New Age Religion and Western Culture

New Age Religion and Western Culture is a historian's account of how twentieth-century alternative spirituality took shape, written from a critical rather than a believing standpoint. Its central argument is that the New Age is best understood as esotericism mirrored in secular thought, a reworking of older currents in the light of modern science and psychology.

The method is empirical and source-based, bracketing the researcher's own metaphysical commitments and treating mind-power, healing, and magical currents as objects of historical analysis. The wider framework, developed further in Hanegraaff's later work, casts esotericism as rejected knowledge, the large domain of ideas progressively excluded by mainstream theology and Enlightenment science.

The study is among the most influential academic accounts of how nineteenth-century New Thought and twentieth-century New Age ideas about mind and reality emerged, and it anchors the scholarly infrastructure now used to study the lineage critically.