According to Dreher, Christian prayer is the primary way to recover a sense of God’s presence and experience enchantment in a secular age. He writes, “It turns out that attention—what we pay attention to, and how we attend—is the most important part of the mindset needed for re-enchantment. And prayer is the most important part of the most important part” (142). However, this solution isn’t as easy as it sounds. Anyone who prays regularly knows that the difficulty isn’t so much knowing what to do as putting down our phones and doing it.

We face a crisis of meaning in the West, a mass confusion over our true identity and purpose. Many feel adrift in the world with no sail, rudder, map, or compass. As a young man confessed to me recently, “I walk out of my house each morning and am overwhelmed with anxiety. I don’t know why I am here.” By jettisoning metanarratives, especially the Christian worldview, our culture has saddled people with the impossible burden of fabricating their own meaning and purpose.

As I read Rod Dreher’s Living in Wonder: Finding Mystery and Meaning in a Secular Age, Billie Eilish’s hauntingly beautiful song “What Was I Made For?” reverberated in my mind. The song, written for the film Barbie, taps into the existential ache over the seeming emptiness and cruelty of existence so common in our culture. Humans have an innate desire for meaning and mystery.

Dreher, a visiting fellow at the Danube Institute, argues there’s “a loss of a meaningful sense of God’s presence and of the existence of meaning and purpose in the world” (71). His basic explanation for this is the rise of materialistic modernism, which displaced Christianity from the cultural imagination in the West. Dreher’s proposal is to pursue “Christian re-enchantment” (153), mainly through “an infusion of authentic, time-tested mysticism . . . from the Eastern churches” (16).

Dark Enchantment

Unfortunately, the search for re-enchantment has led many into the arms of the occult and other forms of “dark enchantment” (128). Materialism is giving way to a return of neo-paganism as a dominant worldview, often taking the form of practices like crystals, manifesting, witchcraft, and astrology. Predictably, the result isn’t flourishing and freedom but ruin and spiritual slavery. Not all encounters with the spiritual realm are created equal.

In journalistic fashion, Dreher relays several compelling stories illustrating the dangers of spiritual darkness and oppression. The demonic is real. Yet the real solution to disenchantment is Christ. This is good, as far as it goes. 

However, Dreher’s analysis of the occult is, at times, conspiratorial and bizarre. He favorably quotes an exorcist who believes that “we are in the middle of a concerted and well-orchestrated war” in which the occult is “supported by the media, big corporations, politicians, and our government” (105). In expressing his concern about the spiritualization of technology, Dreher shares the Google whistleblower’s account that their AI program “had achieved consciousness” and that the engineers had participated in “a ritual committing it to the ancient Egyptian deity Thoth” (125).

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