Is this reading, however, perhaps guilty of forcing Eastern presuppositions on a text that is strongly Judeo-Christian in ethos? Once again, a balanced, scholarly approach is necessary to reveal the objective meaning and intent of the passage in hand.

An Exclusivist Gospel. It needs first be noted that the biblical tradition is extremely exclusivist as regards theology and doctrine. Thus any source of supernatural revelation outside that of the God of Israel is forbidden (See, e.g., Deut. 18:9–15; Lev. 20:6). Likewise, astrology is condemned in Isaiah 47:13–14, Deuteronomy 18:9–12, and Jeremiah 10:2.

Further, the Gospel of Matthew is by nature an extremely Jewish book, and goes out of its way to appeal to Jewish readers, thus, for example, Matthew’s high veneration of the Law and his appeal to Messianic prophecies.¹ Matthew is therefore unlikely to risk alienating his Jewish readership by endorsing a practice clearly condemned in Jewish holy writ.

Jew and Gentile in Matthew. To properly appreciate the significance of the Magi incident, it is first necessary to recognize Matthew’s important theme of the shifting of divine favor from Israel, as the nexus of God’s dealings, to the Gentiles. According to scholars, as Israel as a nation rejects its Messiah, so God’s grace moves to the Gentiles, who prove more receptive.²

Consequently, this theme of judgment on Israel and grace for the Gentiles permeates the book. Thus in Matthew 1:5, Gentiles are included in the Messiah’s genealogy; while in Matthew 21:43 the kingdom will be “taken away” from Israel and “given to a people who will produce its fruit.”³ In Matthew 8:1–13 two incidents are contrasted: the Jewish leper has limited faith (v. 1–4), while the Gentile centurion has great faith (v. 5–13). In summary, the “subjects of the kingdom” are rejected from the kingdom, but Gentiles are embraced (v. 9–12; See also Matt. 22:9–10; 15:21–28; 28:19–20).

So in Matthew 2:1–12, Herod, King of Israel, seeks to kill his nation’s Messiah, while Gentiles traverse the earth to worship Him. Once again, Gentiles show extraordinary faith, while Israel exhibits little.⁴

The Balaam Connection. Moreover, Matthew’s theological intentions become clear when we compare the Magi episode with the story of Balaam in Numbers 22–24, where scholars have long noted a number of striking parallels.⁵

For example, just as Balak, King of Moab, tried to hinder Israel’s flight and inheriting of the Promised Land under Moses (Num. 22:1–6), so Herod desired to kill the Messiah-deliverer who would bring redemption to Israel (Matt. 2:3–12). Furthermore, as the pagan seer Balaam was Balak’s intended instrument of destruction for Israel (Num. 22:7–21), so are the Magi, albeit unwittingly, instruments of Herod’s wrath against Jesus (Matt. 2:7–12).

So, too, first-century Jewish theologian Philo refers to Balaam as a magos, who, like Matthew’s Magi, came “from the East.”⁶ Notably, Balaam had two servants (Num. 22:22), which would bring the number of the party to three, which tallies with the traditional “three wise men” of Christian lore.⁷

In both cases, therefore, evil kings employed pagan Magi as a means of destruction for their enemies, but in both cases, through prophetic intervention, the attempts were defeated, and the Magi became a blessing, not a curse, for God’s people.

Perhaps more notably, Balaam, under the influence of the Holy Spirit, prophesies the “star” that would rise (Num. 24:17), symbolizing the Messiah. Matthew’s Magi also see the star that leads them to the Messiah.⁸

Moreover, both Balaam and the Magi go from being practitioners of pagan arts to recipients of God’s revelation, revelation that their occult means could not have granted. Clearly Matthew is making a statement about revelation given to Gentiles, which results in blessing for themselves and God’s people.

Jesus, Savior of the World. It is here that the real import of the Magi episode becomes clear, for it marks the start of the glorious theme of the extending of God’s grace from Israel to the world.

In Matthew 8:9–12, Gentiles come from East and West—surely linked to the Magi of chapter 2, who are Gentiles from the East. In Matthew 28:19 the disciples are to draw converts from “all nations”—again East and West.

Commentators have also drawn parallels between the Magi incident and the Old Testa­ment prophecies of Gentile lands ac­know­ledging God as King over the whole earth.9 Isaiah 2:2–4 tells of “the mountain of the Lord’s temple” established “as chief among the mountains,” where “all nations will stream to it.”

The nations’ pilgrimage is mentioned elsewhere: according to Isaiah 60:1–6, “Nations will come to your light, and kings to the brightness of your dawn…bearing gold and incense” (See also Ps. 72:10–15). The three gifts of the Magi were, of course, gold, incense, and myrrh (Matt. 2:11).

According to Matthew 24:30 Jesus will come on the clouds in glory, and “all the nations of the earth will mourn.” In Matthew 25:31–46, Jesus judges “all nations,” dividing them as sheep and goats. The message is clear: Jesus is Messiah of Jew and Gentile, and King of the whole world, which will one day pay homage to Him. For Matthew, then, the Magi episode has clear Messianic and eschatological undertones, for the pagan sojourners are among the first to partake of such Gentile “pilgrimage.”¹⁰

What Do We Make of the Revelation to the Magi? The question still remains as to where the Magi obtained their revelation pertaining to the Bethlehem Star.

Here several points need be made: First, it has been pointed out that “since the magi in Matthew’s narrative have some knowledge of Jewish messianic expectation, they must have had some contact with Jewish thinking,” the most likely contact being a Jewish community in the Diaspora, possibly in Babylon.¹¹

Second, ancient Roman writers Tacitus and Suetonius make it clear that there was a common belief in the ancient world that a ruler was to emerge from Judea at this time.¹²

Furthermore, in the Bible, stars are said to represent great people (Dan. 12:3), angels (Job 38:7), and more notably, Jesus Himself (Rev. 22:16). There exists in Scripture, therefore, the notion of personages having some stellar representation—without going to astrological extremes. What can be inferred from the above is that there is no need to resort to astrology to explain the Magi’s knowledge of the Star. There is plenty of evidence to suggest that they derived their information from Jewish sources.

Notably, Jesus’ Second Coming (as with His first) is heralded by a heavenly “sign,” where “all the nations of the earth” will see it and mourn (Matt. 24:30). Matthew thus ends as it begins. It is interesting to note that the fact that “all the earth” sees it indicates that it is not through hidden arts that the star is perceived.

The fact is, Matthew’s account does not tell us specifically what the Magi were. In fact, some have proposed that they were not astrologers at all. Furthermore, neither are we told what the “Star of Bethlehem” was. Many suggestions have been proposed, ranging from astronomical phenomena to supernatural signs.¹³ Given the paucity of data on these questions, it is difficult to draw dogmatic astrological conclusions on the matter.

Much is made of the Magi’s spiritual foresight. What is seldom emphasized, however, is how limited their perception actually was. Far from being certain of the whereabouts of Jesus’ birth, they only had a vague idea. The revelation granted to them, whether through ancient Jewish contact with their civilization or a unique revelation of God, was only sufficient to get them to Jerusalem. It was through special revelation (Micah 5:2) that they ascertained that Jesus was to be born in Bethlehem (Matt. 2:4–6).

Notably, Matthew’s ongoing theme of the gospel of salvation spreading to the ends of the earth presupposes that Christian revelation is superior, granting salvation where other religious traditions cannot. Underscoring this, it is through God’s grace that the Magi were warned in a dream not to go back to Herod. Any possible astrological skills were evidently insufficient to warn them of the danger that lay ahead.

Implications For Us. So then, the Magi incident must be interpreted in the light of a Judeo-Christian theology of the sovereignty of God over all powers and peoples. The point of Matthew 2:1–12 is to glorify God, not pagan traditions.

The clear-cut implication of the text is the common Matthean theme that Jesus, King and Judge of the world, is coming, and that Jew and Gentile alike must accept His way of salvation, forsaking all others.

Here we may find a metaphor for the present day: In Matthew 2 pagan peoples bow the knee to the Jewish Messiah and accept His ways over and above their own, despite significant alterations to their worldview. What, then, should be the response of astrologers today on meeting the same Messiah and learning of His demands for their lives? —Gregory Rogers

Gregory Rogers is an internationally published writer in theology. He is currently enrolled at the South African Theological Seminary (SATS) on the honors level.

notes

1 William Hendriksen, The Gospel of Matthew (Edinburgh: Banner of Truth Trust, 1989), 97–98.

2 Donald A. Hagner, “Introduction,” in Matthew 1–13, vol. 33A of Word Biblical Commentary, ed. Bruce M. Metzger, David A. Hubbard, and Glenn W. Barker (Dallas: Word Books, 1993), CD-ROM, under “The Sitz Im Leben (‘Life Setting’) of Matthew’s Community.”

3 All Bible quotations are from the New International Version.

4 Hagner, “The Magi Worship the Newborn King (2:1–12),” Explanation., in Metzger et al.

5 Raymond E. Brown, Birth of the Messiah (London: Geoffrey Chapman, 1977), 193–95.

6 Philo, Vita Moysis I L #276; cited in Brown, 193.

7 Brown, 193.

8 Ibid., 193–95.

9 Hagner, “The Magi Worship the Newborn King (2:1–12),” Comment., in Metzger et al.

10 Ibid.

11 Ibid.

12 Ben Witherington III, Dictionary of Jesus and the Gospels, ed. Joel B. Green, Scott McKnight, and I. Howard Marshall (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1992), s.v. “Birth of Jesus,” 73.

13 Hendriksen, 152–53.

Christians often feel like strangers to anything or anyone involved with the occult. Traveling to the strange world of the occult understandably may be intimidating, even for those brave souls who set out on the journey.

Having been involved in occult practices prior to trusting Christ and in ministry for many years after trusting Him, I believe this reaction is not only normal, but healthy, given that the occult is evil and dangerous. Retreating from the occult is one thing; retreating from witnessing to those in the occult, however, is another.

Various misconceptions about the occult and its practitioners form another barrier to evangelism. It is vitally important for Christians to keep in mind, as a corrective to such misconceptions, that the power of the gospel to bring salvation (Rom. 1:16) is real, that everyone is made in the image of God, and that there should be nothing daunting about witnessing to someone in the occult when Christ through the power of the Holy Spirit is in the encounter. A basic understanding of what the occult is and why people are drawn to it will be helpful for the believer who desires to prepare for such an encounter.

Clarifying the Definition of Occult. Illumi­nat­ing what constitutes the occult can be tricky because there is disagreement¹ on what the occult is and definitions vary. My working definition of the occult is “an underlying supernatural worldview supporting various practices that are designed to access information or power through reading hidden meanings or through contact with super­natural beings or forces.”

The occultist sees the exterior world as masking a deeper reality. Tapping into these secret truths or powers requires the divinatory ability to interpret general symbols in the natural world (like astrology), or specific symbols, images, or numbers (like Tarot cards or numerology) in one’s life that convey messages; as well as the practical ability to perform esoteric techniques, rituals, and/or incantations to summon aid or direction from forces, disembodied beings, deities, or the dead. The occultist is more of a practitioner than a philosopher and cares about what works in practice, and not what one wonders in theory.

Occult practices are delineated in Deuteronomy 18:10–12: divination (tarot cards, astrology, numerology, palm reading, crystal balls, psychic abilities, and other related practices); initiating contact with spirits or with the dead; and sorcery (the attempt to bring about changes in reality through access to invisible powers or forces or through contact with spirits and/or gods). Astrologers, tarot card readers, psychics, mediums, people who practice what they may call “white magick,”² then, and those who combine a variety of these practices, would all fall into this category.

For the purposes of this article, the occult is not limited to Wicca or Neopaganism, though some of the discussion here applies to them. Satanism, although an occult system, has its own ideology. Many New Agers are involved in occult practices, and some occultists blend New Age views with their own, but the New Age worldview differs in some significant ways from the occult. This discussion thus does not include Satanism or the New Age.

There is no central authority, doctrine, or teaching in the occult, but there are some common characteristics. The principles listed as follows are widespread in the occult, but not everyone necessarily accepts all of them.³

• There is no absolute truth.
• Experience (and for some, nature) informs one’s truth and ethics.
• There is a unifying energy or force(s) in creation that humans can access to alter reality.
• Power is neutral.
• Good and evil are two sides of the same coin, and should be balanced.
• There may be deceptive or even evil spirits, but Satan does not exist as an actual, personal being.
• One can imbue objects with power.
• The rational has its place, but intuition has priority.
• Death results in reincarnation, or death is final.

Understanding People’s Attraction to the Occult. One of the things I’ve been asked many times is, “Why would anyone get involved with something evil like the occult?” The answer is that they do not see it as evil. People in the occult are more likely to see it as part of a spiritual practice used for self-knowledge, personal or spiritual growth, healing, or harnessing energy for helping purposes. They thus regard the occult as participating in beneficial activities. They also tend to get engaged in it gradually, even over many years. They either do not become aware of any negative effects of this association for a long time, if ever, or they become desensitized to it.

The esoteric nature of the occult also attracts people who want to know things others don’t. Occult practices usually entail learning complex systems such as astrology, magical rituals, and numerology. Learning these is challenging and seems to offer a lifetime of discovery and growth in self-knowledge. This is one reason many bright teens and young adults are drawn to the occult. Possessing arcane knowledge makes a person feel special.

Whatever the reasons for being drawn in, it is always much harder to leave than it was to get involved initially. The occult feeds the fallen nature and, as time goes by, imprisons those involved ever more deeply and fiercely on all levels—mental, physical, emotional, and spiritual.

Dialoguing with Occultists. There is no formula for witnessing to someone in the occult, especially since occultists are inclined to be individualistic. They also tend to be on their guard. You should view the occultist as a person made in the image of God and not just as an occultist. Pray for the Lord to give you love for that person. Since occult views vary, begin by asking what his or her particular beliefs are (do not use the word “occult”). It might be helpful to imagine that you are on an investigative assignment to find out all you can about that individual.

It is helpful to ask about the person’s spiritual background, what was attractive about his or her present beliefs, and why he or she rejects Christianity. Listening respectfully will help you understand these issues, give you insight into the occultist’s comprehension or ignorance of the gospel, and open the door for you to speak. Try to ask questions that will get the person to think specifically about his or her beliefs. For example, if the person believes that good and evil are relative, ask for examples and how that works in real life. If the person believes god is an impersonal force, ask, “Why then do you think it is that we are all beings who seek personal relationships?” Some people are more willing to answer questions than others, so you need to be sensitive to this. You do not want to sound like you are interrogating. Remember that although He can use believers in doing so, only God can open people’s eyes. Keeping all this in mind, here are further suggestions:⁴

• Don’t mislead the occultist regarding your faith—you don’t need to announce your Christianity right away, but do reveal it earlier rather than later in the course of the conversation.
• Don’t be surprised if the occultist refers to the Bible or claims its authority.
• Don’t use terms the person may not understand such as atonement, redemption, justification, and so forth; it is better to give examples of what these are.
• Keep in mind that there is demonic power underlying the occult and that the occultist is in bondage (usually unknowingly). At the same time, remember that nowhere in the Bible are believers told to fear Satan—we are to be prudent, vigilant, and discerning, but not afraid; therefore, do not fear occultists (1 John 4:4).
• Don’t try to prove that a particular occult practice or experience is wrong; instead, seek to discuss the nature of God and Jesus, especially Jesus’ power over nature, demons, and illness, as narrated in the Gospels.
• Don’t pretend to know things you don’t.
• Don’t hesitate to stand on the truths of Scripture, but do this with gentleness and love (1 Pet. 3:15).
• Let the person see Jesus’ love in you! There is no such love in the occult. Despite friendships one may have with other occultists, and despite the belief of some occultists in a divine being, the occult is isolating. This is because the individual, being in rebellion against God, seeks answers from the self, creation, or fallen angels (usually without awareness of the latter).

A Final Word of Encouragement. Jesus said, “believe in the Light, so that you may become sons of Light” (John 12:36).5 The Bible also says that believers are to “walk as children of Light” (Eph. 5:8). Treating occultists with kindness and respect is a way to show them this Light that indwells us; doing so exalts God, and paves a way to share the gospel so that they, too, may turn from darkness to light (Acts 26:18; Col. 1:12–14). The darker the night, the brighter the light, and witnessing to someone in the occult not only reveals Christ’s love and truth to that person, but allows you to experience His amazing power as well.

—Marcia Montenegro

Marcia Montenegro is a former professional astrologer who now has a ministry that reaches out to those in the occult and New Age and educates Christians in these areas.

notes

1 Non-Christians may see the occult as hidden teachings that may or may not involve the supernatural. Some Christians use the term “New Age” for the occult, but this writer makes a differentiation between the two.

2 Occult magic is often spelled with a “k” as “magick” to distinguish it from stage magic.

3 See articles on Marcia Montenegro’s Web site at www.christiananswersforthenewage.org on “Astrology,” “The Psychics: Can They Help You?” “What Do You Mean by the Occult?” “Spirit Contact: Who Is on the Other Side?“ “Occult Terms,” and “Wicca, Witchcraft, and Neopaganism.”

4 For further information, see “10 Q & A on Magic, Spells, and Divination,” Rose Publication Pamphlet, principal author, Marcia Montenegro, http://www.rose-publishing.com/productdetails.cfm?PC=999.

5All Bible quotations are from the New American Standard Bible.

SYNOPSIS

The term witchcraft evokes different images for different people. Many Westerners would be surprised to know that more and more of their contemporaries are embracing witchcraft as a viable expression of their own spirituality. However marginal or far out it may have seemed in the past, it is clear that witchcraft is becoming progressively more mainstream throughout the world.

Witches are people who revere both the God and the Goddess. They seek a more friendly relationship with their natural environment, endeavoring to recognize the sacredness of all of nature. Witches, further, seek to utilize cosmic or psychic forces to do their bidding. To this end, the practice of witchcraft involves knowledge and skill in appropriating the rituals that are believed to harness and focus these energies. Seeing themselves in stark contrast to other occult religions such as Satanism, witches seek to work these forces in order to enhance their own experience of life and to promote healing and community.

Do these rituals work? Is this even the important question to ask? What could possibly be wrong with such a seemingly benevolent religion? Witchcraft has something to say about who we are as humans, about what our relationship to our fellow humans and to the rest of the universe ought to be, and about how we should relate to the divine. Some Christians may be surprised to learn of the comparisons and contrasts that can be drawn from witchcraft with their own Christianity.

What kind of images does the term witchcraft provoke? To many it brings thoughts of dark, secret rituals with sinister intent, curses being cast on the unwary designed to bring about their undoing. Others are reminded about witchcraft only one time a year. For them it brings images of children dressed in their pointed hats enjoying candy; of cutouts of witches surrounded by broomsticks, pumpkins, and dry leaves. This creates a problem in trying to understand witchcraft. The subject is either too frightening or too silly to consider. Perhaps many people, Christians included, would be surprised to discover that what goes by the name of witchcraft is often quite a bit more sophisticated and thoughtful than they expected. A Christian analysis must resoundingly condemn witchcraft, but that analysis must be based on a fair assessment of the phenomenon as a whole.

Why Bother?

Some may wonder why there is any need to take a look at witchcraft. After all, there is seemingly no end to which people will go in their eccentric beliefs or practices. The reason a topic such as this merits examination is precisely because witchcraft is becoming less eccentric and more mainstream. For example, in the summer of 2004 the Parliament of the World’s Religions convened in Barcelona, Spain. Representatives from many of the world’s religions were present to “seek peace, justice and sustainability and commit to work for a better world” as well as to “deepen spirituality and experience personal transformation.”¹ Present at the 2004 conference (as well as the 1993 and 1999 conferences) were representatives of the Covenant of the Goddess, “the world’s largest religious organization for Neo-Pagan Witches,” as described by an elder of the organization.² A common theme that comes up in the context of such conferences is the increasing emphasis on “interfaith.”

In contrast, one group that is often conspicuous by its near absence at such conferences is evangelical Christianity. Why might this be so? Without jumping ahead to my critique, it should be pointed out that the worldview of many who would attend such conferences would vehemently reject the religious exclusivism that characterizes historic, orthodox Christianity. In a very serious way, therefore, many of the world’s religions, including witchcraft, either explicitly or implicitly see themselves aligned against evangelical Christianity; nevertheless, Jesus’ command to preach the gospel and make disciples of all nations invariably includes witches. In order to do so, it is necessary that we understand who they are and what they believe. Knowing what we are up against is a primary element in being prepared to carry out His Great Commission.

What Witchcraft Is

Definitions can either facilitate or impede understanding. A helpful definition is one that is not overly simplistic, and one that mentions important distinctions as well as similarities between familiar and unfamiliar terms where they exist. In our current age of ecumenical enthusiasm, there is the danger of Christians overlooking the most important aspect of a given religion, namely, the difference between it and their own Christian faith.

There are similarities between flour and ricin. They both are made from plants; they both are white powders; but it is not their similarities that are interesting or important, it is their differences. One is a food and the other is a poison. One promotes life and the other effects death. Don’t be misled by my metaphor—I am not at this point likening witchcraft to ricin. I am only trying to show that with some issues the differences can be just as important, if not more so, than the similarities. With this in mind let me now delineate the main tenets of modern witchcraft and then contrast those with the main tenets of evangelical Christianity.

Witchcraft Is Known by Many Names

When one begins to investigate the phenomenon of modern witchcraft, it does not take long to notice a range of terms associated with the practice: The Craft, Wicca, paganism, Neo-Paganism, and so on. Brooks Alexander, a Christian researcher who is an expert on the occult and counterculture, gives a helpful summary of certain distinctions between the terms Wicca, witchcraft, and Neo-Paganism. Neo-Paganism is the broadest category, encompassing a wide range of groups “that try to reconstruct ancient, pre- and non-Christian religious systems—such as the Norse, Celtic, Greek, Roman, and Egyptian religions—as well as…various obscure, forgotten, and neglected occult teachings from around the world.”³ He goes on to distinguish witchcraft from Wicca (with Wicca being the narrowest category) along the lines of how closely one follows the specific teachings and practices of the English Wiccan Gerald Gardner, who more or less gave the term Wica (with one c) to his practice.⁴

There may be subtle distinctions that some prefer to maintain when opting for one term over another, but for the most part these terms are used interchangeably. The term witchcraft is certainly the most familiar within and without the practice, but it is also the term that carries with it the most unwanted baggage. It often has sinister or evil connotations, and for those reasons many within the craft prefer the term Wicca (for the practice) and Wiccan (for the practitioner). The prefix “Neo” in Neo-Paganism usually indicates an emphasis on one’s practice in its contemporary manifestation while still hinting that it is perhaps a revival of, or connected to, something ancient.

Witchcraft Is a Religion

As Americans, this is an important point to remember. We cherish our heritage of religious freedom, but in their enthusiasm to refute the beliefs of witchcraft, some Christians have overstated the case. They rightly claim that the United States was founded on the ethical concept of natural law (where morality is grounded in the nature of the creator God),⁵ but they wrongly conclude that witches do not have constitutional rights, since witches reject the traditional Christian notion of the creator God. Without getting into the tricky issue of how and whether religion should interact with government or public life, we should recognize that, within the limits of law, all Americans have the right to exercise their own religion in accordance with the dictates of their conscience. Our contention, such as it is, with witchcraft is one of truth. It is a battle of ideas.

Witchcraft Is a Worldview

A worldview is the sum total of one’s view of the nature of reality. Everyone has a worldview even if only a few reflect on their own. One’s worldview encompasses one’s views of how reality is composed, how it works, and how we as humans fit in or relate to our universe. It can entail one’s views about the purpose of life and the origin and destiny of us all.

Naturalism. Starting at the broadest level and working down, it is fair to say that the worldview of witchcraft is naturalism. Naturalism is the view that there is no transcendent reality such as God that can intervene in the natural world. Naturalism maintains that all of reality is interrelated and operates according to “laws.” Other expressions of naturalism would include materialism, which sees all of reality as being made up of matter that operates according to material laws.

Witchcraft, though an expression of naturalism, is not materialism. Witches recognize that reality extends beyond the realm of the material. This is sometimes confusing. A worldview can be naturalistic even if it accepts the reality of an immaterial realm; indeed, even acknowledging the existence of gods and goddesses does not preclude a worldview from being naturalistic. What stands in stark contrast to naturalism is a worldview that says that the natural realm (whether material, immaterial, or both) is the creation of a transcendent God. This is supernaturalism. This is what historic, orthodox Christianity is.

Occultism. Sharpening the focus, not only can we say that witchcraft is a worldview of naturalism, it is also a worldview of occultism. The term occult is from the Latin occultus meaning “hidden,” or “secret.” The category covers a wide range of beliefs and practices that are characterized by two main points that are often thought to be “hidden” from the average person. First, the occult maintains that there is force or energy into which one can tap or with which one can negotiate to do one’s own bidding. The familiar term spell is applied to the technique of harnessing and focusing this power. The late witchcraft practitioner Scott Cunningham explains, “The spell is…simply a ritual in which various tools are purposefully used, the goal is fully stated (in words, pictures or within the mind), and energy is moved to bring about the needed result.”⁶ Exactly what is the nature of this force or energy, according to the occultist, and what is the best way to work with it is what makes some of the main differences between the major occult groups such as shamanism, witchcraft, Satanism, New Age, and others.

Second, the occult maintains that human beings are divine. The practice of the occult arts is thus an endeavor to actualize one’s own divinity. As witchcraft practitioner Margot Adler claims, “A spiritual path that is not stagnant ultimately leads one to the understanding of one’s own divine nature. Thou art Goddess. Thou are God. Divinity is imminent in all Nature. It is as much within you as without.”⁷

Humanism. Witchcraft sees itself as a celebration of all life. This celebration involves the denial that there is anything wrong with the human race. The practicing witch Starhawk rejoices that “we can open new eyes and see that there is nothing to be saved from, no struggle of life against the universe, no God outside the world to be feared and obeyed”⁸ (emphasis in original). Pagan Elder Donald Frew of the Covenant of the Goddess explains, “How can we achieve salvation, then? We’re not even trying to. We don’t understand what there is to be saved from. The idea of salvation presupposes a Fall of some kind, a fundamental flaw in Creation as it exists today. Witches look at the world [around] us and see wonder, we see mystery.”⁹

Witchcraft Is a Practice

Notice that the term practice is often used with the term witchcraft. What this tells us is that, for many, Wicca is as much what someone does as it is what someone believes. While it is certainly true that what one does is invariably a product of what one believes, for witchcraft the emphasis is on what the practice can do to enhance one’s own well-being as well as the well-being of others. Witches do not simply adhere to a list of dogmas; indeed, in many ways witches like to think that they eschew dogmas. As Adler describes it, “If you go far enough back, all our ancestors practiced religions that had neither creeds nor dogmas, neither prophets nor holy books. These religions were based on the celebrations of the seasonal cycles of nature. They were based on what people did, as opposed to what people believed. It is these polytheistic religions of imminence that are being revived and re-created by Neo-Pagans today.”¹⁰

A look through witchcraft material at the local bookstore will reveal that much of it deals with various rituals and activities that can be perfected in order to manipulate and utilize this cosmic or psychic force to do one’s bidding. One will find chapters on the various items of clothing to wear (robes; jewelry; horned helmet, when one is not working naked, or “skyclad”); the tools to use (candles, herbs, tarot cards, talismans, fetishes); and rituals to perform (spells, incantations, chanting, music, dancing)—all of which enables the practitioner to become open to these forces (if they exist outside) or to conjure up these forces (if they originate from within). One will learn how to interpret dreams, meditate, have out-of-body experiences, speak with the dead, heal, and read auras. One can seek to develop one’s own powers within the context of other witches (in a coven) or alone (in solitary practice). There are no obligations to follow any previously prescribed method. If what others have done before works, that is fine. If one sees the need to change the ritual or tools to get better results, then that is fine as well. All of these activities are designed to do two things: to enhance the well-being of one’s self or those around him or her and to actualize one’s own divinity.

What Witchcraft Is Not

Witchcraft Is Not Satanism

It might be surprising to some to know that witchcraft is not Satanism. Not only do the two have different histories (even if they are short histories), they also have, at a certain level, different views of the world and one’s place in it. I add the qualification “at a certain level” because there is a shared occult perspective between witchcraft and Satanism. Satanism and witchcraft are both occult religions; because of this, they both see reality as entirely natural. There is no transcendent God in the truest sense of the term. Further, they both see all of reality, material and immaterial, as interconnected and working according to “laws” that can be mastered in such a way as to make not only material but also immaterial reality work according to one’s own bidding. Satanism and witchcraft both stand in stark contrast to Christianity in their repudiation not only of God but also of the role of Jesus in effecting the salvation of mankind; indeed, there is a sense in which both Satanism and witchcraft deny that mankind is in any need of salvation.

These similarities are not trivial, but neither are the differences. Any criminal activity that can be associated with occultism is usually associated with some form of Satanism (usually some form of self-styled Satanism). As a matter of principle and practice, witchcraft lives by the creed, “An it harm none, do what you will.”¹¹

Satanism is more often associated with an attitude of self-aggrandizement rather than the sense of community that characterizes most witchcraft. Further, Satanism and witchcraft differ somewhat in their respective views of nature and humanity. As researchers Shelley Rabinovitch and James Lewis observe, “To the neo-Pagan practitioner, nature is viewed as somewhere on a scale from benign to overtly positive, if not outright friendly toward humanity. The ideal in most neo-Pagan practice is to become as one with the natural world—to live in harmony with nature.…In contrast, neo-Satanists view the natural world as somewhere between benign and openly hostile to humans.”¹²

Witchcraft Is Not Christianity

Some witches suggest that the practice of witchcraft can be compatible with Christianity,¹³ but virtually everyone realizes that witchcraft is not Christianity. Some may accuse me of having an uncanny grasp of the obvious for asserting this. Who would possibly confuse the two? In making this claim, however, I mean to do two things.

First, I want to emphasize that one must be careful that various subtle aspects of the practice of witchcraft do not influence one’s own Christian view of the world in a way that is incompatible with the Christian faith. What I have in mind here is how easy it can be for Christians to assume that certain practices that characterize the occult in general or witchcraft in particular are sufficiently neutral that one may safely dabble in their use. Some Christians see no problem with experimenting with séances or tarot cards, not realizing that they could be eroding their own view of the nature of reality, not to mention the danger of encountering demonic activity. Even if these practices “worked,” pragmatism is not a criterion for truth (Jer.44: 17–18).

My second reason for pointing out that witchcraft is not Christianity is to try to summarize exactly where witchcraft and Christianity compare and contrast in their respective worldviews. Before I outline those areas of contrast (i.e., where the flour and ricin are different) let me acknowledge those areas where witches and Christians might share common concerns.

Witchcraft and Christianity: Common Concerns. First, because of their view of the nature of the world, witches often have a sense of environmental concern. Now, the motivations of witches and Christians are widely disparate—witches are environmentally conscientious because of their view that the Earth is sacred, whereas Christians should be environmentally conscientious as a matter of stewardship of the creation before the Creator—but Christians can agree with Wiccans that there is a duty to be environmentally responsible. How that environmental responsibility translates into public policy and individual actions may vary along the political and personal spectrum; nevertheless, we can all agree that there is an environmental responsibility that each of us shares.

Second, witches tend to have a conscientious sense of global concerns. Again, exactly how these concerns translate into public policy and individual actions may vary along the political and personal spectrum, but our common interests stem from the fact that we are all human beings living on the same planet.

Third, witches tend to be benevolently disposed toward their fellow human beings. The stereotype of witches being people with sinister intent wielding spells of black magic needs to be abandoned. As Christians we can share in their concern for the well being of others though we will obviously disagree as to what exactly constitutes that well being.

Witchcraft and Christianity: Mortal Foes in What Ultimately Counts. Our enthusiasm to establish rapport with those around us who may embrace witchcraft as a way of expressing their own spirituality must not keep us from recognizing that, when it comes to what ultimately counts, witchcraft and Christianity (but not witches and Christians¹⁴) are mortal foes. What ultimately counts is the objective truth about who God is, who we are as humans, and how we relate.

Christianity is monotheistic. Christianity claims that there is a God and no one of us is He. Witchcraft claims the opposite: “We are of the nature of the Gods, and a fully realized man or woman is a channel for that divinity, a manifestation of the God or the Goddess.”¹⁵ Adler favorably quotes historian James Breasted who said, “Monotheism is but imperialism in religion.”¹⁶ In place of the strict monotheism of Christianity, witchcraft not only deifies the self, but it ostensibly reveres the pagan God and Goddess.¹⁷

Christianity is exclusivistic. Remember Jesus’ words in John14:6: “I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through Me.” Contrast that with what Adler proclaims: “The belief that there is one word, one truth, one path to the light, makes it easy to destroy ideas, institutions, and human beings…your own spiritual path is not necessarily mine.”¹⁸

Christianity is authoritarian. Usually this term authoritarian has negative associations, but if authoritarian means “recognizing authority” then Christianity certainly does that. Not only has God revealed Himself through the things He has made (see, e.g., Ps.19:1 and Rom.1:20), but He has also revealed Himself finally and fully through Jesus Christ and the Bible. In contrast, Frew says, “To grant a traditional text such authority would be to say that this is it, the truth for all time. But we are a nature religion, and a fundamental truth of nature is that everything changes.”¹⁹ Christians recognize the authority of God’s word in such matters, and so we have to face the fact that the Bible unequivocally condemns the practice of witchcraft, along with all forms of the occult (see Deut.18:10–12; Acts13:6–11;16:16–18; Gal.5:19–21).

Christianity recognizes everyone’s need for salvation. The most important message we have to give to the world is the gospel of Jesus Christ. Without the sacrifice of Christ to wash away our sins and reconcile us to our Maker, there is no hope in the world to come. Witchcraft teaches that our destiny is to return again to this world through reincarnation. Cunningham comments, “While reincarnation isn’t an exclusive Wiccan concept, it is happily embraced by most Wiccans because it answers many questions about daily life and offers explanations for more mystical phenomena such as death, birth and karma.”²⁰ Frew expounds, “While many of us believe in reincarnation, we do not seek to escape the wheel of rebirth. We can’t imagine anything more wonderful than to come back to this bounteous and beautiful Earth.”²¹ In contrast to this spiritually fatal illusion, the Bible warns, “And as it is appointed for men to die once, but after this the judgment” (Heb.9:27 NKJV).

WHAT ARE WE TO DO?

There is a sense in which the job before us as Christians never changes, no matter who our audience is. Tactics and strategies may vary depending on the task at hand—whether apologetics, evangelism, or discipleship—but the commission never varies. It behooves us as Christians to maximize our effectiveness in reaching the lost by being informed and sensitive to the beliefs and practices of others while paying close attention to the subtle differences between various worldviews and our own Christian faith. This is true no less of witches than anyone else who may be living right next door.

notes

1. Parliament of the World’s Religions, http://www.cpwr.org/ 2004Parliament/welcome/index.htm.

2. Donald H. Frew, “Pagans in Interfaith Dialogue: New Faiths, New Challenges,” CoGWeb, http://www.cog.org/pwr/ don.htm. On the significance of the presence of pagan witchcraft at the conference, Frew commented, “The 2004 Parliament…cemented our position as an established religion on the world stage.” (Donald Frew, e-mail interview by author, October31,2004.)

3. Brooks Alexander, Witchcraft Goes Mainstream: Uncovering Its Alarming Impact on You and Your Family (Eugene, OR: Harvest House Publishers, 2004), 23.

4. The question of the origin and history of modern witchcraft is complicated. According to some researchers, Gerald Gardner (1884–1964) is almost single-handedly responsible for the modern phenomenon we now know as witchcraft. Whether Gardner invented or rediscovered the religion is disputed. For discussions on the matter, see Brooks Alexander’s work cited in endnote 3; Ronald Hutton, Triumph of the Moon: A History of Modern Pagan Witchcraft (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999); Jenny Gibbons, “Recent Developments in the Study of The Great European Witch Hunt,” CoGWeb, http://www.cog/org/witch_hunt.html. For a response to earlier versions of Hutton’s arguments, see D. H. Frew, “Methodological Flaws in Recent Studies of Historical and Modern Witchcraft,” Ethnologies 1 (1998): 33–65. For Hutton’s rejoinder to Frew, see Ronald Hutton, “Paganism and Polemic: The Debate over the Origins of Modern Pagan Witchcraft,” Folklore (April 2000), http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m2386/is_1_111/ai_62685559. I agree with Alexander’s conclusion: “There has been no passing down of any tradition from medieval witches to anyone in our own time. There is no identifiable continuity between the witchcraft of the Middle Ages and the modern-day religious movement that bears the same name.” (Alexander, Witchcraft Goes Mainstream, 127.) This is not to say, however, that there is no continuity between some of the concepts of modern witchcraft and ancient religions. As Donald Frew observes, “There is a genuine antiquity to many of the core theological concepts and linked liturgical practices, and…there is a traceable path of transmission from Classical antiquity down to the modern movement, but…this is not the same thing as a continually practicing group.” (Donald Frew, e-mail interview by author, October31,2004.)

5. For a defense of the role of natural law in the birth of the United States of America see Gary T. Amos, Defending the Declaration: How the Bible and Christianity Influenced the Writing of the Declaration of Independence (Brentwood, TN: Wolgemuth and Hyatt Publishers, 1989). For an examination of natural law theory in pluralistic America see Norman Geisler and Frank Turek, Legislating Morality: Is It Wise? Is It Legal? Is It Possible? (Minneapolis: Bethany House Publishers, 1998) and Carl Horn, ed., Whose Values? The Battle for Morality in Pluralistic America (Ann Arbor, MI: Servant Books, 1985).

6. Scott Cunningham, The Truth about Witchcraft Today (St. Paul, MN: Llewellyn Publications, 1988), 17.

7. Margot Adler, Drawing Down the Moon: Witches, Druids, Goddess-Worshippers, and Other Pagans in America Today, rev. and exp. ed. (Boston: Beacon Press, 1986), ix.

8. Starhawk, The Spiral Dance: A Rebirth of the Ancient Religion of the Great Goddess (San Francisco: Harper and Row Publishers, 1979), 14.

9. Frew, “Pagans in Interfaith Dialogue.”

10. Adler, ix.

11. Janet and Stewart Farrar, A Witches Bible Compleat: Principles, Rituals and Beliefs of Modern Witchcraft, rev. ed. (New York: Magickal Childe, 1987), 2:135.

12. Shelley Rabinovitch and James Lewis, The Encyclopedia of Modern Witchcraft and Neo-Paganism (New York: Citadel Press, 2002), s.v. “Neo-Satanism Compared and Contrasted with Neo-Paganism,” 185–86, emphasis in original.

13. See, e.g., Gavin Frost and Yvonne Frost, The Magic Power of Witchcraft (West Nyack, NY: Parker Publishing, 1976), 130.

14. The belief systems of Christianity and witchcraft are mutually exclusive, but Christians are called to love all human beings and consider as their true enemy the evil spiritual force that lies behind the world’s anti-Christian belief systems (Eph.6:12; cf. Matt.5:43–47).

15. Farrar, 2:33.

16. Adler, vii.

17. The emphasis on the God and the Goddess stems from witchcraft’s worldview of the interplay in reality of opposites that seek balance. The Farrars explain, “All activity, all manifestation arises [sic] from (and is inconceivable without) the interaction of pairs and complementary opposites.” (A Witches Bible Compleat,2:107.)

18. Adler, viii.

19. Frew, “Pagans in Interfaith Dialogue.”

20. Cunningham, 65.

21. Frew, “Pagans in Interfaith Dialogue.”

In April of this year, the Department of Veterans Affairs approved the use of the Wiccan pentacle—a five-pointed star surrounded by a circle—on tombstones at Arlington National Cemetery and other U.S. military burial grounds. The pentacle joins a list of 38 other approved religious symbols including an atom for atheists, the humanist emblem, and various forms of the Christian cross.

Wicca, long considered a fringe spiritual practice, has entered the mainstream and the number of practitioners has skyrocketed over the past decade. According to the American Religious Identification Survey¹ conducted every decade by the City University of New York, the number of Wiccans in America was seventeen times larger at the beginning of this decade than it was in the early 1990s. Not only are there military personnel who practice Wicca, but many high school and college students do as well. Wiccans on college campuses have been forming their own clubs for years.

If we hope to engage this growing segment of our society—particularly the young people who practice Wicca—typical Christian tactics such as organizing boycotts, letter-writing, and shunning Wiccan believers, must become a thing of the past. Too often, Christians have refused to treat Wiccans as their neighbors and have been content to remain ignorant about what Wiccans really believe and why they believe it. We know that Paul on Mars Hill and other members of the early church looked with compassion on the pagans in their midst and effectively engaged them in conversations about the gospel. We must do no less with modern-day pagans.

Neo-paganism, or simply paganism, which includes the modern practice of witchcraft, also known as Wicca, is an overarching term for earth-based spirituality that incorporates nature worship into a polytheistic worship of ancient gods and goddesses. Wicca is also known as “The Craft,” and most Wiccans believe in the manipulation of divine or cosmic forces through rite, ritual, and spell casting.

It is important to note, however, that Wicca is not a form of Satan worship. Wiccans worship and invoke pre-Christian deities and, like the ancient pagans, engage in earth worship. Wiccans will say that Satan is part of Christian and Jewish theology. There are Satan worshippers in the United States, however, who sometimes call themselves witches, which can be confusing. Wiccans do not deliberately invoke Satan. Whether or not they do so unwittingly is another matter.

Statistics tell us that three-quarters of practicing pagans are women. Estimates of the total numbers of practicing Wiccans in America vary wildly, as people can be reluctant to reveal their spiritual inclination publicly. Conservative estimates put the number at somewhere between 150,000 and 200,000. A poll² conducted by a large pagan group put the number at almost 800,000, whereas some Wiccans claim that they number in the millions. Wicca is clearly on the rise and these numbers reveal a growing spiritual hunger for something that is not being met by traditional means.

Why Wicca, Why Now? I spent a year crisscrossing the country researching the answer to this question for my book Wicca’s Charm: Understanding the Spiritual Hunger behind the Rise of Modern Witchcraft and Pagan Spirituality. ³ All of the young people I met were interested in spirituality, but not necessarily organized religion.

Why is Wicca on the rise and why does it appeal particularly to young people? First, young people are drawn to Wicca because it has no orthodoxy and has no concept of absolute good or absolute evil. This is greatly appealing to impressionable young people. There are some common practices, rituals, and sayings, but for the most part practitioners can add and subtract to it at will. It is a perfectly postmodern religion. One high school student said she liked Wicca because it was “malleable” and allowed her to create her own religion as it suited her.

Second, I found that young people turned to Wicca because they desperately wanted to believe in something that was “real.” Too many had the false impression that Christianity was simply a collection of rules or nothing more than a boring church service. Teenagers often lacked a robust understanding of the Incarnation and had no concept of the Trinity. This lack of biblical literacy had led them to become easily impressed by magic and by the occult experiences in Wiccan rituals and practice.

Third, Wicca appealed to these young people because it promotes glorification of self. Unlike Christianity, in which God is essentially separate from creation, the gods and goddesses that Wiccans invoke are not. For instance, a young woman who might be feeling angry will take part in a ritual in honor of the Greek goddess of war Athena through which she can vent her anger, and another who might hope to fall in love will petition the goddess Aphrodite. Much of Wiccan ritual is designed to help women, in particular, draw on the power within—which is usually represented by the type of goddess they invoke. These young women enjoy worshiping goddesses, in part because one of their main complaints about the church is that they feel it is patriarchal.

Fourth, many young people embrace Wicca because they, like adult Wicca devotees, are bound by and to a passionate love of nature. Wiccans love the earth and care deeply for the environment. Some feel that the American church has been silent when it comes to stewardship of the environment.

Some of the complaints that Wiccans voice about the way Christianity is practiced have some merit, and I found that most Wiccans took issue with Christian behavior rather than with the gospel itself. Many of them had been disappointed by a pastor or wounded by someone in the church, and some of them had asked difficult questions about Christianity that no one had taken time to answer. Others simply refused to believe the gospel message. When conversing with Wiccans, it is important to approach the conversation with a gentle and humble spirit and to admit where the church might have failed them, but also to explain to them the glorious message of the gospel.

Encouraging the Seeking Spirit. I have found Wiccans to be voracious seekers of knowledge. We must encourage this seeking spirit. They have one thing in common with Christian believers, and that is that they believe in the spirit world and thus want to live their lives according to some kind of spiritual practice. This common interest is a great place from which to launch a dialogue with a Wiccan.

In Acts 17, Luke describes Paul’s interactions with the pagans in Athens. He waded into a pool of pagan thought and spent time there. Acts 17: 22–23⁴ reads, “’Men of Athens! I see that in every way you are very religious. For as I walked around and looked carefully at your objects of worship, I even found an altar with this inscription: TO AN UNKNOWN GOD.’” Paul took time to walk around Athens and study the Athenian rites and rituals, their gods and goddesses. He did not simplistically condemn these men and women without knowledge of what they believed; in fact, he even complimented their religiosity!

If we find out that our children, friends, or other family members are interested in Wicca, the best approach is first to listen and find out what interests them about this belief system. Why are they drawn to it? What does it seem to offer that Christianity does not? It is important to become familiar ourselves with the practice of Wicca to engage in a conversation about it properly.

Parents must be able to give an articulate response about what they believe and why they believe it. It is usually not enough simply to ban the practice of Wicca in the home or to forbid any interaction with Wiccans. That usually motivates a young person to explore further—in secret. I met countless college students who couldn’t wait to get to college so they could join the Wiccan club on campus away from their parents’ watchful eyes. If a Christian parent forbids pagan practices in the home, it is vital that they also engage their children in meaningful conversations about their beliefs and gently challenge them with the message of the gospel. I found that young people are yearning for such meaningful conversations with their parents.

When talking to Wiccans, let them know that Christianity is real—that Christians believe that God became flesh, dwelt among us in the form of Jesus Christ, and left the Holy Spirit for His followers as a real presence of God here on earth. No god or goddess that Wiccans worship became incarnate, died once and for all for our sins, and rose from the dead. The gospel message is good news!

It is also important to point out gently where Wicca is inconsistent. Without a God who is perfectly good, there are no absolutes, no standards by which to measure what is just or unjust. Wicca borrows from Christian values of right and wrong. Wiccans might get upset at how women have been treated, but on what do they base their anger—that treating women poorly goes against their personal taste? Christians believe mistreating women is wrong because God said so. Christians also believe that all life has dignity because we are made in God’s image. Wiccans don’t believe this, but without this belief they have only shaky ground on which to condemn injustice.

When it comes to the environment, it is important to note that the Bible teaches that God delights in His creation, so we, then, are to be good stewards of His creation. Scripture reveals a God who created man and woman from dust, blessed this earth with His presence by taking on material flesh Himself, and promised a renewed earth. We must be honest and admit that professing Christians have not always treated God’s creation with the care we should. It is not too late to start, however. Projects such as restoring a local wilderness area or including creation care in a Sunday school curriculum are simple. We should not be surprised at how much this genuine concern for creation would interest the Wiccan community and pique their curiosity.

As the number of Wiccans continues to grow, it is more important than ever for Christian believers to treat Wiccans in the same way we would treat believers of any other faith. If you meet a Wiccan and find yourself filled with fear, stop and pray. We have no reason to fear—for the power that is in us is greater than that which is in the world! I hope that this Halloween, Christians will pray for their Wiccan neighbors and reach out to them with the love of Christ.

— Catherine Edwards Sanders

NOTES

1. Barry A. Kosmin, Egon Mayer, and Ariela Keyser, American Religious Identification Survey (The Graduate Center of the City University of New York, 2001), 13. See also http://www.gc.cuny.edu/faculty/research_briefs/ aris/aris_index.htm.

2. Kathryn Fuller, Covenant of the Goddess, “Wiccan/Pagan Poll Final Results,” Press Release, October 7, 2000, www.cog.org/cogpoll_final.html.

3. Catherine Edwards Sanders, Wicca’s Charm: Understanding the Spiritual Hunger behind the Rise of Modern Witchcraft and Pagan Spirituality (Colorado Springs: WaterBrook Press, 2005).

4. All Scripture quotations are from the New International Version.

SEE PART ONE FOR SYNOPSIS OF ENTIRE EVALUATION

In part one we considered five questions that appropriately arise when Christians examine the core theory and practice of TPM: (1)Does it compromise Christian faith by its use of psychology? (2)Does it involve recovered memory therapy and visualization? (3)Does it illegitimately presume Christ is willing to cooperate with its process? (4)Does it function as extrabiblical revelation? (5)Does it place experience and feelings over Scripture and reason? After close analysis and a few caveats, the answer I offered to all of these questions was no. TPM per se is not compromising Christian faith with humanistic psychology and occultism, but rather operates within the parameters of orthodox Christian theology.

This does not mean that CRI endorses TPM’s theory of emotional pain or its claims to efficacy. These can only be validated by long-term, extensive, randomized control-group studies, which we have encouraged TPM founder Dr.EdM.Smith to continue pursuing. What this does mean is that CRI finds no biblical problem with Christians receiving TPM as such.

CRI does have concerns, however, about some of the teachings and claims Christians will be exposed to when working through TPM materials. For the sake of Christians who may participate in TPM as a result of our conclusions about its core theory and practice, we feel obliged to comment on its peripheral problems, as well as the steps that Ed Smith has taken to address these concerns.

TPM’S PERIPHERAL PROBLEMS

When I speak of TPM’s “peripheral” problems, I do not mean that they are unimportant; rather, I mean that they are not essential to the theory or practice of TPM. It would be a mistake not to distinguish between the “baby” of the core TPM process and the “bath water” of Smith’s peripheral interpretations, for one should neither throw out the baby while discarding the bath water nor soak in the bath water while embracing the baby.

Over the past three years CRI has engaged in far-reaching dialogue with Smith about the concerns raised below. He consistently maintains that he will change his stance on a subject if he becomes convinced that it is flawed, and his follow-up on this promise has been exceptionally good. At his request we critiqued a draft of the revised Theophostic Prayer Ministry Basic Seminar Manual that Smith published in 2005. It contains extensive changes from the previous edition, some of which Smith made before we established contact with him and others of which he made as a result of our input. It should be understood, then, that Smith’s theology is “in transition” (as he often puts it), and that the critique below is in response only to TPM’s published teachings up to February 2006.

An Inadequate Explanation for Sin in Believers

In his writings published prior to his dialogue with CRI, Smith affirmed the historic Protestant belief that unregenerate human beings have a persistent inclination toward evil, but he departed from most Protestants on what happens to people when they are regenerated. He took Pauline language that is usually understood to be forensic (i.e., referring to a believer’s legal or positional standing before God in Christ, e.g., 2Cor.5:21; Phil.3:9) as speaking not only of imputed, but also of imparted righteousness. In other words, when the Bible says believers are new creatures and the old has passed away (2Cor.5:17), Smith understood this to be saying that the sin nature inherited from Adam is replaced by the righteous nature of Christ.

Does this mean Christians no longer have an inherent inclination toward evil? One could easily draw this conclusion from TPM’s pre-2005 literature, but Smith clarified to me his belief that the same inner principle of sin that enslaves the unsaved continues to exert its pull on believers.¹ He rejects the term sin nature to describe this inner principle because to him a person’s nature is who he or she is, and the true identity of believers is in Christ and not in Adam. Christians still have their old propensity to sin, but they also have a new heart that ultimately leads them to repent and obey God. We find this explanation to be biblically acceptable, and Smith explicitly stated this view in his revised 2005 (current) training manual;² although, as we shall see, his previous emphasis still comes across in the current manual.

Even in his earlier works Smith made it clear that sinlessness is impossible for Christians in this life. The explanation he gave for this was rooted in his version of trichotomy, a belief he still holds, which is that humans are composed of three distinct but connected elements: spirit, soul, and body.³ Smith views the spirit of the Christian as his true self, which perfectly reflects the moral nature of Christ. The soul, on the other hand, is the mind of the Christian, which is the repository for all memories, including lie-based memories.⁴

Smith maintains that Christians often sin as a form of “pain management,” resorting to the pleasure of sin to gain temporary relief from the pain experienced when lie-based memories are triggered. Christians therefore desperately need to replace the lies in their thinking with truth, a process that Smith calls “mind renewal” (Rom.12:2). When not blocked by their minds, the perfect righteousness of their spirits can shine forth.

Smith is concerned that what he calls “worm” theology, which he believes is prevalent in churches today, leaves Christians feeling that they are wretched sinners with no hope of radical change. We agree that to tell Christians that they have no internal source of righteousness (the indwelling Christ) is to consign them to spiritual defeat; however, to tell them they have no sin nature is to leave them unprepared for the battle that lies before them.⁵

Scripture teaches that Christians continue to possess the fallen nature inherited from Adam (called “sin,” “the law of sin,” and “the flesh”; see, e.g., Rom.6:11‑23;7:14‑24; 1John1:8; Heb.12:1,4).⁶ The context of Romans7 supports,⁷ and Smith does not dispute, that Paul was writing as a Christian when he proclaimed that “nothing good dwells in me, that is, in my flesh” (v.18). We know that Christ, who is Goodness personified, dwells in the Christian (e.g., Rom.8:10), and so the flesh is clearly the Christian in-and-of himself—apart from the influence of Christ.

Smith’s previous description of the flesh in Romans7 and elsewhere as merely the appetites of the body that a Christian suffering in lie-based pain turns to for relief⁸ does not do justice to the profound dynamics that lead Christians into sin. Paul rather recounts finding a principle of evil within himself that led him into the very sin that he did not want to practice (vv.19‑23).

Christians throughout the ages have recognized themselves in Paul’s dilemma. This hopeless situation is only exacerbated when Christians try to lift themselves out of the flesh through the power of the flesh. Out of fleshly pride they would like to believe that their flesh is redeemable. They would like to think that if they consecrate themselves more fully, have more faith, or, perhaps, root out more lie-based memories, they will become worthy of God’s love and acceptance. This is why the experience Paul describes in Romans7 is meant to be instructive for all Christians: they all need to come to the end of themselves and to cry out with Paul, “Wretched man that I am! Who will set me free from the body of this death?” (v.24). Only then can they experience the glorious deliverance Paul proclaims in Romans8:2: “The law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus has set you free from the law of sin and death.”

When we despair of any attempt at establishing our own righteousness, we are finally ready to rest in that “righteousness which comes from God on the basis of faith” (Phil.3:3‑9), a righteousness that is outside of ourselves, located in Jesus Christ. When we know it is His righteousness and not our own, this divine righteousness can work through our lives without our taking any credit for it, which, if we did, would plunge us back into pride and the flesh (see Gal.2:20;6:14).⁹

These truths are critical to Christian growth and sanctification, and they will have difficulty penetrating Christian minds that have absorbed the idea that Christians do not have a sin nature, are inherently righteous, and sin mainly because of lie-based memories. When the depth of the sin problem is not recognized, then the solution that is offered—the means of sanctification that is proposed—will be inadequate.

A Correspondingly Inadequate View of Sanctification

Smith’s belief that Theophostic “mind renewal” can promote sanctification seems reasonable, up to a point. If a Christian man tends to snap at his wife when she unknowingly triggers some primal pain in his memory, being healed of that pain would make it easier for him to love her as Scripture commands (Eph.5:25). If a Christian woman abuses alcohol to find temporary escape from lie-based pain, it makes sense that she would be less motivated to become inebriated if the oppressive lies were replaced with liberating truth.

Many approaches to Christian sanctification don’t seem to prevent believers from sometimes behaving contrary to their conscious beliefs, and it seems possible that TPM could bring God’s truth to those deeper layers of their psyches. In other words, TPM may be able to deliver God’s truth to them as they really are, not just as they idealize themselves to be. If a sanctification approach only works in one’s better, more rational moments, then that would leave one’s worst part unchanged.

If TPM’s basic claims are confirmed through further research, CRI would find no problem in describing it as a valid approach to healing emotional wounds that also has applications to sanctification. We cannot, however, accept the proposal that Smith came across as making in his pre-2005 materials—that TPM is the key to sanctification.

Why Smith would have seen TPM in such a way is evident from his trichotomous explanation of sin in the Christian’s life described above. If the persisting problem of sin in the lives of Christians is largely rooted in lie-based memories, then a practice that renews their minds by replacing those lies with truth (e.g., TPM) would be the most direct way to deal with the problem.¹⁰

If, however, sin is ultimately rooted in something deeper and more fundamental to our natures, then a more radical approach to overcoming sin would be required. This is, in fact, what the Bible teaches. In Romans6:1‑14, 2Corinthians5:21, and elsewhere the apostle Paul offered the most radical solution possible: death. He taught that our old selves were hopelessly corrupted by sin and were only worthy of execution, and this death sentence was effected on the cross of Jesus Christ. In like manner we were raised with Christ as new creatures in His righteous image. God declares this to be not only a legal transaction, but also an eternal fact. It therefore provides the Christian with a basis for victory over sin even in this mortal life.

Smith has derided positional truth teaching based on Romans6 and other passages as living in denial (i.e., proclaiming that one is dead to sin when one is actually all too alive to it).¹¹ If someone has not reached the end of himself as Paul did in Romans7, then this truth will indeed do him little good; but I suspect I could gather enough testimonials of victory over besetting sins based on this truth to impress even Smith. What should be decisive in this discussion, however, is that when the subject of gaining victory over the power and pull of sin comes up in the New Testament, the refrain is consistent: by faith we are to daily “put on” or live according to the new self and nature that God has provided, and “put off” or count as dead the old (Rom.6:11‑14;8:12‑13;13:11‑14; Gal.5:16‑25;6:7‑8; Eph.4:22‑27; Col.3:1‑14).

In the years after Smith developed TPM he was zealous to interpret his new method of inner healing in biblical terms, and to place it within the context of Christian sanctification. The teaching that emerged from this effort is where many of the valid theological criticisms of TPM have been lodged. He took biblical texts and terms and infused them with meanings derived from the TPM process.

Smith’s most deliberate attempt to develop a theology of sanctification informed by Theophostic insights appeared in a several-page commentary on Romans7 that was included in Beyond Tolerable Recovery, the previous edition of his basic training manual. Smith described Paul’s inner conflict in markedly Theophostic terms: “I do believe this concept of members includes all that is not of his spirit man, which would include his yet to be renewed mind (which contains the experiential lies) and his physical body from which sin is played out. These subconscious members (experiential lies) are at odds with the logical truth he has stored in his conscious mind which he calls the righteous law of his mind” (emphasis in original).¹²

In Smith’s view, Paul’s deliverance (that he cried out for in vv.24‑25) came through Jesus “showing up” and revealing truth experientially, as He does in TPM; thus Smith intimately associated TPM processes with sanctification processes.¹³ “We are truly limited in our thinking and the experiential lies of our subconscious minds,” Smith wrote. “As the Lord is invited into the dark places, we are released to live out our righteousness which is fully known in our inner man….The law of the spirit of life (the truth that comes directly from the risen Lord) has set him free from the law of sin and death (the false law of lies that result in separation).”¹⁴

Recognizing that such interpretations are controversial, and not wanting to deter people from using TPM, Smith has jettisoned this and many other sections, including whole chapters, in his most recent manual. He has also scaled back on his association of TPM with sanctification. Despite these modifications, there remains an undercurrent throughout his materials that pulls the reader to TPM-like healing and experiential knowledge of truth as the most direct avenue to spiritual growth.¹⁵

It is indeed important for Christians to have experiential, and not merely intellectual, knowledge of such truths as the attributes of God, one’s own unworthiness, the indwelling of the Holy Spirit, the relationship with God as Father, and so forth (see, e.g., Job42:1‑6; Ps.34:8; Rom.8:14‑16; Gal.3:2; Eph.1:17‑19;3:16‑19; John4:13). This kind of fully orbed faith clearly should be a goal for all Christians; but how do we arrive at it? On the one hand, the Theophostic process cannot be found as such in Scripture, which is not to say that it is unbiblical, but rather that it is not normative. On the other hand, Scripture often sets forth as the means for obtaining such experiential knowledge the very practices that Smith pits against it.

Consider, for example, one of the more common junctures in the Christian walk, where the Christian must take her stand by faith in the testimony of Scripture despite, rather than because of, her feelings and experience. Smith does not deny that there is value to such faith without feelings, but he depicts it as inferior to taking such a stand effortlessly, through the emotional support of experiential knowledge.¹⁶ Scripture, however, not only presents such stark stands of faith as pleasing in the sight of God and critical to spiritual survival and growth, but also as the eventual avenue to experiential confirmation (Ps.27:13‑14; Rom.4:18‑22;15:13; 2Cor.5:6‑8; Heb.11:1‑6; 1Pet.1:3‑9;5:8‑10). It is often not the easy times, but the extremely difficult times when the believer gains her greatest experiential knowledge of Christ (2Cor.1:5;4:7‑11;12:7‑10; Phil.3:10). By continually beating the drum of one biblical truth (faith made easy by experiential knowledge) at the expense of others, Smith creates a false conflict that could discourage Christians from treading these other important, but more difficult, pathways to growth.

Smith also frequently pits self-effort against Theophostic healing as the means for achieving victory over sin. In his writings he equates “knowledge, controlled behavior, willpower, and self-effort” with “performance-based spirituality and works sanctification.”¹⁷ He contrasts this works righteousness with the “easy” and “maintenance free” victory that results when people receive truth experientially from Christ, as in a Theophostic session. He stresses, in fact, that “true victory is the absence of battle and struggle….Victory does not require me to defend the same territory in future battles” (emphasis in original).¹⁸

Smith’s choice of words here confuses the biblical concepts of salvation and sanctification. Both are by grace through faith, but salvation involves no human works (Eph.2:8‑9), whereas sanctification, by definition, is where human works enter the picture and become important. In other words, works done for salvation are unbiblical, but works that flow out of salvation are quite biblical and a sign of true salvation (e.g., James1:14‑26). The goal of sanctification is good works, and these are works that we do, even though they are always done in response to the work that the Holy Spirit is doing in us (Eph.2:10; Phil.2:12‑13). Self-effort and self-control in this sense may indeed be a fruit of the Spirit rather than a sign of legalism or works righteousness (Gal.5:22).

It could be demoralizing to tell someone who came to Christ out of homosexuality or drug addiction (examples that Smith has used for this teaching¹⁹) that, although he has daily resisted his urges for years, he has not been victorious. Perhaps his sexual orientation or addiction is so deeply integrated into his personality structure that abstinence is the most for which he can hope. He needs to be encouraged and affirmed for his perseverance in the face of constant temptation.

This emphasis can also set up a false expectation of the Christian life, one that Smith himself does not hold, that sanctification is supposed to be easy.²⁰ Through God’s providence the Christian life has a way of becoming extremely difficult at times for such purposes as refining and proving our faith and developing our character (see, e.g., 1Pet.1:6‑7;4:12‑13; James1:2‑4; Heb.12:1‑13; and the entire book of Job).

To Smith’s credit, the 2005 Basic Seminar Manual has deleted many references found in previous editions that contrasted works-based sanctification with Theophostic moments, and it makes clarifications such as, “Whenever a believer makes the choice to obey rather than sin he is experiencing victory even if it is through some effort or much effort.”²¹ Smith adds, “I do not want the person who may have to battle every day of his life to maintain his obedience, and does so, to feel that his success is a second-class victory or not true victory at all.”²²

The value of these helpful clarifications, however, is diluted three pages later when Smith reverts to affirming, “This is true victory, when I do not have to struggle, but simply walk in the power of His presence and peace” (emphasis added).²³ With references such as this still appearing in his manual and in his introductory book, Healing Life’s Hurts, Smith has further editorial work to do before this criticism of his teaching can be put to rest.

Excessive and Unsubstantiated Claims

Smith has been understandably enthusiastic about the promising results he believes he’s seen from TPM. In his zeal for his discovery, however, he has sometimes promoted it in such sweeping terms that it could be viewed not only as the key to sanctification, but as a cure-all for nonorganic²⁴ mental and emotional problems.

It remains to be established scientifically whether, and to what extent, emotional healing is possible through TPM. Its effectiveness with victims of child abuse receives abundant anecdotal support, with many testimonials of long-lasting healing (up to 10 years). There is also plenty of anecdotal support for TPM’s ability to free people from the effects of less-severe childhood traumas.

What seems much less possible scientifically, and much less supported even anecdotally, are the claims that Smith has made for TPM’s ability to cure chronic disorders that possibly have a mind-body connection (e.g., fibromyalgia²⁵). Smith’s past claims that TPM can provide maintenance-free healing of complex sexual and addictive disorders such as homosexuality and alcoholism are equally unsubstantiated. There has been no scientific research to support such claims and even the anecdotal evidence Smith cited usually did not encompass a sufficient period of time to mean anything.

If research one day could establish that TPM recipients have recovered from such profound conditions without relapse for, say, 15 years or more, then TPM would land a place on the therapeutic map and provoke a literal revolution in psychology. Until then, Smith should be circumspect about the claims he makes, or he will invite skepticism and scorn from counseling professionals. For example, professional counselor Rick Sholette comments, “We cannot isolate a traumatic injury to our non-physical self and surgically remove it without addressing the personal thoughts, feelings, values, attitudes, behaviors, goals, priorities, roles, relationships, wishes, motives, effort levels, interests, investments and more that have attended such pain for years or maybe decades.…It seems to me that Smith fails to sufficiently account for the systemic nature of serious wounding experiences and instead offers a simplistic quick-fix to complicated issues” (emphasis in original).²⁶

Smith does, however, make numerous qualifications regarding the limits of TPM’s efficacy. He acknowledges, for example, that not everyone experiences rapid and radical change after receiving TPM: “Where there is a void or absence of education in life skills, relational graces, life management, parenting responsibilities, money management, sexual orientation, etc. Theophostic Prayer Ministry does not claim to offer any support.…This is where ongoing processes in cognitive therapy, biblical counseling and discipleship can play an active role in ongoing ministry.”²⁷

Smith also says he has listened to CRI’s concerns about making unsubstantiated claims. In his introduction to the revised Basic Seminar Manual he states, “During the early years I prematurely raised the banner before there was any scientific evidence to substantiate what I was claiming….In retrospect, I regret that I did not wait to see what the research discovered.”²⁸

Acceptance and Furtherance of Satanic Ritual Abuse Claims

It is impossible to interact with TPM training seminars and materials for long without encountering discussion of satanic ritual abuse (SRA). Next to Smith’s teachings on the sin nature and sanctification, this emphasis on SRA has been CRI’s greatest cause for concern with TPM.

The heyday of SRA claims predates the birth of TPM in the mid 1990s. In the 1980s and early 1990s allegations of SRA usually emerged during counseling or therapy sessions that employed hypnosis, guided imagery, or some other form of directive therapy to treat problems such as depression and anxiety. During these sessions the therapist and client typically would work through displays of abreaction (e.g., wailing, writhing, vomiting, cathartic withdrawal, and vile and abusive speech) to uncover supposedly repressed traumatic memories from childhood. The memories told lurid tales of unspeakable sexual, psychological, and physical abuses at the hands of trusted people in the child’s life who were actually Satanists. The abuse was said to be part of ritualized Satan worship and often included deliberate and sadistic efforts to program the victim so that she (or he) could unconsciously be of service later in life to the conspiratorial designs of the satanic cult.

At the height of the SRA hysteria speculations were rife about a global, all-powerful satanic conspiracy. SRA “survivors” accused parents, pastors, teachers, and other authority figures of horrendous crimes. Law enforcement officials often took these allegations seriously, leading to many arrests and prosecutions and some incarcerations. Many of the accused were later vindicated, but often too late to restore their families, careers, and reputations.²⁹ Hundreds more have never been cleared.³⁰

During the 1990s both Christian and secular authors and groups (including CRI³¹) published critical evaluations of SRA claims. They pointed out that directive therapy and a phenomenon called false memory syndrome were sufficient to explain most of the accounts of SRA; that even if some isolated cases of satanic ritual abuse did occur, there was no objective evidence for a vast satanic conspiracy; that flawed arguments (e.g., the evidence is missing because the conspirators hid it) were used to support such a conspiracy; and that the details of the conspiracy bore striking resemblance to the accounts of alleged Satanists-turned-Christians that were later proved to be fraudulent.³² Public support for SRA claims soon declined, and today true believers in SRA are mostly limited to die-hard contingents of some therapeutic communities.

It is clear that there remains a population in the larger counseling client pool that will, if given the opportunity, display abreaction and tell gruesome SRA stories. Smith and other TPM facilitators have experienced this phenomenon numerous times. CRI continues to view recovered SRA memories with profound skepticism and suspects that if they are not implanted through directive therapy, then they are most likely originating from the minds of clients who have heard such stories and are desperate to become the center of attention. Smith, however, does not believe that these alternative explanations adequately account for most of the cases he has observed personally.³³ Smith and I have discussed the evidence both for false memories and repressed memories, which are considerations that bear heavily on this debate.³⁴

CRI’s concern about TPM’s promotion of SRA beliefs is mitigated by several factors. First, although Smith still is inclined to believe that ritual abuse occurs (whether by Satanists or other evil people), he has been rethinking and backing away from some of his teachings and practices in this area. During this period of reevaluation, he has pulled his Level II Advanced Training from the market, which was his primary vehicle for teaching on SRA.³⁵

Second, the TPM Guidelines (discussed in part one of this series) and all TPM training materials emphatically forbid the facilitator to ask leading questions or offer diagnoses, which should reduce the occurrence of implanted SRA memories. A TPM facilitator who is committed to SRA intervention may opt to disregard the Guidelines, but such blatant disregard for TPM principles presumably would be the exception and not the rule.

Third, Smith’s approach to dealing with SRA claims is among the most restrained and least sensational we have seen with SRA believers. He warns against (1)getting caught up in the victim’s “reality” and assuming “that the information surfacing in a victim’s memory is totally accurate or even accurate at all” (emphasis in original); (2)taking any action against the alleged perpetrators “unless you have evidence of crimes committed that would hold up in court”; and (3)seeking “to expose, rescue, or inform” alleged victims based on information that surfaces during the sessions. “In doing so,” he warns, “you may very well be caught up in falsehood yourself.”³⁶

Fourth, the TPM process is not even considered successful until the recipient is free of all bitterness toward her perpetrators. Under such conditions, the recipient is less likely to seek justice for wrongs she believes she endured.

This does not eliminate all cause for concern, however. If the alleged perpetrator is innocent, the TPM recipient’s choice to forgive him for wrongs he didn’t actually commit would not prevent harm from being done to their relationship by her believing he committed those wrongs. If he is a significant person in her life, then the consequences of this false belief would be severe.³⁷

Because claims of SRA are typically outlandish, whereas the objective evidence to support them is typically elusive, and because of the damage they can do to relationships and to innocent people’s lives, CRI cautions against getting caught up in this aspect of TPM. Directive therapy cannot be ruled out entirely even in the case of TPM. As Bob and Gretchen Passantino observe, it is possible for directive therapy to occur when the therapist has no awareness that he or she is leading the client: “Directive therapy can be as subtle as a meaningful silence, a nod of approval, or an assurance that the client is ‘believed.’”³⁸

Unbiblical Spiritual Warfare Teachings and Practices

TPM’s stance on spiritual warfare was once a major concern for CRI. Deliverance from demons, breaking demonic curses, and other unbiblical and superstitious practices were heavily emphasized in TPM teaching and practice. Smith has so radically changed his thinking and approach in this area that our remaining concerns are relatively minor; indeed, his biggest critics on this topic now are more likely to be his former colleagues in the Christian deliverance movement.

In his revised 2005 training manual Smith fully elaborates his belief that when the Bible says Satan was rendered powerless at the cross of Christ (Heb.2:14) it means this in the most literal and unqualified sense: Satan was stripped of all of his power as god of this world and the only influence he is still able to exert is the influence we give him through believing his lies.³⁹ Deliverance from demons and other sensational spiritual warfare antics are now considered distractions to the TPM process. In practical terms Smith’s approach to dealing with the demonic is very close to what CRI recommends in Hank Hanegraaff’s The Covering (W Publishing Group, 2002) and in various articles that have been published in the Christian Research Journal.⁴⁰

Smith continues to hold beliefs on spiritual warfare with which CRI takes issue:

· He believes that Christians can be demonized, although he uses the term generally to refer to demonic influence, which, in its most severe instances, can involve inhabitation of a person,⁴¹ but never involuntary control of that person. CRI, on the other hand, believes the term is never used biblically for mere external influence but always carries the meaning of both inhabitation and involuntary control; and, while Scripture teaches that Christians can be influenced by demons, it does not allow for them to be possessed. What CRI finds most problematic in deliverance circles is the belief that Christians can be controlled by demons and therefore need to be exorcised. For Smith, however, even the rare indwelling demon can only exert influence through telling lies, and Christians have the power to resist that influence.⁴²

· Smith believes that Adam forfeited his rulership of the earth to Satan and Satan held this position until Christ stripped him of his power through the resurrection.⁴³ CRI holds that when Scripture calls Satan the ruler or god of this world, it is referring to his spiritual dominion over fallen humanity and not to rulership of the physical earth.⁴⁴

· Smith’s pendulum has swung so far from the excesses of the deliverance movement that in CRI’s view he now underestimates the power of the Devil. CRI agrees that the Devil was defeated by Christ’s death and resurrection but, even as our redemption is assured but still in progress, so the outworking of Christ’s accomplished victory will not be complete until the second coming (Rev.20:2‑3). Christians therefore are still called to battle the Devil (Eph.6:10‑18;⁴⁵ Matt.16:18), which Smith denies.

Despite CRI’s ongoing differences with Smith on some spiritual warfare issues, we are encouraged by his movement toward a more biblical paradigm. The virtual absence of deliverance ministry, of unhealthy preoccupation with the demonic and excessive belief in its power, and of superstitious approaches to spiritual warfare⁴⁶ is refreshing, and we pray that other deliverance practitioners will follow Smith’s lead.

A NEED FOR DISCERNMENT

In many previously published critiques of TPM, concerns have been raised with which we at CRI concur and have even expanded on in this evaluation; nonetheless, CRI’s conclusions about TPM are generally less negative than those of previous critiques. The greatest reason for this disparity is the distinction CRI makes between the biblically sound core theory and practice of TPM and its problematic peripheral teachings, a distinction that was not made in any previous evaluation. Some critics will simply disagree with us that the core theory is biblically sound, but many others have failed to see that the problems they have correctly identified in TPM publications properly belong to the periphery and are not essential to the practice.

To illustrate this point, let us consider the core practice of TPM as described by Ed Smith himself:

The Theophostic prayer ministry process contains four primary components that are essential to bringing about mind renewal, subsequent release of emotional pain and the presence of peace. These components are: 1)identifying the person’s current presenting emotion, 2)encouraging the recipient of ministry to identify the original memory holding the falsehood, 3)discerning the lie-based thinking or lie message held in the memory which is causing the emotional duress, and 4)offering the exposed lie up to the Lord to receive His truth perspective.⁴⁷ (emphases in original)

If these four components are the essential ingredients of TPM, where do Smith’s controversial views on the sin nature, sanctification, satanic ritual abuse, and spiritual warfare necessarily fit into the practice? The answer is that they do not: someone who disagrees with Smith on all of these issues can still engage in the four essential components of TPM. That person would simply need to forego the problematic peripheral teachings when they come up in TPM training materials, which they do much less often in the revised 2005 training manual. When they do appear, often in modified form, Smith usually identifies them as his own personal theology and stresses that the reader can take or leave them while still practicing TPM.

In addition to discerning these teachings, the TPM participant also should be aware that some of these peripheral problems emerge from the experiences themselves: some people receiving TPM “recover” memories of satanic ritual abuse; sometimes phenomena occur that suggest demonic possession. We urge all TPM participants to maintain a healthy skepticism when confronted with such phenomena.

Biblical or factual verification always should be required before accepting a claim that emerges from subjective experience. Spiritual and psychological sources for phenomena are often elusive and insidiously deceptive. They lead people to accept many unbiblical and fantastic beliefs, such as UFO encounters, past lives, visions of Mary, and visitations from nonphysical entities. Naïve subjectivism is a major problem in American culture and, too often, in the church. Such Christian conformity to the thinking of this world is the opposite of mind renewal in the biblical sense (Rom.12:2). We are called to be a part of the solution rather than the problem.

notes

1. Ed M. Smith, telephone conversation with author, October 18, 2004.

2. Ed M. Smith, Theophostic Prayer Ministry Basic Seminar Manual [hereafter BSM] (Campbellsville, KY: New Creation Publishing, 2005),43.

3. CRI and most theologians hold to dichotomy: the belief that humans are composed of only two elements: spirit/soul (i.e., immaterial) and body (i.e., material).

4. See part one for an explanation of lie-based memories.

5. For a thorough treatment and biblical reflection on this topic, see the sidebar “How to Win the War Within,” in Elliot Miller, “The Bondage Maker: Examining the Message and Method of Neil T. Anderson (Part One: Sanctification and the Believer’s Identity in Christ),” Christian Research Journal 21, 1 (1998): 22‑25 (http://www.equip.org/ free/DA081.htm).

6. The term nature is subject to more than one definition, but in the sense Christian theologians use it here it means disposition, inclination, or bent—the principle or law that governs one’s behavior.

7. For example, only a regenerate person could say, “I joyfully concur with the law of God in the inner man” (v.22, NASB [here and throughout]). Furthermore, if Paul were referring to his pre-Christian, unregenerate self, he would not have had to qualify his affirmation that “nothing good dwells in me” with the clarification, “that is, in my flesh” (v.18).

8. Ed M. Smith, Beyond Tolerable Recovery, 4th ed. (Campbellsville, KY: Alathia Publishing, 2000),232‑35.

9. On reading a draft of this article, Smith affirmed his agreement with this and most of the points made both in this section on sin and the one following on sanctification; our evaluation, however, ultimately must be based on his published work.

10. Smith has always maintained that this would not eliminate the need for other means of Christian growth, such as Bible study, prayer, and Christian fellowship and accountability.

11. This derision has been toned down in the current manual, but it still occurs. See Smith, BSM, 162, 262, and 292.

12. Smith, Beyond, 234.

13. Ibid.

14. Ibid., 235–36.

15. See, e.g., Smith, BSM, 279.

16. See, as one of many examples, ibid., 262.

17. Edward M. Smith, Healing Life’s Hurts (Elk Horn, KY: New Creation Publishing, 2005), 59; Smith, BSM, 279.

18. Smith, Healing Life’s Hurts, 65.

19. Regarding homosexuality, see Edward M. Smith, Healing Life’s Deepest Hurts (Ann Arbor, MI: Servant Publications, 2002),19. This example was deleted from the latest revision of this book, but the example regarding addiction stands. See Smith, Healing Life’s Hurts,58‑59.

20. Smith has affirmed to me that perseverance through suffering—whether from illness, circumstances, or as-yet-unhealed lie-based pain—is an important and enduring aspect of Christian growth. See, e.g., Smith, BSM, 19.

21. Ibid., 21.

22. Ibid.

23. Ibid., 24. See also 43, where a similar statement is made.

24. By this I mean nonbiological; that is, psychological problems that originate in one’s thought life rather than in one’s physiology.

25. Ibid., 292.

26. Rick Sholette, “A Brief Evaluation of Theophostic Ministry (TPM)” (self-published paper, 2005), 8.

27. Ed Smith, “How Does TPM Help Where There Is Absence of…?” Theophostic Prayer Ministries, http://www.theophostic.com/displaycommon.cfm?an=1&subarticlenbr=60.

28. Smith, BSM, 7.

29. See, e.g., Jon Trott, “Satanic Panic: The Ingram Family and Other Victims of Hysteria in America,” Cornerstone 20, 95 (1991):8‑10,12.

30. The source of this fact is Gretchen Passantino, a Christian authority on SRA claims, who was kind enough to provide me with extensive feedback to the first draft of this document.

31. See Bob Passantino and Gretchen Passantino, “The Bondage Maker: Examining the Message and Method of Neil T. Anderson (Part Four: Spiritual Warfare and the Myth of Satanic Conspiracies and Ritual Abuse),” Christian Research Journal 21, 4 (1999): 10‑19 (http://www.equip.org/free/DA084.htm); and Bob Passantino and Gretchen Passantino, “The Hard Facts about Satanic Ritual Abuse,” Christian Research Journal 14, 3 (1992): 20‑23, 32‑34 (http://www.equip.org/free/DO040.htm).

32. See, e.g., Bob Passantino, Gretchen Passantino, and Jon Trott, “Satan’s Sideshow: The True Lauren Stratford Story,” Cornerstone18, 90 (1990):23‑28 (http:// www.cornerstonemag.com/features/iss090/sideshow.htm); and Mike Hetenstein and Jon Trott, Selling Satan: The Tragic History of Mike Warnke (Chicago: Cornerstone Press, 1993).

33. Ed M. Smith, “SRA Essentials,” Journal of the International Association for Theophostic Ministry 1 (2003):27.

34. For a good treatment of the evidence for false memories I recommend Paul Simpson, Second Thoughts: Understanding the False Memory Crisis and How It Could Affect You (Nashville: Thomas Nelson Publishers, 1996). For a good treatment of the evidence for repressed memories Smith recommends Jennifer J. Freyd, Betrayal Trauma: The Logic of Forgetting Child Abuse (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996).

35. See Smith, BSM, 318.

36. Ibid., 23.

37. Smith does address this concern in the revised 2005 edition of his manual. See Smith, BSM, 276.

38. Passantino and Passantino, “Hard Facts,” 22.

39. See Smith, BSM, chap. 10.

40. See especially Brent Grimsley and Elliot Miller, “Can a Christian Be ‘Demonized’?” Christian Research Journal16,1 (1993): 16‑19,37‑38 (http://www.equip.org/free/ DD075.htm).

41. Smith, BSM, 204.

42. See, e.g., ibid., 212.

43. See, e.g., ibid., 206.

44. See Elliot Miller, “The Bondage Maker: Examining the Message and Method of Neil T. Anderson (Part Two: Spiritual Warfare and the ‘Truth Encounter’),” Christian Research Journal 21, 2 (1998): 12‑16 (http://www.equip.org/free/DA082.htm).

45. Smith acknowledges that Christians still need to resist the Devil, but he weakly argues that this is not battle, since it is not offensive.

46. For example, anointing homes with oil, “spiritual mapping” to battle “territorial spirits,” “warfare prayers,” endlessly renouncing one’s own sins or the sins of one’s ancestors to break the Devil’s power, and verbally breaking curses.

47. Smith, BSM, 63.

SYNOPSIS

Theophostic Prayer Ministry (TPM), founded by Ed M. Smith in 1996, is an approach to “mind renewal,” or the healing of emotional pain. TPM is perhaps the fastest-growing method of inner healing or healing of memories in evangelical churches today. After an exhaustive evaluation, the Christian Research Institute (CRI) detects nothing unbiblical about the core theory and practice of TPM. The theory seems elegant in its profound simplicity, and the anecdotal reports of its effectiveness in practice justify further investigation; nonetheless, much more scientific research needs to be done before even the more modest claims of TPM can be validated, and some of the extravagant claims seem unlikely ever to be established.

CRI does have concerns about several peripheral issues regarding TPM, but we have been favorably impressed by Smith’s openness to constructive criticism and change. We caution Christians who practice or receive TPM to be discerning about Smith’s teachings on the sin nature, sanctification, and satanic ritual abuse, and to be aware that, despite major improvements, there are still several aspects of Smith’s teaching on spiritual warfare that CRI does not endorse.

“Theophostic Ministry has totally changed my life over the past three years.…The major depression, shame, co-dependent behaviour patterns, suicidal thinking, and agony is [sic] gone. I don’t even remember all the details of all the memories until I look into old journals. And then it’s: ‘Oh yes, I remember’—but there’s no pain.”

—Karen Hayward, Theophostic Prayer Ministry recipient¹

“Dr. Ed Smith claims ‘Theophostics’ [sic] was a direct revelation given from God, to him, in 1996.…Did God allow hurting people to stay in their emotional pain, for thousands of years, waiting for Ed Smith’s breakthrough in psychotherapy? Surely not.…Jesus appearing to the client is the same as the New Age practice of channeling.”

—Whitedove 7 (Internet alias), former Theophostic Prayer Ministry recipient and facilitator²

Across America and, indeed, the world, a 10-year-old inner healing ministry originating out of Campbellsville, Kentucky, is provoking passionate pro and con pronouncements such as those presented above. Theophostic Prayer Ministry (TPM) is perhaps the fastest-growing approach to inner healing or healing of memories³ in evangelical churches today, and its use spans almost all denominational lines.

Founder Ed M. Smith says that Theophostic Prayer Ministries is “primarily a publishing company that produces training materials, books and video tapes for pastors, mental health professionals and lay ministers. We have distribution centers in several foreign countries and have trained people in over 120 countries worldwide.”⁴ The ministry consistently has sent out about 1,000 training manuals each month for the past several years to people interested in facilitating TPM sessions.⁵

Smith holds a doctorate in pastoral ministry from Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary and a master’s degree in education (with a focus in marriage and family counseling) from Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary. After serving for 17 years as a Southern Baptist pastor, he embarked on a full-time counseling practice.

TPM began in 1996 when Smith reached an impasse in his ability to help adult victims of childhood sexual abuse. He could help them realize intellectually that whatever they experienced in their past was no longer threatening them in their present, but he could not help them to feel that truth emotionally. One night he was driving home from a group session and he cried out to God, “I can’t do this anymore.”⁶ Smith says that in answer to this desperate prayer the Lord opened the Scriptures to him so that he could see that the missing ingredient in his counseling ministry had been the Lord Himself. He had acknowledged God before and after each session, but the sessions themselves did not allow for the presence of the Holy Spirit. Once Smith began to invite Jesus into his sessions, Theophostic Prayer Ministry was born.⁷ Theophostic is derived from two Greek words that together mean “the light of God.”

THE CORE THEOPHOSTIC THEORY AND METHOD

One of the elements that make TPM a strikingly distinct approach to healing emotional pain is the central place facilitators seek to give the Spirit of Christ in the sessions. Even a skeptical observer would have to acknowledge that the sessions proceed as if three parties are involved: the facilitator, the recipient, and Jesus. The role that Jesus is believed to play is better understood in light of the core theory behind TPM.

TPM is based on the premise that one’s present emotional pain is usually rooted in the past—not in past experiences per se, but in the interpretations one assigns to them. Smith argues that when people are traumatized, Satan, other people, or their own minds often will supply them with a false interpretation of the event. For example, if a young girl is sexually molested by her father, the thought might register in her mind at some point afterward, “You didn’t cry out for help. You must have wanted it. You’re dirty.” Now, as an adult, the molestation survivor is unable to engage in healthy marital relations because of feeling sexually defiled.

In Smith’s view, emotional pain need not be rooted in severe trauma; it may stem from lesser events such as the harsh or incessant criticism of a parent or teacher, the cruelty of classmates, or the humiliation of a public failure. In other words, not only do the grievously abused possess memories that are based on lies or false impressions (i.e., lie-based), but all of us do, and these are at the root of much of our present pain and irrational, undesirable behavior. Such memories typically recall childhood experiences, but there are exceptions. Whenever a present situation is similar enough to a past traumatic experience, it can trigger that lie-based thinking and our reaction may be out of proportion to the present circumstance. If, for example, a man’s father was constantly critical of decisions he attempted to make on his own, he may lose his temper when his wife innocently asks him what he’s doing because he thinks she’s questioning his judgment.

Drawing on current brain theory,⁸ Smith argues that such primal traumatic experiences and their false interpretations are registered in the right side of our brains, while our ability to understand data intellectually and objectively is the function of the left side of our brains.⁹ He believes this explains why he was having no success convincing adult survivors of sexual abuse that they were no longer in danger: in order to be delivered from the emotional power of those lies, the survivors would need to learn the truth experientially, in a manner similar to how the lies were implanted in their minds.

Theophostic Prayer Ministry therefore unfolds along the following lines: after receiving the recipient’s permission to do so, the facilitator invites Jesus into the session and asks Him to reveal His truth about the memories that will be brought to mind. The recipient is then asked to try to identify the memory where she (or he) first felt the emotions that are troubling her in the present (e.g., feeling unloved). She does this by closing her eyes and mentally drifting back through time, following the “smoke trail” or “emotional echo” of the pain until she reaches a significant memory that matches the pain (e.g., her single mother turned over custody of her to a resentful aunt in order to pursue a relationship with a man who didn’t want the child). The facilitator encourages the recipient to describe the memory and then to describe how that remembered experience makes her feel (e.g., “I am all alone”). This is where the lie is manifest.

The facilitator asks the recipient to rate how true the interpretation of the experience she has just described feels to her. If it feels very true, he suspects he may have found the original lie and encourages the recipient to feel and “embrace” that emotional pain. He then asks Jesus what He wants the recipient to know about the memory content she has just surfaced. The recipient waits on Jesus for an answer, and, predictably, a vision, words, or realization will be impressed on her mind. This answer may be biblical truth (e.g., “I will never leave you nor forsake you”) or factual truth (e.g., she might have been deserted as a child, but she now has a loving husband and many caring people in her family and church who are there for her). The facilitator then again asks the recipient whether the previous interpretation of the experience feels true, and, again predictably, it no longer feels true at all. The facilitator keeps the session focused on that memory until the recipient can remember it with “perfect peace” (i.e., with no hint of the emotional pain and conflict previously associated with it).

If such peace is not achieved, then the facilitator assumes that the original memory or further lies are yet to be uncovered, and the process is repeated through as many memories and lies as necessary for the pain to be completely healed. Smith says that with an experienced facilitator, resolution of lie-based pain in a specific area of memory can usually be achieved in one session, although other lies may need to be dealt with before overall improvement is noted.¹⁰

Smith’s interpretation of what is happening in such sessions is that in the same experiential manner in which the lie was first believed, Jesus now replaces it with His truth. He enters into the recipient’s memory so that she can reexperience the event with Him in the midst of it, giving her a true perspective of what happened: “Jesus brings present-tense experience into a past-tense experience creating a new experience. As a ministry facilitator I cannot do this. I can bring information into a past-tense experience but new data rarely has transforming power in such cases. However, new experience can override old experience.”¹¹ Smith understands this divine action to be the progressive “mind renewal” mentioned in Romans12:2 and related passages, and he believes it plays a central role in the sanctification process (a view I will critique in part two).

Smith says that people who go through this process are healed in the area of their emotional lives that Jesus touched. If a situation similar to the original one now comes up, it no longer triggers the same irrational and harmful emotional reactions. He further maintains that this healing is both lasting and maintenance free for a wide variety of emotional and behavioral problems, including depression, general anxiety, anger issues, phobias, panic attacks, sexual addiction, and eating disorders. Recipient and facilitator testimonials in support of these claims abound in TPM literature, on the Internet, and during TPM events.

EVALUATION OF THE CORE THEOPHOSTIC THEORY AND METHOD

Christian Research Institute (CRI) finds nothing in TPM’s core theory and practice that is inconsistent with Scripture. It certainly fits the biblical worldview to hold that believing lies oppresses or injures people and replacing those lies with truth frees or heals them. The theory that the emotional pain that haunts many people’s lives (including Christians) is rooted in false beliefs associated with past experiences rather than the experiences themselves seems elegant in its profound simplicity, and the proposal that Satan is often the source of those lies while Jesus is the source of the truth that dispels them is again consistent with Scripture (e.g., John8:44;14:6;18:37). This emphasis on conforming one’s beliefs to truth is entirely biblical (Ps.43:3;51:6; Prov.23:23; 1Cor.3:6; Eph.4:14‑15,25;5:8;6:14), and the complete dependence on Christ in ministry to the hurting that TPM advocates, to the point of giving Him the central place in that ministry, is commendable at least in concept and warrants consideration.

We also find the numerous public testimonies of facilitators and recipients for TPM’s lasting efficacy to be intriguing enough to encourage and justify further investigation, but such anecdotal support is entirely insufficient to establish TPM’s claims. Rigorous scientific testing is needed to demonstrate that TPM gets results superior to all or most other varieties of inner healing/therapy and is not simply reaping the common benefits of counseling (e.g., the placebo effect and the therapeutic value of catharsis in a caring environment). Researchers have conducted some initial surveys and case studies that provide favorable results for TPM,¹² but much more extensive and rigorous testing (e.g., randomized control group studies) will be required to establish its claims. CRI thus finds no biblical or spiritual problem with Christians engaging in the TPM core process (but please read part two where several concerns about Smith’s overall teaching will be identified), but at this early stage of the research we can endorse neither TPM’s theory of emotional pain nor its specific claims of efficacy.

ADDRESSING BASIC CONCERNS ABOUT TPM

There are, however, specific concerns that Christians could raise regarding TPM’s core theory and practice that should not be ignored. These include:

1. Does TPM Engage in “Psychoheresy”?

When Ed Smith first founded this ministry he called it TheoPhostic Counseling, but “prayer ministry” is much more descriptive of what goes on in a Theophostic session than is “counseling,” which often connotes giving advice or offering “directive” psychotherapy. The first principle in the Theophostic Prayer Ministry Guidelines, which are available on the TPM Web site, affirms, “Theophostic Ministry is prayer not counseling. Therefore I will not be offering you counsel but rather interceding with you to God. I will be ministering with you in prayer seeking to help you discover with the guidance of the Holy Spirit, the root sources of the emotional pain in your life.”¹³

Counseling does have a broader range of meaning than simply “giving advice,” and in some of these senses TPM sessions could be called counseling. There is a significant difference, however, between TPM on the one hand, and Freudian, Rogerian, and other “nondirective” psychotherapies on the other hand: the sole function of the Theophostic facilitator is to facilitate the recipient’s encounter with Jesus, and it is believed to be Jesus who does the actual therapeutic work. That hardly sounds like any known model of psychology.

It is true, however, that TPM incorporates in its theory and approach concepts found in some schools of the wide field of psychology. These include the idea of a subconscious, the belief that psychological and emotional problems can be rooted in the past and that revisiting such past experiences may be necessary to resolve those problems, and the describing of such problems as wounds that need to be healed. TPM also uses psychological terms to describe phenomena believed to be encountered in the sessions, such as repression, dissociation, and abreaction (the acting out of repressed emotional conflict in sometimes extreme words or behavior).

Some Christians will reject TPM simply for its use of elements of psychotherapy, since such Christians reject all forms of psychotherapy. Still other Christians who accept some forms of psychotherapy will reject TPM because they do not believe in revisiting past experiences to deal with present problems, or they disagree with some other aspect of its theory and practice. These positions are certainly legitimate options within the broader field of orthodox Christianity.

We must, however, advise against the position of Martin and Deidre Bobgan of Psychoheresy Awareness Ministries, which holds that any attempt to integrate any of the vast and often disparate elements of psychotherapy with theology constitutes “psychoheresy” and a distortion of the Christian faith.¹⁴ Not surprisingly, the Bobgans have published a book accusing TPM of heresy.¹⁵

The Bobgans’ use of the word heresy for teachings and ideas that do not actually constitute denials of essential doctrines of the Christian faith is unfortunate. As I have argued previously in this magazine,¹⁶ there are different degrees of possible error in the Christian church. If presumed errors are treated as heresies that do not actually rise to that level, it will unnecessarily polarize Christians and generate more heat than light on important topics that deserve dispassionate discussion and debate for the good of the body of Christ.

2. Does TPM Involve Recovered Memories and Visualization?

These concerns have been raised by the Bobgans, Christian journalist Jan Fletcher in her book Lying Spirits,¹⁷ and several others. CRI is certainly sympathetic with such concerns in general. We have published articles warning about the dangers of recovered memory therapy as a form of illicit directive counseling that can implant suggestions in clients’ minds, leading to false memories and false accusations against innocent people.¹⁸ We have also published articles that warn against the dangers of visualization and guided imagery as activities that potentially can lead to altered states of consciousness, demonic delusion, false views of reality, and occult attempts to manipulate God, Jesus, and reality according to one’s own desires or understanding.¹⁹

Such concerns certainly are relevant when evaluating TPM, since forgotten memories are sometimes recovered and visions are one way that recipients allegedly receive truth from Jesus. To accuse TPM of practicing recovered memory therapy and visualization, however, is to betray either ignorance or a bias against TPM that refuses to be corrected by clear and consistent facts. The official Theophostic Prayer Ministry Guidelines (see n.13), which are given out to all facilitators as well as to recipients, repeatedly affirm that the TPM facilitator will avoid:

1. using all forms of guided imagery and directed visualization;

2. providing any informational input to the recipient;

3. making any suggestions as to what his (or her) memory content or lie-based thinking may contain;

4. asking any questions that are directive, suggestive, or that in any way reflect the facilitator’s assumptions rather than the information that the recipient is surfacing;

5. interpreting or explaining any information, visions, dreams, or other “inner mind realities” that the recipient describes;

6. supplying the recipient with what the facilitator thinks he needs to know, including the facilitator’s opinions and insight as well as any visions, prophecies, or words of knowledge the facilitator may believe she has received for the benefit of the recipient.

I spent a week in May 2003 at TPM’s Campbellsville headquarters observing an entire Theophostic basic training seminar and witnessing numerous actual TPM sessions. Never once did Smith veer from these principles,²⁰ which also are emphasized repeatedly and consistently throughout TPM materials. (It should be clarified at this point that TPM uses the term directive in a limited sense and does provide structure and direction to its sessions, such as putting supposed truth from Jesus to biblical and other tests. These factors will be discussed in more detail under concern no.4 and also in part two.)

Most of the memories revisited in TPM sessions were known to the recipients prior to the sessions, but occasionally memories do surface that can be called “recovered.” This fact raises a valid concern that will be addressed thoroughly in part two, but nonetheless there are several significant differences between TPM and recovered memory therapy per se, which Smith demonstrated in an article in the Theophostic journal that is also available on the TPM Web site.²¹

Fletcher adds to the charge that TPM involves visualization a laundry list of occult practices, including mysticism, hypnosis, divination, and Gnosticism.²² She specifically worries that the recipients’ drifting back through past memories opens them up to altered states of consciousness (ASCs) and lying spirits (hence the title of her book).

As CRI’s specialist in research of ASCs, mysticism, and the occult for the past 29 years, I find no foundation for Fletcher’s concerns. She stretches the meaning of the word Gnosticism (which is the quest for Self-knowledge; i.e., the knowledge of one’s own supposed divinity) beyond recognition in order to apply it to TPM (which is simply seeking the “knowledge” of the harmful lies that the individual believes). Mysticism likewise involves the quest for experiential union with the Divine and presupposes that experience is the ultimate test of truth; but neither of these features applies to Theophostic.²³ Fletcher uses the term divination²⁴ with reference to a practice that more properly should be called spiritism.²⁵ To charge TPM with spiritism, in turn, begs the question of whether the “spirit” they seek to “open themselves up to” is a lying spirit or is, in fact, Jesus. If the Jesus sought in TPM is the Jesus of orthodoxy (and everything I have seen indicates that He is²⁶), then what TPM does should rather be called what Smith calls it: prayer.

Visualization is an active use of the imagination to harness creative energy that can be used as a stepping stone to make contact with spirits (whether “Jesus” or some other entity). Such an approach to encountering Jesus is fatally flawed because the subject is the one who determines what Jesus says or does. This critical flaw can be found in many varieties of inner healing, but not in TPM.

Unlike visualization, in TPM the subject is in a state of passive trust in the Spirit of God and there is no active effort to shape the spiritual experience. This passivity, on the other hand, is not the dangerous passivity of hypnosis or other ASCs, where a trance state is cultivated that can lead to a loss of ego boundaries (i.e., blurring of the subject/object distinction), a feeling of oneness with the universe, and the intrusion of spirit entities into the thought void that has been deliberately created. The TPM process by contrast is a simple drifting back from memory to memory with the goal of locating the original lie, in faith that at that point Christ will replace the lie with His truth. This activity neither empties the mind of content (as in meditation) nor uses the imagination as a springboard to the spiritual realm (as in visualization). It would seem the only legitimate concern that can be raised about this process is whether such faith is presumptuous. If it were, then what the subject experienced would be the product of his own mind rather than a true work of the Spirit of Christ.

3. Does TPM Illegitimately Presume That Christ Is Willing to Cooperate with the Process?

As far as CRI is concerned, a major question regarding the legitimacy of the TPM approach is whether the participants’ trust that Jesus will answer their prayers for emotional healing is warranted. Unlike the Word of Faith movement and some other teachings that presumptuously “claim” the presence and power of Jesus for various purposes, it seems that a case can be made that TPM’s trust that Jesus responds to participants’ in-session prayers is biblically warranted.

Theophostic prayer is predicated on the assumptions that (1)if we ask our Father for a loaf of bread, He will respond with bread and not a serpent (i.e., we will receive what we need through the agency of His Spirit rather than what would harm us through the agency of a demon: Luke11:9‑13); (2)if we ask for wisdom, we will receive what we request as long as we don’t doubt that God will answer us (James1:5‑6); (3)likewise, if we ask for anything according to His will, we can be assured that we will receive it, as long as we ask with confident expectation (1John5:14–15; Mark11:23–24); and (4)whereas God may have a positive purpose for leaving us in physical or circumstantial afflictions, He has no positive reason to leave us languishing in Satan’s lies, and so if we are willing to face the truth about such beliefs, He is willing to reveal it to us. This seems to be a fact that is intuitively true, based on the character of God revealed in Scripture, and that can be inferred from the combined teaching of the following Scriptures: Psalm25:5,8‑14;84:11; Hebrews6:18; 1Timothy2:3–4; John3:19–21;7:17; 1John1:5–7;3:8 (cf.John8:43‑47, etc.).

As Smith put it when I raised this question to him, we know God wants us to walk in truth and light, not in deception and darkness. When we meet His criteria—when we’re willing to face the truth and do His will—He will “show up.” Theophostic prayer for healing of emotional pain caused by believing lies therefore may be a legitimate exercise of stepping out on faith in God’s promises and Fatherly love rather than an act of presumption.

4. Does TPM Function as Extrabiblical Revelation?

Some Christians understandably would have difficulty accepting the notion that Jesus so directly, explicitly, and regularly answers specific requests for truth about issues in our lives. A very legitimate concern would be that these extrabiblical visions of, and words or realizations from, Jesus would begin to rival the Bible as a source of authoritative revelation in the believer’s life.

The Bobgans maintain exactly this in their book on TPM. In the first chapter, which they titled “TheoPhostic Counseling: Latter-Day Revelation from God?” they assert that Smith claims he received TPM as a revelation from God. Smith, however, emphatically denies this: “I am not saying I had a divine revelation, because I did not. I simply began to understand Scripture where I had not before.”²⁷

The fact that Smith denies any claim to new revelation does not resolve all concerns in this regard. A natural question to ask Smith is, “How did the church survive and grow for two millennia without TPM?” His reply is that God “has always used the events of our lives to trigger and expose our lie-based thinking and surface our inner pain” as part of His overall work of sanctifying and renewing the minds of His people.²⁸ Smith clarifies that he “merely took what God does on a regular basis with His children and put it into a systematic format.”²⁹ He further admits, “The truth is, Christian growth and maturity occur in the lives of Christians who are faithful and seek the face of God, whether or not they know about Theophostic Prayer Ministry.”³⁰

Smith also clarifies that no new truth is being revealed to TPM recipients. God is instead personalizing for them the truth already revealed in Scripture. “We do not need new truth,” he writes, “because the written Word contains all the truth we need.”³¹

There are built-in constraints in the Theophostic process (when followed correctly³²) that should prevent TPM from leading its adherents away from the Bible. Smith stresses that TPM is meant to complement and not replace Bible study and the other means of Christian discipleship. He repeatedly emphasizes that TPM experiences are not infallible and need to be put to the test. He identifies four possible sources for the “truth” one receives during TPM: (1)oneself, (2)the facilitator, (3)an evil spirit, or (4)the Holy Spirit.³³ The criteria for testing the received “truth” include conformity to Scripture and the fruit or results of the experience in the believer’s life.³⁴ One of the Theophostic Prayer Ministry Guidelines reads: “I will be careful to discern and call attention to any aspect of ‘truth’ or visual you might receive during a ministry session that does not appear to be authentic and or Biblically consistent. Should this happen, I will encourage you to determine what is true or not and where the false information originated.”³⁵

Ed Smith is a Southern Baptist with no direct connections to the charismatic movement or charismatic theology, and yet it seems that charismatics would more likely feel at home with TPM than would noncharismatics. If one can reconcile charismatic visions and prophecies from Jesus with biblical authority, one should also be able to reconcile TPM experiences with biblical authority. If one views any contemporary words that are supposedly from Jesus as a threat to biblical authority, one will likely have difficulties accepting the legitimacy of TPM experiences.

5. Does TPM Place Experience and Feelings over Scripture and Reason?

To the question of whether TPM functions as extrabiblical revelation can be added the related question of whether TPM values experience and feelings above Scripture and reason. This is how seemingly all of Smith’s critics understand TPM. For example, in “Theophostics [sic]: Unbiblical Teaching Wedded to Mystical Experience,” Bob DeWaay writes: “He teaches that feelings are the ultimate test of reality and that they trump any of our beliefs that are based on the objective teachings of Scripture.”³⁶ This is far from true, and yet to an extent Smith invites this reaction because he has not been careful in his choice of terms to describe TPM. In past editions of his basic training manual he has spoken of “logical thinking” as an obstacle that can keep a person from moving forward, of moving from logic to experience, and of how people need to experience Jesus, not hear more information.³⁷ I raised this concern with Smith and he removed the most egregious examples in the 2005 revision of his manual, but further changes are needed to eliminate the problem.

Thorough exposure to TPM materials should make it clear that Smith places the Bible over all other sources of knowledge and does not promote irrationalism. Many of Smith’s statements that to critics seem to promote experience or feelings over reason are actually promoting one apprehension of logic over another in the context of what works in emotional healing. This can best be explained by citing the common Christian distinction between “head knowledge” and “heart knowledge.” Head knowledge is a merely conceptual understanding of biblical truth that makes no difference in a person’s life because its profound spiritual relevance is not grasped. Heart knowledge is when the relevance of the same truth impacts the Christian’s entire being, including on the experiential and emotional levels. In this sense, truth can be in the head without being in the heart, but it can’t be in the heart without being in the head. What is understood by the heart is just as logical as what is understood by the head, only its spiritual relevance is appreciated more fully.

This translation of truth from mere conception to deeply felt conviction occurs when the Holy Spirit illuminates the believer’s heart to understand the spiritual significance of Scripture (see, e.g., Eph.1:17‑18). It also occurs when the believer puts his or her faith in the Word into practice (see, e.g., James1:22‑25). According to Smith, it further occurs when the Holy Spirit shines the light of truth into the darkness of deception that had been holding a Christian in emotional pain (what Smith calls a “Theophostic moment”). It could be that in all three of these cases the Spirit of God is affecting that part of the human brain that registers experiences (the Holy Spirit’s illumination of the Word itself being an experience), and that this helps explain the vast difference between head knowledge and heart knowledge.

In the Theophostic sessions I observed, logic was always employed and never put on the shelf as the recipient became convinced of the truth that put his or her past experience in a new light. It is true that the recipients sometimes were stuck in their own finite and fallible conception of logical truth and needed to be moved on to a place where they could see their situation from a more divine and truly logical perspective. This, I am convinced both from the context of his teachings and from directly discussing it with him, is what Smith meant when he unwisely spoke of moving people from logic to experience.

This does not mean that Smith is innocent on all counts of placing undue emphasis on experience. He has inappropriately interpreted several biblical passages in light of his TPM experience (e.g., finding too many examples of Theophostic principles in Scripture³⁸). He has stressed the value of receiving experiential truth from the Holy Spirit in a Theophostic moment to such an extent that he has (unintentionally, I am convinced) devalued perceiving inspired truth from the Holy Spirit in Scripture.³⁹ He appears to have been excessively influenced by experience and phenomena in the formation of certain TPM positions that CRI finds problematic (e.g., his views on sanctification, satanic ritual abuse, and spiritual warfare).

To answer the question posed by this article’s title, Theophostic Prayer Ministry essentially is Christian prayer. It bears no essential relationship to occult visualization, and it has some similarities to secular psychotherapy but also major differences. In Part Two we will look at those problematic aspects of TPM that are peripheral to its core theory and practice but nonetheless are well represented in TPM literature and are important in their own right. With part one largely positive and part two largely negative, an adequate understanding of CRI’s position on TPM will not be possible without reading both parts.

notes

1. Karen Hayward, “Life Is ‘Totally Changed’ in South Africa,” Positive Reviews and Testimonies, Theophostic.com, http://www.theophostic.com/ displaycommon.cfm?an=1&subarticlenbr=40.

2. Whitedove 7, e-mail message to Christian Forums message board, ChristianForums.com, http://www.christianforums.com/t2007723-theophostic-ministry.html.

3. Inner healing or healing of memories is “usually referred to as a counseling movement within the Christian church which involves various counseling methods that are basically used for the calling up of suppressed or hurtful memories in order to deal with them.” (http://encyclopedia.thefreedictionary.com/Healing+of+Memories.)

4. http://www.theophostic.com/displaycommon.cfm?an=1&subarticlenbr=29 (page now discontinued).

5. TPM is used by professionally qualified counselors and lay ministers alike. The professionals use it because they believe it is an effective form of therapy and they will likely bring their additional resources to bear in helping the client apart from the TPM session; lay people can use it because the training Smith offers is sufficient to facilitate a TPM session, and he advises them not to use psychological terms or make diagnoses, and to refer the clients to professionals if they present problems that go beyond the scope of TPM. Mental health professionals who use TPM and lay ministers (e.g., in a local church that provides TPM as one of its ministries) are encouraged to establish relationships in which the professionals can provide supervision and consultation for the lay ministers.

6. Edward M. Smith, Healing Life’s Deepest Hurts (Ann Arbor, MI: Servant Publications, 2002),17.

7. This is not to suggest that the entire system was received in one flash of illumination. Through practice, research, theorizing, application, and learning from mistakes, Smith continues to revise and refine his approach.

8. See E. James Wilder, “Current Brain Theory and Basic Theophostic Ministry,” Journal of the International Association for Theophostic Ministry 1(2003):15–19.

9. Wilder’s development of this hypothesis (in ibid.) is far more complex than my use of the common right brain/left brain distinction might suggest. It is speculative and may not be accurate in fine detail, but the basic premise is plausible: a different part of the human brain registers knowledge learned through experience than that which registers knowledge learned through education.

10. Ed Smith, e-mail message to author, November24,2004.

11. Ed M. Smith, Theophostic Prayer Ministry Basic Seminar Manual (Campbellsville, KY: New Creation Publishing, 2005),136–37.

12. For detailed descriptions of the surveys see Fernando Garzon, Psy.D., “How Is the Research Stacking Up?” Journal of the International Association for Theophostic Ministry 1(2003):4,15, and Fernando Garzon, Psy.D., “Research Corner,” Journal of the International Association for Theophostic Ministry, (Spring2004):10–11.

13. Theophostic Prayer Ministries, “Theophostic Prayer Ministry Guidelines,” Theophostic.com, http://www.theophostic.com/displaycommon.cfm?an=9.

14. See, e.g., Martin Bobgan, The Psychological Way/The Spiritual Way (Minneapolis: Bethany Press,1979), and Martin Bobgan and Deidre Bobgan, Psychoheresy: The Psychological Seduction of Christianity (Santa Barbara, CA: EastGate Publishers,1987).

15. See Martin Bobgan and Deidre Bobgan, TheoPhostic Counseling: Divine Revelation? or PsychoHeresy? (Santa Barbara, CA: EastGate Publishers,1999).

16. Elliot Miller, “The Proper Basis and Spirit for Discernment Ministry,” Christian Research Journal 28,5 (2005):3–4 (http://www.equip.org/free/JAD006.htm).

17. Jan Fletcher, Lying Spirits: A Christian Journalist’s Report on Theophostic Ministry (self-published, 2004), available online at http://www.lyingspirits.com/lyingspirits.pdf.

18. See, e.g., Bob Passantino and Gretchen Passantino, “The Bondage Maker: Examining the Message and Method of NeilT.Anderson (Part Four: Spiritual Warfare and the Myth of Satanic Conspiracies and Ritual Abuse),” Christian Research Journal 21,4(1999) (http://www.equip.org/free/DA084.htm).

19. See, e.g., John Ankerberg and John Weldon, “Visualization: God-Given Power or New Age Danger?” (Parts One and Two), Christian Research Journal19,1and2(1996) (http://www.equip.org/free/DN388-1.htm and http://www.equip.org/free/DN388-2.htm).

20. It is unlikely that this was for my benefit, since Smith freely advocated other positions during the seminar with which he knew from our previous conversations that I would strongly disagree.

21. Ed Smith, “A Comparison of Theophostic Ministry and Recovered Memory Therapy,” Journal of the International Association for Theophostic Ministry (Spring2004): 44–48 (http://www.theophostic.com/displaycommon.cfm?an=1&subarticlenbr=3).

22. See chapter four of Fletcher, Lying Spirits.

23. Fletcher cites a letter from Smith to theologians Philip Monroe and Bryan Maier and concludes that Smith thinks that TPM should be evaluated by practical experience rather than by dogma or theology. (Fletcher, 67, 85.) In context, Smith was rather arguing that TPM should be evaluated on its own terms, apart from his controversial views on the sin nature, sanctification, and so forth.

24. Divination involves using various tools of symbolic interpretation for the purpose of reading the fates and gaining hidden knowledge.

25. Spiritism involves voluntary possession by spirits for the purpose of gaining special knowledge or power.

26. See, e.g., the “Author’s Statement of Faith” in Smith, Healing,7–9.

27. Smith, Healing, 17. In a rebuttal to an earlier version of this evaluation, Martin Bobgan provides “proof” that Smith made this claim by quoting three instances where Smith affirmed that God “gave” him Theophostic, and one where Smith says that God “blessed” him with it and “began to pour this information into [his] mind.” (Martin Bobgan, A Response to the Christian Research Institute’s Evaluation of Theophostic Prayer Ministry, http://www.psychoheresy-aware.org/images/Bobgan-Miller.pdf, 6.) Does Bobgan also think that the pastor who claims God “gave” him his latest sermon, the musician who claims that God “gave” her a new song, or the student who claims that God “gave” him the answers for a hostile atheist teacher are all claiming to have received revelation? It is essential in discernment ministry to understand what a claim to revelation necessarily involves: infallibly receiving previously undisclosed doctrinal truth from God that carries authority on a level with Scripture. This is categorically different than claiming illumination from the Holy Spirit to understand biblical truth. The latter is (1)a gift offered to all Christians (e.g., James1:5; Luke11:9–13), (2)all that needs to be inferred from Smith’s words, and (3)what Smith himself has clarified that he meant by those words.

28. Smith, Basic Seminar Manual,261.

29. Ibid.

30. Ibid.,260.

31. Ibid.,274.

32. Prospective TPM recipients need to be aware that many practitioners of TPM mix it with other, often biblically unsound, approaches. It is important to insist on a fully trained facilitator who strictly follows the Guidelines.

33. Smith, Basic Seminar Manual,136–39.

34. Ibid.,160–63. Fruit include the following changes in the recipient: experiencing perfect peace in the area where there was once pain and conflict; having genuine compassion and forgiveness for the ones who hurt him; and undergoing a permanent transformation in the area of his mind that received ministry.

35. Theophostic Prayer Ministries, Theophostic Prayer Ministry Guidelines.

36. Bob DeWaay, “Theophostics: Unbiblical Teaching Wedded to Mystical Experience,” Critical Issues Commentary79 (November/December2003),4 (http://www.twincityfellowship.com/ cic/articles/issue79.htm).

37. See, e.g., Ed M. Smith, Beyond Tolerable Recovery, 4th ed. (Campbellsville, KY: Alathia Publishing,2000), chap.13.

38. Passages where Smith dubiously has seen Theophostic healing, principles, or analogies include John9:25; 1Cor.8:1; Heb.11:1; James1:2–4;2:26; and 1Pet.4:1. See Basic Seminar Manual, 262,310,313–14, and Healing,43.

39. See, e.g., Smith, Basic Seminar Manual, 305, where Smith writes that “in order for people to appropriate the biblical truth (logical cognitive knowledge) they receive from instruction and personal study, they need to renew their minds with the experiential truth (experiential knowledge) that they receive from God” (emphases added). Does truth from God only come to us through experience and not also (and more fundamentally, authoritatively, and reliably) through Bible study? The answer is an emphatic no.

In August a Rhode Island tax administrator ruled that witch­craft is a legitimate religion that is entitled to the same nonprofit tax breaks as established church­es and religions in that state. The new ruling was issued after an American Civil Liberties Union lawyer intervened on behalf of a Wiccan coven whose tax exemption request was denied in the fall of 1988.

Earlier this year, the right to practice witchcraft in the U.S. military was sought by Air Force Airman Patricia Hutchin, 21. According to the Associat­ed Press, Hutchin demanded the right to celebrate her reli­gion’s holidays, including Halloween. Citing Air Force regulations guaranteeing freedom of religion, her superiors at Lackland Air Force Base in San Antonio, Texas, quickly granted her petition.

In a third case a witch in Mis­sissippi sued the Salvation Army for firing her solely because of her Wiccan faith. Jamie K. Dodge, 28, was employed at the Army’s domestic violence shel­ter in Pascagoula, which had been receiving federal, state, and local funds. But on August 27, 1987, an Army supervisor saw Dodge working at the copy machine and noticed she was making a copy of a document. Retrieving a paper from a nearby wastebasket the supervisor found “what appeared to be a descrip­tion of a Satanic or occult ritual,” according to the June 1989 issue of Church & State magazine.

Salvation Army officials ques­tioned her about the paper and she admitted she practiced Wicca as her religion. She was promptly fired. The officials said that when they hired Dodge they thought she was a Catholic. “We recognize other denomina­tions as Christian. But we don’t recognize Wicca as a religion; it’s contrary to everything we believe in,” Major Floyd Langley was quoted as saying. Dodge countered that she could still be a Catholic or Methodist and “be a Wiccan….We believe in one God-force and there are different ways to worship.”

In early 1988 she sued the Salvation Army for $1.25 mil­lion, citing Title VII of the federal law that prohibits discrimination on the basis of religion. And ear­lier this year, a federal judge in Biloxi, Mississippi, agreed, argu­ing that because the Army received public funds they could not discriminate on the basis of religion. Later this year, Dodge accepted a cash settlement from the Army, reported at $30,000.

THE HISTORY OF SRA REPORTS⁸

Until the early 1980s, law enforcement officials, the media, religious researchers, and sociologists recognized four main categories of contemporary Satanism: (1) teenage self-styled, or dabblers; (2) adult self-styled; (3) religious or public; and (4) small group.⁹ Before this time, the idea of a widespread, almost invincible, multi-generational satanic conspiracy was not entertained any more seriously than ideas of UFO abduction conspiracies. During the early 1980s, however, several factors combined to provide fertile ground for the growth of SRA reports. First, cohabitation and divorce rates skyrocketed, producing fragmented family units, single-parent families, families “blended” by divorce and remarriage, and many families with no daytime adult supervision of children. This situation provided pressure toward dysfunctional behavior (e.g., neglect, abuse, incest) in intact families. It also created the setting in broken families for a significant rise in custody disputes, child abandonment, spouse and even child accusations against the nonsupportive spouse, and other manipulative actions.¹⁰ Second, in the eyes of many people, the mental health community became an authoritative “discerner” of truth. This community also expanded during those years to include many different kinds of counselors, including licensed therapists, social workers, lay counselors, peer counselors, support group members and leaders, and pastoral counselors, as well as psychiatrists and psychologists. Many people assumed that any of these counselors, no matter what their training, should invariably be able to tell if a client is telling the truth.¹¹ Third, an increased interest in women’s rights issues and in religious activism caused a greater awareness of, and vigorous opposition to, both pornography and the physical and sexual abuse of children. While women’s rights advocates and evangelical activists frequently opposed each other’s goals and beliefs, they united to protect the victims of pornography and child abuse. This heightened concern generated special interest groups and experts who — usually with the best of intentions — still needed to find a danger of sufficient depth and breadth to warrant large commitments of time, legislation, and funding for their causes.¹² Fourth, a significant segment of American evangelicalism developed a complex satanic end-times view, combining the 1970s “deliverance” ministries with “newspaper prophecy” theology. While the end-times speculators of the 1970s pointed primarily at the rebirth of the nation of Israel as a sign that Christ’s Second Coming was near, the speculators of the 80s also emphasized the rise of destructive occult activity as a sign that the end was imminent.¹³ In Mike Warnke’s testimony of his purported former involvement with Satanism, The Satan Seller, he claimed that in 1965 he led a group of 1,500 Satanists in a desert area of Southern California, and that he was “part of a deep and widespread organization, operating not only in the U.S., but all over the world.”¹⁴ Each of these four developments — family disintegration, diffusion in the mental health community, activist opposition to victimization, and an evangelical expectation of increasing occult activity — provided the nutrients for the development of SRA reports in the 1980s. The first publicized case was that of Michelle Smith. An emotionally dysfunctional woman at the time, Smith claimed to discover — with the help of her therapist (and later husband) Lawrence Pazder — previously repressed early childhood memories of horrible physical and sexual abuse. The abuse was inflicted in a bizarre secret satanic cult whose members included her immediate family. No corroborative evidence for this shocking account was obtained, said Smith and Pazder, for a variety of reasons. First, by its very nature, a conspiracy’s activities are secret and unknown. Second, the cultists planted disinformation, such as wrong dates, in her memory. Third, the almost invincible cult destroyed the evidence of its crimes. And fourth, some of the very people to whom Smith could turn for help were themselves involved in the conspiracy. Nevertheless, the couple claimed that Pazder’s therapeutic expertise established Smith’s story as true. Almost all of the subsequent SRA stories have followed the same pattern sparked by Warnke’s The Satan Seller and developed in Smith and Pazder’s book, Michelle Remembers.

SRA REPORTS

Typical SRA stories display certain essential elements that remain uniform whether the story is “discovered” by a therapist, a social worker, or a parent, and whether the victim is an adult or a child. The Victims. The adult victim¹⁵ is commonly a white woman between the ages of twenty-five and forty-five who has a history of nonspecific psychological problems (which may include suicide attempts). She is herself either intensely religious (usually evangelical or charismatic Protestant) or comes from an intensely religious background. The typical adult victim is highly suggestible,¹⁶ intelligent, creative, and well learned if not well educated in a formal sense. The victim first seeks counseling help for a problem seemingly unrelated to occultic abuse. From our own conversations with dozens of alleged adult survivors, we feel comfortable in affirming that the vast majority of them sincerely believe their stories, although sincerity cannot determine a story’s veracity. Child victims are not so easily characterized, though most are highly motivated to please adults, intelligent, and loyal to the supportive parent. Perhaps this lack of a consistent profile is because children’s disclosures of SRA almost always follow questioning by worried parents or mental health workers. (It is noteworthy that the supportive parent often has characteristics in common with the typical adult victim.) If the child discloses SRA inflicted by an immediate family member, it is typically in a divorce or separation situation where the accused is the nonsupportive parent or one of the nonsupportive parent’s relatives.¹⁷ The Victimizers. The alleged adult survivor’s immediate family members are usually identified as the perpetrators — even if the victim may see them as former victims turned satanic victimizers due to their own trauma. When the immediate family is not involved — as in many of the children’s stories, but almost none of the adult survivor stories — caregivers in regular custody of the victim are seen as the perpetrators (e.g., preschool teachers, day-care workers). Importantly, the hypothetical psychological profile of the SRA perpetrator actually contradicts the most common features of known physical and sexual abusers, psychotics, sociopaths, pornographers, and serial killers — creating serious doubt that such a perpetrator exists.¹⁸ Types of Abuse. SRA includes emotional abuse (terrifying threats, deliberate heightening of fear, etc.), sexual abuse (incest, mutilation of genitals, etc.), other physical abuse (beating, cutting, etc.), and spiritual abuse (taunts that God has rejected them, He won’t forgive them, Jesus is defeated, etc.). The ritual elements of the abuse are always satanic or occultic. Features of satanic ceremony folklore — such as the black mass, human sacrifice, drinking of blood, and satanic symbols — are common. However, victims typically cannot recount the intricacies of occult rituals beyond what is commonly found in satanically oriented material available in general bookstores,¹⁹ or what they have heard from other victims or therapists. SRA Disclosure. Usually adult SRA stories are disclosed during counseling or some other therapeutic setting. The adult victim generally begins therapy for a seemingly unrelated problem such as a sleep or eating disorder, depression, or marital difficulties. During the course of treatment, either the therapist or the client raises the possibility of repressed memories of SRA. With sensationalistic reports of SRA scattered throughout the media, few clients or therapists have not heard something of SRA and its horrors. At first the client may deny a past history of SRA, or may not remember anything, or may have fragments of almost meaningless images that might somehow relate to SRA. However, after long-term, intensive treatment by a therapist committed to believing the client no matter what he or she discloses, the alleged adult survivor gradually pieces together a complex personal SRA history. Ordinarily the therapist decides that the repression was facilitated by the dissociative state known as multiple personality disorder (MPD). After further long-term, intensive therapy and support group involvement, including “abreacting” (see glossary) or “reliving” each of the traumatic “memories”, the client may become emotionally well.²⁰ The child who discloses an SRA story almost always does so at the prompting of a parent or mental health professional.²¹ Such disclosures most often come after frequent, prolonged questioning. And most frequently the child identifies the perpetrator as a day-care worker or other regular, nonfamily care giver. When family members are accused, they are most likely the parents of the spouse other than the one reporting the abuse, or a parent or stepparent who is estranged from the family. Accusations against public officials, entertainment personalities, neighbors, or other, more distant adults usually come only after the case has been sensationalized and the child has been questioned incessantly about “the others” involved in the abuse. Children are much less likely to be diagnosed with MPD. The common presumption is that they are terrified to tell their stories, not that they have repressed their memories of SRA. Adults who suspect that they or their children may be SRA victims are urged by true believers to seek help and affirmation from therapists, friends, support groups, and family members who will believe them unconditionally. Whether their accounts are true or not, this reinforcement and isolation from critical thinking intensifies the victims’ beliefs concerning SRA.²² The SRA Conspiracy. The typical SRA story includes strong commitment to a conspiracy theory of history. That is, the victimization is seen not as the isolated action of a psychotic or sociopathic individual, but as part of a widespread, multigenerational, and nearly omnipotent satanic conspiracy. This conspiracy involves anywhere from thousands to millions of cultists — many of them in the very highest levels of society, including government, law enforcement, mental health institutions, and even religious leadership. We have heard SRA stories accusing famous televangelists, police chiefs, FBI agents, the Pope, CIA leaders, U.N. diplomats, millionaires, philanthropists, pastors, school teachers and principals, psychiatrists, and others. Such a conspiratorial view accomplishes two very important objectives: (1) it accounts for the absolute lack of corroborative evidence of SRA;²³ and (2) it accounts for a number of popularly assumed social ills, such as thousands of missing children and rampant child sexual abuse in day care centers.

SRA CONSPIRACIES AND EVIDENCE

When SRA stories initially surfaced in the early 1980s — first with Michelle Remembers, then followed by the McMartin preschool case in Southern California and the Bakersfield, California and Jordan, Minnesota cases — many journalists, law enforcement personnel, and mental health professionals tended to believe that SRA might exist. We know that horrible people do terrible things to others, that people often conspire, that there really are Satanists, and that abuse sometimes happens within some sort of ritual context.²⁴ However, when dozens of stories multiplied into hundreds and then thousands of stories, none of which produced a single piece of corroborative evidence, some former believers became healthy skeptics. Supervisory Special Agent Kenneth Lanning, of the FBI’s Behavioral Science Unit, has investigated over 300 SRA reports and has yet to find corroborative evidence. While still affirming his willingness to look for and find such hypothetical evidence, Lanning points out the problems inherent in the standard SRA conspiracy theory:

Any professional evaluating victims’ allegations of ritualistic abuse cannot ignore the lack of physical evidence (no bodies or physical evidence left by violent murders), the difficulty in successfully committing a large-scale conspiracy crime (the more people involved in any crime conspiracy, the harder it is to get away with it), and human nature (intragroup conflicts resulting in individual self-serving disclosures are likely to occur in any group involved in organized kidnapping, baby breeding, and human sacrifice).²⁵

SRA “Proofs.” True believers, as we already stated, usually offer four main arguments in defense of SRA: (1) all conspiracies are by definition secret and unknown; (2) evidence against an SRA story actually constitutes proof for it, since Satanists plant false evidence as part of their conspiracy; (3) only a conspiracy such as that described by true believers has the capability of destroying all the evidence; and (4) the very people who should be fighting the SRA conspiracy are actually part of it. To these can be added: (5) only therapists can determine whether victims are telling the truth; (6) children (whether physiological children or the fractured “child” personalities of an MPD client) don’t lie about such things, and no one would make up such horrific tales; (7) the accused perpetrators’ refusal to confess shows the depths of depravity to which they have descended; (8) nondeterminative (i.e., inconclusive) evidence validates the conspiracy (e.g., what a true believer calls an abuse scar a skeptic calls an appendix operation scar); (9) individual occult-related criminal acts validate the whole conspiracy scenario; and (10) the conspiracy explains the purported abduction of thousands of children each year. Trying to Disprove a Negative. In addition to these ten lines of support for SRA conspiracy theories, true believers often demand that doubters disprove their theory. In other words, unless the investigator can deliver overwhelming, unequivocal evidence that the conspiracy can’t possibly exist, the true believer will consider his own view vindicated. This approach matches the absurdity of requiring a man, charged at random, to prove he didn’t kill a given murder victim last July 24. (Fortunately, our justice system is based on the premise that one is innocent until proven guilty.) In the same manner, the more reasonable theory should be adopted unless there is overwhelming evidence in favor of the more bizarre. The “evidence” in favor of SRA conspiracies is negligible, not overwhelming.

FALLACIES OF THE SRA CONSPIRACY THEORY

Logical examination of these ten “proofs” quickly reveals their fatal flaws. First, while conspiracies are certainly secret, they cannot continue to exist and function in an open society without leaving a trail. For example, the FBI may not have known how extensive the Mafia’s network was until years of painstaking investigation and the confessions of some members revealed the truth, but the Mafia left plenty of physical evidence in the form of homicides, gun battles, arson cases, beatings, and a host of other illegal activities. No one has found Teamster’s boss Jimmy Hoffa’s body, but the evidence that he existed is beyond dispute. Statistically speaking, the invincible secrecy that would be necessary to conceal widespread SRA is impossible. Let’s suppose there are 100,000 adult survivors, who represent only a small subgroup of the conspiracy. They are the ones who: were not killed; eventually escaped the cult’s control; got into therapy; “remembered” their abuse; and were then willing to tell others about it. If we conservatively peg the average number of abusive events per survivor at fifty, that would give us 5,000,000 criminal events over the last fifty years in America alone. And not a shred of corroborative evidence? Contrary Evidence. There are several problems with the second “proof.” Evidence against a story, if gathered professionally and examined objectively, is just that: evidence against a story, not evidence for it. To offer only one explanation for contrary evidence is to commit what is known as the either/or (disjunctive) fallacy. For example, if an alleged adult survivor’s story of being an only child is contradicted by proof that her older sister lived with her until she was a teenager,²⁶ the true believer would have us believe that the contrary evidence can only be explained as evidence for victimization. Perhaps (the true believer reasons) the victim was so traumatized that she repressed the memory of her sister, or perhaps the Satanists deliberately manipulated her memory in some way. The true believer will totally ignore the much more likely alternative that the SRA conspiracy scenario is just as untrue as the “only child” memory. Without some objective proof for the story, suspicions of tampering with other parts of the evidence are groundless. Missing Evidence. The third argument, a variation on the second, falls into the same either/or fallacy. The true believer accepts only one possible reason that there is no evidence: obviously, only a conspiracy as big as the SRA stories depict could destroy everything. However, in reality there are at least two possible reasons for a lack of evidence. Besides the one suggested by true believers, the other is that the theory is not true. The facts of the case do not change; one’s presupposition determines how one will interpret the lack of evidence. This, then, is not a proof, and certainly not evidence; it is a subjective belief.²⁷ Paranoia. The fourth argument, which accuses those who disagree of being co-conspirators, stretches the true believers’ credibility and, without warrant for such charges, dwindles to paranoid name calling. Lanning described this vulnerability well, saying, “Another very important aspect of this paranoia is the belief that those who do not recognize the threat are evil and corrupt. In this extreme view, you are either with them or against them. You are either part of the solution or part of the problem.”²⁸ Ph.Deities. The fifth way true believers attempt to support the SRA conspiracy theory betrays a naivete and misplaced trust in authority, if not self-aggrandizement on the part of true-believer therapists. Therapists do not have some sort of omniscient capacity to determine who is recounting reality and who is ascribing reality to fantasy. As one forensic psychologist joked, “They sound more like Ph.Deities than therapists!” Children Do Not Always Tell the Truth. The sixth claim, that children (or childlike MPD manifestations) don’t lie about abuse, gained popularity during the early 1980s as part of the child protection movement. This belief is heavily promoted by many of the most vocal child protection advocates, even though some, such as UCLA psychiatrist Roland Summit, admit that there are no controlled studies to validate it.²⁹ Another major problem with accurately discerning the veracity of SRA stories is that psychological models used to understand the dynamics of ordinary child abuse are superimposed on alleged SRA victims without demonstrating that such a transference is valid. One such model proposed by Summit, the “child sexual abuse accommodation syndrome,” asserts that children who have been abused are characteristically reluctant to disclose, and often recant, their stories. Summit and other therapists even use the accommodation syndrome to determine whether or not a child has been abused. This may have limited validity in an incest situation involving an intact family in which the revelation of child abuse may cause both the perpetrator’s removal from the family and recriminations from other relatives. However, as Lee Coleman notes, it is worse than useless “in cases in which the perpetrator is a non-supported outsider or a non-custodial parent accused by the custodial parent.”³⁰ No one wants to minimize the pain, trauma, and terror that child victims of any kind suffer. However, nonabused children become victims of misdirected intervention when they are treated as though they have been abused and so become convinced they were abused. It is considered more incredible that someone would lie or invent stories about bizarre ritual abuse than it would be for such abuse to have actually occurred. Some true believer therapists have developed variations of this idea, such as psychiatrist Bennet Braun’s “rule of five”: if he hears of the same abuse scenario from five different clients who have no known common association, he accepts that scenario as authentic.³¹ Such a fallacy of credulity, however, ignores the many possible sources of co-contamination among therapists, clients, the media, and so forth; the possible reasons one could believe and/or tell a story that is not true; and the fact that some SRA accounts have been proven to be false. Clients who unknowingly told vivid, yet false, stories have been reported. The causes for this are often broadly described as “directive therapy.”³² Often the controversial practice of hypnotism is used, sometimes with clearly false results.³³ Several experts — including one of the nation’s leading MPD specialists, psychiatrist George Ganaway,³⁴ and a leading hypnosis expert, psychologist Nicholas Spanos³⁵ — have linked high suggestibility (which includes susceptibility to hypnosis) to claims of MPD and alleged adult survivor SRA stories. Sometimes inadvertent hypnosis or self-hypnosis can have tragic consequences, as in the nightmarish case of Paul Ingram. Ingram, who was accused of SRA by his adult daughter, succumbed to intensive interrogation, pastoral pressure, and subtle hypnotic cues. Eventually, through self-induced hypnosis, he “remembered” his participation in satanic crimes so he could confess and plead guilty in criminal court!³⁶ Memory idiosyncrasies can also play a crucial part in false stories, as noted by leading memory expert and psychologist Elizabeth Loftus and others.³⁷ Some false stories are produced with the cooperation of the client, including cases of factitious (fabricated), simulated (imitative), or malingering (avoiding responsibility for one’s eventual recovery) dissociative disorders.³⁸ One of the most interesting examples of factitious disorder is chronicled by Philip M. Coons in his “Factitious Disorder (Munchausen Type) Involving Allegations of Ritual Satanic Abuse.”³⁹ In this case, the client made a minicareer of traveling cross-country, being assisted by different SRA support groups and gaining admittance to inpatient facilities, where she would remain until her ruse was discovered and then move on. Denial Does Not Prove Guilt. The seventh argument true believers use is a variation of the fourth. Accused perpetrators are given a nonlethal form of the same kind of guilt-or-innocence test that was administered to suspected witches during medieval times. If the witch didn’t confess when charged, that proved he or she was unrepentant and should die. If one did confess, the punishment was the same. Today’s true believers don’t kill those they accuse, but they leave them with no way to establish their innocence. Indeed, a protestation of innocence becomes a tautological “proof” of guilt. Nondeterminative Evidence. In connection with the eighth argument, true believers sometimes attempt to find corroborative evidence. Some refer to amorphous “files full of evidence,” yet are unable to cite even one example thereof. They may even refer to unidentified “officials” who have seen their evidence and advised the victims to keep quiet lest they risk death from the avenging cult. True believers sometimes cite ambiguous or nondeterminative evidence. For example, in a telephone interview, Dr. James Friesen, a Christian therapist and author of the popular Uncovering the Mystery of MPD, told us he had corroborative evidence to support an SRA story. A woman claimed she had been impregnated through SRA and given birth to a child later used in a human sacrifice. This woman’s family had no knowledge of her ever giving birth, and her gynecologist confirmed that she had delivered a child at some time in the past. This, however, proves only that she gave birth; it doesn’t prove the circumstances of the pregnancy, the birth, or the fate of her child. Individual Occult-Related Crime. In the ninth argument, true believers almost invariably point to sensational crimes with occultic overtones as though they prove the SRA conspiracy theory. Loner and self-styled Satanist murderer Richard Ramirez does not fit the SRA profile at all. But true believers frequently mention him along with Sean Sellers, a self-styled teen Satanist who killed his parents, and Ricky Kasso, a teen drug dealer and self-styled Satanist who killed a friend and then committed suicide. They also cite the Matamoros, Mexico drug ring murders, which were committed in rituals derived from Palo Mayombe, an Afro-Cuban form of occultism. None of these, however, fits the SRA pattern in any way. During our telephone interview with James Friesen, he said he would send us news clippings citing evidence in support of his SRA theories. The clippings, none of which substantiated SRA claims, included crimes like those above. Missing Statistics for Missing Children. The tenth and final argument most true believers employ is some variation on the idea that the SRA conspiracy theory explains a number of widely held beliefs — for example, that thousands of children disappear each year.⁴⁰ The SRA conspiracy theory is said to account for this phenomenon: the children are sacrificed in satanic rituals! Dr. Al Carlise estimates that 40,000-60,000 people are killed in satanic rituals yearly. Other true believers cite smaller numbers, but still in the tens of thousands. And yet, when statistical studies on missing children are examined, we find that the truth does not fit the SRA conspiracy model. In fact, the vast majority of children reported missing each year are accounted for within a twelve-month period,⁴¹ leaving fewer than 300 unaccounted for after one year. The majority of missing children either are taken by noncustodial parents in custody disputes or are runaways.⁴² Certainly to a parent whose child is missing, the size of the problem is immaterial, the grief real, and the suffering profound. But it is wrong to confuse compassion for an individual with a blind acceptance of false statistics in a futile effort to bolster an SRA conspiracy theory. Equally damaging, if not more so, are the growing number of false accusations of child sexual abuse which are sometimes fueled and supported by inadequate test methods, overly zealous medical and mental health professionals, and excessively concerned parents.⁴³ Drs. Ralph Underwager and Hollida Wakefield summarize the tragedy of false reports concerning children and SRA:

To treat a child as if satanic abuse were real….is to reify a child’s most terrifying fantasies and force a child to grow into an adult whose world remains at the level of a constant night terror. It is to run the risk of training a child to be psychotic, not able to distinguish between reality and unreality. It is to irrevocably and likely irretrievably damage a child and induce a lifelong experience of emotional distress.⁴⁴

SRA STORIES VS. BIBLICAL STANDARDS

There is still no substantial, compelling evidence that SRA stories and conspiracy theories are true. Alternate hypotheses more reasonably explain the social, professional, and personal dynamics reflected in this contemporary satanic panic. The tragedy of broken families, traumatized children, and emotionally incapacitated adults provoked by SRA charges is needless and destructive. Careful investigation of the stories, the alleged victims, and the proponents has given us every reason to reject the satanic conspiracy model in favor of an interpretation consistent with reason and truth. The Bible tells us that we serve the God of truth (Isa. 65:16). Paul exhorts us to test everything, clinging only to what is good (2 Thess. 5:21-22), and commends the Bereans for testing what he taught by God’s Word; that is, by what was known to be true (Acts 17:11). Peter warns us by example not to be seduced by cunningly devised myths (2 Pet. 1:16). God commands us not to bear false witness against another (Deut. 5:20). In Matthew 18:15-19, Jesus warns us not to bring any accusation of sin against a fellow Christian without evidence and witnesses. God’s judgment against those who do evil is according to truth (Rom. 2:2). Should our judgment be based on fallacies, nonevidence, subjectivism, and worldly wisdom? Let us be committed to compassion for victims and biblical judgment for victimizers, but let us not become victimizers by faulty judgment and false accusations. With sound wisdom and biblically based discernment, we need have no fear of a monolithic satanic conspiracy (Prov. 3:23-26).

NOTES

¹ Some stories are chronicled in such books as Truddi Chase’s When Rabbit Howls (New York: Jove Books, 1987), James G. Friesen’s Uncovering the Mystery of MPD (San Bernardino, CA: Here’s Life Publishers, 1991), Robert S. Mayer’s Satan’s Children (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1991), Michelle Smith and Lawrence Pazder’s Michelle Remembers (New York: Congdon & Lattes, 1980), Judith Spencer’s Suffer the Child (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1989), and Lauren Stratford’s Satan’s Underground (Eugene, OR: Harvest House Publishers, 1988; Gretna, LA: Pelican Publishing Co., 1991). ² See, e.g., Friesen. A good reference in response to SRA stories is James T. Richardson, Joel Best, and David G. Bromley, The Satanism Scare (New York: Aldine de Gruyter, 1991). ³ Bob Larson, who hosts a nationally syndicated Christian radio talk show, claims that there are “several hundreds of thousands” of adults who “remember” such horrible abuse. ⁴ Some say that between 40,000 and 60,000 persons per year are ritually murdered (statistic attributed to Dr. Al Carlisle of the Utah State Prison System by Jerry Johnston [The Edge of Evil (Dallas: Word Books, 1989)] and others). ⁵ Whether the true believer uses the term conspiracy, a synonym such as “infiltration” (as Bob Larson uses), or no term at all, the assumption is the same. ⁶ Three notable cases where dozens of children were taken from their parents before there was any corroborative evidence to back up suspicions were in Bakersfield, California; Jordan, Minnesota; and in England. ⁷ The phenomenon of SRA reports is of relatively recent origin. The various aspects are often ambiguous, open-ended, and/or complex. In addition, most of the constructive professional dialogue on the subject has appeared in papers presented at conferences, articles in professional journals, and newspaper articles. Little has been discussed in book form. A comprehensive research bibliography is available by sending a request with a business sized, self-addressed, stamped envelope to Bob and Gretchen Passantino, Answers in Action, P.O. Box 2067, Costa Mesa, CA 92628. ⁸ Space limitations preclude discussing a history of Satanism here. The reader is referred to Bob and Gretchen Passantino’s When the Devil Dares Your Kids (Ann Arbor, MI: Servant Publications, 1991), 34-38. A description and history of witchcraft is on pages 50-55. ⁹ Further information on the types of contemporary Satanists is available in Craig Hawkins’s “The Many Faces of Satanism,” Forward, Fall 1986, 16-22. ¹⁰ For further information on this aspect of SRA development, see the journal Child Abuse and Neglect; Debbie Nathan, “The Ritual Sex Abuse Hoax,” The Village Voice, 12 June 1990, 36-44; Ralph Underwager and Hollida Wakefield, “Cur Allii, Prae Aliis? (Why Some, and Not Others?),” Issues in Child Abuse Accusations 3, 3:178-93; Jeffrey Victor, “The Satanic Cult Scare and Allegations of Ritual Child Abuse,” Issues in Child Abuse Accusations 3, 3:135-43; Wakefield and Underwager’s “Sexual Abuse Allegations in Divorce and Custody Disputes,” Behavioral Sciences and the Law (in press); and Sherrill Mulhern, “Ritual Abuse: Creating a Context for Belief,” Laboratoire des Rumeurs, Paris. ¹¹ For further information on this subject, see John Johnson and Steve Padilla’s “Satanism: Growing Concern — And Skepticism” (Los Angeles Times, 23 April 1991) and Jeffrey Victor’s “The Spread of Satanic-Cult Rumors” (Skeptical Inquirer 14 [Spring 1990]:287-91). ¹² See Elizabeth Loftus and Katherine Ketcham’s Witness for the Defense (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1991), Joel Best’s “Missing Children, Misleading Statistics” (The Public Interest, 84-92), Lee Coleman’s “False Allegations of Child Sexual Abuse” (Forum, January-February 1986, 12-22), and the journal Issues in Child Abuse Accusations. ¹³ For further information on this development in end times theology, see Gary DeMar’s Last Days Madness (Brentwood, TN: Wolgemuth and Hyatt, Publishers, 1991), especially chapters eight and nine. ¹⁴ Mike Warnke, The Satan Seller (Plainfield, NJ: Logos Books, 1972), 93, 116. ¹⁵ The vast majority of alleged adult survivors fit this general profile, although occasionally there are male victims, younger women, ethnic minority members, and so forth. ¹⁶ See George Ganaway’s discussion of this in “Historical versus Narrative Truth: Clarifying the Role of Exogenous Trauma in the Etiology of MPD and Its Variants,” Dissociation 2, 4:205-20. ¹⁷ See, e.g., Wakefield and Underwager, “Sexual Abuse Allegations in Divorce and Custody Disputes.” ¹⁸ A fascinating study of this is in Martha Rogers’s “Evaluating an Alleged Satanic Ritualistic Abuser: What We Don’t Know,” Issues in Child Abuse Accusations 3, 3:166-77. ¹⁹ Many details closely follow descriptions in Anton LaVay’s The Satanic Bible (New York: Avon Books, 1969), The Satan Seller, Michelle Remembers, and other popular books found in general bookstores. It sometimes is possible to follow particular details as they spread from one victim through a support group or therapist to other victims (see, e.g., Victor’s “The Satanic Cult Scare,” 135-43). ²⁰ In our three years of extensive research into SRA and alleged adult survivors, the fully well adult survivor is rare to nonexistent. ²¹ While it is true that questioning often begins with a general troubling complaint by a child such as “My teacher touched me funny,” that is not considered a disclosure of an SRA story. ²² See, e.g., Underwager and Wakefield’s “Cur Allii, Prae Aliis?” ²³ Remember, the individual or small group engaging in criminal abuse is not indicative of SRA, in which widespread conspiracy is an essential part of the definition. ²⁴ E.g., loner Satanist abuse, sexual fondling in a Roman Catholic confessional, or repeated nonreligious abuse in a prescribed manner, location, or sequence. ²⁵ Kenneth V. Lanning, “Commentary on Ritual Abuse: A Law Enforcement View or Perspective,” Child Abuse and Neglect 15 (1991):171-73. ²⁶ See our article on Lauren Stratford’s Satan’s Underground entitled “Satan’s Sideshow,” Cornerstone, issue 90, 26-28. ²⁷ This fallacy is discussed in our book Witch Hunt (Nashville, TN: Thomas Nelson Publishers, 1990), 113-16. ²⁸ Kenneth V. Lanning, “Satanic, Occult, Ritualistic Crime: A Law Enforcement Perspective,” The Police Chief, October 1989. ²⁹ Coleman. See also Jerome Cramer’s “Why Children Lie in Court,” Time, 4 March 1991, 76; Wakefield and Underwager’s “Sexual Abuse Allegations in Divorce and Custody Disputes”; and Debbie Nathan’s “False Evidence: How Bad Science Fueled the Hysteria over Child Abuse,” LA Weekly, 7-13 April 1989, 15-18. ³⁰ Coleman, 12. ³¹ Reported in Diane S. Lund’s “Psychiatrists Debate the Extent of Ritual Abuse,” The Psychiatric Times, April 1991, 54-55. Often true believers believe Braun’s Rule of Five is misrepresented. However, Braun confirmed his view essentially as stated in a phone interview with our frequent coauthor, Jon Trott. ³² See, e.g., Philip Coon, “Iatrogenic Factors in the Misdiagnosis of Multiple Personality Disorder,” Dissociation 2, 2:70-76; George Ganaway, “Historical versus Narrative Truth,” and Ganaway, “Alternative Hypotheses Regarding Satanic Ritual Abuse Memories” (presented at the ninety-ninth annual convention of the American Psychological Association, San Francisco, 19 August 1991); Jon Trott, “Satanic Panic: The Ingram Family and Other Victims of Hysteria in America,” Cornerstone, issue 95, 9-12; Ethan Watters, “The Devil in Mr. Ingram,” Mother Jones, July/August 1991, 30-68; and Glenna Whitley, “The Seduction of Gloria Grady,” D Magazine, October 1991, 45-71. ³³ The best data on the use of hypnosis subtly directing client response is detailed in Nicholas Spanos et. al, “Secondary Identity Enactments During Hypnotic Past-Life Regression: A Sociocognitive Perspective,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 61, 2:308-20. ³⁴ Ganaway, “Historical versus Narrative Truth.” ³⁵ Nicholas P. Spanos, John R. Weekes, and Lorne D. Bertrand, “Multiple Personality: A Social Psychological Perspective,” Journal of Abnormal Psychology 94, 3:362-76; and Spanos et. al, “Secondary Identity Enactments.” ³⁶ The psychological aspects of the case are chronicled in Richard J. Ofshe’s “Inadvertent Hypnosis During Interrogation: False Confession Due to Dissociative State; Mis-Identified Multiple Personality and the Satanic Cult Hypothesis” (Department of Sociology, University of California [Berkeley], in press). The entire case, now on appeal, is discussed in Trott, “Satanic Panic,” and Watters, “The Devil in Mr. Ingram.” ³⁷ See Loftus and Ketcham; Beverly Beyette, “Not-So-Total Recall,” Los Angeles Times, 10 September 1991; Pat Brennan, “Bad Memories Can End Up in Court,” Orange County Register, 24 March 1991; Lawrence W. Daly and J. Frank Pacifico, “Opening the Doors to the Past: Decade Delayed Disclosure of Memories of Years Gone By,” The Champion, December 1991, 43-47; and Irene Wielawski, “Unlocking the Secrets of Memory,” Los Angeles Times, 3 October 1991. ³⁸ See Susan S. Brick and James A. Chu, “The Simulation of Multiple Personalities: A Case Report,” Psychotherapy 28 (Summer 1991):267-71; Cramer, “Why Children Lie in Court”; and Ganaway, “Alternative Hypotheses Regarding Satanic Ritual Abuse Memories.” ³⁹ Philip M. Coons, “Factitious Disorder (Munchausen Type) Involving Allegations of Ritual Satanic Abuse: A Case Report,” Dissociation 3, 4:177-78. ⁴⁰ U.S. Representative Paul Simon (not to be confused with Senator Paul Simon of Illinois) told the House a “conservative estimate….50,000 children [are] abducted by strangers annually” (Nathan, “The Ritual Sex Abuse Hoax,” 36-44). ⁴¹ A careful analysis of missing children statistics is in Best’s “Missing Children, Misleading Statistics,” 84-92. ⁴² Nathan, “The Ritual Sex Abuse Hoax,” 39. ⁴³ See especially Nathan’s “False Evidence,” and “Sex, the Devil, and Day Care,” The Village Voice, 32, 39:25-26. ⁴⁴ Underwager and Wakefield, “Cur Allii, Prae Aliis?” 3, 3:190.

But my life soon took a turn for the worse. Following my high school gradua­tion, I entered a very liberal convent. I immersed myself in liberal theology, existen­tial philosophy, and the sociology of religion.

I no longer read Scripture without being armed with my liberal “debunking tools,” and prayer became less and less personal communion with God and more of a general meditation — until even that disappeared. I had turned my back on the Lord and the Christian life.

I left the religious order and for the next four years tried out Marxism, hedonism, and humanism — in that order. But none of them filled the void created in my heart by turning away from the living God. None of them helped me explain the residual nagging sense of the presence of God. God refused to leave me, but I persisted in looking for an alterna­tive explanation for Him. And I found one (so I thought) — the occult!

People I talked to — non-Christians, Christians, and even clergy — called my dabbling in the occult my “spiritual jour­ney” or “pilgrimage.” Everyone seemed to romanticize it. But this “spiritual journey” didn’t turn out to be as purposeful and exciting as it had first promised to be. I found myself longing to find my way back to true spiritual reality. The problem, how­ever, was that I had developed serious doubts about the credibility of Christianity (an outgrowth of my liberal education).

So, for twelve long years, I remained deeply entrenched in the occult. I was a pro­fessional astrologer the whole time — teaching, doing conferences, and counseling.

I was also a trance medium for 16 months. I have over one hundred pages of transcript material from this period —much of which was generated through me while working with a scientific team in Chicago: a psychologist, a physician/psy­chiatrist, a physicist, and a parapsycholo­gist. This team tested me, hypnotized me, and worked with the material I produced while in an altered state of consciousness. I explained and discussed issues in sub­atomic physics that were “right on target,” according to the physicist. I clarified problems in the psychologist’s research on brain waves and biofeedback without even knowing he was doing this research.

None of this scientific material origi­nated in me. I knew that very well, but didn’t want to believe it, preferring instead the message I was getting from my inner “source”: this knowledge was being generated by my own “expanding consciousness.” I was in touch with my “lighter self,” my “God self,” my “Christ consciousness” — and believed this expansion of knowledge and awareness could continue indefinitely.

Besides being a trance medium, I worked a lot with different methods of divination: numerology, psychometry, I Ching, and Tarot cards. I practiced and taught visualization techniques — working from the Western Kabbalah and Eastern yogas, modern inner-healing therapies, and guided meditations.

Over the last five years of this twelve-year period, I was involved in a syncretistic cult Church Universal and Triumphant (CUT). This cult integrates several world religions and many strands of occult tradi­tion. It’s an outgrowth of the “I AM” movement of the 1930s and the Theosophical movement before that.

CUT presents itself as the religion of the New Age: ushering out the “Age of Pisces” under the leadership and authority of the “Ascended Master” Jesus Christ and ushering in the “Age of Aquarius” under the authority of Saint Germain —whom CUT leaders believe to be an even greater Ascended Master. My earlier trance medium experience had prepared me to accept in detail the message and gestalt of this bizarre group.

While involved with this group, I tried defining my Christianity (with which I was still very uncomfortable) through “Christian metaphysics”: a baptized ver­sion of the positive thinking schools and self-help technologies, and founded squarely on the philosophy and method of mental sorcery. I thoroughly absorbed the writings of Emmet Fox during this time.

Over this twelve-year period, I shut out the Lord and worshipped every false god I bumped into along the way: Gautama Buddha, Lord Maitreya, Hindu gods, Greek gods, Roman gods, Egyptian gods, Chaldean gods, the Cosmic Christ, the Solar Logos, the Ascended Masters, the Divine Mother, the Nameless Void — and finally my “higher self,” my “Christ self,” and my “God self.”

“Are you the one?” I would ask. They all answered, “yes.”

During this time, it became increasingly clear to me that spiritual growth was not something I’d been enhancing, but pre­venting. For three months I forced myself to face this issue. Over the years I’d had many interesting spiritual experiences, but there had been no spiritual growth or life. I realized I had been turning circles and was no closer to the truth now than when I first started searching for it.

Having exhausted all these alternatives to Jesus Christ and coming up so short of the glory of God, I began to panic. I went through a week of pure hell that seemed like a lifetime. God had suddenly become so “other” to me. The only thing I began to see clearly about God that week was that He is utterly holy and righteous. No other god even makes a pretense at being holy and righteous. At this time, the con­sciousness of personal sin reentered my life — what a nauseating, embarrassing, and defeating reality! Seeing myself in this honest light was a shattering experi­ence for me.

Then I remembered a verse I’d read somewhere in the Bible: “The LORD is my righteousness.” I began to see — pos­sibly for the first time — that the very holiness that must in justice consume me, can be imputed to me as a gift from God! What an incredible realization this was. This was utterly against every principle and tenet of New Age spirituality.

During this time, a verse I did not even know I had memorized came to my mind: “There is salvation in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given among men by which we must be saved” (Acts 4:12). I felt a combination of relief and terror at this memory. How could all my twelve years of occult involvement have been a spiritual placebo, I wondered?

Revelation 3:20 surfaced in my mind the same way: “Behold, I stand at the door and knock. If anyone hears my voice and opens the door, I will come in to him and eat with him and he with Me.” Jesus Christ was alive and well and knocking at my door! And this was most assuredly not the Ascended Master Jesus Christ. This was the real live Person! I was now willing to dismantle my altars to false gods; to put away The Bhagavad Gita and the I Ching.

“Lord,” I asked, “what do you want me to do now?” After asking this question, I remember opening my Bible to Acts 9:6 where Paul had fallen to the ground when Jesus appeared in a blinding vision to him on the road to Damascus: “Now get up and go into the city, and you will be told what you must do,” Jesus said to him. When Paul arrived at this city, the disciple Ananias helped him. I applied this verse to my situation, and took it to mean that I should just put myself “out there” and assistance would be arranged.

Little did I know I would soon meet my own “Ananias.” I had on my laundry room table several stacks of graduate school bulletins and catalogues. During the last year of my spiritual “pilgrimage,” I had somehow gotten the idea that I’d understand everything a lot better if I just had a doctorate in theology. So I had sent away for catalogues from every school of theology within a 50-mile radius.

Then I realized I had some preliminar­ies to settle first, such as, which theology? Buddhist? Unitarian? Catholic? Church Universal and Triumphant? One evening I absent mindedly paged through one of the catalogues: Trinity Evangelical Divinity School. I immediately noticed the state­ment of faith. What an odd thing to put in a school catalogue, I thought to myself. I read it and had two distinct and warring reactions. One part of me said, “No one with half a brain could assent to this. Throw this into the fireplace and forget it!” The other part of me said, “Thank God someone still believes.” I read through the catalogue and it became increasingly clear to me that the commitment to scholarship was equaled by a corporate commitment to a life devoted to Jesus Christ as God and Savior.

The thought occurred to me that I should talk to someone from Trinity. “But who?” I asked myself. I decided to scan through the list of faculty in the catalogue and my finger stopped on the name of Dr. John Feinberg. I called Dr. Feinberg and told him I had gotten his name in a round­about way and needed to talk to him about “church membership.”

When I arrived at Dr. Feinberg’s home, I opened two doors: his as well as the one I had closed on the Lord years ago. He opened the Bible with me and helped me understand myself and my experience in the light of what it said. He confirmed the exclusivity of the claim of Christ on my life. He also directed me to a good church that remains to this day my spiritual home. The worship, study, and fellowship at this church have been my major source of growth since my deliverance from occultism.

My restoration to the Father through trusting in Jesus Christ has been the most invigorating, eye-opening, and healing event in my life. I really know what it is to be “bought” with a price, to have someone else foot the bill for my rebellious and disobedient squandering. Jesus paid that price.

I can’t praise and thank God enough for what He has done for me. When you’re finally convinced of the hopelessness of your own efforts — when you realize that you’re as powerless as you are rebellious — that your Creator is sovereign and that you, a creature, can’t restore yourself to Him — and then He reaches down and digs you out of the heap, scrubs you off, and brings you home — I can only respond, “What a Father!”

In this earthly pilgrimage, we might not be sure of the terrain, and the environment is definitely hostile. But as Chris­tians, we know where we’ve come from, we know where we’re going, we know how we’re getting there, and we’ve got hold of the hand that is taking us! Praise God for this wonderful thing He’s done!

Editor’s Note: Karen Winterburn is the director of the Chicago and Suburban Branch of Mt. Carmel Outreach. P.O. Box 6407, Evanston, IL 60202.