Doreen Virtue once stood at the center of the New Age movement. Now she is warning Christians that the same practices that made her famous are leading multitudes into spiritual danger.
“In the New Age, I was very famous. I went on Oprah, all the talk shows, CNN, The View, everything,” she recalled. “I was writing about mediumship, teaching it, practicing it.” For decades she believed she was helping people and even thought she was serving God.
That illusion shattered when Scripture confronted her. Preaching from Matthew 7:21-23, she said, “I came so close to hearing those words,” referring to Jesus’ warning, “I never knew you.” Virtue admitted, “I thought I was a Christian my whole life. I was saved at age 59.”
Her story begins in New Thought churches that taught that “your thoughts create your reality.” From there she moved fully into New Age teaching, touring the world, filling convention centers and mentoring celebrities. “I thought that was my life,” she said. “And that whole time I thought I was doing God’s will because people told me that the New Age materials that I produced comforted them.”
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Virtue now describes New Thought and New Age as spiritually deadly because they shift the focus from God’s sovereignty to human self-exaltation. “New Thought is this belief that you can create through positive thoughts, positive feelings, positive actions,” she said. “The New Age, New Thought glorifies self and Christianity glorifies God.”
Behind the feel-good language of “you deserve it” and “follow your heart,” she sees a deeper appetite. “This is what we see in both New Thought and New Age is this desire to have power,” she said. People wounded by abuse, abandonment or betrayal are especially vulnerable. “They turn to New Age, New Thought because, again, it glorifies self and it makes you feel like a million bucks.”
Virtue warns that this quest for power quickly pulls people into occult practices the Bible explicitly condemns. She lists three pillars of New Age deception: “The first one is idolatry… the second thing is you see witchcraft or sorcery… and the third thing is divination.” These can appear in seemingly harmless forms such as crystals, essential oils marketed for “abundance,” energy language, astrology, numerology or vision boards.
She insists the spiritual power behind many New Age “results” is real but demonic. Speaking of manifestation tools, Virtue says, “Let me tell you, it does work. I did vision boards for decades and seemed to manifest fancy cars, fancy vacations, relationships, houses, everything. But it is sorcerers’ counterfeit. These things do work because demons are behind the scenes using them as Trojan horses for further deception.”
Confronted by passages such as Deuteronomy 18:10-12 and the New Testament warnings against sorcery and idolatry, Virtue walked away from the empire she had built. “I had to say to the whole world I was wrong. I’m sorry,” she said, after touring globally for 25 years and publishing in 38 languages. The cost was high: lost income, lost friends, estranged family members and selling her home. Yet she describes a peace she never found in the New Age.
Now she issues an urgent warning to the church about blending Christian language with New Age ideas. Citing Revelation’s warnings about idolaters and sorcerers, she says, “Idolatry could keep someone out of heaven into the lake of fire and destruction forever.” Virtue warns that “New Age, New Thought is sinful” and “cannot be blended with Christianity at all.”
James Lasher, a seasoned writer and editor at Charisma Media, combines faith and storytelling with a background in journalism from Otterbein University and ministry experience in Guatemala and the LA Dream Center. A Marine Corps and Air Force veteran, he is the author of The Revelation of Jesus: A Common Man’s Commentary and a contributor to Charisma magazine.
