A NEW pop culture phenomenon is dominating the best-seller charts. The Secret , in DVD and book form, has a devoted following. Many claim it has transformed their lives.

According to its website, The Secret  originated in 2004, when Australian TV producer Rhonda Byrne discovered “the secret laws and principles of the universe.”

At the core of The Secret is ‘the Law of Attraction’ – which, according to Wikipedia, “posits that our feelings and thoughts attract real events in the world into our lives – from the workings of the cosmos to interactions among individuals in their physical, emotional and professional affairs.”  

Byrne has made lofty claims for her brainchild, asserting that “the greatest people in history” have been “past Secret teachers” – including Plato, Martin Luther King, Albert Einstein and Winston Churchill.

Byrne applies the attraction principle to things such as weight loss. She writes:  “Food is not responsible for putting on weight. It is your thought that food is responsible for putting on weight that actually has food put on weight . . . Food cannot cause you to put on weight, unless you think it can.”

The Secret  has attracted high profile media attention from Larry King and Oprah Winfrey. It has also attracted severe criticism.

Karin Klein, in the Los Angeles Times , contends that Byrne “took the well-worn ideas of some self-help gurus, customized them for the profoundly lazy, [and] gave them a veneer of mysticism.”

The Guardian ’s Catherine Bennett  savages the film as a “moronic hymn to greed and selfishness,” promoting “[a] creed so transparently ugly and stupid that it seems impossible that anyone could take it seriously.”

The Vancouver Sun ’s Doug Todd maintains that many Secret admirers are “in a dream world, in which they believe fabulous things will just wondrously come their way – without any effort, talent, knowledge or skill . . . It’s like believing that sticking pins in Voodoo dolls will cause your enemy to feel pain. It’s the conviction that wearing your favourite Canucks jersey will cause the team to win.”

Bob Beverley, a Canadian-born psychotherapist and ordained Baptist minister now living in the U.S., is co-author of The Secret Behind the Secret Law of Attraction – the first book responding to the phenomenon.

He told BCCN the ‘law of attraction’ reminded him of faith healing, and the ‘name it and claim it’ prosperity gospel.  Asked why the book and DVD are so popular, he said: “Human beings don’t like to delay gratification . . . We want the quick shortcut.”

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‘Quick fix’ solutions, he said, are contrary to the Christian worldview. “Jesus said, ‘The way is hard that leads to life.’ The Bible doesn’t say, just follow Jesus and everything will be okay. It talks about life’s difficulties – unlike this kind of absurdity.”

Beverley said his perspective on The Secret  is not entirely negative. “I don’t think they’re simply saying this is just about getting what your want. They also promote compassion and gratitude.” However, he cautioned: “To think the universe will . . . line up with what you want is delusional.”

Todd contends The Secret has “a chilling downside,” because “it inevitably leads to believers thinking those who were killed in the Holocaust . . . in Darfur, in Stalin’s purges, in Iraq . . . are responsible for their own tragedies.”

This is reinforced by a Toronto Star account of an event held at Indigo Books in March, featuring Secret teacher Marie Diamond, author of The Very Simple Law of Attraction .

The article recounted an encounter in which a sympathetic audience was troubled by a challenging idea:  “How, for example, was 9/11 attracted to the people in those buildings? That’s something I can’t understand.”

Diamond responded: “Sometimes, we experience the law of attraction collectively. The U.S. maybe had a fear of being attacked. Those 3,000 people – they might have put out some kind of fear that attracted this to happen, fear of dying young, fear that something might happen that day.”

“I get annoyed when I see people who are crushed by life being told that ‘if you’re poor or unhappy, you attracted that to yourself,’” said Beverley.  

Jesus, he added, “had immense compassion for the broken. He didn’t like the Pharisees placing burdens on people, and not lifting a finger to help them carry their burdens.”                              

– David F. Dawes

June 2007