Mission America president Linda Harvey last week joined Truth in Action Ministries’ Carmen Pate and John Rabe on Truth that Transforms where she argued that public schools are pushing “occult practices and ideas and beliefs” on children through practices like meditation and yoga. Harvey particularly blamed Harry Potter for influencing the entertainment industry to make similar “occult” movies and “taking kids away from authentic Christianity and into all kinds of practices and ideas that will lead them down a dark road.” Pate worried about the “occult underlying themes” in children’s cartoons and even suggested that public school-sponsored Earth Day events have a “focus on Gaia worship” and the “worshiping of Mother Nature.”

Harvey: If you look throughout what our kids are told and taught in the social media, throughout the media and in their schools, you see a constant, casual occult practices and ideas and beliefs. It starts with, of course, the worship of the self and your own impulses and whatever sensational element is out there and people don’t often think of this as leading to the occult but it does. When you’ve decided that you are the center of the universe and you want a designer God or some kind of spirituality that just tickles your ears, that’s what our kids are being taught from meditation to yoga to all kinds of fascinations with things like wizards and magic of all kinds and vampires. I mean it is everywhere.

Pate: I realize that when my grandchildren are visiting I have to be very selective about what cartoons I allow them to watch because of the wizardry and occult underlying themes in cartoons.

Harvey: Absolutely. What most of our kids are taught today, it’s the entertainment and it’s the Hollywood media that is taking this up. They’ve taken off from the success of the Harry Potter series and they have decided that children all need therapy and the therapy that they need is to find special powers within themselves to battle the demons, real or imagined, out there, so they never look to Jesus Christ. It’s all taking kids away from authentic Christianity and into all kinds of practices and ideas that will lead them down a dark road.

…

Pate: I think about how Earth Day comes around each spring and there’s a focus on Gaia worship. I mean, really going back again to this worshiping of Mother Nature and all that she is about and kids come out of this because it’s done at school, schools should be telling them truth they’re thinking, so they believe what they’re told, so parents and churches really have their work cut out for them, Linda.