SID: Steven Bancarz. We hear the New Age talked about in various situations, but most of us don’t even know what the New Age is. What is it?
STEVEN: The New Age Movement is a compilation of pagan beliefs and practices. So, the word pagan refers to any type of spiritual system that deviates from that in the Scripture. But what you have with the New Age Movement is not just one set of pagan beliefs and practices, it’s the compilation, a mixing pot that draws from things like Buddhism, Hinduism, Mysticism, includes practices like crystal healing or Reiki, astrology, meditation, Yoga, and so forth.
STEVEN: Some common New Age doctrines would include things like reincarnation or the belief that man is intrinsically divine by nature or the belief that all paths ultimately lead back to God in the end. The end goal of the New Age Movement is to reach a state of enlightenment or spiritual awakening, which is essentially, that the ego, the personal self is an illusion; all that there is God. God is all and all is God.
STEVEN: Reaching that state of consciousness, which they call Christ consciousness or God consciousness, that’s the goal of the New Age Movement; and unfortunately, some of the most influential people in our society right now are teaching this stuff. People like Russell Brand, Jim Carrey, Ellen DeGeneres, Oprah Winfrey. So, this is actually coming down from the highest levels of social influence.
SID: So, you say this is the goal. What is the overall goal of this, to get everyone into this New Age? Is that the goal?
STEVEN: No. The goal is, on a personal level, the goal is to reach a state where you realize that you are God.
SID: That’s the personal level?
STEVEN: That’s the personal level.
SID: What does it try to accomplish with people?
STEVEN: It tries to bring them into a spiritual awakening of their true nature. So basically–
SID: Which on the surface, sounds good.
STEVEN: On the surface, it sounds good, but it’s a false spiritual system. So, it’s a deception.
SID: You personally when you were in the New Age, had huge success. At your highest, what’s going on?
STEVEN: I did have huge success. I had a website that was getting 200,000 to 300,000 website views a day. It was one of the largest in the world at the time. I was actually a lead author on the largest New Age website for a while. This was my career, it was my passion. I was making $40,000 to $50,000 a month in ad revenue. During this time, I actually thought God was blessing me. I thought this was God saying, “Congratulations, you’re helping humanity wake up to their true spiritual nature out of the trap of materialism.”
STEVEN: But Jesus says, Satan is the god of this world, and sometimes the Devil doesn’t come to you as a guy with a pitchfork and horns. Sometimes he comes to you, is everything that you thought you’ve always wanted. And little did I know that I was being rewarded by the satanic kingdom, thinking I was serving God the whole time.
SID: Now, you mentioned many Hollywood stars are propagating this, but how dominant is it?
STEVEN: Right. Well, you have some of the bestselling books of all time that are explicitly New Age and occult. You have 40% of Americans who say they meditate at least once a week. You have 36 million Americans practicing yoga. It’s a $10 billion industry. The crystal industry is $1 billion industry. The psychic services industry, things like palmistry, tarot card reading, astrology readings, up to $2 billion industry.
STEVEN: You have 27% of the American population who says they identify as being spiritual but not religious. There’s scores of New Age beliefs. If you include all the New Age beliefs and tests for those, you’re looking at 90%, 95% of the average American population is consenting to New Age beliefs, which is a testament. This is no longer secluded to a handful of hippies on the fringes of society. It’s infiltrating every part of our culture and now occupies the vast majority of western thought right now.
SID: You talk about the wonderful experiences you had in the New Age and on your website, but not all your experiences were wonderful. Did you ever talk about them on your website?
STEVEN: I did, but I was deceived. I saw a demon. Long story short, I saw a demon. I was in a lucid dream. A lucid dream is where you’re in a dream state, but you become consciously aware that you’re in that dream state. You’re aware that you’re dreaming within a dream. I’m in this dream and I get pulled up by this entity who appears in front of me, we’re hovering in the air together. He has red skin, a red cloak, and black markings on his face.
STEVEN: He’s staring at me, about 20 feet away from me and he has a third eye in between his two regular eyes, which is a symbol for psychic empowerment and spiritual power. He opens his third eye at me. And when he does that, I experienced about three seconds of disorientation and darkness. When I finally opened my eyes and came to, I found myself hovering four feet over my body in my bedroom. I got pulled out of my body by this demon. I stood up and I look around and I think, “Oh, my goodness. I’m out of my body.”
STEVEN: I spent the next four or five minutes fighting to get back into my flesh and I couldn’t. I didn’t have control. I didn’t have sovereignty like I was told I did in the New Age Movement. Just your intentions protect you, your affirmation to protect you. No, they don’t. You’re in the Devil’s arena and you’re playing by his rules now. I was pulled twice out of my body against my will by demons. And this, unfortunately, it made me feel like I was spiritually superior, that I had a leg up on Christians, that I had a leg up on the average folk, that I had these entities giving me all this secret spiritual knowledge and power now.
SID: How’s [this happen to] someone raised in a good Christian home? What was the first crack that got you away from biblical Christianity?
STEVEN: Yeah, like you said, Christian home, Christian private school, Christian homeschooling, grew up in the church my whole life, church home groups at my house. What really led me away from the biblical worldview and caused me to deviate from Christianity was the topic of aliens. I couldn’t reconcile this.
SID: I see that as a choice on things to go to on television. Something in me says, “That’d interesting,” and then God says to me, “Don’t even look at it,” but you looked at it. What happened?
STEVEN: I did look at it. It was actually a program on the History Channel, which is still there unfortunately, called Ancient Aliens, where they present this alleged evidence that mankind was visited in the past by our cosmic brothers and sisters, these extra terrestrials. Little did I know, Sid, that even secular researchers believe these are inter dimensional entities, not extra terrestrial. They believe they are spiritual in origin. I didn’t know this. I thought the New Age explanation was the only game in town, and I couldn’t reconcile this with Genesis. I wondered where God said, “Let there be aliens.”
STEVEN: Did Jesus have to go and die on every single planet that housed extra terrestrial life? I could not reconcile it with the Christian worldview. There’s lots of people, there’s lots of resources available to help people with this, but I never heard it from the pulpit, and the Bible says God’s people perish for a lack of knowledge. It’s exactly what happened to me.
SID: At your height, how financially successful was this industry you were in for you?
STEVEN: At my height, I was making $40,000 to $50,000 a month. Actually in my first three weeks, I made over $50,000. I remember buying my sports car, cash, and I’m sitting in my sports car and my Christian father is outside the window and I rolled down my window and I literally said–here’s how deceived I was–I said, “Seek ye first the Kingdom of God and all these things will be added onto you as well.”
STEVEN: I thought I was serving the Kingdom of God. I was told by New Age teachers that the kingdom is this mystical state of consciousness and that I was helping people reach this. I thought this was God’s abundance on my life.
SID: Steven, I can see what was going on in the outside, but what I’d like to know is at that time, how much peace were you’re really in? What was going on in the inside?
STEVEN: Well, Jesus says, “Whoever commits sin as a slave to sin.” I was a sin slave. It says in Ephesians 5:8, it’s interesting. It doesn’t just say that you were a little dark and now you are light or you had darkness, then you’re now, you’re light. It says, “You were darkness.” I was darkness. The thoughts and intents of my heart were evil continuously. I was an addict. I was violent. I was lustful. I was greedy. I was depressed. I was extremely broken and depraved.
STEVEN: I wasn’t just spiritually ill, I was spiritually dead. I was spiritually bankrupt. I was in a state of turmoil all day, all night.
SID: Everyone looking at you said, “Boy, he’s got it all.”
STEVEN: Right. On the outside, I’m living the dream.
SID: I wonder how many of you guys watching right now are playing a game like an actor, but you’re coming apart on the inside. It took a supernatural visitation for Steven to be free. This visitation showed him something that New Age couldn’t even offer.
SID: Next, be right back.
