Fundamentalism vs. New Age, Two Sides to the Same Coin
Fundamentalism: Freedom from distractions
New Age: Freedom from
restrictions
Each has a drawback:
Fundamentalism: Has restrictions to true choice
New Age: Loss
of direction to distractions
Let me explain. With fundamentalism, for example, Southern
Baptists or Shiite Muslims take great pains to separate men and
women, the temptations of the flesh. Rigorous precepts of
co-mingling, no alcohol, no dancing are enforced to allow men and
women to go on with their lives without distracting temptations of
the flesh. Fundamentalism has at its core a belief that the flesh is
VERY weak, and must be chained up, covered, locked down and put away.
The spirit soars in inverse proportion to how detained is the body.
This actually works pretty well, and isn’t necessarily a terrible
thing. After all, it still is an attempt at living a life of meaning
and usefulness, instead of a life mired in selfish desires and self
destructive behavior.
But Fundamentalism assumes weakness, and therefor never expects too much of
one.
Its drawback comes when those external restrictions are removed.
Without the enforcer, the jailer keeping your body locked up tight,
without the imposition of rules, without a learned internal
decision-making capacity, you can fall victim to excesses for which
you are not prepared. Think the “preacher’s son/daughter”
syndrome or “Catholic school girl.”
Secondly, fundamentalism has a spirit crushing affect on those
that fall ever so slightly outside its ordered confines. I’ve known
several Mormons, both active in the faith and fallen away from it,
and the commonality among them is the crushing expectation of the
community. This can cause them to raise to great heights, but can
just as easily drag them to deep lows. To get a divorce in the Mormon
faith is one of the most unforgivable transgressions. Pre-marital
sex? Drinking? Carousing? Men, failure to provide for your family?
The Mormon community exacts a heavy, many times, unspoken toll on
those not strong enough to keep the rules of faith.
New Age, on the other hand, is a recent phenomenon. It strives to
remove restrictions from the individual. It seeks to unlock your
hidden potential. Give up your petty fears, focus on the self, and
you shall be free. Your guilty heart holds you back. Your fears, your
past, your transgressions, your weaknesses, they all have one thing
in common – they conspire to drag you down, lock you up, keep you
miserable. That cannot be God’s plan for you. New Age strives to
unlock all the chains that bind.
It’s a lovely message for those that have been beaten down, for
those that feel that they have never been realized. It may be the
first time that some of them have felt any self-worth. Perhaps it was
a battered wife, an alcoholic, an abused child, or any of the variety
of broken souls that litter the earth. New Age religion offers these
people a way out, an offer of acceptance and non-judgment.
It really is a lovely message, but it has a fatal flaw as well.
Excessive focus on the self causes a loss of awareness of the other.
Take for example the author Richard Bach, of Jonathan Livingston
Seagull fame. His recent explanation of his divorce is revealing
of the pitfalls of New Age thinking.
…Leslie and I are no longer married. Soul mates, to me,
don’t define themselves by legal marriage. There’s a learning
connection that exists between those two souls. Leslie and I had that
for the longest time, and then a couple of years ago, she had this
startling realization. She said, "Richard, we have different
goals!" I was yearning for my little adventures and looking
forward to writing more books. Leslie has worked all her life long,
and she wanted peace, she wanted to slow the pace, not complicate it,
not speed it up. Not money, not family, no other men or other women,
separated us. We wanted different futures. She was right for her. I
was right for me. Finally it came time for us to make a choice. We
could save the marriage and smother each other: "You can’t be
who you want to be." Or we could separate and save the love and
respect that we had for each other. We decided the marriage was the
less important. And now we’re living separate lives.
Do you see the same thing I see? Lack of passion? Lack of focus?
Lack of heart? Here’s someone who’s painted himself into a corner of
denial. Look, buddy, just admit you two screwed up. You couldn’t
compromise. You couldn’t make it work. Each was more in love with
their “self” than the “other”. Examine your
limitations. Learn from your failure. You’ve got to see where you’ve
screwed up. You’ll not learn from it if you don’t see your failures
in a cold clear light.
One would believe that New Age opens up an infinite variety of
experience, a limitless, endless array of choices all of which are
equal and none of which are right or wrong. They simply are. With
little framework to define a right path or a wrong path, people may
wander around without direction, without purpose, or perhaps the main
purpose being self-fulfillment. Like little ants wandering around
randomly looking for food, deep New Agers suddenly come upon a
morsel, and being so cut off from the other, do not even have the
capacity to communicate the message of what they have found. They are
content to let the colony discover the morsel for themselves, for how
could they be so arrogant as to assume this morsel is fit for anyone
else but themselves.
Without at least some level of rigor, decisions become bland,
tasteless, without risk, without price. A marriage ends because it
did. We chose not to be married, and it was the right choice for us.
We become so detached from each other, so free, that we may as well
just float away in our own little bubble, little known to the
universe, having never wanted to risk offending it with our failure.
I’ve always had a deep distrust for both extremes, that is,
fundamentalists scare me with their rigorous intolerance for
distractions and those that bring them, and New Agers scare me with
their aimless free floating lack of commitment. The truth must lie
somewhere in the middle, somewhere between crushing restrictions and
overwhelming relativism.