Enchantment can’t be a feeling

Plus: the last two Shakers, really bad Bible translations, and more

Good morning! It’s Wednesday, and here’s this week’s post. Also, just FYI, the ebook version of Untrustworthy is just $2.99 through Thursday, 9/12.

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A take I haven’t written elsewhere

Enchantment can’t be a feeling

(via)

Expect to hear a lot about “enchantment” in the next few months. In fact, it’s happening already: For days, Substack has been pushing me to read this post from

L. M. Sacasas

: “If your world is not enchanted, you’re not paying attention.”

One immediate cause is a forthcoming book from

Rod Dreher

, Living in Wonder: Finding Mystery and Meaning in a Secular Age. I’ve not yet read it (though I’ll be editing Brad East’s review for CT), but Dreher has said it concerns enchantment.

The larger background to this whole conversation, of course, is Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age, which I’ve referenced here before and which is perhaps the only serious rival to C.S. Lewis for the title of Most-Referenced Work Among 21st-Century Evangelical Think Piece Writers. Seriously, if you want to understand what we’re on about, half the time it’s just footnotes on A Secular Age. It’s an incredibly influential book, and the inkwell for many, many pages about secularity and, now, enchantment. (There’s a longer intellectual history which Sacasas sketches, but that isn’t where most of us are getting it.)

We’re all secularists about having kids

As enchantment discourse revs up, it already has some dissenters. On his blog, author Alan Jacobs argues that a lot of enchantment discussion is extraneous to the faithful Christian life, functioning as little more than a distraction from thinking about Jesus. Moreover, he says:

Experiencing the world as enchanted has absolutely nothing to do with acknowledging that Jesus Christ is Lord, and that at the end of history every knee will bow and every tongue confess this. That is to say, Christians who have boarded the Enchantment Train should realize that what it promises is often (if not always) something quite different than what the Christian faith—which is often disenchanting—promises, and demands. 

To this, East responds by defining disenchantment thus, then arguing for enchantment as its opposite:

“Disenchantment” names a false apprehension of reality. Imposed by the ambient secular culture, it proposes the world as fundamentally meaningless, chaotic, and godless, and therefore inert or plastic before the constructions and manipulations of rational man. We are alone; miracles are myths; angels and demons are fictions; dreams and visions are disclosive of nothing but our own psyches; numinous encounters are either harmless or signs of a broken or sick mind. Man is the measure of all things and the world is what we make of it. Meaning is imposed and autonomy is the first and last law of reality.

If that’s the alternative, I’m in the enchantment camp. But as Someone Who Has Read A Secular Age (just in case that wasn’t clear, you know; and have I mentioned it’s very long?), I’m not sure this is what everyone has in mind in this conversation.

It’s possible I’m remembering poorly, but my understanding of Taylor’s idea of enchantment (and disenchantment) wasn’t quite so robust or deliberate. That is, I’m inclined to say I have a pretty disenchanted mindset in this lesser sense, despite assenting to nothing in that definition above. It’s not a mindset I consciously chose; it’s—I think—a mix of personality and the influence of living in, yes, a secular age.

If something unexpected happens (running into a friend, losing an important paper), someone with a more enchanted mindset might assume that’s the direct work of spiritual forces: maybe God, maybe demons. I know Christians who function this way, also—I think—due to a mix of personality and cultural influence.¹

I don’t rule out those possibilities, and I might well thank God for the good things or pray for help with the hard things. But I don’t tend to reach for them—to speculate about “things too wonderful for me.” My default explanations would be disenchanted: I ran into the friend because we like the same restaurant. I lost the paper because I didn’t file it in its proper place.

East notes that in his “experience, people talking about or yearning for enchantment feel belittled, bedeviled, and beaten down by disenchantment. They feel condescended to, coerced into pretending that life is nothing but atoms and energy, when they know in their bones the open secret that this world is charged with the grandeur of God.”

That’s bad. But neither should we drift to a different extreme, a move I could see happening in low-church Protestantism in particular. This is what I mean when I say enchantment—if it’s worth anything—can’t be a feeling. It can’t be a mood you try to generate as evidence of holiness, as proof that your salvation really took. It can’t be an aesthetic proclivity or personality pattern recast as a sign of sanctification.²

You see, I can choose the kind of enchantment East describes. I can commit myself to a life shaped by the conviction that our world is “the fallen but good handiwork of a loving Creator; the recipient of his lasting care and unfailing providence; the medium of astonishing beauty; the impress of his grace; the theater of glory as well as of suffering; the audience of the incarnation; the vehicle for the eventual final epiphany of God become flesh.”

But I can’t commit to that lesser enchantment, the kind that operates at the level of instincts and inclinations. I can’t gin up enchanted feelings (and do not intend to try).

I could be wrong—in expectation or desire or both—but I don’t anticipate that my mindset will become more enchanted in that sense. I don’t think it’s how I’m wired. On this I might have to differ from Sacasas: I don’t think I’ll ever find “that ‘the mundane, observed, became the romantic’—or, the enchanted.” Perhaps I’m misunderstanding, but that sounds so dreamy and abstract it makes me itchy.

Or, to borrow Sacasas’s quote of another writer, how is being enchanted or “enamored with existence” a necessary precursor to serving others? Were I to wait for the right mood about existence itself to strike me before I “donat[ed] some of [my] scarce mortal resources to the service of others,” my kids might not get dinner tonight. Life is more responsibility than romance, and I don’t think God requires me to add production of a sense of enchantment to my list. Isn’t the mystery of faith mystery enough?

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Intake

• Starting The Pursuit of Safety: A Theology of Danger, Risk, and Security, by Jeremy Lundgren (forthcoming in October) for review at CT

• “There are only two Shakers left. They’ve still got utopia in their sites,” by Jordan Eisner for The New York Times

Maybe a new Shaker will come this year; maybe not. But in the Meeting House this summer, people are singing. Lavender is drying from the eaves of the old sisters’ shop; future harvests will hang in the new herb house. A concept of survival and flourishing that isn’t primarily concerned with linear time or material gains may be the most radical thing about this historically radical American religion, and the one most resonant with a world that is experiencing, constantly, its own existential threats and calamities. It is obvious by now that everyone and everything is dying and living all at the same time, that failure and hope are all mixed up, and still the sheep are lambing and the roof has sprung a leak again and you’ve been snappish and petty even though you swore you’d be better and someone has to make breakfast and even breakfast can be a gesture of belief in the world as it could and should be.

• “What makes a Bible translation really bad?” by Mark Ward for the Text & Canon Institute

• “Curious George and the case of the unconscious culture,” by

  Erik Hoel
  for
  The Intrinsic Perspective
  (Nb. I don’t think the Curious George stickers in question are all or even mostly AI-generated, but I’m sharing for the idea of unconscious culture production)

• “Two Christian conservatives debate the merits of voting for Kamala Harris,” by Ross Douthat and David French for The New York Times

Douthat: I am a lot more skeptical than you are, David, that the influence of this libertine, lowbrow, Hulk Hogan conservatism is really just driven by fealty to Donald Trump, fealty to MAGA, Trump’s personality and so on.

I think it’s much more of an organic evolution of a political coalition at a time when religion in the United States, our shared Christianity, has been in decline. I think in many cases—and this is one of them—Trump is less a cause than a kind of revealer of things that are already happening.

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Output

New work:

• Would we fight for Taiwan? | Defense Priorities (newsletter)

Newly relevant work:

• The Trump debate is dead | Christianity Today, January 2024

But for the average white evangelical Republican, my strong impression is that this debate is basically finished. Very few evangelicals will vote or caucus this year having freshly agonized over whether to back Donald Trump.

• No matter what Trump does, evangelicals still love him | Reason, July 2023

• Two decades later, the war in Iraq is over—right? | Reason, March 2023

• The uncertain future of presidential debates | The Week, October 2020

• Is there a future for New Orleans? | The Week, July 2019

• The perverse incentives of the National Flood Insurance Program | The Week, August 2017

• America’s presidential debates are broken. Here’s how to fix them. | The Week, September 2016

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1. Before enchantment discourse, we’d have called this leaning charismatic, no?

2. I say it could happen in low-church Protestantism because I’ve witnessed exactly that dynamic around emotional responses to loud, repetitive worship music: If you’re not in a trancelike state of enthusiasm for God by the eighth time the chorus plays with the bass that thumps in every crevice of your head, maybe you need to rededicate your life, my dude!