Reception and Criticisms
According to the American religious scholar J. Gordon Melton, Creme's statement served as a catalyst for assessment of the New Age movement by Evangelical Christians. A week after the advertisements in 1982, other advertisements appeared in the Los Angeles Times denouncing Creme as an instrument of the Antichrist. Constance Cumbey (an Evangelical Christian and a Detroit area attorney and author) holds that "Maitreya" is a pseudonym for the Antichrist and regards Share International as an openly Luciferian movement. Other Christian Evangelicals distanced themselves from Cumbey's conspiracy theory. Some Christian pastors maintain that Maitreya is the Anti-Christ, citing passages in the Bible where Christ warns the disciples to beware of false teachers. Even among Catholics there are a number of voices denouncing Creme and Maitreya as of occult origin and potentially the Anti-Christ. Father Jack Ashcraft, a sedevacantist Byzantine Catholic priest, author and radio host, has gone so far as to postulate the theory that Creme may be the "false prophet" spoken of in the Apocalypse of Saint John.
The beliefs and claims of Creme have been described as fantastic and outlandish by the British journalist Mick Brown.
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