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thinkingmystic · 3 months

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Deceived in a different direction – thoughts on Doreen Virtue’s Deceived No More and the search for answers

“He pulled a Doreen Virtue,” someone wrote in the comment section of a tarot reader who posted a Reel about their conversion back to Catholicism, which also served to denounce their former practices as dangerous and sinful.

I’m sure Doreen Virtue is thrilled that she’s become the lingua franca for (relatively) prominent woo people who convert to Christianity and condemn their previous path as demonic/evil/misguided in the process. Doreen Virtue – riding on the success of Sophy Burnham’s A Book of Angels, published in 1990 – was Hay House’s darling during the late 90s up to the late 00s. Then, in 2018, she announced that all that was dangerous and demonic and that she’s found the real deal in evangelical Jesus.

This is not an uncommon trend, and in trying to understand it – and seeing how many parallels there are to my own ‘Doreen Virtuing’ back in 2010 – I thought I’d take a closer look at Virtue’s Christian memoir, Deceived No More, published in 2020.

Why Virtue’s book?

There are two reasons I’m using Virtue’s book.

First, her about-turn is relatively recent, and in my opinion, there is a potentially interesting connection between her conversion and the run-up to the Trumpian era of politics. This might illustrate the growing ‘new age to alt right pipeline’ we’re seeing.

Second, Virtue was big in the new age scene and released dozens of spiritual books and card decks. She also toured the world giving workshops and presentations. Why would she abandon two decades of work? Or, as we’ll see, might this influence (and its waning) factor into her conversion more than she’s admitting?

Let’s get into the book.

Virtue’s main argument against the New Age: ‘Because the Bible says so’

If you were hoping that Deceived No More would blow you out of the water with its astute exegesis, keep dreaming. Throughout this repetitive book, Virtue’s main argument is that the Bible says so. She offers no explanation and leaves no room for any alternate view of the Bible. In chapter 6 she calls it “God-breathed and internally consistent”; in chapter 11, she advises her audience to ask whether spiritual directors or life coaches believe the Bible is God’s inerrant word. In chapter 9, she writes that one of her four revelations upon converting were that “the Bible is inerrant and trustworthy”. “I didn’t need to consult with apologists (people who defend the Christian faith and inerrancy of the Bible), as I knew for certain that the Bible is God’s Word.” How does she back this belief? By saying (later in the eleventh chapter) that the only way to understand the Bible is through the Holy Spirit, and you don’t get that until you are saved.

As for her hermeneutic approach, she – like many biblical ‘literalists’ – don’t believe they have one. They take the ‘God wrote it, I believe it!’ stance. But no one approaches anything without bias or preconceived ideas – not the original authors/scribes of the texts that would eventually be collated into the Bible, and certainly not the scholars who translate these texts into modern languages. We all have lenses through which we view and interact with the world. It is by understanding these lenses and how they influence us that we arrive at greater self-understanding and compassion towards ourselves and others. Pretending that these lenses don’t exist – or being confident that your view is the only view, because the text you’re interacting with appears to tell you so – is a logical fallacy and a spiritual dead-end.

I was surprised to see just how far right Virtue has swung. Her reading of the Bible is extremely legalistic. In chapter 2 she writes, “God can’t overlook our years of using His name is vain, practicing idolatry, slandering our neighbor, having lustful thoughts, dishonouring our parents, and so forth. Sinful behaviour always has consequences. This isn’t an appeal to legalism, however,” she concludes, but then also says: “Instead of hearing the gospel, mockers need to hear the Law” (chapter 6).

Not all biblical literalists are conservative, but most ‘inerrant’ churches lean conservative. So if we were in any doubt about what exactly Virtue converted to (namely evangelical Christianity)…

“He [the devil] tells you that you’re ‘woke’ if you realise ‘the truth’ that God is simply the ‘universe’” (chapter 6)

“New Agers blame politicians and conservatives for the problems in the world, instead of blaming Satan” (chapter 6)

Which brings me to Virtue’s conversion timeline.

2015: On January 14th she listens to Alistair Begg’s sermon, “Itching Ears”. Begg is a Scottish minister pastoring in Cleveland, and Virtue would go on to adopt many of the same doctrinal stances that his Parkside Church espouses. She credits this sermon as the start of her conversion.

2016: She and her husband Michael attend a Pentecostal church and church shop, including a stint in an Episcopal church. She takes pains to emphasise that Michael wasn’t forcing her away from the new age, but that they left it together.

2017: On January 7th, she has a vision* of Jesus; she is baptised in an unnamed protestant church on the 25th of February (probably the Episcopal one); she and her family move to Seattle on November 17th.

2018: Hosts “The One Year Bible” Instagram live Bible study daily. She posts Deuteronomy 18:10-11 on Instagram on October 6th; is “fired” from Hay House “a few weeks” before Christmas; joins a Baptist church sometime during this year or at the end of previous one.

2019: Would this be when she starts her MA at Western Seminary?

2021: Graduates Western Seminary with an MA in Biblical and Theological Studies.

Sometime before their move to Seattle, Virtue gets “sucked into the world of conspiracy theories”. “I became obsessed with ‘the new world order’, ‘chemtrails’, and the Illuminati. I was constantly upset about genetically modified foods and politicians who didn’t vote as I thought they should,” she writes in chapter 7. My theory – and it is just a theory – is that Virtue’s conversion was influenced by booming Q-Anon rhetoric and the political climate leading up to Trump’s election in 2016.

This wouldn’t be surprising; in fact, it’s got its own term: the new age to alt right pipeline. In a Maintenance Phase podcast on the topic, for instance, they talk about how new age adherents can be especially vulnerable to alt right beliefs and talking points. They specifically reference how a distrust of authority coupled with a niche belief that appeals to particular people – new agers may be especially vulnerable to antivaxxer rhetoric, for instance – then segues into right-adjacent conspiracies which segues into the right itself.

Something the podcast doesn’t mention but that I think also applies, especially in Virtue’s case, is the intersection of white supremacy and white privilege in pushing new agers into alt right territory. The new age tends to be very white, very American, very aspirational middle class. Privilege experiences change, diversity and inclusiveness as threatening. In times of change, then, it’s not uncommon for those with certain privilege to revert to conservatism. In the next section we’ll look at how this may have contributed to Virtue’s about-turn.

Little Miss Popular

In chapter 8 of Deceived No More, Virtue writes, “Right before my salvation, I was at the pinnacle of my New Age career.” It’s true that she published with Hay House consistently – sometimes yearly - since the early 00s, but that had slowed down by the early 2010s. Her last book with Hay House, Sweet Dreams Scripture: Bible Verses and Prayers to Calm and Soothe You, was published in 2017.

But were angels, Virtue’s primary selling point, still popular?

According to Google Trends, global interest in angels peaked in 2009, with a steady overall decline up to the present. The search term “Doreen Virtue” peaked in 2016, presumably around the time she became more vocal about her changing beliefs. The drop-off in searches for her (search terms and topics) between August and November of 2017 was steep.

My speculation is that Virtue’s popularity was already tapering off as Hay House expanded into tarot and other aspects of woo. I like angels as much as the next person, but Virtue’s angelology is particularly saccharine, which, as the world spun from the blow landed by Trump’s election, just wasn’t cutting it. Hay House have also been trying to diversify their demographics. I wouldn’t be surprised if Virtue was simply aging out of popular appeal.

Virtue, though, attributes her sales slump wholly to her conversion (and she may very well be telling the truth; I don’t know). In chapter 13 she notes, “[M]y former publisher reported that my conversion was dramatically affecting my book sales… My former publisher’s accountant estimated that my earnings would drop by 70 percent that year.” This is ultimately what prompts them to move to Seattle.

In the book she attributes this move, depression and unhappiness on social media (she calls it spiritual warfare) to her finally breaking completely with her former path. “Soon after we moved [almost a year later, actually], I made a social media post with the verses from Deuteronomy 18:10-12. In the comment of the post, I said that this was the Bible passage that led me to quit the New Age practices. About an hour later, I received an email from the president of my publishing house informing me that I’d crossed the line with this post. He was concerned that I’d offend witches with these Bible verses that condemned divination, fortune-telling, omen interpretation, mediumship, and witchcraft. Since the publisher had newly begun printing witchcraft books, they didn’t want to upset their customers. He told me I was fired” (chapter 14).

She goes on to lament the direction that Hay House was moving in: “I’d been working with that publisher for twenty-five years and was their top-selling author. We’d travelled around the world together, and here I was getting fired by email three weeks before Christmas. I was losing my radio show, my website, and my publishing contracts. When I’d first started with the publisher, they only printed books about health, inspiration, and positive affirmations. They wouldn’t even use the word psychic or other New Age terms in their books. Here they were, twenty-five years later, printing witchcraft books! This showed me the progressive nature of deception.”

This kind of resentment is one of the constants of the book, along with reminiscences about how popular she used to be, and her endless defence of herself for not knowing better at the time. In chapter 14 she writes about how her New Age friends – “many of whom I helped get publishing contracts” – stopped contacting her. Is it any surprise, though? According to those verses in Deuteronomy, the verses that ultimately converted Virtue, God abhors people in the new age.

In chapter 6, Virtue quotes New Zealand-born evangelist Ray Comfort, “The gospel is inherently offensive to most people.” “Don’t be surprised or take it personally if your loved ones become offended by your evangelising.” Later in chapter 8 she adds, “It’s so ironic that before I was saved, I used to judge Christians as being judgmental. The irony was lost on me until the first time I was called a judgmental Christian when I was only trying to help someone.” Yes, the irony does seem to be totally lost on her.

“My old friends, and some New Age family members, saw my evangelizing work as being ‘unloving’. One family member informed me that Jesus would never talk this way. My relative gave me an ultimatum: either I stop evangelizing against the New Age or I wouldn’t hear from him again.” I’m pretty sure this relative is one of her sons, Charles.

It seems that Virtue’s conversion was shrouded in and accompanied by a lot of anger and lingering resentment, but is it possible that anger/resentment precipitated it? Resentment at a changing market, resentment at a changing publisher, resentment for no longer receiving the “rockstar treatment” she spends so much of Deceived No More talking about? Resentment, even, at a changing world?

Dowdy dressing for Jesus

One of the more bizarre aspects of the book (and there’s plenty; the line “The enemy is a sugar daddy who’ll give you the high life” comes to mind) is Virtue’s attachment to fine clothing and how she thinks Christians are dowdy dressers. In chapter 3 she writes, “I judged them [Christians] as ‘fear-based’, which is a New Age term for someone who operates out of fear, guilt, and negativity. I also thought their manner of dress was boringly conservative.” Oh, you think she mentions it just once?

“Five minutes into the start of each workshop, I’d invariably see two or more conservatively dressed women get up and leave. Looking back, they were probably Christians” (chapter 5).

“[I] donated and sold most of those clothes [the designer dresses] and learned how to wear modest and inexpensive clothing with grace” (chapter 1).

She references her previous lifestyle numerous times, with varying degrees of regret:

“I was seduced by the first-class lifestyle from my New Age teachings… We [her and her husband, Michael] were treated like rock stars on the New Age tours.”

“It all seemed so exotic and exciting!”

“I didn’t realize that I was spending money faster than I was earning it, and after taxes I rarely had much money left over. That kept me in a cycle of continually giving workshops so that I’d have enough money to pay my bills. The devil is an evil genius, y’all. I grieve now thinking of how I could’ve helped impoverished families with that money!” (all from chapter 4)

What I’m driving at is this attitude of Virtue’s that, without using quite as many words, signals she’s a martyr for Christ. She calls it sanctification – chapter 11 is titled “sanctification in the public eye” – but I wonder if there’s an early draft where she used the “m” word. She talks about how she “felt altruistic, like a martyr, denying myself pleasure in order to bring the latest messages to people in my books, audios, videos, seminars, and cards” in the fourth chapter, referring to her new age work. That same attitude persists into her conversion. Her readers are to understand exactly how much she sacrificed to be ‘right’, and she takes much more pain to explain what she’s lost than she does to explain what she’s supposedly found. Which brings me to my next point: what is the goal of this book? Who is it for?

Who is this book for?

The thing that puzzled me most about this book is exactly who its intended audience is supposed to be. You’d expect it to be geared towards new agers, since Virtue apparently regrets her previous teachings so much, but listen to what she has to say about unbelievers:

“Spiritual blindness is a real and pervasive condition. The Bible says that Satan has blinded the minds of those who don’t believe in Jesus, so they’re unable to see the glorious light of the gospel. The devil puts a veil up so that the gospel is hidden and the Bible isn’t understandable to unbelievers… As author Justin Peters recently told me, ‘False teachers are part of God’s judgment upon unbelievers.’ As difficult as it is to fathom, God used my false teachings in His wrath against me and unbelievers” (chapter 6).

For all that Virtue is so regretful about her old teachings and beliefs, she seems curiously uninterested in reaching her old fan base and more interested in defending herself against them and Christians sceptical of her conversion. What she writes in chapter 6, quoted above, reads like a pre-emptive defence for Deceived No More’s inevitable failure to sway her previous audience. As for the sceptical Christians, her primary defence there is ignorance:

“[I] wasn’t a rebellious Christian but a biblically ignorant and foolish unsaved person who didn’t know the true gospel” (introduction)

“[I] was just ignorant of true theology” (chapter 8)

“All those years, I didn’t know I was following a false Christ” (introduction)

Virtue also takes aim at doctrine and teachers she doesn’t approve of, which strikes me as arrogant for someone who at the time of writing the book had only been a Christian Christian for two years (by her own estimation). Joyce Meyers (who I don’t like, either, by the by) is dismissed as a false teacher, and Virtue has a little hitlist of doctrines she considers unbiblical and warns people about. I’ll talk more about this in the next section.

The only time this book stirred any emotion in me is in chapter 11 when Virtue is talking about the Episcopal spiritual director she saw for a short time. “She reassured me that I didn’t need to change anything in terms of deleting cards or crystals from my lifestyle. I simply needed to add Jesus and the Bible, and she said that I should embrace my gifts from God… Now I realize the Holy Spirit was convicting me against following her counsel. The upset I felt was conviction [emphasis hers] from the Holy Spirit, who steers saved people away from sin and back to God’s will. I almost fell for her advice since she seemed wiser and more biblically educated than I was. Ultimately though, it was the author of the Bible—the Holy Spirit—who taught me what was right.”

This was probably the last genuinely kind advice Virtue got before she phased completely into conservative evangelicalism, and she was too defensive, angry, insecure and arrogant to realise that the spiritual director could see which direction she was heading in and trying to help her.

The New Adventures of Old Doreen

I believe that Doreen Virtue believes she’s changed, but I see little evidence of that in Deceived No More. Mostly I see someone trying to reestablish herself in the publishing world – the Christian one, this time – and having to convince people that she’s no longer who she used to be to do so.

In the previous section I mentioned how Virtue has a hit list of what she considers heresy. I’m less interested in her theology and more interested in how unable she is to resist setting herself up as a spiritual authority even if, by her own admission, she doesn’t believe women should teach or preach (she coyly references 1 Timothy 2:12 in chapter 14).

One of her first projects after coming out of her Christian closet was to start a Bible study/group reading through The One Year Bible. “I wasn’t qualified to teach the Bible then [emphasis mine], but I could share commentaries of each day’s Bible reading…” she writes in chapter 14. “The group was free of charge without any financial compensation, so I was really leaning on God, knowing that I’d be involved in researching and teaching [emphasis mine] daily without pay for the whole year.”

This contradicts what she has to say about herself in chapter 6: “The public outpouring of anger against my conversion was humbling, and I saw that popularity is fickle and conditional. I am also humbled by going to seminary classes, where I’m the oldest person in classrooms filled with twenty-five-year-old future pastors. I’m an invisible person in these classes, which has been humbling in a healthy and necessary way.” Virtue was and still is pursuing spiritual authority; it’s just a different stage and a different audience. This doesn’t really gel with her narrative of being a repentant and humbled sinner, does it? (Also, as far as I can tell, the One Year Bible group predates her enrolling in seminary.)

While Virtue repeatedly professes regret for her previous lifestyle, she seems genuinely confused that her actions hurt people. “[P]eople seemed to interpret my denouncing [the new age] as being ‘hate speech’, when my entire motivation was love. I cared enough to warn people about the New Age leading to hell, and I risked losing everything and everyone to sound this warning,” she writes in her introduction. In chapter 14, she says, “The more I spoke openly about changes that stemmed from my conversion to Christianity, the more confused and upset people who followed my work seemed to become.” For someone who has a MA in counselling psychology and who resisted attempts at being evangelised herself for decades, Virtue has little empathy for her previous audience and seems to resent that her good intentions don’t cover her officiousness.

Leaving the new age

So what did Virtue find in Christianity that she couldn’t find in the new age? As far as I can tell (and as much as she’ll admit to), she felt spiritually unfulfilled. In the first chapter of Deceived No More, Virtue writes: “I was unknowingly hungry for the love that only God can give. I’d followed all the New Age prescriptions for healthy, happy living… The New Age, for all its promises, could not save me. Only Jesus could.”

This sentiment is familiar to me because in 2010, I converted to Christianity after several years as a Pagan. There’s a lot of overlap between modern Paganism and new age practices, (which neither group enjoys admitting). Both are groups that follow a spacious set of doctrines or beliefs, a kind of hodgepodge of different practices under wide, inclusive umbrellas.

I recognise the spiritual hunger Virtue references, but I also recognise – which I’m not sure she does, yet – that that hunger doesn’t occur in a vacuum. In hindsight, for me it was a product of PTSD from cancer treatment and abusive relationships, and as yet unrecognised/misunderstood autism, ADHD, and queerness. I’ve thought a lot about my conversion in the years since I’ve left the church and ministry. Virtue doesn’t doubt the validity or meaningfulness of her conversion experience, nor do I mine. But I understand now that it wasn’t so much Jesus, or just Jesus, that pulled me in: I was, I believed at the time, also converting to acceptance: as a Christian, surely I would never feel like an outsider again.

Was it the same for Virtue? I do wonder if my speculations about political rifts, resentment at power shifts at her previous publisher and in society in general, and general financial stress contributed to an environment in which she, too, was yearning for acceptance – or, at the very least, no further loss of privilege. And if she could no longer find that in the new age…

Deceived in a different direction?

One of the worst things I experienced in my time in church and ministry is that some people genuinely enjoy the thought that God loves them and not whatever ‘other’ they most distrust, resent, envy, or hate. I’ve known Christians who seem especially to resent grace: if they work so hard to prove their faith – put in so much time in Bible study, prayer, church attendance and volunteering – and are ‘sinless’, or at least less sinful that someone else – why should others get a free pass to God?

Unfortunately, as we’ve seen in Deceived No More, it appears that Virtue is now one of those Christians. In the first chapter of the book, Virtue writes: “[There] were two desires that drove me toward the New Age. The first was a desire to help people, and the second was a desire for secret wisdom.” It’s hard not to see Virtue’s conversion as a continuation of her previous thinking. As a new age author, speaker, and teacher, she could sell access to her ‘secret knowledge’ – helpfully presenting herself as its arbiter – in book, radio and workshop format. As an evangelical Christian, she does the same thing…via exclusionary doctrine. The only difference, as far as I can tell, is that she’s swapped the carrot for the stick: she’s now found the secret knowledge, and if her search is over, then everyone else’s should be, too.

Some concluding thoughts

The converting tarot reader that inspired this reflection recently changed their Instagram handle to something more appropriately Christian. They appear to be setting themselves up to teach their 30k followers “real Catholicism”. Virtue’s social media presence is focused on educating people about the dangers of the new age – especially her YouTube presence – while espousing her ‘biblically inerrant’ Evangelicalism. And of course, both of them believe their brand of Christianity is the correct one. Both of them believe that their faith system has the answer.

I find it so ironic that the reason we generally first turn to religion and the primary thing that drives a wedge into our maturing faith system is ultimately the same thing, namely: expecting answers.

We commit to religion to find answers to life’s questions and reasons for life’s difficulties. It provides us comfort, community, structure: rules to live and die by, context to make sense of ourselves, a place to belong to something greater than ourselves.

But as our faith journey continues – and I do believe this is a universal experience – as we butt up against the limits of religion-as-answers, we enter new territory: religion-as-experience, religion-as-questioning, even religion-as-doubt.

In the tarot we see this transition happening as The Fool navigates three cycles of seven cards in the Major Arcana in a process of self-individuation. In 78 Degrees of Wisdom, Rachel Pollack writes:

The division into three allows us to see the Major Arcana as dealing with three distinct areas of experience. Briefly, we can call these: consciousness, the outer concerns of life in society; subconscious, or the search inward to find out who we really are; and superconscious, the development of a spiritual awareness and a release of archetypal energy.

To move away from religion-as-answers is risky business, though. It’s uncomfortable and it frequently brings us not just to the limits of our religious understanding, but also to the limits of our ego and induces us to face our innermost selves. If we can’t stand the tension, if we can’t find a way to cope with dissonance, if we find ourselves faltering when faith is a question mark rather than a full stop, we regress.

While I don’t think we’re judged for this, I do think we miss out on something and we’re poorer for that loss, as are our communities.

Any religion or spiritual persuasion – including the new age, including evangelical and Catholic Christianity – that isn’t elastic enough to hold difficult things in tension and through that tension, birth something new – is brittle enough that it will snap if there’s too much pressure. I think the same is true of its adherents.

If we can’t collectively, regardless of our religion, be elastic enough to hold difficult things in tension and through that tension, birth something new – we will snap if there’s too much pressure.

When someone does a Virtue, rather than seeing it as a challenge to legitimacy of whatever path they were on, I think we’re better served seeing it as an opportunity to hold space for the human condition, in others and in ourselves.

We move through The World as The Fool, happy for every opportunity to step off the cliff from what we were once so certain we knew.

*She has a Jesus vision but goes on to denounce this as demonic, too.

#tarot #Christianity #Doreen Virtue #conversion

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