The Pagan Invasion is an explosive new 13-part video series providing a
thorough behind-the-scenes examination of today's New Age movement and neo-pagan
revival. Each superbly produced volume features rare footage from around the
world along with expert analysis by noted Christian leaders and authors. For
more information contact your local Christian bookstore or call 1-800-828-2290.
California residents call 1-800-633-0869.
Hello, I'm Chuck Smith. And I'm Carol Matricciana.
Welcome to this edition of The Pagan Invasion. As we are beginning our entry
into the 21st century, a number of political and spiritual leaders suggest
that we are also witnessing the dawning of a new age. During the 1960s, many also
who were looking for spiritual fulfillment turned to psychedelic drugs
and Eastern mysticism. That experience has now formed the foundation for today's
spiritual climate. The flower power generation of a quarter century ago has
blossomed into today's New Age movement, a highly sophisticated philosophy that
blends pagan religions, evolutionary science, and global politics. By uniting
religions, science, and politics under one umbrella, the New Age movement claims to
offer a new vision for humankind and is making every effort to usher in a new
era of global consciousness. During the 1970s, a scientist named James Lovelock
revived and popularized an ancient pagan religious concept that all species and
elements on earth make up one collective organism. That is, humans, plants, rocks,
and minerals are all part of one cosmic body. It was a proposal he called the
Gaia Hypothesis. The Gaia concept teaches that Mother Earth is a goddess, a person
able to retaliate, and if we as humanity upset her, she might turn on us just like
the white cells of our immune system take action against a dangerous virus.
Therefore, a global, ecological, and environmental movement is absolutely
necessary for our survival. The British newspaper, The Times, credited the Gaia
Hypothesis as perhaps the most significant movement in thought in the
1980s. By April 1990, this idea culminated in the largest worldwide
demonstration in history, known as Earth Day, a festival acknowledging sacred
Mother Earth, Gaia, as a spirit life force believed to have nurtured all life
forms since the dawn of time. Here we are at Malibu Beach on Earth Day, April
1990, and I'm speaking to Mr. James Coburn, an actor. Mr. Coburn, why should
we care about Earth Day or Mother Earth? Mother Earth is the mother. She's the
mother goddess. She's the one that we should be praising rather than raping. I
mean, all of these people here today are here for one reason, because they're
concerned about what's happening to the earth, what mankind is doing to the earth.
I mean, the negative emotion that we carry around a lot of us is another
contributor to it. I mean, it all feeds the moon. What we have to do is be true to
ourselves. We're true to ourselves. We'll be true to Mother Earth. Mother Earth is
going to be bountiful. She's going to give us everything we need. She has for a
long time. We've lost our way. The Preakins used to know how to do it. The
Indians, some of them, still remember how to do it. The earth is a living
organism. We're killing the one we love the most, and she loves us. We've got to
we've got to praise our mother goddess. Time magazine recently heralded this
Gaia reawakening as goddess worship, the effort to create female centered
spiritual expression and get away from a patriarchal father God. Many are looking
with great hope to the New Age movement to answer the crisis problems of our day.
New Age leaders working through organizations such as the United
Nations hope to quickly establish the New World Order. They envision a global
community united in its fight against pollution, where religions put away their
differences and unite as one, and where world peace is a reality. Indeed, we are
on the threshold of a new era, but will the New Age be able to deliver on its
promise of peace and prosperity, or is it a facade masking a dark and sinister
plan of spiritual deception?
Jesus himself warned us that in the last days many would come claiming to be
Christ and Messiah. Our landscape today is literally crawling with individuals
claiming to be Christ and the Eastern gurus are right on the top of the list.
There are two things the gurus have done. On the one hand they've used Eastern
type words that are floating about in the West, words like energy, vibrations and
so on, and they've also used words, phrases, ideas from the Bible, from the
teachings of Jesus, misused them, twisted them around to draw people to themselves
to suggest that the things that Jesus was talking about are actually the
things they are talking about when actually it's not so at all. In Holy
Bible it has been explained very explicitly that be perfect even as your
father who is in heaven is perfect, and we are also basically the same as he is.
The Eastern gurus, the occultists, cultists of every description have taken
the terms of the Bible and felt every liberty to redefine them according to
their basic presuppositions. God becomes not a personal individual, a spirit with
whom we have a personal relationship. Through his son Jesus Christ he becomes
an impersonal force. God is something, an energy that permeates every one of us,
each and every one of us, and it's both personal and non-personal. Jesus becomes
not the way, the truth, and the life, but an avatar, a way-shower, one of many paths
to God. Jesus Christ, of course, was an enlightened master.
Bhagwan is another Jesus, another Buddha. Jesus Christ was a great master like our
master is today. The word made flesh as the Bible puts it. Ernst Winter has a
PhD in international law. He was a diplomat in the Austrian Foreign Service
for ten years and from 1968 through 78 was a director with the United Nations.
My greatest concern really is the growing interest and dedication and
application of Eastern mystical thought and practices within traditional
Christian groups and churches. There's a vacuum, there's a longing, they want to be
filled with both religious experience. Today's New Age teachings falsely claim
that Hindu spiritual experiences are compatible with Christianity and the
incredible thing is that so many Christian leaders through their books,
magazines, sermons, radio and TV programs, encourage millions of Christians to
seek Christianized Hindu experiences. Many people who are in the Christian
Church have come to us and have had deeper experiences of spirituality and
of God as a result of this meditation. Most Catholic monasteries and most
Protestant Bible schools have introduced one system of meditation or another and
they are based upon the practices of yoga. Many of the church people and
particularly the leaders of the churches and denominations look with great hope
to its Eastern mysticism that it would bring new life into a dead body. While
infiltrating the Christian Church, Eastern mysticism is also powerfully
influencing world politics. Under the umbrella of the United Nations, countless
New Age groups spread their philosophies worldwide. Many UN leaders, UN agencies
and the World Council of Churches with its deep UN ties promote New Age beliefs
and practices. The UN has its own meditation room and resident guru Sri
Chinmoy. Even the United States Pentagon has meditation rooms. A graduate of
Harvard School of Divinity, Leland Stewart, directs the Unity and Diversity
Council, a powerful New Age promotional network that originated with a 1965
directive of the United Nations General Assembly. Unity and Diversity Council is
a worldwide coordinating body of what we call it individuals, organizations and
networks looking toward a time in which there will be a one single organized
energy of networking throughout the planet. Under Stewart's leadership in
1982, this group linked arms with Graham Wilson's Mind Body Spirit festivals,
forming a vast army dedicated to the merger of all religions into one under a
world leader. I am very interested in the harmony of all religions. It's not just
to give birth to another religion, but rather to to produce, let's call it a
universal religious outlook through which there can be a new connecting of
all cultures and all religions, all races. In this growing consciousness of sharing
godliness and looking for a leader to lead everyone into this new heaven, the
UN plays a very important role inasmuch as it is a support system. Any group that
meets to discuss these matters would be very eager and very careful to have UN
sponsorship. Our organization has been represented in the United Nations. We
have an office there and this has been going on for approximately five years.
We've been involved in all the sessions that are going on in the UN. We've been
able to watch and participate, offering meditations and presentations. How is
this possible? I think it became possible by the the thought and actions of one
man in the UN, Robert Mueller, who was continuously emphasizing that the UN has
to be a support system to this conditioning of man, to the sharing
desire, to this looking for a one world government, for one world leader, and
playing down, and I believe myself correctly, that the UN is not that world
government. That is a conditioning device, that it is an aid, a support system. It
gives prestige to otherwise completely outlandish groups. The Brahma Kumaras
World Spiritual University in India is used by the UN and its members for
conferences focusing on world peace and unity. Delegates from all over the world,
VIPs, are attending to express their ideas and to experience peace in a very
real way themselves. This experience will enable them also to draw up new laws for
universal peace. This will be endorsed by heads of state and submitted as a
practical form for the United Nations. Many evenings, the UN building is even
used for lectures, talks, meditations, enlightenments on how to make one better
world. The leaders are asked to meditate and be involved because this is part of
the instruction of brainwashing, and all this is part of the conditioning for the
vision of a new world or of a new age.
Appearing in the film Gods of the New Age is Dave Hunt, an internationally
recognized cult expert and best-selling author of more than a dozen books dealing
with Eastern mysticism, psychic phenomenon, cults, and the occult. I asked
him to share his thoughts concerning the implications of moving toward a new world
order. Dave, why are we hearing so much about this new world order? What does that
mean? That's most interesting. It was Mikhail Gorbachev, as near as I can recall,
who was the first one who mentioned it in Perestroika. Then you had Edvard
Shevardnadze before his resignation as foreign minister in September 1990 when
he addressed the United Nations. He said the actions of Saddam Hussein in the
Gulf are a threat to a new world order. President Bush is continually talking
about the new world order, and what he means by that is that we are going to
solve our problems. Finally, the United Nations is going to function as it was
designed. The world for the first time is united against an aggressor, and we're
going to make an example out of Saddam Hussein. We're not going to allow this to
happen anymore in the future. You just can't move in and take over another
country. We are going to have a new world order. It really is going to come.
Unfortunately, it will be ruled over by the Antichrist. People complain and they
say, well, Saddam Hussein, he's only doing what a lot of other people have
done. You didn't enforce the actions of the UN against them. How come you're
doing it to him? Because it's a new world order. It's something entirely new. The
world is united now to bring peace. We're not going to allow aggression, and it
relates back to paganism and Eastern mysticism. We can, in fact, solve our
problems. We have this human potential. We have the power within, and peace will
reign on this world. Now, in 1 Thessalonians 5, Paul warns, when they
say peace and safety, then sudden destruction will come. He doesn't mean
they're whistling Dixie. They're hoping for peace and safety. They think they
have achieved it. You know, the first one who called for a new world order was
Satan in his rebellion against God. I will be like the Most High. I will decide.
And then Adam and Eve joined in his rebellion, and they brought a new world
order. The new world order, what it's all about, is the world as man as God,
creating his own reality, will make, as opposed to the world that God intended
it to be. And it's humanism, cosmic humanism, and we're saying we can solve
our problems. We can bring peace and safety and prosperity. We can solve the
problems of evil and of war and of poverty without God, without the Prince
of Peace. Now, I know Bush claims to be a Christian, and I think in many ways he
conducts himself like a Christian. But unfortunately, he's falling into the trap
of working for a humanistic solution to the problems of this world. And in my
opinion, and my opinion is based upon the Scriptures, you will never have peace
until the Prince of Peace reigns, first in human hearts and then over this world.
And the new world order is an attempt to solve our problems without God.
Most people are aware that the United Nations played a major role in the war
against Iraq. In fact, the United Nations was responsible for not only authorizing
the use of force, but for outlining the terms for a ceasefire. Members of the UN
believe that Saddam Hussein stood in the way of the dream of achieving world
peace. Behind the scenes, the UN has for years been working toward a United
World Government, as well as a United World Religion. Not surprising, many of
its members have been actively involved in participating and promoting Eastern
religious meditation techniques.
Actually, we're being prepared for the surrender to an authority in a way that
perhaps we don't realize. We are going through right now a strange bathing in
Eastern concepts of consciousness, states of consciousness, bliss, reincarnation,
energies, vibrations, all of these words that have become very commonplace really
in the Western languages are also modifying our mind. They are changing our
way of thinking, and this changed way of thinking puts us into a mental state, if
you'd like, and prepares our intellectual functionings for the
surrender. More than ever before, the human race seems willing to surrender
spiritually and emotionally to a charismatic leader who can offer peace
and prosperity to a world trembling on the brink of ecological and social
collapse, international financial chaos, and a nuclear holocaust. Well-known
New-Ager Benjamin Creme claims to be the coming world leader's advanced public
relations man. In 1982, full-page advertisements around the world
announced the coming of Creme's New Age Christ, which gave fresh hope to
millions. At this press conference in Los Angeles, he described how this Christ
would make himself known. It is a truism today to say that we are at the dawn of
a new age, the age of Aquarius, and it is important to remember that all of the
great religions await the coming of a teacher. The Christians await the return
of the Christ. The Muslims await the Imam Mahdi. At the same time, the Buddhists
await the coming of another Buddha. The Hindus await the return of Krishna, and
the Jews, as always, await the coming of the Messiah. I am speaking today about
the return of such a teacher. Simultaneously, throughout the world will
take place hundreds of thousands of spontaneous healings and cures, which
will reinforce, if that were even necessary, the fact that it is the Christ
himself. The day of declaration will be the outstanding event of this or any
other century. On that day, the radio and the television networks of the world
will be linked together. We shall see this extraordinary face on our television
screens, but he will not speak. His words will drop silently into our minds in our
own language. This is the significance of the altered state of consciousness
reached in yoga and other forms of Eastern meditation. A Nobel Prize winner
has described the brain as, quote, a machine that a ghost can operate, unquote.
What that means is, in an altered state of consciousness, the connection between
my spirit that normally operates my brain and my brain is loosened, and that
allows another spirit being to interpose itself, begin to tick off the neurons in
the brain, create an entire universe of illusion, astral travel, give psychic
powers. In this way, the world is being prepared for some ultimate delusion. He
will indeed inaugurate a great new world religion, and at the very most sacred
core of that new world religion will be the process which is called the esoteric
initiations which take us out of the strictly human kingdom into the kingdom
of God. David Spangler, board member of the Planetary Initiative for the World
We Choose, which comes out of the United Nations, declares that Lucifer is the
same force as Christ, that Lucifer prepares us for our own Christhood, that
this is the final Luciferic initiation into the New Age. Benjamin Krem's Christ
may not be the world teacher and ruler of world peace as he forecasted, but
without question the stage is being set today for what the Bible calls the
apostasy or man's abandonment of God. This climate is ushering in the final
actor, the counterfeit, who the Bible predicts must come before the return of
Jesus, the true Prince of Peace who will then reign for a thousand years.
The Dalai Lama is playing a key role right now in this whole thing, this whole
scheme you might say. He's been traveling around the world and I find this
absolutely astonishing. He's been traveling around the world initiating
people into what he calls Tibetan Buddhist deity yoga, where he teaches us
that we are little bodhisattvas, little Buddhas. He says everybody is a Buddha
and I can train you through an initiation ceremony, basically initiating
you into yoga, into this altered state of consciousness, and I will teach you that
you are God and you create reality with your own mind through visualization and
this is how we're going to bring peace to this world. Now of course the media
laughs at him. No they don't. They take the man seriously and they take him so
seriously that he was given the Nobel Peace Prize. I mean I find that
astonishing that a man who's going to bring peace by turning us into gods who
create reality with our mind, he gets the Nobel Peace Prize. The influence of the
Dalai Lama around the world is, and in the political realm, and in the religious
realm, is astonishing. He's embraced. He becomes a spokesperson for peace and he
is one of the prime movers at the peace conferences. One of the reasons for this
is that the political leaders now recognize, and I think it's in preparation
for the revival of the Roman Empire and the coming of the Antichrist, they now
recognize you can't have political peace, military peace, without religious peace.
I mean some of our major problems in the world are religious problems. Hindus
against Buddhists in Pakistan or India or wherever it may be, or Muslims against
Christians and so forth, and they recognize we're going to have to have
not just a one-world government but a one-world religion. And so the Dalai Lama
has become the spokesperson for a broad-minded ecumenism that embraces
everything. Now interestingly, Afgortichev is making the same kind of
noises. He said, tolerance is the Alpha and Omega of the New World Order. Now this
is a man who was baptized as a Christian, you know, into the Orthodox Church. He
knows that Jesus Christ claims to be the Alpha and Omega. It's a slap in the face
to Jesus Christ who said, I am the way, the truth, the life. And Gorbachev says
that tolerance for all religions, for all beliefs, is going to be the Alpha and
Omega of the New World Order. Now you know that he means tolerance, in fact,
for everything except one thing, and that is Jesus Christ who claims to be the
only way. You know what Hinduism will do, for example. Hinduism will accept all
religions. We call this the embrace that smothers. Oh, we'll accept Jesus, of
course. But when we accept Jesus, he's no longer the Jesus of the Bible, but he's a
Hindu avatar, just another one of the many ways. And so this is the
tolerance that they're talking about, and it really is the destruction of
Christianity. And it doesn't make sense. I mean, I wouldn't want to go to a, I
wouldn't want to buy bread, for example, from a baker who says, what does it
matter what you put in? Nails and ground glass and so forth. I mean, why follow a
recipe? Or a doctor who says, you ask him for the diagnosis and the prognosis, and
he says, well, what would you like? So this idea that anything goes, that all
religions work, they have to embrace this in order to bring peace among
religions. That's absolutely contrary to Scripture, but it's coming into the
church, even among evangelicals who now become soft on the Gospel, and let's not
offend people, and we'll try to tone it down. And finally, you don't really have
a solution to the problem anymore. What are some of the political dangers in
religious tolerance and ecumenicalism? Hitler, for example, claimed to be a
Christian, the real Christianity, positive Christianity. National socialism is positive
Christianity. And just like Saddam Hussein, who invokes the name of Allah,
Hitler invoked the name of God in his speeches. We claim the blessing of
Almighty upon our efforts, you know. And if you don't define who God is, and if
you have a vague God, some higher power, who has no real principles, there isn't
a definite truth involved in this, then this becomes an umbrella for almost
anything. Saddam Hussein is a megalomaniac. He uses the name of God for
his own rebellion against God and against the laws of God, against morality
and ethics, and the laws of the world and of the United Nations and so
forth. So rebellion is in the heart of man, and the worst rebellion that
there is, the worst evil in this world, is when you use God as a cover for your
own ego and what you want to do. And ultimately, it prepares the way for the
Antichrist. Now, we are really moving in this direction. Some of the statements by
Gorbachev, for example, are absolutely incredible. In his book, Perestroika, he
said, it's not going to just be Western Europe that will be united, but there's
going to be a united Europe from the Atlantic to the Urals. The Russians, we're
going to be part of this united Europe. And can you believe the reason he gave
for it? He said, because we are Christians. Here was the head of world
atheism, world communism, where they've been trying to destroy Christianity, and
now he's posing as a Christian. And he says, we're a Christian nation. Well,
obviously, he didn't mean born-again, Bible-believing, evangelical
Christianity like you and I mean. He meant an ecumenical false
Christianity that embraces all religions of the world. Now, when Gorbachev wanted
to further his Perestroika and glasnost and the opening up and the
transformation of the Soviet Union, he didn't go to Nashville, Tennessee to meet
with the head of the Southern Baptist Convention. He went to Rome to meet
with the Pope. He recognized that he needed the help of Rome, the most
powerful religious leader on earth. And there is a growing partnership.
Newsweek reported that every week both Gorbachev and President Bush consult the
Pope. So there's a growing partnership between politics and religion. And I
think it's paving the way for the Antichrist. The revived Roman Empire
isn't going to be just a military political entity, but a religious entity
ruled by an emperor who is God. And we're back to paganism again. By the way, the
Dalai Lama is one of the Pope's closest friends. And you have a dialogue going on
between Buddhist monks and Catholic monks to arrive at a commonality and so
forth. But when the Pope addressed large Hindu audiences in New Delhi and
Calcutta, I was absolutely astonished what he said. You can get this out of the
Pope Speaks publication put out by the Vatican or Observatoire Romano, the
official publication of the Vatican. And the Pope said that India's chief
contribution to humanity is its spiritual vision of man. And he says the
world does well to heed and learn the spiritual vision of man that India is
offering. He said that we haven't come here to teach you something. We've come
here to learn from your rich spiritual heritage. It's an embrace of paganism,
literally. You remember in 1986 when he got, I think, 60 leaders of the 12 major
religions of the world to gather at Assisi for prayer. Now, some of these are
fire worshipers. These are pagans, animus, and so forth. And he said all of the
prayers of all of these people to whatever God they're praying to are
creating a spiritual energy that is bringing about peace in this world. So
paganism invades the Episcopalian Church. It invades the Methodists, the
Presbyterians, the Protestants, the Catholics, right up to the to the
Vatican. And I would say that we are heading definitely for a one-world
religion. It won't be new. It will be the old paganism dressed up in Christian
terminology. Now, that's what is most interesting to me because we're
preparing the world and the Church for the Antichrist. Ante in Greek has two
meanings, the one that we most often associate with it, which is opposed to or
against. But it also has another meaning, in the place of or as a substitute for.
And I believe that the Bible teaches that the Antichrist will embody both
meanings. He will oppose Christ in the most diabolically clever way he could, and
anything less would not be worthy of Satan's genius. He will oppose Christ by
pretending to be Christ. Now, if he does that, then his followers must be what?
Christians. That means we must, this is why Paul said that day will not come
except there's a great apostasy of falling away. We must have in this world
a Christianity, quote-unquote, that embraces all religions, including paganism.
A Christianity that can be accepted by Buddhists, Hindus, Muslims, fire
worshipers, unanimous, everything. And I believe that it's under the umbrella of
this false Christianity that all religions will be united and they will
worship the Antichrist as God. Now, I find it very interesting that the wall is
down. It's incredible what's happened. The Berlin Wall is down. Eastern Germany
is suddenly united with Western Germany. It couldn't happen for a hundred years, so
they said. Now we've got Hungary and Poland and Czechoslovakia, they're all
joining in. The Warsaw Pact is dissolved. Russia says we're gonna be part of this
and ultimately we're going to see a world, a new world religion. Now, what
was the religion of the Roman Empire? Well, it was paganism, first of all, and the
Bible says that religion is going to be revived. I believe that the Antichrist
will, in fact, be the new emperor, the new Constantine, over the revived Roman
Empire, which is why we have to have a falling away. We have to have a false
Christianity. We have to have, in fact, a pagan invasion of the church as well as
of politics and of our world, of society. And we have to have a paganized
Christianity, which is what happened to Christianity under Constantine. And we
must have a paganized Christianity, an apostate church that will be the bride
of the Antichrist, just as the true church is the bride of Christ. Now, in
Revelation 17, you have an incredible picture there. The woman rides the beast.
The beast is the revived Roman Empire. The beast is the Antichrist, and it's the
woman, the church, who exercises authority, who is riding this beast. It shows the
importance that religion will have, that paganism, this revived paganism and
mysticism, this whole religious trip is going to have in this new world order.
Many political and religious leaders today are working toward a united new
world order. While they hope this will be the beginning of a time of world peace,
the Judeo-Christian Bible predicts that this will ultimately result in untold
horrors and destruction. Ignoring this clear warning, however, the world
continues to move forward with its plans.
Today's revival of paganism and Hindu practices, which form the heart of the
New Age movement, was ironically the same kind of foundation that prepared the way
for Hitler's rise to power. The Germany of the 20s and 30s was in social and
economic despair and looked for a leader who would free them from the Great
Depression. The man with a promise of hope was Adolf Hitler, who claimed he was
ordained of God to usher in 1,000 years of peace and prosperity. His hypnotic
powers manipulated an entire nation to surrender its collective mind to him.
Obsessed with the occult, Hitler drew many of his bizarre ideas from Hinduism.
He took the symbol of the swastika as his own, a Hindu symbol of power seen in
many of today's temples in India.
Millions of Germans who submitted to Hitler as though he were God died for
him and his cause, much like the followers of Jim Jones. The current
worldwide revival of Hinduism blended with psychology and disguised as
self-improvement, self-hypnosis, positive mental attitude seminars, visualization
techniques, and mind dynamics courses has made today's world far more susceptible
to spiritual deception than the Germany that embraced Adolf Hitler.
Today a desperate world is looking for another spiritual leader. Has the human
race learned nothing from its own mistakes?
It is interesting that they are saying that man has now come to the next stage
of his evolutionary development, and that is that transition from man into the
universal consciousness of God. We hear so much about global peace, global
government, global unification. This is only a foreshadowing of what the Bible
tells us of the one world government that will be headed by the Antichrist,
that will not bring global peace, but will actually bring the greatest war that
man has ever seen or ever known. Again, man trying to substitute for God, but it
never works. Man's sciences and man's ideas cannot bring him into that
universal peace or global peace that the world desires so much. It will not happen
apart from the Prince of Peace, Jesus Christ, who will establish God's kingdom
upon the earth, and at that time they will beat their swords into plowshares
and their spears into pruning hooks. But we await for the coming of our Lord Jesus
Christ for true global peace. Within all of us there is a God-shaped vacuum.
Throughout the ages man has attempted to fill that void with the things of the
world, but it is only through a relationship with our Creator that we can
be truly satisfied. His Holy Scriptures reveal the way in which we can be
reconciled to God, and that is through the provisions of His Son, Jesus Christ.
I'm Chuck Smith, and I'm Carol Matriciana. Join us again for another
edition of The Pagan Invasion.
The Pagan Invasion is an explosive new 13-part video series providing a thorough
behind-the-scenes examination of today's New Age movement and neo-pagan revival.
Each superbly produced volume features rare footage from around the world,
along with expert analysis by noted Christian leaders and authors. For more
information, contact your local Christian bookstore or call 1-800-828-2290.
California residents call 1-800-633-0869.