10AR15-16

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Apologia Report 15:16 (1,021)

April 29, 2010

Subject: How occultism has shaped America

In this issue:

CHRISTIAN SCIENCE - new attitude toward medical care a major

policy shift

OCCULTISM, GENERAL - Mitch Horowitz's Occult America turns out to be a good secular introduction

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CHRISTIAN SCIENCE

"Christian Science Church Seeks Truce with Modern Medicine" by Paul Vitello -- begins: "Since the founding of their church 131 years ago, Christian Scientists have been taught to avoid doctors at all cost. It is a conviction rooted so deeply in church dogma that dozens of members have endured criminal prosecution rather than surrender an ailing person to what they see as the quackery of medical science.

"But faced with dwindling membership and blows to their church's reputation caused by its intransigence concerning medical treatment, even for children with grave illnesses, Christian Science leaders have recently found a new tolerance for medical care. For more than a year, leaders say, they have been encouraging members to see a physician if they feel it is necessary.

"Perhaps more significantly, they have begun a public campaign to redefine their methods as a form of care that the broader public should consider as a supplement rather than a substitute for conventional treatment, like biofeedback, chiropractic or homeopathic care."

Nevertheless, Philip Davis, 59, the church's national spokesman "does not believe in germs or the existence of illness, which they consider a dreamlike state. ...

"Though officials do not provide membership statistics, scholars estimate that the church's numbers have dropped to under 100,000 from a peak of about twice that at the turn of the 20th century. The faith has about 1,100 churches in the United States and 600 abroad." Thus, in the face of eventual extinction, the light of revelation has dawned anew: "[W]e asked ourselves, 'Are we only going to pray for you if we find you pure enough and spiritual enough?'" says Davis.

"Mr. Davis said that by toning down 'the judgmental part of our nature' and opening the doors to people seeking Christian Science prayer as a sort of 'value-added health care,' the church hopes to keep alive a form of religious practice that its adherents still see as the true path to salvation. ...

"Publicly, the church has always said that its members were free to choose medical care. But some former Christian Scientists say those who consult doctors risk ostracism. ...

"The source of deepest tension, said Gary Dorrien, the Reinhold Niebuhr professor of social ethics at Union Theological Seminary in Manhattan, 'is the fact that Christian Scientists are best known right now for denying medical care,' especially to children who subsequently die." The remainder of the article supports the suspicion that social concerns about Christian Science remain lamentably valid.

Vitello notes that "About 1,400 practitioners [official healers] are registered with the church, roughly half as many as were listed in church publications in 1985...."

Another likely factor is economics.

"Lobbyists succeeded in getting provisions that encourage private insurance coverage of Christian Science care into both the 2006 legislation overhauling health care in Massachusetts and the United States Senate version of the health care overhaul; both measures were removed in negotiations. Church officials say they intend to keep trying, at both the state and federal level." Vitello expands on this significantly as well. New York Times, Mar 23 '10, <www.tinyurl.com/yfgrjtg>

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OCCULTISM, GENERAL

Having just finished Occult America: The Secret History of How Mysticism Shaped America, by Mitch Horowitz [1], I'm (RP) pleased to report that it constitutes a good secular introduction. While Horowitz has obvious occupational sympathies for the subject matter as editor in chief of J.P. Tarcher and is "a well-known voice for occult and esoteric ideas" according to the book's jacket, no excessive bias is present. The discussion is consistently factual. And for every instance in which one might accuse the author of encouraging occult belief, there is another in which he acknowledges the all-too-frequently dubious nature of occult claims.

If ever there were a topic that would tempt an author to stray toward the incongruous discussion of fringe matter, this would be it. However, Horowitz does an admirable job of maintaining appropriate brevity. His section about the little-known yet astoundingly successful mail-order prophet of the New Thought gospel, Frank B. Robinson (1886-1948), who claimed to lead "the eighth-largest religion on the planet" never makes a connection to the current Mind Science postal champion, The Unity School of Christianity. This is no fault. I applaud the discipline required to keep this book under 300 pages. Similarly, while one receives the impression that Horowitz finds spirit contact the longest-lived occult practice in America, he neglects to develop C. G. Jung's related importance to the New Age movement.

Yet Horowitz doesn't fail to appreciate the occultic nature of the "woo woo" New Age. His discussion of the core tenets of the New Age (pp256-257) is correspondingly concise. And here one finds a critical reference to "the me-first philosophy" of Werner Erhard’s EST that is characteristic of his writing.

Few will fail to pick up some history. This is where readers are challenged to consider that the "largest remnant of Spiritualism today" is Caodaism, the "third-largest religion in Vietnam" (after Buddhism and Roman Catholicism); and the idea that Spiritualism was "the first spiritual movement that America exported abroad" (p64). Horowitz emphasizes Norman Vincent Peale's attempts to evade acknowledgement of his early dependence upon Ernest Holmes' occult philosophy.

Most significant to me is the honest assessment by Horowitz of the naive selfishness underlying the pop teachings in many occult presentations from New Thought to Rhonda Byrne's The Secret [2]. Recognizing that some belief systems traffic in compromised ethics, he notes that "unlike the Transcendentalists in their study of the cycles of nature, [New Thought] enthusiasts made no allowance for the inevitability of night following day. They made no room for the balance of life and death, illness and health, that Emerson depicted in the essays they claimed as their inspiration. Nor did New Thought acknowledge Emerson's disdain for self-centered prayer. ... Hence, the movement embraced those portions of Transcendentalism that spoke to affirming mental power, and ignored other complexities.

"And here we reach the ultimate dilemma of this most popular of American metaphysics. Unable to come to terms with questions of tragedy or catastrophe in what believers considered a self-created world [or similarly, today's creating "your own reality" - RP], New Thought lapsed into circular reasoning or contradiction. ...

"While outcroppings of New Thought would appear in other nations ... this way of reasoning confined the philosophy largely to an American middle class, where the security of life was a relative given" (p96). It is not too difficult to see that self-centeredness is at least as common to the occult as it is to the Word-Faith movement's poisoning of global Pentecostalism.

As for occult conversion, the spirit of the approach that Horowitz takes (p248) is faithful to the genre with the words: "[Y]ou will tell yourself that it is fiction.... But what if it isn't?" People often come to the challenges of belief with unconscious preconceptions. Latent conviction thrives amidst wishful plausibility here, from toying with horoscopes to endorsing the pop-history of The Da Vinci Code.

In the end, Horowitz notes that despite the ever-present evidence of flim-flam, occult enthusiasts believe what they will. By the end of the book, one can almost see Horowitz as a carnival barker who beckons his readers toward a divination booth at the county fair. One asks, "Is this a con, or a doorway to another dimension?" The astute passerby should consider the possibility that it may be both.

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SOURCES: Monographs

1 - Occult America: The Secret History of How Mysticism Shaped

America, by Mitch Horowitz (Bantam, 2009, hardcover, 304 pages)<www.tinyurl.com/yzypbeu>

2 - The Secret, by Rhonda Byrne (Beyond Words, 2006, hardcover, 216 pages) <www.tinyurl.com/ydjso8v>

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