New Age author and activist Marianne Williamson, best known for her promotion of “A Course in Miracles” – a course supposedly given to a woman who claimed to be channeling Jesus – has announced that she is running for president.

Only in America can someone with Williamson’s offbeat background make a serious run to become president of the world’s largest economy and most powerful military in a world riddled with terrorism, nuclear threats and economic uncertainty.

So what are her qualifications for the job? That all depends on how you define “the job.” If you consider it to be what it is, she has absolutely no qualifications. But if you consider the job to be about “seeking higher wisdom” then she just might be your pick.

“My campaign for the presidency is dedicated to this search for higher wisdom,” she explains on her website. “Its purpose is to create a new political possibility in America — where citizens awaken, our hearts and minds are uplifted, and our democracy once more becomes a thing about which we can all feel proud.”

It might sound good, but a deeper look reveals a few troubling facts that most American voters would want to be aware of before they enter the voting booth in 2020.

For example, the Houston born Williamson describes herself as having explored many careers, including “cocktail waitress and lounge singer” before she began giving lectures on A Course in Miracles to small groups in the Los Angeles area in the 1980’s.

For those who never heard of it, the Course - otherwise known as the "New Age Bible" - was written by Helen Shucman, Ph.D., a prominent clinical and research psychologist and Associate Professor of Medical Psychology at the College of Physicians and Surgeons at the Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center in New York City. Schucman, who once taught Father Benedict Groeschel, claimed to have “channeled” Jesus Christ who dictated the Course to her over a period of seven years.

The best proof we have that this book did not come from Jesus Christ can be found in its many heretical treatments of Christ, the Holy Spirit, and the doctrine of salvation. For example, the Course teaches that there is no sin and that guilt and suffering have no purpose.

Moira Noonan, the author of Ransomed from Darkness, who was once a student of the Course herself, explains more about what students are taught.

“We don’t have to die in order to go Heaven. We just have to wake up . . . Each of us is exactly and entirely the way God created us to be: sinless and wholly innocent. The Course is adamant about this. There is no sin.”

According to this distorted theology, men and women don’t require salvation in the biblical sense because they are already divine. But it goes even further, teaching that sin, guilt, death, judgment, propitiatory atonement, and other biblical doctrines are “attack” philosophies, meaning they are concepts that stand in the way of spiritual progress and the realization of our true divine nature.

The program, which takes a year to complete, is clearly designed to eliminate these Judeo-Christian beliefs from the mind of the student and impose a philosophy that is utterly contrary to the Gospel of Jesus Christ.

Of course, this is not how Williamson describes the Course on her campaign website. Instead, she presents it as something entirely innocent.

“The Course is not a religion, but rather a self-study program of spiritual psychotherapy based on universal spiritual themes," she writes. "There is no dogma or doctrine; it is simply a book on how to forgive. I had no idea at the time that my study of The Course, plus writing and speaking about it, would turn into a 35-year career.”

While going on to become a New Thought minister with a church in Warren, Michigan, Williamson eventually wrote her own book about the Course under the deceptive title, A Return to Love.

For obvious reasons, she doesn’t get into any of these details on the campaign trail and uses the kind of typical poli-speak that could come from the mouth of any presidential candidate.

"I want to engage voters in a more meaningful conversation about America," she said in a statement. “About our history, about how each of us fit into it, and how to create a sustainable future. Our national challenges are deep, but our political conversation is shallow. My campaign is for people who want to dig deeper into the questions we face as a nation, and deeper into finding the answers."

For some strange reason, she seems to think that a background in A Course in Miracles is the way to find these answers to the pressing problems of our day.

I wonder how Americans would feel about this if they knew the whole story, and not just the sanitized version that is being presented by Williamson and her campaign.

We can only hope that reporters do some homework on this candidate and ask her some serious questions about her belief system which is hardly in tandem with the majority of U.S. citizens.

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