9 Comments

I think this is true. The other side of the coin for ex-vangelicals is a re-enchantment to things like tarot, yoga, astrology and other grab-bag-pre-modern spiritualities. These Voltron spiritualities sometimes even pull back in Jesus in ways unrecognizable to the Great Tradition. I don't know which version is more personally disheartening. As always - I appreciate your perspective and research and abundant writings!

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This entry brings to mind the not too recent death of John Allen Chau at the hands or ‘arrows’ of, the Sentinelese. In 2018 he was posthumously and acerbically awarded the ‘Darwin Award’ for his efforts. The controversy surrounding the ongoing evangelization of these remote people, forces one again to look at the Faith with a critical introspection and realize that there are certain cultural and anthropological conditions that simply do not facilitate the transference of the gospel message. These barriers can often be mitigated by building genuine generational trust through incarnational actions, which can speak much louder than words. When missionaries view the resistance of these people as ‘satanic’, rather than ethnologically resilient, they buy into the Colonialist project. The real ‘disenchantment’ comes and manifests itself when their symbiotic connection to Nature is ultimately destroyed though Western existential projection. ‘WEIRD’ might more aptly stand for: Western, Educated, Industrialized and Rapaciously Destructive.

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Is this error inevitable? Is this sophomoric stance predetermined, that we grow up to see our religious upbringing as naïve? Is there a second naiveté? Or do all the onramps run away from Christianity? Anything but Christianity, the whisper in one’s modern mind. Where did the multigenerational communities go? With their wise men and women passing down the integrated life…?

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I think it is important to at least frame a colonial power dynamic that is disjointed from enchantment. For example, there were plenty of old missionaries from Europe and the US who still had a paradigm of "enchantment" and merely identified all cultural beliefs and ideas from the Global South as satanic and demonic. In whatever we mean by the secular age, the colonial impetus has turned toward what you discuss in this article. It also extends into militant forms of "anti-savage" thinking like Dennett or Dawkins. Indeed, there is a hubris in the supposed deconstructed liberal who thinks he has arrived at a place of objectivity. But I am nervous to overly place the lust for colonial power alongside disenchantment. As a person who has lived among people who still had a paradigm of enchantment, I can attest that an anti-colonial approach to missionary-religious-dialogue is still needed that avoids the colonial mindset at work in both "liberal Christians" as well as "fundamentalists." The problem is the underlying cultural hubris and fundamentalist epistemology. It's messy. My concern for this comment is thinking that re-enchantment avoids this dynamic of colonial power. For example, there is a bunch of discussion around enchantment in certain circles right now (thinking of Dreher's "Living in Wonder" who also toured with Kingsnorth in the US recently) that I believe is moving back to enchantment but with the same colonialist mind of the old missionaries--a blanket labeling of all things un-European and un-Christian as demonic with additional modern applications to UFOs, liberal media, etc.

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That's a good point. I wrote about this recently in my post about the "politicization of enchantment":

https://richardbeck.substack.com/p/the-politicization-of-enchantment

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This calls to mind Bonhoeffer's "world come of age." We are seeing it in spades right now in the American evangelical church.

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After COVID I’m not sure one can believe in re-enchantment. Mask wearing—under the auspices of agape—was peak catechesis for the ‘buffered self’.

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I appreciate the things you point out here, Richard, but I am left wondering, "What's your point?" Forgive me if you make it in other writings, but I am not well-versed in your entire body of work.

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Thanks, very interesting and plausible. David Abram's writings illustrates how to go in the opposite direction.

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