New Spiritualities: The Worldview Behind Them

Introduction

Florent Varak lives in a small village in the Dombes, northeast of Lyon. His closest neighbor, a friend, is a shaman: she has set up a Native American tent to welcome clients and heal them of their traumas. "It costs quite a lot to go and see her. I do it for free, but nobody comes to see me." That is the tone in which he opens a day-long conference on new spiritualities at the Église Baptiste Toulouse Métropole.

The subject is close to his heart because he grew up in it. While she was pregnant, his mother performed incantations so that ascended spirits would accompany the unborn child; that he became a Christian was "the great disappointment of her life." His father was a lodge master among the Rosicrucians, and Florent was baptized at birth with rose petals. At the dinner table, the talk was of energy, reincarnation, colors, vibrations, karma and healing. His earliest childhood memory: sitting under the table with a little toy truck in his hand while his father held a healing session. An atmosphere that was "new age," "very 1970s, minus the drugs."

This first part lays the foundations. Before talking about practices, the preacher wants us to understand the worldview that carries these spiritualities, and to confront it with the biblical worldview: who God is, who the angels are, who human beings are, and what took place in the garden of Genesis.

Outline of the Message

1. A French Paradox: Rational and Superstitious

• The great influences come from Lyon: Allan Kardec, whose real name was Hippolyte Léon Rivail, founder of spiritism and revered in Brazil; Willermoz, a Freemason with a mystical and initiatory bent; and Maître Philippe, a healer sought out even by the Russian tsar.
• In France, 51% of people say they have no religion, yet 62% believe in at least one superstition or form of divination. Among 18-24 year olds, 73% believe in at least one divinatory practice: astrology, clairvoyance, witchcraft, card reading, numerology.
• The sociologist Gérard Mermet predicts that the decline of social ties will push people toward esotericism, exotic religions, sects, clairvoyance, astrology, Freemasonry or transhumanism. "Guess what he doesn't mention": evangelicals, who are growing strongly.
• Marlène Schiappa, a former junior minister, has confided her taste for witchcraft: friends read her cards, she wears a coral on her wrist and a bracelet with the number 4. Nancy Reagan secretly brought in the astrologer Joan Quigley from 1981 to 1988; according to the White House chief of staff, every important decision was cleared by her beforehand.
• Polytheism is coming back: a young man from eastern Lyon tells him, "I'm a polytheist, I've thought about it, it's more logical," and his new hairdresser tells him "I believe in several gods" as soon as she learns he is a pastor.
• His pharmacist, who says he is rational and scientific, once threw at him: "I feel sorry for you, there's nobody in your churches." The reply: "We have the opposite problem, we can't build them fast enough." Later, the same man crosses his fingers for his expansion project. "Does it work? You tell me you believe in nothing, and you perform a ritual so that the future turns out the way you want."

2. What Is a New Spirituality?

• The sociologist Jean-Paul Willaime speaks of new religious movements. The most common definition: a set of beliefs and practices directed toward the sacred or the invisible, but outside religion. "Religion is the enemy," his father repeated to him just the other day: "It's a straitjacket, you have to free yourself from it."
• It is a spirituality centered on experience and on the spiritual self. In the United States, the label already exists: "spiritual but not religious." Françoise Champion speaks of a mystical-esoteric nebula; Danièle Hervieu-Léger of believing without belonging, of tinkering.
• It includes about ten components: an esoteric matrix (theosophy, anthroposophy, Rosicrucianism, the historical New Age), positive thinking and the law of attraction (if you think you will be sick, you will be sick), neopaganism and Wicca, the divinatory arts, Ouija boards (he has even seen a "Holy Spirit Ouija board"), energy healing, and "conspirituality," the conviction that deceptive structures want to control us.
• The preacher is not against well-being as God intends it: Proverbs says that a cheerful heart is good medicine (Proverbs 17:22), and he himself laughs constantly. The problem is when well-being serves as a prelude to the world of new spiritualities.
• He also notes a real porousness between these spiritualities and certain branches of the evangelical world, especially around positive thinking.
• The academic term is magic. Pliny the Elder already called it the most deceptive of arts, the one that has had the most power on earth because it combines medicine, religion and astrology. An Oxford professor of archaeology, very favorable to magic, defines it by the links between humanity and the universe: "Man is open to the mechanisms of the universe, and the universe responds to us." We are in pantheism.

3. Everything Begins with a Worldview

• A worldview is a system of thought we develop to explain the world and our experiences: glasses, a set of assumptions we hold, consciously or not, about God, the world, our identity and our place. Everyone has one. The worldview is the overall belief; culture is the shared practice under that umbrella.
• The naturalist view has dominated the West since the Second World War: only material reality exists, there is no transcendence, a human being is a bundle of cells, thought is merely the interaction of electrons in synapses, and truth is relative.
• The anthropologist and missionary Paul Hiebert, in "The Flaw of the Excluded Middle," notes that most worldviews distinguish an upper level (God, the gods, or an energy, a fluid, a great whole), a lower level (matter, the laws of nature) and a middle level: spirits, ancestors, forces, magic. It is there, in the middle, that life is played out. His father speaks of the "master tree" in his garden and goes to connect with it, not because the tree speaks, but because it is said to carry an energy of which all beings are the medium.
• On the banks of the Ganges, a young woman in tears throws her infant into the river. A guru had told her and her husband to sacrifice what was most precious to them so that their misfortunes would stop. "It was not an evil act in the sense of wanting to harm a child. It was the consequence of a logic."
• In Laos, a family whose children are malnourished keeps about fifty chickens without eating them: they must be kept for sacrifices to the gods or to the ancestors in case of illness. In animism, the Creator God is distant and uninterested; it is personal spirits who bring good and evil, and who must be kept in balance.
• When you catch malaria, you know perfectly well it is the mosquito. "But that's not the question. Who sent the mosquito, to that precise place, at that precise moment?" That is what has to be understood and warded off.
• Case study: Tina, who comes from Asia, discovered faith through friends. Her father died recently; she often hears footsteps in the hallway and feels that he is accompanying her from the beyond. The naturalist (a doctor friend, president of the church association) answers that grief creates this in the imagination. The Asian view answers that the ancestors have not left, as in real Chinese restaurants where a small altar receives bowls of rice to honor the ancestors: it is her father coming to visit her. The biblical view answers that a chasm separates the dead from the living, that no communication is possible, and that the only mediator between God and humanity is Jesus Christ.

4. The Fact, and the Interpretation of the Fact

• A second case: on a Native American reservation in North America, a shaman offers you a potion for your terrible migraine, with guaranteed rituals. You know it is a decoction of meadowsweet and willow bark. Do you drink it? Meadowsweet contains precursors of acetylsalicylic acid, in other words aspirin. "Ah, so that's why it works."
• The Egyptologist Walter Emery died at 67 of a cerebral thrombosis while handling a statue of Osiris, god of the dead. The newspapers cried "curse of the tombs." A French physician demonstrated that at least six deaths among these teams were explained by allergic reactions to toxic fungi and molds that had grown in the enclosed space of the tombs. "There is the fact, and there is the interpretation of the fact."
• In new spirituality circles, cauliflower is recommended for brain problems, by the principle of resemblance (just as yellow foods are recommended against jaundice). Asked about it, an AI lists vitamin C, vitamin K, choline, folates and sulfur compounds. "It's not silly and it does no harm."
• A Viking shaman would dip his magic staff into the vat of grain and water, and fermentation would begin: the beer would arrive. No one yet knew that the yeast was passing from batch to batch on the staff. "The problem is not the staff. The problem is what we believe about the staff." Hence the ease of manipulation, especially of vulnerable people.
• A doctor friend, on a vaccination campaign in Cameroon, heads up to a village that his colleagues advise him against: "They are very powerful fetish priests, they will kill you." The chief sends out the sorcerer, who dances, applies makeup and casts spells. "No, I'm just a doctor, I've come to vaccinate." The sorcerer stops. We need to distinguish what is mere staging.
• The underlying question is that of fundamental trust: what do I trust for my life, and what simple means does God give me? The Old Testament hardly mentions the physician except once, about a king who put his trust in physicians rather than in the LORD (2 Chronicles 16:12). The preacher does not think this is prescriptive.
• Magic and spirituality form a continuum, from simple belief (true or false) to the intervention of a real force. If a clairvoyant tells someone "a decisive encounter next month, surrounded by opportunities and dangers," that person walks away conditioned: "Is it you?" Whether it is true or false matters little; she is now in an environment where she can psychologize herself or be manipulated by occult forces.
• As a young convert in business school, Florent shares his faith with a friend who has little interest. A student who is present chimes in: her family consults a fortune teller, who told her she would soon leave for Paris, which would be important for her future. He answers, full of zeal: "That's dangerous, Deuteronomy 18, repent." An hour later, the director chooses two students to present the school in Paris, and she is one of them. "You see, Florent, how it works?" The next day, her father drives her to the station; a car accident puts her in the hospital for six months; she never goes to Paris. He sees in it a demonic intrusion and a Lord who displayed his authority in a very harsh way: "The devil never has complete and total authority."
• Every worldview is a framework of thought that confines. "I am confined within the law of Jesus Christ. I find it good and beautiful, I love Jesus, but I am confined within his prescriptions." New spiritualities confine too.

5. The Biblical View: God, Angels, Humans

• In the biblical view, God is in relationship with everything, with no intermediary other than Jesus Christ. There are angels, chosen and fallen; humans, regenerated or not, and the departed, saved or condemned. God sees them all as living: he is not the God of the dead, but of the living (Luke 20:38). Jesus Christ is the only mediator between God and humanity (1 Timothy 2:5), the one who connects all the spheres.
• God created the spiritual beings just before the universe: in Job 38:7, the angels shout for joy at creation. Then God creates man and woman "in our image, after our likeness" (Genesis 1:26). "Look at one another. You are in the image of God. It is magnificent." There is an intrinsic dignity in the human being, whatever their origin, status or abilities.
• In the ancient Near East, the image is a representation: a king would place his statue at the borders of his empire to say "this is my territory." God entrusts Adam and Eve with being his representatives. The preacher supposes, cautiously, that it is this kingship entrusted to beings "not even able to fly from one planet to another" that upset a chief angel.
• The Bible gives no information on the origin of the devil's fall. Calvin notes that he was created by God, without natural perversity, and that he acquired his wickedness by turning away from God. Ezekiel 28 and Isaiah 14 "don't work very well"; 1 Timothy 3:6 suggests pride. Irenaeus of Lyon speaks of an angel jealous of man because of the gifts God had granted him.
• What is at stake in the garden is a change of loyalty. God is the master, Adam and Eve his representatives; Satan steps in, gains a real ascendancy over man and becomes the one who dictates reality. "He forbids you a single tree? He is really mean. Enjoy yourself, you will be like God." The triple lust (flesh, eyes, pride of life, 1 John 2:16) plays out in Genesis 3 and plays out again in the new spiritualities.
• "If you remember only one thing of all I say on the spiritual level, it is this: change of reality, change of loyalty, change of authority." We come out of it by the reverse: through a biblical understanding of things, a renewed loyalty in Christ, and an authority confessed to Jesus as Lord.

6. Where Do Demons Come From?

• Several theories have been put forward: the disembodied spirits of a pre-Adamic race (hardly defended anymore), or the spirits of the giants born in Genesis 6. In this difficult text, sons of God unite with women and giants are born. The Western reading sees wicked men; Jude and Peter suggest rather spiritual beings in revolt against God.
• Their goal would have been to thwart Genesis 3:15, the promise that a descendant of the woman would crush the devil: to corrupt the human race so that victory could no longer come from a man. That would explain the harshness of the flood, which leaves only the eight members of Noah's family, perhaps kept purely human. "God will never be a liar. He will always carry out his plan."
• A thesis that has come back into fashion, and which is found in the Book of Enoch, holds that the spirits of these hybrid beings, killed by the flood, are the demons of the New Testament. The preacher considers this apocryphal book "a bit fantastical" and not really biblical, but he mentions it because it comes up often in the new spiritualities.
• His position: demons are probably fallen angels, created perfect, who rebelled with Satan and became evil by nature and corrupted in their being.
• Summary before the break: the devil is the origin of a distorted view of reality; the devil can act on the material and sensible world; the devil wants to come between God and humanity. And the starting definition is completed: "Magic is an illegitimate interaction with the beyond."

Key Takeaways

• France sees itself as rational, but the majority believes in some divinatory practice. New spiritualities are not marginal, they are in your pharmacy and at your hairdresser.
• A new spirituality is a quest for the sacred outside religion, centered on experience and on the self. Its academic name is magic.
• Everything is decided at the level of a worldview. Western thought has forgotten the "middle" (spirits, forces, ancestors) where new spiritualities locate real life.
• We must distinguish the fact from its interpretation: the problem is not the staff, but what we believe about the staff. The question is that of fundamental trust.
• The fall is a change of reality, loyalty and authority. We come out of it through a biblical understanding, a renewed loyalty in Christ and Jesus confessed as Lord.

Personal Application

1. What little rituals (crossed fingers, touching wood, a horoscope read "just for fun") reveal in you or in those close to you a belief that goes unrecognized?
2. What glasses are you wearing without knowing it? How does your worldview explain illness, bad luck or grief?
3. Faced with a well-being practice or alternative medicine, can you separate the fact from its interpretation? What do you trust for your life?
4. Is there an area where your loyalty has shifted, where someone or something other than Christ dictates your reality?
5. How would you answer, with compassion and truth, a Tina who believes her late father is visiting her?

Verses Cited

• Genesis 1:26-27
• Genesis 3
• Genesis 3:15
• Genesis 6:1-8
• Deuteronomy 18:9-14
• 2 Chronicles 16:12
• Job 38:4-7
• Proverbs 17:22
• Isaiah 14:12-15
• Ezekiel 28:11-19
• Luke 20:38
• 1 Timothy 2:5
• 1 Timothy 3:6
• 2 Peter 2:4
• Jude 1:6
• 1 John 2:16

Frequently Asked Questions

What is a "new spirituality" according to Florent Varak?

Florent Varak takes up the most common definition: a set of beliefs and practices directed toward the sacred or the invisible, but outside religion. It is a spirituality centered on experience and on the spiritual self, "spiritual but not religious." The academic term for it is magic, which he defines at the end of the session as an illegitimate interaction with the beyond.

What is Paul Hiebert's "flaw of the excluded middle"?

The anthropologist and missionary Paul Hiebert observes that most worldviews distinguish an upper level (God, the gods or an energy), a lower level (matter, the laws of nature) and a middle level where spirits, ancestors, forces and magic come into play. For Florent Varak, it is in this middle that new spiritualities locate the real stakes of life, and it is often the level that Western thought has forgotten.

How should you respond to someone who believes a deceased relative is visiting them?

Starting from the case of Tina, who hears footsteps and thinks her late father is accompanying her, Florent Varak shows that the answer depends on the worldview. The naturalist sees the work of grief and imagination; the Asian view sees the ancestor coming to visit. The biblical view reminds us that there is a chasm between the dead and the living, with no communication possible, and that the only mediator between God and humanity is Jesus Christ.