Conservative columnist and Orthodox Christian Rod Dreher’s new book Living in Wonder: Finding Mystery and Meaning in a Secular Age is three books in one. Two of them are very good. The third is dangerous, especially to those of us in the Pagan community.
It’s important to read good writers from religious and political perspectives other than your own. It helps keep you out of an echo chamber where you never hear anything that challenges your thinking. Sometimes it shows you that you’re overlooking – or outright ignoring – other people’s very valid concerns. You may learn something you wouldn’t have learned otherwise.
And sometimes you get critical insight into the thinking of people you hope will be your neighbors but may end up being your enemies.
Rod Dreher: conservative columnist and Eastern Orthodox Christian
Rod Dreher is one of my favorite writers on the conservative side. I rarely agree with him, but he’s almost always thoughtful and reasonable – he’s not a Fox News propagandist. He grew up in Louisiana and has written for numerous major publications including the New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Dallas Morning News, and National Review. He grew up Methodist, became Catholic as a young adult and then Eastern Orthodox in 2006. He currently lives in Budapest and writes for The European Conservative.
His 2017 book The Benedict Option: A Strategy for Christians in a Post-Christian Nation suggested that in the face of the declining influence of Christianity, Christians should “embrace exile from the mainstream culture and construct a resilient counterculture” – an approach those of us in the Pagan community are familiar with.
When I heard he had a new book on the topic of re-enchantment, I knew I wanted to read it. When I heard it discussed spiritual warfare, I knew I needed to read it sooner rather than later.
The history of disenchantment
The first “book within the book” is the story of how the West became disenchanted.
In his 2017 book The Myth of Disenchantment: Magic, Modernity and the Birth of the Human Sciences, Professor of Religion Jason Josephson-Storm showed that the myth of disenchantment is a lie. We have always lived in a world filled with Gods, spirits, and magic, and we always will.
At the same time, modernity brought with it a view of reality as soulless matter. We may bump into Gods and spirits as much as our ancient ancestors did, but we never recognize them. That’s because mainstream Western culture says such things not only do not exist, they cannot exist. If we have a mystical or religious experience we tend to rationalize it away for fear of being called childish, uneducated, or mentally ill.
Dreher does an excellent job of showing how this disenchantment came to be. I’ve written a fair amount about this over the years – many of Dreher’s points are familiar. But as an Eastern Orthodox Christian he brings a different and insightful perspective.
He says “it is impossible to discount the role that the Reformation played in exiling the numinous from the collective consciousness of Western Christianity.” And unlike almost every political conservative I’ve ever read, he blames capitalism as much as Protestantism, because capitalism reduces a world infused with the divine to a thing to be monetized. His argument isn’t quite animism, but it’s certainly on the right track.
Dreher says “you may desire enchantment, but if you do not have a mind prepared to receive it, and act on the message it carries, a hierophany will do you little good.” And on that we are in complete agreement.
A recipe for re-enchantment
If we live in a world assumed to be soulless, materialist, and disenchanted, what can we do about it? Earlier this year I laid out 5 Steps to Re-enchant the World. In the second “book within the book” Dreher advocates for his own approach.
It’s somewhat different, but it’s not completely different. We both recommend prayer.
Dreher tells the story of his own healing experience with prayer, and emphasizes the importance of focusing our attention on the person to whom we are praying. He says “there is a world outside our heads, but how we attend to it determines how real it becomes to us. And the manner of our attending is the way to become aware of the divine presence saturating the material world.”
Dreher recommends ritual prayer, and while he points out the weaknesses of Evangelical extemporaneous prayer, he admits it can be done well. He’s right – I incorporate both styles in my own practice.
He calls out the need for an appreciation of beauty, especially the beauty of the natural world. He says “we are not going to argue ourselves back to enchantment, nor are we going to behave ourselves into true goodness. We need reason, and we need morality. But, above all, we need beauty.”
All this is good and helpful, and if this was the extent of the book (to be fair, it’s about 80% of the book) I would recommend it unconditionally to my Christian friends and, with the usual caveat of “separate the human commonalities from the Christian specifics,” to my Pagan friends.
But there’s a third “book within the book” that we have to deal with.
“The Dark Enchantment of the Occult”
The fifth chapter of the book is titled “The Dark Enchantment of the Occult” and it opens with a quote from Hamlet: “the Devil hath power to assume a pleasing shape.”
Living in Wonder includes numerous stories of religious experiences, of miracles, and of demonic possession. I do not challenge the authenticity of these stories. I’ve seen too much, done too much, and experienced too much to try to dismiss other people’s experiences as lies or delusions.
I do challenge the interpretation of these experiences, and I strongly challenge the religious implications of those interpretations.
The critical problem with this book is summarized in this quote: “people today aren’t wrong to seek enchantment – but if they do it outside a clearly and uniquely Christian path, they will inevitably be drawn into the demonic.”
The danger of that line of thinking is shown here: “as the old Christian faith framework breaks down, more and more Americans … are opening themselves to dark enchantment, a real phenomenon, one that kills the soul. In the spiritual warfare raging around us, both visibly and invisibly, there is no neutral ground. You must take a side and commit.”
This is the path to a new Satanic Panic. This is the path to quite literally demonizing your neighbors because they follow a different religion. And it ignores the fact that many of us – myself included – find great meaning and purpose in what Dreher dismisses as “the occult.”
This is the result of bad metaphysics.
A failure to recognize unstated assumptions – and to deal with them
Metaphysics are our foundational assumptions about the world and how it works. They form a container for interpreting our experiences, a boundary between what we assume is possible and what we assume is not. Anything that conflicts with our metaphysics is likely to be rejected, because it’s easier to deny the reality of our own experiences than it is to contemplate the possibility that our fundamental assumptions about the universe might be wrong.
This is why we occasionally see people reverting out of Paganism and witchcraft and back to Christianity. They never examined their foundational beliefs and they never dealt with their religious baggage. And then when times got tough – materially or spiritually or both – they went running back to the religion of their childhood, or to a different variant of it.
“You must take a side and commit” assumes that there are two sides: the Christian God and the Christian devil. For all that Dreher correctly points out that the West is unique in its abandonment of mystery and wonder, he never considers that the dominant religion of the West – Christianity – is simply one religion among many. Orthodox Christians like to point out that theirs is the only unbroken line to Jesus and the apostles, but Hinduism is far older than Orthodoxy… and the world’s remaining indigenous religions are older still.
Age and continuity alone prove nothing. But when we see many different religions providing many different people with meaning and wisdom in many different ways, it points us toward religious plurality, not religious exclusivity. As religious scholar Page duBois explained in her 2014 book A Million and One Gods – the Persistence of Polytheism, polytheism is humanity’s default religious position. Without constant reinforcement by institutional monotheists, people will intuitively acknowledge, pray to, and worship many Gods.
Dreher is hardly alone in his belief that the many Gods are demons in disguise. But the evidence points in another direction.
The religious implications of Tanya Luhrmann’s work
Dreher relays the findings of anthropologist Tanya Luhrmann, who spent time in Evangelical churches studying how God becomes real to people, and how they “live their lives in ways that enable that spiritual intimacy.” Luhrmann says “these practices work. They change people.”
Dreher rightly points out that “the techniques that Luhrmann observed in her fieldwork among Christians she also saw working among Pagans.”
Early in her academic career, Tanya Luhrmann embedded herself with a group of British witches. She studied, practiced, and celebrated with them… and then she wrote Persuasions of the Witch’s Craft (1989) from a strictly atheist and materialist viewpoint. To say that her book was not well received in the Pagan community would be a major understatement. Still, she was an objective observer, and if she saw these techniques producing similar results in both Pagan and Christian settings, it’s fair to say that whatever is driving the results is also similar.
So either the Christian God is all-good and all-powerful but he allows the Christian devil to mimic him to perfection, or other Gods exist and have the same or similar essence as the Christian God.
My experiences and reasoning have led me to conclude that the Gods are many, not one.
I’m not sure if Rod Dreher has ever seriously contemplated that question. Most people who grow up Christian and remain Christian to any significant degree never consider it. I don’t fault him for diving deeply into the practices and traditions of Orthodoxy, nor for recommending them to others. They clearly work for him, and that’s a good thing.
I do fault him for assuming that other people’s practices and traditions are “demonic.”
The dangers of Christian re-enchantment
On one hand, I would love to see a re-enchanted Christianity. Enchantment is part of our legacy as humans and it should be available to followers of all religions. And while Christianity is in significant decline, it’s still the dominant religion in this country. If we want to re-enchant the West any time soon it would greatly help to re-enchant Christianity.
On the other hand, it’s not lost on me that Christians stopped burning witches (or rather, people they thought were witches) about the same time Christianity became disenchanted. We know there are some Christians who would burn witches today if they thought they could get away with it – I’d like to keep them completely out of mainstream Christian thought and practice.
An enchanted Christianity that is accepting and tolerant of other paths would be a beautiful thing.
An enchanted Christianity that is exclusivist and intolerant of other paths would be a very dangerous thing.
We will see how the coming years play out.
Living in Wonder: Finding Mystery and Meaning in a Secular Age
by Rod Dreher
published by Zondervan – October 2024
288 pages
Hardcover: $29.99; Kindle: $14.99
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