There's no belief like self-belief

If nothing else, Glenn Hoddle provides a fascinating illustration of the late-20th-century cocktail of belief. It is testimony to a century of Western religious exploration - a kind of souvenir-hunting among all the cultures of the world for interesting and useful ideas to bring home.

Pretty much every faith, every spiritual practice, has left a trace in Hoddle's powerful, if sometimes incoherent, philosophy of life. Teasing apart the strands to work out where they came from is not an easy task. Hoddle is not the most articulate of exponents and many of his beliefs have been given a strongly personal interpretation, but one thing is clear: while Hoddle may be in a muddle, he is in company. While his comments on the likely sins of disabled people in former lives have provoked a range of reactions from disbelief to disgust, many of his ideas are widely accepted in the diverse and inchoate New Age movement. Millions of people who happily mix astrology with devout Catholicism, Feng Shui and yoga with Anglicanism, would, if closely questioned on their religious beliefs, describe a similar credo.

Hoddle is not and never has been a born-again Christian. The media jumped on the fact that Hoddle did indeed have a Damascene conversion - in 1986 - and that it happened in Bethlehem. But Hoddle has always vehemently denied the description. Talking about the experience, he recalled "a real spiritual feeling inside of me and it was exhilarating and I came back from that trip and searched myself and searched different books: the Bible, Eastern philosophies, the whole lot really."

Central to Hoddle's beliefs is that all religions lead to the same place. God is the hub and the spokes are the different world religions is a metaphor he has used to explain his attitude. This kind of universalism has become one of the defining features of New Age philosophy, allowing for an admirable religious tolerance, but also encouraging, at its crudest, an airbrushing out of the doctrines which are radically different between faiths. Hoddle has great admiration for Christ; he happily expands on why Jesus Christ is a "strong" character and a great example to us all, and admits that he learnt a lot about God from Cliff Richard, a long-term, born-again Christian.

"I did not understand the Bible," he explained in the mid-1980s. "I learned more about God from Cliff's own book about Christianity, which put things in a more modern way."

But he is also oddly patronising at times, claiming that his faith is "deeper" than that of an evangelical Christian. He sets himself apart as something unique, with a bizarre arrogance: "But my faith in God is at a spirit level . . . a very individual situation."

For Hoddle, God is within. The idea of God as internal rather than external is arguably the greatest influence of Eastern spirituality on the West this century. From this belief spring many New Age characteristics such as optimism and faith in human nature which is ultimately God-like. What follows is that we can learn to express our God-like nature with God-like gifts and powers - miracles are not beyond anyone, goes the thinking. This is the religion of self-empowerment which has flourished, particularly, in California and swept across the world, filling bookshops with dozens of best-sellers, ranging from how you can find your true, inner divinity to how you can heal your own cancer.

It is typical in this context to believe that you can tap special abilities to heal, to offer wisdom and insight to other people. Hoddle indicates this when he claims that "If a manager has faith, he should be able to help other people. If a manager can help people face their problems, he might send someone on a new way of life, a new path."

The danger in this belief is obvious: people become inflated with their own powers and start making extravagant claims for themselves and abusing the gullible vulnerability of others. The Nine o'clock Service, which collapsed in 1995 in Sheffield, demonstrated how badly things can go wrong. A Church of England priest with a lot of charisma managed to convince scores of young women that his fondling of them was part of their "healing".

The beliefs which have landed Hoddle in his current predicament - karma and reincarnation - are accepted among millions of Indians as well as a growing number of Westerners. The appeal of reincarnation lies in the re-working of the Christian idea of the immortality of the soul, but removes the seeming harshness of only one chance before the Last Judgment, heaven and hell.

In one of the most memorable illuminations of his eclectic belief system, Hoddle explained: "I have been here before as a spirit - this is just my physical body, it is just an overcoat. And at death, you will take the overcoat off . . . I think we make mistakes when we are down here and that our spirit has to come back and learn."

The Hindu concept of karma is the belief that every action, every experience and every thought has its consequences. Either we experience those in our present life or in a future life. Many have embraced karma as an explanation for the problem that all religions grapple with - the huge injustice of life. Why is it that some people are born with brains, beauty and all the luck and others go from one horrific tragedy to another? Karma has the potential to be a harsh and very offensive philosophy, as Hoddle's comments showed. If someone suffers a terrible tragedy, the conclusion is that it is their own fault, and they must go through the suffering to rid themselves of the bad karma; it can result in a very brutal fatalism. What makes Hoddle's remarks so offensive is that in some parts of India, the disabled and disfigured are very badly treated and the family stigmatised, because of precisely this kind of argument, while the wealthy and successful preen themselves on having good karma.

But this is a very crude understanding of karma. As we are all suffering from karma, everyone deserves to give and receive compassion. We can't measure one person's suffering against another's, so we can't start guessing who did what in their previous life - as Hoddle appeared to be doing.

But Christianity and Hinduism are not the only ingredients of Hoddle's theological casserole. Mixed in with the wholesale borrowing and freely adapted Eastern imports, Hoddle has, like many New Agers, included bits of Romanticism, which proclaimed a personal spirituality beyond the reach of the authority of the church. The most striking illustration of Hoddle's Romanticism is his sense of destiny, which he often refers to in terms not unlike Napoleon's. He believes it was his destiny to become manager of England. While such a belief must give him great strength, it can also generate overweening arrogance. Hoddle's beliefs demonstrate the strength of the New Age - it can, and does, help many people to develop a sense of their place in the world. But there is no intellectual coherence here - it is not regarded as necessary because the intellect is seen as inferior to emotion and instinct. Such muddled beliefs can become gullible nonsense.

Equally dangerous is the fact that Hoddle explicitly rejects any communal context to belief. This is where the New Age is a radical departure from all the religions from which it borrows. Hindus and Christians believe faith is a social as well as a personal experience. But the New Age in general, and Hoddle in particular, place all authority with the self.

Without any social framework, it is possible to ad lib, making it up as you go along, with no one to provide a reality check.