It's a shame about Doreen

We get off track; we get back on

I’ve been thinking about Doreen Virtue lately. I don’t know if it’s because I’m noticing the things that are shifting in my life, because of what’s happening in this country and the world right now, or because of the way my memory haunts me and pulls me back through layers of my experience. Whatever the reason, she is on my mind. More accurately, what she represents.

I once heard someone say that spiritual beliefs and practices are like train stations, so this morning, I am thinking about my spiritual life in that way. The train pulls into a station and I get off and explore. Sometimes I stay a while before getting back on the train and continuing down the track.

In the early 2000s, I got off at a station called Hay House Radio. Before podcasts, before the digital world grew into what it is now, Hay House had an online radio station showcasing their authors. People like Sonia Choquette, Wayne Dyer, and Caroline Myss hosted shows where they talked about and promoted their work, and Doreen Virtue was ubiquitous.

The Angel Lady, Doreen described herself as a “fourth generation metaphysician who works with the angelic realm, the elementals, and ascended masters, bringing through their messages and teachings of love and support.” In other words, she was about as New Age as you can get.

She had a lustrous halo of blonde hair and wore flowing long dresses with bell sleeves. She spoke in a cheery lilting voice as she answered listener questions. She wrote books and published oracle card decks. In fact, the first oracle card deck I owned (not tarot - I got my first tarot deck when I was in high school) was Doreen’s Archangel Oracle.

During Doreen’s Hay House heyday, most of the books and decks she published were about angels, but as her popularity grew she branched out into all sorts of creatures - mermaids, dolphins, fairies, unicorns. She talked about numerology and twin flames. She gave workshops and created certification programs. She was the queen of light and soft New Age philosophy.

In 2017, Doreen took a sharp turn. After experiencing a vision of Jesus, she fell on her knees and begged God to forgive her wickedness. She was baptized as a Christian and disavowed her work. These days, Doreen is a brunette. Gone is the blonde hair and mystical wardrobe. Her website, which was once a glittering pastel affair, is now plain and serious, branded with a gold Bible and cross.

I had already lost touch with what Doreen was doing when her conversion took place, but back in the early 2000s, I listened to her quite a bit. I listened to Hay House radio in general, and I wasn’t particularly discerning. I listened to everybody. My first real introduction to New Age philosophy had come in the 80s when I read and was captivated by Shirley MacLaine’s Out on Limb. The first time I heard about the idea of communicating with angels was in the mid 90s when I read the book Angelspeake.

So when I tuned into Hay House radio in 2005 and let it roll as the background narration to my daily life, I wasn’t shocked or disturbed by ideas like communicating with spirit guides or angels and I was open-minded about just about everything. I listened to Doreen’s show and I bought her products and I used the Archangel deck until the cards started to come apart. It was Doreen who really piqued my interest in the Archangel Michael - an idea or energy or ally - that I leaned on during times of great anxiety.

When I first moved back to Kentucky after ten years in New York, I had an intense driving anxiety. When I sat behind the wheel of my car, my legs would shake so intensely I wasn’t sure I could press the pedals. I put an AA Michael finger rosary next to my gear shift and asked for angelic protection everytime I had to drive, envisioning my car encased in protective light. The first time I flew after 911, I was terrified, but as Doreen suggested, I closed my eyes during take-off and imagined angels holding up the wings of the plane. These techniques worked for me. You can certainly debate why they worked but honestly, I don’t really care why. They moved me into a better feeling place and did no harm.

As it is with all spiritual teachers, there were times when Doreen said things that I didn’t agree with at all. She talked about how one day we would all be breatharians, for instance. She talked about how, at some point, the earth would be plunged into days of darkness, the communication grid would go down, and we would have to rely on telepathy to communicate with one another. I remember this in particular because it sounded so much like doomsday religion. She said that gargoyles held and attracted negative energy, just like heavy metal music.

There were other things about Doreen that raised a red flag for me from the beginning. Her last name, for instance, which was the last name of her second husband. I now know that Doreen has been married five times, but has chosen to keep her second husband’s name, a name that conveniently works for selling angel cards or Christianity.

Another was her doctorate. Doreen often mentioned that she held a Ph.D. in Counseling Psychology and referred to herself as Dr. Doreen Virtue. This caught my attention because it felt to me like a way of giving herself credibility. I used the internet, such as it was at that time, to look into Doreen’s doctorate and found that it was a distance learning degree from a non-accredited university. (California Coast University has since become accredited, but it wasn’t when Doreen got her degree.)

These things chipped at my trust of Doreen, even back in my Hay House days. Eventually, I got back on the train of my spiritual life and headed toward the next station; I dropped Doreen from my rotation without rancor. Hay House Radio itself ceased to be at some point, I vaguely remember that it became available to paid members only for a while, but I could be wrong. It all just sort of faded away for me as my personal train carried on down the tracks.

Six years ago, I was mindlessly scrolling when I saw a post in a facebook group that said, “What happened to Doreen Virtue?” Always eager to hear the latest gossip, I immediately went to Youtube to find out. I navigated to Doreen’s channel and discovered a video of Doreen telling the story of why she now denounced her work. She barely resembled the version of herself I remembered. Her physical and energetic appearance was completely different. I discovered that she had published a blog post, an A to Z of practices to be avoided. This list, which reads like a Chick Tract, includes everything you can think of from affirmations for personal empowerment to statues to drum circles.

A friend texted me a link to an article about Doreen’s change of faith with the shocked face emoji. I replied “I know. It’s such a shame.” My friend didn’t respond, so I suppose she didn’t care for my flippant answer, but it was the truth. I did think it was a shame and I still do, not because I place too much credence in any of Doreen’s teachings pre or post conversion, but because I hate to see anyone fall victim to dogmatic fear. Those who live in spiritual fear infuse others with that same fear. That isn’t fair. And it certainly isn’t love.

Fundamentalism is Killing Us

Humans often feel we must make others wrong in order to be right. It’s one of our most misguided qualities. (i.e. my religion is the one true religion, and therefore your religion is wrong.) When Doreen converted to Christianity, she could have simply converted, but she didn’t do that. When she became Christian, she had to make her other work, her past experiences, “demonic.” She had to invalidate even her own vision of Jesus.

Am I working my own version of making others wrong so that I can be right when I tell you how I feel about what Doreen is doing? Maybe, but I don’t think so, because I honestly don’t care what Doreen believes to be true about god. I don’t care how she prays or how she worships. She has every right to believe what she believes, just like the people who flock to the mega churches that populate my town. The fact that I am offended by what they do and say in those churches means nothing. Who cares? It’s none of my business what they do…until it is my business.

It’s my business when hateful theology costs lives, when people in the LGBTQ+ community are disowned by their families and forced through the torture of conversion therapy; when laws are passed to ban gender affirming care, when we no longer have a say in our own reproductive health; when we are asked to sit back and quietly witness violence; when facsists are revered as messiahs…then it’s my business. And yours.

Here is the part where I’m going to tell you what I think about rigid belief systems:

• Dogma is dogma, whether it comes from the New Age or the corner church.

• Fundamentalist belief systems of all kinds are violent and fuel violence.

• Conservative Christianity conflates love with fear and controls its followers with anxiety and shame.

• No one knows for sure what happens after we die or what or who “God” is.

When it first happened, people were upset. I read all sorts of comments speculating what may have happened to Doreen. Some thought she was a con artist who conned in the New Age as long as she could and had now moved on to con the Christians. Some thought she was a walk-in (a new soul had entered her body. I don’t believe in this concept, by the way.) Some thought she had been possessed. Some thought she had experienced something while navigating the astral plane that had frightened her. Some thought she was experiencing a psychotic break.

We are alive and that means we change. It takes great courage to announce to the world that you are no longer who you have been or aren’t who they believe you to be. It’s a big deal to walk away from your life’s work, to publicly change your mind. If Doreen had done that, if she had announced that her beliefs had changed and she was no longer going to produce angel content, I probably wouldn’t be thinking about her right now. There probably wouldn’t be people still debating what happened to her.

But that isn’t what Doreen did. Doreen didn’t just experience a change of heart or a change of faith. She set about destroying the very thing that had brought peace to her followers and attacked the people who had supported her by telling them they were going to hell for doing what she herself had taught them to do.

A Little Bit of Knowledge is a Dangerous Thing

Doreen’s literalist Christian theology is fixated on the idea that the enemy is always tempting us, always trying to trick us. If we are deceived and fail to repent, what happens? You guessed it. Straight to a fiery eternity we go. This isn’t the story of a loving god. It isn’t a story of love at all. It is a story of fear, the fear that consumes us when we dislodge from the heart.

Maybe Doreen is a grifter working a new grift, but I lean toward thinking her conversion was genuine, if misguided. Perhaps Doreen Virtue, like many of her followers, is simply easily influenced. This is not a value judgment. We are all susceptible to influence to varying degrees.

And while it may seem like an extreme course correction, to go from “Love and Light” to “You’re consorting with demons,” I think these two philosophical paths aren’t really that different. They are both, at their essence, fear-based.

Love and light theologies are often fixated on thinking the right thoughts, doing the right things, staying in the positive vibes only. Just as it is with fundamentalist religion, in much New Age teaching, everything exists on a binary of good and evil. Even back in the day, Doreen marketed her angel card decks by framing them as a “safe” alternative to the “dangerous” tarot.

Here is what I think happened to Doreen:

I think she rode her train to the end of the line.

I think Doreen, when she was answering questions on her radio show and speaking to sold out auditoriums and charging thousands of dollars to certify angel therapists, started to believe that she was a direct channel for God, that she was speaking for God. She started to believe that she knew the truth. Even though she was paying lip service to concepts like love and unity and oneness and acceptance, Doreen was fully in her ego, and when we are fully in our ego with the spiritual concepts and start to think we have all the answers, we lose touch with reality, with compassion, with kindness.

I believe there are so many systems of belief, so many rituals, so many different ideas about god on this planet, because there are so many different people. We are not one size fits all. I believe that god is the creative energy of love, and we have options for finding and communing with that love.

I believe the doorway to God is within us. We find it in our hearts. If we stay grounded in the heart, we keep love the center of our spiritual lives, but if we abandon the heart, if we reach too far outside of ourselves and place our trust too completely in a leader or a doctrine or a concept, we become confused and ungrounded.

I think Doreen got too far away from her heart. She had run to the end of what she could do in the New Age and was ready to be hooked by the next big thing when she heard a fire and brimstone sermon. When Doreen was on her knees begging for redemption, she was absolutely engulfed by fear, and with fear as her guide, she has re-directed the narcissism she developed as the Angel Lady toward judging others. She has seated herself as the judge of other people’s path, of their spiritual practice.

Judging and condemning others for believing differently than you is not loving. Doreen probably believes she is loving her audience when tells them they are being deceived by demons, but she isn’t. She has aligned herself with the most cruel and damaging of Christian rhetoric. And it makes me sad. I feel sad about her, but mostly, I feel sad for her. It must be an incredibly painful way to go through life.

You may wonder why I feel so comfortable calling Doreen by name and speculating about her life. The answer is, Doreen is a public figure and chose to go through this re-brand publicly, but more importantly, she is harming people. There is nothing wrong with deciding something isn’t for you and changing your course. But there is something wrong with harming other people.

I remember thinking, when I used to listen to her show, that she was a soft place for those who were struggling with religious trauma. She offered a gentle way to begin thinking about one’s spiritual self outside of the control of the evangelical church. I am sad for the people who found her work to be a comfort, who started working with angel cards as a way to find spiritual peace, only to be slammed by her. I am sad for those who feel confused, who doubt themselves because of the doctrine she promotes.

No one else’s version of God has to be yours. No document or collection of writings is the infallible word of gGod, and no leader is your authority. In my opinion, and it’s just that - my opinion - to be one with love is to let go of dogmas and allow yourself to exist as you naturally are.

The tarot is a deck of cards. It is a language, a way of interpreting the world. Demonizing the tarot in order to promote your own product - whether that product is an angel oracle deck or a Fundamentalist view of Jesus - is unethical marketing.

What We Find the Surface

I’ve often heard people say that practicing spirituality without religion lacks depth, that those without religion are skimming around on the surface of things, taking a little bit of this and a little bit of that, but never diving deeply enough into anything to encounter challenging complex theology. I agree that this is often the case, but deep thinking about God does not only exist within religion, and that same shallowness is often found in its practitioners.

Just like those who quote scripture, The New Age tends to pull metaphysical and spiritual concepts out of context. So much of the confusion we’re seeing now can be traced back to this sort of shallowness, the belief, for instance, that reality is formless and that we, as individuals, have complete control over our lives. That’s insane, and Doreen taught some insane ideas when she was in the New Age just as she’s teaching insane ideas now. Two sides of the same coin.

As the train I’m on travels the tracks of spiritual exploration, I find it increasingly difficult to claim any name for myself, to make any sort of declaration that I am one thing at the exclusion of other things. I am not a mini-god and my experience isn’t more important than anyone else’s. I am deeply uncomfortable claiming that anything is “the” truth. I am most comfortable holding opposites, open to possibilities, and I want every person to have the freedom to dance with the divine in the way that is harmonious with their soul, understanding that they dance may change over time.

Perhaps I’m thinking lately about Doreen Virtue because these are such perilous times. Conservative Christianity has been effectively used as a tool to manipulate the country and our government. Q-Anon was able to grab from the New Age and Christianity because ungrounded fear is ungrounded fear, no matter which side of the coin you’re on.

Perhaps I’m thinking about her because I am thinking about my life, the right and wrong turns I’ve taken, the places I’ve been, the people I’ve been, the things I once believed that I no longer believe.

When I remember listening to Doreen, I remember the feeling of peace. I remember listening to her voice and feeling reassured that I was not alone, that love was all around me. It was simple, and yes, and admittedly shallow. But it felt good. It was a comfort. Sometimes I miss how uncomplicated it was. Sometimes I close my eyes and remember what it felt like to listen to Doreen’s message of love and light and feel protected, surrounded by the wings of angels, knowing that all is well.