Prevalence of the New
Age
The New Age has touched you.
You've heard its ideas, listened to its music, viewed its artwork, watched its superstars, read its literature, and bought its products. You may even have participated in its therapies, shared in its rituals, and embraced its philosophies — all without knowing them as New Age.
The New Age spirit is an ineluctable and elusive movement. Its broad umbrella shadows a diverse and shifting culture that is now in the midst of a change that New Agers believe is potentially as sweeping as the Renaissance or the Protestant Reformation. They believe the world is on the verge of a profound breakthrough. The limited, finite, Old Order will give way to a glorious, unlimited New Order of peace, prosperity, and perfection. This radical "paradigm shift" is to occur as more and more people question traditional assumptions about life, the nature of reality, and the future of the planet.
The New Age consciousness is multifaceted and multifocused.
"It's from the grassroots up . . . a transformation going on everywhere," said Roland Mick, director of development for the Association of Wholistic Practitioners, a New Age health organization based in Pittsburgh. "This is unique in our recorded history." As we chatted at the Celebration of Innovation, a New Age exposition in San Francisco, Mick
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compared the movement to a "rough gem" that's been discovered by many groups of people. And each group is busy "polishing a particular facet" of the gem.1
New Age influence has indeed touched every facet of contemporary life. Its popularizers and their beliefs are often visible on your television set, at the movies, in printed horoscopes, or at your local health-food store. Even sports and exercise programs, motivational training, psychological counseling, and religious classes are frequent pipelines for New Age thinking.
Purveyors of New Age thought have found a receptive audience.
Thirty-four million Americans are concerned with inner growth, including mysticism, according to SRI International, an opinion research organization in Menlo Park, California.2 Nearly half of American adults (42%) now believe they have been in contact with someone who has died — up from 27% in a previous national survey eleven years earlier.
Sociologist-priest Andrew Greeley found that still higher percentages of Americans reported having had psychic experiences such as extrasensory perception (ESP) — 67% of all adult Americans, or some seventy million. By comparison, 58% said in 1973 that they had experienced ESP.
Roughly 30 million Americans — about one in four — now believe in reincarnation, a key tenet of the New Age, and 14% endorse the work of spirit mediums, or what New Agers often call "trance channelers."
"What was paranormal is now normal," Greeley declared. "It's even happening to elite scientists and physicians who insist that such things cannot possibly happen." The priest-professor added that persons who have paranormal experiences "are anything but religious nuts or psychiatric cases."3
National surveys by the Gallup organization corroborate Greeley's findings: Paranormal experiences and belief in New Age suppositions are on the rise, making New Age "the fastest-growing alternative belief system in the country," according to new religions researchers Bob and Gretchen Passantino.4
A 1978 Gallup Poll indicated that 10 million Americans were engaged in some aspect of Eastern mysticism and 9 million in spiritual healing.5 And the same polling organization
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found that between 1978 and 1984 belief in astrology had risen from 40% to 59% among schoolchildren.6
According to the results of a 1987 survey conducted by Northern Illinois University, 67% of American adults read astrology reports, while 36% believe that the reports are scientific.7
In May 1988 the media was abuzz with reports — based on revelations in a book by former White House chief of staff Donald T. Regan — that President and Mrs. Reagan frequently read astrology forecasts and that Nancy Reagan consulted astrologers to help schedule her husband's activities and travel.
The Northern Illinois University survey also reported that more than half of Americans think extraterrestrial beings have visited Earth, a belief held in many New Age circles.
Credence in such New Age articles of faith have been bolstered considerably by entities like NBC-TV's ALF, a puppet "alien" whose ratings have sometimes hit the Nielson Top Ten. Spinning the saga of his journey from Melmac to Earth, ALF — an acronym for Alien Life Form — climbed to the top three ratings for Saturday-morning TV cartoon shows. No harm in introducing a little magic and fantasy into children's lives — or ours — especially if toy makers and schlockmeisters can peddle 250 ALF items with sales rocketing above $200 million.8
Shades of E.T.!
There's no business like show business to introduce New Age suppositions and make them appear credible to a general audience. Take science fiction cinema, for instance.
George Lucas's Star Wars epics, in which the Force is "an energy field generated by living things," easily pass muster as a New Age definition of God.
Characters in the Charlie's Angels TV program talk about the energy fields of the chakras of the human body, "subtly injecting change and acceptance into public consciousness in just 10 years," New Age aerospace engineer Jack Houck observed approvingly.9
Tal Brooke, author of The Cosmic Circuit, considers the "Hollywood connection" a chief channel for "vigorously injecting Eastern mysticism" into the national culture. Such films as Clockwork Orange, Rosemary's Baby, the Exorcist,
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2001, Dr. Strangelove, Cocoon, and Angel Heart convey New Age themes and occultism, Brooke said over a spicy Indian dinner in Redwood City, California.10
The Last Temptation of Christ touched off what TIME magazine called "the angriest religious debate in years"11 over the nature of God and the person of Jesus Christ. The movie, based on Nikos Kazantzakis's 1955 novel, injects pantheistic and mystic thinking into a startling rendition of a fictionalized Jesus who doubts his messiahship and struggles with lustful temptations.
"Everything's a part of God," declares the tormented Christ.12 Small wonder. On the introduction page of the script is this quotation from Kazantzakis: "It is not God who will save us — it is we who will save God, by battling, by creating and transmuting matter into spirit."13 In the prologue to his novel, Kazantzakis speaks of the "yearning . . . of man to attain God, or more exactly, to return to God and identify himself with him." The supreme purpose of the struggle between the flesh and the spirit in the book and the movie is "union with God," a very Eastern concept of the pathway to godhead and release from the cycle of birth and death into bliss.14
"The culture is being permeated with New Age. The media started out with jokes about channeling, but recently there have been actual attempts to contact the dead on television," says Gordon Lewis, a specialist in cultural apologetics at Denver Seminary.15 Celebrities like Shirley MacLaine publicly endorse their spirit guides. Linda Evans of Dynasty and Joyce DeWitt, formerly of Three's Company, follow guidance from a discarnate entity named Mafu. Other celebrity subscribers who have publicly affirmed their New Age connections include chocolate-chip-cookie king Wally (Famous) Amos, actress Marsha Mason, singers Helen Reddy and Tina Turner, musician Paul Horn, and entertainer Lisa Bonet.16
Until 1986, asserts University of Denver humanities professor Carl A. Raschke, "the New Age was a subculture, a counterculture; but it didn't have the bucks to go public." Somehow, says Raschke, they got the bucks. And they're putting them into "celebrities, advertising and testimonies . . . It got glossy and glitzy overnight . . . . That gets the media interested, and that gets public attention."17
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Testimonies like the one by CNN mogul Ted Turner also project New Age before the public. Turner was quoted in the Denver Post as saying that America needs to elect a New Age president if it is to survive through the Year 2000.18 San Francisco physician Raphael Ornstein was quick to oblige: He announced his candidacy for the presidency under the banner of the Human Ecology Party on April 22, 1988.
Meanwhile, Ornstein's Global Peace Foundation has a vision to convert Alcatraz into a New Age holistic health spa and peace center. Some $60 million to $100 million is all that is needed to crystallize this "international showcase."19 The project, even on the drawing board, lavished mega-attention — if not megabucks — on New Age agendas.
New Age theories have also been polished up for the military brass. Marilyn Ferguson, the leading New Age theoretician, has lectured at the U.S. Army War College. And the Army's Organizational Effectiveness School has used New Age-oriented curriculums in some of its programs.
Major corporations have hired New Age consultants to help increase employee productivity. New Age ideas have percolated into political action groups, consciousness-raising groups, think tanks, and holistic health associations as well as creative imagination workshops, "superlearning" programs, and management training seminars. (To be consistent, however, we note that programs and curriculums devised by adherents of Judeo-Christian faith may also contain elements of their belief systems.)
Although Yoga, a popular therapy for high-stress professionals, is touted as a form of exercise and relaxation — not a religion — it is based on assumptions shared with the New Age worldview. Whatever its posture, Yoga is thriving: The Yoga Journal had jumped to a circulation of about 50,000 by 1988, an increase of 40% in less than four years.20
As the public has grown more tolerant of psychic phenomena, the nation's courts have increasingly called on psychics to use their reputed powers to weed out lying witnesses, pinpoint suspects, and locate missing bodies.21
New Age publishing is a billion-dollar phenomenon unto itself. Nearly everyone's bookshelf contains self-improvement psychology books that incorporate New Age ideas. The movement is also well reflected in literature that sell heavily
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in bookstore religion sections: from Scott Peck's The Road Less Traveled, to the ponderous 2,097-page Urantia Book, allegedly dictated, or "channeled," from an extraterrestrial source, to A Course in Miracles, one of the most widely read New Age "spiritual" books. Talk show superstar Oprah Winfrey said that the "Course" was her favorite spiritual reading during the summer of 1988.
Waldenbooks sought to capture both the Christian and New Age markets by promoting seer Jeane Dixon's Yesterday, Today and Forever with the pitch: "Live a more meaningful life by linking astrology with Christianity."22
New Age has likely touched you through its myriad products and gadgets. Consider just a few: crystals, singing Tibetan bowls, pyramids, statues, incense, greeting cards, tarot cards, charms, pendants, talismans, fortune-telling devices and astrology charts, computer software, herbal medicines, esoteric vitamins, "bonkers" massage tools, "rebirthing" tanks, and colonic cleansers. And that's just the beginning.
Maybe you've found New Age music soothing in freeway traffic. Need a companion? Try a New Age dating service waiting to make "synchronicity" happen for you and your "soulmate." And, as Wall Street Journal reporter Meg Sullivan lists, there are New Age travel agencies, New Age accountants, and even New Age attorneys.23
The prevalence of the New Age is assured for the foreseeable future; in fact, as the year 2000 approaches, New Age millennial expectations will likely crescendo to fever pitch. The movement's major drawing power, according to Berkeley sociologist Robert Bellah, an author of the acclaimed Habits of the Heart, comes from those in the younger ranks of the well-educated middle class who are discontent with "vague spiritual orientations."24
Across the bay in San Francisco, philosophy professor Jacob Needleman, an expert on new religious movements, commented, "A whole new set of categories has taken root which express the search for new ways of relating to other people and to the events of one's life. Their prevalence is a clear sign of the great shift in the consciousness of the West."25
For many attracted to the New Age, "the dominant
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Christian view has broken down, or the church as they have known it has disappointed them."26 They are yearning for a source of meaning and value — something they can believe in, says New Age author Marilyn Ferguson.27
The movement's "promise of omnipotence and indestructibility" lures converts, according to humanistic psychologist Maxine Negri. All human goals appear possible, "even the elimination of death — not through Jesus Christ or Mohammed or other 'divine' messengers but through one's own human, independently earned spiritual enlightenment."28
From the evangelical Christian perspective, writer Robert Burrows sees the New Age movement as "real and pervasive" and not about to go away. "As its beliefs and practices continue to be assimilated into the general culture, mingle with compatible currents, and tug at the natural inclinations of the fallen human heart, it can do nothing but grow."29
In its current expressions, the most durable legacy of the New Age may well be its influence on the way you and I — and those around us — think. To understand that, let's take a closer look at the movement's assumptions and premises.
Chapter 3 || Table of Contents
1. Roland Mick, interview with author, San Francisco, Calif., 8 November 1987.
2. Cited in Carol McGraw, "Seekers of Self Now Herald the New Age," Los Angeles Times, 17 February 1987, pt. 1, 3.
3. Greely's research was conducted in 1973–74 by the University of Chicago's National Opinion Research Council; it was not published until 1987 (American Health [January–February 1987]: 47–49).
4. Christian Herald (February 1988): 51.
5. Cited in Marilyn Ferguson, Aquarian Conspiracy: Personal and Social Transformation in the 1980s (Los Angeles: J.P. Tarcher, 1980), 364.
6. Cited in a brochure of the Southern California Skeptics (Pasadena, Calif.).
7. Public Opinion Laboratory of Northern Illinois University; published in American Demographics and cited by EP News Service.
8. William A. Henry III and Denise Worrell, "Stranger in a Strange Land: Puppet or Alien, NBC's ALF Is an Intergalactic Star," TIME, 21 March 1988, 71.
9. Celebration of Innovation Workshop, San Francisco, 7 November 1987.
10. Tal Brooke, interview with author, Redwood City, Calif., 23 November 1987.
11. John Leo et al., "A Holy Furor" (cover story), TIME, 15 August 1988, 36.
12. From The Last Temptation of Christ, viewed by the author, 10 August 1988.
13. American Family Association (Tupelo, Miss.), "Script Sheet on the Movie 'The Last Temptation of Christ,' A Sampling of Scenes and Quotes from the Script."
14. Nikos Kazantzakis, The Last Temptation of Christ, trans. P.A. Bien (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1960), 1–2.
15. Gordon Lewis, interview with author, Denver, Colo., 1 December 1987.
16. Nina Easton, "Shirley MacLaine's Mysticism for the Masses," Los Angeles Times Magazine, 6 September 1987, 8.
17. Carl A. Raschke, interview with author, Denver, Colo., 2 December 1987.
18. Cited in Ronald Enroth, "The New Age Movement," Fundamentalist Journal (February 1988): 49.
19. San Francisco Medical Research Foundation, Human Ecology Catalog (San Anselmo, Calif.: SFMRF, 1987), 14–15.
20. Beth Ann Krier, "In America, Yoga Finds Itself in Some Strange Positions," Los Angeles Times, 17 February 1988, pt. 5, 1.
21. Howard E. Goldfluss, "Courtroom Psychics," OMNI (July 1987): 12.
22. "Great Gifts from Waldenbooks" (advertisement), New Age Journal (November–December 1987): 24.
23. Meg Sullivan, "New Age Will Dawn in August, Seers Say, and Malibu is Ready," Wall Street Journal, 23 June 1987.
24. Robert N. Bellah, interview with author, Berkeley, Calif., 25 November 1987.
25. Quoted in John Koffend, "The Gospel according to Helen," Psychology Today (September 1980): 77-78.
26. Maurice Smith, "Understanding and Responding to the New Age Movements," Interfaith Witness Department, Home Mission Board, Southern Baptist Convention, 1985, 6.
27. Ferguson, Aquarian Conspiracy, 363.
28. Maxine Negri, "Age-Old Problems of the New Age Movement," Humanist (March–April 1988): 23-24.
29. Karen Hoyt et al., New Age Rage (Old Tappan, N.J.: Fleming H. Revell Co., 1987), 44.
