^{April 15, 2026}

Former Astrologist Reveals the Dangers of New Age Spiritualism

Inside This Episode

Why would a psychic and astrologist walk away from the very practices that once defined her life? Angela Scafidi (Heaven & Healing Podcast) used tarot, astrology, yoga, crystals, and her psychic abilities to help others find healing—but despite real results, she found herself more broken than when she started.

In this episode, Angela gives a rare look inside the New Age, the spiritual reality she believes is behind it, and the moment, at her lowest point, Jesus changed everything.

She also shares a strong warning for Christians following the Epstein files—and why she believes there’s more happening beneath the surface than most people realize.

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Transcript

Eric Huffman: Why did this woman...

Angela Scafidi: This new moon is all about communicating your heart's desires.

Eric Huffman: ...leave her New Age spirituality to follow Jesus?

Angela Scafidi: Satan masquerades as an angel of light, and that's exactly how the occult shows up. Of course, it's going to be helpful. Of course, it's going to be accurate. Of course, you're going to see real results. Why would you pursue it otherwise? But something having spiritual power does not mean that it is good power.

Eric Huffman: Today, former psychic and astrologist Angela Scafidi gives us a rare look inside her former world and shares how, in her darkest moment, everything changed.

Angela Scafidi: Didn't matter how much money I spent on the crystals. It didn't matter how good at astrology I was. It didn't matter how well I felt like I could communicate with the spirit realm. At the end of the day, I was still just as broken as I was the first day I pursued any of that stuff.

Eric Huffman: When did the time finally come when you came to the end of yourself and realized you couldn't continue down that path?

Angela Scafidi: I was having just an absolute crash-out mental breakdown on my kitchen floor, crying my eyes out, and I called out just... I just said, "Jesus, save me." Three words accomplished what 10 years of trying to heal myself on the New Age hamster wheel never did.

Eric Huffman: Wow.

Angela Scafidi, welcome to Maybe God.

Angela Scafidi: Thank you so much for having me. It's an honor to be here today.

Eric Huffman: It's the coolest thing to talk to you. I've seen you elsewhere. I've watched your podcast, Heaven & Healing Podcast, which I recommend highly. You've got an incredible story to tell. We're going to tell it or let you tell it in a minute. But first, I just want to get you familiarized with people who might not know your story yet and not know who you are, what you're doing. Just tell us now, you're a woman on a mission, clearly. I mentioned the podcast, but you're everywhere right now, at least in Christian circles. What is the mission you're on? How would you describe your mission?

Angela Scafidi: To put it as plainly and simply as I can, really to expose the darkness, but more importantly, to reveal the Light of the World that is Jesus Christ. He's the only solution for it.

Eric Huffman: Amen. Short and sweet. I like that.

Angela Scafidi: Amen.

Eric Huffman: That was great.

Angela Scafidi: Don't get used to it. I'm not short and sweet.

Eric Huffman: Me either. I've heard you say that revival is happening in the land, especially in terms of people who've been in New Age practice and things like that, New Age spirituality. Like a mass exodus is happening. What are you seeing specifically that leads you to declare revival?

Angela Scafidi: I say often that there is a mass exodus of New Age spiritualists coming to the truth. And I believe it's because when you are wrapped up in sort of that arbitrary spiritualist doctrine, although you claim relativism and everything's about my truth and subjectivity, ultimately, you're seeking Truth, capital T, which is why you become so desperate to sort of define truth on your own terms. But ultimately, that's because there is a hunger, like an insatiable desire to actually know what that truth truly is. Because as we know, truth cannot be subjective.

And so I believe that it is because of that hunger for truth, that ultimately a lot of New Agers find Jesus because that is who He is. He is Truth by name and by function. And so if you are really determined to know the meaning of life, if you are really determined to embody the healing that you're so desperate for on whatever spiritual journey you're currently walking along the path of, it's sort of inevitable to land on Jesus at some point.

Eric Huffman: So these other practices, they promise big and deliver small. They don't satisfy. Just to get the lay of the land again, for people that might not be familiar with what constitutes a New Age practice, give us a sort of spectrum of things we're talking about when we say New Age.

Angela Scafidi: I'm glad you said that because New Age isn't new at all. It's just sort of the quick term that we use, the popular term that we use modernly. But New Age actually started in the Garden of Eden when the serpent said to Eve, "Hey, you can be like God. You can have all this hidden knowledge. You know, you can have divination." That's really the first sin of humanity was the entry point of divination, which is to just essentially circumvent God, His authority. So you want to manipulate His law. You want to access the spirit realm, but you want to do it free from any accountability. You want to become your own God. And so the New Age has been happening since humanity came under the curse of the fall.

That being said, it's just like the broad definition of it. More specifically, what we're really seeing today, more than anything, is the occult. So you have tarot cards, astrology, any form of divination, whether that be fortune-telling, even something as seemingly innocuous as palm reading. You have mediumship, which was actually the open door for me into the occult, seeking mediums, psychics, even yoga, which is something we can get into if you like.

Eric Huffman: We will.

Angela Scafidi: A lot of people don't realize that. There's just so many things. It's just like a smorgasbord of endless modalities. And it really comes from Eastern mysticism to even some forms of Christianity. You know, like they'll take a rosary and add that to their altar or something. It's just kind of pick and choose your own religion like a buffet.

Eric Huffman: But I guess the thread that connects them all together might be the idea of a spiritual shortcut. Is that...?

Angela Scafidi: Correct? Yeah.

Eric Huffman: Okay.

Angela Scafidi: Really self-worship.

Eric Huffman: Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Boy, I want to talk about all of this, and we will in a moment because you have so much to say just from your own experience. You've got such an amazing story. Let's go back then to where it all began. When you were young, I've heard you say you were raised by a single mother. Your grandma played a big part in your life. Just talk about your upbringing a little bit and how those relationships shaped you.

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Angela Scafidi: I do think it is always important to sort of just give the baseline or the foundation of the childhood because when you understand that I had no father figure, so I had no understanding of what that sort of love was like. And God has an order for a reason. He has Himself as the head, and then the man is the head of the household, followed by the wife, followed by the children. So you remove one of those elements, the element really that is supposed to be directly under God, how could we ever have God to begin with if that one key element was missing?

So my mom didn't have a husband and she didn't know the Lord Jesus Christ. So she did the best she could with what she had, which was honestly very little. She was under the impression that she sort of had to step into the masculine in order to fulfill both roles. So I was raised on sort of a feminist ideology really inadvertently because that wasn't necessarily her goal, but it's just the nature of the beast when you're a woman put in that sort of position, and you don't have God to lean on. She had nothing but her own understanding.

So in that, she really relied on my grandmother heavily just for any sort of support. And so now I had two matriarchs that were shepherding me all throughout my life. And I loved my grandmom. She was just my best friend in the world. I never felt like I was missing out on anything. Although I say that, yet I had depression, I had anxiety. So it was the sort of thing where the programming was more subliminal than it was overt. I wasn't aware of all the things that I was missing or all the things that I was really lacking and needing essentially, but it really affected me on a subconscious level, which is where all this stuff later in life starts to come into play. All the seeking and the desire to heal and to fill in this void that I didn't even recognize was there to begin with.

Long story short, grandmom basically co-parented me. And by the time I'm now late teens, very, very early 20s, we never thought... I basically thought my grandmom was immortal. When you're a kid, you don't really think about these sorts of things really hitting you, like death hitting you. So I didn't see any end in sight for our relationship. And then we were just on a cruise ship, my mom, myself, my stepdad at the time—which they're now divorced, and it just happens. We get this phone call from my grandfather that it's not looking good. Well, what does that mean? It means that she doesn't have much time left. And it was just like all of a sudden. I mean, we wouldn't have gone on a vacation if we thought anything was wrong with my grandmom.

So the next phone call was the one where he says, "It's over." And I'm beside myself. I mean, I have this completely apocalyptic moment on the balcony of a cruise ship. I screamed at the top of my lungs. I pulled the curtain down, and I just collapsed into a ball on the floor and I'm screaming, I'm screaming, I'm screaming. I go out on the balcony, I sit, and I just look out at the horizon line and the ocean and the blue sky meeting the water. And I'm just beside myself, like, how could this happen? Because I'm already depressed. My teenage years were really miserable in that sense. I was really isolated. I was an only child. I never had a father again to stick up for me or to teach me any form of grit. And so I was just the bullied loner. And I relied a lot on music to sort of get me through.

Eric Huffman: Did you ever meet your dad?

Angela Scafidi: No. Well, yes, actually, after I got saved, I met my dad.

Eric Huffman: But only then.

Angela Scafidi: Yes.

Eric Huffman: So, when you were a child, we're going to get back to what happened when your grandmother passed away. But when you were in your teens, no dad at home, mom doing the best she can, but sort of not in an explicit way, but an implicit way saying, you know, I guess, passing on to you a semi-feminist kind of ideology of you got to take matters into your own hands. So I can understand the through line there with later in life when you were broken, taking matters into your own hands. And we'll talk about how you did that specifically.

There seems to be, though, Angela, a common theme. Now, that's not a universal theme with people who have stories like yours, but you're not the first person I've talked to that has a similar story and started the same way without dad at home. Do you think there's a... am I reading too much into that? Are kids without dads somehow lower-hanging fruit for our spiritual enemy to attack?

Angela Scafidi: I believe so. Again, going back to just the order that God has designed within the household, there's an intended structure within that nuclear unit. It's supposed to be the man shepherding the family under the headship of Christ, of course, but that element was never there with or without Jesus. And so mom was doing everything. And she didn't have God either.

Eric Huffman: Your take now is that that reality contributed to your struggles in adolescence with depression. Were you harming yourself? How bad did it get?

Angela Scafidi: I was, yeah. I believe that it's a layered sort of thing. The sort of boys when I was a teenager that eventually became the men that I was interested in, it comes back to the daddy issues. That's a stereotype for a reason. I never had modeled to me what masculine love should look like, should actually be. It's really strange how I went for these men that ultimately did reject me a lot of the time or weren't even there.

When I was a teenager, I got involved in online relationships before it was cool, before Tinder existed. That's just an interesting comparison that I've made that I would pursue relationships with guys that I couldn't actually be with physically and that I never had a dad there physically. So it's just so many layers to it, so many components.

But to answer your question in high school, yes, I did self-harm. That was just completely from the depression that I... I wore it like a badge in a way because it felt like the only thing that made me me was how sad I was, which is extremely, extremely depressing to say. But that's just sort of how it was for me as a teenager. And so the self-harm thing, the loathing thing, really, I was like the emo kid. And that became an aesthetic for me because I didn't know how else to cry out for help, really. Like, "Hey, I'm hurting. Hey, I need something. Hey, nothing's right. Something's really off with me. Notice. I want somebody to notice." And so that was the case for me, which is why I got so into the music. Like I mentioned, I used to be all about pop punk and emo music. And I used to say that those bands saved my life because I had no friends. I just had the lyrics and that's really what got me through a lot of that season for me.

Eric Huffman: When you say that, do you mean that you would have been more likely to take your own life, but for the music at the time?

Angela Scafidi: Yeah.

Eric Huffman: Yeah.

Angela Scafidi: And I do believe, you know, everything's hindsight's always 20/20. I don't know if I was ever like truly brave enough to actually end my life. But I know that there were many nights where I felt like I was hanging on by a thread and all I had was just my headphones in.

Eric Huffman: It's so typical of our enemy, though, spiritually speaking, that the only thing keeping you alive, in a sense, was the same thing that was keeping you dead.

Angela Scafidi: Absolutely perpetuating it because, you know, the music I listened to wasn't uplifting by any means. It just sort of..

Eric Huffman: Interesting. Were there spiritual experiences at that stage in your life? Were you having supernatural encounters?

Angela Scafidi: I actually had a supernatural experience when I was very, very young. When I was about three years old, I saw what I thought was a man in the window, and I later described him to my mom. And a couple months later, she, myself, and my grandmother were looking through a photo album and I pointed to a picture and I said, "That's the man." And it was my great-grandfather. So both of them were like, "Wow. Oh," because he had died just a couple months before I was born. So they were just sort of saying, "Wow, he actually came, he visited, like she saw his ghost." And so back to just the subliminal things that get in our mind from a young age, I'm like three, four years old now, just having it just programmed, even the tiniest little seed that, oh, like the dead, dead people from our family can come back and visit us. And I know now that was a familiar spirit. That was not my great-grandfather actually coming to visit me.

Eric Huffman: What do you mean familiar spirit? Demon?

Angela Scafidi: Yeah. So we see familiar spirits in the Bible. They're basically just demons that are assigned to family lines.

Eric Huffman: And he was presenting himself as someone in your family, your great-grandfather?

Angela Scafidi: Yes.

Eric Huffman: And you were probably getting some positive reinforcement from mom and grandma for having-

Angela Scafidi: Absolutely.

Eric Huffman: So now you're a gifted child with some kind of thin membrane with the spirit world kind of.

Angela Scafidi: Right. Which I believe all children really have discernment that we can either steward well or steward poorly. For me, that sort of experience didn't go on and on and on. I wasn't seeing ghosts or demons or angels or anything throughout my teenage years, but I was very interested in the paranormal, or whatever reason, as terrified of it as I was. I also simultaneously couldn't get enough of it. So I would watch the movies, I would watch the shows that scared me because they intrigued me just as much as they scared me. And so I was just drawn to that sort of thing. I did have a few kind of paranormal experiences later on after I started smoking weed, but

Eric Huffman: We'll talk about that in a minute.

Eric Huffman: What was, if anything, your experience with Christianity? What was your opinion of the church growing up?

Angela Scafidi: I grew up very, very loosely Catholic. I went to Catholic school, not throughout the entirety of my childhood, but for a good portion of it. So I was familiar with just the crucifix above the classroom door. I was familiar with the name Jesus. I was familiar with the terminology of God and the Eucharist and confirmation. You know, it's all stuff like I went through. I went through all the motions.

I sat in a confessional booth with a priest terrified out of my mind. I had actually some really, really awful experiences in Catholic school, actually with priests where, praise God, I was never physically abused, but I was emotionally abused by a priest. I had this little boy leave death threats in my desk and very long story short, administration came to the conclusion that I was leaving the death threats in my own desk for attention. So they locked me in a room with a priest to get me to confess, and I didn't because I didn't do anything wrong. And the priest yelled at me and said, "God knows you're a liar."

Eric Huffman: Oh my gosh. How old were you?

Angela Scafidi: I was in seventh grade.

Eric Huffman: Goodness. I mean, that's going to leave a mark on you psychologically, emotionally to have authority figures, the ones who should stand up for you in that moment. You've got a boy leaving you death threats, and they're putting it back on you. That had to scar you.

Angela Scafidi: It did. That was one of the more traumatic bullying experiences that I've had. But this sort of thing just... it followed me my whole life, the bullies and the rejection and people not taking me seriously when all that stuff would happen to me. I just felt like, you know... I'm actually working on my memoir right now. So I've had to revisit all of this. And I'm seeing in hindsight that the enemy has always had a target on my back long before I ever knew Christ.

I mean, even in the womb. My mom actually, when she was seven months pregnant, she walked out her front door, like anybody does on any given day. She walked just one step down, twisted her ankle, compensated by landing on her other ankle, twisted that ankle, broke both of her ankles, and fell down the stairs when she was seven months pregnant with me. And she actually delivered me with two casts on her legs.

Eric Huffman: Gosh.

Angela Scafidi: It feels like the enemy always kind of wanted me dead. Like he, he could read the seed or something. Like he knew who I would be eventually in life. So he wanted to kill me. He wanted me to go down every wrong path. Well, the last-ditch effort really was New Age. If she's going to go to spirituality at some point, then let me just lead her down this path.

Eric Huffman: Yeah. Let's go back to that cruise ship then when you got the devastating news about your grandma's passing. Was she sick? Did you expect it at all?

Angela Scafidi: Nope. We didn't expect it at all. It was just completely... I mean, it was sepsis. So once it hit, it hit. There's kind of logistics where they, they should have done an MRI and they didn't kind of thing, but you know-

Eric Huffman: Everybody probably loses a grandparent at some point and goes through the grief of that. You were especially struck by your grandmother's passing. Talk to us about why that was.

Angela Scafidi: Right. Well, I say that a lot. You know, it's not unique for someone to go through the loss of a grandparent. And I was blessed in so much that I was like 19, 20 when she passed. And I know for a lot of my peers at the time, they had long lost their grandparent, you know, age 10 or 11. So I'm so blessed for the time that I had with her. But it did really affect me viscerally, on a deeper level because of the way that she really helped raise me in a lot of ways. We lived right down the street from my grandparents growing up, and I was there every day before school, after school. She was just like my best friend. It was the worst thing that could have happened to me at that time in my life. That was just icing on the cake of what was already a really, really, really difficult existence for me.

Eric Huffman: And from what I've seen and heard of your story, it seems like that was like a major domino to fall in terms of what happened next. Where did that grief and brokenness lead you? What did you pursue to heal that hurt?

Angela Scafidi: So it's just so normalized, you know, just the occult, like New Age, like we talked about at the beginning. It's all throughout culture. It's permeating and it has been for long, because this is back in 2014 when this happened, you know? Even then it was popularized. I had been familiar with mediumship. Long Island Medium was a very popular show at the time. I used to watch it. And so it was just kind of there in my mind. I know that mediums can talk to dead people and I really want to talk to my grandmom again.

So about six months after she passed, myself and my mom went to a medium and she just knew... I mean, she knew everything. I had on a turtleneck like I do now and I had on a necklace underneath the turtleneck and she knew what the necklace looked like. She knew that it came from my grandma. She knew about my childhood. She knew about my uncle, who wasn't even mentioned, my uncle who had committed suicide, claimed that he came through. She knew that my mom was single. Like she just knew all these things that she had really no business knowing.

So the only reasonable conclusion was that she was truly hearing from the dead, like my grandmom was really there. And just the way she was speaking to me on behalf of what I was my grandmom felt so confirming and reassuring and very comforting because I had just longed to hear from my grandmom that she was still with me, that she was proud of me, that she missed me, and all these things. And that's exactly what I got. I mean, I got exactly what I wanted to gain from that experience. And the door just flung right open because it's like, well, if I can maintain a relationship with my grandmom beyond the grave, I am certainly going to do it.

So from there, I went and I bought my first set of what... they're called Angel Cards. So just another form of Oracle cards. I bought the same exact deck that the medium had there that day, which by the way, she claimed to be Catholic. She said that the archangels were there. She prayed before we started. She assured us that she only communes with angels and that she goes through all the motions to make sure that nothing negative can come through.

So I'm just like under this impression, as many people are very innocently, that this is all pure, this is even holy in a way. Because I was familiar with Catholicism. So I'm like, oh, this is even more safe because that's what I grew up with. My grandmom was Catholic. We were kind of Catholic. So great. The medium's Catholic. Yeah, she's talking to God. She's talking to the archangels. Archangel Gabriel's there. He even has a message for you.

Eric Huffman: Wow.

Angela Scafidi: Archangel Gabriel wanted to let everyone know that He wants to change the world through my words. It's so funny is that the archangel Gabriel, quote unquote, goes to every false prophet to say a similar message when that demon that's assigned to that role wants to perpetuate a false religion. You take Islam, for instance, same exact thing. So this demon posing as Archangel Michael's coming to me, "I want to change the world with your words." Because I've always been a writer. I've always wanted to be an author. So the idea was down the line, I was going to start writing books for the occult and praise God, I never got to that point.

Eric Huffman: And writing and speaking, you're gifted with words and it clearly is your God-given purpose. And whatever these voices or entities were speaking into your life, wanted to take that gifting, that purpose and twist it just a little bit. But at that point in time, what I would say is that you were emotionally and spiritually vulnerable, as vulnerable as a person can be because you had lost this matriarch, this person you were closer to than anyone.

And for people that might be watching and thinking, "Well, this is crazy. Only a crazy person would go and seek out a medium," just think to the moment you were most broken and brokenhearted and the moment how you felt and what you wouldn't give to hear from the person you miss the most. And then you're sitting in front of someone who's telling you things there's no way she could know unless she really had spiritual insight. And so you're getting all that affirmation and supernatural confirmation. And so, yeah, one step at a time, you're falling deeper into the, I guess, misplaced trust of a person who seems to have your best interests at heart.

In terms of what you heard from your quote-unquote grandma, and I know that's not who you believe you were really hearing from, we'll say more about that in a minute, what exactly was she telling you to do next?

Angela Scafidi: Well, she had used the exact verbiage like my grandma used to call me her little pet. The medium said the same thing like, "Oh, she's saying you're her little pet. She's saying that you're her star." And the necklace I had mentioned was a gift from my grandma from her last Christmas, where if you held it up to the light and you looked through it, it was like a star. And it came with like a little poem about how I'm like her shooting star or whatever. So it was just like all these little things that she had to offer.

She had described my grandmother to a tee, what she looked like, described the relationship that she had with my grandfather. And again, the uncle thing, that really pulled on my mom's heartstrings. So, you know, I'm bringing my family into this because it just started with my mom. But then once we had that experience, I'm like, "Oh, my aunt has to get in on this. My uncle has to get on this. My grandpa..." Like I want everyone pulling cards and hearing from grandmamas, basically. So she had words allegedly from my uncle. Even my mom miscarried before she had me, and the medium knew that and said that the baby was there.

This is how the enemy works, though. He capitalizes on trauma, and he uses it as means for entry and for agreement. Because when you have these reassurances, like we were discussing in these alleged comforts and really feelings of connection, that forms an agreement that you want to pursue even further, which just opens up the door even more. And that's what it did for me. Because after that, you know, I pulled the first card. I'm like, "Well, I need more of these cards so that I can talk to her whenever I want. I don't want to have to see a medium to do it. I want to be able to do it from my own bedroom." So I started doing that almost every night, just pulling these cards that were supposed to be messages from her.

Eric Huffman: The Angel Cards, the Oracle cards. At this point, you're in a mediumship. You're into Oracle cards. What else? New Age practices. What other things are you getting into?

Angela Scafidi: That's what it started with. It started with the cards. And then from there, I'm just looking up mediumship, psychic mediumship, learning about energies and frequencies at this point, and just things that can sort of enhance your psychic ability and give you a sort of spiritual awakening, which is what led me to crystals. I learned that I could have certain kinds of crystals that would help facilitate that connection even more so.

So I went to a metaphysical shop and I heard a voice in my ear when I'm looking at all the crystals, because it's so overwhelming. There's like so many different kinds. I'm looking at this particular one, and I hear a voice that says, "That one." So I'm like, "Okay, this is it. So this is the one that I'm going to use to pray to grandma, to talk to grandma with. This is like my heavenly iPhone, basically." So I get that. I get a couple of different other ones, ones that are supposed to help with anxiety and grief and love and all these things. And it starts with just this very small round table nightstand, just a couple of crystals here and there, which by the end of my journey in the occult would be thousands and thousands of dollars worth of crystals, quite literally all over my home. I mean, like altars and grids on basically every available surface area.

Eric Huffman: Because it's just never enough. Like, there's always the next thing?

Angela Scafidi: Never enough. There's always the next thing. That's exactly how it is. It sort of just works until it doesn't. But there's always a reason why it stops working. It's just a part of the process. You just need to level up, so to speak, and so-

Eric Huffman: So when it stops working, it's you, that's the problem?

Angela Scafidi: Exactly.

Eric Huffman: Ah. I heard you say one time that New Age spirituality promises peace and happiness, but it's really just a works-based, and that stuck with me. I don't know why. I'll never forget it, because something about it rang so true. And it's so typical. Every false religion or whatever is works-based. It is a never-ending self-induced spiral of works.

Angela Scafidi: Yeah. I call New Age a hamster wheel. That's the best way I can describe how it felt.

Eric Huffman: And it just doesn't seem to deliver, but people keep getting drawn into it, because, I guess, despite its flaws, it seems to work in a supernatural... There's power in it, right?

Angela Scafidi: Yeah, it does work. It works until it doesn't. And it works very short-term, is the thing. What happens is, you get... you know, we'll take the medium, for instance. That worked. Her having this communion with the other realm, it worked. I got the results that I was looking for in the short-term, and so that creates almost like a high. And so you go chase the next high. Now I have these crystals. I'm actually feeling energy in my hands. If I put it on my forehead, if I put it on my chest, I'm feeling the vibration, then the energy from the crystals. I'm experiencing something. It works. Now I need more. They're like spiritual narcotics. The cards work. I hear exactly what I need to hear. Oh, I need more. I need another deck. It just creates this perpetual, ongoing addiction where you now are gathering all these different sorts of narcotics, and it's like, well, you know, take your pick for the day. Which high do you need now?

Eric Huffman: Now your journey started off with you seeking communion with your grandmother. As it developed, did it grow into other things beyond just wanting to talk to grandma? Did people come to you for... like, did you become a practitioner, a leader of sorts?

Angela Scafidi: I did.

Eric Huffman: Okay.

Angela Scafidi: Yeah. What did that look like?

Angela Scafidi: It's very, very quickly. It goes from grandma to now I'm communing with the Galactic Federation, which is... I got to a point about four or five years into my journey, my spiritualism, where all the stuff that I was into, it started with, you know, like the yoga, the Reiki, the chakras, all this sort of earthy, hippy-dippy, boho kind of stuff, to now, okay, well, I'm so immersed in all of this stuff, why am I still depressed?

I had also lost over 120 pounds by that point. You know, my grandmom's physical health was never great, and so I made a decision at 20 that I was not going to go down that same path, and so I turned my health around. I lost all this weight. So I felt, like, better physically, just because I was not eating, like, cheese every meal, but I was still depressed. At the end of the day, when I would put my head on the pillow at night, there was still something missing, and I couldn't figure out why, because I had all these modalities. I was working out now. I was taking care of myself. I was eating well. So, like, what is missing? So I'm up late Googling. Okay, what's wrong with me, basically? Why do I feel so out of place?

And Google diagnoses me as a starseed. So I find these spiritual articles, you know, because at first it's coming up, like, if you need help, here's the suicide hotline. So I reframed the Google search to adding "spiritual" at the end. Like, why do I feel so alone, spiritual reason?

So, now I'm getting the diagnosis of you're a starseed, which is basically this doctrine of, okay, well, you have actually come here from a higher dimension, you've come from the ninth dimension, from one of the many constellations. In my case, it was the Pleiades. You've come from the Pleiades, and you've incarnated on the Earth plane in order to ascend the collective into ninth-D consciousness out of the three-D consciousness, and you're a savior of humanity. So it was like a false gospel, really. Like, I came here to resurrect the planet and help all of mankind.

Eric Huffman: Wait, Google told you all this?

Angela Scafidi: Google told me that, yeah.

Eric Huffman: I must have different settings.

Angela Scafidi: Praise God.

Eric Huffman: A starseed. So you're basically a member of an alien race.

Angela Scafidi: Yeah. That's how deep it got, you know? I go from just, like, seeing a medium, because it's just cultural and whatever, it's innocuous, people do it to now, five years later, four years later, thinking that I'm an intergalactic cosmic being from the stars, you know? So it sounds so silly. This is the part of my journey. You can't help but laugh at it, but it just illustrates this is how desperate I actually was. That I'm reading this, and it's resonating, and I'm thinking, "Oh, well, this makes sense, because if this is true, if this is true, then that means I picked my life. I chose to come here. I knew everything that would ever happen to me, and it's a part of some grand karmic mission It's actually ascending the collective. It's helping other people. I have to go through all of this pain and suffering, because I have to really learn what it's like for the third dimension and all these people that are suffering in order to raise that vibration." That resonated with me.

Eric Huffman: Well, I'll tell you, I don't think you should shy away from telling this part of your story, even though it might sound like you feel, like, kooky or whatever. I think mainstream Christians need to hear this stuff, because this stuff you're talking about is mainstream now, too, in the culture. It's not a fringe element of culture anymore. Like, you don't have to go to some woo-woo shop in the hippie part of town. Like, go to Barnes & Noble and it's all front and center, because everybody's sort of swimming in these waters now.

And if you're like me, you're watching this, I feel like sometimes I'm a little bit in a Christian bubble, I'm a pastor now, and, you know, all this stuff, I'm always around Christians, but this stuff you're talking about, it's not as fringy as it maybe once was, or it's certainly not as fringy as many Christians think it is. So I just want to encourage you to keep telling the whole story, because the message is that's where this goes. That's where this journey leads. You're never satisfied with just a deck of angel cards. It's going to take you to the next thing and the next thing and the next thing.

Angela Scafidi: Always will. It always will. But that's sort of my point in even sharing that bit is, of course, to illustrate just how deep it got, but also because what that did was it shifted my entire spiritual journey from just the crystals and the energy and the Reiki and the yoga and the normal thing. Now I'm, like, in the cosmos, so that's when astrology entered the picture. And that really became my niche, my entire world. And that's where I found, quote-unquote, found myself within spirituality, because I did end up pursuing my Reiki certification so that I could facilitate energy healing, and I did end up becoming a yoga teacher, but when it came to astrology, I was very, very good at it. I was masterfully skilled at identifying someone's sign. And not just their sign, but I could kind of tell their chart just by looking at them, just by talking to them for 30 seconds. Because I did have voices that were giving me this information, so I had achieved what I set out to do long ago the first time I saw that medium, which was receive intel from the spirit realm about other people that I believed could help them, too. So it was through astrology.

Eric Huffman: And it was accurate?

Angela Scafidi: Yeah, oh, yeah. And it was through astrology that I really believed I was helping others, because I was able to determine, well, here's your birth chart, and here's how this birth chart begins to interface with the current transits. And that's something I was so obsessed with astrology, because every other modality, it sort of, like, has this framework, and you just learn from it, and you develop it. Now, with astrology, it's always changing, because obviously the sun's always moving, the moon's always moving, you know, there's always something different quite literally every day. It's why there's a daily horoscope. And so to take your birth chart, which is fixed, and see how that interfaces with the daily transits, I was so obsessed with it, and it became my entire personality.

Eric Huffman: Well, I think I know what you'd say to this, but what would you say to somebody who says, "Look, when you helped me with astrology, whatever, I don't know the terminology, it really helped me, and it was real accurate information that you gave me, and it got me through the day. Like, how can you now turn around and say, I should never have done that for these people"?

Angela Scafidi: Well, I don't think anyone's ever actually asked me that.

Eric Huffman: Well, hypothetically speaking.

Angela Scafidi: No, I mean, in all the interviews I've done, I don't think anyone's ever asked me, what would you say to someone that claimed you helped them?

Eric Huffman: Ah.

Angela Scafidi: So there was actually, toward the end of my journey, this girl that I read cards for, I did a spread for her for like a six-month period, and I nailed everything right down to like, your ex-fiance is going to come back, and he's going to want you back, and you have to say no because it's going to, whatever. That was a good decision for her to make because he was an abusive person, so she shouldn't have. So she was actually someone that kind of saw the change. It was like, you know, it's just been confusing to see because this is at the very beginning, because your readings really helped me.

I think that this is a really common misconception when we talk about New Age spiritualism or the occult as being overtly demonic because it is demonic. But we have to remember that 2 Corinthians 11:14 says that Satan masquerades as an angel of light, and that's exactly how the occult shows up. Of course, it's going to be helpful. Of course, it's going to be accurate. Of course, you're going to see real results. Why would you pursue it otherwise if there wasn't actually something you were gaining from it?

Even take that biblically, like they were gaining real power from their children's sacrifice, from worshiping these false gods. They were gaining something from that allegiance because it actually works. But something having spiritual power does not mean that it is good power. It doesn't mean that it's holy power. And just because there's a lot of lowercase T truths doesn't mean that the uppercase T Truth is involved in it at all.

This is why discernment is so important because in our own strength, in our own understanding, we as human beings are inclined to just find what feels good and do what feels good and do what satisfies us and is gratifying to our flesh, which New Age is. I mean, in Galatians, I believe, it refers to witchcraft as a work of the flesh because it is extremely gratifying to your flesh. But we have this blueprint. We have the Bible. We have the word of God that is the sword of the spirit to cut through truth and lies to help us discern these things, not the difference between right and wrong, but like what feels right and what actually is right. So the New Age is always going to produce real results, but it's a matter of where is that going to leave you eternally?

Eric Huffman: I was just thinking about 1 Corinthians 6:12, as you were talking, where Paul said, I have the right to do anything, you say, I have the right to do anything, you say, but not everything is beneficial. I have the right to do anything, you say, but I will not be mastered by anything. And so by doing these things, we have a right to do, we have free will to do, it doesn't mean we should do those things because they master us, I mean, they claim us when we submit to them. And then as you talked about earlier, it's on to the next thing and the next, and you basically become a slave to these practices. It is not God's will for us to access even correct information in incorrect ways. And I think that's part of what your story tells. Let's get into the nitty-gritty a little bit more here so people can understand what you saw. Did you have, in those years, visual spiritual encounters? Did you see demons?

Angela Scafidi: Never outright. Ironically enough, I was always really terrified of the darkness. So I was very intentional with, before we do XYZ practice or XYZ ritual, I have to like set up an energetic pillar of light in each corner of the room and then connect that by like a force field of angelic frequency so that only angels could come through. Like you kind of just gaslight yourself into thinking that you have the ability to determine what is actually coming through in these sorts of practices.

I was really afraid of ever crossing a line. I didn't mess with the idea of Ouija boards. I would have never even called myself a witch because, to me, witchcraft was always about manipulating for self-gain, whereas what I was doing, although I was a witch for all intents and purposes, I was practicing witchcraft, to me, what I was doing was just trying to heal and trying to help other people heal too. So I would have never called it that in a thousand years.

Any negative connotation or negative experience, I wanted to avoid at all costs because that was never my intention. And I think by and large, a lot of New Age spiritualists, it's not the intention is to pursue something dark. It's just, I just want to be better, I want to do better, I want to feel better. That's how it gets you.

Eric Huffman: Yeah, that's what makes it so insidious is how most of the people that get into this have the best of intentions. And we've talked with Jenn Nizza on the podcast before and Jac Marino Chen and others that have similar testimonies. Like they just wanted to help people. They just thought they were doing the right thing, but then soon enough they realized otherwise. What about the rest of your life outside of these practices, outside of new age spirituality? What kind of life were you living? Was there drugs and alcohol involved where you could live clean as a whistle? What was it?

Angela Scafidi: I was obsessed with smoking weed. That was like my everyday. Never really during the day because I wanted to be aware and vigilant and spiritually in tune. But at night, it was every single night I'm smoking weed. Alcohol, yes and no. I really kind of reserved it for partying. But anytime I partook, it was always excess. It was never just like one drink, two drink. It was always like I'm the one vomiting at the end of the night sort of thing. So, yes, that was a part of my life, but not in a way that it was like all-consuming or like the focal point of everything else.

I did drugs here and there like acid and shrooms, but acid never really affected me. My shroom experience, I thought, healed me from an eating disorder, which it didn't. Apart from that, I mean, I was pretty promiscuous because I had lost all this weight. And so when that happened, attention that I wanted my whole life came, and it was always from the wrong source. And so that was leading me through unhealthy, toxic patterns, which interfaced with my spirituality, even because the one guy I'm like, well, this is my twin flame. We're like destined to inflict chaos in one another's lives because it's going to help us spiritually ascend.

And then that kind of bumped up against the relationship I have with my now husband because he was actually with me on and off throughout all of this stuff. Like, he's been around since high school. So he saw the depressed emo version of me. He saw the new age version of me. He saw me when my grandmom died. Like he saw every single version up until the point of Christ, to which he did eventually praise the Lord, get saved as well. But yeah, that was just sort of who I was other than the spirituality. But spirituality was the...

Eric Huffman: The drug of choice.

Angela Scafidi: Yeah. And it was the means by which everything else orbited around. There was no decision made that was not with that in mind.

Eric Huffman: Yeah. How long did that lifestyle go on for?

Angela Scafidi: So my grandmom died in 2014, and I found Jesus or I should say He was never lost. He found me in December of 2021.

Eric Huffman: Okay.

Angela Scafidi: But it was in September of that year actually where I'm kind of like... this is my come-to-Jesus moment really at the end of myself. I had relapsed self-harm in like March of 2021. And at this time now I had a podcast. I had an astrology podcast that, again, that was my thing. I'm really good at it. I'm good at the full moon, new moon reports. I'm good at explaining the ironically times and seasons that we're in through an astrological framework and communicating that well and studying it and making it make sense to people in a way that I believed could help them heal. And yet I'm doing all of that on camera and then off camera. I'm like relapsing self-harm. Fresh cuts on my leg, but I'm telling people about the self-healing journey. I was just in no position to be teaching.

Eric Huffman: Yeah, you were a fragmented person.

Angela Scafidi: My point is that that's who I remained throughout every single thing that I experienced and went through. I was always coming back to just the sad girl that wanted to cut herself and die. It didn't matter what I did. It didn't matter how much money I spent on the crystals. It didn't matter how many different tarot decks I had or how good at astrology I was or how wonderful of a yoga teacher I was. I was like all my classmates' favorite teacher. None of that mattered. It didn't matter how good at Reiki I was. It didn't matter how many tapestries I had on my wall. It didn't matter how well I felt like I could communicate with the spirit realm. At the end of the day, I was still just as broken as I was the first day I pursued any of that stuff. And it drove me insane because I felt like I should be happy by now. I was pushing 30. I was 27. And I couldn't imagine going on another three years, reaching the point of 30 and still feeling the way that I did when I was 17.

Eric Huffman: Yeah. I can imagine that would be so frustrating.

Angela Scafidi: It was frustrating and it was hopeless. It was just, "What now? I don't know where else to go."

Eric Huffman: When did the time finally come when you came to the end of yourself and realized you couldn't continue down that path?

Angela Scafidi: I was having just an absolute crash-out mental breakdown on my kitchen floor one evening in September of that year, 2021, and I wanted to just end my life. And I'm on the floor crying my eyes out and I called out, I just said, "Jesus, save me." And I didn't know why I said that. I didn't know where it came from. It didn't make any sense because I had never heard anyone even use that terminology before. No one had been evangelizing to me in this timeframe. I did have a friend who was Christian, but she was never actively telling me, "Hey, everything you're doing is because you're looking for Jesus." So, she was just like my Christian friend that I thought was judgmental and hypocritical. But she was praying for me, which I always feel is really important to mention because God totally heard her prayers.

I said, "Jesus, save me." And then nothing happened. It wasn't like this grand moment where... and a lot of people do have really cool testimonies like this, like the heavens didn't open up above me. I didn't see like His feet walk toward me on the floor. I just went to bed. But the next morning I woke up, I did not feel that depression. I did not feel the anxiety. Really what stood out most was I always had these really intrusive thoughts in my head, which was completely demonic. I mean, voices in my head all the time that I would describe as like a ping pong match, just like fighting with itself, that I could never get any peace from, which is why I smoked weed every night. That was gone. Like those voices weren't there.

So, I was really curious as to what had been done differently in the last 24 hours. And the only thing that changed was that I said, "Jesus, save me." So, three words accomplished what 10 years of trying to heal myself on the New Age hamster wheel never did, made those voices go away, made the depression lift, made the anxiety flee. And I know that's not everyone's testimony and everyone's story, but I know that it's His will to set us free from that bondage.

So, if you're a Christian and you're still dealing with like depression, anxiety, just know that it is the heart of the Father to set you free from that because His yoke is easy and His burden is light. And He revealed that to me in a moment. And He was kind enough to reveal that to me, even when I went on for another three months after that and just tried to incorporate Him as another modality. I was like, "Well, okay, Jesus, God, yeah, this is great. Maybe now how I can frame things is, astrology is God's plan for your life. I'll make it less about me and doing what I want to do and fulfilling my own needs to following God's plan."

So, I started reading the Bible and I started to try and reframe even my yoga classes. I remember at the end of one of my yoga classes, instead of namaste, I said, God bless you. And it's like everything we just did for the last hour in the class, like the flow state that we had worked so hard to achieve, it's like it all just turned off and everyone was just like... because His name does not belong in a yoga studio. But I was really trying, I was really trying to make Him the center of all the witchcraft I was doing because I thought I could have both.

What ends up happening is, I'm reading the Bible and the Bible did what the Bible does. It convicted me. I read Isaiah 47, where God is rebuking the Babylonians for practicing astrology. And I'm paraphrasing, but He essentially says, "Hey, your stargazers aren't gonna save you. They can't even save themselves. They're gonna burn in their own fire." And I read that and I felt for the first time... this is the moment I really believe I was born again because I was made so supernaturally aware all at once that I was a sinner and that I needed a savior. And more than a savior, I needed a Lord because I had actually already recognized that there was some healing element to the name of Jesus. But it was that moment where I was like, wow, I have to actually come under the authority of this God because I have been disobedient to Him this whole time, thinking that I was doing God's work.

Eric Huffman: Yeah, boy. That is powerful

Angela Scafidi: So that was really the moment I felt the Holy Spirit come and just seriously give me a new heart. I was just like born again in that moment. And the next day I'm calling my best friend, the Christian, I'm like, "Hey, you're the only person I think that this won't sound crazy to, but I need to get rid of everything. I need to stop being a yoga teacher. I can't do Reiki anymore. I can't do astrology anymore. I need to burn everything." I had never even read the Book of Acts. I didn't know that they actually do that, that they actually burn all their witchcraft paraphernalia. But I had the Holy Spirit now and that's what He prompted me to do next. So that was the next step for me.

Eric Huffman: Well, I just think about what it must have been like for you at that point in time. You're giving up your livelihood, not just your habits and, you know, hobbies. It was your livelihood. And even to the point of burning all that stuff. You probably could have sold that paraphernalia for something, you know, but you were so done with it. It sounds like the last thing you would want to do is sell it to somebody else and let them go deeper in the darkness.

Angela Scafidi: Yeah.

Eric Huffman: Because, wow.

Angela Scafidi: I had some of my New Age friends be like, "You just sell that to me." And I told them I wasn't going to deal them demons. I was already using that terminology. I'm like, "Guys, this is demonic." I came out swinging kind of hard with that kind of rhetoric, but it's because I could see. And now that I could see, I was telling everyone else they were blind because I just needed them to know. So I was like, "Guys, I'm not giving you, I'm not dealing demons. You're not having any of this stuff. I got to burn it all." That's what I did.

Eric Huffman: When I hear this part of your story, I think it's pretty... it holds with the pattern I usually see with converts to Christianity is you first become a believer and you became a believer that night, actually the morning after when you cried out to Jesus and you were delivered from the things that were oppressing you. But it took a while to become a disciple.

The difference between a believer and a disciple is obedience. And it wasn't until you were convicted about your sin, by reading the Bible months later, after trying to syncretize Jesus into your preexisting worldview, that you realized, "I don't need to just believe this. I need to obey it." And this is where I remind everybody watching that Jesus did not come to the earth to make believers of us. Even the demons believe, right, and shudder, the Bible says. But He came to make disciples of us. And you said, that's really when you feel like you became a Christian. And I think I'd probably agree with that because that's when you decided to surrender, when you finally saw your sin. A lot of people, especially I would guess in the New Age world, sin isn't something you talk about because there's no such thing because-

Angela Scafidi: No, that's a lie. That's a lie that man made up to make us forget about who we actually are as human beings.

Eric Huffman: And to oppress us and keep us in our place and all this stuff. But to see your sin, for God to show you your sin is the most gracious and kind thing He can do for us because it reorients us around, as you started this conversation with the Truth, capital T, this is who we really are. We're fallen, we're broken, we're sinners, imperfect, far from God, but for His grace, we're lost. And so how can I not submit and surrender to this kind of God who would go to these great lengths to deliver me?

Angela Scafidi: Exactly.

Eric Huffman: Wow, what a powerful story. Besides sin, did you struggle with any other Christian doctrines or teachings, things you found in the Bible that didn't jive with what you thought was true before you came to Christianity? Was there any other question or doubt you struggled with?

Angela Scafidi: No. I think really the biggest thing for me when I first got saved was that I subconsciously just had these white gloves on after the fact because I was... and I see this pattern with a lot of ex-New Agers, unfortunately, where you get so deceived, or I'm sorry, you get so scared out of being deceived again that from a heart posture of like, I genuinely want to be obedient, you sort of shut off like Holy Spirit. Like there is no Holy Spirit. It's just He's just sort of this idea of rather than a person and someone you have a true relationship with and who has true power. Because I was all caught up in talking about how everything was demonic and everything's a counterfeit, and I got so lost in all of that that I was failing to recognize that in order for a counterfeit to exist, it needs to be perverting and stealing from what is therefore authentic. So I completely shut out any possibility of there being a supernatural life as a Christian. In fact, I would say people, if they believed in the gifts of the Holy Spirit, if they believed in prophecy, if they believed in deliverance, I'd say, No, they're practicing New Age. That's the Kundalini Spirit, all these sorts of things.

Eric Huffman: Because you've been burned.

Angela Scafidi: Because I was burned, yeah. And I didn't want to touch anything that looked like it. That took a year for me to... once I was actually water baptized, that's when that veil kind of was lifted. And I was like, "Wow, okay, so Holy Spirit is real." And it's not that, you know, you're supposed to like live a life of witchcraft or whatever, but signs and wonders follow those who believe. The counterfeit is signs and wonders are something you must chase and pursue, which is all I ever did in the New Age. But just signs and wonders is a natural byproduct of being a disciple, as you said, of Jesus Christ is beautiful and it's wholesome and it's powerful. And it's really what the New Agers are looking for. Like they're looking for the Holy Spirit.

And I think we make a really big mistake in almost like gaslighting New Agers in this sense by telling them, hey, you know, what you're doing isn't real, it's demonic, it's evil, it's this. It's like, yes, all of that is true, but it gets to a point where we're only preaching bad news at them when we know that the gospel is good news. Like, hey, what you're looking for, the devil is actually trying to pervert and corrupt this desire you have to be in communion with a supernatural God. We're made in His image and likeness. God is supernatural. Of course, you want to pursue that. And if the only place you can ever find it is in the occult and not the church, well, you asked me if I ever had any experience with Christianity. I never saw anything supernatural, working happening in the Catholic Church or in my Christian friend I mentioned growing up. The only place I ever saw supernatural power was in the occult. I think that's another tactic of the devil. So that was really like my next obstacle to overcome once I was a believer was coming around to that realization and not being afraid of Him in all of who He is.

Eric Huffman: The Holy Spirit in particular.

Angela Scafidi: Mm-hmm.

Eric Huffman: Yeah. No, I think there's an epidemic of Western churches that are Christian and all in with the Father and the Son, but pretty agnostic about the Spirit. Is that your experience as well?

Angela Scafidi: Yeah. And not even agnostic, but I would even say like borderline, just really negligent of or afraid of.

Eric Huffman: Yeah. So as you've leaned into that relationship, the specific relationship we have with the Holy Spirit, where has that led you? What insights have you gained, and how has it infused your walk with Jesus?

Angela Scafidi: I would say that, you know, the verse says, who the Son sets free is free indeed. I would say that I gained the indeed part after this happened to me because, you know, my water baptism was amazing. And it was so much more than just like... you know, I feel like a lot of people just say, it's just a public display of affection kind of thing, but it was so much more than that. According to 1 Peter, it really equates to the days of Noah and, you know, washing out those spirits. And so it was like a form of deliverance for me. And that's really what led into deliverance.

I did receive deliverance. I don't know where you stand on that, so I'll just say that I did receive deliverance. That's actually a major part of my testimony because my husband witnessed me experience that. And he got born again the night that he saw me set free from spirits of witchcraft and things like that, that followed me from New Age into my life as a Christian.

Eric Huffman: I want to talk about it. I am not anti-deliverance. Let's say, hopefully I'm righteously suspicious sometimes because I've seen so much malpractice. I've seen so many charlatans and bad outcomes and things like that. For me as a pastor, I think of spiritual deliverance as needing to be integrated with discipleship.

Angela Scafidi: Absolutely.

Eric Huffman: And it grieves me when I see discipleship and deliverance being sort of siloed from each other. I think both suffer when there's not integration.

Angela Scafidi: Absolutely. I agree.

Eric Huffman: For people that might be totally lost right now. Tell us what deliverance is in your view.

Angela Scafidi: Well, I had real demons cast out of me as a born-again Christian. And so I believe the doctrine I believe is that they're in kind of like the realm of the soul, realm of the flesh, not the realm of the Spirit where Holy Spirit is. That experience for me was really, really transformative because I had these... sort of like the PTSD that I had from New Age, I believe, was from the yoke that I had from all of those agreements that were made in New Age with all these demons.

I mean, to think about all the practices that I was doing and all the people in the occult that have these thousands, as I said, it's like a spiritual buffet. There's so many different modalities. There's so many different spirits that you come into agreement with. And it's just like, well, now that I have the Holy Spirit, you actually have the authority to make them leave. It's only because of Him. It's not in spite of the cross, it's because of the cross.

And so once that happened, it's like all the PTSD, all the fear completely went away. And it's actually when that happened that I was able to get plugged into a good community and be properly discipled because I didn't have this like vagabond, like New Age spiritual framework. I feel like a lot of ex-New Agers fall into that too, where, well, now I'm just going to do my own thing and be like a Lone Ranger Christian instead of come under leadership and pastoral covering and be discipled because in a weird way, it turns into, you go from following your heart to now like, oh, well, God told me. And that can get so convoluted.

There's just so many little foxes that the enemy will continue to use after you get saved as an ex-New Age or particularly where the language just sort of changes, but the spirituality hasn't. You're just kind of putting Christianese on it now. So the deliverance gave me my husband, it gave me like free indeed, meaning no more fear, no more walking around with white gloves. And it gave me really proper discipleship.

Eric Huffman: Thank God for that. I know there are some solid deliverance ministries out there and we should celebrate them. I hope every single local church has some form of a deliverance ministry, whether it's its own department or whether it's integrated into others. We have to be engaged in spiritual warfare. That's as biblical as it gets. My concern with deliverance ministries, as I see it is, it can at times actually start to look a little bit like how you described your experience in the New Age, which is this hamster wheel of never-ending need for more deliverance.

Angela Scafidi: I agree.

Eric Huffman: How can you ever be sure you're safe from the demons? And there's just a lot of fear-mongering that I've seen and heard. And that grieves me, but I know there are good ones out there. Do you have any sort of telltale signs you look for in deliverance ministries or ministers that are green flags, let's say, that help you see that this is real, this is truly of God and in line with scripture and all of that?

Angela Scafidi: Well, I would say fruit. Jesus says, you'll know them by their fruit, not how loud they are or how great they are, but like fruit. Like what kind of fruit is the ministry producing? Are people having an experience and actually getting set free or are they having an experience and as you said, they just need to come back for more and more and more and more, or do they get set free and then do they walk out in the freedom and then do they go, they become a disciple and then do they go and make disciples? So we see just the kind of formula that God gave us, be fruitful and multiply in the sense of discipleship, not just go have a lot of babies. So I think that's something that for me has been really key to look for is just the fruit of what someone is producing and what the fruit of whom they are producing is producing.

Eric Huffman: Right. I think it comes down to discernment and the Holy Spirit. Again, it comes back to the Spirit. The Spirit gifts us with discernment to separate the wheat from the chaff and know where He is and how He's speaking and identify when the voices we're hearing or the things that are happening are of the enemy. There's a lot of that going on in the world these days, and watching your channel and your videos on YouTube, sometimes it scares me how much is going on in the world that's of the devil, how many openings that we potentially can give him.

You've talked about your former addiction to music, I guess, the world's music and marijuana, drugs and alcohol, clearly another potential portal. You've talked a lot about Taylor Swift in some of your videos as an example of the kinds of openings we can give the enemy. The Wizard of Oz and Wicked. I've heard you talk about movies as well. Is there anything out there in the world that Christians can still enjoy in good conscience or do we need to move out into the desert and create communes for ourselves?

Angela Scafidi: I think so. You know, the closer I actually get with Jesus, the more I feel like that kind of desire, maybe paranoia, to just like go out. I even said this on a recent video I did, like just go turn my own butter for the rest of my life. I feel less of that because I actually do just feel so free and so close to Him that now I'm at this place where I can be so vigilant and so discerning and so aware of everything, but not be paranoid by it and know what I'm going to avoid because it's just spiritual garbage. The same way I wouldn't go in the trash can for my dinner, I'm not going to do the same through media, like watch the equivalent of what is garbage media, garbage entertainment, and feed that to my soul because it's just not good for me. It's not conforming me to His image in any way.

Eric Huffman: And you don't have the appetite for it anymore.

Angela Scafidi: And I don't have the appetite for it. Yeah. I don't think we have to avoid everything, but I do think that we have to be, like the Bible says, very aware as to not be ignorant to the wiles of the devil.

Eric Huffman: Yeah, sure.

Angela Scafidi: Because there's a lot of them, as you mentioned.

Eric Huffman: And not everything is equal. There's some things that are, I guess, bigger portals than others. You've talked a lot about yoga, for instance, and I know a lot of Christians that still do yoga because they swear it doesn't affect them spiritually. What do you say to somebody who goes, "Well, this is just good for me. It makes me feel better. It's good for my body. I don't do it as a form of worship."? Why is it still a danger?

Angela Scafidi: It's always interesting when you say that to Christians that, like, you know, yoga is this, yoga is that, and they say, "It doesn't affect me spiritually" because it's like the moment you mentioned that it's wrong, it comes out how much it is affecting them spiritually because they-

Eric Huffman: They get angry.

Angela Scafidi: They get angry. I'm like, is the yoga really working because you're supposed to be super peaceful and super zen, but you're raging. There's so much vitriol. And it's because the spiritual yoke you're denying is actually there. And now it's manifesting because the light is shining onto the darkness, and it's being revealed. And the spirits you're in agreement with through the yoga practice do not like it. And they're going to try and talk you out of it. They're going to try and make me seem like a crazy person for telling you and for warning you in love that this is very evil.

There's so many different things that I could say. I have so much content on yoga because it was such, obviously, like a central part of my own life. And I thought the same thing. Like, this is the best thing I've ever done for myself. This is healthy. You know, this is healing. This is a physical modality. It's just stretching. It's exercise. It's just whatever. But it's unfortunately not that simple.

The easiest way that I can compare it to just when people say, well, it's just a physical thing is, you know, everything has a spiritual framework. If you sit in the bathtub, you're not getting baptized. It's when you attach a spiritual framework to the thing that it becomes what it is, right? So even sex, within covenant, that is a holy, sacred thing that God encourages you to do and pursue. Now you take that same exact physical action, and you put it in the context of premarital sex. Well, now it's fornication. Now it's sin. Now it's an open door.

So just because you use very common stretching technique within the framework of the yoga practice doesn't mean that stretching itself is demonic. It's when you put it under the umbrella of yoga that it falls under the framework of what yoga is. And now you're in agreement with everything that yoga entails. You can't accidentally do yoga. I say this to people all the time. They're like, so what, when I bend down and touch my toes, I'm inviting demons? No, you don't go to a yoga class by accident. You don't do yoga videos on YouTube by accident. You don't do yoga by accident the same way you don't, like I said, take a bath and get baptized by accident. You know what I'm saying?

Eric Huffman: Yeah, I do. And I've never been to a yoga class, so I feel a little out of my depth. It's not about my spiritual fortitude. I'm just lazy. I've never understood why you don't just stay home and stretch. If you're a Christian, just stretch, do stretches. Why you got to go to yoga class? And the biggest red flag to me is their resistance to me calling them out on it. There's something there. And yeah, we should be vigilant. As Christians, we should be discerning and vigilant. This is also fascinating.

One of the things I've heard you talk about lately, Angela, and I loved your perspective on this because I've done a deep dive now, unfortunately, because I felt like I should on the Epstein files that have come out. I just feel like I need to know what's going on, how deep the darkness goes so I can help people understand the enemy we're up against. A lot of people just don't want to know anything about it. Your take on Christians and our response to the Epstein files being so evil and dark, I found it so fascinating. Could you just, I hate to put you on the spot, just summarize kind of your message for Christians in light of these dark revelations?

Angela Scafidi: Yeah. This is something I've really kind of alluded to it earlier when I mentioned like the closer I get to Jesus, the less of this kind of stuff I want. It's really been a sanctification process, I'd say over the last six months, because it's no secret. You're online so you see that there are people that build entire ministries basically talking about the kingdom of darkness and exposing these things. And look, I'm not saying there's not a time and place for exposure. We just talked for an hour and a half exposing New Age. We're supposed to expose the unfruitful works of darkness.

But I think a lot of people use that verse and then just conveniently throw out the rest of it that says, do not participate in them. Because there is a threshold that that verse makes pretty explicit that you can cross. So it goes from we're exposing to now we're participating in the thing we think we're exposing because it's entertaining to us.

The Holy Spirit revealed to me when I was... I started to look at the files because I had the thought, you know, just full admittance here that, well, I can make a video and I can talk about, see, this is all the stuff we've been trying to tell you since 2020 that they're all satanic pedophiles and they're doing XYZ and look at how dark this is, look at how gross this is. And the Holy Spirit was like, "You need to stop looking at this. This is black magic. They are literally cursing us through this. They are using this as a trauma ritual as like an initiation thing to get us to fall further in line with the divide and conquer with the Antichrist system that is inevitable to come as we know through the scriptures. And you need to tell people about Me right now and not about this. You need to start looking at Me and stop looking at the files." And I said, okay.

So that's kind of the message I was just putting out. I'm trying to just encourage Christians that exposure is biblical. Exposure has its time and place. We must not be ignorant to the wiles of the devil. We do have to be sober minded. We do have to be vigilant. I believe that the art of war is indeed to know thy enemy. So knowing how the enemy works is crucial in spiritual warfare. Our weapons of warfare are not carnal. But at the same time, if it's getting to a point in your walk where you are literally starting to feast from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, then you're missing the point because Jesus is the way, the truth and the life. And God says, don't eat of that tree because you're going to die.

So you start to engage in the thing that you think you're exposing by doing this and you become like a Gnostic when you're not supposed to be a Gnostic, you're supposed to be a disciple and you're supposed to demonstrate the kingdom. So I just help people like, you know, make your exposure videos. Obviously, I have a calling for what I do, exposing the New Age. It's important. We all have specific callings in the body of Christ, but we all also have a mandate, go cast out demons, go heal the sick, go baptize, go make disciples. And if you aren't doing those things, it could be because you are so wrapped up in the darkness that you have forgotten to shine the light, which is what we're supposed to do.

Eric Huffman: Boy, that's what I loved about your insights. And I didn't hear... I looked far and wide, I saw different people talking about this, I have never heard anybody say what you've said about this particular moment, because the spiritual insight there that's so profound is that the people perpetrating these horrific things aren't being exposed. We're being exposed to them and their evil. And so what's happening is heads aren't rolling. Nobody's being held accountable. Nobody's going to prison. Nothing's happening. All that's happening is we're being desensitized and we're being made cynical and feeling powerless in the face of such darkness because there are no consequences for it.

Angela Scafidi: Which makes us easier to control.

Eric Huffman: Absolutely.

Angela Scafidi: Then we're in the flesh.

Eric Huffman: Boy, that really, it spoke to me, but it really convicted me, Angela. And I was grateful.

Angela Scafidi: Oh, wow.

Eric Huffman: One last question for anybody watching right now that might kind of be dabbling, one foot in, one foot out, even with the darkness, whether it's in the form of Epstein Files obsession or actual New Age practice as someone who's walked in the darkness and been delivered from it into the light, thank God. What would you say to them right now?

Angela Scafidi: I would just say that there's nothing that's going to satisfy you the way Jesus will and does. I would say that everything that the world has to offer, it can't hold a candle to the fire of God. And it's okay for you to miss out on what the world is doing. It's okay for you to miss out on the latest headline. It's okay for you to miss out on that party. In fact, I would encourage you that you want to be missing out on what the world has to offer. You want to be missing out on the bait of the devil. You want to be missing out on the counterfeit because Jesus isn't in any of that. Jesus is found in Himself. And that comes with a willingness to truly deny yourself and say, You know what? You are the way, You are the truth, You are the life.

If you can't tell, that's my favorite scripture because my whole, up until I found Christ... and by the way, I'm 31 now. So me being terrified of turning 30, 30 was like the best year of my life. That's the year I had my daughter, and I wasn't afraid to turn 30 because I was actually free. But the point is, I had searched for the meaning of life, I had searched for the truth and I had always tried to find my way. And Jesus says so plainly, I'm all three of those things. And we will go to the ends of the earth to try and discover those three components of existence, whether it be in obsessing over the darkness of the Epstein files and the corruption of the government and all these sorts of things, or it be in drugs, it be in porn, it be in serial cheating, or it be in witchcraft like I was in.

We will go anywhere except to the one source, the one person, the one God who is all of those things in function and in name and just in embodiment. But He's the only one that can ever provide what you're actually looking for because what you're looking for is to be filled with His Spirit. What you're looking for is His Spirit, to know Him, to be in communion with Him. And until you actually are born again, you will be constantly trying to heal your soul with a spirit that is dead underneath. Once He comes in and fills you with new life, all that stuff in your soul, those demons, that trauma, all that stuff can actually leave you and be gone from you and be sanctified and be fortified because He has entered you and given you new life. There is just no other answer. There's no other answer. There's no other way. Jesus is it.

Eric Huffman: Amen. And you have lived it. You're not just talking about it theoretically. And that's the best part of your story is knowing where you came from and all you've been through and the path you could have taken. But for the grace of God, Angela, your testimony is so powerful. You're a gift to many people. You're a gift to us today. I hope everybody watching or listening will check out your podcast, Heaven and Healing. It's on YouTube. I guess it's also a podcast like on Apple.

Angela Scafidi: Yeah. It's on like Apple, Spotify, all that stuff as well.

Eric Huffman: New content every Monday and Thursday at 5 p.m. Central. Also you mentioned a memoir. I'm looking forward to that. I guess the release is still TBD, but we'll be looking for that.

Angela Scafidi: Yeah. I got to finish it first. I have our second child coming in May. So the goal is to be finished at least the first draft before edits and all that, before he comes. But that's a matter of my discipline, I suppose.

Eric Huffman: Sister, that is a lot. Well, thank you, especially given everything else you've got going on. Thank you so much for taking the time to be with us today on Maybe God.

Angela Scafidi: Of course, yeah.

Eric Huffman: And yeah, keep going, sister. Thank you, Angela.

Angela Scafidi: Thank you. God bless you.

Eric Huffman: All right. God bless you.