Escape from the crystal maze

Charles Strohmer has had an unusual life and ministry. Disillusioned with the 'American dream' in his teens, and with the 'Aquarian dream' in his 20s, he had his senses honed to the inconsistencies and failings of modernism, as well as to the spiritual deceptions of the so-called New Age movement.
Now Charles is a Christian, Mike Taylor helps us to get to know him.

EN: Charles, tell us a little about your early life and especially about early religious influences.

CS: I was born in Detroit, Michigan, in 1949, the first of seven children! I worked as a car mechanic with my father for many years. We were a pretty close family.
We were all raised Roman Catholic, but for various reasons I rejected it in my mid-teens. When I was 14, I studied Eastern religions (like Brahminism) for a massive, 9th-grade school project. In the church I heard about Jesus, sin, the saints, prayer, the cross, the resurrection. Now I was learning about karma, reincarnation, self-realisation, enlightenment, spiritual evolution, meditation, yoga. I remember how odd that was - none of them made much sense to me at the time. I turned in the paper and tucked them away in my memory.

Spirits and astrology

EN: Is that what made you interested in the New Age movement?

CS: Well, I got interested in New Age ideas chiefly as a substitute for modernism. I was fed up with the inconsistencies of philosophical materialism and Enlightenment rationalism, and the failings and broken promises of the 'American dream'. In short, I believed that the West was spiritually bankrupt. You couldn't find the truth there. It sounds like a cliche, but I purposed to search for the truth, whatever that was, whatever it cost me. In my teenage way, I reasoned that the Truth would do at least two things. It would tell me what was wrong with life, and what to do about it.
It was an interesting time, the 1960s. There was a kind of divine synchronicity in the air. Hundreds of thousands of young people were becoming disillusioned with the status quo. And suddenly, it seemed, the East was in the West saying that the ancients were right all along. It was a very appealing message. Counter-cultural leaders and heroes like the Beatles and Timothy Leary were telling us to listen to the Eastern religious gurus. I approached it slowly, but after a year or two it had become the organising principle of my life.

EN: How did it affect your life, practically?

CS: For one thing, my manner of dressing changed radically! I exchanged my short hair, Oxford shirts, continental trousers and generally 'clean-cut' look, for long hair, bell-bottomed jeans, a Fu-Manchu moustache and the generally disarrayed look of someone on the road, which I was. I travelled a lot in those years. I stayed well away from Christianity.

EN: Tell us about your interest in astrology.

CS: That began about a year after I'd been a 'hippie'. Interestingly, I rejected getting involved at first, even though a friend had been pestering me about it for about a year. Eventually I capitulated. I learned how to construct and interpret my own charts, and then those of friends and family members. Then people began to pay me to interpret their horoscopes. I earned a bit of money doing it. And that lasted until I became a Christian.

EN: What other New Age practices were you involved in?

CS: Eastern religious forms of meditation, in which you empty the mind and seek inner peace and enlightenment. That was a big interest of mine. I was also trained to contact 'spirit guides' in the early 1970s, long before it became popular to talk about it openly, like Shirley MacLaine has done recently. I also practised occult visualisation techniques, and I was a kind of Western ascetic. These things dominated my search for truth.
The lifestyle was anything but boring. It was quite appealing because it offered a spirituality without morality. We could live whatever kind of life we wanted, complete with spiritual answers, and not be bothered with moral demands like the ten commandments.

Through the barrier

EN: Yet you became disillusioned with the New Age and became a Christian.

CS: Yes. That was a process which took place over several months in 1976.

EN: What happened?

CS: I was moving from Detroit to southern California to open an astrological centre. During the long drive to California I began having the most unusual experiences. I remember racing along the expressway in my old rusty brown car (I was alone) on a sunny afternoon, and suddenly it was like I had driven through some sort of invisible barrier and entered another dimension. Real twilight zone stuff. Alarming thoughts about sin, and that I was a sinner, began to terrify me. I became overwhelmed with true moral guilt.
This didn't compute with my life as a New Age seeker, in which the human problem was not sin, but one's 'bad karma'. Suddenly my perception of that had changed completely. I didn't know how, but I could see clearly that 'sin' was the problem. And when I began to remember where sinners went, that really upset me! I tried meditating to shake off the guilt, but that did not work. The sense that I was a sinner on my way to hell increased steadily during that long drive. It haunted me daily for weeks after I had settled into my rooms in Costa Mesa, California. This was in July 1976.
To make a long story short, I eventually broke under the intense feelings of guilt and began weeping profusely one evening in my rooms. I cried for a couple of hours, confessing 'God, I'm sorry, God, I'm sorry' over and over again. Then a marvellous peace began to descend on me. Someone once described it as 'liquid love'. I knew that God was real and that he had forgiven me. I felt clean. Free. There was a strong sense of the presence of Jesus Christ in my rooms during the conversion process. I even experienced him delivering me from the so-called spirit guides that I had collected over the years. I then understood that they were evil spirits.
The next day everything was different. I knew I had to ditch all the occult New Age stuff. I began talking to people about Jesus. I read the Bible. I prayed. Things I never thought I'd ever be doing! No one told me to do it. When I read in John's Gospel about the Holy Spirit who convicts you of sin and who teaches you about Jesus, then I had a clue. Later I went to a few Christian ministers who helped me sort out what had happened.

EN: So now you are a professional writer and lecturer. What was the motivation for that?

CS: Ever since I've been a Christian, I've had a burning desire to develop a biblical worldview and to communicate that to modern spiritual seekers, and to help other Christians to do the same.

Writing is hard work

EN: So it came naturally?

CS: Getting here has been very costly. There's a mystique surrounding writers. When people know you're a writer, they immediately think you're making a lot of money, that writing comes easy, that Christian publishers are a dream to work for, and other myths. In reality, writing is an isolating job, it's hard work, and you can work for weeks on an article, or for a year or more on a book, and not get paid a dime. I made more money selling car parts than I do now. And Christian publishers can be a real pain to work for.
Having said all that, I feel I'm in the centre of God's will for me. And I love it. The godly successes and occasional testimonies are greatly encouraging. My first book What your horoscope doesn't tell you, is now in seven languages. Wise as a serpent, harmless as a dove (which is about how to communicate Christianity in a non-confrontational way to modern spiritual seekers, has just been released in an American edition titled The Gospel and the new spirituality. I've been able to contribute a booklet on the grace of God to the Sovereign World's Explaining series. And I've just had a new book come out with CPAS entitled Building bridges to the New Age world.
I also enjoy travelling to teach. I'm now travelling every year to Romania to teach a course on Christian worldview to university students. And I have especially enjoyed the warmth and hospitality that Christians in the UK have extended to me over the years. I'll be here again in November for a three-week speaking trip. I've made some very good friends here and I think that I have had a hand in helping UK Christians to get ahead of the curve a little bit regarding the New Age. We were really caught by surprise in the States.

Francis Schaeffer

EN: You have been strongly influenced by the late Dr. Francis Schaeffer and also by the British theologian and philosopher the Rev. John Peck. Can you tell us a little about this?

CS: I came across Schaeffer around 1978. Schaeffer and other L'Abri leaders were a refreshing change from the intellectually-stifling form of Christianity that I was a part of at the time. Schaeffer gave you breathing room. He let you retain your honest doubts and unanswered questions. He articulated a theory of the times, especially the turbulent 1960s, that is still relevant today. I studied just about all of his writings.
In the early 1980s I began to pray for a mentor, a tutor. Although he would demur, John Peck has become something of that to me. We first met briefly in 1983 in the States, when he came to our arts group in Michigan for a weekend seminar. In 1985 and 86 our arts group brought John, his wife, Hanna, and two of their children to the States for a year. John taught us how to develop a Christian worldview and how to apply that and communicate it to secular life. We have been in very close contact ever since. I don't know where I would be today without John's godly wisdom. He is a man who truly lives out of a worldview whose twin foci are a manger and a cross.

A number of books written by Charles Strohmer are reviewed by Mike Taylor on page 21.