Melissa Dougherty was far into the New Age way of thinking before having her first child and having her deep-seated beliefs challenged — and ultimately debunked.
“Of all people, it was two Jehovah’s Witnesses that challenged me, and I’m researching them, and as I’m researching them I’m realizing, ‘Oh, what I believe is wrong, because if the Bible is true, then what they believe is wrong, but if the Bible is true, what I believe is wrong,’” she tells Allie Beth Stuckey of “Relatable.”
“So it was kind of a rug that got pulled out from underneath me, but after I got out of it I’m like, ‘Yeah, I’m an ex-New Ager,’” she continues.
While the New Age movement often gets confused with New Thought, they are not the same — but both are infiltrating Christianity. New Thought places more of an emphasis on a divine power as the source.
“One of the problems that I see, personally, with specifically New Thought teachings,” she tells Stuckey, are practices like “affirmations.”
“What a lot of people don’t realize is what affirmations are is New Thought prayers. They were created by the New Thought movements to speak affirmative prayer in the now, in order for you to basically manifest what it is.”
“You don’t ask, in other words, you say it as if you had it and then your feelings are very, very important. Feelings are everything in New Thought. That’s where your power is,” she explains.
When Dougherty discusses these beliefs with Christians, she’s realized that the more progressive Christians have ideas that often align with the New Thought movement.
“New Thought as a movement is interwoven throughout America, but it’s also something that is adopted within many churches by many Christians, and it gives you this alternative Jesus, it gives you this alternative gospel that sounds a lot like the progressive gospel,” she explains.
“These are two different movements to be sure, but the fact that I can find so many New Thought beliefs among progressives is very interesting,” she continues, noting that phrases like “your true authentic self” are interwoven into both lines of thinking.
“And so much of what you said, we can see specifically in a variety of ways in progressivism, but gender is the first one that comes to mind,” Stuckey comments.
“When you serve the God of self,” she continues, adding, “You have the power of speech to declare a new reality that everyone else must then submit to.”
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