The Secret Is Total Bunk

I’ve been intending to write about The Secret for a while and Rev. Fred Small’s recent UU World article “Psst: ‘The Secret’ isn’t total bunk,”(adapted form a sermon) inspired me to sit down and get to it. (The Secret has also recently been mentioned at Philocrities and over at Surviving the Workday).

The problems with the book, the DVD companion to the book, and the general philosophy/science outlined therein are so numerous that I have no intention of trying to outline them all. You can read the wikipedia article, which outlines a good number of the problematic aspects and claims. The question for me, as it is was for Rev. Small, is if there is something redeemable about The Secret. Should we throw the baby out with the bathwater?

In the end, for Rev. Small, there was something redeemable about The Secret. After pointing out some of the problems with the book, he writes:

The Secret reminded me that to dwell constantly in the negative is its own kind of hell—a hell of my own choosing. I don’t want to deny or flee the negative, but I need not build my house on its sinkhole. How effective an activist for change can I be when my thinking and speaking are infused with hopelessness? How much time and energy in all areas of my life do I devote to criticizing what is, rather than creating what could be?

“There is no greater power in the Universe than the power of love,” says The Secret. “The feeling of love is the highest frequency you can emit. If you could wrap every thought in love, if you could love everything and everyone, your life would be transformed.” That’s a view I wholeheartedly endorse.

Yet, for me, while I understand that some good thoughts and ideas can come from The Secret - especially the sense that positive thinking is important, focusing on the negative is not often helpful, that we should “emit” love our lives, I think it is total bunk. Just because some parts of a book or a way of thinking can be isolated and might be helpful, I don’t think that we can, or should, separate out the acceptable parts of thinking such as that espoused in The Secret given what the overall “package” implies - an overall package that people are buying into by the thousands.

What does the overall package imply, you ask? That your thoughts are responsible for what happens in your life - if you think positive things, positive things will happen. And if you think negative things, negative things will happen. There is no gray area here.

“Everything that’s coming into your life, you are attracting into your life. And it’s attracted to you by virtue of the images you’re holding in your mind,” Bob Proctor of The Secret DVD tells us.

As Rev. Small reminds us in the UU World article:

The Secret demands three simple steps: 1) Ask. 2) Believe. 3) Receive.

“It’s like having the Universe as your catalog,” explains [Dr. Vitale, Metaphysician]. “You flip through it and say, ‘I’d like to have that product and I’d like to have a person like that.’ It is You placing your order with the Universe. It’s really that easy.”

The insurmountable problem I have with this is that the logical conclusion these sort of theological/scientific claims require: if things aren’t going well for you, it is because you are doing something wrong. Not only is this just reprehensible to me in general (thinking of those I know who have suffered and succumbed to cancer despite hopeful, joyful honest asking and believing), but this is also a quite racist, classist and sexist claim as well: those who are doing well are doing so because they have asked and believed - because they have done what they need to do, attracting good to themselves. Those who are not doing well have not asked and have not believed - according to The Secret’s law of attraction, they have not attracted good things to them because their thoughts and energies are not good enough. So, women, if you get raped: you could have prevented that with different thoughts. To the millions suffering from the HIV/AIDS epidemic in Africa: you could have prevented this by thinking different thoughts. Did your wife get laid off from her job?: that also could have prevented by thinking different thoughts. If you go to a highly segregated school that is vastly underfunded and get an inadequate education: you simply did not open that catalog of the universe and pick out what you wanted - you could have prevented this by maybe taking a little action, but mostly by thinking different thoughts, emitting different energy. It’s really that easy.

Rhonda Byrne speaks to this in a Newsweek article:

“The law of attraction is that each one of us is determining the frequency that we’re on by what we’re thinking and feeling,” Byrne said in a telephone interview, in response to a question about the massacre in Rwanda. “If we are in fear, if we’re feeling in our lives that we’re victims and feeling powerless, then we are on a frequency of attracting those things to us … totally unconsciously, totally innocently, totally all of those words that are so important.” (Jerry Adler. “Decoding ‘The Secret’” Newsweek, March 2007)

Right. So apparently the Rwandans might who were massacred (or those killed during the Holocaust or, say, Matthew Shepard or other people who have been brutally killed) might have been having totally unconscious, totally innocent frequencies which, in the end, resulted in their deaths. What a woefully inadequate answer to questions about longing, hoping, and suffering in our world. Shame on you Rhonda Byrne.

Positive thinking is great. Emitting love frequencies is great. But this is not what The Secret is about. The Secret is making claims about how the universe works. If you think about what you want, believe it will come to you, it will. If it doesn’t, you aren’t doing things right. This sounds to me too much like blaming those who suffer from injustice, oppression, and simply those who suffer. It feels like such a slap in the face to all of the people who I have known throughout my life - and really, those throughout the world - who have believed, and yet suffered and struggled and not received. And, it is a slap in the face to those who, for whatever reason, have not been able to believe.

Our Unitarian Universalist faith does not offer easy answers to why there is suffering in the world. We do not have answers as to why we do not always get what we want, or why justice and goodness and health so often fail to manifest in our lives. This is because there are not easy answers to these questions. These are important places for reflection, exploration, struggle, and grappling with hard theological and scientific questions. Why did the cancer treatment not work? Why did our dad lose his job? Why does violence like that which we see in Darfur continue? The Secret, and any embrace of it, dismisses these questions and this grappling that is so central to our faith with easy, simplistic answers.

Let’s call this what it is. The Secret is bad pseudo-science and has nothing to do with what Unitarian Universalism is about. We can embrace love and positive thinking and hope without contaminating our faith or our lives with the absurd theological and scientific claims of The Secret.

Addendum: I just want to clarify, after reflecting on this post, that my frustration with The Secret is primarily about The Secret and its theology, not about Rev. Small’s attempt to glean something useful from it. I understand where Rev. Small was going with trying to take some good out of a book/theology/world-view that he takes pains to point out has great problems. I just respectfully disagree with that approach. I don’t know Rev. Small, but imagine, like so many of our ministers, is a thoughtful, kind, and very wise person. Just thought it was important to clarify this.

A Congregationally Based Movement? On Community Ministry and the Work of Our Faith in the World

Long long ago, a curious, excited, idealistic, and somewhat-wounded undergraduate student was three years into her studies. She had registered for a religion course her first year at school because, as a lowly first year student, she could not get into any of the courses she wanted to take. But, in the beautiful world of finding-yourself-undergraduate land, this was just the way that many found their calling. And so, between the pages of Hittite-Suzerain treaties and in a large lecture hall filled with works on eschatology, a scholar-of-religion-to-be was born.

In time, this intellectual interest in religion began to fuse with personal interest in religion and spirituality. The young woman had found a lot of love and healing in Christianity, even if she had also found a lot of pain and fundamentalist judgment. Even in all that creepy, way-too-cheerful Jesus-saturated blah blah, she was also able to find a peace. A connection. She was able to help make sense of things that did not make sense. Part of her interest in religion in an academic sense was the amazing and exciting ways that people all throughout time had managed to do that sense-making, too, in their own creative ways. It was beautiful and amazing. It left her hungry for more.

The young student, only one year away from graduating with a liberal arts degree in religion and political science realized that she needed to figure out her next step. A little voice in her head said, “Did you ever think of becoming a minister?” The young woman laughed. Ha ha ha. A minister. Wouldn’t the family find that interesting-ish/weird/curious. She told that little voice to be silent — perhaps facing life-after-undergraduate school was making her brain say and think funny things. Minister. Ha. Double ha.

But, time came and went, and the little voice stayed. As the young woman thought more, she was able to envision the possibility of a ministry that was not about preaching on a pulpit and being in a church and with a congregation, things that were fine for some people, but not really a place that tugged on her heartstrings. Rather, she felt the presence of the divine on the streets and in the mountains and in the “out there” beyond church walls. She loved being in the mountains of Appalachia, learning about the ways that they did their sense making. She loved being with the people that didn’t usually go to church as they did religion in their own non-church way - breaking beans on the porch, talking about things. Communing over french fries and soda, loud souped up cars clunking by. She liked being with the people who weren’t always welcome in church. In living rooms. At the hospital. In everyday life. Fumbling along in some difficult yet holy and sacred and beautiful way to make sense of a world that was not just. Maybe, the little voice and she discussed in the way that people discuss things with voices in their head, just maybe there was a way to be a minister, to be present to people in a journey of making sense of the world, that didn’t involve being a church-minister. Maybe. She thought.

She made an appointment to talk to a liberal Episcopalian priest in the DC area. She asked, “So is it necessary to actually believe everything the Episcopal church says is true? Do you have to believe in Jesus as God, and Savior of the world sort of thing, or can you sort of pick and choose, or use Christianity as one among many frameworks for making sense of the world?” The young woman could not imagine that the minister would say that you really had to believe that all the stories were true as in capital-T True. But, the minister did tell her just that in the most solemn and how-could-you-even-ask-that way. You couldn’t just think that it was a nice idea. You had to think it was real. Real. Real-Jesus-raised-up-from-death sort of way. And so that was that. The Episcopalians seemed like the only hope for a church where she could fit in and that would maybe consider making her a not-in-a-church-minister. So she told that voice to hush. There was no ordination for her. She would just have to free-lance it somehow. She knew she liked to study religion and so she applied to the schools where she thought the best feminist theology stuff would be taking place. One of those places happened to be Harvard Divinity School.

Come to find out, she had missed a church that might take her. All over New England and Harvard Div. School there were the Unitarian Universalists. She and her partner visited a church because they had seen a quote outside a UU church that said “unquestioned answers are more dangerous than unanswered questions.” Time passed. Classes passed. She met other students in this UU church. She and her partner joined a UU congregation. The little voice had grown, was not so little anymore, and was jumping up and down in her head saying “We’ve found it! We’ve found it! Sign up for this! Yay!” But she went slowly, trying to calm down her voice. There was a community ministry option in this church that would let you be a not-in-a-church minister. You didn’t have to say things you didn’t believe or stick to a particular framework for making sense of the world. You could draw from various traditions, centered in the seven principles. This might fit, she told herself.

And, in many ways, it did fit. But, yet, she heard from several people that Unitarian Universalism was a congregationally-based movement. Hmmm. Would she fit in a congregationally-based movement if she wanted to be a non-congregationally based minister (horrors of all horrors!)? She was happy to affiliate with a church, to be a member of a church, but that could never be the center of her ministry. She found out that even though she didn’t plan to ever be a parish minister, she was required to do a parish internship. Another time,  Unitarian Univeralist minister was telling a story about how someone once said, “Oh, I’m a Unitarian Universalist at heart, but I don’t belong to a church,” to which the minister replied that you MUST belong to a church (or the Church of the Larger Fellowship) to be a Unitarian Universalist. Hmm.

The young woman wondered if our congregations make places for everyone who might be a Unitarian Universalist at heart. She thought of the young men she mentored in the inner city; the Appalachian families she knew; those who had been wounded by a church experience; those whose souls did not fit well with committee work.

The young woman thought of Buddhism, and loving-kindness as a part of Buddhist practice, and thought that while there are many who belong to Buddhist communities or sanghas, there are also lots of Buddhists who do not belong to an official faith community. Isn’t it possible to be Unitarian Universalist in our everyday lives, without belonging to an official congregation or the CLF? Must we be a congregationally based movement or can our congregations be just one part of our movement? Does it make sense to use parish ministry as the primary paradigm by which to train and teach our ministers, or would it not make sense to envision new ways of being ministers that does not follow a congregational/parish framework? What would a cadre of real actual equal-to-parish ministers who were not PARISH ministers look like if they were to meet the needs of the hurting and seeking people in this world who don’t want to or can’t or don’t fit in a congregational setting? What might we be able to do outside a congregational setting that we can’t do within one?

The young woman loves her new religious home. She loves Unitarian Universalism, its ministers, its congregants, its songs (well, many of them), and sermons. But she has great hopes for a Unitarian Universalism that has room for all those who are UUs “at heart” and don’t fit into congregations or who are able to give and get in rich and valuable ways outside of parishes. She thinks of approaches to living out Unitarian Universalist faith in the world that make space for new sorts of communities, new visions of religious practice, new ways of doing justice and loving that are big enough and flexible enough for all beings and ways of being.