NAME IT AND CLAIM IT (PART II)

“Core Tenets of the New Thought Movement”

By Akin Ojumu

Truth is bitter. Whether you coat it with sugar or you soak it in honey, it’ll taste like vinegar in the mouth of the hearer all the same. Truth is deafening. No matter how softly it’s spoken, it always sounds like the roar of a supersonic jet engine in the ears of people.

Telling folks that the doctrinal beliefs they’ve held all their Christian lives have their origin in the occult is a bitter pill to swallow. It’s a hard thing for people to hear that their theological foundation is rooted in a metaphysical cult.

Notwithstanding, the truth must be told. As much as I hate to do so, I have to let my friends know that they live in a toxic bubble of spiritual deception.

The Word of Faith movement is a syncretic belief system that borrows its ideology chiefly from New Thought, which is a mental healing movement that originated in the United States in the 19th century. Founded by Phineas Parkhurst Quimby, who was a 19th Century American folk healer and mentalist, New Thought is based on the idea that thought can shape reality, and that people can achieve their goals by meditating on them and speaking them out.

It’s from New Thought that the Christian Science Church (which, by the way, is neither Christian nor Scientific) originates. Likewise, New Thought shaped the beliefs of people like E.W. Kenyon, Kenneth Hagin, and Norman Vincent Peale, the man who popularized the concept of positive thinking through his best-selling book titled, The Power of Positive Thinking.

New Thought beliefs are disparate and difficult to summarize. The following are just three of them:

1) Human is Divine

New Thought movement asserts that human personhood is divine. They believe that we all are Little Gods and incarnations of the Almighty God. And because we are our gods, we are able to create our own reality and are able to control our own destiny. Gone is the supremacy and sovereignty of YAHWEH over all things. We are all co-equal with the Almighty.

Of course, this desire to be like God is the same enticing carrot of deception that Satan dangled before Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden when he promised them equality with God. They fell for it, and the rest, as they say, is history.

Genesis 3:5

“For God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.”

2) Law of Attraction

The Law of Attraction is a pseudoscientific belief that the universe provides what a person focuses on through their thoughts. It’s based on the idea that positive thoughts and actions lead to positive outcomes, while negative thoughts and actions lead to negative outcomes.

Adherents of the law of attraction believe they can bring things into existence by their thoughts and words. For instance, if you are sick, you can get healed by simply thinking and declaring you are healed. Likewise, if you are poor, all you need to do to become rich is by thinking and declaring you are rich. You can pretty much have anything you desire, if you think about it and you declare it. Just name it, and you’ll claim it.

The essential core tenet of the Law of Attraction is that God, if He exists at all, is nothing more than a universal energy force that we can manipulate by our thoughts and words. Because God can be manipulated by us, we all have the power to determine our own destiny. We can all create our own reality. By fully and consistently applying the “law of attraction,” we can be who we want to be and have everything we want to have.  (Source: Got Questions).

Now, while it’s true that our thoughts and feelings do impact our physical well-being (i.e., psychosomatic disorder), what New Thought gets wrong is the fact that God designed our bodies that way and not because of some connection with a universal energy force or because our negative or positive thoughts are attracting negative or positive physical symptoms respectively.

We’ll take it from here next time.