Marilyn Ferguson - Religious and Other Criticism

Religious and Other Criticism

Such validation did not come without a price. Ferguson was attacked in some quarters for her very optimism. Others alleged that her "new" ideas were merely a repackaging of old notions of positive thinking, and some saw the "New Age" (a term Ferguson herself seldom used) as merely extending the self-absorption that had marked much of the 1970s. Most persistently, some religious groups contended that the "conspiracy" was an attempt to subvert Christian views. This view, most notably expressed by author Constance Cumbey in her 1983 book The Hidden Dangers of the Rainbow, was restated as recently as 2007, when one online essayist wrote that the Christian church “rightly discerned the New Age movement, as outlined in Ferguson’s book, to be demonically inspired in anticipation of the ultimate unveiling of . . . the antichrist.” It was inaccurately alleged that Ferguson, herself raised and confirmed a Lutheran, had written the book at the behest of the Stanford Research Institute with the goal of overtaking western culture with Eastern mysticism.