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Ernest Holmes: Feel the Bern

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By Harv Bishop

“The money that is now being spent in preparing for war would completely abolish poverty from the Earth. It is a terrific thing that, right now, the world is in a position to do away with impoverishment!”

“…When only six percent of the National Budget is for the alleviation of impoverishment and 72- or 73- percent is for destruction, one knows there is something wrong in the worldly state of affairs and in the state of the human mind. When we stop to think of these things, we know that there is something lacking, there is something missing, there is something that we have overlooked.”

Is this quote from the latest stump speech by presidential candidate Bernie Sanders?

No. It is Ernest Holmes, founder of the Science of Mind philosophy. His article “World Peace is Not an Illusion,” appeared in the July 1955 Science of Mind magazine during the Cold War years. It is all the more remarkable because Holmes is believed by some to have been a Republican.*

Holmes- Feel the Berne
Holmes portrait by Tim Botta

Several inferences, both spiritual and temporal, can be drawn from this article about peace and the elimination of poverty that foreshadow the sometimes-controversial emerging progressive New Thought vision of creating  world that works for everyone.

What does this article tell us?

First, Holmes was clearly interested in a world that works for everyone. He believed peace is possible and the elimination of poverty is possible.

Secondly, he calls for prayer and affirmation of peace. In the article he writes, “Peace is the fundamental reality of God.” But he doesn’t stop there.

Holmes is a pragmatist. He believes New Thought can walk and chew gum and the same time. He sees both the world as it can be as consciousness is raised and he sees the world as it is and does not shy away from calling out what he sees as mistaken priorities in government spending.

New Thought adherents can still suggest that seeing wrongs in the world rather than only perfection perpetuates those wrongs because “what we think about grows.” But Holmes did not ignore or deny the world of “effect.”

Some New Thought proponents say that evolving our own consciousness and creating our reality is what New Thought is about. A Utopian vision of a world that works for everyone gets in the way of that, they say. Others argue that prayer and visualizing a world that works for everyone is where our responsibility begins and ends. Affirmative prayer alone will carry the day.

But Holmes sees a role for both action and prayer. That action involves some level of government spending to eliminate poverty not only domestically but also globally (which would be abhorrent to many on the political right today).

Ernest Holmes

He does not advocate that the impoverished rely solely on mind power metaphysics to become wealthy. There is no suggestion that the poor created their fate by their negative thinking. Poverty and war exist, in part, he believes, because of our collective beliefs and fear and because of budget priorities set by our governing system.

In the same article he writes “I am not a pacifist… Let us realize if the world is healed of war and brought into peace it won’t have been because guns were bigger and better, or more of them. We need them until it does heal itself.”

Holmes recognizes that peace and prosperity are fundamental potentials of God realization, but pragmatic steps (government spending on poverty and weapons) are needed until the world is healed. Holmes accepts the practical steps that  must be done while holding a higher vision.

Today, some New Thought folks on the right say New Thought ministers and churches should only be in the business of growing individual consciousness and, like 12-Step groups, avoid political “issues.” Others charge that the mission of creating a world that works for everyone naturally favors “utopian” issues embraced by the left such as peace, equality and the environment. Therefore, they say, minsters should speak to spiritual not political issues.

I could foresee a New Thought minster today being criticized as being “political not spiritual” for uttering the same words from the pulpit that Ernest Holmes wrote in Science of Mind magazine 60 years ago.

Why?

Clearly the center of gravity for Republicans has moved far to the right of the Eisenhower- and Nixon-era Republicans of Holmes’s time when society had more or less made peace with a post-New Deal consensus that did not hold individuals accountable for their own economic misfortune.

We also live in a time when many formally consensus issues including peace, eliminating poverty and protecting the environment have become political trip wires.

Taking away incandescent light bulbs and replacing them with energy saving CFLs and LEDs is seen as a blow to individual liberty by some on the political right. So too the Chevy Volt and other electric cars according to University of Michigan scholar Andrew Hofmann’s book “How Culture Shapes the Climate Debate.” The extreme right believes that climate change is a false Trojan horse designed to undermine the free market and bring about socialism, so LED light bulbs and hybrid electric cars are harbingers of a socialist takeover. If these things are considered the first steps to “socialism,” how much more risk would New Thought ministers face for talking about government social programs which are mistakenly believed to be socialist?*

Today’s ministers, ironically, may have less freedom to speak out than Ernest Holmes writing shortly after the anti-communist hysteria of McCarthyism.

Our polarized politics creates a difficult to negotiate razor’s edge for New Thought minsters and adherents. It also makes creative problem solving less likely, robbing us of solutions that could honor the best of what the left and right have to offer to improve people’s lives. Is a minister speaking on LGBTQ equality being political or talking about basic human rights? I have a gay student, studying to be a Lutheran minister, ardently Republican and equally outspoken for LGBTQ rights. That kind of non-stereotypical, creative synthesis is lost when we view the world in black and white and shout at each other instead of engage in dialogue.

I’ll stand with Ernest Holmes. New Thought can walk and chew gum. We can accommodate both individual spiritual growth and concern for the planet. We can hold a high vision and take pragmatic steps — that includes creative ideas from left and right — toward a world that works for everyone.

*Rev. Dr. Marilyn Leo, daughter of life-long Holmes friend Dr. Reginald Armor, and author of “In His Company: Ernest Holmes Remembered,” says that Holmes political affiliation is unknown though it is widely speculated within Religious Science that he was Republican. Two of Holmes close associates and successors were Republican, she says.

* The modern welfare state was designed in the 1880s in Germany to blunt early socialism’s impact and preserve capitalism. The same motives have been ascribed to America’s New Deal Keynesian economics.

Thanks to Mitch Horowitz for highlighting Holmes’s fascinating July 1955 article, “World Peace is Not an Illusion,” from Science of Mind magazine in the comments following Mitch’s blog post on these pages “What Does New Thought Say About War?” You can access a PDF of the July 1955 issue of Science of Mind magazine via the Science of Mind archives website.

For more about a politics that transcends polarization see the Institute for Cultural Evolution founded by Steve McIntosh and Carter Phipps.

Tim Botta’s artwork appears at http://timbotta.tumblr.com/ and Fine Art America. 

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7 Comments

  1. Meditation this morning reinforces this idea, that faith results in action. The problems in our world are the result of action that justifies itself by backing into faith. Seems to me there is plenty of that no matter where a person is in the political spectrum. It’s today’s focus on the wonderful, free http://Pray-As-You-Go.org

  2. In the 1950s, both political parties, Democrats and Republicans, had a range from left to right, from liberal to conservative.
    The democratic liberal wing was largely made up of union members. Republican Liberals were often upper-middle-class business people, academics, and others mostly from New England in the middle Atlantic states.
    So the viewpoints expressed by Dr. Holmes in the 1955 article would not have been out of place for Republican who leaned toward liberalism.

    The confluence of cultural economic development (as described in Spiral Dynamics), and the changes in the make up of the two major political parties that you mention have led many in new thought to be more liberal today than in the past. This does create a challenge for those in ministry and for organization as a whole, as we seek to apply spiritual principles to the world’s significant problems.
    When every issue is politicized, every approach to every issue becomes a political statement. My thoughts are that only by cultivating a great capacity to listen to those with positions across the spectrum of any issue can we truly provide our spiritual principles to the greatest audience.

  3. Well said and written! Thank you! I don’t know if Ernest ever spoke in terms of “karma” –but if there are Universal Laws that move us forward – i.e. seeing the Truth (the Essence) of the situation–I would think that there also might be a Universal Law that pertains to “omission”—neglecting to do something when it is called to our attention. (It’s like “The Parable of the Talents-not using the talents that have been given to you).
    I think that sometimes the challenge in New Thought is that we can say that “prayer” will “solve it” … we “say” it, then sit down and watch the nightly news or some mind-wasting sitcom that actually puts us back in the stream of the “collective consciousness”. Yes, prayer does change things, but along with the element of prayer comes “faith” and “behind faith” is action and as Jesus said “faith without works is dead.
    James 2:14-26New King James Version (NKJV)
    14 What does it profit, my brethren, if someone says he has faith but does not have works? Can faith save him? 15 If a brother or sister is naked and destitute of daily food, 16 and one of you says to them, “Depart in peace, be warmed and filled,” but you do not give them the things which are needed for the body, what does it profit? 17 Thus also faith by itself, if it does not have works, is dead.

    YES! ” We can accommodate both individual spiritual growth and concern for the planet. We can hold a high vision and take pragmatic steps — that includes creative ideas from left and right — toward a world that works for everyone.” –Thank you Harv!

    1. Thanks so much for your kind words Sharon. Very good point about omission and neglect in the face of injustice. Thoreau made two important and similar points. Because we are connected to a larger Reality we are responsible to address other’s suffering and engaging as business as usual is being complicit. His direct point was to business owners and such trading with the South even if they did not own slaves. Vaclav Havel the playwright, leader the Czech resistance and eventual president, argued that if the dictatorial state required beer-makers to brew beer according to a state recipe it was then an act of resistance and follow one’s ability to make the best beer possible.

  4. Remember Eisenhower himself was asked by Truman to run as president as a Democrat (conservative?)
    and became angry and caustic when he declined. Moderate as a Republican Eisenhower had planned a
    trip to Russia in response to Khrushchev’s invitation. Holmes’ Republican affiliation would not be con-
    sidered unusual in view of that, don’t you think?

    edt

    1. Hello Erik,
      Agreed. As per my comments about the rightward drift away from the New Deal consensus to some extent by both parties and most especially contemporary Republicans, yes it would not be unusual for that time period. Also Dr. Jim Lockard’s excellent comments above are exactly on point.
      I don’t see the irony in Holmes possibly being Republican in that historical context, but in the fact that today his position would be considered to have commonalities with progressive Democrats. For that matter Nixon would be almost considered more Democrat than Republican by today’s measures! Ultimately Holmes position and record on these issues, and others, transcends political boundaries.
      Best,
      Harv

  5. I think that Holmes would would have eschewed any political label. Though he may have voted more often for Republican candidates, I think it doubtful that he thought he “was” a Republican.

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