The Seduction of Christianity – Program 1

By: JJohanna Michaelson, Dave Hunt; ©1985

Is there a great lie that is sweeping across America, and even infiltrating our Churches?

The Big Lie

John Ankerberg: Welcome to our program tonight. Our two guests are going to be informing us of things they’ve written in their books. They’re saying that there’s a great lie that is sweeping across America. A seduction is taking place in our country that is encompassing our people in science, our people in government, people in medicine, psychology, into the United Nations, and it actually encompasses those in the religious world. All of the Christian denominations are being taken in by this lie. Now, that’s quite a statement, and we want to find out what they’re talking about tonight. Our guests are Mrs. Johanna Michaelsen and Mr. Dave Hunt.

Dave, I’d like to come to you first. There is a man that you have written about in your book. His name is Napoleon Hill. He has written the bestselling book Think and Grow Rich, and many people that we’ve had on the program have referred to that book—both Christian and non-Christian. Many people in the secular world in big business and finance have referred to that book as being a life-changing book to them, that it helped them. You start off with that book as saying it has a part of this big lie that you say is coming across America. I’d like to know what you’re talking about.

Dave Hunt: Okay, John. Let me read, first of all—just to back up what you said—a quote from a Success Motivation Institute tape by Earl Nightingale. Now, Earl Nightingale is probably one of the best known Motivation/Success speakers. You’ll pick him up on Nightingale-Conant Corporation tapes. If you’re flying American Airlines or other Airlines, you know, you can pick these up. He says, “Without question”—he’s referring to Think and Grow Rich—“Without question this single book has had a greater influence on the lives, accomplishments and fortunes of more individuals than any other work of its kind. All over the free world there are literally thousands of successful men in all lines of work who are where they are today because they once bought a copy of Think and Grow Rich and they’ll be quick to tell you so. I’ve sat in richly paneled executive offices, listened to world-famous business leaders and so on. And he says, “All over the free world, thousands of men whose lives have been changed by this book.” I’m telling you that this book is teaching straight occultism. The New Testament talks about a revival of sorcery in the last days…

Ankerberg: Witchcraft.

Hunt: Witchcraft. And as I sit here saying this, I know that most people won’t believe it. So, let me just read what Napoleon Hill himself had to say.

Ankerberg: Alright.

Hunt: Now, this is from another one of his books called Grow Rich with Peace of Mind, and I’m reading from pages 158-160.

Ankerberg: And these books are on the newsstands even right now.

Hunt: Right. They’re all bestsellers.

Ankerberg: Right.Hunt: He is the “granddaddy” of the Success Motivation-Positive Mental Attitude world that our businessmen and executive sales managers, etc., study. Napoleon Hill declares, “Now and again, I have had evidence that unseen friends hover about me, unknowable to the ordinary senses. In my studies I discovered there is a group of strange beings who maintain a school of wisdom…. The School has Masters who can disembody themselves and travel instantly to any place they choose…to give knowledge directly by voice.” Now, it’s my contention that these are demons. Unless you believe that there is some School of Masters out on the Astral Plane and that these beings are of some other dimension and they can disembody and travel across the Astral Plane and materialize right in front of you. If you want to believe in that, fine. But I think all the evidence would indicate that these are demonic entities who are out to deceive the human race.

Ankerberg: Now, if you were to say that to the leaders of GM or the corporate leaders of Xerox or some of these others that are conducting courses for motivation in business when they refer back to Napoleon Hill. Have you ever asked them? What do they say when you say, “Do you know where Napoleon Hill said he got that information?”

Hunt: Well, some of them would say that he just meant this as an illustration, or it’s an allegory. But basically, what it boils down to in many cases, John, is this: We have adopted a Jungian view—and we’ll get into Jung, Carl Gustav Jung, a little later—[that] “There’s no reality out there.” So, there’s no God; there’s no Satan; there are no demons; there are no angels. You come up with images, and they simply are what he would call “Archetypes dredged up from the collective unconscious of the human race….”

Ankerberg: Carl Gustav Jung said that.

Hunt: …that surface now and then like Loch Ness monsters to inspire or frighten us. Jung was heavily involved in the occult himself, yet he is quoted and followed by Christian psychologists today. He carried the Bardo Thodol, the Tibetan Book of the Dead with him everywhere he went. He even saw ghosts, you know. You can read the accounts. But he didn’t admit that these were real entities. They were projections, what he called “exteriorizations” from his own mind. So these men would say, “Well, it’s a figure of speech. We don’t care what you call it, but it works.”

Ankerberg: Okay. Let’s go back to Napoleon Hill. We’ll get to Carl Gustav Jung later. We want to talk about how Napoleon Hill helped this big lie that’s going across America. You were getting to the point that he talked about these Ascended Masters that gave the information. Tell us how he talks about that.

Hunt: Alright. Let’s read Napoleon Hill again. “Now I knew that one of these Masters had come across thousands of miles, through the night, into my study.” Here’s an entity that materializes right in front of him! He’s talking to somebody.

Ankerberg: Okay.

Hunt: “I shall not set down every word he said… much of what he said already has been presented to you in the chapters of this book and will follow in other chapters.” It’s the foundation of his writings, what he learned from this School of Masters.

Ankerberg: Okay.Hunt: Here’s what the voice said: “‘You have earned the right to reveal a supreme secret to others,’ said the voice. ‘You have been under the guidance of the Great School…. Now you must give the world a blueprint.’” Okay? I’m sitting here tonight to tell you that the blueprint for success that was given to Napoleon Hill by demonic entities is literally the foundation of the whole Success Motivation, Positive Mental Attitude world that you get out there when you take these courses or listen to these motivational tapes and so forth.

Ankerberg: And we’re going to prove that by not just quoting Napoleon Hill, because if you don’t know that, hang in there. We’ve got others that we’re going to quote that have picked this up. And let’s give the blueprint. What is one of the main things of the blueprint that he wrote in his book that the Ascended Masters gave to him?

Hunt: Well, they said that “Whatever the human mind can conceive, the human mind can achieve.” [p. 176, Think and Grow Rich]

Ankerberg: Now, this is the “supreme secret” that he put into his book.

Hunt: In other words, there is an infinite human potential. This is the foundation of the whole Human Potential movement out there—that deep within us there is a potential of infinite wisdom, of infinite power, and we simply need to know how to tap into this potential within us. Actually, if it’s infinite—we get into this later—we’re gods, you know, and that’s where this ultimately leads. So Napoleon Hill, writing with W. Clement Stone….

Ankerberg: W. Clement Stone is the insurance man in Chicago.

Hunt: Right. Wrote the book Success Through a Positive Mental Attitude….

Ankerberg: Okay, “PMA.”

Hunt: They coined the phrase. They called it “The Science of the Positive Mental Attitude.”

Ankerberg: But the science they got from the Ascended Masters.

Hunt: Right.

Ankerberg: Keep going.

Hunt: He said, “Truly, deeply believe you will have great wealth, and you will have it.” Now, this is a counterfeit faith of the sorcerers.

Ankerberg: And this is on the secular side of the fence now. “You believe it, and you’ll have it.”

Hunt: Right. The basis of this is the PMA…

Ankerberg: Positive Mental Attitude.

Hunt: …or this Success Through Positive Mental Attitude book, is a guide for “tapping into the great universal storehouse of infinite intelligence wherein is stored all knowledge and all facts and which may be contacted through the subconscious.” Now, he says, “There is a universal law that we translate into physical reality the thoughts and attitudes we hold in our minds no matter what they are. We have the power to create reality with our minds.” Now, we get into, later, “positive” and “negative.” Now, that’s why you must think positive thoughts, because if you think negative thoughts, you’re going to create a negative world out there for yourself. So, we are the source of power. Self becomes very important.

Ankerberg: In essence, David, what he is saying is that “You need to look inside yourself and you will find powers there and there are laws concerning, when you look inside of yourself, that if you follow these laws, will bring you success—financially and every other way.”

Hunt: Right. So, ultimately, we’re looking to ourselves. And, let me just quote again what the Masters said to Napoleon Hill.

Ankerberg: Okay.

Hunt: “Know your own mind—live your own life. You can make your life what you want it to be…. You’re the captain of your fate, the master of your destiny if you only know how to take charge and exercise these powers and tap into this potential. Self-confident faith in yourself is an indispensable ingredient for good living. A healthy ego makes you more receptive to the influences which guide you from a region beyond the power of the five senses to know…. Unseen, silent forces influence us constantly…there are unseen watchers….” So, now the thing we have to do is get into ourselves. Get to appreciate ourselves; appreciate the powers we have; love ourselves; develop a sense of our self-worth and self-esteem; self-confidence; self-development; self-actualization; self-ad nauseum. It goes on and on and on.

Ankerberg: So, basically the courses then help you, give you the information then how to look inside yourself and develop this to achieve wealth and health and everything else.

Hunt: Find out who you really are.

Ankerberg: Okay, who else picked this up? What’s the next stage?

Hunt: Well, there are a lot of people that picked it up. I mean, the whole world of psychology is centered in self.

Ankerberg: Name a few.

Hunt: You can begin with Freud and Fromm and Jung and Rogers and Maslow and Perls and all of them.

Ankerberg: Tell how Freud started it, how he picked it up.

Hunt: Freud and Jung—most people are not aware of this—their basic theories were developed under hypnosis. Now, we don’t have time to get into this, but hypnosis, in my opinion, is right out of the pit of hell. It puts you in an altered state of consciousness. Someone else is controlling your mind. Well, demonic entities can also control your mind. Some people say, “Well, if a medical doctor hypnotizes you, that’s okay. If an occultist hypnotizes you, you’ve got problems.” I don’t think the demons go by those rules. They don’t care who hypnotizes you.

Johanna Michaelsen: They don’t care if you’re wearing a white coat or not. It makes no difference.

Ankerberg: So, Freud said what? Out of hypnosis he found information that said what?Hunt: He hypnotized patients, as did Carl Jung. And under hypnosis their patients came out with alleged memories. And it’s a whole thing we don’t have time to get into, but the Supreme Court of the State of California, where Johanna and I come from, has outlawed testimony by witnesses who have been hypnotized because they know you can lie under hypnosis; you can be deceived under hypnosis. And when you’ve once been hypnotized, you can never thereafter tell the difference between a real memory and what may have been wittingly or unwittingly implanted by the hypnotist. And these things are created.

Ankerberg: Why? Why? Slow down and tell us why.

Hunt: Because it is a primary form of suggestion. You have to make suggestions to hypnotize a person.

Ankerberg: What’s happening in your mind under hypnosis?

Hunt: You’re in an altered state of consciousness where you are subject to manipulation. But, anyway, it was under hypnosis that their patients came out with memories. Memories of traumas they had suffered and I started to say “prior lives,” because that’s where psychiatrists are now. First of all, in their early childhood; Freud came out with his theory of psychic determinism that “you are what your childhood experiences have made you.” Carl Jung came out with the same thing. Then they postulated the idea of an “unconscious.” The unconscious is the “deep silk hat” into which the therapist reaches to find the traumas and the solution. And it has all been fabricated under hypnosis. Stanislaf Grof went a little farther. He found out that when he gave LSD to schizophrenics, they came out with spontaneous memories of what happened in the womb, in the birthing process.

Ankerberg: Which is impossible, because the brain stem of a child, up to the point of even after birth, does not record memory, so there’s nothing there. But they still gave back accurate information.

Hunt: Right.

Ankerberg: So, what you’re saying is that from your point of view, that Carl Gustav Jung and Freud started building theories from people that they were listening to under hypnosis, from their so-called subconscious, that gave them the information. And now we’ve got psychiatrists going back in that same spot and finding out stuff that’s even impossible. And you’re saying that the source is not what is the subconscious, but what, David?

Hunt: It’s demonic. We can document that. I don’t know if Johanna wants to jump in here while we’re talking, but….

Ankerberg: Johanna, give us one example, if you can.

Hunt: She’s had these experiences herself.

Michaelsen: Well, you know, when Napoleon Hill talks about these “Guides” coming to him, that’s the same kind of experience that I had. From the time I was eleven years old, seeing these “beings” who come. They materialize, they’re as real as you are standing there or you sitting here. They speak to you; they communicate. You see it in a different sense of “seeing,” but you know they’re there. And they can indeed give the kind of information that Napoleon Hill was picking up, accurately. When I was involved in Mind Control—and they’re deliberately bringing in the spirit guides, who were coming in a very different guise at that point—they gave information I had no other way of knowing and gave me a sense of well-being. And there were some who said, “Oh, this is just imagination,” the way Napoleon Hill said it. You know, it is a frightening thing. But people tend to wash it out and say, “Well, it’s nothing to be frightened of. If it isn’t imagination, it’s going to help us go into this wonderful, new, exciting, evolutionary mode of enlightenment. And that’s why everybody’s tapping into it.Ankerberg: Okay, Dave, we’ve talked a little bit about the fact that Napoleon Hill in the business world gave some advice for how to be successful that actually came out of the occult—“From the demonic,” as folks in Christianity would say. He said, “the Ascended Masters.” Okay? Whatever people want to do with that, that was picked up by other people and it’s also now come into the Church. Give us that bridge.

Hunt: Well, “Success” is the name of the game. Everybody wants to be successful. What’s wrong with that? But you want to take the advice of demons to be successful. Instead of looking to God, you look to yourself. And this whole idea of “self-love” and “self-esteem” has come within the Church now. One of the major television evangelists has written a book called Self-Esteem: The New Reformation, in which he says, “We’re not ‘bad’; we’re simply badly informed about how ‘good’ we are,” and that “sin or guilt is a loss of self-esteem. A person is in hell when he has lost his self-esteem.” This is what hell is. And he says, “Jesus knew His worth. His success fed His self-esteem.”

I mean, we’ve got to esteem ourselves highly if all the power is within. And we’re going to be successful as we tap into this power within. “He bore the cross to sanctify His self-esteem and He bore the cross to sanctify your self-esteem. And the cross will sanctify the ego trip.” You remember what the Masters of this School of Wisdom told Napoleon Hill about the ego. “You’ve got to have a healthy ego.” Now, that’s rather a unique view of the cross.

And this man, Dr. Robert Schuller… and I’m not trying to put him down, but I think he could be wrong and I could be wrong. Now, I’m willing to be told when I’m wrong. And we should all be willing to be told when we’re wrong, and we need to confront one another when there are differences like this. In Christianity Today he said, and I quote: “I don’t think anything has been done in the name of Christ and under the banner of Christianity that has proven more destructive to human personality, and hence counterproductive to the evangelism enterprise, than the often crude, uncouth and un-Christian strategy of attempting to make people aware of their lost and sinful condition.” You see, that’s very damaging to the human ego and to your sense of self-esteem and self-worth. We don’t want to tell people they’re sinners, but we want to build them up.

Now, a Christian, a very big man in the Southern Baptist Church, one of the top motivational men—in other words, this is another bridge—is out there quoting Napoleon Hill and so forth, says this: “As you accept yourself, you will see yourself as a person who truly deserves the good things in life. Shakespeare said it. ‘This above all—to thine own self be true.’” Now, this is a leading Christian writing this. “Once you accept yourself for your true worth, then the symptoms of vulgarity, profanity, sloppiness, promiscuity, etc., disappear. There, my friend, goes your problem.” In other words, he’s saying, “All the problems in the world today are because we don’t recognize what beautiful people we are. We don’t have a high enough sense of self-worth.”

Another major Christian psychologist, probably the leading one in America, says, “The health of an entire society depends on the ease with which the individual members gain personal acceptance. Thus, whenever the keys to self-esteem are seemingly out of reach for a large percentage of the people, as in 20^th Century America, then widespread mental illness, neuroticism, hatred, alcoholism, drug abuse, violence and social disorder will certainly occur.” Now, my Bible tells me, 2 Timothy 3:1, “In the last days, dangerous times will come. Men will be lovers of self.” And the Greek word there is not “agape,” it’s “phileo”—they will be fond of themselves. They will have a high self-esteem, and because of this, he lists a number of horrible things that will be in the world in the last days. This Christian psychologist is telling us just the opposite. He says, “These things are in society because we have too low a self-esteem.”

Now, in order to build up our self-esteem, going back to this motivational writer once again—you know, it’s almost funny, but here’s a Christian, a leading Christian, a Southern Baptist, telling you how to build up your self-esteem—“To build your self-image, make a list of your positive qualities on a card and keep it for handy reference. Brag on yourself from time to time. Get in your own corner.” We used to call that boasting. The Bible says, “In lowliness of mind let each esteem others better than himself.” [Phil. 2:3] But we’re being taught the problem is that we don’t esteem ourselves highly enough. “You should set aside a few minutes each day for the sole purpose of deliberately looking yourself in the eye in a mirror. As you do this, repeat some positive affirmations of things you have done. Use your victory list from step 10. Then repeat many of the things other people have said to you or about you that were positive. There are also cases where plastic surgery can be quite helpful in building a self-image. This is especially true in cases of an unusually large or long nose, protruding ears, grossly oversized or undersized breasts, etc.”

The Bible tells me to set my gaze upon Jesus and that I will be transformed into His image. But now we’re being taught, “No, build a self-image of yourself as you want to be and then this power within will transform you into this.”

Michaelsen: And what’s so frightening is that that’s at the heart of occultism. It’s the building up of self that every occultist is seeking to do so that he can evolve to this great higher consciousness, to this new man, the Noetic Man, that’s going to come over and take over the entire world. Yet the Bible says, Jesus said: “Deny self…take up your cross and follow me.” [Mark 8:34] You know, it’s not this theology of “get bigger and bigger and better” as Emile Coue was teaching, and as I recited forever and ever in Mind Control: “Every day in every way I’m getting better and better and better.” And I had one Christian psychologist tell me, via a friend who was going to one, who said, “Yeah, look yourself in the eye and pat yourself on the head and give yourself a hug and say, ‘Oh, you good thing.’” You know, it reminded me of Harvey sitting under the aspen tree saying, “You poor thing…you poor, poor thing…” in that play. It’s at the heart of occultism.

Ankerberg: The reason that you’re bringing this up, Dave, and you’ve documented all the names and the people that we’re talking about, I think we’re both sure that they’re solid Christians—all the people we’ve mentioned concerning Christianity tonight. And we’re going to mention some others, okay? But the names are mentioned in your book. But the reason that we’re bringing it up, in light of the fact that these people might take offense at this, is because you have a straight statement concerning the “self” by Jesus. “If any man would follow me, let him take up his cross daily, deny himself, and follow me.” [Mark 8:34] That is in direct opposition to building up the self. Now, we’ve got to talk more about this and we’re just at the tip of the iceberg. We haven’t explained the big lie yet. We’re just talking about how [we] get into it. So please stick with us. This is very important. I hope you’ll join us next week.

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