A review of The Secret by Rhonda Byrne
 
Esoteric (that is, inner, hidden) spirituality is going public. The official web site of The Secret announces “a new era for humankind,” kick-started by the sale of two million copies since the book’s appearance in November, 2006. The secret kept since Babylonian times is now available on Amazon.com. So what’s the rush?

 
Money? The Secret is one more offering in a successful series of best-selling spiritual volumes, starting with Shirley McLaine’s Going Within, followed by James Redfield’s “The Celestine Prophecy” and consummated by Dan Brown’s The DaVinci Code. All those involved have done very well, thank you. But there is more than money involved.
 
A sense of [manifest] destiny? We are, says The Secret, “the generation that will change history.” The “generation,” it turns out, is particularly American, as the Australian editor, Rhonda Byrne, readily admits. Good ole US of A—pragmatic, positive thinking (already developed by New Thought and Norman Vincent Peale and lately tv-marketed by the multi-millionairesWayne Dyer, Anthony Robbins, Dr. Phil and Mitch Albom) is now joined to “Nature spirituality,” represented by the occult channeler Neil Donald Walsch (who appears on the DVD). The Package promises to make spiritual and material millionaires of us all. This is what New Age researcher Tony Schwartz calls “an emerging new American wisdom tradition” that will fill our pockets and save the planet.
 
A major change of spirituality? On his private island with his new wife, Tony Robbins must be kicking himself that his brand of positive thinking never came up with such a wealth-producing product as The Secret. This is the power of positive thinking on spiritual steroids, this is a new hybrid religion that joins the self-indulgent materialism of the West with the Hindu/Buddhist spirituality of the East. It takes principles and quotations from all religions and reveals that guilt is passé, that the “law of attraction” is neither good nor evil, and that whatever you desire and attract to yourself “you deserve.” Such “revelation” arrives on the scene at the right time.
 
Sociologists now tell us that modern society has made a “subjectivist turn,” away from the understanding of life as “established roles” and “given orders of things” to life as a state of consciousness that considers the inner self as the norm of behavior and gives high priority to “subjective well-being.” Turns out that material and spiritual well-being is just what the modern gurus ordered.
 
A choice of worldview? The Secret is not just a fluke commercial success or the latest version of the human potential movement. It is one more proof that the “Christian” theistic West has (since the 1960s) made major moves to adopt the timeless beliefs of pagan, pantheistic monism. The vocabulary of this ancient religion is all over the glossy pages of this contemporary best-seller.
 
“You are the master of the universe”; “you are eternal energy… which can never be created or destroyed;” “we are all One”; “everything is One universal Mind”; “We are the creators of the universe”; “you are God manifested in human form.” 
 
Step back and note what is happening. Human potential has morphed into divine potential, monistically adopting the unique attributes of God the Creator. This is the classic worship of Nature which necessarily eliminates God, its transcendent and holy Creator.
 
Scholars of religion identify two types of spirituality: 1. esoteric (inner) religion—the God within; finding truth within the human heart, since humanity is divine. This is the air breathed in The Secret ; 2. exoteric (outer) religion that finds truth beyond the sphere of Nature and humanity in the person of God, Creator and Redeemer, whose being is outside of created things. A classic text from the Christian scriptures said this with surprising clarity two thousand years ago. There are only two kinds of religious people, those who worship and serve creation and those who worship and serve the Creator (Romans 1:25).
 
These two types of spirituality really do describe the two religious worldviews on offer. They both require faith and service. They cannot be mixed because they are mutually self-excluding. You have to choose.
 
The age-old esoteric option, presented with such brilliant marketing skill in The Secret, is tempting because it offers power, money, human divinity, the elimination of all things distasteful and the promise of a humanly-realized earthly utopia—but it fails to take seriously human evil, physical death and the reality of God as separate from us, demanding our allegiance.
 
The exoteric/outside option, found in the Revealed Word,faces squarely the present reality of evil and the ugliness of death and finds final hope only in the Creator as the loving, effective Redeemer.
 
The options for present and future personal happiness could not be more clearly presented: either esoteric hope in humanity or exoteric hope in God.
__________________
Dr. Peter Jones
Director, Christian Witness to a Pagan Planet

Adjunct Professor, Westminster Seminary in California
 
Copyright Escondido 2007