Three is a tendency for individuals to assume that the days in which they are living are the apex of spiritual decline. That with the preponderance of new religions and religious philosophies and the decline of the old mainline Christian faiths, a new religious order will be established and Christians will be pre-Constantinian outcasts once more. History tends to generalize and sanitize and as a result the past often becomes homogeneous and the glory days become perhaps a little more glorious than they may have in actual fact been.

Mitch Horowitz’s Occult America: The Secret History of How Mysticism Shaped Our Nation (Bantam Books 2009 isbn:978-0-553-80675-5) provides a helpful corrective to the view that America was once a unified Christian (at least in the traditional creedal sense of the word) nation. In a book that is deeply sympathetic to the Occult*, Horowitz paints a picture of 1800 and 1900s America where as many as 1.5 to 3 million of the 30 Million Americans in the 1850s considered themselves occultist.

Beyond the numbers, what is perhaps most striking is the role that the Occult had not only in the founding of still-surviving new American religions like Mormonism, Seventh Day Adventism, Christian Science, and the Shakers but how many prominent individuals were influence by Spiritualist ideas even if they did not embrace the movement outright. Political leaders like Abraham Lincoln, Ronald Reagan and George Wallace, societal revolutionaries like Frederick Douglass and Marcus Garvey and even so-called mainstream Christian writers like Norman Vincent Peale all were profoundly influenced by the Occult in one of its various forms.

What is equally amazing are the number of now long-forgotten Occult leaders who, despite the millions of books and products sold and relative fame in their own lifetimes, have faded beyond the warrant of even a historical footnote in the history of Religion in America.

Horowitz not only provides a well-documented history of a forgotten segment of American society, he provides a striking reminder to the church today that the rise of new (oftentimes repackaged old) religious thought is nothing new. The church has faced them in the past and the gates of hell have not prevailed against it. Where the Occult arose to meet a need often neglected by mainline Christian religion like racial inequality, gender inequality, poverty, or a lack of interfaith and ecumenical engagement, the church rose to the occasion and self-corrected.

The haunting question, however, that Horowitz raises has he closes Occult America is how much Occultism has seeped into the mainstream of American religious thought through these self-corrections:

Most people, thought schools, or movements identified as New Age from the 1970s [the modern inheritors of the early Occultists] through the early twenty-first century shared these traits: 

1. “Belief in the therapeutic value of spiritual or religious ideas

2. “Belief in a mind-body connection in health

3. “Belief that human consciousness is evolving to higher stages

4. “Belief that thoughts, in some greater or lesser measure, determine reality

5. “Belief that spiritual understanding is available without allegiance to a specific religion or doctrine.”

Most twenty-first century Americans, whatever their background, would probably agree with a majority of those statements. To a very great degree, occult movements and personalities had introduced those ideas, in some of their most popular variants, into American life. . . The encounter between America and occultism resulted in a vast reworking of arcane practices and beliefs from the Old World and the creation of a new spiritual culture. This new culture extolled religious egalitarianism and responded, perhaps more than any other movement in history, to the inner needs and search of the individual. (257-8)

*The term "Occult" is used throughout to subsume the broad range of religious philosophies including Swedenborgianism, Transcendentalism, Spiritualism, Theosophy, Rosicrucianism, Numerology, Voodoo, Hoodoo, Astrology, New Age, New Thought, Mesmerism, and Religious Science.