How it All Began

By Douglas Groothuis, PhD

Moses, the man of God, wrote but one Psalm. In it he writes something pertinent to those in their later years, like me.

Our days may come to seventy years,    

or eighty, if our strength endures;

yet the best of them are but trouble and sorrow,    

for they quickly pass, and we fly away (Psalm 90:10).

This Psalm has been a source of inspiration, mediation, and lament for me over many years, especially during the time of my first wife’s terminal illness.[1] If our strength endures, we may live to eighty, he says, although he lived much longer. Since I recently turned sixty-nine, the biblical age of seventy is not far off. Yes, the best of years “are but trouble and sorrow,” and where does the time fly to? However, Moses also wrote that we should as God to “teach us to number our days, that we gain a heart of wisdom” (Psalm 90:12), a prayer of mine for decades. By God’s grace, he has given me some wisdom and blessing, at least in my writing.

An Unlikely Best-Seller

So, let me reflect a bit on my first and best-selling book, Unmasking the New Age, which was published forty years ago this month when I was twenty-nine-years old and a graduate student at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. This provided my start as a public intellectual and author of many books. I sometimes tell people that “I started out famous and became obscure.”

Despite the publication date of 1986 and that I have written many other books, over the years, when I meet someone over fifty, they not infrequently will ask, “Didn’t you write that book on the New Age movement?” In my late twenties and into my thirties, I was primarily known as an expert on the New Age movement or what is sometimes called the phenomena of new spiritual movements. I went on to write Confronting the New Age (InterVarsity, 1988) and Revealing the New Age Jesus (1990).[2] Deceived by the Light (1995), which is about near-death experiences, challenged New Age thinking as well when these experiences were interpreted in pantheistic or occultic ways.

Before converting to Christianity in 1976, I was interested in Eastern religions and the paranormal, although I did not delve deeply into this experientially, but mostly through reading. After becoming a Christian, I wanted to understand the worldviews and way of life that I had rejected in coming to Jesus Christ as Savior and Lord. After conversion I grew in my knowledge of the Bible, through hearing the Bible preached and taught and through my reading and study, I began to see the antithesis between a biblical worldview and that of other philosophies and religions (Colossians 2:8-9). By reading apologists such as Blaise Pascal, Francis Schaeffer, Os Guinness, and James Sire, I became grounded in the case for Christianity against its rivals and counterfeits (1 John 4:1-4). The publications and tapes of The Spiritual Counterfeits Project, out of Berkeley, California, were also formative for me, especially the writing of Brooks Alexander.

I had studied with the hopes of writing a book on the New Age since about 1981, but in 1983, I met Rebecca Merrill (later Groothuis), who joined the campus ministry I worked with and encouraged me to write the book. She said that I knew more about the subject than anyone and that she would edit the chapters before I sent them off. It was true that I had taught much about this worldview and had much first-hand experience of New Age events and speakers in the hippie-town of Eugene, Oregon.

In 1983, I secured a contract with InterVarsity Press, because the head editor, James Sire, saw the need for such a book and looked past my lack of credentials. I had been much influenced by and had taught through his book, The Universe Next Door: A Basic Worldview Catalogue, which featured two chapters related to the New Age perspective. He and I agreed that most books on this topic were sensationalistic and tied the New Age movement into end times scenarios of questionable credibility (to put it nicely). I explained the rise of the worldview in historical context in light of previous movements, what the New Age essentially affirmed, compared it with biblical teaching, critiqued it apologetically, and outlined how Christians could respond so as to keep their theological integrity and to reach those enamored of and deceived by the New Age. My original title for the book was ponderous and academic: The One For All: The Convergence of Pantheism in the West. That was descriptively accurate, but a sure-fire loser at the box office (to so to speak). So, it was renamed Unmasking the New Age: Is There a New Movement Trying to Transform Society? Interestingly, I never explicitly used the metaphor of “unmasking” in the book, but that was what I did.

These are the chapters:

1.      The One for All

2.     From Counterculture to New Age

3.     Holistic Health

4.    Exploring Human Potential in Psychology

5.     The New God of Science

6.    The Politics of Transformation

7.     New Age Spirituality

8.    Challenging the One for All

Notes

Related Reading

The New Age Worldview

The worldview I exposed has several features. It is monistic: all is one; there is no division between God, nature, and humans. It is pantheistic: this great oneness is an impersonal deity, which is within all of us. Since God is within, we can find unlimited potential through unlocking our divine potential through some conscious-raising experience, such as meditation or yoga. Since it is rooted in Eastern religions (as well as Western occultism), New Age adherents also teach reincarnation and karma. The spiritual world of the New Age is also open to the influence of supposedly higher beings who communicate with us through mediumship or channeling. These entities to an entity (including those claiming to be Christ) never communicate a biblical worldview. Those who attain a higher consciousness also have access to telepathy, clairvoyance, telekinesis, and other paranormal abilities. Of course, I critique of all this and more in Unmasking the New Age, but I leave it to you to consult the book for a thorough response. In a nutshell, God is not one with his creation; we are made in God’s image, but are not God; our problem is not ignorance of our divine nature, but sin; and the answer is not to look within, but to repent of our sin and come to Jesus Christ as the atoning sacrifice for our sin and our resurrected Savior.

The Book Takes Off

Professor Gordon R. Lewis, who would later become my colleague at Denver Seminary, wrote forward to the book (I later dedicated my book, Philosophy in Seven Sentences [2016] to  him) and I received a book cover endorsement (in impossibly tiny print) from counter-cult apologetics pioneer, Walter Martin: “This well-researched book convincingly articulates the spiritual and social dangers inherent in New Age thinking.” Ronald Enroth, a sociology professor and cult expert, also wrote, “This could be one of the most significant books of the decade. In a nonsensational way, this book reveals the incredible intrusion of New Age thinking into every facet of our culture.” As Scripture says, “the greater blesses the lesser” (Hebrews 7:7). I couldn’t have asked for three better endorsements from these senior scholars.

After a rather slow start, Unmasking the New Age began to sell briskly in early 1987. Focus on the Family picked it up as a premium, which meant that they would send you one if you donated a certain amount. They bought five thousand for that purpose. I received many requests for radio and television interviews—this was well before the internet—and even appeared on a short segment of “The 700 Club,” which was a major, national Christian television program at that time. (However, I was not interviewed by Pat Robertson, the famous founder and host of the program.) I was quoted in a cover story of Time Magazine about the New Age movement and asked to write many articles and reviews on this new spiritual movement that was perplexing and entrancing so many. From 1986-89, I lived in Seattle, Washington, which was a hotbed of New Age activity.

These were the days when publishing a book was a significant means to advance your ministry and quite a big deal, since self-publishing barely existed. There were no social media platforms as we know them today. You took all the gigs you could and hoped for good book reviews in major evangelical magazines, such as Moody Monthly, Eternity, and Christianity Today. My book received some positive reviews and was excerpted in several key periodicals. I got a short notice from the venerable American church historian, Martin Marty, in the liberal Christian Century. Apparently, Marty had not read the book since he said it was a bit much to claim that the New Age movement was a vast conspiracy when I dedicated several pages to denying that claim, popular though it was among fundamentalists and evangelicals.

I remember that we sold a hundred copies of Unmasking the New Age at a church conference on the New Age in Seattle in 1986 when I lived there with my first wife, Becky, who ran the book table. (After calculating the money received relative to books sold, we discovered that several copies were stolen.) The book has sold over 160,000 copies and is still in print. Of all my books, it has been translated into the most non-English languages. Why is this?

When the book was published, I had yet to receive my MA in philosophy. I had only published a few book reviews and articles. I had worked at an obscure (but significant) campus ministry/think tank in Eugene, Oregon, from 1979-84, called The McKenzie Study Center (which is sadly defunct). However, at the time there was no mainstream evangelical book that evaluated the New Age movement from a cultural critique and worldview standpoint. Lawyer, Constance Cumbey, wrote a popular conspiratorial potboiler called Hidden Dangers of the Rainbow and Dave Hunt (who was a better researcher and writer) had written Peace, Prosperity, and the Coming Holocaust. The title indicates a spectacular apocalypticism. Around the time Unmasking the New Age was released, Gary North came out with an update of his book, None Dare Call it Witchcraft (1976), which was called Unholy Spirits (1986). This was thorough, worldview oriented, and not tied into end time events (since North was a postmillennialist). However, it didn’t get the traction of my book, possibly because of its large length. My book was modest 194 pages, including the index. It originally sold as a paperback for $6.95.

The ultimate reason that Unmasking the New Age did so well was the sovereign grace of God, who is the giver of every good and perfect gift (James 1:17). My book wasn’t perfect, of course, but it was published by an upstanding and solid Christian publisher (InterVarsity Press), was well-edited by Becky Groothuis, received excellent pre-publication endorsements (mentioned above), and met a need for an approachable, thoughtful, clearly-written, and well-researched analysis and critique of the New Age movement.

The New Age, Then and Now

Despite my best efforts, the New Age worldview is still very much with us. When I wrote my books on the New Age perspective (although not new at all as a worldview) was a flashy trend, with celebrity advocates such as Shirley McLaine (who wrote three memoirs about her mystical experiences), channelers galore (such as J. Z. Knight), and extravagant health claims made for crystals, energy medicine, past-life regressions, and more. People were trying to get their bearings on all this. I was able to put these diverse elements into an historical, theological, and apologetics framework that was not sensational, but neither was it purely academic.

The academic books, with their claims to fairness and neutrality, would come out about a decade later. My book was a fair analysis, but also a warning against the dangers of the false worldview of pantheistic-monism and its related tenets of reincarnation, karma, magic, mediumship, and mystical utopianism. I was sounding an alarm against false religion, not merely documenting a phenomenon. But I was also offering Christianity as a living and logical alternative to the New Age counterfeit (as I often called it).  

As mentioned, I wrote several other books related to the New Age worldview and its penetration into society (and even into the church). When I addressed all the central issues that concerned me, I moved on to other topics. I became a professional philosopher, not a perpetual cult-watcher and researcher. Although I have revisited New Age themes over the years in reviews and articles, it is no longer my central focus. However, my apologetics textbook, Christian Apologetics, 2^nd ed. (InterVarsity, 2022) spends more time addressing pantheistic monism than most books of its kind. That is rooted in my early apologetic work on the New Age worldview.

I recently read a book called Strange Rites: New Religions for a Godless World (2020), by religion scholar, Tara Elizabeth Burton, which covered many of the same ideas and practices I had covered so many years ago. The main difference between the alternative religious phenomena then and now was the engine of the Internet in the propagation of these ideas and practices and that these “new religions” were more intwined with LGBTQ perspectives than when I wrote. While not an overt advocate of what she describes, Burton fails to bring a biblical perspective to bear on her research as I did. Concerning basic worldview options, “There is nothing new under the sun” (Ecclesiastes 1:9). Or as Francis Schaeffer wrote:

Most people catch their presuppositions from their family and surrounding society the way a child catches measles. But people with more understanding realize that their presuppositions should be chosen after a careful consideration of what world view is true. When all is done, when all the alternatives have been explored, “not many men are in the room”— that is, although world views have many variations, there are not many basic world views or basic presuppositions.[3]

My Ongoing Mission

My mission in life is to teach, preach, write, and mentor in order to make God’s truth known and applied to the church and to the world. With nineteen books published after my first book, there is still much work for me to do, Lord willing. I have a lot of fire in my bones (Jeremiah 20:9; Acts 20:24). Writing Unmasking the New Age was a pivotal step in my long and not-yet-concluded ministry. For that, I thank God: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

[1] See Douglas Groothuis, “Moses and our Sadness,” Walking through Twilight: A Wife’s Illness—a Philosopher’s Lament (InterVarsity, 2017).

[2] This was revised and updated as Jesus in an Age of Controversy (Harvest House, 1996).

[3] Schaeffer, Francis A.. How Should We Then Live? (Kindle Locations 247-250). Crossway. Kindle Edition.