by Heidi Swander

  www.olivetreeviews.org   

July 18, 2011 

"The New Age is upon us and we are witnessing the birth pangs of the new culture and the new civilization. This is now in progress. That which is old and undesirable must go . . . The spirit has gone out of the old faiths and the true spiritual light is transferring itself into a new form which will manifest on Earth eventually as the New World Religion." So said occultist Alice Bailey (1880-1949) while under the influence of her spirit guide, Djwal Khul. As I wrote in an article last March, Bailey and her demonic counterpart actually laid the foundation for the New World Order. The New World Religion piece of that coming global order is advancing successfully on at least three fronts:

The Media

In her newest, brilliant documentary, Wide is the Gate: The Emerging New Christianity, Caryl Matrisciana takes great pains to explain the underpinnings of the New Age movement and its progression through the last six or seven decades. As the film explains, the movement continues to morph over time to fit the perceived needs of the masses in order for them to accept the message. In terms of the media, Caryl traces the path from the Beatles' embrace of Transcendental Meditation (and their desire to properly learn it so they could "propagate and sell the idea to everyone") to Oprah Winfrey who, as author and former occultist Johanna Michaelsen explains, "has become one of the main proponents of New Age occult meditation and Eastern mystical techniques."

WIDE IS THE GATE: The Emerging New Christianity

Wikipedia observes that, "Since the 1950s, in the countries that have reached a high level of industrialization, the mass media of cinema, radio and TV have a key role in political power." This observation is intriguing in light of Bailey's comment above. To reach the entire Earth with the New Age message, the means used to broadcast the message would be necessarily extensive. And so it is.

Of the media's influence in the last 40+ years, Ray Yungen says, "In the 2000s I had a sense that some kind of threshold had been crossed; that Alice Bailey's vision of a new world was actually coming into being in a full sense. I could clearly understand that the public -- which had been conditioned through the 70s, 80s and 90s with this constant flow of self-help books based on metaphysics -- was ripe, and a threshold had been crossed where now the New Age was going from a minority view to a majority view."

The School

An article entitled, "A Religion for the New Age" by John Dunphy in a 1983 edition of the magazine, The Humanist, states, "The battle for humankind's future must be waged and won in the public school classroom by teachers who correctly perceive their role as the proselytizers of a new faith. The classroom must and will become the arena of conflict between the old and the new . . . the rotting corpse of Christianity and the new faith of Humanism."

Wide is the Gate demonstrates that presently, "Children and naïve young people are being targeted in the classroom, indoctrinated with an anti-biblical worldview, yet taught to embrace a global, one-world spirituality."

Johanna explains that, "They have been carefully programming the children in the perspective of a one-world government for many generations. But now they also understand that they need to give the children a mystical experience. The purpose of bringing in these ancient occult practices into the school is very simple. If you can give a child an experience -- a spiritual experience -- at an early age, then you have likely got him for life. He will be converted. If you can program him into your way of thinking from the time he's young, you will indeed find it very difficult to see him depart from it as he grows older."  

Does this principle sound familiar? It should. It's one God set out in His Word, and we know that the enemy of our souls is very adroit at taking our Father's principles and turning them against Him.  

Additionally, hitting the schools with such metaphysical philosophy is another avenue from which to capture the loyalty of a wide swath of humanity.

The Church

The big holdout to this spiritual takeover had been the church: Had been.  But now, as we are well aware, a vast majority of churches have succumbed to the wiles of the New Age to one degree or another.  

As Caryl states in her film, "Many evangelical leaders in the church today have unknowingly taken it upon themselves to further Alice Bailey's esoteric teachings and are calling for changes in so-called "old-fashioned" Christianity.  At its core is an ominous rejection of the Creator God. With such presumption comes the idea that we, the people, are going to usurp God's authority, take over His role and rethink, redesign and reinvent biblical Christianity and usher in a Christianized, all-embracing New Spirituality."

Christian author and former New Age follower Warren Smith actually draws a timeline in this documentary, showing the progression from occultist Alice Bailey to some of the leaders of today's New Spirituality: "You go back to Norman Vincent Peale. He says that god is in you in The Power of Positive Thinking. Then, you look back and see that he was influenced by occult New Agers. We have a stream going from the occult to Peale to Schuller to Rick Warren to this Emerging Church, and I would suggest that with the connections that Rick Warren has with all of these people, he is really the CEO of an apostate church."

Conclusion

As we see this cloud of New Age spirituality descending on our world in every major medium, what can we do?

What we must do, as Christians, is ensure that we and our children are immersed in and insulated by Scripture. Jesus said that it is the truth that will set us free, and that truth is found in the pages of the Bible.