22AR27-15

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AR 27:15 - Leaving the New Age behind

In this issue:

NEW AGE MOVEMENT - reading the Old Testament, and dumping occultism for Christ

WOKEISM - its influence on America's legal system

Apologia Report 27:15 (1,568)
April 20, 2022

NEW AGE MOVEMENT

Back in January 2018, with AR 23:2, we learned from the "Wild Hunt" Pagan blog <www.bit.ly/3x0zTjM> about famous occult teacher Doreen Virtue becoming a Christian. Most of us have heard about a celebrity finding Christ and then wondered how much of the story is accurate.

In this case, it's taken more than five years for us to stumble upon a corroborating source - and it's a heart-warming one. Virtue's story, "I Left the New Age Behind When I Read the Old Testament," was recently added to Christianity Today's great collection of monthly testimonials. <www.bit.ly/3J3hjJZ>

Ever since I (RP) was first drawn to apologetics in the 1970s, I've been prone to assume that people deeply involved in falsehood are the most hardened to the gospel. This is silly. Who but the Holy Spirit is responsible for conversion? Is any one thing more difficult for Him than another? To this day I still fall too often for that first-impression fallacy.

Both accounts of Virtue's conversion detail how difficult it is for celebrities to deal with the personal and public aftermath of the change they're going through. (Bob Dylan's tragic struggles come to mind.)

Virtue's testimony is a great reminder that the convicting power of the Holy Spirit encounters no barrier but that of a rebellious heart - which the Word of God can penetrate at any time and at any level. Only God understands the heart's deceitfulness and the factors involved in the timing of its changes.

Here again we read that fame and fortune were not enough. The deceptions of false teaching are not impregnable. Humble desperation reaches God's ear.

Reminding us of how much we miss (despite our best efforts), the above feature also mentions that in 2020 Virtue published her autobiography, Deceived No More: How Jesus Led Me Out of the New Age and Into His Word, from Thomas Nelson. <www.bit.ly/3qYCHKk>

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WOKEISM

On March 23, N.S. Lyons (Common Sense <theupheaval@substack.com>) called attention to a lengthy piece by Aaron Sibarium dated two days earlier, "The Takeover of America's Legal System". Lyons, slow to use hyperbole, refers to it as "bone-chilling."

Lyons begins with a description of "the phenomenon of institutional capture ... how America's most important institutions have been transformed by an illiberal ideology - and have come to betray their own missions."

He sees it in "Medicine. Hollywood. Education. The reason we [the readers of Common Sense, who are, "Americans who aren't on the hard left or the hard right who feel that the world has gone mad"] exist is because of the takeover of newspapers like The New York Times." Sibarium writes about "how the legal system in America, as one prominent liberal scholar put it, is at risk of becoming 'a totalitarian nightmare.'"

Sibarium lays out the context: "in times past, lawyers worried about the public - not other lawyers. ...

"'The idea that guilty people shouldn't get lawyers attacks the legal system at its root,' Andrew Koppelman, a prominent liberal scholar of constitutional law at Northwestern University, said. 'People will ask: "How can you represent someone who's guilty?' The answer is that a society where accused people don't get a defense as a matter of course is a society you don't want to live in. It's a totalitarian nightmare.' ...

"Critical race theory, as it came to be called in the 1980s, began as a critique of neutral principles of justice. ...

"At first, the conventional wisdom held that this was 'just a few college kids' - a few spoiled snowflakes - who would 'grow out of it' when they reached the real world and became serious people. That did not happen. Instead, the undergraduates clung to their ideas about justice and injustice. They became medical students and law students. Then 2020 happened.

"All of sudden, critical race theory was more than mainstream in America's law schools. It was mandatory. ...

"As of last month, the American Bar Association is requiring all accredited law schools to 'provide education to law students on bias, cross-cultural competency, and racism,' both at the start of law school and 'at least once again before graduation.' That's in addition to a mandatory legal ethics class, which must now instruct students that they have a duty as lawyers to 'eliminate racism.' (The American Bar Association, which accredits almost every law school in the United States, voted 348 to 17 to adopt the new standard.)" Numerous examples follow.

"This has all come as a shock to many law professors, who had long assumed that law schools wouldn't cave to the new orthodoxy. ...

"The problem has come not just from students, but from administrators, who often foment the forces they capitulate to. Administrators now outnumber faculty at some universities - Yale employs 5,066 administrators and just 4,937 professors - and law schools haven't been spared the bloat. Several law professors bemoaned the proliferation of diversity, equity, and inclusion [DEI] offices, which, they said, tend to validate student grievances and encourage censorship. ...

At law schools: "Those students and organizations who do dissent often encounter a tsunami of hate." (Examples here, descend into vicious profanity.)

How bad is it? "[M]ost attorneys contacted for this article, would not go on the record for fear" of losing their job/career.

"Lawyers at top law firms in New York, Washington, D.C., and Los Angeles said they fret constantly about saying the wrong thing - or taking on the wrong client.

"'It's much worse than McCarthyism,' Alan Dershowitz, a professor emeritus at Harvard Law, told me. 'McCarthyism was a reflection of dying, old views. They were not the future. But the people today who are imposing litmus tests for who they represent - they are the future.' ...

"Law firms also worry about losing their corporate clients, which, like many American institutions, have grown more stridently ideological in recent years. ...

"[O]ne lawyer in Washington, D.C., [said r]eligious liberty cases, for example, are 'totally off the table. I wouldn't even think to bring it up.' ...

"The problem, [Nadine Strossen, the first woman to head the American Civil Liberties Union and a professor at New York Law School] said, is that rights mean nothing without representation. 'ANYONE who doesn't have access to counsel in defending a right, as a practical matter, doesn't have a meaningful opportunity to exercise that right,' the former ACLU chief told me in an email. 'Hence, undermining representation for any unpopular speaker or idea endangers freedom for ANY speaker or idea, because the tides of popularity are constantly shifting.'

"Ken Starr, the former solicitor general who led the 1998 investigation of Bill Clinton, agreed. 'At a time when fundamental freedoms are under assault around the globe, it is all the more imperative that American lawyers boldly stand up for the rule of law,' Starr said. 'In our country, that includes - especially now - the representation of controversial causes and unpopular clients.'

"Another cornerstone of the rule of law is an impartial judiciary. Some judges, however, have begun to see themselves not as impartial adjudicators, but as agents of social change - believing, like [FTC commissioner Rebecca] Slaughter, that they cannot be neutral in the midst of moral emergencies." Again, numerous examples follow.

Sibarium reviews "the movement to abolish the right to eliminate members of a jury pool.

"The so-called peremptory strike allows attorneys, in a trial case, to toss out potential jurors they deem biased. Peremptories, as criminal-defense attorneys see it, offer their least sympathetic clients - those against whom all the cards have been stacked - a glimmer of hope.

"The problem, as progressives see it, is peremptory strikes have also been used to disproportionately exclude potential black jurors. Supreme Court Justice Steven Breyer was among the most prominent to call for an end to peremptories, arguing in a 2005 opinion that they magnify racial bias in the legal system. But it wasn't until the last year or so that the cause gained momentum." Yet more examples are given of this as well.

"Then there's the erosion of the principle that one is innocent until proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. 'The Anti-Innocence Project,' one criminal-defense attorney in San Francisco joked."

Rebecca Slaughter, one of the five commissioners who run the Federal Trade Commission, declared in a September 2020 Twitter thread: '#Antitrust can and should be #antiracist.'

She then added: "There's precedent for using antitrust to combat racism. E.g., South Africa considers #racialequity in #antitrust analysis to reduce high economic concentration & balance racially skewed business ownership.'"

Sibarium closes with the followup that "Several attorneys called FTC commissioner Rebecca Slaughter's thread - and her almost off-the-cuff reference to South Africa - deeply unsettling. Of all places, they said, South Africa? Did she know what was going on there?" No response.

"It started in 1998 with the Competition Act, an antitrust law that effectively required businesses to be partly black-owned. The act was an early example of 'Black Economic Empowerment' - race-conscious policies aimed at lifting black South Africans out of poverty. ...

"By 2009, Moeletsi Mbeki, a black South African political economist, was warning that South Africa's race-conscious policies would 'collapse' the country. By 2021, South Africa's unemployment rate was 44%, the highest in the world."

With the ominous final paragraph, Sibarium writes: "On November 12, the FTC released a draft strategic plan for the next five years. One of its main objectives: use the agency's power to 'advance racial equity.'" <www.bit.ly/3ubUQ9n>

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