I've definitely seen this trend in the "re-enchantment" discourse of focusing on supernatural/paranormal/fortean phenomenon to push back against reductive materialism. It looks like Dreher is continuing this trend with several of the stories you mention above. Having been a wiccan for a time during my sojourn in the enemies camp I'm really concerned about this emphasis. The quickest way we get mass demonic deception is to have a generation so hungry for an "enchanted" world that they take any supernatural activity as a guide to truth. When all one want's is magic in the world demons start pulling rabbits out of hats. I think the real way to re-enchantment is emphasizing the sacred in the mundane. That we need to help people see God at work through his word, his sacraments, and his church. To remind them that when they commune with brothers and sisters in Christ they stand on holy ground, and that those in Christ are united to the Father through the Holy Spirit. He is in us and we stand before his throne every waking moment. That's enchanting.
Whoa. Was not expecting you to drop this lore in the chat bro. Very thoughtful comments. I'm reminded of the Screwtape letter about the twin goals of making people EITHER hyper-interested in the demonic or completely inoculated to it.
In fairness to Dreher, much of this book is preoccupied with as you say seeking the sacred in the mundane. He recommends the film To the Wonder, which is evocative here.
I totally agree re: emphasizing the sacred in the mundane:
-----
From Luther's Large Catechism on "give us this day our daily bread"
"Give us this day our daily bread.
Here, now, we consider the poor breadbasket, the necessaries of our body and of the temporal life. It is a brief and simple word, but it has a very wide scope. For when you mention and pray for daily bread, you pray for everything that is necessary in order to have and enjoy daily bread and, on the other hand, against everything which interferes with it. Therefore you must open wide and extend your thoughts not only to the oven or the flour-bin but to the distant field and the entire land, which bears and brings to us daily bread and every sort of sustenance. For if God did not cause it to grow, and bless and preserve it in the field, we could never take bread from the oven or have any to set upon the table."
----
It's true that our modern agriculture and supply chains provide a huge separation between much of our food and us consuming it relative to pre-industrial times. On the other side, if you think about it in a different light, God's provision and sustaining of the farmer, the entire supply chain behind building and operating the equipment, all of the harvesting and storage, all of the transportation logistics (including all of the supply chain behind the car that takes you to the market and back), along with all of the logistics behind actually consuming and using the bread (knife, toaster, etc...) positively dwarf how a peasant would see the steps in getting a loaf of bread. It's mindbogglingly staggering and should inspire awe when we think about it.
Thank you for this review. I started reading Living In Wonder, but it seemed like it was leading in directions I didn’t really want to go. I am in my mid-seventies, so while I grew up (and grew old) thoroughly immersed in modernity, I still had links to the pre-modern world. I was raised in a traditional Lutheran church, with a liturgy that included the Gloria Patri and the Te Deum. I honed my reading skills on fairy tales and (highly edited) Greek myths. I read Tolkien, starting in high school, and added Lewis in college. On social media someone asked the question, "What is your favorite book by Lewis?" I would have to say, The Discarded Image is my personal favorite. I think it would be very easy for me to lose myself in enchantment, but as Paul wrote, "For I reckon that the sufferings of this present time are not worthy to be compared with the glory which shall be revealed in us." (Romans 8:18) I need the grounding of my Calvinist presbyterian church so that I may endure to the end.
Sounds like you've done your share of denomination-hopping! I've attended some Lutheran services, never really considered joining since they fence their table pretty strictly, but liturgically they do feel like "cousins" to me as an Anglican.
I remember reading some of The Discarded Image in high school, but I'm not actually sure if I've read it all cover to cover. I hear it cited a fair bit in this whole "reenchantment discourse," but I don't know that Lewis would have followed the people citing him to the same conclusions, particularly their genealogies of modernity.
Philosophy really isn't my field, but it seems like these writers may be taking nominalism/realism with with respect to universals and confusing or conflating it with other things.
As a matter of fact, Dreher discusses panentheism positively in the book. He's far from the first--N. T. Wright has made positive noises in that direction too.
Yes, in fact Dreher mentioned the "It's all Ockham's fault" thesis towards the end of our discussion on Paul Vanderklay's channel. :)
For some reason, there seems to be a connection between an an especially high view of the sacraments and panentheism. I'm not sure I can articulate exactly what it is, but I think there has to be -- and we have to observe -- a fundamental distinction between panentheism and God's immanence. I have a feeling that in the end this "re-enchantment" thing is only going to create different -- or bigger --problems.
I went back and watched Dreher make that throwaway comment about William of Ockham's being the "big villain" in the video. I'm becoming more and more dubious of the guys making that claim. For one thing, they don't seem to recognize that there's range of positions between a radical realism and a radical nominalism. For another thing, they seem to be applying "nominalism" to things that have nothing to do with the existence or nonexistence of universals.
There's a place for doing intellectual history -- and I think it's often interesting. But I'm getting tired of sloppy intellectual history being done only (apparently) to find terms that can be applied to people in order to dismiss them. "You're a nominalist, ... a rationalist, ... a gnostic, ... a whatever (so I can dismiss what you say)." It's putting an intellectual veneer on C. S. Lewis's Bulverism. It's interesting that the Bible and the creeds don't get into things like that; what's important is our confession of concrete facts.
I noticed another one of these called ‘The Languages of Rivers and Stars’ by Seth Lewis with an enthusiastic review by Alistair Begg whom I rate very much. But not going to read the book. It reminded me too much of one about thankfulness by a Canadian lady.
I was a bit disturbed to hear that orthodox believers don’t believe in original sin. It was on a tour in Romania at an Orthodox Church.
I like Lewis and Tolkien’s and have an eclectic Christian church background. I followed RD for a while but in the end had reservations about Dreher.
It seems to me in my walk with God, that often silence is the answer and just plain faithfulness in prayer, Bible reading and church attendance is the way to healing. Fellowship and shared service as well. Nature, travel and life brings joy. Liturgy can be healing. But there is no one method. God in Christ meets us where we are. We have to walk through the pain.
I'm a big Dreher fan, but he sometimes doesn't 'get' evangelicals completely.
They way he weaves storytelling and narrative theological discovery together reminds me in some ways of the late great Catherine Marshall -- though I am not sure if he'd like that association.
Matthew C. Bingham's new "A Heart Aflame' (Crossway) is an engaging counterpoint to the ongoing mysticism conversation.
One autumn night in Hungary, a distraught young American exchange student walked up to Rod Dreher and anxiously plucked his sleeve. “I’m a conservative evangelical and have been all my life,” the young man said. “But I’m dying. I mean, I’m like a fish lying on a riverbank, gasping for air. I believe it all, but I am desperate for a sense of enchantment.” Then he said, “I’d like you to tell me about Orthodoxy.”
---
I think Dreher's right that there can be a real sterility in some forms of evangelicalism or a brain-on-a-stick flatness in something like my own Reformed tradition, but what it also misses is that those very same things can be present in a high liturgical tradition by someone who's gone through the motions a million times and is on checked out autopilot. There are people raised liturgically who find they can finally breathe in something very informal or even slapdash and vice versa. It's not really an argument either way for the truth of either system, or really even its merits for the Church since what's more culturally congruent in one society is alien to another.
---
While he's certainly not someone cold-blooded in disposition, the by repute sterile and austere New England Puritans had a deeply enchanted and philosophical figure in Jonathan Edwards. His writings on the "flying spider" to the Royal Society are definitely remarkable:
"Edwards draws two theological conclusions from observing spiders. First, God not only provides for “all the necessities, but also for the pleasure and recreation of all sorts of creatures, even the insects.” To Edwards, it looked like the spiders were having fun flying from place to place. Second, God manages the amounts of creatures on earth for the greater good: “The wisdom of the Creator is also admirable in so nicely and mathematically adjusting their plastic nature, that notwithstanding their destruction by this means and the multitudes that are eaten by birds, that they do not decrease and so by little and little come to nothing.”
Obviously, one example has limited value, but I think it does highlight how wonder would work in someone otherwise taking quite a different approach.
Great point about people who are checked out in a liturgical tradition. Dreher has been Catholic, surely he's aware of this. I realize low-church Protestantism is the fashionable tradition to dunk on at the moment but two can play at this game, with receipts.
Wow, what a lovely and unexpected Edwards reference! Thank you!
To my ears it's part of the eternal struggle to define the Christian experience. And even the language of "experience" tips my hand a bit.
It's been the dog-bites-man story of the past 40 years in the American Christian church ("dog-bites-man" being a cliche that describes something so obvious as to not even be newsworthy) that the church is shrinking. Drastically.
The mass exodus seems to have slowed a bit, though what many consider its final blow came with the COVID-19 shutdowns.
The newest stories, however, are of revival -- but not in the evangelical churches that have had cultural sway in the past 40 years, but rather, in the highly liturgical, very traditional churches -- Catholic, and especially Orthodox.
And the talk there is of "re-enchantment" of the church. The desire among Christians I have known is to "experience" Christianity. The problem, as I see it, is not in the wish for the mysteries of Christianity to be explored. I think the problem is in the expectation that they should be "felt".
We understand that we believe in a God who is silent and invisible. Traditionally and theologically, the way American Protestantism has dealt with the problem of a silent and invisible God is through Bible scholarship and relying on what we collectively agreed upon could be the only authoritative means to understand our silent and invisible God -- explicit revelation. The Bible.
And what we meant by that was not a sacralizing of the Bible, but rather, the use of the means of study by which we would understand any written text. If (so we believed) God had chosen to reveal himself to us through the written word, we should diligently try to figure out as close to exactly what that written word was telling us. Just as any other text, we followed rules of interpretation. And we came up with an uncommonly universal agreement on almost every Christian doctrine.
But it was hard work. It was a slog. And it didn't solve our daily problems. And it often ran counter to what we wanted to believe. It was dry. It was history. It wasn't enjoyable reading. The Bible scholars mostly borrowed their approach from their secular university counterparts and developed a vocabulary that was once meant to clarify, but has long since become a means of obfuscation, and an esoteric language by which they communicate among themselves and to nobody else. It is utterly inscrutable. On purpose. (try to read even the first paragraph of any of these articles
So, the other, far more popular means of attempting to discover a God who is invisible and silent is to set our artists to the task. That's the approach we really like. That's the approach we connect with. And, since most of us have been raised in a Christianity that is essentially exactly this, this is the Christianity that we feel most comfortable with. It "feels" right.
And we graciously attribute this approach all the best of motive and intentions. Who are we to question anyone's search for the Christian experience? Besides, we believers believed we were utterly eviscerated by science about 100 years ago and have been reeling from the blows ever since. So, since reason failed, why not magic?
And book learning could never hope to compete with the emotional experience we can derive from the right music, moving rhetoric, soaring architecture. And even though we of the leave-it-up-to-the-artists camp understand intuitively that among the many weaknesses of this approach are that the church becomes exceedingly splintered over style rather than substance (we have to have two services -- a traditional and a contemporary -- in order to accommodate each faction's God). And we understand that we further splinter over the lack of exact doctrine (and we remain loathe to consult the theologians because we don't want to accept the dry scholarship in lieu of the emotional high. And we probably don't really want an answer because then we might be responsible to act on it. We'd rather the devil of mystery that we know than the devil of responsibility that we don't know but might invite.)
The new explosion in growth being "enjoyed" by the Catholics and Orthodox is swirling around the promise of new "enchantment". Experience. Excitement (ironic, that, because the previous mass exodus from those liturgical churches was due to abject boredom with a millennia-long sameness and ritual). I imagine that in a few short years, what is exciting and new to this influx of young men, will become boring. They will move on from it just as they moved on to it -- ever searching for the next new high. More enchantment. The dopamine fix of a novel experience.
So we bounce around from experience to experience -- because we would rather feel something than be faced with the chronic mystery that we cannot *know* it in a way satisfactory to our common sense. And then we contrarily and arbitrarily insist upon using the language of empirical experience to describe what our artists have made us feel.
>So, theologians developed a language that at first was meant to clarify, but quickly morphed into esotericism and obfuscation.
>And the artists caused us to develop a reactionary language, equally esoteric and meant to obfuscate. "Come let us pretend together, and by that pretense, we will allow our increasingly uncomfortable beliefs to become true!"
All the while St Paul calls us to "Make it your goal to live a quiet life, minding your own business and working with your hands, just as we instructed you before."
A church that either seeks to amass esoteric knowledge purportedly solving all the mysteries, or, on the other hand, seeks to compete in the world of sex, drugs, rock&roll to give us the "experience" of a lifetime...
...is not a church that is preparing us for the mundane life we could learn to love in contentment. Nobody ever asked anyone to be "soaked in contentment" and expected to garner a million subscribers to their substack."
Thanks for the review. I still haven't decided if I want to read Dreher's book.
Now about this passage: "It’s my belief that the apostles experienced something singular in the years they spent with Jesus, and then the weeks spent with Jesus in his risen form. We envy them because we long for what they had. I’m inclined to think God calls us to be content with the record of what they had, as we anticipate the day when faith will finally become sight."
But we are left with more than the record of what they had; we have been given the Holy Spirit, who is promised to be to us all that Jesus was to the apostles, and more. We are not bereft; we have "another Comforter."
I agree that we're not bereft, but I simply report my humble personal experience, which I'm sure is the experience of many other Christians, that the Holy Spirit's operations aren't detectable in some concrete way for me in the same way the objects around me are concretely perceivable. It's definitely not detectable for me in the way Jesus' presence was to the disciples.
If we rely on the "smells and bells" of enchantment to sustain our religion, how will we survive the 400 years of silence before the Bright and Morning Star appears? Every word. Every promise. May we wait patiently for the Consolation of Israel sustained by the unshakable promise.
There is a lot of buzz about enchantment these days. Buzz worries me.
I wonder if you have heard of Lilias Trotter. A Victorian lady who spent 40 years with in Algeria reaching out to Muslims. Write lots but was an amazing artist whom Ruskin said of, that she could have been the greatest English woman painter ever. She chose Jesus over art. Lots of publications but never lost her love of painting and drawing and saw the Lord in creation in an amazing way. Her ‘A Blossom in the Desert ‘ title taken from her love for a daisy brought to her one day is just lovely.
Rod Dreher is asking the right question—but keeps answering it with mood or mystique dressed up as direction.
Yes, something vital has dimmed. But feeling the absence of enchantment isn’t the same as knowing what will restore it. Charles Taylor reminds us: our age isn’t empty—it’s saturated. Meaning isn’t missing; it’s overloaded, competing, noisy.
Dreher writes as if beauty must point somewhere, or it’s lost. But beauty doesn’t need to explain itself to be true. Enchantment isn’t something we recover. It’s something we discover—in spite of, and sometimes because of, all the noise about “godless modernity.”
We don’t need to mystify our way out. We need habits that hold, silence that isn’t projection, and a theology that endures even when God goes quiet.
Dreher is sincere. But sincerity can mislead—especially when it confuses intensity with clarity and decibels with depth.
That kind of confusion once lived on the Left Bank. Now it rents in Budapest.
Well, beauty does in fact point somewhere. I also think Dreher sees himself as encouraging people towards discovery. But agree that intensity shouldn't be confused with clarity.
You're right—beauty often does point somewhere. But God doesn’t sign his sunsets. I don’t doubt Dreher’s intent to inspire discovery—I just question the travel guide. Sacred longing deserves more than mood lighting. Grateful for the thoughtful pushback.
John of the Cross used the expression “dark night of the soul” explicitly to refer to a phase of spiritual development where the prayerful CANNOT “cling to what they know even amid God’s absolute silence”. That IS the dark night.
I believe a couple things could be conflated here. You can have a degree of cerebral knowledge with no attending feeling, or a strong feeling of personal abandonment.
Interesting. Only comeback I have is "Though He slay me, yet I will trust Him" is a pretty high bar for the faithful to attain and I am pretty well convinced that no human can sustain the effort for very long. Even Job began to slide eventually. Maybe it's the fear inherent in your awareness of your own vulnerability that is the real threat of the "dark night".
I've definitely seen this trend in the "re-enchantment" discourse of focusing on supernatural/paranormal/fortean phenomenon to push back against reductive materialism. It looks like Dreher is continuing this trend with several of the stories you mention above. Having been a wiccan for a time during my sojourn in the enemies camp I'm really concerned about this emphasis. The quickest way we get mass demonic deception is to have a generation so hungry for an "enchanted" world that they take any supernatural activity as a guide to truth. When all one want's is magic in the world demons start pulling rabbits out of hats. I think the real way to re-enchantment is emphasizing the sacred in the mundane. That we need to help people see God at work through his word, his sacraments, and his church. To remind them that when they commune with brothers and sisters in Christ they stand on holy ground, and that those in Christ are united to the Father through the Holy Spirit. He is in us and we stand before his throne every waking moment. That's enchanting.
Whoa. Was not expecting you to drop this lore in the chat bro. Very thoughtful comments. I'm reminded of the Screwtape letter about the twin goals of making people EITHER hyper-interested in the demonic or completely inoculated to it.
In fairness to Dreher, much of this book is preoccupied with as you say seeking the sacred in the mundane. He recommends the film To the Wonder, which is evocative here.
I totally agree re: emphasizing the sacred in the mundane:
-----
From Luther's Large Catechism on "give us this day our daily bread"
"Give us this day our daily bread.
Here, now, we consider the poor breadbasket, the necessaries of our body and of the temporal life. It is a brief and simple word, but it has a very wide scope. For when you mention and pray for daily bread, you pray for everything that is necessary in order to have and enjoy daily bread and, on the other hand, against everything which interferes with it. Therefore you must open wide and extend your thoughts not only to the oven or the flour-bin but to the distant field and the entire land, which bears and brings to us daily bread and every sort of sustenance. For if God did not cause it to grow, and bless and preserve it in the field, we could never take bread from the oven or have any to set upon the table."
----
It's true that our modern agriculture and supply chains provide a huge separation between much of our food and us consuming it relative to pre-industrial times. On the other side, if you think about it in a different light, God's provision and sustaining of the farmer, the entire supply chain behind building and operating the equipment, all of the harvesting and storage, all of the transportation logistics (including all of the supply chain behind the car that takes you to the market and back), along with all of the logistics behind actually consuming and using the bread (knife, toaster, etc...) positively dwarf how a peasant would see the steps in getting a loaf of bread. It's mindbogglingly staggering and should inspire awe when we think about it.
Thank you for this review. I started reading Living In Wonder, but it seemed like it was leading in directions I didn’t really want to go. I am in my mid-seventies, so while I grew up (and grew old) thoroughly immersed in modernity, I still had links to the pre-modern world. I was raised in a traditional Lutheran church, with a liturgy that included the Gloria Patri and the Te Deum. I honed my reading skills on fairy tales and (highly edited) Greek myths. I read Tolkien, starting in high school, and added Lewis in college. On social media someone asked the question, "What is your favorite book by Lewis?" I would have to say, The Discarded Image is my personal favorite. I think it would be very easy for me to lose myself in enchantment, but as Paul wrote, "For I reckon that the sufferings of this present time are not worthy to be compared with the glory which shall be revealed in us." (Romans 8:18) I need the grounding of my Calvinist presbyterian church so that I may endure to the end.
Sounds like you've done your share of denomination-hopping! I've attended some Lutheran services, never really considered joining since they fence their table pretty strictly, but liturgically they do feel like "cousins" to me as an Anglican.
I remember reading some of The Discarded Image in high school, but I'm not actually sure if I've read it all cover to cover. I hear it cited a fair bit in this whole "reenchantment discourse," but I don't know that Lewis would have followed the people citing him to the same conclusions, particularly their genealogies of modernity.
The Discarded Image is such an amazing book.
I always appreciate your reviews, Bethel.
You mention it in passing, but how likely do you think it is that efforts like Dreher's will end up promoting panentheism?
It seems like a fine line between "see[ing] God’s grandeur in a wild rabbit" and seeing God in a wild rabbit.
On another note (somewhat tangential): Have you seen Christian writers blaming everything, not on Descartes, but on William of Ockham?
A couple of examples are https://www.patheos.com/blogs/rogereolson/2015/11/the-catastrophe-of-nominalism/ and https://heidelblog.net/2015/12/the-cruelty-of-nominalism/
Philosophy really isn't my field, but it seems like these writers may be taking nominalism/realism with with respect to universals and confusing or conflating it with other things.
As a matter of fact, Dreher discusses panentheism positively in the book. He's far from the first--N. T. Wright has made positive noises in that direction too.
Yes, in fact Dreher mentioned the "It's all Ockham's fault" thesis towards the end of our discussion on Paul Vanderklay's channel. :)
For some reason, there seems to be a connection between an an especially high view of the sacraments and panentheism. I'm not sure I can articulate exactly what it is, but I think there has to be -- and we have to observe -- a fundamental distinction between panentheism and God's immanence. I have a feeling that in the end this "re-enchantment" thing is only going to create different -- or bigger --problems.
I went back and watched Dreher make that throwaway comment about William of Ockham's being the "big villain" in the video. I'm becoming more and more dubious of the guys making that claim. For one thing, they don't seem to recognize that there's range of positions between a radical realism and a radical nominalism. For another thing, they seem to be applying "nominalism" to things that have nothing to do with the existence or nonexistence of universals.
There's a place for doing intellectual history -- and I think it's often interesting. But I'm getting tired of sloppy intellectual history being done only (apparently) to find terms that can be applied to people in order to dismiss them. "You're a nominalist, ... a rationalist, ... a gnostic, ... a whatever (so I can dismiss what you say)." It's putting an intellectual veneer on C. S. Lewis's Bulverism. It's interesting that the Bible and the creeds don't get into things like that; what's important is our confession of concrete facts.
I noticed another one of these called ‘The Languages of Rivers and Stars’ by Seth Lewis with an enthusiastic review by Alistair Begg whom I rate very much. But not going to read the book. It reminded me too much of one about thankfulness by a Canadian lady.
I was a bit disturbed to hear that orthodox believers don’t believe in original sin. It was on a tour in Romania at an Orthodox Church.
I like Lewis and Tolkien’s and have an eclectic Christian church background. I followed RD for a while but in the end had reservations about Dreher.
It seems to me in my walk with God, that often silence is the answer and just plain faithfulness in prayer, Bible reading and church attendance is the way to healing. Fellowship and shared service as well. Nature, travel and life brings joy. Liturgy can be healing. But there is no one method. God in Christ meets us where we are. We have to walk through the pain.
Amen.
Good stuff. Thank you.
I'm a big Dreher fan, but he sometimes doesn't 'get' evangelicals completely.
They way he weaves storytelling and narrative theological discovery together reminds me in some ways of the late great Catherine Marshall -- though I am not sure if he'd like that association.
Matthew C. Bingham's new "A Heart Aflame' (Crossway) is an engaging counterpoint to the ongoing mysticism conversation.
Have to check that out. Agree that evangelicals seem to have been a black box to Dreher for a while, although I don't sense hostility from him.
One autumn night in Hungary, a distraught young American exchange student walked up to Rod Dreher and anxiously plucked his sleeve. “I’m a conservative evangelical and have been all my life,” the young man said. “But I’m dying. I mean, I’m like a fish lying on a riverbank, gasping for air. I believe it all, but I am desperate for a sense of enchantment.” Then he said, “I’d like you to tell me about Orthodoxy.”
---
I think Dreher's right that there can be a real sterility in some forms of evangelicalism or a brain-on-a-stick flatness in something like my own Reformed tradition, but what it also misses is that those very same things can be present in a high liturgical tradition by someone who's gone through the motions a million times and is on checked out autopilot. There are people raised liturgically who find they can finally breathe in something very informal or even slapdash and vice versa. It's not really an argument either way for the truth of either system, or really even its merits for the Church since what's more culturally congruent in one society is alien to another.
---
While he's certainly not someone cold-blooded in disposition, the by repute sterile and austere New England Puritans had a deeply enchanted and philosophical figure in Jonathan Edwards. His writings on the "flying spider" to the Royal Society are definitely remarkable:
https://www.nyhistory.org/blogs/jonathan-edwards-and-the-flying-spiders
"Edwards draws two theological conclusions from observing spiders. First, God not only provides for “all the necessities, but also for the pleasure and recreation of all sorts of creatures, even the insects.” To Edwards, it looked like the spiders were having fun flying from place to place. Second, God manages the amounts of creatures on earth for the greater good: “The wisdom of the Creator is also admirable in so nicely and mathematically adjusting their plastic nature, that notwithstanding their destruction by this means and the multitudes that are eaten by birds, that they do not decrease and so by little and little come to nothing.”
Obviously, one example has limited value, but I think it does highlight how wonder would work in someone otherwise taking quite a different approach.
Thanks as always for your writing and reviews.
Great point about people who are checked out in a liturgical tradition. Dreher has been Catholic, surely he's aware of this. I realize low-church Protestantism is the fashionable tradition to dunk on at the moment but two can play at this game, with receipts.
Wow, what a lovely and unexpected Edwards reference! Thank you!
To my ears it's part of the eternal struggle to define the Christian experience. And even the language of "experience" tips my hand a bit.
It's been the dog-bites-man story of the past 40 years in the American Christian church ("dog-bites-man" being a cliche that describes something so obvious as to not even be newsworthy) that the church is shrinking. Drastically.
The mass exodus seems to have slowed a bit, though what many consider its final blow came with the COVID-19 shutdowns.
The newest stories, however, are of revival -- but not in the evangelical churches that have had cultural sway in the past 40 years, but rather, in the highly liturgical, very traditional churches -- Catholic, and especially Orthodox.
And the talk there is of "re-enchantment" of the church. The desire among Christians I have known is to "experience" Christianity. The problem, as I see it, is not in the wish for the mysteries of Christianity to be explored. I think the problem is in the expectation that they should be "felt".
We understand that we believe in a God who is silent and invisible. Traditionally and theologically, the way American Protestantism has dealt with the problem of a silent and invisible God is through Bible scholarship and relying on what we collectively agreed upon could be the only authoritative means to understand our silent and invisible God -- explicit revelation. The Bible.
And what we meant by that was not a sacralizing of the Bible, but rather, the use of the means of study by which we would understand any written text. If (so we believed) God had chosen to reveal himself to us through the written word, we should diligently try to figure out as close to exactly what that written word was telling us. Just as any other text, we followed rules of interpretation. And we came up with an uncommonly universal agreement on almost every Christian doctrine.
But it was hard work. It was a slog. And it didn't solve our daily problems. And it often ran counter to what we wanted to believe. It was dry. It was history. It wasn't enjoyable reading. The Bible scholars mostly borrowed their approach from their secular university counterparts and developed a vocabulary that was once meant to clarify, but has long since become a means of obfuscation, and an esoteric language by which they communicate among themselves and to nobody else. It is utterly inscrutable. On purpose. (try to read even the first paragraph of any of these articles
https://theecclesialcalvinist.wordpress.com/articles/ )
So, the other, far more popular means of attempting to discover a God who is invisible and silent is to set our artists to the task. That's the approach we really like. That's the approach we connect with. And, since most of us have been raised in a Christianity that is essentially exactly this, this is the Christianity that we feel most comfortable with. It "feels" right.
And we graciously attribute this approach all the best of motive and intentions. Who are we to question anyone's search for the Christian experience? Besides, we believers believed we were utterly eviscerated by science about 100 years ago and have been reeling from the blows ever since. So, since reason failed, why not magic?
And book learning could never hope to compete with the emotional experience we can derive from the right music, moving rhetoric, soaring architecture. And even though we of the leave-it-up-to-the-artists camp understand intuitively that among the many weaknesses of this approach are that the church becomes exceedingly splintered over style rather than substance (we have to have two services -- a traditional and a contemporary -- in order to accommodate each faction's God). And we understand that we further splinter over the lack of exact doctrine (and we remain loathe to consult the theologians because we don't want to accept the dry scholarship in lieu of the emotional high. And we probably don't really want an answer because then we might be responsible to act on it. We'd rather the devil of mystery that we know than the devil of responsibility that we don't know but might invite.)
The new explosion in growth being "enjoyed" by the Catholics and Orthodox is swirling around the promise of new "enchantment". Experience. Excitement (ironic, that, because the previous mass exodus from those liturgical churches was due to abject boredom with a millennia-long sameness and ritual). I imagine that in a few short years, what is exciting and new to this influx of young men, will become boring. They will move on from it just as they moved on to it -- ever searching for the next new high. More enchantment. The dopamine fix of a novel experience.
So we bounce around from experience to experience -- because we would rather feel something than be faced with the chronic mystery that we cannot *know* it in a way satisfactory to our common sense. And then we contrarily and arbitrarily insist upon using the language of empirical experience to describe what our artists have made us feel.
>So, theologians developed a language that at first was meant to clarify, but quickly morphed into esotericism and obfuscation.
>And the artists caused us to develop a reactionary language, equally esoteric and meant to obfuscate. "Come let us pretend together, and by that pretense, we will allow our increasingly uncomfortable beliefs to become true!"
All the while St Paul calls us to "Make it your goal to live a quiet life, minding your own business and working with your hands, just as we instructed you before."
A church that either seeks to amass esoteric knowledge purportedly solving all the mysteries, or, on the other hand, seeks to compete in the world of sex, drugs, rock&roll to give us the "experience" of a lifetime...
...is not a church that is preparing us for the mundane life we could learn to love in contentment. Nobody ever asked anyone to be "soaked in contentment" and expected to garner a million subscribers to their substack."
Thanks for the review. I still haven't decided if I want to read Dreher's book.
Now about this passage: "It’s my belief that the apostles experienced something singular in the years they spent with Jesus, and then the weeks spent with Jesus in his risen form. We envy them because we long for what they had. I’m inclined to think God calls us to be content with the record of what they had, as we anticipate the day when faith will finally become sight."
But we are left with more than the record of what they had; we have been given the Holy Spirit, who is promised to be to us all that Jesus was to the apostles, and more. We are not bereft; we have "another Comforter."
I agree that we're not bereft, but I simply report my humble personal experience, which I'm sure is the experience of many other Christians, that the Holy Spirit's operations aren't detectable in some concrete way for me in the same way the objects around me are concretely perceivable. It's definitely not detectable for me in the way Jesus' presence was to the disciples.
If we rely on the "smells and bells" of enchantment to sustain our religion, how will we survive the 400 years of silence before the Bright and Morning Star appears? Every word. Every promise. May we wait patiently for the Consolation of Israel sustained by the unshakable promise.
There is a lot of buzz about enchantment these days. Buzz worries me.
Buzz is nearly always at least somewhat disproportionate to the substance when you take a closer look.
I wonder if you have heard of Lilias Trotter. A Victorian lady who spent 40 years with in Algeria reaching out to Muslims. Write lots but was an amazing artist whom Ruskin said of, that she could have been the greatest English woman painter ever. She chose Jesus over art. Lots of publications but never lost her love of painting and drawing and saw the Lord in creation in an amazing way. Her ‘A Blossom in the Desert ‘ title taken from her love for a daisy brought to her one day is just lovely.
I haven't! Should look her up!
Rod Dreher is asking the right question—but keeps answering it with mood or mystique dressed up as direction.
Yes, something vital has dimmed. But feeling the absence of enchantment isn’t the same as knowing what will restore it. Charles Taylor reminds us: our age isn’t empty—it’s saturated. Meaning isn’t missing; it’s overloaded, competing, noisy.
Dreher writes as if beauty must point somewhere, or it’s lost. But beauty doesn’t need to explain itself to be true. Enchantment isn’t something we recover. It’s something we discover—in spite of, and sometimes because of, all the noise about “godless modernity.”
We don’t need to mystify our way out. We need habits that hold, silence that isn’t projection, and a theology that endures even when God goes quiet.
Dreher is sincere. But sincerity can mislead—especially when it confuses intensity with clarity and decibels with depth.
That kind of confusion once lived on the Left Bank. Now it rents in Budapest.
Well, beauty does in fact point somewhere. I also think Dreher sees himself as encouraging people towards discovery. But agree that intensity shouldn't be confused with clarity.
You're right—beauty often does point somewhere. But God doesn’t sign his sunsets. I don’t doubt Dreher’s intent to inspire discovery—I just question the travel guide. Sacred longing deserves more than mood lighting. Grateful for the thoughtful pushback.
John of the Cross used the expression “dark night of the soul” explicitly to refer to a phase of spiritual development where the prayerful CANNOT “cling to what they know even amid God’s absolute silence”. That IS the dark night.
I believe a couple things could be conflated here. You can have a degree of cerebral knowledge with no attending feeling, or a strong feeling of personal abandonment.
Interesting. Only comeback I have is "Though He slay me, yet I will trust Him" is a pretty high bar for the faithful to attain and I am pretty well convinced that no human can sustain the effort for very long. Even Job began to slide eventually. Maybe it's the fear inherent in your awareness of your own vulnerability that is the real threat of the "dark night".