Most Christians see the New Age movement’s deep ties to occultism and witchcraft and recognize it as a demonic worldview. But there’s an adjacent movement that, despite its inextricable connection to New Age, is packaged as a Christian belief system.
That movement is called New Thought. It’s a spiritual movement that influenced New Ageism that centers on how the power of the mind shapes reality — emphasizing positive thinking, the law of attraction, mental healing, the divine nature of humanity, and the idea that Infinite Intelligence or God is within all things and accessible through right thinking.
This is the movement author and Christian apologist Melissa Dougherty found herself in before she became a true Christian.
On this episode of “Unashamed,” Melissa unpacks the good-sounding but ultimately evil mechanics of the New Thought movement that has millions of people duped into thinking they’re Christians.
“If I were to define New Thought in two words, it would be metaphysical Christianity. All that means is that everything that you see physically has a spiritual counterpart, including words,” Melissa says.
Instead of reading Scripture in its proper historical context to decipher what’s being communicated, New Thought, she explains, positions the reader as “the arbiter.”
“You’re the one that interprets it on how it feels to you and what it means to you. Because metaphysically speaking, truth is found from within, not outside of yourself, because God is in you,” she says. “So it’s a subjective interpretation. … There’s a higher, deeper, esoteric, hidden meaning within that text that’s meant for you.”
Melissa boils down the movement into one simple concept: “It’s the positive thinking movement in America with Jesus as its mascot.”
People in this movement believe that they “create [their] reality” through cognition. “Sickness, poverty, things like that are all a state of mind. How you feel creates your reality,” Melissa says.
This results in a lot of “distortion of truth,” she laments. For example, “there’s a saying in New Thought that when you look in the mirror, there’s a god staring back at you, and that’s the secret … of what Jesus was really trying to say.”
While this “sounds really good,” Melissa says, it’s a lie. That’s why she titled her book “Happy Lies” — because it shines a true biblical light on the positive-sounding but heretical New Thought movement.
“It duped me,” she confesses.
To hear more, watch the full episode above.
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