By Trevin Wax, TGC. (Photo: Dyana Wing So/Unsplash)
As a Christian in these times, it’s hard not to celebrate when we see cracks in the sidewalks of secularism. In recent decades, atheism and agnosticism have been widespread among society’s elites, yet a persistent spiritual openness endures among most Americans—even those claiming no religious affiliation—like stubborn weeds or grass peeking through pavement.
Should we see these shoots of reenchantment as hopeful signs of revival or as weeds that conceal deeper dangers?
Disenchantment and Reenchantment
This spiritual openness is cast as a reaction to “disenchantment,” a term first coined by the German sociologist Max Weber, who described how the modern world, once alive with sacramental mystery and spiritual presence, became “de-magicked”—a world reoriented around reason, efficiency, and secular rationality.
Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor would later describe disenchantment as the shift to a world understood entirely on its own terms—an immanent, self-sufficient order where the “buffered self” lives and acts without need for divine intervention.
According to this way of thinking, personal spirituality doesn’t have to be at odds with the common assumptions in a secular age, because people open to various pseudoreligions or spiritual practices typically search for meaning and purpose within the world, or within themselves. And it’s possible to do this, as Paul Kingsnorth points out, as an attempt to “divine our sacred values in a society that presumes our purpose in life to be self-creation in a borderless, post-natural world.”
This spiritual openness indicates an enduring hunger and the experiential dissatisfaction of living in a flattened-out, disenchanted world. And that’s good news for Christians. Today’s evangelistic conversations often won’t need to start with proving God’s existence or the possibility of miracles. For some, the reenchanted world of Christianity, in all its mystery, will appeal rather than repel. These developments are positive.