Does Protestantism have an enchantment problem?

Yes and no, and elephants

I finished Rod Dreher’s Living in Wonder a week or so ago. A reminder that this book argues that, we Western Christians especially, have lost the sense that the world is enchanted. What is disenchantment? Toward the end of the book, Dreher has something that might count for a definition.

The received narrative of the modern world - that mind and body are separated, that the spirit has nothing to do with materiality, and that there is no intrinsic meaning to matter - is a lie.

I quite liked the book (five stars on Goodreads from me, not many books get that). I like reading anecdotes that remind you that God is real, God is powerful, God acts in this world today, and there are many in Dreher’s book.

For example, as it happens, a student had just asked me if angels still disguise themselves as humans today. I can’t say for certain, but toward the end of the book, Dreher does have the remarkable story of the Italian “Stefano”. In high school, Stefano is a rabid atheist and communist, from a family of the same, your stereotypical high school rebel (in a Catholic school, actually). But in college, perhaps disillusioned by all of that, he starts to tiptoe toward Christianity, one day feels compelled to stop into a church and pray. And then, one day on the street, he is confronted by an apparently homeless man who knows his name, says he has been on a mission to find Stefano, knows his life story, tells him why God gave him the struggles he had in life, tells him that from now on Stefano will live for Jesus. When asked, the man gives his name as “Merry Christmas” (it was almost Christmas), blesses Stefano in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, and then walks away, never to be seen again¹. Stefano and, later, the rest of his family, become Christians. It’s a neat story (it has additional supernatural aspects that, for brevity, I am not sharing here).

But at the same time (and perhaps this is Protestant of me), I am wary about spending too much time reading stories of the miraculous. They’re cool, they’re worth celebrating, God is awesome, but our faith is not based upon them. You can put too much attention that way.

Speaking again of Rod Dreher, I also appreciate people who, like myself, are willing to entertain questions that threaten established paradigms. Let’s have a chapter about whether UFOs are the craft of spiritual beings, and maybe AI is a way for such entities to influence man! He has that chapter. Rod Dreher does sometimes seem a little crazy (and his emotions actually can mislead him from time to time), but he’s my kind of crazy.

OK. Dreher mused on his own website that Protestants might not know how to handle the book. Well, I wanted to offer a few thoughts that are by no means comprehensive to what you could say (that would require another book), but here are some thoughts anyway.

How we respond to stories of the miraculous

For one, I do think to some extent the way Protestants, Roman Catholics, and Orthodox respond to, say, stories of the miraculous, is a matter of degree. Dreher would almost certainly look at Protestants and say, the evidential standard y’all require to believe in a miracle is too high, and you’ve also categorized-away many real miracles as a priori impossible (not things God would ever do). You reacted to what you perceived as an excess of superstition around the time of the Reformation, maybe you had a point back then, but you went too far. Now you can’t see a lot of the stuff happening in the world. And, actually, I would agree that is a sometimes failing of Protestantism today. Also, the tendency some Protestants have to categorize any supernatural story that falls outside of our theological comfort zone as demonic activity (or just too-quickly deny that it could have happened at all), I do not agree with². A few people would even try to put the story of Stefano under that heading (although a blessing in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit really does not sound like something a demon would do to me). I am willing to hear these stories and consider that they might be true, and what they might mean.

On the flip side, though, Protestants can look east and say, also accurately I think, y’all are too credulous. Most unfortunately, in this excellent book, one of the final stories Dreher tells is about the Holy Fire ceremony in Jerusalem. This takes place every year on Holy Saturday, the day before Orthodox Easter, at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, which church contains what many believe to be the actual tomb of Christ. Dreher’s description of the ceremony:

The patriarch ritually enters the aedicule, the small chamber built over Christ’s tomb, and prays with two candles before him. A mysterious blue light enters the darkness and lights the candles. This it the miracle of the Holy Fire. The patriarch emerges to general clamor in the basilica and passes the fire to the faithful, all of whom are holding candles and singing hymns. The Orthodox see this as the first light of the resurrection.

If you’ve never heard of it, you can see video here. Dreher relays this story with apparent complete confidence in the miraculous claims about the event (just so we’re clear, a miraculous lighting of the candles). Problem is, and I’m guessing he doesn’t know this… we have near-to-proof, in the form of statements from actual clerics involved, that it’s just a normal fire, in fact a lamp is kept always burning inside the aedicule. I won’t tell you the whole story, but if you want to spend an interesting hour, Roman Catholic apologist Jimmy Akin has a nice podcast where he reviews all the evidence and says, as I would say, it would be really cool if this was a miracle, but it just doesn’t appear to be, we have near-to-proof from the people involved that it’s just a normal fire. (In fact, one of the clerics makes a nice comment to the effect that God does not work miracles on command.) So yes, Protestants are sometimes too skeptical, we might insist on something like mathematical proof of a claim before we’ll believe it. But you are sometimes too eager to believe in these stories, dear Orthodox friends.

Propositions and participation

Two, the book sometimes reads like an apology for Eastern Orthodoxy. Orthodoxy, in Dreher’s telling, offers a faith that is enchanted, is mystical, and is participatory, at times involving the whole body in rituals Christians have performed for over a thousand years. Through these actions, we know God.

And - it is again my opinion that the various Christian traditions do have things we can learn from each other - there are benefits to a faith filled with standardized rituals. For example, I think (and Dreher actually gives this example), that just after the death of someone, say, in that moment, most humans do not want an improvised prayer. It would still be accepted as a faithful act, but it is not what they want in that moment - no, they want ritual, they want ancient, they want historically-connected, they want solemn. That’s a time when “people have said exactly this thing in this situation for the last two thousand years” is desirable. You don’t have to write to me about the dangers of empty formalism, but that is something for less formally liturgical, more spontaneous, Protestant groups to consider. (In the real event Dreher describes, he offered the Lord’s Prayer, and a Psalm, after the death, which is something any Protestant could do too.)

But the real problem with us terrible Westerners, in his telling, is that we’re analysts. Because of efforts from Thomas Aquinas forward, we sort of stand outside of creation, apart from God, and pick those things apart (and it is not a coincidence that reductionistic science was also largely birthed in the West). We write these giant systematic theologies and can tell you lots of facts about God, but that isn’t the same thing as knowing him. Horror of horrors, some of us attend services where the main affair is people sitting and listening to a sermon! To give you some idea, from Dreher:

In the post-Christian world, people - especially young people - are not looking for powerful exegesis of papal encyclicals, erudite sermons about the mechanics of salvation, five killer apologetic arguments to use against atheists, or any other canned strategy. They want to know whether life has any meaning or is this all there is. They don’t want to know about God; they want to know God.

Maybe you also have the thought that an irony here is that he’s leveling the sort of objection that could have come from the very-evangelical-Protestant campus ministry I attended in undergrad, targeted at more liturgical wings of Christianity! To my amusement, elsewhere Dreher names Calvinists and Thomistic Catholics as two groups with an overly intellectual approach to faith… well no wonder we like each other (sometimes). (He does elsewhere acknowledge that groups that are doing well attracting the young are sterner Protestants, especially Calvinists, and Latin-Mass Catholics - and the Orthodox, of course.)

But, I did want to say a bit in defense of propositional Christianity. It is good to clearly state what you believe. Tight categories make for careful thinking and, importantly, protect you from falling into error. That’s kind of the whole reason we developed all these creeds and many of the catechisms. Evil and error loves vague terminology, it thrives there. This is a situation where I really do not know enough about Orthodoxy to tell you what temptations it is facing in the modern world, but one sort of uncomfortable vibe I got reading Dreher was that at times it felt like he was promoting a sort of emotionalism less tethered to careful reason. Understand that he would almost certainly object to that characterization. But a propositional faith is good.

In part, we may be in a situation here where there are only tradeoffs. As I mentioned a few posts ago, when Dreher is offering his history of how the West became disenchanted, one culprit he identifies is the rise of literacy, which rewarded brains for taking more analytical ways of approaching the world. And I would be willing to say he is probably right about that - mass literacy changed the world in all kinds of ways, and a few of those changes were negative (we could say that for just about any new technology, if we could calls books and the ability to read them a technology). But, even if literacy did create these new problems… anybody want to go back? (I mean… you’re reading this right now.) Solutions to problem A often create problem B, and we humans try to deal with it.

How to handle the demonic

Before we end talking about elephants (that’s right), I did want to offer one compliment to Roman Catholicism and Orthodoxy, which is that they seem to have a better handle on acknowledging and dealing with the demonic than many Protestant groups. Here, like most people in the West, I do read and speak with way more Roman Catholics than Orthodox folks, so forgive me for directing my comments that way. But, I think if you went to most Roman Catholic priests (with the giant qualifier that, assuming they have a supernatural worldview - assuming they’re Christians, really³), and said this weird stuff is happening in my house and I think it’s demons, please help, they would know what to do. That is to say, a checklist would appear in their head, which would begin with searching for some sort of natural explanation for this report because that’s usually actually what it is, but if that failed, they would continue down the checklist, and basically they have long-established techniques for responding to this sort of situation. And maybe that’s also a plug for institutionalism and ritual there - dealing with a possible demon, you don’t want to be the guy coming up with stuff on your own, that sounds tremendously dangerous.

Maybe I’m wrong - and this probably is a situation where exactly where you are in Protestantism, denominationally, matters a lot, and even what part of the world (Lutherans in Madagascar seem to perform exorcisms like it’s the most normal need in the world, for example) - but I think many Protestant pastors would be less certain what to do, would be more surprised, would not have a checklist in their drawer to pull out. And this matters, maybe more now than before, because materialism is a dead-end. So, having rejected Christianity, an increasing number of people are turning to the occult. And guess what that opens you up to. Dreher, quoting Jonathan Pageau,

"You're going to have people come to your church and say they want to be Christians, and they have been worshiping Odin and sacrificing animals. You're going to have people who have taken massive amounts of psychedelics and had encounters with beings that ruined them.”

Dreher actually begins the book with a story about a teenager in New England, name Nino, driving home one day, sees a UFO hovering over a field. He has the sense that this experience somehow planted a seed within him. Seven years later, in college, he’s studying at his kitchen table when a sort of portal opens in the wall and two humanoid beings appear, make a couple predictions that come true, and then vanish. The beings reappeared regularly over the next few years, including after Nino married (and his new wife saw them too, which was kind of comforting in a “guess I’m not losing my mind” sense). Nino mentions that when he prayed, they disappeared immediately. Rod suggested Nino talk with an exorcist and (he was Roman Catholic) he began that process, hopeful that this would get the beings to go away. Would Protestants be comfortable handling a story like that?

OK. And with that I’m going to end discussion of the book proper. Roman Catholic friends are going to read this and say, you coward, you need to address sacraments, blessings, holy water, relics, and maybe even the spiritual energy of special places, those all have to do with enchantment too! We could also talk about distinctly Protestant efforts to promote an enchanted worldview, from Michael Heiser, to Haunted Cosmos. Well you can bring them up in the comments, I has to stop somewhere. But I’m stopping with elephants.

Enchanted elephants

I wanted to end with a story I thought was neat, just heard it yesterday, from a Protestant who clearly does believe in an enchanted cosmos, and I think he’s even one of those terrible Calvinists (biologist Gordon Wilson). Y’all have probably heard of The Riot and the Dance films, Christian nature documentaries. We need more stuff like that in the world, can’t let the materialists do all the cool science videography. Back in 2021, they were raising investment money to make some new episodes, so we tossed $1000 their way. And then I mostly forgot about it… and then yesterday, got an email that four new episodes are finished, only available to investors at the moment (so keep an eye out for that, they will eventually be on Angel Guild).

So the daughter and I watched the first one, and it contained a story I had never heard, about a herd of elephants, which would certainly be Rod Dreher approved. The story goes - in 1999, the matriarch of an elephant herd in South Africa is killed by a poacher. The herd goes rogue, they are afraid, and angry, and destructive. A South African conservationist (pictured below) named Lawrence Anthony steps in and, just with his body language and voice, calms the new matriarch, and gets the whole herd moved to a safer preserve. (Wilson has elsewhere indicated that animals know humans are God-ordained to rule the Earth, and offer us special respect.) Anthony continues to have contact with the herd until they accept their new home.

Coming soon!

Nothing too mystical about all of that, you might say. But twelve years later, Anthony dies of a sudden heart attack… and though far away, the elephants somehow know he is gone. The herd travels miles to his home. They circle the home for days in a sort of funeral liturgy similar to how they mourn the death of another elephant. And then they leave.

I had never heard that story. How did they know? The world is more than just this material stuff.

THE END

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1. If you believe this story - and I’m inclined to, actually - it does provoke other questions. Like, would God require an angel to genuinely live as a homeless man on Earth for some time, with a mission to complete? I don’t know, but that was the sense of the story.

2. Jimmy Akin is a Roman Catholic apologist, but he also regularly comments on this tendency of people (including Catholics) to attribute things to demons, demons, demons, everything is demons (or aliens). Well it might be, but you can’t just say that, you need evidence (like, it looks like the goal of this activity was to destroy someone’s faith, would help the demon argument). Sometimes feels like we’re more ready to credit the bad guys with power than the good guys.

3. Dreher, talking to an Orthodox exorcist:

“The vast majority of clerics do not believe in demons,” he responds, gravely. “I will further say that most clerics do not believe in God. I am not being pessimistic; I believe it is the truth. Most clerics live by their self-conceived truths; demons and God are relative.”

So let us be careful about thinking the grass is always greener on the other side.