Rod Dreher has a message to deliver about aliens. In his recent book Living in Wonder (2024), Dreher tells the story of Nino, “a solid, conservative young man, with close-cropped hair and an aquiline nose” who encountered a UFO as a teenager driving in rural New England. According to Nino, the incident was followed by over a decade of telepathic communication with extraterrestrial beings and periodic unsettling apparitions. Upon Dreher’s advice, Nino began the process of seeking an exorcist, but not without assuring Dreher that whatever the beings’ intentions may have been, the experience brought him closer to Jesus. Drawing on Nino’s tantalizingly unconcluded extraterrestrial misadventures, Dreher invites his readers to “open our eyes to the reality of the world of spirit and how it interacts with matter.” An openness, he suggests, that will help us “escape the dark wood of late modernity, with its death, depression, and nihilism, and find our way back to the straight path.”

The dark wood of late modernity is disenchanted, and to escape its nihilism, we need to re-enchant the world. Or so any number of recent books say. If Dreher’s wild-eyed campfire stories and their allusions to the benefits of Eastern Orthodoxy are too much for you, more staid and secular writers make similar appeals. Bestselling author Katherine May writes in Enchantment (2023): “Could there be another way to live – one that feels more meaningful, more grounded in the places beneath our feet? One that would allow us to feel more connected, more rested and at ease, even as seismic changes unfold on the planet?”

These and many, many more books – not to mention podcasts, conferences, articles, and societies – diagnose a crisis of spiritual restlessness and emptiness and prescribe the antidote of re-enchantment. Other examples include Re-enchanting the Text (2023) by Cheryl Bridges Johns, Art and Enchantment (2023) by Patrick Curry, The Reenchantment of Nature (2002) by theologian Alister McGrath, or The Enchantment of Modern Life (2001) by secular philosopher Jane Bennett. The premise underlying all of it is that the modern world is disenchanted, that this disenchantment is a problem, and that the solution to this problem is an attempt to recover or reinvent enchantment. But increasingly, I’m not sure that is the case. I’m not even sure we often know what we mean when we use the word disenchantment.

The History of Disenchantment

The word “disenchantment” was popularized by the German sociologist Max Weber in his book The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1904). Weber uses the phrase Entzauberung der Welt (which could be literally translated as “de-magicking of the world”) to describe the change in worldview from the medieval to the modern era. Weber suggests that the medieval era was characterized by a magical sensibility, in the sense of religious sacramentality (the priest who turns the wine into blood as if through magic), but also the medieval cultural milieu and its pervasive belief in animate spiritual forces (angels, demons, fairies, etc.). By contrast, he suggests that the modern era is “de-magicked,” essentially secular, and oriented toward rationality and efficiency. This word “disenchantment” came to encapsulate a story that many writers have since told about the origins of the secular modern world.

The word was adopted by theorists like Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, who began their Dialectic of Enlightenment (1947) with this assertion: “Enlightenment’s program was the disenchantment of the world (Entzauberung der Welt).” However, most of the books calling for re-enchantment take their cues not primarily from Weber’s dry sociological reflections or the radical visions of the fathers of the Frankfurt School (from whose legacy the greatly feared Critical Theory flowered), but from Charles Taylor’s account of disenchantment in A Secular Age (2007). At nearly one thousand pages, the book is not succinct, but Taylor’s clarifying description of disenchantment is:

New science gave a clear theoretical form to the idea of an immanent order which could be understood on its own, without reference to interventions from outside (even if we might reason from it to a Creator, and even a benevolent Creator), the life of the buffered individual, instrumentally effective in secular time, created the practical context within which the self-sufficiency of this immanent realm could become a matter of experience.

What is important in Taylor’s description of the features of disenchantment – immanent order, buffered individualism, instrumentality of nature, secular time – is that they become a “matter of experience.” He goes on to describe this experiential standpoint as the “immanent frame”: a way of seeing that brackets out the possibility of anything beyond the tangible and quantifiable. This “self-sufficient realm of experience” has a few characteristic dimensions: a changed relationship with the natural world, a decline in religious orientation and practice, and the internalization of meaning. These are worth spelling out a little more to understand what it is people feel is lost.

According to Taylor’s account, when disenchantment becomes a “matter of experience,” the workings of the natural world are explored and explained without reference to God, which is sometimes identified as the omission of Aristotle’s formal and final cause. The result of this posture toward acquiring knowledge is that the material world gradually comes to be conceived of as an intricate and self-perpetuating machine. This does not necessarily preclude the possibility of God’s existence – and, indeed, many of the early naturalists conclude that the complexity of the natural world testifies to God’s craftsmanship – but that the way the natural world is approached no longer necessarily implicates God in its existence or promises to disclose anything about God to those who study it. Experientially, this means that in comparison with a premodern perspective, people in the modern world no longer experience the world as unfolding theophany but as a self-contained and self-perpetuating machine; God may have created the machine, but the machine can be understood on its own.

Attempts at enchantment have become inextricably tangled with capitalism, and capitalism itself has become a source of enchantment, even fervor, in the contemporary secular world.

In this account of modernity, the decline of enchantment accompanies a decline in religiosity. In a 2009 essay for Modern Theology, Patrick Sherry notes that Weber, who himself admitted to being “absolutely unmusical religiously,” did not see disenchantment as “anti-religious, though it contributed to the breaking down of some forms of traditional religion.” Just as God could be inferred from the natural world, but is not necessarily implicated in it, religious belief could exist in the modern perspective but was not a given.

Closely aligned with the changed relationship with nature and decline in religiosity is the internalization of meaning and the emergence (or rather retreat inward) of the buffered individual. Taylor writes that for modern people, the “depths which were previously located in the cosmos, the enchanted world, are now readily placed within.” The buffered individual increasingly sees herself as sealed off and other than the world and people outside of her, no longer experiencing the sense of unity between the inner and outer world. Taylor writes of “the agent who no longer fears demons, spirits, magic forces, who is disembodied from the social world and enjoys a kind of mental invulnerability in his or her private castle.” What were once spiritual struggles or achievements are construed as psychological ones.

The world, it seems, could not stay disenchanted for long. Summarizing Taylor, James K. A. Smith writes, “Almost as soon as unbelief becomes an option, unbelievers begin to have doubts – which is to say, they begin to wonder if there isn’t something ‘more.’ They worry about the shape of a world so flattened by disenchantment.”

In place of the old enchantments, diffuse and subtle re-enchantments have been channeled into other areas of contemporary life. Scholars like Christopher Partridge in The Re-Enchantment of the West (2005–2006) and Graham Ward in True Religion (2002) observed the ways that ostensibly secular people were beginning to immerse themselves in a web of pseudoreligious rituals and practices, from the goth aesthetic to yoga, and even to witchcraft.

More recently, Tara Isabella Burton chronicles in Strange Rites (2020) the ways that people, desiring enchantment and religious ritual, find these outside of institutional religion by creating their own “bespoke religious selves” through everything from exercise communities to fantasy fiction fan websites. Burton suggests that consumerism is woven through this, that people “aren’t just building new religions” but “buying them.” Burton and others note that attempts at enchantment have become inextricably tangled with capitalism, and that capitalism itself has become a source of enchantment, or even religious fervor, in the contemporary secular world.

The impulse to re-enchant the world is, it seems, part and parcel of disenchantment itself. The act of re-enchantment presupposes being disenchanted as a precondition; one cannot re-enchant something which is not disenchanted. And thus, the impulse toward re-enchantment is itself an expression of a disenchanted outlook. There is an irony in the fact that many attempts to re-enchant the world lead to more deeply entrenched disenchantment. One of the principal elements of Taylor’s “immanent frame” is an acquisitive posture toward the natural world as something outside of and separate from me, which I can wield for practical, financial, and even spiritual purposes. Enchantment, in this view, is the fruit of being a “porous self” not sealed off from the world but affected and moved by it. As a “matter of experience,” enchantment is something assumed and natural. The enchanted person does not understand herself to be enchanted; by Taylor’s definition this would make her disenchanted. Attempts to re-enchant the world reinforce this alienation from the natural world. By attempting to re-enchant the world, we underscore the sense of distance between ourselves (the ones doing the re-enchanting) and the world (that which will be enchanted). By putting ourselves in the posture of a consumer who demands enchantment from the world as a spiritual solace in draining time, or even a wizard who re-enchants it, we inscribe into the world the alienation we seek to escape.

Of course, this approach also seems to entail a misunderstanding of disenchantment. Taylor makes clear that disenchantment pertains to people’s experience of the world, not the world itself. This fact alone should offer pause, because many of the calls for re-enchantment call for the re-enchantment of the world itself. As though at the rise of modernity there was an extinction of mythical creatures, as though Francis Bacon himself laid waste to fairyland. If Bacon’s approach did put to death some mythical creatures, it was largely by replacing incorrect understandings of the natural phenomena with more precise understandings; instead of vapors, germs; instead of humors, a better understanding of the inner workings of the human body.

Very often, the impulse for re-enchantment stems from a sense of nostalgia wrapped up in an attitude of grievance – as though the world now is very much worse off than it used to be. While some aspects of the scientific revolution may have led to a sense of alienation from nature, it has also led to a world where the majority of children do not die in infancy and few mothers die in childbirth, to the development of lifesaving medications for diseases that would previously have been fatal, to a world where fewer people die of infectious diseases. This is not to avoid the very grave dangers the scientific revolution may have brought about (ecological and otherwise). However, as Owen Barfield puts it, whatever sins disenchantment “may be guilty of, we owe to it, up to now, our independence, much of our security, our psychological integrity, and perhaps our very existence as individuals.”

The Christian Exodus from Magic

But all this ignores a simpler question: What if there simply were no mythical creatures to drive extinct? What if, in fact, disenchantment did lead to a more clear-eyed view of reality? We may feel nostalgic for a time with a more enchanted view of the world, may feel that it was easier or more emotionally gratifying, but what if that view was merely or primarily false? An outworking of superstition? Do we wish for enchantment at the cost of reality?

What is sometimes forgotten in these conversations is that Christianity itself has been a driving force of disenchantment. In his 1645 poem “On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity,” John Milton describes the gods of the classical world descending to hell at Jesus’ entrance to the world:

The Oracles are dumb;
No voice or hideous hum
Runs through the arched roof in words deceiving.
Apollo from his shrine
Can no more divine,
With hollow shriek the steep of Delphos leaving.
No nightly trance or breathed spell
Inspires the pale-ey’d priest from the prophetic cell.

What is described here is, quite literally, a disenchantment. The evacuation of the classical imagination of its many and colorful gods to make room for this one, incarnate, triune God. The effect that Christianity gradually had in the classical world was an undoing of its grim and vindictive superstitions. We may pine for medieval Europe’s enchantments, but they pale in comparison to the enchantments of the Pantheon and the folk religions which suffused the social imagination of the cultures into which Christianity was born. Much ink is spilled in the New Testament urging the new Christian community to forgo deeply entrenched superstitions, many of which are far darker than our sentimental desire for enchantment might imagine. The Epistle to the Ephesians entreats them to “no longer live as the Gentiles do, in the futility of their thinking … darkened in their understanding and separated from the life of God” (Eph. 4:17–18). These appeals do not deny the supernatural realm, but seek to unhook the appeal of superstitions, inviting Christians to focus their attention instead on Christ. After all, not all enchantment is benign; demons exist as well as angels. In seeking enchantment we mistake superstition for reality, and the demonic for the divine.

In pursuit of a meaningful life, we should seek not the enchantments of the magicians of Egypt, but the pillar of fire, which leads us out of darkness and into the Promised Land.

If the widespread calls for re-enchantment tell us anything, it is that people feel a sense of hollowness and spiritual hunger in the contemporary world. Re-enchantment may seem like the answer to this hunger, but on closer inspection, it turns out that re-enchantment contributes to this same hollowness. We cannot slake our thirst for spiritual things by projecting our desires onto the natural world, and offering people something that may or may not be reality will not satisfy sincere spiritual hunger. And there is real danger in seeking out enchantment for the sake of enchantment, danger that we may stumble on a magic we can’t control; in seeking to enchant we may find ourselves bewitched.

After all, the world is not disenchanted. Whatever meaning and spiritual potency was in the world remains in it. It is only the quality of our attention that has changed. In pursuit of a meaningful life in a spiritually impoverished time, we should seek not the enchantments of the magicians of Egypt, but the pillar of fire, which leads us out of darkness and into the Promised Land.