Has religion gone the way of the typewriter?
Max Weber wrote in the early 20th century of the “disenchantment of the world”, his take on modernity’s expulsion of the old gods from collective practice and imagination. Out went the sacred, he argued, and in came the spirit of accumulation.
Fast forward to the present, and the theme of re-enchantment is in vogue. Paul Kingsnorth’s essays, directed against what he calls “the Machine” of techno-capitalism, are a clarion call for a return to the sacred. Psychiatrist Iain McGilchrist’s work on the brain’s left and right hemispheres has major implications for our post-Enlightenment view of rationality and science. Philosopher Charles Taylor’s latest book Cosmic Connections looks to Romantic poetry and music as a potential means of escape from our disenchanted troubles.
Then there is Orthodox writer Rod Dreher, whose recent Living in Wonder argued the case for Christian re-enchantment. For Dreher, “the sickness of the modern West comes from our having cut ourselves off from the source of enchantment”.
This lens of enchantment and disenchantment is important context for the engaging new book from sociologist of religion Christian Smith, Why Religion Went Obsolete: The Demise of Traditional Faith in America. Smith finds that an ongoing “cultural re-enchantment” is bad news for Christians and secular materialists alike, as post-Boomers turn to “supernatural, enchanted, magical, esoteric, occultic and sometimes dark ideas” as replacements for traditional faith. His discovery of this re-enchantment is not a major part of the book — but is key to understanding it.
The book’s central argument is that traditional religion has become culturally “obsolete” amongst American post-Boomers in the sense that they “feel it is no longer useful or needed because something else has superseded it in function, efficiency, value or interest”.