The Kingdom of the Cult Watchers: With the Advent of the New Age Movement, Cult-Watching Groups Must Aim at Far More Diffuse and Diverse Targets

Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley, California, is the kind of street that tourists drive down with their windows rolled up, their heads swiveling, and their tongues clucking as they observe the human zoo. I walked Telegraph recently with Tal Brooke and Brooks Alexander, president and cofounder, respectively, of the Spiritual Counterfeits Project (SCP), a Christian countercult organization. An hour or more on the crowded urban street turned up exactly one man in a coat and tie—me. There were many more men with nose rings (not to mention eyelid rings and lip rings). But that, after all, is mere fashion. Something else seemed far more significant.

Granted that Telegraph Avenue has long been headquarters for the countercultural fringe, it took no keen powers of observation to see that the cutting edge of the fringe is in mystical religions and the occult. Here, in the shadow of a great university, sidewalk vendors were selling oracles and fortunes. Gurus, mind powers, and Eastern religion were the themes of ubiquitous advertising flyers.

Telegraph illustrated something that Brooke and Alexander wanted to underline: Our culture is toying with a dramatic change in outlook. An era of scientific rationalism, skeptical about anything that cannot be observed scientifically, has been infected with a spirit of credulity, of psychic powers and Shirley MacLaine.

SCP is one of the oldest and best-known countercult groups, having started in 1973 as part of the sixtiesish Christian World Liberation Front. “We regard ourselves more as culture watchers than as cult watchers,” Brooks Alexander told me. “When I became a Christian, it was obvious to me that the environment I had left was something very powerful, and that it would become more mainstream.” He had been “spiritually promiscuous” before his conversion in 1969; drugs, communal living, and Transcendental Meditation were his background.

Tal Brooke, who came to Christ in 1971 after spending years in India with a guru, Sai Baba, added, “Our aim is to make people aware of what is happening all around them. They are taking it in by osmosis.”

“In the early days of Christianity,” Brooke said, “Christians knew they were in a fight. They weren’t at home in their culture. Also, they had people who had come out of that culture. Most Christian leaders today were raised as Christians.” To Brooke, being able to breathe the atmosphere of Telegraph Avenue from his office at SCP is an important asset. In a thousand ways, SCP staff must engage the New Age. They are sure that the rest of us will follow suit, very soon.

A Growing Movement

Like many countercult organizations, SCP has had its struggles. The organization was thrown into bankruptcy seven years ago by legal costs associated with a suit by the Local Church, a group claiming they had been unfairly labeled as a cult. Recently, a bruising organizational fight within SCP led to the disaffection of some supporters.

Yet SCP has survived these and other battles and, according to Brooke, is more robust than ever. A staff of ten publishes articulate, handsome publications, primarily studying New Age developments. Researchers answer questions by mail and telephone and are available for public speaking. But SCP’s main function is to become aware, and to help other Christians beware.

Groups like SCP are multiplying fast. The 1988 Directory of Cult Research Organizations listed 305 evangelical groups. The 1991 directory lists over 500. Of these, very few are as large or long-established as SCP. One of the directory’s compilers, Keith Edward Tolbert of the American Religions Center (ARC), says only eight or nine ministries have paid staff and do original research. Most are shoestring organizations run by a handful of volunteers with a fervent interest in a particular aberrant group. Naturally, such groups come and go. But their overall number is rapidly increasing, and the largest countercult organizations seem to be growing.

There is no master plan; the increase is a grassroots response to the growing number and vitality of alternative religions. In 1963 it was possible for Anthony Hoekema of Calvin Seminary to publish a work entitled The Four Major Cults. Now it would be 40, if not 400.

The focus of countercult groups (also known as cult-apologetic groups) is shifting, too. At one time, they concerned themselves strictly with cults—groups with defined authority structures, coherent beliefs, and a cohesive social framework. Cults could be recognized sociologically as well as theologically. They were generally well outside the cultural mainstream, leading to the popular definition of cultic as weird. You did not have to worry much about the cults’ doctrine seeping into the First Presbyterian Church in town without somebody realizing what was happening.

The advent of New Age religion has changed this considerably. The New Age has no clear sociological cohesion. It has limited doctrinal coherence. And the New Age is much closer to the mainstream—so close, in fact, that training courses for car salesmen sometimes use New Age ideas. New Age thinking therefore can and does hold potential for passing into the church unnoticed. Thus, cult-watching groups are taking aim at far more diffuse and diverse targets—ideas and techniques as much as religious organizations. They find these ideas not only outside the church, but within it.

Tolbert says most cult-apologetic groups still concentrate on Mormons and Jehovah’s Witnesses. But the New Age has become a fast-growing third category. And “the Christian cult organizations now critique groups that they themselves would regard as Christian.”

This can lead to sensationalism: talk show-incited, newsletter-spread, undocumented assertions of New Age conspiracies. Such well-known evangelicals as Tony Campolo, Richard Foster, and James Dobson have been accused of New Age ideas or practices. Last year Bob and Gretchen Passantino published Witch Hunt, a warning against unfounded or undocumented charges of heresy or New Age influence. “Sensationalism gets ratings,” Gretchen notes. “Sober analysis doesn’t.” Heresy can mean “whatever you disagree with.” Let the gullible beware.

But to dismiss all heresy hunting because of sensational grandstanding would be a mistake. There are serious, thoughtful observers among the cult watchers for whom the word heresy has gained new significance. If you think about our cultural situation, it is hard to avoid agreeing with them.

The Long Tradition Of Heresy

Traditionally, heresy has been defined as any teaching that claims to be Christian, yet contradicts orthodox belief (see “What Is Heresy?” p. 22). Many of the newer cults make no claim to be Christian, so the term heresy would not fit. However, when alien beliefs outside the church influence people inside the church, heresy can result. For example, gnosticism outside the early church led to gnostic heresies within.

Today, as Catholic theologian Karl Rahner has pointed out, a neat boundary between heresy within the church and “other religions” outside is impossible. Nearly all philosophies and religions worldwide have been touched by Christianity and in some way react to it. At the same time, modern Christians live in a world of such incomprehensible amounts of secularized information that they can never claim to have thought through all of life from a Christian point of view. (Rahner carries it much too far, claiming not only that a Christian might be heretical without knowing it, but that a pagan might be Christian without realizing it.)

In such a world, Christian and alien beliefs sometimes interpenetrate. To spot heresy within the church often requires an awareness of the same error in our society. For example, if the so-called health-and-wealth gospel is heretical, as many believe, its error is closely linked to the materialist beliefs of a largely secular society.

This link between non-Christian belief and Christian heresy is clearly seen in the Bible. In both testaments, believers encountered other religions as a threat that could infiltrate the community of faith. The law of Deuteronomy 13 attests to this, as it regulates how believers should respond to syncretists: “If your very own brother … or your closest friend secretly entices you, saying, ‘Let us go and worship other gods’ (gods that neither you nor your fathers have known, gods of the people around you …), do not yield to him or listen to him” (vv. 6–8; all Scripture quotations from the NIV).

The New Testament picture was similar. Greco-Roman society was rife with religion; as the gospel spread, it met scores of competitors. Paul battled protognosticism, mystery religions, and legalistic varieties of Judaism as they crept into the church. He excoriated “other gospels” (Gal. 1:9) and told Timothy his priority in the church at Ephesus was to command certain men to stop teaching false doctrines (1 Tim. 1:3).

Gordon Lewis of Denver Seminary points out that Titus 1:9 includes a qualification for church leadership that is now neglected: the leader must be able to “encourage others by sound doctrine and refute those who oppose it.” Second John 1:9 says flatly, “Anyone who runs ahead and does not continue in the teaching of Christ does not have God.” The epistle goes on to instruct believers not to welcome bogus teachers into their homes.

Such concerns were not confined to the beginning of the church. In its first centuries, the church was fiercely concerned with combating error and defining doctrine. It was an era of true religious pluralism. It was also an era for creeds and heresy trials.

When People Believe In Everything

In modern times, heresy trials have been of interest mainly to historians. Tolerance has been ascendant, and doctrine has not, to many, seemed worth fighting about. Christianity’s chief competitor has been a sterile, secular humanism—a religion of emptiness, based on a reductionist error. The competition was so obvious, so basic, that careful doctrinal thinking did not seem essential. Naïvely, perhaps, while concentrating on this fight, some Christians reached out to those who did not scorn supernaturalism—thinkers like Carl Jung, William James, Albert Einstein, Joseph Campbell—who seemed sympathetic to a “spiritual” view of the world. Other Christians subordinated doctrine to religious experience.

Today the ground has shifted decisively. G. K. Chesterton’s warning has come true: When people stop believing in anything, they are prepared to believe in everything. Religions divide and mutate like viruses. Our situation is more like the early church’s than, perhaps, it has been at any time since Constantine. Now, as then, Christianity competes with a hundred religions on a spectrum from Krishna to Christ. It is clearly not enough to believe in the supernatural or to feel born again. Precision in belief is essential.

The logical place to expect an interest in theological precision would be seminaries, but they have shown far more interest in the heresies of the third century than of the twentieth. And Southern Baptists, Missouri Synod Lutherans, and Conservative Baptists are the only Protestant denominations I could locate with departments concerned with new religions and cults. As a result, the field is largely open for enterprising individuals.

The Granddaddy’S Kids

Walter Martin, a feisty Baptist, was not the first of the cult watchers, but he was certainly the most prominent (see “Walter Martin, the ‘Answer Man,’ ” p. 21). He likened himself to a modern Paul Revere, dashing about the country shouting to the church, “The cults are coming!” Colorful and media savvy, he brought cult apologetics out of obscurity into national prominence. When the Jesus movement erupted, he became a major influence.

The origins of the Christian cult-monitoring movement are to be found, according to Tolbert, “in one man … Walter Martin. I am in contact with virtually every Christian cult-monitoring organization and I have yet to find someone who cannot remember the first time he/she heard Dr. Martin speak.”

“He loved nothing better,” Westmont College sociologist Ron Enroth recalls, “than to get on TV with a Mormon bishop and nail him to the wall.” But Martin, who died in the summer of 1989 at the age of 60, left behind more than a legacy of contention. He had won many converts, had encouraged many would-be cult watchers into action, and had launched the Christian Research Institute (CRI).

CRI is by far the largest of the cult-apologetic groups. As the most direct offspring of Martin’s work, its concerns frequently represent the entire cult-watching movement. Some expected CRI to wither after Martin’s death. Instead, the organization has grown in size and stature under the leadership of Hank Hanegraaff, Martin’s hand-picked successor. Income from gifts has doubled in the last three years, and CRI has been able to double its research staff. The atmosphere is collegial; the staff is young and energetic; the building is new and spotless. CRI is big enough to continue its concern for traditional American cults and add New Age religion.

When I visited CRI’s glass-and-stone headquarters in Irvine, California, the half-dozen members of the research team seemed most interested in talking about a threat inside the church: the positive-confession movement. This is a loose affiliation of charismatic Christians known for their so-called health-and-wealth gospel. Their best-known leaders are Kenneth Hagin, Fred Price, and Kenneth Copeland. CRI researchers believe positive-confession preachers, while professing orthodoxy, have been teaching heresy in their view of the divinity of Christ (they say redeemed human beings are meant to be “little gods”), in their emphasis on words of faith having intrinsic power, and in their certainty that God intends prosperity for all his children.

When I visited, CRI had recently completed a week of “Bible Answer Man” radio shows exposing the positive-confession movement. Hank Hanegraaff had referred on this nationally broadcast show to the “heresy spreading throughout the church like a deadly cancer.” Nevertheless, CRI researchers were not quite ready to call positive-confession preachers heretics, and thus anathema to the church. Researcher Rob Bowman (whose specialty is Jehovah’s Witnesses) made the distinction that heresy is an outright denial of essential doctrine, such as Jehovah’s Witnesses make about the Trinity. An aberration, Bowman said, is based on confusion or compromise. He was still willing to give positive-confession preachers the benefit of the doubt.

Who Watches The Cult Watchers?

CRI staff did not impress me as shoot-from-the hip guys; they seemed anxious to avoid going too far in their condemnations. Hank Hanegraaff told me, “When I came to CRI, I felt we should say the positive-confession teachers are as heretical as the Mormons.” But his research team pointed out that the positive-confession people affirm orthodox doctrine, even while teaching what CRI believes is incompatible with orthodoxy. Hanegraaff deferred to his staff’s judgment.

As I sat listening to CRI staff discuss the basis of heresy, and which doctrines were essential and which peripheral, and just how far an aberrant teacher had to go to become a heretic, I had a momentary flash: perhaps this was the kind of discussion one might have heard in the fourth century, at some creedal council. But the difference came to me just as forcefully. Fourth-century arguments involved the most visible leaders in the Christian church, men whose learning and spiritual authority were widely recognized. This discussion was being carried on in an industrial park in Irvine, among men who, however thoughtful, were little known and had limited accountability.

I asked about accountability. The CRI team mentioned the churches of which they were members, and CRI’s board of directors. But even assuming that such boards are careful and independent—a large assumption for many countercult groups—how can they help prevent unfounded allegations or sloppy thinking?

“What distresses me,” Westmont College professor Ron Enroth says, “is that there is no serious attention being paid to these issues at our seminaries.” Cult watching has “step-child status” in official evangelicalism, he believes. “We have many checks and balances in seminaries. In cult-watching groups there’s no back-up, no official accountability structure.”

Gordon Lewis, one of the few seminary professors to specialize in cult apologetics, told me, “A number of professors think they are too sophisticated for this.” In 1983 Lewis helped launch an umbrella organization, Evangelical Ministries to New Religions (EMNR), that he hopes will someday police countercult ministries. So far, though, EMNR limps along with volunteer help and has managed only to encourage a limited network of informal contacts. The problem of sloppy research and exaggerated claims remains. Countercult leaders seem uniformly concerned.

Practical Sophistication

Few cult watchers have formal theological training (CRI’s staff is largely an exception), but they sometimes have a different kind of sophistication coming from regular, live contact with the groups they study. Take Eric Pement, who never completed college. “I was a proofreader who couldn’t keep his mouth shut,” he says, explaining how he came to his current editorial position at Cornerstone, a lively magazine that publishes articles on the cults and other topics. Pement is also responsible for building the Directory of Cult Research Organizations, and he spends countless hours counseling individuals involved in cults. With two other staff members at the 500-member communal Jesus People USA (JPUSA), Pement spends several hours a day engaging Wiccans and neopagans in dialogue through a network of computer bulletin boards. He knows things about Wiccans you cannot learn in a library.

Cult watchers use computers with great sophistication. The network of computer bulletin boards Pement “talks” through is a free marketplace of ideas where Christians interact with a wide variety of non-Christians, particularly neopagan occultists. In a different application, ARC’s Tolbert has used computers to develop a bibliographic data base for anyone who wants to search the combined libraries of a number of cult-watching groups. Tolbert picked up his computer expertise “on the job.”

Walter Martin himself was largely self-taught. Years of answering questions and confronting cult members trained him to cut to the heart of an issue. When I asked Bob Passantino, a long-time friend of Martin’s, whether cult-apologetic ministries need more contact with seminaries, he was doubtful: “Professors don’t have a lot of combat experience.”

Cult watchers do not see the need for a panel of experts to pronounce on theology so much as they see a need for ordinary Christians to learn discernment. “We have heard so much from our devotional writers,” Lewis says, “that it’s more important to experience God than to define him.” But, Lewis says, “We must explode the view that any spiritual experience is good. If Satan is a deceiver who disguises himself as an angel of light, it can be suicide to expose yourself to any spiritual experience that comes along. It will be tragic if creeds do not become important to the church again.”

That perspective seems distant from the church today. You would have to look hard to find much excitement about doctrine. But for how much longer? We live in an era of true pluralism. Mass media make the spread of theological novelties faster and easier, while the decline of denominational structures makes them harder to screen or stop.

Countercult leaders insist that they are not nit-picking, not merely being “negative,” not crying “wolf.” They believe our times have stirred up a witch’s brew of religion, and that their own scattered efforts are inadequate to the problem. “We’re watchdogs,” one of them told me. And they are raising a howl meant to wake the rest of us.

Walter Martin, the ‘Answer Man’

Walter Martin was an energetic, bluff man with a remarkable memory and a delight in the parry and thrust of debate. Although he did not receive his Ph.D. until he was in his late forties, his peers called him “Doctor” or “Doc” from the time he was in junior-high school, leading to a classic problem: When introduced to an audience as “Dr. Martin,” should he explain that only his friends called him Doctor? To some, Martin seemed abrasive and sarcastic. His friends, though, knew him as a deeply caring man, full of bear hugs and compassion. “Don’t tell me I don’t love the cults,” he would say, bristling at the thought. “I gave my life for the cults.” The interest began right after his conversion, while in high school at Stony Brook School. By 1949, as a freshman at Shelton College in New York, Martin was already speaking about cults and publishing pamphlets. He practiced apologetics in a public park, taking on questioners from a soapbox. “If you’re not quick, you’re dead,” he said of answering spontaneous questions.

In 1974, after a painful divorce, Martin left New Jersey for California. Some believe he experienced personal renewal, a “baptism of boldness” in California, where he taught at Anaheim’s Melodyland School of Theology. If there is some uncertainty about this, it is because Martin found it extremely difficult to talk personally, even to his friends. Gretchen Passantino, a long-time friend and associate, remembers the premarital counseling he tried to offer her and her husband, Bob. After fumbling at it for some time, Martin said, “This is awful. Why don’t you just interview me?”

Martin had no known hobbies. His work was his life, and, as the Christian Research Institute’s Hank Hanegraaff put it, “He had fire in his belly until the day he died.” When they traveled together, Hanegraaff remembers, Martin constantly looked for any chance, public or private, to share his faith. “No matter how tired he was, when power came on in the microphone, he was full of energy. He was doing what God had created him to do.” Martin was on the road, speaking, virtually every week of the year. His best-known work, The Kingdom of the Cults, was largely written from hotel rooms, so that many of its citations, done from memory, required correction in later editions.

In June of 1989, the 60-year-old Martin came home to Southern California after a Saturday TV debate with liberal Episcopal Bishop John Spong. Early Monday morning his wife, Darlene, awakened to discover that he was not in bed. She found him in the bathroom, on his knees. “Walt was often up in the middle of the night,” she remembered at his memorial service. “And I was many times awakened to the sounds of his praying quietly or reading the Scriptures in the next room, or jotting down notes for a sermon or a new book he would like to write.” She was about to tell him to say “Amen” and come to bed, but “after gently touching him on his shoulder and calling his name, I realized he was no longer here, but in the presence of the Lord.”

What Is Heresy?

Though the Bible in both Old and New Testaments shows concern for what we call heresy, the Greek term hairesis, from which the word comes, began with a different sense. In Greek society, it referred to a school of thought, particularly of some specific philosopher. Josephus adapted the term to describe the Essenes, Sadducees, and Pharisees—sects within Judaism. That is the sense in which the New Testament most often uses hairesis. For example, Paul in Acts 26:5 claimed that “according to the strictest sect [hairesis] of our religion, I lived as a Pharisee.”

Paul also lists hairesis as one of the works of the flesh in Galatians 5:20, though he probably meant factionalism, not heretical teaching. In the New Testament, the closest usage to the word’s later meaning comes in 2 Peter 2:1, which says that false teachers will “secretly introduce destructive heresies, even denying the sovereign Lord who bought them.”

In the first centuries of the church, heresy became identified with aberrant teaching. But as Geoffrey Bromiley writes in The International Standard Bible Encyclopedia, “The original sense [of factionalism] may still be glimpsed, for heresy arises when a party develops around a particular leader (self-willed and possibly self-appointed) whose divergent opinion opposes some common teaching of the Church.”

Eugene H. Peterson is pastor of Christ Our King Presbyterian Church, Bel Air, Maryland, and author of A Long Obedience in the Same Direction (InterVarsity) and Answering God (Harper & Row), both of which are about the Psalms.

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