New Age

For the past 100 years, the 90,000 residents of Santa Fe, New Mexico, have participated in a unique annual ritual: the burning of Zozobra. With a budget of just over one million dollars, the city constructs a towering 50-foot papier-mâché effigy, which is set ablaze as the crowd chants, “Burn him!” The purpose is to symbolically purge the community of its collective anxieties.

As described by the New York Times, Zozobra is imagined as a beast from the nearby mountains, lured into town under the guise of a celebration. Dressed in formal attire, Zozobra “thrusts the town into darkness and takes away ‘the hopes and dreams of Santa Fe’s children.’” The townspeople attempt to subdue him, but it’s only when the Fire Spirit-summoned by the unity of the citizens-arrives that Zozobra is ultimately defeated by fire.

The ritual’s goal is to literally incinerate the worries and troubles of Santa Fe’s residents. Before the burning, people stuff the effigy with written notes of their anxieties, medical bills, report cards, parking tickets, and even loved ones’ ashes. The act of burning these items serves as a powerful symbol of letting go.

Fire, both historically and in this ritual, represents destruction and renewal. It “eliminates dead vegetation and enriches soil, promoting new growth; it rejuvenates via destruction.” By channeling fire through ritual, people hope to gain control over the cycle of death and rebirth, using flames as a metaphorical reset button. The burning of Zozobra unites the community in optimism, offering a chance to vanquish the undesirable and begin anew each year.

Astrology is a meme, and it’s spreading in that blooming way that memes do. On social media, astrologers and astrology-meme machines amass tens or hundreds of thousands of followers. People joke about Mercury retrograde, and categorize “the signs as ...” literally anything: cat breeds, Oscar Wilde quotes, and Stranger Things characters. In online publications daily, weekly, and monthly horoscopes and zodiac-themed listicles flourish.

This isn’t the first moment astrology has had and it won’t be the last. The practice has been around in various forms for thousands of years. In the decades between the New Age boom and now, while astrology certainly didn’t go away—you could still regularly find horoscopes in the back pages of magazines. Chani Nicholas, an astrologer based in Los Angeles said:

(For a time) it went back to being a little bit more in the background. Then something happened in the last five years that’s given it an edginess, a relevance for this time and place, that it hasn’t had for a good 35 years. Millennials have taken it and run with it.

The stigma has receded as the practice has grabbed a foothold in online culture, especially for young people. One researcher said, “Over the past two years, we’ve really seen a reframing of New Age practices, very much geared toward a Millennial and young Gen X quotient.”

Callie Beusman, a senior editor at Broadly, says traffic for the site’s horoscopes “has grown really exponentially.” SimilarWeb reported in December 2024 that the top 10 astrology sites received a total of 38 million visits in one month.

Editor’s Note: You can check the most up-to-date astrology stats on SimilarWeb here

In a 2024 interview the actress Julia Fox was asked, “Do you meditate or journal or otherwise practice mindfulness?” She replied:

I don’t, but I do pray. When I was little, I [prayed to] Jesus Christ. Now I pray to the universe, the collective consciousness, the karmic force behind everything. I used to pray for things that I really wanted. Now I pray to be guided, stay on the right path, for strength, for positivity. But then I also definitely do pray for things I want, too.

Controversial activist Ayaan Hirsi Ali became well known when she published her 2007 memoir Infidel, which was an account of her life as a Muslim woman and her fight against radical Islam. She made headlines worldwide when she converted to atheism, receiving numerous death threats. In November 2023, she announced her conversion to Christianity. Her reasons address in part what is happening in the world today. She writes:

Atheists were wrong when they said rejection of God would usher in a new age of reason and intelligent humanism. But the 'God hole'—the void left by the retreat of the church—has merely been filled by a jumble of irrational, quasi-religious dogma. The result is a world where modern cults prey on the dislocated masses, offering them spurious reasons for being and action. This is mostly by engaging in virtue-signaling theater on behalf of a victimized minority or our supposedly doomed planet. The line often attributed to G.K. Chesterton has turned into a prophecy: 'When men choose not to believe in God, they do not thereafter believe in nothing, they then become capable of believing in anything.'

In this nihilistic vacuum, the challenge before us becomes civilizational. We can’t withstand China, Russia, and Iran if we can’t explain to our populations why it matters that we do. We can’t fight woke ideology if we can’t defend the civilization that it is determined to destroy. And we can’t counter Islamism with purely secular tools. To win the hearts and minds of Muslims here in the West, we have to offer them something more than videos on TikTok.

The lesson I learned from my years with the Muslim Brotherhood was the power of a unifying story, embedded in the foundational texts of Islam, to attract, engage, and mobilize the Muslim masses. Unless we offer something as meaningful, I fear the erosion of our civilization will continue. And fortunately, there is no need to look for some New Age concoction of medication and mindfulness. Christianity has it all.

Forty years ago, First Lady Nancy Reagan was ridiculed for bringing astrology to the White House. She consulted a San Francisco astrologer who advised the Reagans on which days public appearances would be more optimal for the President's success and safety.

Today astrology is about far more than figuring out if your crush is compatible or which soup to eat based on your sign. Personal star watchers are must-have advisors for scheduling art openings, Hollywood premieres, book launches, and board meetings.

Because of the pandemic, a lot of people who hadn't found astrology are looking for answers, both personally and professionally. The global astrology economy was valued at $12.8 billion in 2021 and could reach $22.8 billion by 2031, according to a new report.

Astrologer Heidi Rose Robbins says, “I used to read for artists and healers. Now it's CEOs and stockbrokers. Sometimes it's about choosing the right time for a big negotiation, and other times it's about seeking fulfillment and purpose.”

According to Jennifer Freed, who has a yearlong waiting list and reads for Gwyneth Paltrow, best-selling authors, and CEOs:

There is no more stigma that is keeping people away from astrology. It's just cumulative math. You can test anything in the marketplace, and if it's not effective it will go away. Astrology has survived for thousands of years.

An Aperture video goes into some depth as to how the promises of self-help and New Age teachings fail to deliver what the individual truly needs. The narrator says:

Today a snake oil salesperson describes someone who advertises or sells any product that promises the world and fails to deliver. Sadly, that's the story of self-improvement, at least as it is today. Because while it might seem like a new trend, the idea of self-help dates back to early philosophers like Seneca and Socrates. In the Fifth Century BC Socrates spoke about the constant improvement of your soul. He insisted that practices like meditation, fasting, prayer, and exercise could feed your soul and therefore improve your life.

Hundreds of years later, in the 1970s, the New Age movement arose and preached a philosophy of personal transformation and healing. The movement revolved around accessing our spiritual energy through yoga, meditation, tarot card readings, and astrology. This idea that we could elevate ourselves has persisted. But like most things in the West, once people found out just how much money they could make, self-improvement shifted from being a guide for those who needed it the most to a product reserved for those who could afford it.

Deepak Chopra, a prominent figure in the New Age movement, tells us that our mental health can determine our physical reality, that we can think ourselves into being healthier and happier. After his ideas were popularized by Oprah Winfrey, Chopra became an international sensation. He held seminars and became a spiritual advisor to celebrities like Michael Jackson. Needless to say, lost souls worldwide have made Chopra a very wealthy man.

Possible Preaching Angle:

One of the biggest problems with self-help is that just like snake oil salespersons, self-help experts claim to be able to heal the world with their speech. In reality, whether you're Chopra or one of the hundreds of other experts, the false path to self-improvement continues to ruin lives.

Tara Edelschick was raised in a home that was loving, loud, and fun, but an undercurrent of anxiety coursed through it all. The world was seen as a scary place. Tara said, “The message of my childhood was clear and insistent: Work, play, and love hard. Stay in control at all times, because something scary is waiting to take you down. I heeded that message into adulthood.”

She went to a great college, found the perfect job, and chose a wonderful husband. She thought to herself, “Weaker souls might need a god, but I needed no such crutch. I can orchestrate the perfect life. But that belief was obliterated when my husband, Scott, died from complications during a routine surgery. Ten days later, I delivered our first child, Sarah, stillborn.”

During the next year, she began a search for God. She visited psychics, read New Age thinkers, and attended meditation classes. Her forays into faith were attempts to make sense of what had happened to her and to control a world in which she had far less control than she thought she had.

Then she started reading the Book of John with a friend. Tony was the only Christian she knew who didn’t try to explain away the loss of her husband and baby. He said that if she would just read the Bible, God would do the convincing. So, they read the Bible together over the phone on Saturday mornings.

Tara writes,

I especially loved the story of (Jesus and) Lazarus. Unlike the Eastern philosophies that maintain that suffering is the result of our attachments, this story was about a man who was unashamedly attached. A man who behaved as though death was not natural. As though everything was broken, and that the sane response was to snort and weep. I loved that man.

After months of reading the Bible, Tara had to admit what she had fought so long to resist: She was hungry for Jesus. For the Jesus who hung out with whores, who wept when his friend died, and who claimed to be the Way, the Truth, and the Life. She said, “All of my searching for something in which to place my faith … led me to God who offered me himself in the form of Jesus. I didn’t have to find him or explain him; I just had to say yes.”

After that, Tara returned to school to study childhood bereavement. She married a wonderful man, and they had two beautiful sons. After getting married, she facilitated a support group for surviving parents whose spouse had died, and taught a class at Harvard on bereavement. She often found herself the repository for stories of loss, told in lowered voices at parties and grocery stores.

She says,

I try to listen deeply as people share those stories, nodding in agreement with how awful it is. I bear their story and, in so doing, remind them that they are not alone. These days when I sit with the broken and mourning, I pray for God’s love to do what I cannot: to bind up the wounded places, leaving their scars to bear witness of the power of both loss and love.

As recently as five years ago, author and speaker Doreen Virtue was the world’s top-selling New Age author. She enjoyed a phenomenally lucrative lifestyle, living on a 50-acre ranch in Hawaii. Her publisher treated her like a rock star, flying her and her husband first class to give sold-out workshops across the globe. She rubbed elbows with celebrities.

Virtue described her life and teaching this way:

New Agers often view Christianity as having dogmatic rules, but they have their own rigid standards about what an “enlightened person” must and mustn’t do. During my 20 years as a New Age teacher, I promoted techniques like “positive affirmations,” believing and teaching that “your words create your reality.” We held up our wealth and fame as evidence that our principles were true and effective. Yet despite this worldly success, we were unrepentant sinners with lives marred by divorces and addictions. Having sold-out workshops, standing ovations, adoring fans, and celebrity friends gave us swollen egos. I remember believing my every thought was a message or a sign from God or his angels.

In January 2015, she was driving along a Hawaiian road while listening to the Scottish-born pastor Alistair Begg. It was a sermon called “Itching Ears” taken from 2 Timothy 4, where the Apostle Paul writes that in the end times, people will want their itching ears tickled by false teachers who offer false hope (v. 3).

I could tell he was describing people just like me. God used Begg’s sermon to convict me for the first time in my life. His words pierced my stony heart, and I felt ashamed of my false teachings. Then when I read Deuteronomy 18:10–12, I encountered a list of sinful activities that included several I was practicing, such as divination, interpreting signs and omens, and mediumship. I was broken, deeply shamed, and humbled. I dropped to my knees in shame and sorrow. “I’m so sorry, God!” I kept wailing in repentance. “I didn’t know!” On that very day I gave my life to Jesus as Lord and Savior.

The decision had far-reaching consequences. Doreen and her husband left their fancy Hawaii home. Her New Age publisher ended their professional partnership. New Agers treated her as an object of scorn.

Having to admit that I was wrong to the entire world—my books were published in 38 languages—has been deeply humbling. Even so, I needed that humility to better learn how to lean upon God. After seeking but never finding peace in New Age, I have finally found it in Christ.

In Oprah Winfrey’s lifetime achievement award acceptance speech at the 2018 Golden Globes, she said, "What I know for sure is that speaking your truth is the most powerful tool we all have."

“Your truth.” Those two words are so entrenched in our lexicon today that we hardly recognize them for the incoherent nightmare that they are. Among other things, the philosophy of "your truth" destroys families when a dad suddenly decides "his truth" is calling him to a new lover, a new family, or maybe even a new gender. It's a philosophy that can destroy entire societies, because invariably one person's truth will go to battle with another person's truth, and devoid of reason, only power decides the victor.

"Your truth" also puts an incredible, self-justifying burden on the individual. If we are all self-made projects whose destinies are wholly ours to discover and implement, life becomes a rat race of performative individuality. "Live your truth" autonomy is as exhausting as it is incoherent. Depression is the inevitable result and “the inexorable counterpart of the human being who is her/his own sovereign.”

Author Meghan O'Gieblyn, explores meaning, morality, and faith. She recalls the role of thinking and reason during her days at Bible College:

When I was a Christian, I had a naive, unquestioning faith in the faculty of higher thought, in my ability to comprehend objective truths about the world. ... People often decry the thoughtlessness of religion, but when I think back on my time in Bible school, it occurs to me that there exist few communities where thought is taken so seriously. We spent hours arguing with each other—in the dining hall, in the campus plaza—over the finer points of predestination or the legitimacy of covenant theology.

Beliefs were real things that had life-or-death consequences. A person’s eternal fate depended on a willingness to accept or reject the truth—and we believed implicitly that logic was the means of determining those truths. Even when I began to harbor doubts…. I maintained an essential trust in the notion that reason would reveal to me the truth.

Today, no longer a believer, she has her doubts:

I no longer believe in God. I have not for some time. I now live with the rest of modernity in a world that is “disenchanted.” ... I live in a university town, a place that is populated by people who consider themselves called to a “life of the mind.” Yet my friends and I rarely talk about ideas or try to persuade one another of anything. It’s understood that people come to their convictions by elusive forces: some combination of hormones, evolutionary biases, and unconscious needs. Twice a week I attend a yoga class where I am instructed to “let go of the thinking mind.”

In an issue of CT magazine Nicole Watt shares her journey from spiritism to faith in Christ:

From the time I was a child … I felt I could sense (and at times see) what you could call the unseen or spirit world. Sometimes this world was as sweet as the childlike wonder of knowing where the prize Easter egg was hidden. Other times, an ominous flash of perception would warn me that I was in a home where witchcraft was practiced.

As a teenager, I was curious about the supernatural realm, and I started satisfying that curiosity with books on the occult. I loved God, but I also nursed a disobedient streak. And even though the subject matter was frightening, I found myself gradually lured in. I bought a Ouija board and became interested in clairvoyance.

As the doorway to the demonic realm swung open, terrifying incidents occurred. At one point, I slept with a Bible because I believed I was hearing demons in my room. Another time, I woke up in a cold sweat after feeling a tug at my nightgown and hearing a low, menacing growl in my ear.

Yet the idea of accessing supernatural powers remained appealing …. Looking back, I see how Satan was preparing me to be seduced by one of the greatest dangers of New Age thinking: the false promise of peace through spiritual enlightenment.

In my mid-20s I began studying Reiki, a New Age healing technique that uses different symbols and hand positions to supposedly channel energy from the universe. (The term itself means “universal life energy.”) At the time, I was desperate for peace and longing for spiritual awakening. Wanting to belong, I eagerly accepted the idea that Satan was a manmade myth contrived to keep people in religious bondage.

By the time I became a Reiki master, I was also a mom living on my own. And as so many new parents can attest, the anxious and awestruck feelings of parenthood have a way of awakening interest in religion. Next door to me lived an elderly couple raising their young granddaughter. She invited me to her church, where I finally found a home for my soul … and was baptized.

Now, I was straddling two worlds. On Saturdays I would offer Reiki sessions and teach classes …. But I was becoming increasingly uncomfortable with the Reiki world. Every day I felt a greater burden of conviction to tell people that whatever healing they experienced during Reiki sessions was a gift from God, not me. He was the answer to all their questions, problems, and longings.

Soon enough, I came face-t0-face with the foolishness of serving two masters. The crisis point arrived when a friend asked if I would teach Reiki to her and another woman …. The first session went smoothly enough, but that night I had a terrible dream of two witches attacking me. I yelled out the name of Jesus, and immediately they disappeared. I awoke from the dream scared but in awe of a name so powerful that satanic forces fled at its mention.

The next day I informed the women that I wouldn’t teach the class any longer. I said, “You do not need more teaching. You need Jesus.” They erupted in tears and anger, accusing me of arrogance, stupidity, and a lack of empathy …. But I also felt an incredible relief. I ripped up all my Reiki books and asked God to forgive me. That was over 15 years ago, and I haven’t practiced Reiki since.

The New Age is the old Satan playing on our deepest longings for peace, connection, abundance, and immortality. In contrast, the Christian path of obedience, sacrifice, and suffering can seem foolish. That’s why I praise the name of Jesus, who laid down his life not for spiritual masters but for weak and wounded sinners he loved so dearly.

Wellness preachers are wildly popular on Instagram. The New York Times calls them “quasi-spiritual influencers” and “Instavangelists” who have replaced the televangelist. They have online followers anywhere from 900,000 to 7.5 million (Gwyneth Paltrow). They are the “neo-religious leaders of our era.” Their online followers are composed largely of Millennials, and according to the Pew Research Center, 22% are not affiliated with any specific religion. The new belief system is “a blend of left-wing political orthodoxy, intersectional feminism, self-optimization, therapy, wellness, astrology and Dolly Parton.”

The article’s author, Leigh Stein, notes what is fundamentally missing:

Left-wing secular millennials may follow politics devoutly. But the women we’ve chosen as our moral leaders aren’t challenging us to ask the fundamental questions that leaders of faith have been wrestling with for thousands of years: Why are we here? Why do we suffer? What should we believe in beyond the limits of our puny selfhood?

Stein longs for

… role models my age who are not only righteous crusaders, but also humble and merciful, and that I’m not finding them where I live (online). ... There is a chasm between the vast scope of our needs and what influencers can provide. We’re looking for guidance in the wrong places. Maybe we actually need to go to something like church? ... I have hardly prayed to God since I was a teenager, but the pandemic has cracked open inside me a profound yearning for reverence, humility and awe. I have an overdraft on my outrage account. I want moral authority from someone who isn’t shilling a memoir or calling out her enemies on social media for clout.

Reiki is a relaxation practice that claims it promotes physical and emotional healing. The International Center for Reiki Training reports that more than four million people have completed their courses. Several major hospitals in the US and Canada offer Reiki to suffering patients. Practitioner uses their hands to either lightly touch or hover over the patient’s body to manipulate its natural flow of energy.

Anne Bokma, in her book My Year of Living Spiritually, investigated a wide variety of alternative spiritual practices, one of which was Reiki. Most “Reiki Masters” invoke spirit guides. At the start of one session Bokma was told: “The room is filling up with beautiful divine beings.” Through the Master the divine being said: “What a delicious feeling it is that you can sense me with your physical form.” And “You can communicate with us and ask us for guidance and clarity any time.” Another Master invoked the Archangel Michael, who is wielding the “sword of truth” to break Bokma’s chains.

A Reiki Master Teacher Training director writes:

If I need guidance, I find it works best for me to stop whatever I am doing, take a deep breath, say a prayer, invoke the distant healing symbol, and ask that the Reiki energy help connect me with my guides. When I feel the energy flowing, I will ask a specific question, stay very quiet and pay attention to what I hear. Now I don't usually audibly hear voices, but I FEEL them. For example, I knew I was to move to a new home in Colorado, however I wasn't sure where. To discern this, I asked my guides to tell me where my next home was to be. Then I just felt a warm glowing sensation in my heart and had an idea of a place that I had never been, but was feeling very curious about. I immediately went to this area, and within two hours had found my new home.

The NXIVM cult (pronounced Nex-ee-um), chronicled in HBO’s current docuseries The Vow, is a cult that targeted celebrities so they could recruit other celebrity friends. Their fame earned the cult more credibility and attracted new members. Actors and directors from major Hollywood productions were cleverly duped by its founder, Keith Raniere, who was recently sentenced to 120 years in prison.

Cult experts who have worked with ex-members explain the lure for famous, successful people:

Many people in that line of work think, OK, I had success with this series, and I have money, and I have name recognition. But I don't feel that I have a deeper sense of meaning. I've accomplished many of the things I hoped for regarding my career in entertainment, but what about really making a difference in the world? And Keith Raniere was selling that. He was telling people, ‘OK, you made movies. You were successful in television. But what about changing the world? What about really having an impact, not just through entertainment, but in a meaningful way?’

With the help of friends, family and cult experts, many celebrities realized that it was a destructive, abusive cult. They came to regret how they had hurt so many. One cult expert reported:

They feel terrible. When they start understanding how it works, the psychological manipulation part, they realize that it was self-perpetuating: You get hooked in, and the next thing you do is start bringing other people in and using the same manipulative techniques. And when you realize that's what's taken place, it's horrible to realize that you've messed up so many people's lives. A lot of people that I know that were in the upper echelon of it are doing everything they can to help those people they brought in.

Editor’s Note: As of 12/20/20 the NXIVM website has been taken down, and the leaders are in jail, but some followers have reorganized under different names.

Author Anne Bokma left her fundamentalist Christian church in her 20s. She recently spent a full year investigating and experimenting with numerous forms of popular New Age spirituality, from yoga to witchcraft, magic mushrooms to death cafés.

Bokma recalls the time in her early 30s when she prayed really hard. She was eight months pregnant and in the hospital experiencing premature labor pains. A nurse waved the ultrasound wand over her belly and after many minutes of trying, could not detect a heartbeat. A doctor was called as Bokma and her husband started to panic. The doctor also could not find a heartbeat. Bokma immediately began “bargaining, begging and beseeching” God. She didn’t really believe in a supernatural entity who personally intervenes, “but this did not stop me from crying out for mercy in my hour of need.”

Bokma tells the rest of the story, showing that her prayer was never really sincere:

When all hope seems lost, praying means you’re at least doing something. After searching in vain for another couple of minutes, the doctor … picked up the cord attached to the ultrasound machine and dangled it in front of our eyes. It hadn’t been plugged in. Our baby was alive, though not because of divine intervention. This made me think about what Mark Twain must have meant when he said: “Under the circumstances, swearing seems more apt than prayer.” Some might have called this incident a miracle. We called her Ruby.

While the United States is gradually becoming more spiritual and less religious, polls show that belief in the paranormal is on the rise. Polls conducted in recent decades by Gallup and the data firm YouGov suggest that roughly half of Americans believe demonic possession is real. The percentage who believe in the devil is even higher, and in fact has been growing: Gallup polls show that the number rose from 55 percent in 1990 to 70 percent in 2007.

But why is belief in demons on the rise when belief in Christian faith is declining? It seems that people seek spiritual fulfillment through the occult. Carlos Eire, a historian at Yale said, “As people’s participation in orthodox Christianity declines, there’s always been a surge in interest in the occult and the demonic. Today we’re seeing a hunger for contact with the supernatural.”

Adam Jortner, an expert on American history at Auburn University, agrees, “When the influence of the major institutional Churches is curbed, people begin to look for their own answers. ... At the same time that there has been a rebirth in magical thinking, American culture has become steeped in movies, TV shows, and other media about demons and demonic possession.”

Possible Preaching Angle:

This situation could actually lead many back to the church. As secularization creates a gap where people begin to seek out the demonic, more and more are returning to the church seeking freedom from demonic oppression in the form of exorcism.

The American poet, Christian Wiman, wrote a poem about how all of his friends are finding new beliefs. One turns to Catholicism while another turns to pantheism. A Jewish friend now worships the pantheon of “Paleo, Keto, Zone, South Beach,” and “Bourbon.” Meanwhile, her “Exercise regimens [are] so extreme [that] she merges with machine.” A male friend turns to the god of sex by marrying someone twenty years younger. All of these friends use these gods to cope with the age-old challenges that we all must face: dementia, doubt, despair, and death.

Wiman writes that, “All my friends are finding new beliefs, and I am finding it harder and harder to keep track, of the new gods and the new loves, and the old gods and the old loves.”

Possible Preaching Angle:

Wiman describes our changing religious world. While our culture may be less religious in the traditional sense of Christianity and Judaism, we are no less religious when it comes to the gods of dieting, fitness, and sex. Look beneath the advertising and you’ll see that all of these gods promise immortality in their own way. Age-old needs are being met by new-age beliefs.

In a story about country artist Willie Nelson for Rolling Stone, Patrick Doyle writes:

Nelson wrote a new song last night. It’s called “God is Love.” He speaks a verse of it, making eye contact with me and the entire time: “Take these words of wisdom with you everywhere you go/Tell all the religions in the world, and through them the truth shall flow/But God is love, and love is God, that’s all you need to know.”

Nelson says he doesn’t see God as a “big guy in the sky, making all the decisions. I think God is love, period. There’s love in everything out there – trees, grass, air, water. Love is the one thing that runs through every living thing. Everybody loves something: The grass loves the water. That’s the one thing that we all have in common, that we all love and like to be loved. That’s God.”

On February 26, 2019, a lake became human. For years, Lake Erie has been in ecological crisis. Invasive species are rampant. Biodiversity is crashing. Each summer, blue-green algae blooms in volumes visible from space, creating toxic “dead zones.” In August 2014, Lake Erie was so fouled that the city of Toledo lost drinking water for three days in the hottest part of the year.

Toledo residents were so appalled by the lake’s degradation and exhausted by government failures to improve Erie’s health that they acted. In December 2018 citizens wrote an emergency “bill of rights” for Lake Erie. It had a radical proposition: That the “Lake Erie ecosystem” should be granted legal personhood and accorded the consequent rights in law – including the right “to exist, flourish, and naturally evolve.”

There have been cities in the United States that have passed ordinances making polluting illegal. But no American city or state has changed the legality of nature effectively giving personhood to a gigantic lake. Citizens could sue a polluter on behalf of the lake, and if the court finds the polluter guilty, the judge could impose penalties

The bill illustrates a movement around the world--all seeking to recognize interdependence and animacy in the living world. These are known as the”‘rights of nature” movement. Animists believe that everything that exists is alive in some way:

“Nature’s capacity … to encounter us … is the ground tone of its spiritual, vibrant power. Indigenous peoples celebrated relations with other-than-human beings that are alive with spirit, emotion, and personhood. This personhood includes ‘bear persons’ and ‘rock persons’ along with ‘human persons.’ In other words, all things are persons, only some of whom are human.”

In an interview for the Howard Stern Show, former First Lady Hillary Clinton was asked about her faith.

“I have a deep faith,” she said before saying she believes there is a God and that when we die, we’re going to go “somewhere.” “We’re learning more and more about what holds the universe together. Dark matter makes up most of the universe. We really don’t quite know what it is. It’s energy. I think religious belief and science are compatible, unlike those who reject one or the other. I think that energy doesn’t die. Energy keeps going.”

Stern replied, “That’s comforting.”