Why the Internet Didn't Kill New Age Spirituality

In this essay · 6 sections

1. When the only copy was a photocopy
2. Then everything arrived
3. A trunk full of magazines
4. Two people at once
5. Embarrassed to repeat it
6. The friend who checks

For a long time I assumed this stuff had a shelf life. The books I read in my twenties, Edgar Cayce diagnosing strangers in his sleep, Baird Spalding's masters of the Far East doing things physics doesn't allow, belonged to a world where checking anything took real effort. Once everyone carried a library in their pocket, I thought, those claims would fade the way rumors do when somebody finally looks up the facts. They haven't. The same ideas still reach me, except that now I don't have to go looking for them: they turn up most mornings, somewhere between a weather alert and a photo of somebody's lunch.

In 2018 Pew Research reported that roughly six in ten American adults held at least one of four New Age beliefs: that psychics are real, that reincarnation happens, that astrology works, or that spiritual energy can live in physical things like mountains, trees and crystals.¹ When Pew asked about astrology again in late 2024, 27 percent of adults said they believed in it, statistically no different from the 29 percent of 2017.² Those numbers can't tell you what effect the internet had. They do show that belief in astrology remained broadly stable through years when checking claims had become much easier. I've watched new age spirituality from both ends of a thirty-year stretch: first as a reader who had very little else to read, and these days as the friend people send things to when they want to know whether they're true.

When the only copy was a photocopy

When I first found this material, my whole world had just turned over and something new arrived nearly every day: vegetarianism, meditation, the idea that some people were more evolved than others. None of it was in the newspapers or on television; it came as photocopies, and as small magazines that looked terrible, with crooked type and pages copied from copies until the letters went soft.

The first ones belonged to a friend a few years older, whom I considered far smarter than me. He never pushed them on me. He simply had them, they seemed to do him good, and when I asked, he lent them, which I suspect is exactly why they worked so well. They sounded cryptic and deep, written by people who seemed to have risen above the human jungle I lived in, and reading them felt like being let into something most people didn't have access to.

That feeling was doing most of the work. I couldn't verify a single line, and it didn't occur to me that I should, because the rarity looked like proof in itself: if something this important wasn't in the papers, the papers obviously weren't ready for it. Later, inside the first organization I joined, the founder's own texts became our reading, and we treated them the same way, reading them, copying them and discussing them. Anything to compare them with was hard to find where I was, and the question of checking simply hadn't come up.

Then everything arrived

Now there is everything to read, and checking a claim has become far easier than it was. The habit of checking didn't arrive with it. When I scroll through the feeds of people I knew in those years, I can see what they've done with the same material.

Some still pass around the metaphysics of thirty years ago as if it were current, and remember those years as the time we were the chosen ones, the core of something. Others went a step further and now offer the readings themselves: people who once hung on every word of astrologers, palm readers and tarot readers are astrologers and tarot readers today, some with diplomas, and in their posts they describe the work as a calling. From a feed I can see what they offer, though not why. Among the people I knew then, the number who believe seems about the same, while the number offering readings has grown.

A trunk full of magazines

I can't look at that second group without counting myself in. The founder of that first organization wrote constantly, and at some point his writing had to be gathered into small magazines and produced in quantity. I was one of the people producing them. Making copy after copy didn't feel like diluting anything; we were carrying a message, people were going to wake up reading it, and when we drove across the country with the trunk full of magazines, it felt like a convoy carrying light. At the time I didn't live for anything else.

Even then, scarcity was only half of it. I had a mission, which no number of copies could wear out, and the reader had the feeling of being let in; more information would have touched neither.

Two people at once

In our local group there were people whose whole working day consisted of weighing evidence. For me, their presence was the evidence. If people like that took the system seriously, it had to be sound, and I was hardly the one to judge. It never crossed my mind that the logic might run the other way. Years later, the question that stayed with me was how someone manages to be two people at once: careful, coherent and critical at work, and then, in the evening, believing things they would have sent straight back to any colleague who brought them in.

Competence doesn't travel between domains automatically, and something narrower than that has been measured. In 2015 Lisa Fazio and her colleagues showed that repeating a false statement made people rate it as more likely to be true even when they demonstrably knew the correct answer, a pattern they called knowledge neglect.³ Their statements were trivia, not doctrine, so I'm extending the finding by analogy. Still, if knowledge already in your head can lose to a sentence you've read twice, a library on your phone won't help much on its own, least of all when you don't open it and familiarity starts passing for evidence.

Embarrassed to repeat it

If information were the cure, it would have cured me. It didn't, at least not directly. What moved me was an accumulation. On one side there were friends who had drifted into chemtrails and whatever conspiracy was in season, and on the other, the very spiritual end of spirituality, where the promises kept getting larger. Kept in proportion, a spiritual life sits quite comfortably next to a rational one. When the exaggerations started arriving from every direction at once, I began, slowly, to step back from the claims.

I remember starting to feel embarrassed repeating what the practice was supposed to do for people. That, more or less, was when I changed sides on the claims, though not on the practice itself, and I only noticed it afterwards, when I realized I no longer agreed with things I'd been saying for years. I can't point to a cause, and no single piece of information did it; it simply happened.

The friend who checks

These days a different alarm goes off, usually within a second, whenever I read something that sits outside critical thinking and ordinary sense. Friends send me texts and ask whether they're true, or whether a machine wrote them. They know I'm good with computers and that I check things, so I do roughly what a journalist would. I look for the original source, read what it claims and what evidence it offers, compare it with others, and send back where the support ends, which is often well before the sentence my friend was sent. I don't invent answers, though choosing and weighing the sources is a judgment call, and it's probably the part they're really asking me for. Otherwise my verdicts mostly stay with me, a habit with its own history.

I'm aware of the shape of this. Thirty years ago I was the one borrowing light from an older friend, and now friends come to me to find out what's true. The need for someone to help you decide didn't vanish when everything became available. My friend back then wanted nothing from me, and I want nothing from mine, so the motive hasn't changed. What changed is the thing passed across the table. He handed me conclusions that had moved him. I try to hand over the trail, the source and how far it goes, and let the other person take the last step.

That's the harder deal, because a trail is more work than a conclusion and it rarely ends in a promise. I'd like to think this is what checking differently looks like. I didn't think I needed checking the last time, either.

Follow One Source

The next time someone sends you a claim that matters enough to pass on, follow one of its sources back as far as you can, ideally to the original, and check whether it supports the sentence being shared. Sometimes it says something narrower, now and then it says the opposite, and sometimes the link only leads to another person repeating the claim. You don't have to settle the whole subject. Before you lend the claim your own name, though, it helps to know how far you managed to check it.

Safe travels.

Notes & References

1. Gecewicz, C. (2018) — "'New Age' beliefs common among both religious and nonreligious Americans." Pew Research Center, October 1, 2018. ↩
2. Rotolo, C. (2025) — "30% of Americans Consult Astrology, Tarot Cards or Fortune Tellers." Pew Research Center, May 21, 2025 (survey of 9,593 U.S. adults, October 21–27, 2024). ↩
3. Fazio, L. K., Brashier, N. M., Payne, B. K., & Marsh, E. J. (2015) — "Knowledge does not protect against illusory truth." Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 144(5), 993–1002. ↩