The Second Coming of the New Age: The Hidden Dangers of Alternative Spirituality in Contemporary America and Its Churches

by Steven Bancarz

I was replacing a good relationship with God with mystical experiences and astral projection. I believed this ability made me unique. I had been brought up in an incredibly broken home, so New Age was giving me the sense of worth I had been denied as a child. New Age played to all the worst parts of me that had been developed through the tough times of my childhood. It allowed me to take my own lack of self-worth and turn it into selfishness, my want for love into greed, my trauma into a victimhood mentality, my fear into substance abuse, and my depression into a lack of faith. New Age did not help any of my problems; it only turned them into subtler and unrecognizably ugly character flaws.