Navigating Reenchantment

Rod Dreher. Living in Wonder: Finding Mystery and Meaning in a Secular Age. Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2024. $29.99, 288pp.

I can remember the first time it dawned on me that my view of reality had gaps. I was an early twenty-something in a Bible College missiology class learning about the spiritual beliefs of different cultures. There were two large categories: the modern West, and then everyone else. A diagram appeared with three tiers: the bottom tier was for human beings, who have a spiritual capacity; the top tier was for transcendent beings beyond the world (God or the gods); and the middle tier was for intermediary beings, of which every culture save the modern West had plenty: faeries, djinns, demons, angels, elves, Iwa, nature spirits, and so on.

Here was a seed sown, a curtain pulled back, and a rock placed in the shoe of my mind. If the modern West is unique in having an empty vacuum where these beings have always dwelled, then the most likely explanation is that it is we and not the rest of the world that is deceived. And in its wake another thought, thick with implications: what happens to the Western world when that vacuum inevitably collapses?

A Timely Book

Enter Rod Dreher’s latest book, Living in Wonder. It tells the story of how such a state of affairs came about, explains the ways in which the collapse of materialism—and the attendant re-enchantment—is already taking place, and helps Christians to learn how to live a more enchanted faith. 

This latest book serves as the capstone to Dreher’s trilogy of books on how to live as Christians in a post-Christian world. The Benedict Option made the case that thick, deeply shaped communities were needed for Christian churches to withstand increasingly anti-Christian cultural pressures. In Live Not By Lies, Dreher drew inspiration from Christian dissidents under communism to arm believers to withstand the encroaching soft totalitarianism spreading across the West. And now, Living in Wonder makes the case that the post-Christian West will be re-enchanted similar to the pre-Christian world and that only a living, vibrant, miraculous faith will be adequate for such a time.

As with some of his previous books, Dreher is slightly ahead of the curve here. Many of his readers will feel stretched by the high strangeness of the stories he tells as well as the spiritual medicine he prescribes. But in my view, time has largely vindicated the central theses of his last two books, and this ought to earn him a more generous—which is not to say uncritical—reading than he has sometimes received. I certainly felt my own convictions and assumptions being stretched at various points, and while I’ll offer some pushback in this review, by and large the book is full of wisdom and good sense about navigating the promises and pitfalls of re-enchantment. It’s also timely, coming in a moment of cultural upheaval when many are questioning and seeking.

The book itself leans on Dreher’s strengths as a writer: his ability to translate big ideas for a popular audience, his uncanny talent for making connections between different thinkers that ignite bright sparks of insight, and his well-honed journalist’s ability to tell a good story.

Definition and Synopsis

But what is enchantment? Well, it’s a bit of a slippery term. Dreher cites Charles Taylor to provide an initial definition that focuses on a sense of “fullness, a richness,” “awe, or wonder.” Modern people, he argues, have been starved of these experiences by the cramped flatness of modernity and the philosophical foundations under it. Chapter 2 tells the story of how the world—or rather our experience of it as Westerners—became disenchanted. 

Next, drawing in part on the work of psychiatrist Iain McGilchrist and sociologist Hartmut Rosa, Dreher details how reductive and stifling the typical modern experience of the world is and the social ills that result from it. More importantly, he shows how this view of the world is simply not true. Reality itself is more beautiful and meaningful and sacred than moderns, stuck in a left-brain-dominated mental cubicle, have yet to experience. Absorbing these chapters will be a life-giving experience for many.

But Dreher has some sober warnings about “false” and “dark” enchantment. He devotes one chapter to the dark enchantments of the occult—complete with tales of demonic manifestation, possession, and exorcism—and the next chapter to the even stranger topic of aliens and technology, more on which later.

In the closing chapters, Dreher prescribes what he calls true—or Christian—enchantment. He drills in on the topics of attention, prayer, beauty, architecture, miracles, and the need for mysticism. While the book is written for all small-o orthodox Christians, these chapters carry a strong taste of Dreher’s Eastern Orthodoxy, which, when added to his treatment of the Reformation, is sure to be a stumbling block to some Protestant readers.

Reading While Protestant

The biggest problem I detect with Living in Wonder is Dreher’s treatment of the Reformation. He tells a too-neat narrative that draws a straight line from medieval nominalism to the Reformation and then on to “its secular successor, the Enlightenment.” Of the more than thirty references in the book to either the Reformation or Protestantism, all are essentially negative—the Reformation “severed the perceived link between spirit and matter,” Protestantism is “marooned primarily in the head,” and so on. Some of these criticisms are on the mark, to be sure, but the overall picture is one-dimensional. 

From reading only this book you’d never dream there was any reason for the Reformation in the first place, or that there might have been a few problems with the spiritual landscape of late medieval Europe where common people had no access to the Word of God or public worship in their own language, where they weren’t even given the cup during mass for fear that some might spill, and where their Christianity was perhaps enchanted but also marked by ignorance, superstition, and a tragic absence of spiritual assurance. 

Whatever else it was, and I realize it was a complex phenomenon with varied consequences, the Reformation was a revival of genuine spiritual life. 

This is not the place—and I am not the person—to relitigate the merits of the Reformation, but although I gave Living in Wonder a sympathetic and generous reading, this too-simplistic treatment of the Reformation as purely a vector for disenchantment was somewhat off-putting. More concerning to me than some ruffled Protestant feathers, however, is the mistaken conclusion that readers may draw from the book’s narrative that in order to find Christian re-enchantment they must swim the Tiber or the Bosphorus.

Thankfully, that isn’t so.

Comparing Narratives

Dreher loves to compare and contrast different thinkers, so allow me to take a page from his playbook and put Living in Wonder in conversation with another book. I happened to be reading Baptist theologian Craig Carter’s Contemplating God with the Great Tradition at the same time as Living in Wonder. Carter tells a similar narrative as Dreher, lambasting modernist metaphysics as a colossal wrong turn with incalculable consequences. However, while he agrees with Dreher that the rise of medieval nominalism paved the way for dry-frozen dead-matter modernity, he sees the next decisive turn occurring with Hume and Kant rather than with the Reformation. The endpoint for both is the same: disenchantment and nihilism as a cultural crisis in the early 21st century.

If Dreher catalogs the ways in which the lived experience of moderns, including evangelicals, has been disenchanted by modernity, Carter (who is a part of a broader movement to recover classical trinitarian theism) catalogs the ways in which Protestant theology has been unwittingly reshaped throughout the 19th and 20th centuries to accord with the constraints of modernity. Carter’s narrative shored up some gaps in Dreher’s book and modeled a Protestant approach to recovering the best of pre-modern thought. 

Another difference between the books highlights one of the reasons I suspect Living in Wonder will not land with much impact among evangelicals, and that is its lack of engagement with the Bible itself. Evangelicals, whatever their faults, have a deep instinct to be biblical that stems from the Sola Scriptura ethos of the Reformation. But Dreher makes his argument almost entirely from extra-biblical sources and advocates for traditions and spiritual practices such as icon veneration that evangelicals have issues with for reasons that are rooted in the biblical text. 

For Bible-loving Protestants, the final question will always be: but is it Biblical? I am convinced that Christian re-enchantment is good to the extent that it is a recovery of genuinely biblical and supernatural beliefs and practices, but it may take someone other than Dreher to write the book that will convince evangelicals of that.

About the Aliens

Well, every reviewer and reader of this book is going to have to confront perhaps the weirdest aspect of Dreher’s text: the aliens. Yes, the book takes seriously the oft-ridiculed claim that there have been strange visitations from some distant planet. Except Dreher doesn’t believe they are space aliens from another planetary civilization. Rather, he’s come to believe, along with a number of other Christians, that they are demonic spiritual forces disguised as extra-terrestrials in advanced technology. And, well, I sort of agree. 

First of all, I don’t blame anyone for avoiding this topic. The usual heuristics used to determine if something deserves our attention and engagement meant that, for the vast majority of people, talk of aliens, abductions, and messages from non-human entities immediately signaled that this person or topic could be ignored as so much “crackpottery.” This made a lot of sense, but the topic is increasingly being taken seriously by serious people, including Christians. 

Many see a new era of UFO disclosure beginning in 2017, after existing in fringe subcultures for a few decades, with the famous and controversial New York Times article that featured leaked videos and whistleblower testimony. That bombshell set off a series of revelations, claims, and counter-claims that have continued to this day, including a 2023 Congressional hearing and proposed US legislation that contained striking language. But just beneath the surface discussions of nuts and bolts are deeper questions about consciousness and reality.   

The overall picture, to my mind, is still very murky. There are some things we can say with certainty and other things where we should reserve judgment. There are legitimate insider whistleblowers and disinformation agents. There are real declassified government documents and fabricated ones. There are possibly secret technologies that appear to defy physics but are simply very advanced. And lastly, there are factions warring behind the scenes to control the narrative. Who can really parse this mess? The whole thing is a dark wood of confusion and our conclusions on the matter should be tentative. 

That being said, Dreher’s treatment of the topic is a good general overview of the topic, and he is correct that many people today are drawn into this topic to the point where it acts as a new kind of religion, as it forces a rethink of one’s metaphysical beliefs and undermines materialism. He draws on the seminal work of Jacques Vallée and the books of Diana Pasulka, while on the Christian side he leans on the older writing of the Orthodox Seraphim Rose and the more recent work of the evangelical scholar Michael Heiser, who was deeply versed in ‘UFOlogy.’ However, while Dreher states that Heiser “strongly believed that UFOs were both real and of demonic origin,” in fact Heiser was extremely circumspect in his conclusions. While acknowledging the demonic element, he was always careful to define terms, preferred prosaic explanations when possible, and strongly resisted a single explanation for everything wrapped up in the UFO phenomenon. 

There are a number of bewildering things that get lumped together with UFOs: including technology, psychedelics, parapsychology, consciousness, the demonic, and the paranormal. Pasulka’s description of her findings, quoted in Living in Wonder, is fitting: “a fusion of magic, or the supernatural, and the technological.” This, admittedly, does not fit neatly into our usual categories. But if, as Dreher claims, “the world is not what we think it is,” then perhaps we need to get used to weirder explanations.

Takeaways for Protestants

So what can evangelicals and Protestants take away from Living in Wonder? Quite a lot, but let me offer three items.

The first is the need for disentangling. I agree with Dreher that Western Christianity, and more specifically the reformed evangelicalism of which I am a part, needs to be thoughtfully disentangled from the philosophical assumptions of modernity. We ought to honest that our tribe has at times had a tendency to manifest exactly those traits that, according to Iain McGilchrist, characterizes left-brain dominated thinking, such as the uncritical adoption of modernist metaphysical assumptions, the tendency to focus in on theological minutiae, and the attempt to treat the Bible as if it was written by and for modern Westerners. Knowing this, we can thoughtfully bring balance without rejecting the fundamentals of what makes reformed evangelicalism what it is.

The second is the need for retrieval. We Protestants will want to mine our own tradition’s resources and sift through the best of our shared pre-Reformation history for help in recovering a faith that is recognizably continuous with the Great Tradition we find across the centuries. The good news is that there is a lot of gold in those hills, even among that most maligned group of overly cerebral Protestants, the Calvinists. See, for example, Belden C. Lane’s book Ravished by Beauty: The Surprising Legacy of Reformed Spirituality (Oxford University Press, 2011). Lane explores little-known texts by John Calvin, Jonathan Edwards, and other Puritans which exult in the created world as a theater for God’s glory, in the human body, and in sensual pleasures as metaphors for the soul’s desire and enjoyment of God. This kind of historical retrieval can serve as “the clean sea breeze of the centuries blowing through our minds,” in the words of C.S. Lewis, helping us see what we otherwise would be blind to.

And the third is a measured embrace of mysticism, sacramentalism, and a deep connection with God through nature. These may not be contemporary hallmarks of Protestant spirituality, but they are threads which run through our history nonetheless, and they can and should be appropriated by evangelicals hungry for an enchanted faith in a Protestant key. 

A failure to recover a distinctive Protestant approach to enchantment will leave people recovering from disenchantment looking East, drawn by the ‘Byzantine mood’ generated by popular figures like Martin Shaw, Paul Kingsnorth, and Jonathan Pageau—the three “Prophets of the Real” that Dreher profiles in Chapter 10. 

A Trustworthy Guide?

Early in the book, Dreher refers to the opening scenes of Dante’s Comedy, “the greatest story of Christian re-enchantment ever told.” He casts our modern world, including Christians, as the character of Dante, lost in the dark woods of modern disenchantment and in mortal danger. Continuing the metaphor, he implicitly offers to serve as a guide to the reader, taking on the role that the poet Virgil played in guiding Dante through the levels of the inferno and on towards paradise. 

That image lingers in my mind as I finish the book and consider it as a whole. Knowing how much Dante has meant personally to Dreher, this seems to be his hope for the book. On the one hand, Living in Wonder is a mix of story and argument powerful enough to shift one's view of the world and break the mental shackles of reductive modernity. On the other hand, it may be just too weird for some, and for typical evangelicals it may be a bit too Eastern and a bit too negative on the Reformation to be easily digested. This is a shame because the central message is one I think evangelicals need to reckon with. 

But for those who—like the twenty-something version of me in missiology class—realize that it is we modern Westerners who are out of touch with the wild, enchanted world as God made it, Dreher can be their Virgil, ably guiding them out of the dark wood of a disenchanted modernity and into a fresh experience of enchantment, beauty, wonder, and—best of all—a vibrant relationship with Christ Jesus.