A phrase from a book published in 1975
In April 1975 a small monastic press in northern California printed a book called Orthodoxy and the Religion of the Future. Its author was Hieromonk Seraphim (Rose), an American who had taken a master's degree in Oriental languages at Berkeley, spent years among the seekers of San Francisco, and then gone to live as a monk in the forest at Platina. Chapter V of that book carries a title which has outlived most of the rest: "The 'New Religious Consciousness': The Spirit of the Eastern Cults in the 1970s".
He set the phrase inside inverted commas because it was not his own coinage. It was in the air around him. The following year two Berkeley sociologists, Charles Glock and Robert Bellah, edited a volume under exactly that title for the University of California Press. Believers and unbelievers alike could see that something was shifting in American religious life, and both were reaching for a name.
What he was actually looking at
The chapter is reportage before it is argument. Its five sections walk through scenes that a Californian of the period could have attended on a free afternoon: Hare Krishna devotees chanting in San Francisco, Guru Maharaj-ji filling the Houston Astrodome, tantric yoga in the mountains of New Mexico, zen training in northern California. Only in the fifth section, "The New 'Spirituality' vs. Christianity", does he begin to draw conclusions.
None of this was foreign material to him. Before his baptism he had studied at the Academy of Asian Studies in San Francisco under Alan Watts, and he had been a genuinely serious student of Eastern thought rather than a hostile tourist in it. When he writes about the attraction of these movements he is describing something he had felt. That is worth keeping in view, because it changes the tone of the chapter from denunciation to recognition.
Behind the individual scenes he thought he could see one shape. Each promised contact with a reality deeper than the ordinary one. Each offered a technique for reaching it. And each, in his reading, offered that contact on terms that asked nothing of the seeker's moral life.
The diagnosis: experience without repentance
This is the heart of it. What he named was not a doctrine but an appetite — for states, for felt presence, for the transcendent as something a person can be given rather than something a person is remade by. Peace and contentment were being offered as products, quickly and at no moral cost, and he thought Christians had begun to shop in the same market under Christian labels.
His answer was not to deny that the experiences happened. It was to deny that they proved anything. An experience can be vivid, unforgettable, even benevolent in its feel, and still tell you nothing whatever about its source. Against the promise of quick arrival he set a description of Christian life that reads almost harshly by comparison, and that he meant to apply to himself before anyone else.
Christian spirituality is formed in the arduous struggle to acquire the eternal Kingdom of Heaven
Fr. Seraphim Rose, Orthodoxy and the Religion of the Future, ch. VIII §2 (St Herman of Alaska Brotherhood, Fifth Edition, 2004)
A necessary note on who wrote which chapter
Anyone who quotes this book should know that it is a compilation as well as an argument, and that its opening chapters are not by Fr. Seraphim at all. Attributions to him circulate widely and are often wrong. The printed bylines of the Fifth Edition are these:
Fr. Seraphim himself wrote the Preface, the Introduction, Chapters IV to VIII and the Epilogue "Jonestown and the 1980s", and he compiled and edited the whole. The chapter on the new religious consciousness is his. The argument about whether Christians and non-Christians worship the same God, which is quoted from this book more often than anything else in it, belongs to Fr. Basile Sakkas, and quoting it as Fr. Seraphim's is simply a mistake of fact. In the Introduction he describes those borrowed chapters in the third person, as an editor would:
The first three chapters offer a general approach to non-Christian religions and their radical difference from Christianity, both in theology and in spiritual life.
Fr. Seraphim Rose, Orthodoxy and the Religion of the Future, Introduction §4 (St Herman of Alaska Brotherhood, Fifth Edition, 2004)
- Chapter I, "The 'Monotheistic' Religions" — by Fr. Basile Sakkas, reprinted from La Foi Transmise, 5 April 1970
- Chapter II, "The Power of the Pagan Gods" — by "A Convert to Orthodoxy"
- Chapter III, "A Fakir's 'Miracle' and the Prayer of Jesus" — by Archimandrite Nicholas Drobyazgin
- Preface to the Fifth Edition and the Epilogue to the Fifth Edition — by Hieromonk Damascene
Why the edition matters
The book has been reprinted nine times since 1975, through five editions, the fifth appearing in 2004. Its text has not stayed identical across those printings, and the changes touch questions about the Church that are not incidental. Sergei Chapnin has publicly asked which version is genuinely Fr. Seraphim's own, who authorised the revisions, and on what authority.
That question has not been settled, and this parish is not in a position to settle it. The practical consequence for a reader is simple and worth observing everywhere: name the edition you are quoting. Everything cited on this page is from the Fifth Edition of 2004.
None of this is a reason to distrust the book. It is a reason to read it as a document with a history, written by a man in his early forties in a particular decade, revised after his death by people who loved him, and quoted ever since by readers who mostly do not know which parts are his.
The positive criterion: humility and the Cross
Strip away the furniture of the 1970s and what remains is a test, and the test is not about which movement to avoid. It is about what genuine Christian experience looks like from the inside. The Fathers whom Fr. Seraphim was drawing on are consistent here: grace makes a person quieter, more self-suspicious, more patient with others and more willing to be inconvenienced for them.
The measure is the Cross, which is why the criterion cannot be intensity. "If any man would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me" (Matthew 16:24, RSV). An experience that leaves a person more certain of their own advancement has failed the test, however vivid it was. An ordinary Tuesday spent forgiving someone has passed it, however flat it felt.
Saint Paul tells the Philippians to work out their own salvation with fear and trembling (Philippians 2:12). That phrase, fear and trembling, is the opposite register from the one the new religious consciousness was working in, and the difference is not a difference of temperament. It is a difference about what a human being is for.
This is not a verdict on anybody's neighbours
It would be easy to read Chapter V as a list of people to be suspicious of, and some readers have done exactly that. It is not how its author asked to be read at the end of his life. In November 1980 a catechumen wrote to him, distressed by the words she saw Orthodox writers using about other Christians, and asked whether she might still call her Protestant and Catholic family Christians. His answer, which he credited to Fr. Dimitry Dudko, has become the most quoted thing he ever wrote:
In the same years he put the matter in print rather than in a private letter. Convert harshness, he wrote in The Orthodox Word, is spiritually wrong even when it is worded in a theologically correct manner, and it drives away from the Church people who would otherwise have been drawn to it. He also thought part of the reason others have not seen Orthodoxy is that we have not lived it in a way they could recognise. His own mother was a Protestant and his father a former Roman Catholic who became Protestant, and his counsel to converts was to live at peace especially with their own families.
We should view the non-Orthodox as people to whom Orthodoxy has not yet been revealed, as people who are potentially Orthodox
Fr. Seraphim Rose, letter of 27 November 1980, in Hieromonk Damascene, Father Seraphim Rose: His Life and Works, ch. 84 (St Herman of Alaska Brotherhood)
What a reader in 2026 might make of it
Half a century on, the particular scenes have dated. The ashram has become the retreat centre and the app. Breathwork, plant medicine, silent weekends, sleep optimisation, the quantified interior life: much of what is now sold as wellness makes the same offer the chapter described, which is transcendence without repentance, and makes it at scale and for a subscription fee. The appetite has not gone anywhere. It has been industrialised.
Other parts of the book have worn less well. The chapter on unidentified flying objects reads strangely now. Academic readers have found the whole book polemical and thin on the scholarship of world religions, and that criticism is fair to record. Fr. Seraphim's own standing in the Church is likewise unsettled: he is locally venerated in some places, and in December 2025 the Synod of Bishops of the Russian Church Abroad established a commission to study his life, legacy and veneration. He is not a canonised saint of the Russian Church, and this parish does not call him one.
The part that survives is the question he was asking, and it is a question anyone can use. Not: is this exotic, or foreign, or new? But: does this ask anything of me? Does it make me easier to live with?
Turning the question inward
The most useful thing about this diagnosis is that it works just as well on Orthodox Christians, and Fr. Seraphim applied it to us first. A person can want the singing, the incense, the beauty of an old rite and the pleasure of belonging to something ancient, and want all of it for exactly the reasons Chapter V describes. He said as much repeatedly, and admitted to being suspicious of a church full of correct icons, because the people in it might simply be following a fashion.
So the article ends where the discipline actually begins, which is with the writer and not the reader. If you have come here from a congregation where Christ is loved and the singing is warm, nothing on this page is aimed at you. The Orthodox Church makes a large claim about herself, and we have not tried to soften it. But the test she applies first is to her own members, on an ordinary weekday, in confession. You are welcome to come and watch how that goes.