Does Christianity Conflict with New Thought Beliefs, The Divine Self, and the God or Goddess Within?
Undeniably, we live in an increasingly strange world. It is a world of “wishcraft” wherein individuals fashion a brave and reassuring new world by manifesting and affirming their desires. New Thought leader Emma Curtis Hopkins frames this world. She asserts: Germs do not make you sick, but “bad” thoughts do.
Whatever the cause of sickness may be, Christian apologist Melissa Dougherty critiques Hopkins’ contention that her students can achieve healing and wealth via correct thoughts. For instance, Hopkins instructs her students to heal blindness by stating: “Let there be light. You are bathed in a sea of light for God is light, and He is all around you. You are the glorious presence of God always.” Other New Thought proponents offer us the opportunity to save ourselves and make huge amounts of money via affirmations, introspection, and a metamystigorical view of biblical scripture.
Brené Brown contends that “True belonging is the spiritual practice of believing in and belonging to yourself so deeply that you can share your most authentic self with the world and find sacredness in both being a part of something and standing alone in the wilderness. True belonging doesn’t require you to change who you are; it requires you to be who you are.”
Lastly, many of us have encountered New Thought beliefs in the context of the recent Lindsay Clancy trial. Commentators celebrate the courage of a mother who strangled her three young children to death. One commentator observed that Lindsay—a woman who had a nanny and other sources of help—is nothing less than a hero, a divine feminine rising, a goddess-incarnate woman, an inspiration, who “stuck it to” the patriarchy. Evidently, this “you be you” vision deserves celebration, regardless of the fatalities that arise.
Observers can find individuals who subscribe to all or some of the above-referenced views in Christian churches throughout America. Rather than talking to a Holy God—who is beyond us—many Christians prefer the reliable company of self. They see themselves as sovereign as they attempt to ignite their inner “Christ Consciousness,” their own divine inner spark, through the power of their minds and visualization. On this pedestal, they perceive that they possess the same divinity as Jesus Christ the Anointed One.
Out of this less-than-divine stew, some churches “manifest” the miraculous. As Dougherty points out, some pastors state that Christians have the authority to channel dead spirits, summon angels apparently at will, and discern people’s auras on a road marked with vibrations and quantum physics.
Dougherty rightly contends that these beliefs lead to “Happy Lies”: a world in which personal feelings become our authority for discerning reality, and subjective positivity matters more than objectivity. Hence, we end up in a self-created world, a universe in which we endlessly chase happiness on our own terms, only to feel sad and exhausted as we hotly pursue more of ourselves.
This ravenous pursuit leads somewhere. In Habits of the Heart, Robert N. Bellah, Richard Madsen, William M. Sullivan, Ann Swidler, and Steven M. Tipton show how religion in America has moved from being highly public and largely unified to extremely private and diverse. This quest creates the possibility of millions of American religions grounded in personal, self-obsessed, self-absorbed religious experience disconnected from a sacred text. If true, New Thought, the Divine Self, and the Goddess within culminate in the tyranny, if not the revenge, of the self. And Christian churches throughout America would do well to engage in a root-and-branch exorcism of practices and beliefs that inevitably lead to nothing less than a dead end that has escaped reality.