Ever since Marianne Williamson, a well-known New Age guru and cheerleader for A Course in Miracles, entered the presidential race, there have been many articles written about the Course, some of which are very misleading.

For an example of the latter, The Detroit News published an article on August 18 in which it presents the Course in a glowing light and leaves unchallenged misguided quotes from ex-Catholics who think it’s a “practical application of Christianity” or just a way to “pray in God” rather than “to God.”

Nothing could be further from the truth.

As I state in my book, The Learn to Discern Compendium, the Course, which was written by a woman who claimed to be channeling Jesus Christ, teaches that we all live in heaven with God and that our lives on earth are just a bad dream.

“We don’t have to die in order to go Heaven. We just have to wake up,” explains former New Age practitioner and author, Moira Noonan in her book, Ransomed from Darkness. “Each of us is exactly and entirely the way God created us to be: sinless and wholly innocent. The Course is adamant about this. There is no sin.”

According to this distorted theology, men and women don’t require salvation in the biblical sense because they are already divine.

“Salvation is merely accepting ones true identity as one essence with God,” explains The Christian Research Institute (CRI). “Therefore, we need nothing from God because each person’s true nature is God.”

The Course goes even further, teaching that sin, guilt, death, judgment, propitiatory atonement, and other biblical doctrines are “attack” philosophies, meaning they are concepts that stand in the way of spiritual progress and the realization of our true divine nature.

“People must become free of these false, enslaving, and evil ideas if they desire true spiritual freedom. Otherwise, they choose to remain in hell and to kill the God of love. In this worldview, orthodox Christian beliefs (biblical teachings given by the one true God) are held to be evil, insane, and anti-Christ,” CRI writes.

In order to achieve this way of thinking and to achieve the physical and spiritual health God intended us to have, the Course teaches that we must accept the proper attitudes toward ourselves, life in general, and the world.

These attitudes are 1) the rejection of biblical understandings about such issues as sin, guilt, atonement and 2) the acceptance of New Age occult teachings such as pantheism (All is God, God is All) and psychic development.

In other words, it teaches people how to reject the Judeo-Christian worldview. Is it any wonder that this book is known as “the New Age bible”?

In his book, A Still Small Voice, the late Father Benedict Groeschel said the God who is referenced in the Course is an “unorthodox representation of Christ, who is by no means denied, but so distorted that the ‘Son of God’ becomes a vague mystical figure who conveniently fits into any doctrinal crevice the individual may carve out for him.”

The news article contained not a single mention of these facts and legitimate criticisms, preferring to quote an ex-Catholic facilitator of the Course named William Carpenter, 68, who gave some nebulous explanation about the group moving from “praying to God to praying in God. We’re already whole, perfect and complete.”

Only later in the article are we told that Carpenter took up the course in 1976 after discovering “an inner longing that wasn’t fulfilled by the Catholic faith of his upbringing.”

Carpenter claims the Course gives “a practical application of Christianity,” a statement which the article leaves completely unchallenged by knowledgeable and practicing Christians.

Judging by the polls, there’s no chance that Marianne Williamson will be elected president, but her candidacy is bringing this very dangerous course into the limelight where it is receiving all the wrong kind of attention from media sources who are either practicing shoddy journalism, pushing an anti-Christian agenda – or both.

Unfortunately, it will be the poorly catechized who suffer most from this new and misleading presentation of a decades-old heresy.

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