Religion and
Churches
The 2,738-seat Avery Fisher Hall at Lincoln Center in New York City is all but filled — as usual — for the eleven o'clock Sunday service. A well-dressed crowd, ranging from mini-skirted teens to elegantly frocked grandmothers, has gathered expectantly to hear the Reverend Eric Butterworth, the slim, white-haired minister of this low-key Unity Church. He begins to speak in gentle and reassuring tones.
"It is our purpose to let people discover their divine depths, to challenge you to break down barriers and be rid of worry and fear." Then, paraphrasing Shakespeare: "There's nothing good or ill but thinking makes it so."1
Thus described in Forbes magazine, Butterworth, who hosts a daily radio show and is author of ten books, including Life Is for Living and Discover the Power Within You, sells a hot product these days: self-help through spiritual awareness.
The message is simple: "We alone have the power within us to solve our problems, relieve our anxieties and pain, heal our illnesses, improve our golf game or get a promotion."2
So what's New Age or even new about that? Butterworth's message is duplicated in thousands of houses of worship each week.
It is closely akin to the teachings of the Church of Christ, Scientist, founded by Mary Baker Eddy in 1879, and bears striking resemblance to the self-esteem theme of Reformed Church in America minister Norman Vincent Peale, whose
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Power of Positive Thinking was an immediate smash in 1952 and remains so to this day.
It is also echoed in some of the preachments and writings of another Reformed Church minister, Robert Schuller, whose giant Crystal Cathedral in Garden Grove, California, has become synonymous with "Possibility Thinking." Ever since the ebullient prophet of happiness mounted the tarpaper roof of a drive-in theater snack shack in 1955 and launched the nation's first year-round drive-in church, Schuller has pronounced that a lack of self-esteem separates the average believer from fully understanding God.
After reading the first edition of this book, Schuller telephoned me, objecting strongly to being classed as "a fellow traveler" with New Agers. "I don't deserve that," he chided. "And I categorically deny that I believe in pantheism, reincarnation, channeling, astrology or crystals." Schuller added that he was "frustrated with the New Age movement" although, in his opinion, too much of the "anti-New Age work today is simply condemning it." Schuller went on to defend his concepts of "self-esteem" and "self-potential" theology, saying they are biblical ideas taught by Jesus.
Step back 125 years and you can find "positive thinking" in the writings of American Transcendentalists like Henry David Thoreau (1817-62), and in the indigenous religious movements such as Spiritualism, Unity, and New Thought.
The "self" of Whitman's Leaves of Grass "becomes a tireless, divine presence in all things, a ganglion of creative power which carves myriad experiences into a scintillating, personal vision."3 Emerson, influenced by Hindu religious literature, spoke of the "Over-Soul," the mystic force within all nature and human personality" governed and brought into existence by Mind.
The Transcendentalists sought God in nature. And both Transcendentalism and Unitarianism exalted the human potentialities — the transcending impulse for self-realization that has come to be the sine qua non of modern pop psychology.
Transcendentalism took the Eastern holy books, the Bhagavad Gita and the Upanishads, which had recently been translated into English, and created what religious historian Gordon Melton has called "a uniquely American form of
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mysticism . . . the first substantial religious movement in North America with a prominent Asian component."4
In religious terms, "mind-cure" theology "frequently links the finite, personal mind with the divine or transcendental Mind to which ordinary consciousness must be assimilated," writes Carl Raschke.5
New Thought, dipping into Hindu Vedanta wisdom as well as Emersonian philosophy, popped up in denominations like the Divine Science Church, the Church of Religious Science, and the Unity School of Christianity.
Then add the fad of Spiritualism, the occult preoccupation with communication between the living and the dead that swept the nation like an uncontrolled brush fire in the 1850s. Together with the eclectic New Thought, Spiritualism contributed a major stalk to an emerging variety of American Gnosticism that some historians see coming to full flower now in the New Age movement of the 1980s.
Now stir in the arcane Oriental and occult notions of the volatile Russian mystic Helena Blavatsky, whose 1877 book, Isis Unveiled, divulged "secret doctrines" that laid the foundation for Theosophy. Madame Blavatsky's "unveiled truth" declared the soul's capacity to become God through increasingly refined inner knowledge" until engulfed in the great cosmic vision of reality."6 Ancient "ascended masters" guided the destiny of humanity, she taught.
Theosophy, Spiritualism and New Thought all splintered into factions when Blavatsky died in 1891. And Alice Bailey, an influential and prolific writer, left the Theosophical Society to form the Arcane School (School for Esoteric Studies) early this century. She may have been the first to use the words "New Age" to describe the gestating forces of the "movement"; it appears on page nine in her 1948 book, Reappearance of the Christ. Meanwhile, Blavatsky's appointed heir, Annie Besant — who taught that a person is the result of his or her own act of "self-creation" — nominated Indian master Krishnamurti Jeddu as the embodiment of the Theosophists' vision of a new world religious teacher. A disillusioned Krishnamurti later rejected the role.
Then in the 1930s, Guy Ballard founded the "I AM" movement, model for Elizabeth Clare Prophet's Church Universal and Triumphant of 1960s origin.
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This compressed history highlights the precursors of the New Age movement, and reminds that a diversity of organizations such as neopagan, metaphysical, and spiritualist churches as well as the Theosophical Society — which is currently enjoying a renaissance of sorts — and Unitarian-Universalism have both molded mainstream American religion and been shaped by it themselves over a comparatively long period of time.
On the one hand, New Age motifs are being openly embraced by some arms of liberal Christianity; on the other, the New Age movement "is sucking up like a black hole many of the more familiar doctrines and orthodoxies, religious and political, of the liberal churches of the last twenty years," according to Carl Raschke.7
At the same time, New Age metaphysical groups often coopt the language and trappings of the traditional Christian churches, thereby making newcomers feel more comfortable in their transition to alternate forms of belief and practice.
For example, the Institute of Metaphysics in Los Angeles, founded in 1976 by James Thomas, can advertise itself as a New Age Center and at the same time hold a fund-raising jamboree with "the rousing music of oldtime Gospel . . . featuring Rev. Ketina Brown and Bishop James Davis."8
Meanwhile, the four-times married former Mrs. California, Terry Cole-Whittaker, who was ordained by the Los Angeles Church of Religious Science, can bid farewell to her supersize San Diego congregation, dump "the Reverend" from her title, and proclaim a health and wealth individualism ("Be your own guru") through her Adventures in Enlightenment Foundation — and never miss a beat nor lose her following. Just-plain Cole-Whittaker insists that, despite shedding the mantle of religions, her work is still "spiritual."9
The self-improvement, visualization, and guided imagery techniques — including meditational yoga — have percolated into many liberal Protestant denominations, some Roman Catholic circles, and not a few conservative and Pentecostal / charismatic Christian churches. (We'll take a deeper look at the trends of visualized prayer, "inner healing," and "healing of memories" in chapter 27.)
The Reconstructionist wing of Judaism has also been receptive to New Age ideas. And Baha'i, an independent
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world religion that teaches the spiritual evolution of human society and the oneness of God and all religions, has picked up on New Age thought in the realm of mystical science, promoting it at conferences and in dialogues between scientists and Baha'i scholars.10 Through the years the Unitarian Universalist Association, a creedless denomination, has exerted a powerful influence in American politics, science, arts, and letters while maintaining a veritable "Who's Who" list of UU notables. Recently it has also become enamored with the "new physics." Unitarian-Universalist president William F. Schulz has said that the recognition of parallelism between Eastern mysticism and Western physics is growing in UU circles. Increasingly, he and other UUs share much of the monistic worldview of physicist Fritjof Capra that all things are related in a "deep ecology" of "the divine One."11
The Roman Catholic Church has also been a fertile soil for New Age-associated theology and suppositions.
Jewish psychotherapist Ira Progoff — who has been touted by his organization as "the Freud of the age" and "the Einstein of psychology" has made deep inroads through his "Intensive Journaling" seminars. About 35% of them are held under Catholic auspices, including sessions in monasteries and retreat centers. Another 35% of the 400 that he and his corps of 125 leaders conduct around the country each year are sponsored by other religious groups and churches.
Based on prayer, meditation, and writing exercises (journaling), Progoff's intensive seminars involve getting in touch with "a quality of wisdom that is in us but beyond us . . . an expression of touching a depth level where we sense truths that are larger than personal in their significance." Participants are told to meditate on a self-chosen "mantra crystal," a short phrase intended to create a "pendulum rhythm" and to express "the crystallized essence of your life and experience."12
In an interview, Progoff insisted that the technique is theologically neutral and not limited to any particular doctrine or religious concepts. But there is, he said, a supernatural dimension: A "Person of wisdom" has touched the mediator with truth in the "underground stream" of his or her being.13
Wabun, an associate of Native American mystic teacher
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Sun Bear, brings ecofeminist concerns of New Age to Catholics and other church groups. She said she had addressed a group of 3000 Catholic women in 1987 "who are challenging the patriarchy of the church."14
One of the most controversial links between Eastern mysticism and Christianity is "creation spirituality," developed by former Dominican priest Matthew Fox of Oakland, California. In addition to similarities to New Age views on the sacredness of nature, creation spirituality posits the New Age mystic-science worldview and the evolution of consciousness projected by Jesuit Pierre Teilhard de Chardin.
Popular and casual in style, Fox speaks widely at church conferences and teaches at his Institute in Culture and Creation Spirituality at Holy Name College in Oakland, although he was suspended from his order in 1992 because of possible heresies in his copious writings. Fox has denied his works are unorthodox.
The faculty at Fox's Oakland institute includes a self-described witch named Starhawk, who teaches classes on ritual making and sexuality and on spirituality in native religions; a Bible scholar; a physicist; a masseuse; a gestalt therapist; and an African dance teacher.
Fox, who says "98% of Bible scholars agree with me . . . that we need to go back to 'original blessing' — not 'original sin,' " frequently refers to God as "She" and affirms a belief in panentheism, the view that "everything is in God and God is in everything." (He rejects pantheism, which holds that "everything is God and God is everything.")15
"Religion could be playing such a fundamental role in healing and announcing good news instead of being preoccupied with control and anthropomorphic agendas," the soft-spoken priest said with a hint of puckishness as we chatted by a crackling log fire in the lounge of All Saints Episcopal Church in Beverly Hills, where he was about to begin a weekend seminar.16
One indication that New Age-related theology is strongly influential in the world of organized religion is the fact that half the students who had attended Fox's institute were from Catholic religious communities; the rest were predominantly middle-class "religious seekers" of all faiths, ranging from housewives to Episcopal clergy (1986 figures).
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But the biggest camel's nose to slip into the churches' tent could well be the 1,200-page, three-volume compendium of New Age thought called A Course in Miracles. Within a dozen years, what began as an obscure manuscript has been quietly transformed into a teaching phenomenon sparking sales of more than a half-million copies and spawning hundreds of study groups in churches, institutions, and homes across America. In Southern California alone, 153 separate ongoing classes in "A Course in Miracles" were offered in September 1987. Fourteen were listed just in San Diego! Sets of blue-bound text, workbook, and teacher's manual line the shelves of major bookstore chains (now in softcover for $25, down from $40), and the teachings are firmly established in New Age circles.
My wife, Marjorie Lee, and I drove to Tiburon, a Marin County community in a jewel-like setting just north of the Golden Gate Bridge, on a glistening day in late November 1987 to meet several of the principal actors in the unfolding drama. Tiburon is an artsy and affluent little bedroom community a short ferry ride across the bay from the glimmering skyscrapers of downtown San Francisco. It's the kind of place where the locals understand and appreciate New Age humor, such as the sign posted in a main-street gift shop: "Shoplifting raises hell with your karma."
First we stopped in at Dr. Gerald G. Jampolsky's Center for Attitudinal Healing, which the psychiatrist — also author of the best-selling Love Is Letting Go of Fear — founded in 1975 in response to a vision he received from studying "A Course in Miracles." (It was officially published by others a year later.) Now forty-five of his centers dot the world, helping children and adults cope with life-threatening diseases and other crises, without charge.
A onetime militant atheist of Jewish background, Jampolsky himself has recovered from a life shattered by divorce and alcoholism. The principles of his healing therapies include "love, forgiveness and ways to achieve oneness with God and one another . . . . We can't feel God's peace until we let go of negative feelings and fear," he said as we sat in his office at the center's compact, wharf-front headquarters.
Behind Jampolsky's desk was a large poster that sums up "attitudinal healing:: [T]rue friendship is a state of bliss
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where we see only the God self in each other; it is a state of inner knowing that we are always connected by love with each other and God forever."
Jampolsky, who has been on The Phil Donahue Show, Today, 60 Minutes, Robert Schuller's Hour of Power, and has spoken to a variety of denominational religious groups, said his centers don't use "Course in Miracles" materials in treatment programs. And he added: "New Age is not a term I would use, myself."
But "The Course," as it is is commonly referred to, is clearly "a perfect summary of attitudinal healing," Jampolsky has written. "A single Source unites all minds."17
I had read that Jesus speaks in the first person in the text of the Course, and that it "introduces man to his God-nature."18 I also knew that in 1965, Jewish psychologist Helen Schucman, an employee in the Psychiatry Department at Columbia University in New York, began "hearing" that inaudible voice in her head and started dictating a comprehensive message that was to continue for seven years. Declaring herself an atheist and a reluctant scribe, Schucman nonetheless took down the revelations that detailed a metaphysical "New Thought" kind of salvation attained through a person's own efforts.
"You know that inner Voice — it won't leave me alone! It keeps saying, 'This is a course in miracles. Please take notes,' " she told colleague William Thetford, then a professor of medical psychology at Columbia and late a collaborator and editor of the Course materials.19 Next morning, she showed Thetford her shorthand, which became the introduction to the text.
This is a course in miracles. It is a required course.
Only the time you take it is voluntary . . .
This course can be summed up very simply in this way:
Nothing real can be threatened,
Nothing unreal exists.
Herein lies the peace of God.
While the Course's teachings are complex, arcane, and couched in Christian terminology with a psychological application, the nub of Schucman's channeled revelation is that
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each person is God; the universe is one; and evil is illusion — a spirituality that squares nicely with the ancient non-dualistic Vedanta of Hinduism as well as with modern New Age fundamentals.
Kenneth Wapnick, a onetime Catholic monk with a Jewish upbringing, has become a chief interpreter of the Course. In addition to several books expounding its teachings, he has established a foundation to disseminate the Course's message. Wapnick, a resident of Westchester, New York, is candid in saying that the Course is incompatible with biblical Christianity — though he has also asserted that there are many paths to Do, including Christianity, and that "in the end, all theologies will drop away and what's left is only the love of God."20
In a lengthy interview with Dean Halverson, who at the time was a researcher for the Spiritual Counterfeits Project, Wapnick explained why biblical Christianity is antithetical to the teachings enunciated by the Jesus of the Course:
There are three basic reasons. One is the Course's idea that God did not create the world. The second is the Course's teaching that Jesus was not the only Son of God. The third involves the Course's assertion that Jesus did not suffer and die for our sins . . . because once you see his death in that way, then you make sin real. You make sin real and then you have to atone for it. The whole idea of the Course is that sin is an illusion:
The Bible teaches that God created the world and pronounced it very good. The Course teaches that God did not create this world, but the ego did, and that it's an illusion.
The Course says that you forgive your brother for what he has not done to you, not for what he has done . . .
What I do with my guilt is project it onto you. And I attack you for it. When I forgive you and I correct my misperception of you, which means that I now see you as guiltless, I am really doing the same thing for myself. That forgives me of my guilt . . . . So forgiveness is basically seeing our true selves as sinless and guiltless as well . . . .
The Course teaches that we are all equally Christ. The only difference is that Jesus was the first to remember who he was. . . .
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The crux of the whole thing is that our relationship with God has never been impaired. It's only in our thinking that it was. For the Course, sin never really happened . . . .
The Course's definition of resurrection is much different from that of traditional Christianity. It's not the body that resurrects. Resurrection is defined as the awakening from the dream of death . . . .
[S]ome parts of the Bible have the Holy Spirit as their source. Other parts are from the ego.21
Summing it up, this is Halverson's side of the interview: "While superficial similarities between the Course and Christianity exist, the two belief systems could not be more opposed to one another. The Bible speaks of a sinful humanity that is separated from God and in need of reconciliation through the atoning work of Jesus Christ. The Course would dismiss such teaching by saying that its source is not God, but the guilt-ridden, separatist ego.
"Anyone who believes the Course is compatible with Christianity either does not understand the Course or Christianity, or both."22
Our next stop that November afternoon was the beautiful Tiburon cliffside home of Robert and Judith Skutch, whose nonprofit Foundation for Inner Peace publishes A Course in Miracles. Dressed in sweats and loafers, Bob Skutch showed us to his picturesque living room, where a huge clear crystal catches beams of sunlight streaming in from the picture window looking across Marin Bay.
Bob, a former television copyrighter, and Judy, long interested in the study of the paranormal, remote viewing, and Kirilian photography, have become official custodians of Schucman's legacy and "inner Voice" (she died in 1981). The Skutches promote the Course in a low-key way, overseeing its translation into multiple languages and coordinating distribution to a burgeoning informal worldwide network of teachers and study groups. Church groups — particularly Unity and Religious Science, and some Episcopal, Methodist, and Presbyterian — are among them, Bob said.
Judy sometimes lectures about the Course, but the Skutches do not head a cult-like operation. Neither are they pushing a high-profile marketing campaign nor a high-powered
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organizational scheme. They think that's the way Helen Schucman would have wanted it.
"The administration work and mail comes through here," Bob said, waving his arm toward a small back room. Decisions, he added, are made "through praying," which he defined as "listening to the inner Spirit, your Teacher, the Holy Spirit, or whatever."
I remarked that we had noticed San Quentin prison crouched on a jutting point of land around the bay from their home. Oh, yes, Bob said, four groups of prisoners within the maximum security facility were currently studying the Course.
"How did that mesh with the Course's insistence that evil and the physical world are illusion?" I asked. "How would the inmates feel?"
"They have made the world they have chosen," he answered. "Everything is an illusion except love. God didn't create matter — nothing, nothing. It's an illusion."
Chapter 23 || Table of Contents
1. Jeffrey A. Trachtenberg and Edward Giltenan, "Mainstream Metaphysics," Forbes Magazine, 1 June 1987, 156.
2. Ibid.
3. Carl A. Raschke, Interruption of Eternity: Modern Gnosticism in the Origins of the New Religious Consciousness (Chicago: Nelson-Hall, 1980), 175.
4. J. Gordon Melton, Encyclopedic Handbook of Cults in America (New York and London: Garland Publishing, 1986), 108.
5. Raschke, Interruption of Eternity, 178.
6. Cited in ibid., 197.
7. Carl A. Raschke, interview with author, Denver, Colo., 2 December 1987.
8. November 1987 news release, Institute of Metaphysics, Los Angeles, Calif.
9. Armando Acuna, "Cole-Whittaker Returns to Conduct 'Spiritual Tours,' " Los Angeles Times [San Diego ed.], 28 February 1986, pt. 2, 1.
10. Baha'i International Community, Office of Public Information, New York, 9 October 1987 news release.
11. William F. Schulz, interview with author, Pasadena, Calif., 14 February 1986.
12. Dialogue House/national Intensive Journal Workshop, Los Angeles, Calif., 15 May 1981.
13. Ira Progoff, telephone interview with author, 17 May 1981.
14. Bear Tribe Medicine Society Workshop, Medicine Wheel Gathering, Santa Monica Mountains, Calif., 31 October 1987.
15. Russell Chandler, "Oakland Priest may Be Next in Line for Vatican Censure," Los Angeles Times, 20 December 1986, pt. 8, 1.
16. Ibid.
17. Gerald G. Jampolsky, Teach Only Love (New York: Bantam Books, 1983), 25, 40.
18. Tara Singh, How to Learn from a Course in Miracles (Los Angeles: Life Action Press, 1988), 17.
19. Robert Skutch, Journey with Distance: The Story behind a Course in Miracles (Berkeley, Calif.: Celestial Arts, 1984), 54.
20. Dean Halverson, "A Matter of Course: Conversation with Kenneth Wapnick," Spiritual Counterfeits Project Journal 7, no. 1 (1987): 16.
21. Ibid., 11–17.
22. Dean Halverson, "A Course in Miracles: Seeing yourself as Sinless," Spiritual Counterfeits Project Journal 7, no. 1 (1987): 23.
