It’s commonly noted that the Western world is showing signs of decline. With historically high rates of depression and anxiety, low trust in institutions, and rapid population decline, many fear the consequences if nothing changes. Amid the ever-growing list of books and podcasts diagnosing and offering solutions to the problems, one idea seems to be gaining steam: “enchantment.”
Popularized by the German philosopher Max Weber, “disenchantment” describes how the West stopped seeing the world as sacred and magical in light of the Scientific Revolution. (In other words, we no longer see lightning as a display of God’s wrath.) Philosopher Charles Taylor further developed this idea in his seminal book A Secular Age, and now there’s a growing movement for “re-enchantment” as a cure for what ails us. Think Justin Brierly leaving the apologetics podcast Unbelievable? to host the Re-Enchanting podcast and author Aaron Renn’s call for “Protestant Re-enchantment.” Even authors who don’t use the word engage with those ideas, such as Spencer Klavan in his Light of the Mind, Light of the World and Jordan Peterson in We Who Wrestle with God.
So Rod Dreher’s Living in Wonder: Finding Meaning and Mystery in a Secular Age has been hotly anticipated by those following this conversation. Dreher, author of The Benedict Option and Live Not by Lies, is well-versed in enchantment as a member of the Eastern Orthodox Church, whose traditions are far more mystical than those of most other Western churches. Dreher notes this explicitly in his framing of his purposes for his book:
The Christian churches of the East—the Orthodox, and the so-called Oriental Orthodox—have maintained a distinctly more mystical character than their Western brethren. And now, at the end of the Christian age in the West, an infusion of authentic, time-tested mysticism is a gift from the Eastern churches to the suffering West.
Dreher defines “enchantment” as the belief that “God is everywhere present and fills all things” and “that we live in a world of beautiful and terrible things—things that fill us with awe and call us out of ourselves into a higher and greater reality.” It is to believe and live as if the spiritual world is real and active in our material, visible world; that the world is objectively meaningful; and that we are part of a cosmic drama in which we get to be free actors. It’s to see the world as sacred and sacramental. It’s to acknowledge that the world is full of demons and angels, that dreams can be visions, and that an unexpected thought might be God speaking. This perspective was the norm throughout history, and it’s only in the West (and places like China and Japan that are touched by its influence) that we have rejected this. And that, in Dreher’s view, is the source of our woes.
Dreher traces this disenchantment to the influence of medieval Catholic thinkers who argued that the natural world and the supernatural world were separate. This allowed us to imagine a world that wasn’t God-infused, leading to secular sciences (again, the Scientific Revolution), economics (capitalism), and technology that ignored God and treated the material world as just “stuff” we could use however we wanted. But because our lives are lived in that “stuff,” this made life itself—including relationships and work—feel meaningless, and therefore something not worth investing in if it took too much effort (which it so often does). We therefore detach from relationships and work, making us lonely and nihilistic and unable to support our shared institutions. Dreher warns that, if this continues, society will collapse or be taken over by a tyrant or witchcraft- or AI/aliens-led demonic forces. The only solution is to return to Christian enchantment through religious art and ritual that, for example, Eastern Orthodox traditions steeped in. But most importantly, we must embrace a mindset shift so we can once again see the mystical in the material.
There’s a lot that’s worthy here. Dreher is right to note that individuals and societies fall apart if life is not experienced as meaningful. He’s also right that modern society—through, in part, narrowly scientific ways of looking at the world—trains us to distrust our meaningful experiences as “subjective” and “emotional,” which makes them unsatisfying. He’s therefore correct that there’s something in the “enchanted” worldview worth recapturing. Much of his advice for how to do that—go to church, pray regularly (both alone and with others), enjoy religious art—is hard to object to and backed up by plenty of data. (Jonathan Haidt’s The Anxious Generation argues some of these things from a sociological perspective.)
One of Living in Wonder’s biggest strengths is it doesn’t just tell us to restore sacred wonder to our lives but gives us the experience through its prose. Dreher writes the book poetically, describing the “thin spaces of the world, where the veil between the seen and the unseen is porous” and a world “pregnant with power, waiting for the occasion to act.” Reading this, you can feel how fulfilling it is to imagine the world the way he does. And because it’s so attractive, it makes you think, “If I’m built in such a way that this calls to me so deeply, maybe that’s the way the world really is.” It reminds me of reading C.S. Lewis’ Narnia books growing up, or his Weight of Glory essay. Those baptized my imagination and are a big reason I’m a Christian today.
But Dreher is clear that he doesn’t want merely to instill in his readers an “ordinary” religious imagination but instead wants to change our way of thinking completely. Enchantment won’t work if we keep it “abstract”; we must experience it ourselves in our “daily life.” This looks like regularly interpreting reports of aliens and things like AI as demons, strange dreams as if they’re messages from God, and coincidences as sorcery or miracles—not in every instance, of course, but such interpretations should be a normative disposition toward events in our lives.
What prevents us from doing that? Analytical reasoning. Dreher spends a lot of time talking about the difference between right-brain (intuitive, experiential, empathetic) thinking and left-brain (analytical, logical) thinking, drawing largely on the work of British neuroscientist Iain McGilchrist. It’s the right brain that makes us see the world as spiritual, and the left brain that says, “What’s your evidence for that?” It’s the left brain that considers a dream and wonders, “How do you know that was from God?” or “What’s the evidence that AI is a demon?” Dreher argues that we need both: “The left brain takes things apart to analyze them and the right brain puts them back together.” The problem is that we’ve made the left brain “supreme.” To restore the transcendent in our lives, we need to give the right brain the ability to tell the left brain to shut up sometimes.
The trouble is that Dreher never gets around to explaining when exactly the left brain should pipe down and when it should speak up. When is it good to demand evidence and when do we just trust our gut? When is analytical reasoning a useful tool (“a good servant”) and when is it a source of harm (“a bad master”)?
This is a pretty big problem for Dreher’s case for a couple of reasons. First, he openly admits that the rise of such analytical reasoning is responsible for some of the West’s major contributions to the world—stuff like modern science, capitalism (which he acknowledges “has lifted countless millions out of abject poverty”), and free democratic societies. He assures us that he doesn’t want any of these things to go away. But he also wants to go back to the worldview we had before that, even though he just told us that rejecting an “enchanted” world is responsible for the development of those very materialistic goodies. So how do we keep both? He never says.
Second, it’s unclear why elevating intuitive reasoning will lead people to Dreher’s preferred perspective. By his own admission, the same practices that shape us to “feel” the presence of God also make pagans and New Agers “feel” the truth of whatever they’re told to believe about life. Witches and astrology fans use coincidences to justify the belief that the stars control their destiny and that crystals get you in touch with your “true self.” Female friend groups started rethinking their marriages when they read this year’s Miranda July book All Fours, which elevates trusting personal feelings as a way to justify “open” marriages. Social media shapes us to customize our beliefs just like our algorithms. Listening to our hearts won’t all lead us to the same truth but, rather, to the “truth” shaped by whatever environment we’ve spent the most time in.
Funnily enough, the Bible endorses using something approximating “left brain” tools to help verify the validity of truth claims. According to biblical scholar Dru Johnson, one of the innovations of the Bible was that it demanded predictive evidence for prophetic validity. While Israel’s prophetic contemporaries would predict the future with entrails without being concerned when their prophecies didn’t come true, God told the Israelites to evaluate a prophet by whether the things he predicted came to pass. This is also how scientists debunk astrology today, by demonstrating that it has no greater predictive power for personality and life outcomes than random chance. The problem is that these “rational” tools can often be turned against Christians who claim supernatural experiences as well, hence why Dreher blames them for our disenchanted world.
Despite Dreher’s claim that in our society “science, mathematics, and empirical reasoning (left brain) have crowded out poetry, art, and religion (right brain) as ways of knowing,” it seems clear that both forms of knowing have run amok today, just unintegrated. After all, how many people love doing math over watching movies? Even one of Dreher’s interview subjects says a big problem with the evangelical church is its emotionalism.
There are segments of Living in Wonder in which Dreher hints at what an integrated heart and head could look like, such as when he describes exorcists checking for natural explanations before assuming demon possession or explores how the social sciences affirm cross-cultural agreement on what architectural designs look beautiful to people. But these aren’t consistent. And more importantly, he doesn’t highlight examples of when he’s allowed his left-brain reasoning to disprove something his right-brain told him was true. This suggests that an equal partnership between the two “brains” isn’t what he’s after.
It doesn’t help that Dreher’s arguments often lack a helpful measure of self-awareness and charity to opposing viewpoints. He tends to characterize pushback to his claims of the supernatural as being driven by “discomfort” or closed-mindedness rather than good-faith skepticism. He mocks Westerners as “WEIRDos” (a play on the Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic designation) because of their bias toward analytical reasoning, and scoffs when people point out that they have that bias because they’ve seen the amazing historical results. He blames every modern Western evil on Catholic and Protestant deviations from Eastern Orthodoxy, but never explains why—by that logic—Orthodoxy shouldn’t take responsibility for things that happened under its tradition (like, perhaps, Soviet communism)—or that didn’t happen, like much of the quality-of-life goods the West has produced and that he says he appreciates.
Because of this, I don’t see this book substantially changing the direction of “the West” (whose influence extends far beyond literal Western borders). Analytical types will reject it and continue slouching toward nihilism, while intuitive types will continue to spin off toward increasingly sectarian/superstitious nonsense. The enchantment project to restore the West may succeed eventually, but it will be because of someone else’s model, not Dreher’s.
My own “disenchanting” of my worldview was a slow and often painful, process. It happened as I watched loved ones die despite other loved ones claiming God would heal them. It happened in the face of my certainty that I knew what role God wanted me to play in his cosmic drama—then turned out to be wrong. These experiences didn’t make me lose trust in God, but they did make me lose trust in people’s ability to discern God’s plan. I—and people I trusted—had misread so many signs before. How could I trust them now?
Instead, I’ve come to a “trust but verify” spiritual view of the world. Christian apologetics and social science give me confidence that the Bible is reliable and that what it says about how to live in the world is true. So I can look at my life as part of a transcendent, epic adventure story that God is still writing. And if I follow his commandments as he has already written them in scripture, I can be confident that I am actively participating in that story. I can look at every moment in my life that way, without having to embrace individual, subjective interpretations or magical claims made by other people. In other words: I can be enchanted in my worldview while skeptical of individual claims about discrete events.
Even so, in the day-to-day trenches, without constant reminders, it’s easy to stop experiencing the transcendent in everyday life. That’s what I appreciate about re-enchantment advocates like Dreher. They highlight our need for wonder in our daily lives and to re-engage with sacramental awe.
There may be a path forward toward the enchanted world Dreher wants to see. But it won’t be found here. Still, while Living in Wonder may not give you the best roadmap to a new land, it is an important reminder of what we’re missing in the one we currently inhabit.
