Paganism in the Spotlight

Western culture has adopted a worldview that is not friendly to Christianity. A pagan vision is being applied to all of existence, to science, law, education, politics, sexuality, ecology, and ethics. All must be filtered through the subjective paranormal grill of a sort of occultic vision of human beings.

Those are stark words, but we're seeing evidence of it all around us. Welcome to Renewing Your Mind. Dr. Peter Jones is with us this week to show us the dominant worldviews that are driving modern culture. He explains that the Swiss psychologist Karl Jung was key in the development of a so-called new spirituality, a worldview that has exploded in popularity. Jung promoted a pagan philosophy that stressed the joining of opposites, thus blurring the lines between right and wrong. Let's learn more. The spirituality about which I spoke, which essentially is represented as a sort of hidden esoteric tradition, I believe comes to the surface openly in the 60s and represents thus the fulfillment of Jung's vision of a society liberated to practice pagan spirituality.

That's the basic argument that I'm proposing to you. Some of us watched this happen, didn't we? We saw all of a sudden this outbreak of the most bizarre kind of spirituality we'd never heard before.

When you have Shirley MacLaine out on a limb announcing, I am God, and we had to wonder when this odd limb would break. And we would come back to our senses. But we discovered that what she was representing was what was called the new age movement.

Don't ever use that phrase ever again because the progressives don't use it either. But we were introduced via that amazingly beautiful song, the age of Aquarius, into a notion of the change of the times, that something very profound and strange was happening. This indeed was the dawning of the age of Aquarius. Incidentally, Jung in his writings was a popularizer of the notion of the age of Aquarius.

So there's nothing left to chance here. The age of Aquarius is that moment in the zodiacal system where the age of Pisces, which stood for the fish, is now superseded by the age of Aquarius. The age of the goddess, water bringer of spiritual drink. And by the way, Jung was known as the father of the new age movement. As well as being called the father of neo-nosticism and the psychologist of the 21st century. Just so that you know that when I made reference to Jung, that I wasn't going out on a limb with Shirley MacLaine.

But I think there's something to be said for finding him at the center of things. But as a matter of fact, the 60s was but the dawning of the age of Aquarius, as that song says. Dylan asked us what time was it, and he said the times were a changing. Now, as I say, all generations see the change of times, but I think that this was a very different kind of change. It was this extraordinary catastrophic change, as that feminist historian spoke of.

Dylan was announcing a radical departure from everything that the West had known in the past as something seemingly brand new. David Horowitz and Peter Collier, who were Marxist students, leaders of the SDS in Berkeley in the 60s, who finally went back on all of that stuff and wrote the book Destructive Generation about the 60s revolution, understood that at the heart of the revolution was not simply drugs and sex, but it was also the destruction of Western civilization. If you want to hear this man, he's an amazing person, David Horowitz.

You can find him on Google him. He has incredible insights as to what is happening right now. He's a Jewish agnostic, by the way. But what we were actually seeing in the 60s, I believe, was a pagan revival. Ex-Roman Catholic Jungian Gnostic, by the name of Marc Gaffney, describes this time as a serendipitous confluence of events. That is to say, an unforeseen but delightful turn of events where you have the decline of Christianity and the growth of these alternate spiritualities. And so many spiritualities got their start here in the 60s. A pantheistic spiritual revival took place.

I'll just run through a few of them. The American Indian Vision Quest, the Akashic Record, the Ayurvedic Medicine, the chakras, Eastern Meditation of all kinds, Ekankar, which is soul travel, Feng Shui, Hare Krishna, karma, mandalas, mantras, reincarnation, shamanism, sufism, tai chi, tantrism, aiching, to mention just a few. And these, for many people, have become dominant notions in the identification of spirituality in our once Christian West. That's why I said earlier, many people now are turning away from secular humanism, and they're saying we're spiritual but not religious. What they mean by that is, you see, that they are looking for a notion of spirituality freed from the doubts of secular humanism, but totally eliminating the notion of religion, in particular, the Christian religion, which is not to be found within, but is a revelation from the outside. So, the New Age has morphed into the age of interfaith religion, where everything is good.

Jung already affirmed this. Our world has shrunk, and it is dawning on us that humanity is one with one psyche. This should prompt Christians, for the sake of charity, to set a good example and acknowledge that though there is only one truth, it speaks in many tongues.

That's the message now you often hear, is it not? There's one truth, but it speaks in many tongues. This is where we must situate the so-called interfaith movement that you've obviously come across in your own churches, where you've been asked to participate in some kind of a drive for homeless people, because there's an interfaith group here. Well, some of that is harmless, obviously, but the driving ideology behind interfaith is this notion of the coming of pagan spirituality. A Christian eco-feminist theologian by the name of Heather Eaton argues that the Christian faith must now exhibit an openness to reinterpretations in the light of the myriad religious traditions and a willingness to be transformed by the inter-religious dialogue. You see, you move in that direction and then, oh, after all, what you thought about Christianity has to change radically, of course. And so the modern religious person needs to encounter many religious perspectives and be transformed by the process.

Terribly seductive, right? And if you don't do that, you're an old fogey. You're stuck in some kind of historical ravine and you are not showing that you're open to the future, which, by the way, is turning back to the past, right, in the old pagan religion. So don't buy that kind of argumentation. And you're asked to see the future of Christianity as just one religious option among many. And so we find ourselves in the beginning of this 21st century where the marginal 60s spirituality has become mainstream.

We thought that the New Age hippies from the West Coast were going to last as long as bell-bottom pants in the hula hoop. And actually, that has gone mainstream. That old phrase I just already cited, I'm spiritual but not religious, you see, shows that it has gone mainstream. So many people are now claiming to be spiritual. Because we are all convinced of what Jung was telling us, that the divine reigns within us.

And that because our inner psyches are in control, then our fantasies are morally justified. It brings us psychological health. It brings us the completion of ourselves.

And indeed, hopefully, the health of the planet. All this is intertwined in this vision you see. In other words, broken Humpty Dumpty of contemporary Western humanity, broken by the demise of secular humanism, deconstructed by post-modernism, needs a new organizing call. You know, in Western universities today, philosophy is in ruins because post-modernism says secular humanism doesn't work.

So what do you do? Well, what's the new call? It's found actually not in the rational but in the irrational.

See that flip. You don't find it in logos but in mythos, not in word but in myth. That's how we will put the world back together again, say these folks. But not just in terms of personal healing.

This is a massive moment and that's why I'm taking my time to open it up to you. Because it's not simply for personal healing. This vision of the world, a pagan vision, is being applied to all of existence.

To science, law, education, politics, sexuality, ecology and ethics. All must be filtered through this subjective paranormal grill of a sort of occultic vision of human beings. That's the future, I believe.

That's on the way. You talk about, you know, spiritual combat. This is where we're going and I do feel that we need to be forearmed in order to be able to stand against it. The whole reinterpretation of existence is now being done, obviously, for the sake of the planet. We're reinventing the human, says Thomas Berry. A modern Jungian philosopher from Australia explains this organizing core principle. Quote, our age is destined to discover the divine as a dimension of the human.

Do you see that? And explicitly characterizes this thorough oneness notion as the essential project of Jung's new humanism. So this redefinition of the human, you see, is really the fulfillment of what Jung was looking for. A new humanity.

Who on earth ever thought that this would be what we would see at the beginning of the 21st century in Christian America? Based upon this notion of God, you see, that I described to you, which was Jung's notion of abraxas, half man, half beast, a god higher than both the Christian god and the devil, combining all the opposites. That sounds a little old-fashioned, but this Jungian Australian scholar, David Tisi, actually gives it a little modern twist. Let us agree that the old image of God is dead and buried. The image of a supernatural deity who has objective existence. We can't believe in that anymore, right?

If you're a normal human being these days. And that is a human invention that education and science can no longer sustain. Today only sentimentalists, fundamentalists, and unthinking people like you want to return to that antiquated image. We need to discover God anew. Here's the radical character of this new spirituality you see.

It's not content to let people go off in the corner and meditate on themselves. Now we must impose this new vision of existence upon everybody. This will be the dominant worldview. Now, of course, this is good news for unrepentant sinners. Billy Graham used to say, this is good news. God loves the sinner and I love to sin. That was Billy Graham's funny line.

And you can be taken further now, you see, because the good news is even more encouraging. Sinners are God. And what's sin anyway? Last week the presiding bishop of the Episcopal Church declared that sin is no longer an operative notion in the modern world. This is the presiding bishop of the Episcopal Church. We are in deep kimchi, folks, when we get to that stage that we can just dismiss out of hand one of the fundamental notions of biblical truth.

But that's where we are. The British sociologist Christopher Partridge is a wonderful sociologist. I think he's a Christian. His book is entitled The Re-enchantment of the West. The Re-enchantment of the West.

Christopher Partridge in 2004 made a timely observation about this phenomenon. Many are now convinced that the contemporary world has much to learn from pre-modern and primal cultures. That's a fancy way of saying paganism, obviously. This is, of course, what he's talking about, which I've described to you as the new humanism.

Well, when I stood in Boston in 1964 and began to breathe in this amazing reality of a Christian America, I never dreamt that in 2014 that I would look out and see and read what I'm reading today. I've already mentioned that this Jewish sociologist, Philip Goldberg, in his book The American Vader from Emerson and the Beatles to Yoga and Meditation, how Indian spirituality changed the West, is now telling us that America has become Hindu. We're all Hindus now, said Newsweek in 2009. Large numbers of Americans are espousing this worldview of Hinduism, talking about mantras and mandalas and avatars and karma and all these terms and practicing yoga in the schools and mindfulness, which is a Buddhist form of meditation in the schools.

Out in California, we've just fought a court battle and lost, by the way, against yoga being taught in the schools. So you can say that this vision of paganism is winning and being applied even in the schools these days. And that term Advaita, says Goldberg, is the fundamental notion which means not to. And so we are swallowing down, you see, this oneness ideology that everything is one, which successfully eliminates God who is separate, right? You want to have a God who is separate?

Well, he doesn't exist anymore. Everything is one and this is the way we will build the world from now on. And so we give plenty of time to the Dalai Lama to teach us about peace and other things, to teach us how we can discover Eastern spiritual pacifism. As I mentioned, we have yoga in the schools.

In Canada, it's the Buddhist Mind Up program and we practice yoga at the White House, as does the power couple bill in Hillary Clinton. Well, what produced this massive turn to the East? Well, obviously, I believe that Jung is powerfully involved, but at the same time, something took place in 1893 at the Parliament of the World's Religions. I attended the Parliament of the World's Religions 100 years later, by the way. I just missed it, which was an amazing experience.

I might have time to tell you about it. But in 1893, the original one, there was the meeting of 4,000 basically liberal Christians and they wanted to look out on the world, but they invited a Hindu guru by the name of Vivekananda, who taught about the God within and yoga and blew away many of these people in attendance. And a number of Americans were deeply influenced by this man, including, by the way, Carl Jung. Carl Jung himself was fascinated by Eastern mysticism.

He declared in 1932, we have conquered the East politically, but now the spirit of the East is really antes portas, Latin for at the door. So our present culture is following Jung's fascination with guess what? Yoga. With Hindu spirituality. And actually Jung predicted that the West would produce a yoga based on Christianity.

And all these predictions are coming true. How odd. Number of people doing yoga now is phenomenal. 15,000 sites advertise yoga programs in New York alone.

15,000. If this was Bible studies, we'd say this is a Christian revival, right? Rather, it's a new form of spirituality. Jung in the 50s predicted we are only at the threshold of a new spiritual epoch.

We believe that the theories about the unconscious were ushering in a new age of the Paraclete, the end of the Christian era, the coming of the age of Aquarius. Jung's prediction of a new Pentecost has caught on. Brother Wayne Teasdale, a lay monk and teacher of inter-spirituality, combines the traditions of Christianity, Hinduism and Buddhism and calls this time in which we are now living an inter-spiritual age. But Barbara Marks Hubbard, who is a progressivist, a leader of this movement, talks about a new Pentecost. Way back in the middle of the 20th century, Jung's dismantling of the truest world view and thinking about God and the world produced a spiritual oneism and this has had massive repercussions in today's world.

Again, I'd like to cite Partridge. There is some evidence to suggest that the rising tide of spirituality, this was in 2004, I think he said it, is producing a re-enchantment of the world by Gnostic Hindu spirituality. The shift in the West means that the center of spiritual gravity is moving away from Judeo-Christian theology to an eclecticism of what he calls occulture.

It's a nice way of talking about the occult. A Dutch historian of religion talks about the profound transformation of religion in the West away from traditional Christianity to what he calls magic. And then, finally, a brilliant pagan philosopher by the name of Richard Tarnas says we are living in one of those rare ages that brings forth through great stress and struggle a genuinely fundamental transformation in the underlying assumptions and principles of the cultural world view. He talks about the coming of the great synthesis. So we have people now describing the present day as the fourth Great Awakening, the Great Emergence, the Great Shift, the New Pentecost.

The whole system will have a makeover. A totalizing oneness civilization is in preparation. Some Christians are mesmerized by all this and believe that only good days are ahead. Failing to understand, it seems to me, the influences that produce this culture and this optimism in our time. We need to seriously study the sources of this material and bring the gospel to bear upon it. That is a serious warning today from Dr. Peter Jones, and you're listening to Renewing Your Mind, Dr. Jones' series, Only Two Religions, is a wake-up call. As he explains it, there are fundamental religious convictions driving modern culture, and they're antithetical to biblical Christianity.

We'd like for you to have this series. There are 12 messages on two DVDs. You'll learn about Carl Jung's influence on modern culture.

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Dr. R.C. Sproul established this ministry 50 years ago to clearly proclaim God's Word. We do that in several areas of study, including theology, worldview and culture, church history, biblical studies, and Christian living. By God's sustaining grace, this teaching fellowship has worked to unfold the riches of Scripture. And when you give a donation of any amount today, we will say thank you by sending you Dr. Jones' series, Only Two Religions.

Again, our phone number is 800-435-4343, and our web address, renewingyourmind.org. Tomorrow we'll wrap up Dr. Jones' series, and here's a preview. The worship of creation rather than the worship of the Creator. It's for that reason, ultimately, that we have sexual perversion. It's the overturning, you see, of the image of God in man, which is part of the apostasy of paganism, in order to dethrone God from His place in the world. I hope you'll join us tomorrow for Renewing Your Mind. Copyright © 2020, New Thinking Allowed Foundation