Latest / Worldview Matters With David Fiorazo / Melissa Dougherty: ‘Happy Lies’ & Our Self-Obsessed World (REPLAY)

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Melissa Dougherty: ‘Happy Lies’ & Our Self-Obsessed World (REPLAY) · Worldview Matters With David Fiorazo

• 0:00
  Hey friends, welcome to World View Matters.
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  Powerful podcast today I've got in today's guest
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  is the author of the brand new book Happy Lies.
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  Melissa Doherty, she's an ex-new thought follower.
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  She describes this philosophy as a stealthy message
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  of encouragement to live your truth, seek your happiness,
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  find your identity through sexual freedom,
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  and thank your desires into existence,
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  often with the name of Jesus attached as an endorsement.
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  New thought, ideology subtly infiltrates contemporary Christian thought,
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  presenting a false gospel that masquerades
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  as a more open-minded, tolerant and loving interpretation
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  of Jesus and the Bible.
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  You've probably adopted some of its teachings
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  and you don't even realize it that's coming up.
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  Welcome to World View Matters,
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  discussing controversial issues,
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  discerning current events,
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  defending biblical Christianity,
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  no topic off limits.
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  And now, here's your host, David Firazo.
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  Hey friends, welcome.
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  Get ready. This is so good.
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  I want to give you her website, MelissaDoherty.com.
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  It's actually .co.
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  The book is called Happy Lies, How of Movement.
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  You probably never heard of shaped our self-obsessed world.
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  Melissa is a Christian apologist best known for her YouTube channel,
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  and her videos, which primarily cover new age and new thought,
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  they've been viewed over 18 million times.
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  Melissa is highly regarded and connected in the apologetics community.
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  She has had numerous influential guests on her channel
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  and is a frequent speaker and commentator on other YouTube videos
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  and podcasts. She's got a bachelor's degree in religious studies
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  from Southern Evangelical Seminary,
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  where she's also pursuing, pursuing her master's degree
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  in religious studies.
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  She is married with two daughters,
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  lives in New Mexico, Melissa.
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  Thank you for your time today and thank you for this book.
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  Yeah, thanks for having me on.
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  Yeah, we talked before we got on.
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  There's so much in here.
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  This is going to be really hard to condense,
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  but we prayed that God would just guide and lead us
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  in what we need to share.
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  So let's start with the very beginning.
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  I'm looking at some of the endorsements.
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  These people, great men and women of God.
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  I've had them on this podcast.
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  J. Warner Wallace.
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  I've talked to Hillary Morgan Ferrer,
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  Natasha Crane, Sean McDowell, Frank Turrick, Rockstars.
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  And you're in this group as well.
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  So I thank you for all your work and I encourage people to go to
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  Melissa Doherty on YouTube, Phenomenal YouTube channel.
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  And you will be doing a deep dive on Robert Schuler.
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  And we'll get to that.
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  That's chapter 10 in your book.
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  But before we do that, could you clarify what new thought is
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  and what makes it different from new age?
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  Sure.
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  This is the number one question I'm asked
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  because it shouldn't be confused with new age.
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  And that was actually the epiphany I had
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  that was part of the reason why I wrote this book.
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  Is that this is actually my spiritual background.
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  I've, you know, thought I was an ex-new ageer,
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  but I'm technically an ex-new thotter.
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  And yeah, there's a whole story behind that.
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  But it was when I realized what I was in,
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  looked more Christian early on when I got out of it,
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  when I thought it was new age.
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  That's whatever I was in looked different than this over here
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  than what people were asking me about.
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  Like, oh, Melissa, you know, you're in the new age.
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  Tell me is raky new age.
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  And my first answer was, what's raky?
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  You know what I mean?
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  Like, well, I understood tarot, tarot cards.
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  I never would have thought yoga was new age.
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  Sacred geometry.
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  Geez.
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  There was just so many transcendental meditation.
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  There were so many things that I'd never heard of.
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  And I'm like, what was I in?
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  You know, I just thought it was just another element of new age.
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  And then all these years go by and I realize,
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  oh, no, these are two different things.
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  So in short, new age, most people are more familiar with.
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  New age is more recognizable in my opinion.
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  And it's more of an outward kind of,
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  you're doing outward things to work on what's on the inside.
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  So think of tarot cards, psychic mediums.
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  You're doing, you know, believe in karma, yoga, reincarnation,
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  star seeds, light work.
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  The list goes on and on.
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  There's so many there.
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  I would say more recognizable in that regard.
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  And it's more Eastern, think of Eastern mysticism,
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  like Buddhism or Hinduism.
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  New thought is in its own little bucket.
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  Oh, and I should say there are some, there's some overlap here.
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  So a lot of, for example, the beginnings of new thought
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  did begin with spirit contact, right?
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  Like there's overlap there in that regard.
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  But new thought is different when it comes to the history,
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  the origins and the movement,
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  and even the beliefs of what it stands for.
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  And my point is that new thought is more sinister
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  because it's made to look Christian.
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  It uses Christian terminology,
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  claims to be Christian and origin,
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  and is more gnostic in origin.
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  Let me tell you a little bit about what that means.
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  So some things that would be new thought in belief and practice,
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  manifestation, visualization, the law of attraction,
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  affirmations, the power of positive thinking,
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  and it draws on the power of your mind to create your reality.
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  There's power in your thoughts.
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  There's power in your words.
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  And in fact, all the, there's so many scriptures that they'll use
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  to say that you can create your reality.
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  Like you are a co-creator with God.
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  And the element of positive thinking, though, is very big.
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  Any word.
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  And two words, I would say it's metaphysical Christianity.
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  It's a better, more spiritual Christianity.
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  In a sentence, I would say it's the positive thinking movement
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  in America with Jesus as its mascot.
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  So those are the differences, the main differences between the two,
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  where they overlap ultimately is the core belief
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  that you are somehow divine, that you are.
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  Yeah, yeah.
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  So I mean, there's, I wrote a whole book about it.
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  So I mean, there's more in the book.
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  Well, many, many, many decades ago,
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  one of the first books I picked up was Norman Vincent Peel's
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  The Power of Positive Thinking.
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  And I got sucked right into that because I read,
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  I wasn't a student of the Bible, but I read some scripture
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  and I thought, wow, this is great because it's positive.
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  So I hear a lot of similarities between the prosperity gospel,
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  words, faith, and new thought.
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  Because there's a lot of affirmations, a lot about visualizing
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  and creating things with your words.
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  Do you find there's a hard distinction to make
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  between new thought and some of these others?
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  Oh, 100%.
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  Yeah.
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  Okay.
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  That's chapter eight.
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  The whole, all of chapter eight is the word of faith movement
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  and the overlap of new thought teachings.
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  Okay.
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  And it's, it's a mixture.
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  The word, word of faith movement is a mixture of new thought,
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  penicostalism, and early faith cure movement teachings.
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  And if you mix those together, you get the word of faith movement.
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  And the question is not.
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  It's not if new thought teachings are in the word of faith movement.
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  That's not the question.
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  The question is how did they get there?
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  So I attempt to do that in that chapter and I,
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  I attempt to draw the lines back to new thought, prosperity,
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  declarations, little gods doctrine, and health teachings,
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  back to the origins being in new thought specifically.
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  So on page, well, I got the pages folded over here.
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  Page nine, early in your book, I love the Spurgeon quote,
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  that discernment is not knowing the difference between right and wrong.
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  It is knowing the difference between right and almost right.
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  And I think that's what you said earlier in a way,
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  there's subtleties to these deceptions.
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  And they sound good.
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  They sound like they could be biblical.
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  And those that don't, that maybe aren't mature in the word of God
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  and their biblical studies might be sucked in.
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  Like I was, you know, I was a Christian, but not a deep,
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  not a mature believer, not a student of the Bible at that time.
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  And I got sucked right into this because it's positive.
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  It sounds good.
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  Who wouldn't want that?
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  So you say also that if it was a virus,
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  if new thought were a virus, chances are you'd be infected.
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  So you're coming from the standpoint of a lot of believers
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  in today's church, particularly in America,
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  probably have some understanding or either some influence of new thought
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  in their theology and their lives, explain that.
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  Everywhere.
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  That's why it's a movement you've probably never heard of.
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  If you've never heard of new thought,
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  I am confident enough to say that you have been exposed to it.
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  You don't know what this is and you know exactly what this is.
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  And because we've seen it everywhere, it's secular and spiritual.
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  In fact, one of the biggest in the origins of the new thought movement,
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  there was, I want to say a church, but it's really not a religious science.
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  The founder of religious science is Ernest Holmes.
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  And they wanted it to sound a certain way.
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  You know, this is like a mind science.
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  This is a spirit science.
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  It's a better kind of Christianity, but it was very secular.
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  Ernest Holmes wouldn't have necessarily even adopted a lot of Christian terminology.
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  It was the beliefs and the teachings of the power of the mind.
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  And then you have these two bleedovers.
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  You have one that's really secular, which I go into,
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  but you're taking the power of the mind,
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  affirmations, manifestation, or whatever,
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  your typical TikTok theology.
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  But they don't call themselves Christians,
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  but they'll say, oh yeah, Jesus taught this, but so did Buddha, right?
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  They wouldn't necessarily adhere to Christianity.
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  In that way, it's all over America.
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  Like you're having these teachings that are on the self-help section in every bookstore,
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  that we are attributing power to ourselves.
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  You know, however that looks.
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  And then you have this other long stretch that is 100% in the Christian church.
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  And that's the other part of the book that I go over is where it's at in society
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  and where it's at in the church.
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  So at some point, whether you're Christian or not,
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  you have come face to face head to head with new thought teachings without even realizing it.
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  Friends, the book is available on Melissa Doherty's website,
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  but also five star reviews.
• 10:51
  It's kicking butt on Amazon.
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  You can go check that out.
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  They're happy lies.
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  How a movement you probably never heard of shaped our self-obsessed world.
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  Oh my goodness.
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  And iPhones don't help.
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  Narcissism.
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  Now, let's talk about chapter two briefly.
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  New thought old lies, the roots of today's toxic positivity.
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  I was sharing something I was going through in my life with a Christian brother.
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  And this is a guy that I would say has the gift of encouragement and means well.
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  But when I shared with him, you know, just some of what was going on in my personal life
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  and a trial that I was enduring, he looked at it as I was complaining.
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  Because he was always, you know, pause.
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  You got to be positive.
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  Yeah.
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  Just keeps, you know, you're speaking about it the wrong way.
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  Don't confess that I'm going to wait a minute.
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  That's, that's not.
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  So I'm making it worse.
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  I'm, I'm making my trial.
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  I'm extending my own, you know, trial.
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  So share your thoughts on what chapter two, the toxic positivity.
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  Because I think a lot of people have run into another believer, maybe well meaning or not,
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  that is that kind of person.
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  Yes.
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  Oh, there's so much to say on this.
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  Okay.
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  Because it has to be nuanced, right?
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  Because they're coming from this.
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  It's, you know, they wouldn't even think of it as toxic positivity.
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  They're thinking of it as you.
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  Faith.
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  Yeah.
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  Like faith being a power.
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  Exactly.
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  Like there's, you got to have this, this unquestioning faith.
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  And there's been a lot of really bad theology that has come from this idea that you're never allowed
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  to doubt what you're believing for.
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  And there's something in the book where it's dubbed a critical thinking is negative thinking.
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  And part of the problem with this whole movement.
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  Okay.
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  The entire movement.
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  In fact, there's a quote from this really dusty, new thought history book that.
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  It really helps kind of emphasize what I'm trying to say about critical thinking.
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  Because what ends up happening is that if you think that there's power in your mind.
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  And that, that power can create and it can make things happen.
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  Then you have to always control what you're thinking about, which sounds good on the surface.
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  But the problem is, is that say you get somebody like you or me.
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  Who comes and they starts, starts testing what you believe.
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  Starts testing and asking good questions.
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  The first thing that typically happens is, oh, you're bad juju.
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  You're bad energy.
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  Okay.
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  And this is an origin in the movement where it builds on the concept of idealism,
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  which is just a way to look at truth where what you're thinking about.
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  Because there's a material realm in a, this is where it gets real nasty.
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  There's a material realm and there's a physical realm.
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  And what you're thinking can bring forth stuff from the material,
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  or from the physical realm into the material realm.
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  So if there's something wrong in the physical,
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  you have to bring it forth from the spiritual.
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  That's how you fix it.
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  You fix it in the spiritual realm.
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  And how do you do that?
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  Do your thoughts, words and feelings.
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  Well, if somebody's coming to you and they're bringing forth a different vibes
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  that are messing up how you feel about something,
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  then you've been taught that needs to shut down.
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  You need to get that out of your world.
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  And so this is why you have a sense of isolation
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  when it comes to these kinds of beliefs.
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  But they actually think that there's a level of power that they actually have.
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  And this is actually part of the problem because we don't have that much power.
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  We don't.
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  Faith is really a trust.
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  It's a contentment in whatever happens.
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  And a trust in God that is steadfast no matter what happens.
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  And yeah, there's a whole history about it.
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  You have fathers in the movement, a manual Swedenborg,
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  Phineas Quimby is probably the one that people mostly know.
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  And he's been the one that's been credited, so to speak,
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  with taking it and making it really Christian.
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  And he was the one who was really teaching that you're not like,
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  let's take sickness.
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  That was the big thing at the time.
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  It was sickness.
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  You're not actually sick.
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  It's because you're you're thinking wrong thoughts.
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  And if you can correct your thinking, you can correct your body based on the idealism
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  that I was just telling you before.
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  And if I can find this quote, I'll read it to you.
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  There's a whole thing that I have.
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  Oh, here it is.
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  Okay, this is a quote from one of my dusty new thought books.
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  At the core of all, this is what's called anti-nomeanism,
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  which is just a word that literally means against law.
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  Okay, against law.
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  Which means if people saw no moral laws that God expects Christians to obey,
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  then it's a free for all.
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  We are we are the authority because we can have individual direct communication with God.
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  This is one thing the movement was known for is there you don't need to go to the dusty dusty Bible.
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  You don't need to go to a priest.
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  No, no, you can speak to God individually.
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  You can have that experience.
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  He can speak to you.
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  Okay.
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  This caused a lot of contempt for negative and critical thinking.
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  As this held them back from this personal experience with God.
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  Okay, so that's really where it is.
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  That's that's part of the core issue.
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  Again, there's more to say on this.
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  It's again a whole chapter on this with the origins.
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  But yeah, that's that's basically what I would I would say as far as that goes.
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  Okay, there's some we have to take a brief pause and there's so many people that you talk about that I want to mention.
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  I'm very familiar with most of them.
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  I think a lot of people that are watching and listening are probably familiar with some of these as well.
• 16:30
  So we'll be right back with Melissa Doherty.
• 16:32
  The book Happy Lies on World View Matters.
• 16:35
  Today's show is brought to you by Harbinger's Daily.
• 16:38
  World news biblically understood.
• 16:41
  Stay informed at harbingerstaley.com.
• 16:45
  Hey friends, thanks for sharing the podcast.
• 16:55
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• 17:00
  World View Matters David Fioraza.
• 17:02
  So subscribe follow us and thank you for that.
• 17:06
  Okay, so Melissa.
• 17:09
  Before we get to some of these names, some of these people that I think a lot of our audience would recognize and then get I want to get to Robert Shuler too.
• 17:17
  But this is going by way too fast.
• 17:19
  I know I know maybe we'll have to have you back up but you know you wrote something that you never shared before and I found that to be very interesting on identity crisis.
• 17:32
  Do you just speak briefly to that under who or what am I?
• 17:36
  You were 13 years old and tell that story because I the way you set it up and then you ended by saying I know because this girl was me.
• 17:47
  Wow.
• 17:48
  And if it was today, you probably would have been down the hormones or surgeries or doing something share a little bit about that please.
• 17:57
  It's a very vulnerable thing to share because I don't I don't particularly like talking about it.
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  So I'm like, here I'm going to I've never shared that right.
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  And so here I'm here.
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  I'm going to put it in a book.
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  But the point of it the whole point was, okay, I'm seeing this gender crisis, but it's really an identity crisis.
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  And the problem is is that you're you're talking about new thought as a movement.
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  I wanted to see the bigger picture of all of this and it was in reading Carl Truman's book.
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  I put them a few times in the chapter, which by the way, this chapter was way geekier.
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  And I had a few people peer review it and they're like, bring it on back Melissa.
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  I was like, it was so geeky because I wanted to go into like romanticism and transcendentalism and the origins of these movements and how new thought like
• 18:39
  developed this this inner knowing of identity and it was just real geeky.
• 18:44
  So, but it was in reading his, yeah, it was in reading his book, though, I'm reading his book.
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  And this is before I even wanted to write.
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  And I'm thinking to myself, this sounds so familiar.
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  There's so many things he's saying about expressive individualism, about the roots of the sexual identity crisis that we're having about following your heart, about how the outside of you is secondary to how you feel on the inside.
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  All these things is just that the where I would have taken it and where I did take it was that it was beyond a social movement.
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  It was what was on the inside was divine, right?
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  So, whatever's inside of you is not just comes first.
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  It was that this is God from within informing you of who you actually are.
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  So, it puts forth why it might be very difficult to talk with somebody that has an identity crisis going on.
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  And in my case, it wasn't just gender.
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  I didn't feel, I hated being a girl.
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  Like, it was not something I wanted to do.
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  So, it was more or less, first it was envy.
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  I envied boys.
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  I wanted, you know, I wasn't happy with who I was or content in that.
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  But I also had the spiritual worldview, which I did not understand at the time to be clear.
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  I did not realize that these were spiritual beliefs called new thought.
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  I didn't get that at all.
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  What I did know was whatever's in here is truly who I am.
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  And so, I'm building on that and how those beliefs helped inform that identity crisis.
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  And by the way, it goes beyond gender.
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  Okay, it went way beyond gender.
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  I remember believing that there were like multidimensions and beings that we could interact with
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  that went beyond just the human body.
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  Like, this is where the trans species, the other kin, which are, if people don't know what that is,
• 20:41
  trans species are people that believe that they identify as different species of animals.
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  And then other kin gets real interesting because that's where you identify as like a fantasy creature.
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  You identify as a being that may not be even known to humanity because what's on here,
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  what's in here is informing me of my true identity, my true authentic self.
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  And there's so much to say on this, but the beliefs that new thought brings,
• 21:10
  and this is why I start the book with relativism, is because you have to mess with what's true.
• 21:15
  If it's your truth, it goes beyond, yeah, it goes beyond just like, oh, this is how I feel.
• 21:20
  No, no, no.
• 21:21
  This truth, capital T inside of me is divine, is God, and God must be obeyed.
• 21:30
  So I'm taking it to this whole other level of, it's beyond sexual identity.
• 21:35
  This is where it disconnects from reality, but that's not how they see it.
• 21:41
  And then I bring my story into it saying that these beliefs did not help.
• 21:46
  Well, I think it's relatable to a lot of people, whether it's their children or someone they know with the identity crisis.
• 21:54
  But you mentioned friends, Anton Mesber and Mesmerize and hypnotherapy.
• 21:59
  You mentioned Ralph Waldo Emerson.
• 22:01
  Emerson was a big one in that chapter too.
• 22:04
  Yeah.
• 22:05
  Yeah.
• 22:06
  Mary Baker, Eddie, you mentioned the Unity Church.
• 22:09
  Oh, my goodness, there's so much to get into.
• 22:11
  But I bought a copy of Think and Grow Rich, Napoleon Hill, and you talk about him as well.
• 22:18
  Is that where Christ consciousness came from?
• 22:22
  No, actually, I had to do a little deep dive on this myself.
• 22:25
  Napoleon Hill, I actually just said a deep dive on him.
• 22:27
  You mean Christ's consciousness with new thought?
• 22:31
  Yes.
• 22:32
  Yes, yeah.
• 22:33
  That's, I'm surprised I didn't mention that earlier.
• 22:35
  Christ's consciousness is a new thought term, yes.
• 22:37
  Because most of us just heard that when Oprah first was talking about, you know, what's Christ's consciousness?
• 22:43
  I made a deep dive about her because she's not a new age.
• 22:45
  If you want to look at the face of new thought, look at Oprah Winfrey.
• 22:50
  Yeah, she is what she believes because she read new thought authors.
• 22:54
  Christ's consciousness is probably the most popular metaphysical term I could think of as far as metaphysical Christianity
• 23:01
  because there's a metaphysical definition with Christ.
• 23:04
  We hear that and we think Messiah anointed one, but they separate Jesus and Christ.
• 23:09
  Or Jesus is a man, a human just like us, and Christ is the dormant inner divinity within humanity that he obtained.
• 23:16
  He became conscious of it.
• 23:17
  And so can you?
• 23:18
  This is also where I am affirmations come from.
• 23:21
  It's new thought prayer.
• 23:22
  You're speaking in the affirmative.
• 23:25
  You're creating your reality by speaking in the affirmative.
• 23:28
  And so, yeah, Christ's consciousness is probably one of the biggest new thought terms out there.
• 23:33
  So let's jump to now.
• 23:34
  We have four minutes left.
• 23:36
  I live in Southern California for 17 years.
• 23:38
  I lived in Anaheim for a little bit, five minutes from the Crystal Cathedral in Garden Grove.
• 23:44
  Robert Schuhler.
• 23:46
  Now, friends, if you don't know this history, this is him in part influenced the corporate model for churches,
• 23:54
  business aspect of churches, the pastors, the CEO, the seeker sensitive, you know, the mega church.
• 24:00
  He went door to door and asked people in that community, how could I get you to church?
• 24:05
  What kind of church would you go to and talk about a recipe for getting away from the Bible, right?
• 24:12
  So share your thoughts on that.
• 24:13
  You call it the Schuhler secret and the church growth movement you talk about.
• 24:18
  So huge today.
• 24:19
  Yeah.
• 24:20
  Yeah, the original title to that chapter was the seeker sensitive seeker centered secret.
• 24:25
  And I differentiate I actually think there's a difference between like seeker sensitive and seeker centered and, you know, whatever.
• 24:31
  But most people recognize it as seeker sensitive and Robert Schuhler is he is a new thought pastor.
• 24:37
  And I think people are surprised to hear that.
• 24:39
  But I think it emphasizes my point of how stealthy this really was because Robert Schuhler was mentored by Norman Vincent Piel,
• 24:47
  who was also a new thought pastor, which again, people are surprised to hear.
• 24:51
  But again, that's my point.
• 24:53
  You had the positive thinking, the possibility thinking, and what Robert Schuhler was trying to do, in essence,
• 25:00
  and what I saw is that he made a business model to grow a church.
• 25:04
  And it really worked.
• 25:06
  Yeah, it really worked.
• 25:07
  And it catered to the non-believer, and it got them through the doors.
• 25:11
  And they heard a motivational message that gave them great life advice that kept them coming back.
• 25:17
  And yeah, and so there was this, you don't want you want to get away from certain traditional things.
• 25:21
  And but what's here's what's worse.
• 25:23
  Okay, here's my here's my issue with Schuhler and why there's even a chapter about him.
• 25:26
  He's a new thought pastor, okay, who had a very big reach when it came to not just the people that went to his church
• 25:36
  and who watched him on TV, but he had a direct mentorship relationship with some of the most popular pastors in America,
• 25:43
  who took that model and his methods.
• 25:47
  And I'm not saying that they agreed necessarily with his beliefs, but they never actually say that.
• 25:53
  They never, you know, I think that they've distanced themselves as far as some of that goes.
• 25:59
  But they definitely took his methods and took it and made the church into what it is today that the church growth model.
• 26:06
  It's a business model and it really does work.
• 26:09
  Okay, it really does work.
• 26:10
  But what you win them with, you win them too.
• 26:12
  And you have to keep doing what you've been doing to keep people in the door.
• 26:16
  It's like the big, the front doors are just as big as the back doors.
• 26:20
  And I'm talking about that topic head on because the question that I'm asking, the number one question is,
• 26:25
  is this biblical?
• 26:27
  Is what, how much did Robert Schouler's new thought beliefs inform that model?
• 26:34
  And how much of it is actually doing more harm than good?
• 26:38
  Sure, I think that there are some aspects of it that can be redeemed.
• 26:41
  And I think I wrote a very fair chapter in this regard of doing the pros and cons of the church growth model,
• 26:47
  of the seeker sensitive model.
• 26:49
  However, the question, we have to have this conversation, how much did Robert Schouler's beliefs inform the actual function?
• 26:58
  And what this was for of this model?
• 27:00
  Because you can't sit there and say, hey, the fact that we're growing means that we're being blessed by God.
• 27:07
  And you have to look at the theology, you have to look at the pulpit.
• 27:10
  And so, yeah, I ask those hard questions in that chapter.
• 27:14
  Thank you, Melissa.
• 27:15
  We ran out of time already with you.
• 27:17
  I knew it would go by fast.
• 27:18
  There was so much more we wanted to talk about.
• 27:20
  But happy lies, friends, is the book.
• 27:22
  Very helpful.
• 27:23
  In fact, what you just shared on that balance of, you know, the corporate model, seeker sensitive churches.
• 27:28
  But Melissa, do already.
• 27:29
  God bless you.
• 27:30
  I wish you good success.
• 27:31
  And God will continue to enlarge your territory.
• 27:33
  Thanks for your time today.
• 27:35
  Thank you for your time.
• 27:36
  Thanks for having me on.
• 27:37
  You're most welcome.
• 27:38
  Friends, get the book.
• 27:40
  Happy lies.
• 27:41
  You'll learn a lot and you'll probably go, whoa, that's what I was thinking.
• 27:44
  That's what I think, you know, whatever.
• 27:46
  Praise God.
• 27:47
  It's just these go by very, very fast.
• 27:49
  But hopefully they're helpful to the body of Christ.
• 27:51
  God bless you.
• 27:52
  And as always, keep speaking the truth about things that matter.