“I’m spiritual, but not religious.”
Perhaps you’ve come across this widely known saying before. It conveys an individual’s preference for personal mystical experiences over formal doctrines and practices. The expression gained popularity during the New Age movement, which, in most people’s minds, reached its peak in the 1980s and 1990s with bestselling books like Conversations with God by Neale Donald Walsch and The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle.
It might be tempting to believe that the New Age vanished after this cultural high-water mark. But that’s a dramatic misreading of the past. Instead, “the New Age” has become America’s default religion. A 2022 poll by YouGov.org revealed that 87% of Americans believe in at least one teaching of New Age spirituality, and nearly half believe in five or more.
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As recent years have shown, the less Evangelicals recognize a threat, the more it seems to tighten its grip on them. In my view, the lives of many Evangelicals reveal that they, too, embrace the “spiritual but not religious” mindset. These beliefs haven’t just stolen into the pews — they’ve taken root in the pulpit as well.
The long road
I spent two decades in the New Age before coming to Christ. I visited more than 30 countries around the world seeking God. Or so I thought.
I participated in ayahuasca retreats deep in the Peruvian jungles and explored sacred geometry during workshops nestled in Bali’s hills. My journey also took me to massive Hindu festivals in India, attended by millions, and to Buddhist meditation mats in the mountains of Kashmir. Blending Jungian transpersonal psychotherapy with past-life regression, tarot readings, psychedelics, Reiki, and other practices paints a vivid picture of the person I used to be.
What drew me away from those beliefs was the undeniable presence of evil, which I glimpsed in small but striking ways during my travels, particularly in less-developed countries. Yet, in a worldview where “all is One” (monism) or “all is God” (pantheism), I found no solid basis to label the wickedness I personally encountered as truly wrong.
Consider: if good and evil are equally “God,” by what standard can we judge whether an action is one or the other? This leads to troubling moral waters. Do these principles also mean industrial waste is “God”? How about slavery, the gulags, or genocide? I found such ideas revolting, and literally unconscionable.
Worse still, no one in the New Age community would discuss this problem with me. For instance, as an extreme example, I’d challenge fellow seekers to tell an imaginary sex-trafficked child that her grim fate was simply “her karma.” This hypothetical scenario, though consistent with the logical outcome of the concept of karma, abruptly ended many conversations. Few of us in the New Age had considered the trajectory of our theological presuppositions.
A homecoming
In February 2020, COVID madness descended over the world I’d just returned from exploring. With surging global fear in view, I concluded that any notion of God that couldn’t account for evil was no notion of God at all. That would be like a model of Earth and the Solar System that explained daylight but not nighttime.
After nearly two decades of spiritual seeking I’d come up fruitless. Having exhausted other answers, I was ready for my first work of Christian apologetics: NT Wright’s Simply Christian.
In the book, Wright explains how a great wave of evil was preparing to crash over Jesus as He hung on the cross. But through Christ’s death and resurrection, He drove back the wave of evil forever.
“The real enemy, after all, was not Rome, but the powers of evil that stood behind human arrogance and violence, powers of evil with which Israel’s leaders had fatally colluded. It was time for the evil which had dogged Jesus’ footsteps throughout his career — the shrieking maniacs, the conspiring Herodians, the carping Pharisees, the plotting chief priests, the betrayer among his own disciples, the whispering voices within his own soul — to gather into one great tidal wave of evil that would crash with full force over his head … In meeting the fate which was rushing towards him, he would be the place where heaven and earth met, as he hung suspended between the two. He would be the place where God’s future arrived in the present, with the kingdom of God celebrating its triumph over the kingdoms of the world by refusing to join in their spiral of violence” (Simply Christian, NT Wright).
Something clicked.
After that, I read CS Lewis’ Mere Christianity — the only other Christian book I knew of — and The Screwtape Letters. Confronted by the luminous words of Lewis, the last defenses surrounding my heart collapsed. I was captured by the truth.
I wasted no time taking the next step. I immediately asked some Christian friends to baptize me, which they did several weeks later in the Spokane River, on the Sunday of Labor Day weekend 2020. These were the same friends who gave me Simply Christian in the first place. I’d met them in August 2015 at the 80,000-person pagan Burning Man festival in the Nevada desert. They’d been running an underground Christian ministry there for more than a decade.
Today, five years after reading Wright, I’m a Confessional, Calvinistic, and Covenantal member in good standing of a Reformed Presbyterian church. God is truly great!
Lies and truth
But something unexpected happened to me on the way to Westminster.
For 20 years, I explored the New Age, searching for truth, but came up empty-handed. That hollow world is filled with broken people clinging to spiritual crutches that buckle under the mounting pressure of their burdened consciences. New Agers dive into self-denying Eastern meditations, “Law of Attraction” workshops, and trendy practices that chase spiritual highs through emotional outbursts or, increasingly, psychedelic substances. With enough money, time, and effort, relief is possible — but regeneration? Never. All the “trauma healing” I pursued only sharpened my flaws, tightening the grip of my demons: spiritual ambition and lust. (They call it “reclaiming your authenticity,” if you want the technical jargon.)
But then, in an astonishingly short time, Christ set me free from it all. And He did so for the low, low price of … free. No expensive trainings, workshops, or seminars required. The church membership class that introduced me to the doctrines of grace was free. My friends in Idaho gave me a study Bible as a gift. The Holy Spirit took it from there, guiding me with gentleness, care, and boundless grace through intense waves of confession and repentance.
New age infiltration
So, you can imagine my shock to be a Prodigal Son, returning home to my Father’s house, only to discover my siblings feeding from the pig’s trough!
For example, I’ve been astounded to see the angry reaction from Christians on X when I question the Hindu practice of yoga. Enthusiasts say it’s “just stretching,” that they enjoy the exercise, or that it’s permissible as a “meat sacrificed to idols” issue (ref. 1 Cor 8) and that I should just lighten up.
The word “yoga” is based on the Sanskrit term “yuj” meaning “yoke,” as in “to yoke—or become one with—the Divine.” Every entry-level yoga teacher training explains how different poses are devoted to Hindu demons. Popular sequences like “sun salutations” express embodied devotion to a solar deity. Many yoga classrooms have idols of the Hindu false god Shiva and end their classes with chants of the so-called sacred syllable “OM” after concluding with Shavasana, or “corpse pose.” And advanced contortionistic postures are even used to awaken the “serpent energy” known as Kundalini. This same “secret energy,” said to be coiled at the base of the spine near the genitals, is also used in sexually driven conjuring rituals, aka sex magic.
So no, it’s not “just stretching.”
Cancelling the Enneagram
I was further floored to discover the popularity of the Enneagram with Christians in positions of power. Russell Moore claims to be an “Enneagram Type 4” and spoke at the 2023 Gospel for the Enneagram Summit. Andy Stanley discussed the Enneagram on his leadership podcast saying, “It helped me tremendously.” Even N.T. Wright uncritically referenced the Enneagram on his own website, in a discussion about the Psalms.
Little do Christians know that even in New Age circles, that “personality test” was considered woo-woo!
The Enneagram was introduced to the West in the 1920s by a Russian mystic named G.I. Gurdjieff, who taught a system of “awakening to higher consciousness” he called The Fourth Way. Gurdjieff’s work became foundational to the Human Potential movement, which formed a major artery of the New Age.
Much could be said of Gurdjieff and his propensity for drunkenness, violence, and abuse of his pupils, which he claimed helped them “awaken.” But as Margaret Croydon sums up on the Gurdjieff International website:
“Finally, [Gurdjieff] was the first thinker in the West to believe in the evolution of man’s being through ‘work on oneself’ — an evolution which, for him, was related to the evolution of the cosmos. ‘As above, so below,’ he said.”
“Spiritual evolution” through “self-work” along with the occult saying, “as above, so below,” are pillars of the New Age.
No quarter for false teaching
Yoga and the Enneagram are two examples of New Age contamination I’ve seen in Evangelical circles, but I could name more. It seems that every day Americans aren’t the only ones who are “spiritual but not religious.” Many professing Christians are, as well.
Christians should know better. But at the encouragement of respected leaders they’ve adopted the same practices I fled from. They’re trading the rich, saving discipleship of historic Christianity for empty spiritual dead ends.
The difference is stark: One offers endless seeking without finding; the other offers Christ, who finds us (Matt. 15:24). One requires constant payments for diminishing returns; the other gives in abundance what money can’t buy (Jn. 7:38). One collapsed under the weight of evil. The other explained and defeated evil forever:
“These things I have spoken to you, that in Me you may have peace. In the world you will have tribulation; but be of good cheer, I have overcome the world” (John 16:33).
When Christ warned about the narrow gate (Matt. 7:13-14), He wasn’t just speaking about moral standards. He was also referencing how the exclusive claims of faith in Him stand against the global array of “spiritual, but not religious” options.
So, my question for the Evangelicals church today isn’t whether we’re spiritual — it’s whether we have the courage to be distinctively Christian. Have we invited the same spirits I fled from into our sanctuaries, wrapped in Christian language and excuses?
The New Age hasn’t disappeared; it’s been baptized. And until we recognize this infiltration for what it is, we’ll be offering brothers and sisters stones instead of bread, serpents instead of fish, and death instead of life eternal.
Will Spencer is an entrepreneur, traveler, and storyteller. Born into a Jewish family, he began searching for God at a young age. His path led him from meditation mats on Himalayan mountaintops to ayahuasca retreats in the Amazon jungle, from Hindu astrological festivals to abandoned Buddhist temples, and 33 countries on six continents. The Lord finally found him at the Burning Man festival in the Nevada desert. Now Will exposes the growing deception of “New Age” pagan spirituality, and helps men reclaim righteous authority in their families, churches, and nation. https://renofmen.com/links.
