When Wellness Language Sounds Christian – but Isn’t

I spent the weekend with a bunch of weirdos. And I mean that in the best way, and occasionally in the worst. Let me explain.

As a Christian health coach who believes in ancestral health, sunlight, and local food…

I’m used to being called weird.

Those were mostly the kind of weirdos I was with all weekend at the Seeking Whole Health conference in Wooster, Ohio.

But there was another kind of weird that popped up occasionally but persistently… 

It’s the kind of weird that one of my favorite YouTubers and authors, Melissa Dougherty, would call nopey nonsense. Bad theology. New Thought.

Bad theology hurts people. I’ve seen it first hand.
So, while I want to tell you about the good, I also want to address what is deceptive and dangerous that was hiding within the good. Threatening to poison it.

And the good was so good, guys. The conference began and ended with singing and worship, driving home with each note that the purpose of our health is to bring glory to God.

Over and over, as we explored different avenues of health, it was repeated like a refrain, that our bodies are a temple of the Holy Spirit; they belong to God, and so it is our responsibility to care for them.

But like a discordant note hiding in the harmony, red flags of bad theology snuck in.

Brief references to the power of our words to heal. Things I noticed but wondered if maybe I was being too picky, too judgemental.

I can be that way. It’s something I’m working on.

However, it finally became undeniable and my jaw nearly dropped to the floor when I sat in a lecture where nearly 15 minutes was dedicated to “The Hidden Messages in Water” and flippant quotations of “the power of life and death is in the tongue.”

If you aren’t familiar, and I don’t blame you if you’re not – “The Hidden Messages in Water” is a book in which the author claims that he performed studies that showed if you talked nicely to water or played nice music for it, it froze into prettier crystals than if you said mean things to it or played it rock music (which, frankly, discredits the whole study in my estimation anyway because I personally love rock music).

No mention that this supposed study was performed privately and the methodology and data never shared publicly or peer-reviewed.
No mention that the supposed doctor performing the study got his degree from a discredited degree mill, and has no actual education in science or medicine.
No mention of the absence mechanism or repeatability.

Just a statement of the claims in the book as if they were undoubted truth, a quick reference to Proverbs 18:21, and then he said something that made me look around to see if I was the only one who’d noticed. “It’s not just a Bible verse, folks.”

As if somehow being the word of God could be superseded by anything else or more.

But before I could finish scanning the room we were off to the races for 15 minutes of talk about how we have the power to change our cells and our health with our words.

And, I’ll be honest, I’ve been in this space long enough that I was braced for this moment. That wasn’t what made my jaw nearly drop. It was the reaction.

The room that had been quietly, attentively listening to 30 minutes of talk on epigenetics, suddenly filled with the sound of clapping, amens, and emphatic agreement.

Because we’d hit a moment that felt spiritual. It resonated as more important. Truthful.
After all, doesn’t scripture deserve emphatic agreement from a room full of Christians?!

The trouble is that even the demons can quote scripture to you.
Satan himself tempted Eve by distorting the words of God. 

And let me be clear by saying that I think this speaker is a genuine believer and is errant but sincere in his theology on this. I’m in no way saying that he’s a devil.

I am, however, saying that the devil uses bad theology to deceive and derail believers. To get us to believe wrong things.

This belief that our words have power to change physical reality is a wrong one. Unbiblical.

And this wasn’t just one odd moment in one lecture.

I’ve heard versions of this idea for years in the health and wellness space.

Different wording. Different packaging. Same ideology underneath.

This belief that our words can change physical reality didn’t start in the church.
It comes from a movement called New Thought that took hold in America in the 19th century and has had deep and widespread influence.

Over time, that influence bled into the church.
Into self-help.
And into the wellness movement.

In fact, New Thought and its close cousin, the Human Potential Movement, helped lay the foundations for the modern wellness culture as we know it.

Those movements aren’t Christian, though they often claim to be. They support this claim by cherry picking Bible verses to suit their needs instead of seeing them in the context of scripture.

And the context of scripture is that we’re not God. We’re fallen, sinful, and not in control.
From creation to the instructions to the church, we see this truth repeated: we are called to serve Him.

But we hear that so often we can breeze past what it really means, so let me say it another way:

God doesn’t obey our commands — we’re called to obey His.

The idea that we can change water, our cells, or anything else with our words puts us on God’s throne. It pretends that we can have the power and authority that belong only to Him.

That sounds really nice, until life gets hard.

It can be a delightful lie to believe on the surface, but it’s also a great burden.

Suffering is part of our life. Maybe great or small, but unavoidable.

If we believe that God is in control and has a plan that works together for our good, we can suffer with hope in the promises of God.

If we believe that our words have the power to change the universe if only we have enough faith, we pick up a burden that is heavy and not ours.

Either the situation changes and we convince ourselves we wield power that isn’t ours. We move another step further toward making gods of ourselves.

Or the situation doesn’t change.
Maybe it gets worse. Maybe it ends in the worst way we can imagine.

And now we carry the burden of that suffering with guilt, feeling like our faith wasn’t strong enough.
Or anger that God didn’t hold up His end of the deal.

That is the stuff that leads to deconstruction or just walking away. It leaves us angry and bitter toward God, or struggling in despair and guilt over our “lack of faith.”

Or we stay in the church, but ultimately worship ourselves instead of learning submission to God.

And one of the most overlooked tragedies of it all is that we miss out on the opportunity to be brought a little closer to Him.

We miss the chance to allow Him to have authority and control in those hardest moments and to learn to trust Him and understand His love for us. 

We forget that our prayers don’t change God. He uses them to change us, to make us more like Christ. To learn to pray not our will, but HIS be done.

Our words and our thoughts may not change physical reality, but they do change our spirits and God created us as whole, embodied people – body and spirit together. Each impacts the other.

So there IS life and death in the tongue, that is the inerrant word of God.
There is a reason that Paul tells us in Philippians to think on what is true and praiseworthy. 

Believing our thoughts and words create reality is an attempt to make God obedient to us.

But taking our thoughts captive in obedience to God changes us.

It changes our spirit.

And, just as Proverbs tells us repeatedly, it benefits our health too.

Not because thoughts and words change molecules, but because they change our hormones, our stress responses, and our actions.

This is where the distinction matters most: Scripture is not calling us to ignore our thoughts, but to bring them under obedience to Christ—not because they create reality, but because they shape us.

It can feel like a distinction without a difference, but the distinction actually makes all the difference.

I’ve watched too many friends walk away from their faith or allow it to be distorted by happy little lies that feel spiritual and use Bible verses to back themselves up. It’s been the same story since Eden – bald-faced lies aren’t what tear Christians away from their faith. Deceptions are.

I don’t believe that Eve ate the fruit and participated in introducing sin to the world because she just really wanted to do something she absolutely knew she shouldn’t. Instead, she took her thoughts off the completeness of what God told her, and allowed bits and pieces of it, distorted and out of context, to make her doubt what was true and right and give her an excuse to give into temptation.

And what’s more confusing than feeling like you’re the only one who feels a little weird about a respected Christian speaker making a claim, quoting scripture, and being cheered for it?

Without the right context, it’s easy to feel like, well, didn’t God say?

And this is exactly why these ideas spread so easily in the wellness world.

Because they don’t sound anti-Christian. They sound spiritual.

Biblical, even.

So I’m not saying any of this to nitpick or judge. Rather, to try to draw a distinction clearly because it’s in the confusing squishy, blurry places that we get lost. 

Let me close by reiterating that I believe this particular speaker, and all of them that brought up these kinds of practices, are sincere believers in Jesus. I believe deeply that they are well meaning and love God and want to help people.

And – I say this as someone who is confident that I have gaps and errors in my beliefs that I hope will be corrected – they are working from theology that is in error.
A particularly pernicious error.

Which is why it’s worth calling out and detailing to the best of my ability.

This kind of belief, along with its cousins like affirmations, manifestation, empty-mind meditation, and automatic writing, is everywhere in the wellness culture.

Because modern wellness culture grew out of the New Thought and Human Potential movements that created these ideas in the first place.

And because these movements are expert-level at using Christian language and Bible verses to sound Christian, many well-intentioned believers are fooled.

So if this is something you’ve encountered before or you do in the future, my goal is that you’re prepared to see it and to test it against scripture.

Scripture in its full context, not cherry-picked to sound warm and fuzzy.

NOTE:

If this topic is new to you and you want to dive deeper, I suggest starting with the book Happy Lies by Melissa Dougherty. I cannot recommend it highly enough. Or go check out her YouTube channel. She’s the expert on identifying these ideas and answering them with sound Christian doctrine and logic.