On “The 700 Club” today, Pat Robertson responded to a concerned viewer who feared that ever since her family moved to Santa Fe, New Mexico, they have been exposed to “New Age spirituality” such as “dream catchers, yoga [and] veganism,” and wondered whether she should let her daughter take “yoga classes with one of her friends.” - See more at: http://www.rightwingwatch.org/...
New Age Spiritualism?
Yoga stems from pre-Vedic Indian traditions, before 500/600BC in India.
Dream catching finds its origins in the Ojibwe people in N America from well before anyone actually thought of history.
Veganism has its roots in ancient Greece and India.
These are hardly what I would call new and probably predate Christianity by quite some time.
Well it's foreign stuff, you know not American...wait...neither is Christianity, one could argue Dream Catching is more "real American" than that holy trinity stuff.
Dreamcatchers are meant to filter out the bad dreams and allow only the good to pass through, great for children's bedtime I might add. I was given one when I was five years old, it still hangs in the bedroom.
As for yoga prayers,/mantras, some are religious some are not, but if you haven't a clue as to their meaning, then they have no meaning and are they therefore anything but a means of meditation?
Now Pat is a Southern Baptist and that dates from the 1680's which makes it pretty newfangled stuff in comparison, I might consider it part of the New Age Spirituality that you mention.
Whatever works for the individual I say, but then again, I have no stake in the Religious Industrial Complex's business model.
Just a thought