay Area…………………69% U.S. ……………………77%

Disagree: Bay Area…………………27% U.S. ……………………18%

Don’t know: Bay Area………………… 4% U.S. …………………… 4%

# Do you believe that what is misguided about the New Age movement and Eastern mysticism is that people worship themselves, rather than God? Agree……………………42% Disagree…………………31% Don’t know……………….27%

# Do you believe Satan or some demonic power is at work behind a lot of the New Age movement and Eastern gurus? Disagree…………………60% Agree……………………26% Don’t know……………….14%