Magical Systems and the Soft Enchantments of Christianity
Part 3, The Prosperity Gospel as Hard Magic
In the last post I shared that the Christian experience of enchantment is soft rather than hard magic. Our world is charged with the grandeur of God, full of wonder and awe, suffused with the miraculous. And yet, as I go on to say, this "magic" is not at our disposal. Christian enchantment is not pagan enchantment. God is not at our beck and call. God is not an energy, force, or potency in creation that we can control, direct, or manipulate. Christianity is enchanted, but it isn't a hard magical system.
However, as I also observed in the last post, many Christians are tempted to turn the soft enchantment of Christianity into something akin to a hard magical system. The example I mention in the new paperback edition of Hunting Magic Eels is the prosperity gospel.
To be clear, I don't think the "name it and claim it" theology of the prosperity gospel is an attempt to control or manipulate God. The "name it and claim it" prayers in prosperity churches are not like magical spells. And yet, these prayers do tip toward something like hard magic. Not so much in positing some mechanism to be manipulated, but in their confidence of sure reply.
Let me explain how confidence tips into mechanism. When the apophatic mystery of prayer is lost and replaced with overconfidence, God becomes increasingly at our disposal. Prayer begins to take on a "If A, then B" dynamic. You claim it and God will grant it. The conviction here, concerning this reliable connection, makes the relationship practically causal, and therefore mechanistic, and therefore hard magic.
You can see this causal, mechanistic, hard magical imagination at work in prosperity churches in how they struggle with lament. For lament acknowledges unanswered prayer and sits dismayed in the face of the inscrutable ways of God. Lament shatters any dream that our prayers function like spells, that God is at our disposal.
Returning to the contrast I made between faith and magic in an earlier post, lament is what pushes prayer into a relational, rather than magical, space. In many ways, magical systems is the central debate in the book of Job. Job's friends keep defending a hard magical world. Do good and you get rewarded. Do bad and you get punished. The "mechanism" of the enchantment--"how it works"--is clear and transparent. But Job rejects this hard magical view of his situation. Job's lament concerning God's inscrutability, the infuriating mystery of his situation, pushes him into a relationship with God. Job's friends preach magic. Job seeks an encounter.
I expect some readers will not like using hard versus soft magic to analyze these issues, finding the notion of "magic" both confusing and unnecessary. To such readers I say: Stop being a theological snowflake. I'm experimenting here, floating some thought balloons. And for my part, I find the hard versus soft magic contrast helpful in illuminating some things. Specifically, I think there is a way our overconfidence in prayer, as you see in prosperity gospel spaces, along with a marginalization of lament, puts God too much at our disposal in a way that causes prayer to tip into the magical. More simply, lament protects prayer from becoming magic. Lament shoves us back into mystery, which recenters our relationship with God.
Lament and mystery preserve the soft enchantments of prayer, protecting prayer from the temptations of hard magical thinking.
Thank you for sharing these insights, please keep throwing up these “thought balloons”. Like you said in your book “unclean”, “magical thinking is very often carried over into the life of the church” and “tends to override reason.” I have experienced in my own walk and observation of my own spiritual formation process parsing out the difference between Biblical teaching and magical thinking has been incredibly fruitful. As a youth pastor I am trying to think carefully about your observations and translate them to teachable practices that will help my young people.
This is a fascinating piece, lots to think about. I've been thinking recently about the difference between different levels of technological complexity in the devices and tools we use. It seems that simple mechanical objects work more like a hard magic system with simple inputs and outputs. This often makes it easier to understand for the average person, for example, most people can get their head around how bicycle mechanisms work without too much effort. Something like an AI system, plagued by the infamous 'black box problem' where even the engineers don't know how the algorithm works, is much harder for the average person so understand. In this way, an AI system, or even a more simple computer system can be seen as something that is more like soft magic. I wonder if this 'black box' aspect of AI will be used to play into people's religious sensibilities.