A massive shift in the 21st C zeitgeist has been the shift from the material to the immaterial. This is what identifies as 'post/post-modernism'. This is the ideology we are witnessing amongst all sectors of society including the church.
The hyper-spiritual, the introduction of new-age modalities, crystals, chakras, you name it...it all has a name, a name which goes back into the mists of time...Gnosticism. This belief system glommed onto Christianity in the 1st century and was one of the primary heresies defended against by the Apostles and early church fathers. They effectively forced it underground for a long time, and other than a few minor blemishes on the ideological body, it remained largely ineffectual until it broke forth with vigor as an underlying, parasitical influence within freemasonry.
Gnosticism has one other peculiar characteristic. It is an eclectic belief. It combines together a little bit of this and a little bit of that, much like the proverbial kitchen recipe. In this case it mixed together the ritual, drama and mystery of the eastern religions with a fundamental concept found in Greek philosophy, that of dualism. Plato taught a dualism of the ideal and the sensory. He divided the whole of reality into two antithetical spheres, the sphere of matter, or sensory experience (taste, touch and sight) and the sphere of ideas representing an ideal world of thought forms and concepts. He believed the sensory world was inferior to the ideal world, and that the human individual could escape from the world of matter through knowledge. Plotinus, following the religion of Persia, taught a dualism of light and darkness. We have then two basic ideas: the world of mystery (magic formulae, secrets and rituals) and the concept of dualism. Mix these assumptions with Christianity and the stage is set for Gnosticism. It became an observable religious movement in the second century. Scholars debate exactly how developed it was in the apostolic age, but what cannot be doubted is that an incipient kind of Gnosticism, or proto-Gnosticism, was already in the process of development. The movement gradually merged into the Manichean religion of the third century where it peaked and began to wane. Many of its ideas eventually landed up in Free-Masonry. Its ideas have never really died. [Morphew, Derek. The Spiritual Spider Web: A Study in Acient and Contemporary Gnosticism (Kingdom Theology Series) . Derek Morphew Publishing. Kindle Edition.]"
This parasitical germ was transported through the next few hundred years and with the emergence of the erroneously named 'enlightenment'(oxymoron) it finally found purchase through many, though primarily German philosophers and thinkers in its fullest expression during the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
Of course the discoveries of the Gnostic texts at Nag Hammadi sent it into overdrive and we are living in the results thereof. It is the ideology behind many modern movie 'classics', the abortion industry, the LGB,etc movement, the trans movement, the hyper-spiritual movement in churches, and its impact is increasing exponentially.
