How God Changes Your Brain - Andrew Newberg, M. D_ [57]
In Western culture, the authoritarian notion of God dominated human thought until the 1400s, when a series of events undermined the power of the church. The Black Plague wiped out half the population of Europe, which helped to undermine religious authority. Science gained favor, and God retreated farther into the heavens. In a minority of Jewish, Islamic, and Christian texts, God's wrath also declined, to be replaced by images of a more benevolent and mystical force.
For the next two hundred years, Europe experienced a series of conflicts between competing Christian theologies. The Catholic Church splintered as people pulled up their roots in their search for a more personal God. And where did they seek the freedom to practice religion as they saw fit? In the colonies along the North American coast.
GLIMMERS OF AMERICAN MYSTICISM
Many of the people who first came to America were religiously persecuted in Europe, and yet they continued to embrace an authoritarian God. In the 1500s, Protestant England found a toehold along the northeastern seaboard, but times were harsh, and this too was reflected in the Puritan vision of God.
Slowly, Puritan severity gave way to more moderate Anglican parishes, which under English law was the only sanctioned religion allowed. But by the early 1700s the Anglican establishment was challenged by the Presbyterians, Baptists, and Methodists. These Protestant dissenters shared an evangelical fondness that made God more personal and joyful. Compared to earlier religious traditions, early American evangelism represented a true liberation from a state-controlled religious authority.
Still, the founders of our country continued to battle over issues of religious freedom. Eventually, the then-vague notion of church/state separation won out, and people were free to envision God in any way they saw fit. America became the first world nation to encourage religious pluralism, and for the most part American religious ideology was liberal, antislavery, antiwar, and supportive of women's involvement with the church. On the other side of the religious coin, many hell-and-brimstone preachers continued to flame the images of a wrathful God.
Then something unusual occurred in the mid-1800s. Small groups of people—many of them wealthy, educated, and culturally sophisticated—became enamored of various esoteric, spiritualistic, and transcendental philosophies imported from Europe and Asia. These were the people who introduced the notion of a truly mystical God, and the movement captured the imagination of America. One could argue that the “spirit” of Christianity was reborn, and it spawned new sects across the country. For example, Christian Science practitioners embraced the notion that God was entirely good and perfect and that, through divine love, all forms of sickness could be healed. Evil was simply an absence of truth.
The Unity School of Christianity went a step further. Founded in 1889 by Charles and Myrtle Fillmore, it transformed the idea of God into a benevolent presence that lives within each person. Thus, all people are spiritual beings who can shape their lives through the use of affirmative positive thoughts and prayer.
These “New Thought” churches changed the religious landscape of America by taking the authority of God completely out of the hands of the clergy and giving it to their congregants. Suddenly, God was no longer a distant heavenly power, but an internally active force that anyone could directly experience and use. Evangelical revivalism swept through the nation as tens of thousands of people were touched by gifts of the Holy Spirit.∗2 The mystical God had arrived.7
DOES GOD HAVE A WALLET?