Confronting Neo-Paganism

1. Introduction: Revolutionary Times 

We are living in a most disorienting time, especially since someone said that orientation is knowing where the East is! When I came to the States in 1964, the threat from the East was not spiritual but material—atheistic Marxism and a fear of the disappearance of religion altogether, predicted by Ludwig Feuerbach,¹ Karl Marx, and Sigmund Freud. The 1960s Death of God theology seemed to represent in North America the final triumph of secular humanism.² In 1967 the sociologist Peter Berger did note the “overall decline in the plausibility of Christianity,”³ but what few saw, including Berger,⁴ was also the demise of secular humanism. In 2008, in an article entitled “Secularization Falsified,” Berger had changed his mind. Religion had not been declining. On the contrary, in much of the world there has been a veritable explosion of religious faith.⁵  

What had created this unexpected situation? Philosopher David Harvey believes he knows: “The moral crisis of our time is a crisis of Enlightenment thought.”⁶ And the “assumptions of secular humanism” have been undermined by Postmodernism. ⁷ “The irony is delicious,” says theologian Don Carson. “The modernity which has arrogantly insisted that human reason is the final arbiter of truth has spawned a stepchild that has arisen to slay it.”⁸An informed observer called this Postmodern critique “a rage against humanism and the Enlightenment legacy.”⁹  

Postmodernism had brought an end to secularism in the oddest of ways. The French thinker, Lydia Jaeger, notes that “L’irrationalisme postmoderne est, en fait, l’ultramodernité: la modernité poussée jusqu’à ses conséquences logiques extrèmes.”¹⁰ For her, the ultimate contribution of autonomous reason (postmodernism) is the lucid observation that reason has no reasonable, objective grounds on which to stand. Such deconstruction raises a serious question: where does Postmodernism lead our culture? The answer I propose represents the body of this paper. Many now believe that grounds for existence can only be found in the irrational, in the age-old metanarrative of pantheistic Oneism. 

[I am proposing to use two relatively neutral, descriptive terms, Oneism and Two-ism, in order to avoid applying a narrow theological system that only a few of us could affirm. These terms seek to express the only two bedrock options found in Romans 1:25: either the worship and service of creation understood as closed, homogeneous system, or the worship and service by creation of the transcendent ontologically other Creator]. 

Perhaps, we should have seen this spiritual tsunami coming. Instead, we treated the New Age as the latest, more or less harmless religious sect, which would go the way of the hoola hoop. We failed to hear the vast implications of Lennon’s Imagine and Dylan’s The Times They Are A’Changin. In fact, the “Yellow Submarine” was taking us to another “planet,” the zodiacal Age of Aquarius.  

These changin’ times have, in one generation, radically transformed how popular culture thinks about sexuality, the family, gender roles, marriage, abortion, pornography, American history, the dating of history, the names of national holidays, the use of the Constitution, free speech, globalism, education, environmentalism, psychology and religious unity. A Roman Catholic theologian, Richard Grigg, in his book When God Becomes Goddess: The Transformation of American Religion, (1995),¹¹ reassures us that religion in America will not disappear but is in the “process of transformation.” “…[S]ignificant elements of traditional religious belief and practice are passing away, but a new kind of religiosity is poised to take its place.”¹² Since, of course, there are only two kinds of “religiosity,” this “new kind” would be Oneism. 

This “new religiosity” maintains the fiction of progress, but as C. S. Lewis remarked: “Pantheism is congenial to our minds not because it is the final stage in a slow process of enlightenment [as it often claims], but because it is almost as old as we are.”¹³ In its present iteration, this ancient ideology denigrates theism as out-of-date, dysfunctional and blame-worthy, and triumphantly declares itself to be our future. The Jungian mystic and counselor to Hillary Clinton in the White House, Jean Huston, has provocatively declared: “Other times in history thought they were it. They were wrong. Now is it.”¹⁴ Joseph Campbell before his death in 1987 was asked: “Do you still believe that we are at this moment participating in one of the greatest leaps of the human spirit”? He answered: “The greatest ever.”¹⁵ 

How did we get to this moment of Oneist triumph? 

2. Ideological Revolution  

The coherent ancient ideology of Oneism comes in a number of interlaced forms that together constitute a formidable construction of a “new” seductive worldview for our contemporary culture.  

1. The Hinduization of the West 

In the Sixties, spiritual globalism took a leap forward as Eastern Oneism continued its invasion of Western culture. Though Vivekananda had already made the trip West in 1893, and many had followed him, the Sixties saw a whole series of Indian gurus make their mark on the student generation. The “Fab Four” met the Maharishi, and popular culture was introduced to the “wisdom of the East.” In August 2009, Newsweek announced that “We are all Hindus Now,” meaning that the Western soul has been profoundly and definitively altered—a change that spiritual observer, Philip Goldberg, in his book American Veda¹⁶ compares to the Great Awakenings of the 18th century.  

Many of the architects of modern spirituality, such as Aldous Huxley, Joseph Campbell and Huston Smith, were converts of Vedanta. Campbell and Smith were introduced to the culture thanks to the Bill Moyers PBS video series. Campbell, mentor of George Lucas and inspiration of the Star Wars movie series, had an enduring friendship with the guru Jiddu Krishnamurti, and Hinduism became the overarching theme of Campbell’s work. Huston Smith was an MK (missionary kid) in China who converted to Buddhism and became a leading authority in the history of religions. No one can underestimate the influence in the West of the Dalai Lama, from the same Eastern spiritual tradition. It is doubtless true to say that the key New Age leaders and their present disciples all claim some form of Vedantic enlightenment. 

Hindu terms have entered Western consciousness. Everyday conversation includes words like karma, mantra, mandala, yoga (practiced by 18 million Americans) and avatar (Hindu term meaning incarnation). James Cameron in his film Avatar invites viewers to give up the biblical worldview in favor of Oneism. Mindfulness is now proposed as a valid Psychological method by recognized experts in the field of psychology as a way of reducing stress. Elizabeth Gilbert, Eat, Pray, Love, convinces many, including Julia Roberts, who played the lead in the movie version of the book, and became a Hindu, that you can eat great food, have all the sex you want, as long as you master Indian meditation and reject the God of Theism.¹⁷ The secular Jew and Hindu convert, Goldberg, notes that the Roman Catholic mystics, Bede Griffith, Wayne Teasdale, Thomas Merton and Thomas Keating were all deeply influenced by Eastern religion, and that Centering Prayer is “the highest level of Indian spirituality.”¹⁸ Interestingly, their major influence has been seen in Christianity since the Sixties when Vatican II officially recognized the mysticism of pagan religions as a valid form of spirituality for Christians.¹⁹ 

2. The Return of Gnosticism  

If you can speak of the Easternization of the West, you can also speak of the Gnosticization of the West.²⁰ The discovery in 1945 of the Nag Hammadi Library gave scholarship its first direct knowledge of ancient Gnosticism. The Gnostic documents became popularly known because of their translation in 1977 and, more recently, because of their use by Dan Brown in his mega best-seller The DaVinci Code.  

James Robinson, like Hans Jonas, who saw Gnosticism as an ancient form of existentialism,²¹ presented these newly found texts as an attractive, timeless “answer to the human dilemma.”²² Robinson declared that the Gnostic library had much in common with three movements.  

1. Gnostic texts have “much in common with primitive Christianity.” This affirmation has given life to the New “Progressive” Christianity, which argues that the Gnostic gospels prove that original Christianity was interfaith, a notion most Americans find acceptable.  

2. Gnostic texts have “much in common with eastern religions and with holy men of all times.” This affirmation fits well with the Easternization of the West.  

3. Gnostic texts have “…much in common with…the counter-culture movements coming from the 1960’s.”²³  

Gnosticism became a cultural phenomenon through the influence of C. G. Jung, who was deeply influenced by it. Jungian psychology has introduced a form of Gnosticism into the Western psyche via the notion of the all-powerful subconscious.²⁴Joseph Campbell said of Jung: his works “have inspired…an astonishing number of the leading scholars of our time.”²⁵ James Herrick see the imporatance of Jung “less for his psychoanalytical theories than for a “closely related set of religious ideas, some of which are at the center of the New Religious synthesis, like Gnostic and occult ideas about the divinity of the individual, spiritual gnosis, and paranormal reality.”²⁶ Someone has called Jung the psychologist of the 21^st century.²⁷ One writer on Jung says without overstatement that Carl Jung is the Father of Neo-Gnosticism and the New Age Movement.²⁸ A contemporary philosopher, Richard Wolin, Distinguished Professor at the Graduate Center, City University of New York,  believes that “…since the 1970s Jung’s influence on spiritual currents of the New Age movement has been enormous It may only be a slight exaggeration to say scratch a witch and underneath you will find a Jungian.” ²⁹ 

The modern expert on Gnosticism, Kurt Rudolf, rightly sees that Gnosticism is not spiritual dualism but “dualism on a monistic background.”³⁰ That is, while espousing a radical dualism between the flesh and the spirit, it affirms the primordial unity of all immateriality and expresses a yearning for the restoration of that essential non-material unity. Gnostics, like modern day Eastern spiritualists, long for the ultimate experience of “non-dual” reality and dismiss theists as dualists. Help comes to the postmodern deconstructed world not through reason but through unreason. 186. Jung: “the distinguishing mark of the Christian epoch, and its highest achievement, has become the congenital vice of our age: the supremacy of the word…necessary at a certain [phase of man’s development, it has a perilous shadow side.”³¹ “The missing center of the mandala of the global community is [mystical] consciousness of the Self in the process of individuation,”³² that is, joining the opposites in a non-dual synthesis. Humans are connected by a vast psychic force, the collective unconscious. 

Jung calls Christian orthodoxy “systematic blindness” in insisting that God is outside of man, unaware of “this inner deity revealing itself from the depths of the soul.”³³ But who is this divinity? In his The Seven Sermons to the Dead, Jung following the ancient Gnostic myth, elevates Abraxas, half man, half beast, as a God higher than both the Christian God and Devil, that combines all opposites into one Being, including Christ and Satan, God’s “light and dark sons,” and the male-female androgyne. ³⁴ Jung’s Depth Psychology seeks to be the world’s final, unitary religion.³⁵  Little wonder Jung’s recent biographer, Richard Noll sees Jung as the new Julian the Apostate, who, in the 4th century, turned the empire back to paganism. Says Noll, the only difference is that “Jung has succeeded where Julian failed.”³⁶ 

3. Pagan Mythology  

All these movements are deeply related. The Jungian channeler, Jean Houston, mentioned above, believes our present society is in a state both of “breakdown and breakthrough…what I call a whole system transition, …requir[ing] a new alignment that only myth can bring [emphasis mine].”³⁷ Houston follows the example of the Jungian, Joseph Campbell, and his message concerning The Power of Myth. The myth Houston proposes for the reconstruction of our world is the ancient Egyptian myth of Isis, the goddess of the underworld.³⁸ A reviewer states: “Jean Houston’s work sparkles like a jewel whose inner fire is capable of drawing the participant out of the temporal world into the eternal realm of myth and archetype, the abode of the soul.”³⁹ Again, the answer is mythos not logos. As well as working both with the Clintons and President and Mrs Carter,  Jean Houston has been an advisor to UNICEF and, since 2003, she has worked with the United Nations Development Program, training leaders in developing countries throughout the world in the “new field of social artistry,” actually helping young leaders to access their indigenous pagan myths. 

4. Perennialsim 

The unveiling of Gnosticism, of Indian Vedanta and of many forms of ancient Nature mythology in contemporary culture evidences the surfacing of a long-existing esoteric, occult spirituality known among the cognoscenti as “the Perennial Philosophy.” Peter Occhiogrosso, author of The Joy of Sects, a 600-page encyclopedia of world religions, argues that a deep level of agreement exists between the many religions, though their proponents may not see it or speak of it. He likens this Perennial Philosophy to an underground well that feeds each religious stream.⁴⁰ Joseph Campbell combines Jungian archetypes and mystical spirituality in his The Hero with a Thousand Faces to express the complimentary notion that all human civilizations have the same monomyth (with only minor differences in details).⁴¹ Integral thinker Dr. Roger Walsh’s work, Essential Spirituality: the Seven Central Practices, (John Wiley & Sons, 2000) identifies what the world’s wisdom traditions have in common, and in his The World of Shamanism: New Views of an Ancient Tradition (Llewellyn Press, 2007), he believes shamanism to be the world’s most enduring healing and religious tradition.⁴²  

The Gnostic Bishop Stephan Hoeller, of the Ecclesia Gnostica of Los Angeles, agrees. The Perennial Philosophy is but another term for Gnosticism, whether ancient or modern. Ken Wilber, whom we will discuss below, calls his own system a variant of the Perennial Philosophy, as do a highly significant group of spiritual leaders, from Helena Blavatsky, Aldous Huxley, Carl Jung and Huston Smith. Smith, hailed as the greatest living philosopher of world religion, calls himself a Perennialist with a capital P. All have rejected secular humanism. All identify with this ancient pagan tradition and promote it as the hope of the future. One notable perennialist today is Prince Charles, Patron of the Temenos Academy, which is dedicated to the central ideas of the Perennial Philosophy. Charles declares: “Only this great Tradition, in its sacralization of Nature, will solve the environmental crisis of the twenty-first century.”⁴³  

A decade ago the respected American historian Gertrude Himmelfarb, said: “There has been a culture war and the Left won it,”⁴⁴ but the war was also religious, and it has just begun.