^{January 9, 2025}

Melissa Dougherty Exposes the DARK Side of Modern Christianity!

Inside This Episode

Manifestation, the Law of Attraction, and the idea that we are all gods and goddesses - these are just a few examples of New Thought - a movement Christian apologist and YouTuber Melissa Dougherty says is taking over our churches without Christians even realizing it. Melissa used to be all-in with New Age and New Thought, but in recent years she has made it her life’s mission to help believers identify and deconstruct what she calls fake Christianity.   

Order Melissa’s book, Happy Lies

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Head to YouTube to watch Maybe God’s full-length interviews! 

Transcript

Julie Mirlicourtois: Hey, Maybe God family. Happy new year. This is Julie Mirlicourtois, executive producer of Maybe God. Before we get started with today's episode, featuring a very special guest, I wanted to pop in and let you know about a few things happening in the Maybe God community.

First, a really exciting announcement. If you listened to our episode with Sissy Goff about anxious parenting, or if you follow Sissy's work through her best-selling books and hit podcast, you're not going to want to miss our in-person event with Sissy, happening here in Houston on Saturday, February 8th, 2025. She'll be talking about her latest work, The Worry-Free Parent, and you'll even have a chance to meet Sissy and have her sign your books. Just check out the link in the show notes to get your ticket today. And since there are a limited number of seats, don't wait to grab your spot.

We also wanted to let you know about some very exciting projects we have going on right now. If you're a long-time podcast listener, you've likely noticed that we've changed our format a bit. That's because all of our interviews are now playing also on our YouTube channel. Where we've reached thousands of people who are searching for answers to their biggest questions about faith. If you haven't already checked out our YouTube channel, please head there now and subscribe, so you can be part of this fast-growing and very engaged community. We read all your comments, so let us know what you're watching, what you love, and what you want more of.

Finally, we just launched a brand new YouTube channel featuring Maybe God host Eric Huffman. It's called The Story Pastor. And on this new channel, Eric reacts to videos about everything, from people's arguments against God to hilarious TikTok content and current events.

We'd be so grateful if you'd support this new endeavor by subscribing to The Story Pastor on YouTube today. Just head to the links in the show notes and let us know if you have any videos that you'd like Eric to react to.

Okay, that's it for today. Thanks for listening. Now enjoy today's episode.

Eric Huffman: Manifestation, the law of attraction, and the idea that all people are gods and goddesses in their own right. These are just a few examples of New Thought, a movement that our guest today says is taking over our churches without Christians even realizing it.

Melissa Dougherty used to be all-in with New Age and New Thought.

Melissa Dougherty: The other word for New Thought is metaphysical Christianity.

Eric Huffman: But in recent years, she's become a Christian apologist, and she's made it her life's mission to help believers identify and deconstruct what she calls fake Christianity.

Melissa Dougherty: You just have your way of believing, and I have my way of believing. Really great excuse to just not believe what the Bible says.

Eric Huffman: Melissa's new book, Happy Lies, is being released on January 28th, 2025. Melissa, welcome to Maybe God.

Melissa Dougherty: Yeah, thanks for having me on, Eric. I appreciate it.

Eric Huffman: Well, I'm so thrilled to talk to you. I mentioned before the camera started rolling just how special this is for me and how much I've been looking forward to this. I've followed you online for years now. My wife and I watch your videos all the time and talk about them. And so we're grateful for all that you've contributed to Christianity and to YouTube in recent years. So, thank you.

Melissa Dougherty: Yeah. Yeah, I appreciate it. I'm honored that you guys even watch it. It's always so cool to run into people that, you know, watch your stuff because you can kind of like geek out together and discuss the things. But yeah, I'm honored. I'm honored that you guys would watch my stuff for that long.

Eric Huffman: For sure. Yeah, we have, and we've enjoyed it. And it's so fascinating. But I also feel like I just wish more people knew the things you're talking about because so few people are talking about New Thought.

Everybody kind of knows what new age is or they have some idea of the new age movement. But New Thought is sort of a separate thing that we're going to talk about today. And it's, as you've said in your book, even more dangerous than some of the things you find in new age.

So, let's just talk about how it began for you because you clearly have a grasp on this movement. You're someone who is talking about something no one else is. So, how'd your journey with new age and New Thought begin? Take us back.

Melissa Dougherty: I mean, I grew up in a New Thought household. The other word for "New Thought" is metaphysical Christianity, which I will get to here in a little bit. So, I grew up in what I would consider a Christian household, but the way that Jesus and spiritual things were talked about were very different.

Lots of things about the power of your mind. We had a lot of very strange things happen, spiritually strange things happen. And I thought it was so cool, Eric. I was like, "Oh my goodness, we're special." I thought that there was just this higher spiritual plane that we had access to that would make us more aligned spiritually, vibrationally, whatever it was.

Eric Huffman: Vibrationally, you say?

Melissa Dougherty: Yeah, yes. And vibrations, frequencies, those were very big words. But I just thought it was all Christian. We went to church.

Eric Huffman: What kind of church was it?

Melissa Dougherty: A Presbyterian church.

Eric Huffman: Really?

Melissa Dougherty: Yes. I remember the pastor and his robes and everything. We'd have Sunday school. I was always, always interested in spiritual things. And I always loved God. I don't remember there was a time that I didn't love Him. But I became a Christian... This is a story on its own, but I was in a dark place, had a friend tell me the gospel, became a Christian, transformed my life radically.

Eric Huffman: How old were you?

Melissa Dougherty: 16 years old. Radically transformed my life. But I had questions and I did not find that there were people that were open to answering those questions. I felt a lot of pushback where almost like an anti-intellectual strain, if you will, where it's just like, I don't think about that. You're stumbling my faith. I'm like, "But no, why don't we know the answers to these? Somebody's got to have answers for Christianity 101 questions."

I had questions about hell. What about those who had never heard? What's up with the violence in the Old Testament? What is a wineskin? I mean, what's happening? Like, what is up with this? Why do we do sacrifices? I was so curious. I was hungry. That's the word. I was very hungry.

I did not get discipleship, but there were lots and lots of books, beliefs, things that I was exposed to growing up that seemed to fill those gaps and they seemed very open-minded, nonjudgmental, positive, very, very tolerant. You know, it's not like I sat there and I read all these books. It happened over time gradually where these beliefs that looked like Christianity started seeping in and supplementing whatever it was that I was looking for. And those were New Thought beliefs.

Now, people might hear that and they're like, I don't know what that is. Yeah, you do. You know exactly what this is. You know what it is and you don't know what it is.

I had a child around 2011, another long story short, but that's really what pulled the rug out underneath me is that I still had questions. I'm like, Man, I really still have this itch to just sit down with somebody and talk about spiritual things. And Jehovah's Witnesses showed up. At the time I was-

Eric Huffman: [inaudible 00:07:06]

Melissa Dougherty: At my door, man. I was really into the law of attraction at the time and I thought that I had attracted them to me. I thought we all believed the same thing. I thought if you believed in God in some way... I guess you could say I was like extremely free grace as well. Because if you somehow knew about Jesus or had any sort of belief in Him at all, or God, you were saved.

Eric Huffman: We're on the same team.

Melissa Dougherty: You're on the same team. Yes. You just have your way of believing and I have my way of believing. That is so easy to do, but it's a really, really great excuse to just not believe what the Bible says and kind of just make your own way there.

But it was them, they came and I started thinking, "Hold on, I don't know that much, but that's weird." I'm like, there's something off with what they're saying. I started researching their religion and it was in that research that I realized, "Oh, what I believe is this thing called new age." But it really wasn't. And that's the thing is that I completely wholeheartedly repented. I learned that, oh, this is like the serpent's lie. I believed the oldest lie in the book, which actually was the original title idea for this book, the oldest lie in the book.

Eric Huffman: Really?

Melissa Dougherty: Yes.

Eric Huffman: I like happy lies.

Melissa Dougherty: I like happy lies too. I think it works much better. But the idea was, how could I have not known? And this is important because I had been, at that point, going to a church for like a decade, a weekly involved volunteering church, a Bible believing church in that case. How could I have not known what happened here?

And so I came out thinking it was new age, that these things that I had been into were new age. Let me put specifics to these things. What I mean by this is manifestation, affirmations, law of attraction, your mind having mind power, vibrations and frequencies, your words having power to create because you're a co-creator with God, a sense of Christ consciousness, which what that is, is the fact that what Jesus did, you can do and more.

He's here showing you what you can do and how you can achieve the things that He's achieving as a powerful spiritual being. Your true authentic self, which really messed me up as a kid, that's chapters five, and identity, like who you are on the inside is a spiritual being and that's truly who you are.

And there's laws of the universe that you can wield at your will. There's a law of tithing where what you give, you receive.  The law of sowing, whatever you, as far as you, whether it's generosity, money, whatever it is, you must get that back.

There's all kinds of teachings that were sold to me as Christian teachings. That's the difference. Is that everything I just said to you would have had a scripture verse packed onto it and said it was something that Jesus taught.

Eric Huffman: That's what makes it so deceptive, what you're talking about. We'll talk about this more in a minute, but just... I think you quoted Spurgeon in your book, that discernment isn't discerning truth from lies. It's learning to tell the difference between true and almost true, because deception is only deceptive if it looks true.

You can point to a Bible verse and say, well, this is where... Jesus did say you'll do things even greater than I've done to His disciples. And so you can take that and extrapolate it to mean whatever you want it to mean.

Let's back up just a little bit and define some terms. I know in your book and already in the interview, you've talked about something like the law of attraction. What is that? What's the law of attraction?

Melissa Dougherty: The law of attraction is a wildly popular culture of belief. It took the culture by storm a few years ago with the book The Secret by Rhonda Byrne, but it's no secret. This has been a teaching around forever. It was brilliant marketing on her part.

But the law of attraction is also remarketed as what's called the law of love, where there is a spiritual power within yourself that what you believe, think, and say through your thoughts, words, and emotions, you will attract into your life.

The simplest way they put it is like equals like. You are a mirror, a spiritual mirror, and whatever you put out frequency-wise, because your thoughts are on a frequency and a vibration, right, and it will attract back to you. And this is the other thing, is that they'll try to misuse a lot of quantum physics and quantum mechanics to say, Oh, it's scientific, which the original term for New Thought, for the New Thought movement, was the mind cure movement, where you can cure yourself through your thinking. It's your mind. So, if something's wrong with your body, you fix the mind.

And so, the law of attraction takes all these concepts and tells you whatever you want in your life, you can manifest into your life by believing you have it now. So, right now, say that you're, I don't know, in need of a job. What you will do is you don't want for the job. You act and live as if you had the job.

And according to the law of attraction, if your thoughts are aligned with this, yeah, if your thoughts are aligned with that, and you're believing with all your heart, which again, they use scripture for this. Matthew 7:7 is the formula for the law of attraction. You ask, believe, and receive with no doubt, you must, and they are very confident about this, you will receive it. So, don't doubt. So there's levels of that.

The reason why any of this works, at the core of it all, is because you are a divine being. You on the inside, the truest part of you is spirit, and that is divine. Once you become conscious of it, like Christ did, then you will be able to live this powerful life, this powerful life. Whatever you show love to is what you will attract. That's why judging is a big deal. You don't want to show judgment to something because you don't want to bring that judgment on yourself. And really what it does is that it makes you not critically think about what you're doing.

Eric Huffman: Pete Yeah, it also makes you the protagonist in the story of life. Like you're the center of it. I understand how it happens, why it's so appealing. I remember when the secret was a big deal, churches had book groups and study groups doing it in their churches. And because you can get just enough scripture to match up with these ideas. I mean, we are all gods and goddesses. Well, God made us in His image.

That sort of thing can so easily be congealed to make just enough sense as to trick and deceive susceptible people. I want to back up just a little bit again to sort of your early experiences, because you alluded to being so challenged by the idea that your true self is within you.

You talked about, and I applaud your vulnerability about a time when you were 13, facing an identity crisis. This was your, you know, I don't want to spill the beans before the book comes out, but it was first time you've talked about this publicly. Mix with this idea that your true self is within you. How did that sort of play together to create even a bigger crisis?

Melissa Dougherty: I had to go to therapy over that chapter. Yes. So that chapter about the identity crisis, it all started with Carl Trueman's book, Strange New World, which is a play on Brave New World. I'm reading his book, Eric, and I'm blown away because the things that he's talking about sound really New Thought.

He's talking about romanticism and how we got to the sexual crisis that we're in today. All right? That's his book is about. And he's going over the historical origins of following your true authentic self. And he's going over, well, how did we get there in society?

And he's talking about this man named Jean Rousseau. He's talking about romanticism, about how your emotions are the leader of who you are, your true authentic self. The word that he has for it in his book is "expressive individualism". That whoever you are, however you feel on the inside is who you actually are. That's your truth, in other words. And there is a disconnect from what's real in the physical material world. All of that is New Thought. Because that's the idea is that it's metaphysical. It's not about the material. It's beyond the material. It's about the spiritual.

And I'm sitting here kind of pulling my hair out, like, what's the connection? What's happening here? Because when I was growing up, I would hear these, read them. I would read my grandmother's books, my great grandmother's books, I would hear these terms, I would see these things, and I was fascinated with them.

But one of the things that you're taught is that, yeah, who you are in here is divine. It's spiritual. And that is the truest part of who you are. If what's inside doesn't match what's on the outside, then you go with what's inside.

That really screwed me up when I was a kid, because I did not feel like who I was on the inside matched who I was on the outside. It went even beyond that. Right now we're having people, you know, like otherkin, trans species, that are kind of taking it to a point where they believe that there's other dimensional beings out there that they can identify as. And it's real to them, because it's not just a social thing. It's a spiritual thing.

Eric Huffman: Sure.

Melissa Dougherty: It's spiritual. And so... yeah, go ahead.

Eric Huffman: Well, I think a bigger issue that this applies to is obviously the gender issue, right? Where that seems to be in Western civilization, like the norm now is if your actual biological body doesn't match your understanding of your own gender identity, then it's your body that's wrong. And your true self is who you believe yourself to be.

Again, I mean, I don't wanna tell your story for you, but you experienced some of that gender sort of confusion. And the point you made was, you know, had you grown up two decades later than you did, the story might've ended up very differently for you.

Melissa Dougherty: Mm-hmm. Yes, exactly. It would have ended very different. The cross lining there was you had romanticism, but in New Thought, there's this parallel movement called transcendentalism. That was the missing piece of the whole puzzle was, Oh, this is why this sounds like New Thought. The true authentic self is very much a very huge New Thought teaching.

But where the romanticism comes in as a social, it plows through socially, my argument in that chapter is that it's spiritual as well. Like you're not just coming up against somebody's identity saying, Oh, this doesn't match reality to them. It's like you're coming against something divine, something deeper within.

Eric Huffman: Interesting.

Melissa Dougherty: Yeah.

Eric Huffman: So you grew up in sort of a wash in New Age ideology, I guess. And then you came to Christ and started going to a Bible church. And then you had this experience, you had a daughter, you had this experience with the Jehovah's Witnesses that sort of brought everything to light for you. You realized that not all religions are the same. There's some things that are truer than others. That sent you down this journey. What have you learned about New Thought as opposed to... you thought you were New Agey.

Melissa Dougherty: Yep.

Eric Huffman: But it turns out you weren't, you were something else. This New Thought movement came onto the radar. What are the distinctions between the two? People seem to be fairly familiar with New Age. Most people have never heard, if you're watching right now, you probably never heard of or really dug into New Thought. So what's the difference and what makes New Thought even more dangerous than New Age is?

Melissa Dougherty: What makes New Thought more dangerous is that they haven't heard of it, but they have experienced it way more than New Age, especially if you're a Christian, because it looks and sounds Christian. That's what makes it so... it took me a while to pick up on it.

I mean, it was 2011 when all of that happened. I didn't really understand that, oh, there's a big difference here until maybe two, three years ago. It was when I was reading all these books and Carl Trueman's was one of them. All these just a variety of books. I was researching, I was thinking, and all of a sudden I just looked at these two things, I'm like, that's New Age. Oh, that's New Thought. These two things are not the same. Why is nobody talking about this? Because New Thought is stealthy. New Age looks like the devil. It looks very obvious. It looks like the red dude with the pitchfork and the pointy tail. I mean, it looks occultic, the chakras.

Eric Huffman: Give me more specifics.

Melissa Dougherty: Yeah, yeah. So, think of like, if you walk into any New Age store, okay, most Christians are like, Oh, I'm in a New Age store. You see crystals, you see tarot cards, you see chakras, yoga would be considered New Age. Who knew? I had no idea.

And that's the thing is I'm leaving these beliefs that I think are New Age and I'm learning about all these other things that would be considered New Age. Like somebody asked me about Reiki shortly after I learned all these things. And I'm like, what's that? I didn't know what Reiki was. Sacred geometry would be another one. Psychic mediums. Even though there's some overlap.

And that's the thing is that there is some overlap. You'll find influencers today that are very metaphysical. They say that they're Christians, they follow Christ consciousness, they're very, very New Thought, positive minded manifestation, law of attraction, but they also do tarot cards, right? They also do this over here.

I was like, I would say 70, 30, 80, 20. I believed in the frequencies and vibrations of crystals, for example, of oils. I believe that there was a vibration and frequency within everything, including our words. I didn't do anything with yoga. I never would have known yoga was New Age.

Psychic mediums, I went to go see a psychic once. I thought that they were like the new cool kids on the block prophets of the day. I thought there were mistakes in the Bible that God had just raised up people to correct those things in the Bible. I mean, that's like a short list. There's probably a lot more that I could put on what fits in the New Age bucket.

What's tricky to define about New Thought, I gave some terms earlier and I have a chapter about the terms, is that it's almost like it's equivocation. You and I will say the same thing. Like Christ. I begin the whole chapter with the word Christ. And you and I, if you're a New Thoughter and I'm a Christian, you wouldn't even call yourself a New Thoughter, you would call yourself a Christian.

And so, you and I would be having coffee and you're like, Christ is King. I'm like, amen to that. You would mean something completely different than what I mean. So, it's not necessarily about pointing out things in terms. Sometimes you can do that like with the law of attraction, Christ consciousness. But it's really about pointing out what they mean when they use these terms, whether it's grace, justification, whatever it is, because it has a metaphysical definition to it. What do they mean by salvation? What do they mean by gospel? You'll hear these terms kind of slot together with these verses. So it can be confusing.

Eric Huffman: I just think that's important for people to understand that if someone's all in new ager, they probably don't identify themselves as Christian. They might be okay in some way or in some theory, like Jesus is fine. He's a good guy, whatever. They might not hate Christianity, but they wouldn't identify as such.

But somebody that has this, what you call like a virus of New Thought can cozy up to Christianity and just co-opt all the terms and interpret them through this New Thought filter in such a way that's really... I mean, I don't know how to convey this strongly enough if you're watching and listening. This is truly plaguing the church.

It's truly a danger today. And that's why I wanted to talk to you and let other people hear you because you're one of the only voices that's talking about this. And I think it's so prolific in the church that it's normative and we don't see it much anymore because it's everywhere. And yet it is a bastardized version of the true word of God. And so we must have the tools to root it out where it presents itself and to correct it, which is way easier said than done.

Before we get into some of the distinctions between New Thought Christianity and real Christianity, let's talk about the origins of the New Thought movement, when and where it came from.

Melissa Dougherty: Oh, man. This is actually such an interesting thing to research because there are thick, Eric, like thick books made about this. And I can only write one chapter about it. But it goes back to, honestly, the garden. If we're going to go all the way back, it really is the oldest lie. It's just a rehashed version of it.

And then if you're going to fast forward from there, you have Plato, and then you have Neoplatonism, and then you have Gnosticism. And then from there, you have people that have been influenced by these weird Gnostic teachings that have kind of taken it and dabbled into spiritualism, the occult, and come up with New Thought.

One of those men is a man named Emanuel Swedenborg. He is one of those people that is the best example of an origin story of New Thought because nobody's ever heard of him. But he has affected everything in how we America. Like how we do America. He is one of those untold people, especially the spiritual aspect of it.

Emanuel Swedenborg, he was really respected. He was an inventor. He was a minister. He wore many, many... He wasn't a minister, but he was religious at the time in some aspects, just like all these people were. But he wore many hats.

Eric Huffman: What century was this, more or less?

Melissa Dougherty: Oh, I believe it was 17. Actually, let me get an exact one here for you.

Eric Huffman: Yeah.

Melissa Dougherty: Because the element of Emanuel Swedenborg is that he just came out of... Everybody was coming out of the Enlightenment era and everybody was so sick of Christianity. What was interesting with him is that he started having really crazy spiritual experience. Yeah, 1600s. So, 1688 to 1772. Because I think of him and I think of like, Oh, medieval kind of space. So, it goes pretty far back.

But he started having insane spiritual experiences, just visitations from other beings, angelic beings is what he called, and they started giving him spiritual information. And he started writing them down. This is what he's best known for are these conversations that he would have with these angels of his about heaven, about hell, about who Jesus is. And he would write them down and people would read them and they'd get distributed.

But one very important teaching he had was called the Law of Correspondence. And it kind of backs up everything that we're talking about today. Basically, what this says is that for everything, remember what I said about Plato and Platonism and Neoplatonism, everything in the physical realm has a spiritual counterpart.

Now, when I say everything, I mean everything. Words, your thoughts, written words, writing, everything that I could create right now... I'm a painter. If I paint something, there's a spiritual equivalent to that, okay?

So, that means if I'm reading something in the Bible, and that's physical, let's just take that for an example, and it's physical and I'm reading it, but my spirit says something different than what's on the page, then I default to what resonates with me because that's the truest part. You default to the spirit because that's perfect, which is very Gnostic. You see the lineage here.

And so, if something's wrong with the body, which is physical, you fix it in the spiritual realm through your thoughts, words, and things like that. Now, what happened is that you have people after Swedenborg that came and took those concepts and expanded on them. Like Phineas Quimby, which is like a really great name for a cat. I really want to get a cat and be like, Phineas, come on. Anyway, that's just a great name.

Phineas Quimby is probably the name that most people would recognize as the father of New Thought. He had tuberculosis, was just sick of the doctors. He was also religious. He was a Unitarian... no, that was... I'm thinking of Emerson. Anyway.  All of them are religious. And he claimed to have healed himself through his mind and started marketing these ideas. And he is really one of the big players of the New Thought movement.

And then Mary Baker Eddy was a student of his. She became a cult leader, kind of went her own way. And then you had Warren Felt Evans, who was with Quimby as well. Emma Curtis Hopkins, who was somebody who's actually a big player in the prosperity gospel.

Eric Huffman: Really?

Melissa Dougherty: Yeah,. The whole chapter eight. All of chapter eight is about the word of faith movement and the prosperity gospel. And why, when I left what I thought was New Age, you know, 80-20, when I left my 80-20, I was very confused because I'm looking at these churches and I'm like, "Why are you guys doing the law of attraction?" What you're doing? What is this?

Same exact scriptures that were in New Thought would be used in these churches, same methods. Everything. And it took me a long time to kind of put it together that, oh, there's a New Thought infused element here and you can demonstrably point back to Emma Curtis Hopkins.

Again, nobody's ever heard of these people, you know? And so the baton just keeps getting handed over and over and these writers, like Dale Carnegie, people are floored when they hear that Dale Carnegie, the author of How to Win Friends and Influence People, is a New Thought author. Norman Vincent Peale. You have all of these men, Napoleon Hill, who are still on the bookshelves today.

Eric Huffman: What's the Napoleon Hill book everybody's read?

Melissa Dougherty: There's a lot of them. Think and Grow Rich is probably the one that people would know best. Like you're having all these occult infused beliefs that are Christianized that are being sold and distributed as Christian material. Christians are reading it and they are repeating it. Like, oh, our words have power. Oh, my thoughts. Oh, look, it's in the Bible or something. Like, look, see? We can do this. And that's where-

Eric Huffman: And it starts and then it infiltrates within.

Melissa Dougherty: Yes. And it's popular.

Eric Huffman: Yeah, Peale and his wife, what was the devotional that they-

Melissa Dougherty: Guideposts?

Eric Huffman: Guideposts. Everybody read Guideposts where I was growing up. And I was in the Bible Belt, you know? Guideposts was everywhere. And you know, little did I know or we know at the time that some of these New Thought ideas were infiltrating at the time through something as seemingly innocuous as Guideposts, you know?

I think just like any negative movement, it just takes advantage of well-meaning people. So I think it's important to say that, you know, not everyone that's gotten involved in this stuff is evil or sinister or whatever, but they fall in prey to some sinister ideas.

Maybe there's people watching right now that are hearing this and going, what's wrong with adding a little more positivity to the Christian worldview? You know, Christians can be pretty dour, pretty down sometimes. Maybe we need a little bit more positive thinking. What would you say to that? What's so dangerous about this?

Melissa Dougherty: I'd say amen to that. What's wrong with that? It was cynical Christians that kind of... I have a whole video about this, but I'm like, man, Christians are cynical. These ones over here, they're much better. I'm going to go over there. That was my draw to these teachings was cynical Christians. 100% I agree to that.

What do you mean by that though? What do you mean? What do you mean by being more positive? Because thinking positive does not mean you can create your reality with your words. This is the problem. Every single chapter I wrote needed a nuance. Self-help. Let's take that one. The entire self-help movement as we know it, is the foundation of that are New Thought authors. And their teachings and their methods. And I break that down. But then what's wrong with self-help? You see what I mean? That's why Happy Lies... It balances the whole book out because every single part of this has to be nuanced.

There is nothing wrong with thinking positive. In fact, we need that more. But I can't tell you how I've run into the opposite where I have a Christian who refuses to doubt anything, to have any sort of critical thinking capacity because they think they're going to be blessed if they don't doubt.

I have run into Christians, people, who are so positive-minded that they believe that whatever they are thinking is going to put out a frequency in the universe and they can't be around me because I ask too many questions. Think about that. In other words, it exploits this intrinsically good thing with virtuous language, puts it on its tail, and it makes you your own God. And then it blames you when things go wrong. This is a burden, okay? So you're having... yeah, think positive. Amen to that, go read the Proverbs. The power of life and death is in the tongue. It does not mean you can create your reality. It means don't be a jerk. Be careful with what you say. We don't have that much power. And amen to that. Because if we did, we would have to blame ourselves for everything that goes on.

It takes away God's sovereignty and providence and thank God for His sovereignty and providence because the joy comes in the contentment. And that's the other thing. If everybody's talking about vibrations, frequencies manifesting... Why is it that all these TikTokers and influencers go viral when they're talking about money, health, and wealth? But I don't see anybody over here trying to manifest humility, contentment, and generosity. Why don't I see? It's a vice. They take the virtuous language where they talk about... it's like the gender movement, right? They talk about being open-minded, tolerance, and loving. And they'd say those three words, but then they deliver intolerance, hates, and these things that go against it — the opposite of it. That's really the problem.

Eric Huffman: Well, that's one of the problems. And even more... I'm going to stop real quick. What is that? Is that rain? Goodness gracious. We're getting a deluge all of a sudden. I thought it was a giant plane flying.

Melissa Dougherty: Hey man, the rain pours on the just and the unjust.

Eric Huffman: I don't know which one I am today, but...

Melissa Dougherty: Yeah, man. You manifested it.

Eric Huffman: I guess. Should we just power through? Because we're going to pick it up on my mic, but it's okay. That's one side of the sinister nature of this. But the other thing that you point out in your book is the bait and switch element of this, which I thought was so profound. I had never thought of it. New Thought presents itself as more gracious than real Christianity.

And it seems that way at the beginning until you realize, well, then it's up to you to have all the right thoughts. It's up to you to have enough, I guess they would call it faith or positivity. And if things don't go your way and you're the God of that worldview, then you're the one who's at fault and it's up to you. And that's where it gets really dark is when you realize, well, there's something wrong with me. If there's something wrong with me that doesn't get right, it's because there's something wrong with me. And it's just endless cycle of gracelessness.

But I also think it's important to just say, and we've alluded to this already, that bad ideas like this flourish in a vacuum. And I think churches, maybe during this particular, the 1700s, post-enlightenment, whatever, and up to today, too many churches are theological vacuums where the whole truth of the gospel isn't being preached or taught.

You mentioned the problem early on for you was no discipleship was happening. I think churches that don't prioritize discipleship over everything else pretty much, because if you disciple people well, all of the rest of the church will fix itself. You'll worship well, you'll minister to the poor well, you'll do all these other things well if you're discipling people well.

But if you're not giving people the whole gospel and teaching them the Bible, all of it, then what happens is these bad ideas start to sound better than they are. And I understand the appeal. I see it. Why don't we, just for clarity's sake, go through some things point by point and talk about the differences in the Christian worldview and the New Thought worldview, and just by taking concepts. Let's start with love. Love's a big concept-

Melissa Dougherty: Oh, I'm so glad you asked that. I was about to pull that up.

Eric Huffman: ..for Christianity and for New Thought, and that's where a lot of the conflation and confusion happens. How do the two movements see love differently?

Melissa Dougherty: Okay, so love... this is a big deal for me personally, because this is one of the things that really messed me up is that in Christianity, there's four words for love in the Bible, right? I mean, you have eros, which is like a passionate love, and then you have like a friendship-

Eric Huffman: Storge.

Melissa Dougherty: Yeah, thank you. Storge. And then you have agape. You know what I mean? You have all these different types of love.

Eric Huffman: Yeah.

Melissa Dougherty: In English, there's just one word. But agape love is the godly love. 1 John has a good read about this, that it's not that... God isn't part love, right? He is love, right? If we could understand these attributes of God, if we understand... I really wish that churches would really study this more about things that God isn't made up of, but like the attributes of what He is. There's beautiful things about this.

And when you think about love, when you're thinking about what is love, well, the perfect expression of what love is is God, okay? He's not part love, He is love. God is love, love is not God, right? And that's something they say a lot in progressive Christianity to correct that view.

So we are incomplete in how we view love until we have an encounter with the God of love. And then it's not shortchanged anymore. We understand what that looks like. And the perfect person to look at is Jesus Christ. He came, He spoke some things that were really important, died on a cross, rose again, laying down His life for His friends, and for the world. That's the perfect expression of what love is.

Well, in New Thought, this all really goes back to Swedenborg, actually, a lot of it anyway, is that he saw love as like the highest force of power. Love, in other words, is a force of power. It's something you can yield. It's a power in the universe. The highest vibrational frequency that you can be on, possibly be on, is love.

So what does that look like to them? Well, love means you don't judge those. Love means that you are tolerant no matter what. Love means that whoever it is that you're talking to, you need to accept and affirm them as they are, because love does not offend, right?

Eric Huffman: Yeah.

Melissa Dougherty: They take scripture all the time to do this. Like, God is love, that is in 1 John. But it's equivocation. What I mean by equivocation is you're using two of the same words... And this is a fallacy. It's called the fallacy of equivocation. You're taking one word, love, but you have two different meanings for it. The meaning that the Bible has, they're using that meaning to back up their meaning. And they're saying, look, it's in the Bible. And so that's what messes Christians up. So that's the simplest way I can put it.

What they do, what this is really, is a response to what I would think that they would see as rigid legalism in the church. Think of the opposite, all right? The pendulum problem is what I call this. Think of the most legalistic, judgmental, cynical Christian that you can think of. And everybody's thinking of somebody right now, I know it. And because maybe they're really hard to talk to. Maybe they are really judgy. They want to be the exact opposite of that.

So there's this overcompensation of "it doesn't matter if it's true. If it's not loving, then it can't be true." So therefore, truth is defined by what's loving, not the other way around, okay? That's just one way, I guess, in a simplistic way that I could put of the differences between biblical love and how New Thought would define love.

Eric Huffman: Yeah. I think that's really helpful because it just messes with the terms just enough to confuse. I mean, yeah, if it's not loving, then it can't be true, is the New Thought way of looking at it. And the Christian way would be, I guess, if it's not true, it can't be love.

Melissa Dougherty: It's truth and love, that's what everybody misses. I have a little chart in my chapter where I talk about this, where I talk about these extremes, where there's all truth, but no love, and then on the other extreme, you have all love, but no truth. It's truth and love. It's both. And we got to dance that dance. There's a reason why in scripture, it's not just all heart and all mind, it's loving God with your heart and mind.

It's a beautiful verse. But if you ever want to see anything wrong with either of these problems, look at that verse and think, well, where's the pendulum at? What's happening here? And a lot of times it comes down to what we are afraid of.

A lot of times, Christians especially, we're like, well, I don't want to show them love because it might seem like I'm affirming them. That's not how that works. Like you can have a conversation with somebody you disagree with and not agree with them.

Eric Huffman: Okay, let's go on to another term that is easily conflated. And that's just God, generally. What are the differences between the Christian understanding of God and what New Thought would say about the identity of God?

Melissa Dougherty: Well, like I was kind of saying before, with Christianity, with the way that we view God is that He's omnipresent. In other words, He's omnipresent, He's all powerful. He's this being with these attributes that were made in His image, but they're not equal with us. But He is outside of us. He is separate from us.

In Christianity, I mean, I guess the word for that... I mean, you have classical theism as the fancy word for it, but we are monotheists. New Thoughters would say, Oh, we're monotheists too. They don't believe in many gods, right? But the way that they view God and the way that Christians view God is very, very different.

We look at God outside of us as a separate being that is higher than us, that is beyond us, that we cannot completely know. In New Thought, their word for God would be the divine mind, which, again, I wouldn't find... if somebody I knew today... Like I did a lot of interviews for this book, and if I went to a New Thought center, they would call Him father, right? But the actual way that they view it is called the divine mind, capital D, capital M. And we are all a part of this divine mind. We just have to have access to it. We have to become conscious of it. But this God is also personal. And this is a cop-out, honestly.

So you have pantheism, right? Where everything is God, you, me, our cameras, our socks, our shoes, everything, everything is God. They would say, oh, no, we're panentheists. And I'm like, okay, that means that God is in everything, but is not everything. And I always thought that that was just kind of a cop-out. What that is is that it's theism marrying pantheism to make sense of this spirituality that doesn't go together. Like these two things do not go together, but that's how they would view it.

And what they mean by that is that God is in me, but I am not God. And that means that I have access to this divine power, this divine mind that we're all a part of, that we have access to, that we can tap into.

Eric Huffman: It reminds me of...

Melissa Dougherty: And so...

Eric Huffman: Sorry. The movie.

Melissa Dougherty: Oh, is it? I've never actually seen that movie.

Eric Huffman: Yeah. You probably shouldn't. I mean, it's probably a wash in all this new age, New Thought stuff. But there's a tree. I can't remember the name of it, Ewa or something that the native race or whatever has to connect to and sit around and they're all plugged into it, literally like... I'm glad you used the word "it", and so did I just now, because that's how New Thought describes God, really, not as a... They might say Father or that he's relational, but they use the word "it" because fundamentally it's the divine mind, whatever that is. It's an "it", not a "he".

Melissa Dougherty: We make a mistake, according to them, by putting anthropomorphic kind of verbiage to him. Yeah, exactly. So when I say Him or you say Father or whatever it is, well, to somebody else, that might resonate differently as like maybe mother God. Maybe it might resonate differently as some other being. And that's okay, because that's how they view. So there's a very fluid view of what that looks like for each person. It's on its head, okay?

So we, as Christians, we approach, and this is so twisted, we approach the Bible and God, letting Him be who he is. Who are you? I wanna know who you are. What's twisted is that they'll do the opposite. They'll say, this is who I think God is. This is what resonates with me, and then they'll turn around and kind of accuse us of making God in our own image.

Eric Huffman: Is that where you get some of the... what I would say is like worship or veneration of the creation, like mother earth is one example, or the universe?

Melissa Dougherty: I wouldn't say that they would... like mother earth, they might have like a... if everything's a vibration and a frequency, they would have a veneration for earth, but they wouldn't worship the earth. I think that would be more of like a new age belief.

Eric Huffman: Ah, okay.

Melissa Dougherty: But they definitely would have an understanding... Like I was talking with somebody who's very New Thought, and they believe that the earth has its own frequency and vibration. With all of our technology and our phones and the pollution that's happening, it's really messing with the frequency of the earth and it's messing with us. I mean, there's a level there of giving too much power to the creation.

That's where the overlap can really come in. Because I know that there's like tribes and New Age people that would definitely do like grounding work. They would consider it like a vibrational, kind of like a spiritual plane of work that would have to do to raise the earth's vibration. So, I mean, there's overlap in that regard, but I wouldn't say that they would like worship the earth in that regard.

Eric Huffman: Sure. I'm learning here to distinguish between new age and New Thought, I guess. And I think that's an important thing to do because-

Melissa Dougherty: I'm still learning too.

Eric Huffman: So much of the super weird stuff that most people don't relate to is New Age. And the more mundane everyday infiltration has happened from New Thought as its source. And so-

Melissa Dougherty: The simplest way I can put it is that remember that New Thought poses itself as being Christian. It's the positive thinking movement in America with Jesus as its mascot. Like that's just the simplest way I can put it. New Age is more woo woo.

Eric Huffman: Yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah, to put it simply. And I think the most important conflation or you said it's the fallacy of what... where you take a term-

Melissa Dougherty: Equivocation.

Eric Huffman: Equivocation is with Christ. You alluded to this earlier, but let's dig into that a little bit more because you have a Christian on one side of the table and a New Thoughter on the other. They'll both say Christ and they'll think they're together on the same team, but they're not. So what are the differences between how Christians think of Jesus Christ and how a New Thoughter might use that same term?

Melissa Dougherty: Yes. This is probably the number one term that I would say is unique to New Thought is Christ. So when we hear the word Christ, we think of anointed one, Messiah. Christians hear that term and we read it in light of the Old Testament. Like, oh, the Christ is the Messiah who's gonna come and He's gonna save us. Really, really, really simple. That's so simple.

But remember in metaphysical Christianity, there's always a higher non-material, unphysical meaning for this. So Jesus and Christ, when we say that Jesus and Christ, it's the same person. In New Thought, Jesus is a man, a human being, just like you and me. That's where it gets personal. He's just like us, but He obtained the Christ. He became conscious of it. It was in the Christ consciousness that He was able to walk on water, do healings, do what would be considered miracles. Though a lot of people in New Thought would think, oh, that was just Jesus and His Christ consciousness and He was a fully functioning... He had the correct type of thinking, in other words, in order for those things to happen.

And here's the thing. You all, we all have the Christ within us. Jesus was the Way Shower. That's the word that they would use. Capital W, capital S, the Way Shower to show us the way of how to awaken to the Christ within. So you are just as much Christ and me just as much the Christ as Jesus is. This is where "I am" affirmations come from and come into play.

Eric Huffman: What are those?

Melissa Dougherty: "I am" affirmations are declarations that you declare and affirm to create things, in other words, to create your reality. Okay, remember your words have power. So if you have an innate divinity within that is able to create the world around you, okay, because remember the material world responds to your frequency because everything is spiritual. And if your spiritual self is calling something forth, it must come forth. So when Jesus claims to be the "I am", He's trying to teach you, you can too. You are the "I am".

Eric Huffman: Wow.

Melissa Dougherty: There are lots of New Thought leaders who teach about the power of "I am". And there's power when you say "I am". Whatever you say after those words will happen, and it must happen. Because you're a powerful being, be careful with what you say.

These are called affirmations and they're actually really, really popular in the culture. Again, I will put a caveat to this in just a second because affirmations as they are structured with "I am" statements are New Thought prayers. So as we know them, that we can think New Thought for this popular practice.

However, some of that might just be semantics where if a Christian's looking in the mirror and they're affirming, if you're affirming something true and you don't believe that there's like a divine entity within yourself that's calling forth something... I mean, I've done that, right, where, I mean, I'm going out on a speaking event, I'm like, "You got this, man. You got this. You got this Melissa. You know this stuff. I am able to do this, whatever it is. I do not see that as saying affirmations. I mean, you're being encouraging.

So that's the dance with the nuance of these whole things. I mean, you have affirmations as they are taught by New Thought that is supposed to make you believe that you have power to bring it forth versus just saying something that is true about yourself and your relationship with God. Yeah, these are two different things.But that's Christ

Eric Huffman: They are two different things, yeah.

Melissa Dougherty: - And Christ consciousness...

Eric Huffman: Sorry. The one assumes like God's sovereignty. He is the great I am, and we're under His authority and whatever we are is because of him. And that's the hierarchy of it in New Thought. It sounds like everybody's their own "I am".

Melissa Dougherty: Yes, very much.

Eric Huffman: Like you're an "I am" too, just like Jesus was. If you declare it, you're an "I am" and you get to define that or affirm that or whatever, and yeah, I can see how appealing and slippery that is. You hear about affirmations all the time if you're on social media or at the bookstore.

Melissa Dougherty: And declarations.

Eric Huffman: And you're saying most of that is rooted in New Thought.

Melissa Dougherty: Demonstrably. Affirmations all by themselves, the reason why they exist in culture the way they do is because of New Thought, because of New Thought authors. In fact, you can trace... Any historian with her fancy cool pen can go back and do this research.

Louise Hay is the founder of Hay House, the most popular New Age publisher in the entire world. And she is mostly New Thought. She claimed that she used affirmations to heal herself. Now, Louise Hay was influenced by Ernest Holmes, who was the founder of Center for Spiritual Living, which is one of the largest New Thought denominations in the world. In fact, we can thank the popularity of affirmations to Ernest Holmes. Was that thunder?

Eric Huffman: Yes, it was. Sorry.

Melissa Dougherty: Oh, Lord. Sounds like the voice of God in the background.

Eric Huffman: Go back to "thank the popularity".

Melissa Dougherty: We can thank the popularity of affirmations to Ernest Holmes. There's four main... I think it's... yeah, it's four main New Thought denominations, if you wanna call them that. Unity, Center for Spiritual Living, which used to be Religious Science, which Ernest Holmes founded, yeah Divine Science, and then... I forget the other one. It's falling out of my brain right now.

Eric Huffman: Well, there's Christian Science.

Melissa Dougherty: Then Christian Science, yes. I think Christian Science kinda goes out of my brain because it turned very cultish. She kind of went off on her own.

Eric Huffman: But it's still alive and well.

Melissa Dougherty: Oh, it's still very alive and well. Most people recognize that.

Eric Huffman: It's alive. I'm not sure it says "well", but it's-

Melissa Dougherty: No, it's alive. Exactly. This is just an example. This is why each chapter needed to go into its own thing, go over how this happened, why is this New Thought, and uncomplicate that a little bit. And every single chapter needed this nuance for this reason.

Eric Huffman: Well, we started down this path by talking about Christ and the differences between the Christian understanding of Christ and the New Thought one. I recently did another interview with a young pastor, I use that term, because he does to identify himself as the TikTok pastor, Brandan Robertson, I don't know.

Melissa Dougherty: Oh, I know who he is. I quote some of his stuff, or I think I quote him in the book.

Eric Huffman: And man, as you're talking, I'm like, well, that's what I was picking up on, it was New Thought. He talked about Christ being special in some ways, but not unique. And His words and the writings in scripture are inspired in a way, but no more inspired than our words today, or the words of preachers or prophets today are.

And I think that's objectively dangerous, I think. I think that's to put ourselves on par with Jesus and say He was the "I am" because He declared it, and you can be too, I think that's obviously problematic. It might seem empowering on the surface, but it doesn't take long to see how dark that can become.

But I think the lesson there is just because someone's throwing around the name of Christ, it doesn't always mean Jesus Christ, Son of God, Son of man, fully human, fully divine, the One and only, the One for whom and through whom and by whom all things were created, as Christians believe. It could mean this Christ consciousness or what... cosmic Christ is another.

Melissa Dougherty: Yeah, cosmic Christ is another. That's very interesting you picked up on that. There's a whole chapter on progressive Christianity as well. Because what I'm submitting in that chapter is that everybody is looking at progressive Christianity and they're like, what is this spirituality? There's an alternative thing going on here. But they're like, oh, it's New Age. I'm like, no, it's not New Age. It's a mix of things.

And one person that keeps getting brought up no matter what is Richard Rohr. He talks about the universal Christ and it's cosmic Christ and all these other things. It's almost like purposely confusing because you have Christ consciousness, but universal Christ is more pantheistic, but he would disagree. He would say, no, that's panentheistic. You know what I mean?

Eric Huffman: Oh, I know exactly what you mean. I was a progressive Christian.

Melissa Dougherty: Yes, right, you were.

Eric Huffman: I actually would say, I don't think there's full overlap. It's not a perfect circle, the Venn diagram between progressive Christianity and New Thought. Because I think there's a lot of progressive Christians that are... I think there's a lot that are trying to be as faithful as they can. I think there's a lot though that are just humanists, that are not supernaturalists really. They just want to make the world a better place and work to do it. And I think that's admirable, but it's still problematic.

It's definitely not New Thought though, but I sense in you raising the alarm bells about progressive Christianity's tilt toward New Thought. And I think that's true. Richard Rohr, he's a big deal in a lot of churches, including not just progressive churches. His work has sort of seeped into evangelical spaces and things. I don't think people realize... he seems like such a nice guy. He seems like he's knowledgeable and inspired. We don't really have time to get into all the what's and why's, but I think he is pretty sneaky in smuggling in a lot of these dangerous New Thought ideas into his writings. And he's so influential, it's a little scary sometimes.

Melissa Dougherty: They purposely wear all these hats, so it's like hard to pin them down.

Eric Huffman: Sure.

Melissa Dougherty: I think I used the example of a laser pointer, like a cat trying to catch it. And it keeps evading the cat. I mean, he's perennial, he's Catholic. There's some New Thought in there. That's kind of the frustration I had with writing that chapter, because I'm like, what is the secret sauce that brings all this together? Because I see a lot of New Thought stuff here, but that's not New Thought. Like progressive Christianity is its own movement. So what's going on?

So I do my best to try to pull that out, but uncertainty, social constructs, all these things, they dance together.

Eric Huffman: Sure.

Melissa Dougherty: And yeah, it makes it confusing.

Eric Huffman: Well, I just want to say, if you're watching or listening right now, and I know a lot of faithful Christians that sort of follow or have fallen under the influence of Richard Rohr, give that a second thought, do your homework, and really look into that before you keep going down that path. Just be discerning about what you're reading, because it's not always what it seems to be.

Along those lines, what other sorts of red flags do you think people should be looking for? If they're trying to be faithful and they want to discern that they're on the right path or their church is on the right path, what kinds of things do you see in here? Maybe it's phrases that you hear people saying that sound good, but they're really New Thoughty, or what kinds of maybe even influencers, you're pretty good at naming names, if there's any others you want to throw out there, what things do you see or hear in churches that you think people need to be more aware of?

Melissa Dougherty: Well, I'll make it real simple. I mean, as far as like examples, I'm just going to say right now, I would go in a hot minute and have a cup of coffee with Joel Osteen. Like we would hit it off. You know what I mean? He's probably a really nice guy.

Eric Huffman: Yeah, I think he is. He's about three blocks from us right now.

Melissa Dougherty: Oh, really?

Eric Huffman: Yeah, we're neighbors.

Melissa Dougherty: Can you see his smile? Is it blinding you?

Eric Huffman: Well, you know, yeah. I mean, if he smiles, it lights up the whole city.

Melissa Dougherty: It does, doesn't it? See, that's what I mean, though. It's like you have all this likability, but he is-

Eric Huffman: He's actually a very nice guy.

Melissa Dougherty: I'm sure. I'm positive, really, pun intended, that he's very, very kind guy. But he is the best example I can use of the confusion of positive thinking. He is the example I'll use because of the phrases he says are probably the ones that I hear the most said by Christians, you know, about... Maybe it's a lot of word of faith phrases, though, too, you know? It's like, there's victory, don't think that, don't speak that, think positive.

On any level, when it comes to the overemphasis on your thinking, on the positive thinking aspect, ask questions. Why? Where did you get that? What scriptures are you quoting? You know, that's what I would do. Also, the being your true authentic self, this is a big one as well. That's also very social as well. But when I hear people talk about their true authentic self, I typically need to dig a little deeper and I'll almost always find that it's something spiritual within. Ask more questions about that, about the link to that, being your true self. What does that mean? What do you mean by being your true self?

Eric Huffman: Why does that bother you, that language?

Melissa Dougherty: Oh, because... oh yeah, true authentic self. Because I think that it's one of those... you know, have you ever heard that term "positive vibes"?

Eric Huffman: Yes, all the time.

Melissa Dougherty: Okay, yeah, yeah. Like, Hey man, I need some positive vibes. A lot of times that's a cultural thing that we're just saying like, Hey man, can you just give me some good energy today? But they don't really know, they don't really mean that. It's just something that we say to tell people, Hey, I need some help today.  Or, you know, I got something going on.

Okay, when people say true authentic self, I kind of get the same feel, where it's like, what do they mean by that? Because I can sit there and say, truly who I am on the inside and that verbiage can be the same, but I might mean something very different than what they mean. And so your true authentic self, your true self, okay, is a big and false self, by the way. So true self versus-

Eric Huffman: That's the dichotomy, yes.

Melissa Dougherty: Yes, I can't believe we haven't mentioned that yet. But yeah, you have a false self and you have a true self. Your false self is the false version of yourself that you're trying to overcome because your true self is underneath that. That's your authentic self. That is where you will find peace, harmony, happiness. This is where the power is. Okay, so break that down for me. What do you mean by true authentic self? And that's where your identity comes from and all these other things. Or they could just be using it in a general sense. They're just being real with you. Like, I mean, let me be authentic with you real quick. So, I mean, there's that.

Manifestation, vibrations, frequency.

Eric Huffman: I can't let it go because you said in your book something that stuck with me, which was in the Bible, there's no such thing as your true self and your false self. There's just your old self and your new self.

Melissa Dougherty: Yeah.

Eric Huffman: And that's another example of how close these terms are to the truth, as to be-

Melissa Dougherty: Actually, that comes from another author. That came from... I quoted somebody. It was Allie Beth Stuckey. She had written a book, and that was a quote from her book.

Eric Huffman: And I think that's so true. And it might seem like semantics to somebody watching right now. Who cares if I say false self or true self or old self and new self? It's the same thing. But not really. Because when Christians talk about the old self, we're talking about sin and depravity and damnation and everything. The new self comes through the work of Christ on the cross. It's imparted on us because of Him, not because of us. And it's just received by faith.

Melissa Dougherty: Even sin and repentance is redefined. Your only sin in New Thought is your ignorance to your true self. It's ignorance. In other words, sin equals ignorance. And then you're talking about repentance. Repentance in New Thought means something very different. Repenting means change... is your mind. They literally take that literal meaning. Oh, it's a change of mind. Literally. And it's just so confusing. Yeah, so like these things do matter. Sorry to cut you off.

Eric Huffman: No, you didn't. That's exactly right. I think just hopefully we've made the point by now that things that are almost true are false.

Melissa Dougherty: Yeah, they're happy lies. That's what they are.

Eric Huffman: Yeah, got it right here. Yeah, that's right. One more sort of thought about the church today and maybe potential red flags. I don't know that you would call this a red flag. What are your thoughts on deliverance ministries?

Melissa Dougherty: Oh, I have lots of thoughts about those, Eric.

Eric Huffman: Those are big and growing in influence right now.

Melissa Dougherty: I'm at a watch and wait with this whole topic. And I've never actually directly been asked about this, but I have some issues with deliverance ministries.

Eric Huffman: So just for everybody's sake, deliverance ministries... it's not new, but it's growing in our time. A ministry of the sort of a parachurch ministry that's all over the country, all over the world, where the emphasis is on spiritual cleansing, like cleaning your spiritual house and casting out demons and demonic forces and things like that.

Melissa Dougherty: Yeah, so imagine this for a second, Eric. Okay, say that you're a deliverance minister and somebody comes up to you and says, "I have a demon of gluttony attached to me. I need this to be exercised." But the problem is they've been to you 10 times already. They pay you $500 to get rid of this demon. That's just one. Say it's adulterer, all right?

Say it's somebody who has these things in their life. Maybe they're emotionally unstable. Maybe they're an overly sensitive person and they think that things are... maybe they do over-spiritualize things around them. There is no place for them to get any sort of biblical discernment because that's seen as being legalistic. Like that's seen as being... like you're a Pharisee. This is my problem with these ministries is that a lot of times it's sin to be repented of not... yeah. And so there's that.

However, I will say there's a caveat to that. I have this whole other group of charismatic friends that are so solid and biblically solid and they have an enormous problem with the deliverance ministries and how they are doing it. I have a friend, she's like, that's not how we did this. We just prayed for somebody, and they got healed or they... whatever. I believe that I was delivered. When I got saved, when I got born again, that person I was that night when I went to sleep, it's like, seriously, Eric, I lifted up out of my bed, I'm like, whoa, this is... who am I? Like this person I was yesterday felt like they just stayed asleep and dead. It's like, I was new. I felt delivered. Nobody prayed for me. You know what I mean? It was like, there was this element there.

Eric Huffman: It was the work of the Holy Spirit in you.

Melissa Dougherty: It was the work of the Holy Spirit.

Eric Huffman: It wasn't a show.

Melissa Dougherty: Exactly.

Eric Huffman: It wasn't an industry or anything.

Melissa Dougherty: It's way simpler.

Eric Huffman: And I think deliverance-

Melissa Dougherty: I actually have a lot to say, but I did a few videos on some deliverance ministry, like Kathryn Krick. I think that there's conversations that have there. But the other major problem I have is they don't allow people to question them. Say you're asking questions, you're like, "Hold on. This is my 10th time here." "Don't question God's anointed. You can't...

Eric Huffman: That's a sign of the demonic in your life if you're questioning.

Melissa Dougherty: That's the sign of... exactly. Yes. That's Satan. He's putting doubts in your mind. And so I'm like, you're kind of getting a little cultish at this point, guys. Like you need to allow people to question what you're doing. And so there are issues there.

I'm convinced that's why a lot of them have the platforms they have. They have dynamic personalities and we'd probably go out and have a cup of coffee and get along just fine. But I think that there are hard conversations that need to happen. And I won't be bullied into staying quiet. And I hope that people listening won't either. Ask questions.  Because if it can be destroyed by truth, it should be destroyed by truth.

Eric Huffman: Amen. That's a good way to put it. You should write a book about that.

Melissa Dougherty: Nobody's ever asked me. So I'm like, okay, floodgates.

Eric Huffman: Well, it's one of those things. It can be good. It can be good and godly and biblical. I think a lot of them are not because, well, they operate outside anybody's authority other than the deliverance minister. There's no church over them or anything.

Also I think it's another product of the dearth of discipleship. I think it's a discipleship problem. And if discipleship was happening more in churches, you would need less of these deliverance ministries and things and they would be less appealing because discipleship is in some ways a cure-all for so much of what ails the church.

Melissa Dougherty: It's so simple.

Eric Huffman: That's for you pastors, if you're listening. We got to get back to discipling people instead of drawing crowds. I think that's so important.

All right. So we're almost out of time, but I can't let you go without talking about Oprah. I know that's funny. I come out of nowhere, but you've done some videos on Oprah. My producer's last boss was Oprah. Yeah, she took a massive downgrade to come work for me, right? I'll take it. That's grace.

Melissa Dougherty: Oh, and that's the other example I was going to give was her. I said Joel Osteen before, and then I trailed off, but yeah, Oprah was the other example. So I'm glad you brought her up.

Eric Huffman: Yeah. You've insisted on another video that Oprah is not new age, new agey, even though I would have categorized her as such. So what do you see in Oprah and her philosophy that's more New Thought than new age? What do you see that's problematic there?

Melissa Dougherty: Well, first, number one, I'm surprised we haven't brought up the seeker-sensitive model because so many times in this conversation, we've had like talks about discipleship and church. I go into that in chapter 10. So if anybody wants to know, that was a pain in the neck chapter to write.

But Oprah. So, yes. So this is something that I kind of wanted to... I wanted to make a deep dive video about Oprah because the thing about Oprah, she believes in Christ consciousness. She inherently believes way more New Thought beliefs.

One of the mistakes that human beings make is believing that there is only one way. There are millions of ways to be a human being. Then how do you please God? And many ways, no, but many paths to what you call God. That is passing. And her path might be something else. And when she gets there, she might call it the light.

So I made a deep dive video going into who is Oprah, what is she about, and why she is not a new ager. And it inherently goes back into defining what New Thought is and what new age is and what has informed Oprah's beliefs. One of the men, she's read many of them, but one of them is a man named Eric Butterworth, who was a Unity New Thought minister. She read his book about Christ consciousness, about these New Thought beliefs, and it radically changed her spirituality. Everybody has taken that little clip and used it to show why Oprah's a new ager. But I'm like, she's not a new ager.

And so I'm using this clip, but I found the whole episode and I watched it. And there's part in that episode where Oprah, this woman, they're still going at it. Like the conversation kept going after this whole clip happened. And the woman in the audience calls Oprah a new ager and Oprah got mad at her. She's like, I am not new age.

Eric Huffman: Interesting.

Melissa Dougherty: Yes. And I was like, oh, I'm so mad. I didn't find this clip for my... But that's the idea. She's like, I don't worship the trees. I don't look at the... you know, she's saying why she's not a new ager. I'm a Christian. And that's the point is that New Thought, metaphysical Christianity is made to look Christian. It will deceive you before the new age ever will for that reason. It makes this higher version of Christianity that makes it look way more spiritual, much more appealing. And the example-

Eric Huffman: More self-centered.

Melissa Dougherty: Exactly. Exactly. But remember it's using the virtuous language of humility and humble and tolerance and nonjudgmental. People buy this stuff. The example I use in the book is Indiana Jones. I use the example, the Holy Grail, the movie about the Holy Grail. It's my favorite scene to explain this, like what we're talking about. He's walking into the cave, you know, trying to find the Holy Grail. And there's all these beautiful, you know, bejeweled, golden, bright, shiny chalices. And I'm like, he's just not fooled. He's like looking around, looking around, and he zones in on this really just gross looking clay cup. It was dirty and simple. And I love what he said. He looks at it and he's like, "Now that is the cup of a carpenter." And he picks it up, takes a drink and he was correct. And that's the point is it's so simple. It's a simple gospel message. I have no doubt about it. This is spiritual.

Whenever you have these kinds of beliefs that are revolving around you, you have the serpent's lie rehashed. And we love this stuff. It's like that hymn. You know, it's prone to wonder, Lord, I feel it, prone to lover, leave the God I love. It's like you have to redirect yourself. You have to look at that clay cup and not be distracted by all the shiny things around you because they are just happy lies.

Eric Huffman: That's so good. And the clay cup is the perfect symbol of Christianity. And it's all we need. But we have this tendency, we're prone to wonder, where we always want to add to it. Some preacher said one time that Christ plus nothing equals everything, but Christ plus anything equals nothing. Which is such a good reminder I come back to all the time. Because we don't need to dress it up any. We don't need to shine it up or polish it or make it look any better than it already is. It's already everything as it is.

Melissa Dougherty: Amen. 

Eric Huffman: I think so many of us have that tendency that we always have to be on our guard. I'll wrap with this. One more question just along those lines, which is, if somebody's watching or listening to this and they're like, you know, I feel like I've been drawn in to some of this New Thought stuff or my church has, and I've just sort of sat idly by and I don't know how to put that rabbit back in the hat, what do you say to them as a word of encouragement or advice to get back on track?

Melissa Dougherty: Well, first thing I would say... I'll tell you what I did. And that's to surround yourself with knowledgeable Christians that are gonna hold you accountable. You know, find yourself a Bible-believing church. But the biggest thing I'll say is immerse yourself in your Bible. It is a cleansing. It is the sword of the Spirit. It'll cut through and undo so much.

There is a Holy Spirit-filled urge that we get when we're immersed in Scripture and we see it, we can't unsee it. In fact, that's my call to action at the end of the book is do something with this. Take it. Grow on this. With everything I wrote about, like there's still so much more to learn and know about this.

The idea is to get these conversations and have something said and done. The rabbit, in other words, can be put back in the hat. You don't have to catch the rabbit though. I think that whenever it comes to an element of truth, it's like the rabbit wants to go back into the hat. You know, there's this beautiful thing of going through what we've gone through, seeing it, knowing what it is. Oh, there's a name for this. I know what this is now. And I can see things differently now. I can read Scripture and understand that passage better. I had to go through and mark all the places in Scripture that had been messed up for me and read them again and then again and again. And you will be cleansed. It's a spiritual thing.

That's probably the biggest thing I would say. And just make sure that you're surrounding yourself with people that you can have these conversations with. If there's any repentance to be done, repent. Like I fell on my knees when I discovered what this was. I'm like, this is the serpent's lie, the oldest lie told to humanity and I fell for it. How is this possible? How did this look Christian?

And so what you do is that you take Scripture and you allow God to speak to you through the Scriptures and it will cleanse you over time. And the Holy Spirit will lead you and guide you.

Eric Huffman: Amen. If you're watching and still with us, thank you. And the serpent's lie that we keep coming back to is basically when the serpent said to Eve, did God really say, right?

Melissa Dougherty: Did God really say. You can be like God.

Eric Huffman: Right. If most of what you've done to think about the Bible is hear other people talk about the Bible on TikTok or even in sermons and things, as opposed to going to the Bible yourself, that's a perfect storm or recipe for New Thought infiltration, especially these days. So going right to the source.

And I love how you said in the book, before you get in the habit of, when you wake up in the morning, before you reach for your phone, reach for your Bible. It's as simple as that. Just spend a little time in the Word yourself, cutting out all the middle men and all the middle women and going right to the Word yourself and letting it sort of just wash over you.

Melissa Dougherty: Also, if I can suggest maybe some good teachers that they might enjoy, there's Skip Heitzig. He's a really great Bible teacher.

Eric Huffman: Is he your pastor?

Melissa Dougherty: Yeah, yeah, he's my pastor.

Eric Huffman: I watch him all the time.

Melissa Dougherty: Stop.

Eric Huffman: No, I do watch him all the time.

Melissa Dougherty: Really? That is so cool. Yeah, man. I mean, he is, line by line exegetically... he's online.

Eric Huffman: So good.

Melissa Dougherty: So, I mean, yeah, you can go online, watch his stuff. Mike Winger. Mike Winger does a lot of this good stuff. I'm thinking of another... oh, David Guzik. I mean, yeah, you're taking Bible teachers. This is all they do. And they take a literal grammatical approach to the Bible. And what I mean by that is hermeneutics. They're taking the Bible and they're giving you the information in the context in which the writer meant for it to be given.

That's what you want to look for. Because God did rise up shepherds. He rose up pastors to teach the word and they are out there. So don't think, oh, I can't trust anybody. Yes, you can.

Eric Huffman: That's right.

Melissa Dougherty: Yes, you can.

Eric Huffman: Because it would be real easy if you feel like you've been deceived by all this stuff to just walk away from all of it altogether. But there's such good teachers out there still. You just have to be discerning.

Melissa Dougherty: Amen. [inaudible 01:20:37] He's good. Even though he's reformed. I'm not reformed, but he is good.

Eric Huffman: No, for sure. He's another good one.

Melissa Dougherty: Yeah.

Eric Huffman: Hey, Melissa, thank you so much for the time today. Congratulations on the book.

Melissa Dougherty: Thank you.

Eric Huffman: I know how hard it can be to churn out a whole book, especially one that's... you know, you're going to catch heat for this. You don't strike me as a person-

Melissa Dougherty: Oh, yeah. There's something for everybody in this book to get offended over.

Eric Huffman: Yeah. You don't strike me as someone that's super bothered by a little controversy. So I'm sure you'll be fine with that. But everybody watching or listening, check out Melissa's book coming out January 25th, Happy Lies.

Melissa Dougherty: 28th.

Eric Huffman: 20 what?

Melissa Dougherty: 28th.

Eric Huffman: 28th, sorry. Oh, it's 2025. January 28th, 2025. And you'll be glad that you did. Melissa, thanks again for joining us on Maybe God.

Melissa Dougherty: This has been a blast. Thanks for having me on.