Julian and Matthew decompress after the interview with Gavin Ryan and discuss the "alt-med treadmill" and what it means to never quite know where the threshold of evidence lies. -- -- --Support us on PatreonPre-order Conspirituality: How New Age Conspiracy Theories Became a Health Threat: America | Canada Follow us on Instagram | Twitter: Derek | Matthew | JulianOriginal music by EarthRise SoundSystem Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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| Hello Conspirituality Podcast listeners. | |
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| Thank you. | |
| I mean, conspirituality's most prominent influencers have always shown either an affinity for or a great facility with utilizing the language of evangelical Christianity. | |
| You know, that was essential to Christian Northrop's Great Awakening series. | |
| R.F.K. | |
| Jr. | |
| gets into it by the time he's thumping a Bible and talking about how he's going to die with his boots on because the apocalypse is coming. | |
| Zach Bush is the doctor who wants to be the priest. | |
| It feels to me also, I don't really know how to understand it or theorize it or certainly like measure it, but it feels like there's a growing kind of dovetailing between | |
| The New Age wellness, you know, yoga associated spiritualities that we began studying and the sort of evangelical Christian backbone of American popular religion. | |
| And that is a kind of, I suppose it makes sense that as, you know, Can spiritualists gain more political traction that they're also going to network more effectively with people in the spirituality game who are actually already networked and politically powerful? | |
| I guess that's not surprising, but it is something that I guess I didn't expect and now I feel I have to learn a lot more about evangelical, fundamentalist, and Pentecostal Christianity than I knew. | |
| Yeah, it's weird. | |
| It's like, it's almost this invitation to reconsider just how much the roots of what we think of as New Age movements are embedded in these Christian revivalist and millenarian kind of Obviously, there's all of the science of mind stuff, Christian science, going back to Mary Baker Eddy. | |
| But I think there's another piece here, which is that the prosperity gospel and the outsider kind of narrative that evangelicals have about the apocalyptic stuff, the rapture stuff, the we live in a fallen culture that needs to be sanctified once again the we live in a fallen culture that needs to be sanctified once again by everyone becoming born again in | |
| And that has so much, I don't even know what to call it, if it's structural or energetic or mood overlap with so much of the new age stuff. | |
| And then there's just, to go back to the prosperity gospel piece, there's just the reality that for these conspiritualists, the way that their audience has exploded exponentially through the pandemic period means that they just keep breaking through into new demographics. | |
| And they have the opportunism and the training to say, okay, well, how do I slightly tweak my language so that these people will give me their money as well and will give me their adulation when I show up on these big stages? | |
| And to them, I can only imagine it feels like Making it. | |
| They're becoming stars. | |
| And if their audience are Evangelical Christians, great! | |
| I think Jesus is wonderful. | |
| He's one of the Ascended Masters. | |
| I've always thought so, right? | |
| Right. | |
| Yeah, there's that sense of making it because the audience is new, it's wider, it might feel a little bit more populist. | |
| It might feel as though, now I'm really getting to the heart of American culture with my messaging. | |
| I remember my own cult leader, Charles Anderson, Endeavor Academy, was very much interested in not only proclaiming that A Course in Miracles was the kind of | |
| New Age Bible that kind of completed the Christian story and it was the endpoint of the Gospels and of course it redeemed all of the Old Testament, but it also included all of this esoteric material and it brought together the great rays and it was the pinnacle of theosophy. | |
| It was really kind of like the crowning achievement for him of And I think that's just because he picked it up in 1976 and he knew it really well. | |
| It's not like he knew anything about anything else. | |
| But what was interesting was that he was very interested in the sort of mainstream churches in the area potentially inviting him to speak so that he could become like a normal pastor in some way so that his revelation could not just be some kind of New Age explosion, but it could also be recognized as kind of like down-home religion. | |
| It was very interesting. | |
| It was like a pathway for him to popularity was to say, oh, if local churches can accept me, if the Lutherans will have me over for their corn roast, and I can give a little talk on what I understand about Jesus, then I really will have made it. | |
| Then more people will wake up. | |
| And so I think this, what you're saying about the outsider-ness of both the New Ager and the Evangelical, Might play this role in continually seeking the notion of the all-American audience. | |
| Like, who is that? | |
| How can I get to the heartland? | |
| Yeah, and it really makes me think about how, you know, within the yoga world, I was talking with someone about this the other day who has done a lot of yoga but didn't know much of the background. | |
| I was talking about this vying for lineage, right? | |
| That is so familiar to us in our generation of yogis, is that there was Always this jockeying for position of who has the actual lineage and who can make a case for how they trace their approach back to the real lineage. | |
| And it makes me think about how, you know, all of the pseudoscience stuff that is so dominant in alternative medicine. | |
| Some of it is about lineage and tradition, but some of it is also the same sort of spirit that we are doing something that is evolving the model of wellness to the next level. | |
| And at some point, the mainstream is going to catch up with us. | |
| Just like quantum physics caught up with ancient mysticism, just like there were people in the 80s going around saying, well, did you know that Jesus actually went and studied in ashrams in India? | |
| And we can finally have this synthesis, which really, when I was younger, made a lot of sense to me, this desire to find a perennialist synthesis. | |
| But more and more, I'm just like, oh God, no. | |
| What were we thinking? | |
| It's so interesting, because what we're also talking about, I think, is do the influencers that we cover, do they want to be countercultural? | |
| Or do they want to be mainstream? | |
| Like, do they view themselves? | |
| Well, no, but hold on. | |
| They want to be part of the mainstream that considers itself countercultural. | |
| Yeah. | |
| Right? | |
| And that's the weird thing about this period. | |
| And I keep thinking, I keep trying to find the right way to say this is that the people who are ushering in actual fascism, like with overturning Roe versus Wade, they're the same people who claim that all sorts of other things that are coming from the left are a form of fascism. | |
| authoritarianism, tyranny, imposition on their freedoms. | |
| Right. | |
| And, and of course you have the, my body, my choice kind of massive contradiction there. | |
| And, and by the same token, this, this idea that, that, you know, it's, it's the, it's Fox news's notion that there's a war on Christmas. | |
| So, so, so Fox news gets to be the outsider group who's advocating for Christmas against the oppressive, you know, mainstream liberal demonization of Jesus. | |
| And It's like, what are you even talking about? | |
| CNN runs, like, documentary films about the life of Jesus at Christmastime. |