The World Is Not What We Think It Is
Review of Living in Wonder by Rod Dreher
Rod Dreher, at the beginning of Living in Wonder: Finding Mystery and Meaning in a Secular Age, interviews a devout Christian lawyer, reflecting on his experience of demonic oppression. The man says, “This whole thing had made me understand that materialism is false. The world is not what we think it it is.”
This, Dreher writes, is the thesis of his book. For a few hundred years, Western civilization has attempted to live in and believe in a materialist world, a world sapped of the spiritual—and though this led us to incredible scientific and technological breakthroughs, it has also eroded and degraded our human spirit. In the book, he agrees with the psychiatrist Iain McGilchrist, whose work argues that
our material and technological achievements have “washed away our sense of living in a world of wonder, meaning, and harmony, and made us miserable.”
In that same vein, Dreher writes that
modernity has “turned us from a flock of pilgrims on a journey of ultimate meaning into lonely tourists flitting around from place to place, madly trying to stay one step ahead of boredom.”
And yet, something is changing and stirring in our midst, as we begin to witness what Justin Brierly calls “a surprising rebirth of belief in God,” or perhaps, in the gods. Dreher proposes in his book that we are entering an age of re-enchantment, which for Christians is both good news and bad news.
Enchantment sounds like a strange word to many of us, because it makes us think of magic or fantasy literature when we hear it. But this isn’t what enchantment refers to in the book. Dreher, using the work of theorists Joshua Landy and Michael Saler, explains that:
“a meaningful form of re-enchantment will recognize that the world holds these realities:
Mystery and wonder
Order
Purpose
Meaning, as a “hierarchy of significance attaching objects and events encountered”
The possibility of redemption, for both individuals and moments in time
A means of connecting to the infinite
The existence of sacred spaces
Miracles, defined as “exceptional events which go against (and perhaps even alter) the accepted order of things”
Epiphanies, which are “moments of being in which, for a brief instant, the center appears to hold, and the promise is held out of a quasi-mystical union with something larger than oneself””
A world without enchantment envisions a cardinal bird on your porch, trying to find some food. A world with enchantment also believes that cardinal bird is a visitation, a sign from a deceased friend (as Kasey Musgraves sings about here, about her friend, the late John Prine). A materialist, non-spiritual world only accepts scientific, empirical arguments about causality; an enchanted world accepts that creatures and things have a purpose, one that has called them forward. The reason a sunset exists cannot be explained merely by the science of optics; rather, it’s reason for existence is beauty, and because God (or the gods) spoke it into being. Enchantment, in this sense, is not necessarily Christian, it’s simply an openness to the reality of things that are not physically tangible; it’s an openness and acceptance that invisible things nevertheless exist. It’s an acceptance that this world is not what we think it is.
Through a mixture of cultural commentary, personal testimonies, and his own self-reflection, Dreher shows that a materialist worldview no longer makes sense of our world in the West and we are seeking enchantment: through a reconnection with God or religion; by dabbling in the occult; by experimenting with psychedelics; or through new, technological mediums like artificial intelligence chatbots, acting for some as modern-day Ouija boards. With chapter titles ranging from “The Dark Enchantment of the Occult,” “Aliens and the Sacred Machine,” and “Attention and Prayer,” there is a wide range of topics covered, and a lot of it sounds somewhat kooky—until you, like me, begin to encounter people who have these kinds of “enchanted” experiences in your ministry and your life.
Here’s why I think this book is so, so important for pastors particularly to read. There was a time, maybe it was most of the twentieth century, that the clear opponent of Christianity was a kind of secular atheism, one often tied with elites, scientists, intellectuals, and communists. Many of the great Christian apologists of the last century (Chesterton, C.S. Lewis, and even more recent ones such as Tim Keller or John Lennox), all were addressing skeptics as their audience, materialists who had become convinced by the evolutionary, materialist model of the universe. The New Atheists (notably Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens) in the early years of the 21st century held a banner for this kind of skepticism, right at the rise of the Internet.
But skepticism like that has long since run out of steam, according to Dreher. It couldn’t supply answers to our human longing for meaning and purpose. Our problem now is the gods people do believe in. As Chesterton is quoted as saying,
When men stop believing in God, they don’t believe in nothing; they believe in anything.
It is not atheism or skepticism that we must now be on guard against; it’s witchcraft, paganism, nature worship, the occult, the places and spirits people discover when they trip on psychedelics; it’s the way techno-futurists hail AI as man’s way of creating its own gods; it’s the strange encounters people find in the UFO community; it’s books of magic spells on the new non-fiction rack at your public library (I saw one of these in my very own library in Kenton County, KY); it’s the social media influencers who teach young people to cast curses and enchantments and make potions, as well as advise them on which crystals bring good health and safety to your home; it’s online enthusiasts of sexual and gender identities, who propose a kind of religion out of self-creation and the breaking of taboos.
If all this sounds crazy to you, I assure you: I totally agree. But as a pastor, I’m finding examples of this more and more in people’s lives (and at times, in my own). People who have escaped from the occult, who believe in the healing powers of crystals and amulets, who have encountered demons, who have had life-changing experiences for better or worse because they tripped on mushrooms.
One example: there was a young man, in his early 20s, doing some work at my house last year. I tell him I’m a pastor in conversation, and he began asking me about faith and about Jesus. He was clearly on a spiritual journey, and soon enough I began to ask him questions, about his life and about what he believed in. He was not a Christian, “at least not yet” (a turn of phrase that should get every pastor excited!); but he was definitely not an atheist. He told me about his ex-girlfriend, that she was into witchcraft; “she’s a witch,” he said more casually than I would have expected, as if he was telling me she was a schoolteacher.
He told me that she used to suffer from sleep paralysis until a strange thing happened. One night, looking over to his girlfriend next to him in bed, in a kind of awake/dream state, he saw a demon on top of her, which he described as a large black creature. He said, in the awake/dream, he wrestled with it and tried to tear it off her, and he said it was terrifying. But after that, apparently, the sleep paralysis went away.
He also told me about the time he was hanging out with his friend who was something of a body builder, a really strong guy, and his friend’s small, scrawny brother came over in a fit. They believed that he was out of his mind and possessed by a demon, shouting horrible, cruel things, and the little brother picked up his big brother and threw him against the wall, something he shouldn’t have physically been able to do. Another terrifying experience, which he very plainly attributed to an encounter with the demonic.
My conversation with this young man was a turning point for me pastorally. I realized that a lot of my energies in preaching and teaching had been to equip people to believe intellectually, not only that God exists, but that Christianity is true. The opponent, in my mind, was materialist atheism, scientism, the belief that our existence is random and purposeless. But this young man helped me see that, for a growing number of people, the need is not to show the the spiritual world is real, but it is to demonstrate that Jesus is powerful enough to rescue us from spiritual darkness. The great model for the ministry needed in this moment is the power-evangelism seen in the book of Acts. The Roman empire was not full of atheists; it was full of deeply spiritual people, who just happened to be in league with a dark spirituality that was keeping them in chains (the early Christians clearly believed that the Roman gods were actually demons in disguise). The apostles came, therefore, not to argue for the existence of God, but to demonstrate the saving power of the name of Jesus against all other gods. I believe that is our calling again today. I’m learning that the more post-Christian we become, the more pre-Christian we become too. And for that, we need to model our ministries and our outreach on the book of Acts, meaning we need to be “clothed with power” (Acts 1).
I was grateful that day to be able to talk and pray with this young man. I asked him, have you ever heard the story of the prodigal son? And he looked at me, clearly interested, and said, No, I’ve never heard that one. Can you imagine, living your life and never having heard that story? Anyhow, I told it to him, and tried my best to explain it, and I pray that someday he will come to accept God as the Father who loves him. If you have a moment, say a prayer for him.
But in that conversation, it was as if God was giving me a huge neon billboard sign, saying, This is where the people are at! This is what you’re going to be dealing with in your ministry! Get ready for it!
And this is why I think Living In Wonder is an important book for pastors to read. We need to be thinking critically about how to lead churches of counter-formation in a re-enchanting world. How do we become people who are open to a real and ongoing experience of God, and at the same time protect ourselves and our families from the very real and dark enchantment that is coming? How do we become a community of deep prayer? How do we cultivate attention to the Holy Spirit? How can we learn together to discern and test the spirits of our age?
Dreher, I think, gives us a good primer to begin these kinds of needed conversations. As a convert to Eastern Orthodoxy, he gives a wonderful perspective on how the mystery of our worship, liturgies, and sacraments have a central place in drawing people, with wonder, into the presence of the living God. My hope is that he is one voice of many, who are calling Christians of all stripes to model and offer this life of wonder to the world.
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So true. I do believe that as Western culture abandons it’s Christian roots, that it will be more open to the demonic powers of darkness. Christians, both clergy and laity, had better be prepared for this encounter.