All of these writers point to the breakdown in the Reformation's orthodox stance in both conservative and liberal camps as opening the door to Transcendentalism and, finally, to the current orientation. Beyond the liberal-evangelical split, Wade Clark Roof now says we cannot discern any real differences between New Age and evangelical spirituality on a number of counts. Although Roof does not make the point, these are clearly the tenets of ancient Gnosticism. Both liberals and evangelicals disdain doctrine for personal experience, and objective truth for personal transformation, and in this sense, each is, in its own way, Gnostic. The anti-intellectualism is understandable, according to Lee.
Pentecostalism represents an even greater dependence on Gnostic tendencies.
Even the desire to speak in tongues, as if the biblical idea of tongues was a super-natural language unknown to mortals, shows the desire to escape even natural human language in a direct spiritual encounter of immediate ecstasy. The outer edges of Pentecostalism are especially blatant in Gnostic emphases, as a number of works have shown, including The Agony of Deceit . And though Assemblies of God theology is officially trinitarian, in praxis the Pentecostal knows only Oneness, and calls the Holy Spirit by the name of Jesus, not the Jesus of the Gospels or even the Christ of Paul, but the American Jesus, a Pentecostal like oneself. The Word is primarily seen as an instrument for coaxing the individual into accepting the new birth. The new birth, especially if one judges by the testimonies of converts, is not so much the result of hearing with human ears, in human words, a declaration of things that happened in human history.