Talking to a 'New-ager'

 In the late 1990s I and a few friends conducted an outreach to New Agers. Unlike most church outreach, it was not 'in-drag'. We went to where New Agers were and sought conversations on their territory. Over five years we ran a stand at an annual New Age festival in our city. The stand was staffed continuously for the four or five days of the event and we had sufficient team members to have from 3 to about 6 people at all times. They ranged from 'ordinary' folk to theologians and scientists. During this time we had hundreds of conversations with New Agers ranging from those who dabbled to those who went 'full bore'.

Our approach to the guests to our stand was based on this:

Firstly, normal conversational approaches are applicable here as anywhere else. First find out a little about the person's interest then get going with 'why' (as Simon Sinek does in business coaching): "Why do you have that belief?" and "Sounds like you've thought this out, what does it really do for you?"

Most answers are dead ends, but one can hint at the content of Eastern 'exilic' religions or ancient 'mimetic' religions (to use Westphal's taxonomy: https://www.amazon.com.au/God-Guilt-Death-Existential-Phenomenology/dp/0253204178) to move the conversation along.

Most New Agers' adopt a couple of baseline beliefs: that truth is relative, and the individual is the centre of the beliefs held.

The relativity of truth can be confronted with the shared nature of reality: we all walk through doorways, not walls; as a Catholic priest remarked in a conversation with me.

We all get hungry and thirsty, we all need sleep. We all sweat, bleed, weep, wash and toilet...we all seek medical help from time to time. The train leaves at the same time for us all. We all breathe. There is clearly a shared inescapable baseline of reality that denominates our material experience.

We all fear death and we are confronted by dependence at every moment. If any deny they are afraid of death, I ask if they have ever gone to the doctor. So far everyone has. I ask why. The want to 'get better'. Thus, they are afraid of death! (Pannenberg says 'all fear is fear of death') We are all enmeshed in a common objective reality!

When they do articulate their beliefs, I find a point to ask "And then what?" to explore the consequence of a belief. I seek to move the conversation to the universal apprehension of the 'human dilemma': there is something 'wrong' that they are attempting to correct by reaching for the transcendental, to something beyond, or 'better' than their life-experience and something that will allow them to integrate their experience of life and its discontents that is beyond their basic being and experience. Something is clearly absent from their 'life-world'! They are seeking it.

Does their NA belief do this?

Some will say yes, but then one can circle back to the question of the congruence of their belief with the world as it is, both at the base material level and in the human quest for the transcendent, for a 'home' in reality.

The aim here is to 'put stones in the shoe' in terms of the disjunct between their relativistic framing of reality and the convenience of a belief that fails to accommodate it fully.

Then, one can explore their basic Buddhist or Hindu framing of reality: if reality is illusory, why seek anything? If it is so bad, why are we asked to ignore it...both in a way absolutes that seek to resolve the dilemma, but they do so by a pretense that a mere program of personal convenience is adequate to deal with a truly confronting existential phenomenon. And why do such programs, invented by people who either think its is OK to abandon family (Buddha) or that there is no real evil or good (Hindu) have any substance?

Of course, as you mentioned on air, Jesus is a part of this conversation, but particularly if one can steer to the summative content of his work that he didn't avoid the real problems of humanity, but confronted, defeated and resolved them; without denying their reality, their effect or their significance, resolving them in the terms of the reality in which they occur.

The other issue to have ready is that personhood (personality) for them is not a core part of reality. If this is so, they are still actually living as though it is! And Jesus, he being the creator, shows that personhood is foundational to all reality; moreover, that he is of the godhead of father, son and spirit, love in community is basically real. Thus our impulse to share, to love and to be in community is itself consistent and based in what is really real and inescapably so.

Just as an addendum. Dr Peter Jones of truthxchange has some great content on YouTube, in books, and a course on Ligonier that deals with modern paganism. These are worth a look.