After Disenchantment

What does the phrase “disenchantment of the world” mean? Disenchantment is easy to identify and even easier to feel, but giving a precise definition of this phrase is tough, principally because the meaning of the genteel “disenchantment” is too hazy and unstable. Aside from being generously sprinkled with fairy dust and dewdrops, the word is a synonym for “disillusionment” and “disappointment” and therefore suggestive of emotions, moods, and vague feelings rather than an aggressive and pervasive rejection of religion and all things supernatural, which is in fact what the disenchantment of the world amounts to.

Disenchantment and All That

Yes, this is what it’s all about: a hegemonic displacement of religious beliefs. Disenchantment is the progressive eclipse of a worldview that includes spiritual and supernatural realities by a materialist worldview that denies the existence of all things spiritual and supernatural. Disenchantment, then, is the process that has created the dominant materialist worldview of today’s Western world, succinctly summed up by Richard Dawkins. We humans, Dawkins says, are nothing more than “machines made of atoms, living finitely on a rock spinning around an ordinary star.” No deities involved, no spiritual realm, no intelligent design, no afterlife, no purpose for us humans beyond satisfying our appetites and enjoying as much of our ridiculously brief existence as possible. The universe, Dawkins likes to say, “owes us no comfort.” Should you dare to disagree, he and others of his ilk would diagnose you as hopelessly and perilously deluded.

Many in our day recoil from such a worldview and from the inescapable fact that it reigns supreme. Many, too, wish they could do something to bring that reign to an end or at least loosen its chokehold on our culture. If you are one such dissident, nonconformist, contrarian, or whatever you prefer to call yourself as an opponent of this worldview, you might draw comfort from knowing that you are not alone and that disenchantment has been resisted ever since it began to assert itself. For inspiration, consider the objection raised by Flannery O’Connor a while back, when Bible reading and prayer were not just allowed in many American public schools but also enforced.

Seventy years ago, in response to a Life magazine editorial that irked her greatly, O’Connor poked the disenchantment of her age in the eye, providing us in the age of artificial intelligence with an object lesson in nonconformism. Mid-century America, she said, lacked a sense of spiritual purpose, a fact that placed her in a tight spot when it came to writing fiction, because the meaning of life for her was “centered in our Redemption by Christ.” Her audience, by contrast, lived in a culture that had been dominated for “the last few centuries” by the “secular belief” that this redemption wasn’t needed at all.

O’Connor had a talent for channeling her resistance to disenchantment through vexed fictional characters. One of the first of these was Hazel Motes, the protagonist in her 1952 novel Wise Blood. Hazel embodied his era’s disenchanted sensibility so intensely that he set out to establish the Church Without Christ, “where the blind don’t see and the lame don’t walk and what’s dead stays that way.” And his nihilistic church, Hazel loves to add, is “the Church that the blood of Jesus don’t foul with redemption.”

Unsurprisingly, some reviewers found Hazel—and O’Connor—to be a bit too grotesque and much too Southern. The Life editorial she was addressing, which bemoaned the grimness and grotesqueness of American postwar novels, had taken aim at Southern writers, singling out William Faulkner and the “papaya-smelly, overripe school of the Truman Capotes,” who, as Life saw it, were “still producing a literature which sounds sometimes as if it were written by an unemployed homosexual living in a packing-box shanty on the city dump while awaiting admission to the county poorhouse.”

What O’Connor, a young Catholic writer from very Protestant Milledgeville, Georgia, had to say about disenchanted “modern life” and her audience seems more relevant now than it probably was seventy years ago, and not only to novelists, but to anyone who cares to challenge what is wrong with our unspiritual culture:

Writers who see by the light of their Christian faith will have, in these times, the sharpest eyes for the grotesque, for the perverse, and for the unacceptable. . . . The novelist with Christian concerns will find in modern life distortions which are repugnant to him, and his problem will be to make these appear as distortions to an audience which is used to seeing them as natural.

O’Connor’s “modern” age has now evolved into some other era without an agreed-upon name, the contours of which could only be guessed at in the wildest science fiction of her day. Whether one calls our present age postmodern, post-postmodern, transmodern, hypermodern, or metamodern makes no difference. The disenchantment of our century and its warped re-enchanting efforts are something far weirder and more threatening than anything O’Connor and her contemporaries could have ever imagined.

Yet the basic quandary faced by a nonconformist in the early twenty-first century is the same as the one faced by O’Connor decades ago: How does one address a culture that doesn’t share in one’s beliefs or spiritual experiences? How can one best challenge a disenchanted culture or its perverse re-enchantments without being instantly dismissed? Or, harder yet, how can one convince others in such a culture to change their worldview?

Addressing these questions requires coming to terms with what we are up against, as well as understanding essential aspects of the nature and history of disenchantment and its conjoined twin, re-enchantment. Facing up to future challenges is also important, perhaps even more so than understanding how we got here.

Essential Aspects of Disenchantment

Four characteristics of disenchantment shape all discourse on this subject. First, disenchantment is more than a historical phenomenon. It is also a social fact, and as such, it manifests itself in myriad ways. Social facts are ways of acting and thinking, widely diffused in society, that mold collective thinking and behavior. Social facts are invisible but have coercive power over thought, emotions, and behavior.

Second, disenchantment is more than a social fact. It is also a myth, and as such, it governs thinking and discourse. “Myth,” as employed here, is closely related to “social fact.” A myth is a culturally shared narrative that explains, legitimates, or gives meaning to fundamental aspects of reality. Myths create a collective worldview and reinforce social facts by delineating the contours of transcendence and establishing boundaries between what is true and not, possible and impossible.

Third, the “disenchantment of the world” can never be complete, despite the totality suggested by the myth. Disenchantment is always a matter of degrees, always relative to issues of time and place. In our culture, for instance, disenchantment is unevenly distributed, but the higher one moves through its social hierarchies, the more prevalent this worldview becomes, and the more intensely the myth of disenchantment acts as a coercive social fact, demanding wholesale acceptance of a materialistic dogmatism as inflexible as the medieval theological dogmatism it mocks.

Fourth, the historical phenomenon of disenchantment has evolved over time, by a process that can be roughly subdivided into four distinct phases. During each of these phases, disenchantment has been conjoined with genuine spiritual re-enchantment of a limited sort, and also with artificial materialist re-enchantment (which might not always be presented as re-enchantment by its promoters or recognized as such by those affected by it). This seemingly paradoxical intertwining is inevitable, for various reasons, and history proves it to be a fact.

Max Weber was painfully aware of this intertwining when he first spoke of “the disenchantment of the world.” Whenever disenchantment occurs, he observed, it creates a void that is bound to be filled with some ersatz enchantment, due principally to the fact that humans long to find meaning in life. Science can tell us how the world works, but it provides no answers to existential questions and makes no claims about ultimate values and realities or the meaning of life. And the existential angst engendered by this hollowness is the main reason that a materialistic worldview can never totally replace religion, and disenchantment can never be total. This hollowness is also what compels disenchanters to insist that genuine “wonder” or “enchantment” can be experienced only through their worldview.

Curiously, a peculiar semantic inversion occurs in the polemic of Richard Dawkins and his fellow disenchanters, one that turns the physical world itself into the sole source of genuine enchantment. The philosopher Tom Clark sums up the semantic inversion beloved by aggressive disenchanters: “Far from mechanizing humanity,” he says, “naturalism re-enchants the physical world by showing how consciousness and choice don’t involve supernatural processes.” (Some dogmatic materialists prefer to speak of “naturalism” rather than “materialism,” but the terms are basically interchangeable.)

Wonder. Awe. Joy. Words that gild dogmatic materialism with an enchanted emotional veneer. Words that ring false. Semiotic reversals that reveal the urge to re-enchant, which is deeply embedded in the hearts, minds, and tongues of disenchanters.

And there’s the rub, the hitch, the snag. This re-enchanting urge is no mere quirk. It’s a feature of disenchantment, and it spells trouble. Disenchantment and re-enchantment are always conjoined, naturally entwined in an inescapable embrace. So, beware of disenchanters who re-enchant as they see fit, especially if they attempt it in their own image and likeness. History proves that re-enchanting disenchanters, and disenchantments that beget re-enchantments, can engender miserable monstrosities.

Tellingly, Weber spoke of the disenchanted world as ill-equipped to deal with the “eternal struggle” of “different gods in conflict with one another” and of the modern person as faced with a “polytheism” of values or a “struggle of the gods,” that is, a welter of ultimate values—religious, ethical, political, social, and aesthetic—which will never be fully reconciled through materialism or scientific reasoning. Such thinking was nothing new. St. Augustine had a similar insight long before Weber and modern science came along, though Augustine, of course, focused on the damage caused to human nature by original sin, not on existential angst caused by science. As he saw it, the genuine enchantment tragically lost in Eden left behind a void that fallen human nature can fill only with false, depraved religions that mirror human vices and frailties. Medieval theologians—including Thomas Aquinas—tended to adopt this view too, and so did John Calvin.

One can hear echoes of Augustine and Calvin in Weber’s analysis of the inescapable re-emergence of enchantment as akin to a polytheistic instinct that can only invent “miserable monstrosities”of all sorts, including artistic ones. Speaking of the social and political realm, he warned, “If one tries intellectually to construe new religions without a new and genuine prophecy, then, in an inner sense, something similar will result, but with still worse effects.”

Those “miserable monstrosities” and their “worse effects” can be easily spotted throughout modern history, and the undeniable constancy of their cyclical recurrence in all four phases of disenchantment might be the most convincing proof of the constant that lurks behind every re-enchantment.

Some re-enchantments—such as the First and Second Great Awakenings—are genuinely spiritual and benevolent. But some re-enchantments are wretched. To cope with these painful realities, it helps to know not only how we got here but also the contours of the phenomenon with which we are contending.

The Evolution of Disenchantment/Re-Enchantment Cycles

The first disenchanting phase was engendered by the Protestant Reformation, which desacralized the material world by rejecting the intermingling of the heavenly and the earthly that was so essential to medieval Catholicism, attacking its piety as idolatrous, superstitious, and a form of sorcery. Western culture remained Christian during this first phase, albeit full of competing churches and worldviews, as well as differing degrees of “disenchantment,” with Catholics at one end of the spectrum, Anglicans and Lutherans in the middle, and Reformed Protestants at the other end. On the fringes of all the newly created churches, various nonconformists initiated simultaneous re-enchantments. Their ranks included mystics, dissenters, and radicals of various stripes, including a few apocalyptic enthusiasts who embraced violence as the means of re-enchantment. Most of these spiritual re-enchantments, however, tended to be separatist, individualistic, and limited to small circles.

At the same time, at elite levels throughout much of fragmented Christendom, alchemy, astrology, and esoteric occultism enjoyed a revival. A monstrous re-enchantment took place in the form of religious wars in which Christians slaughtered each other and witch hunts by Protestants and Catholics, which led to the incineration of tens of thousands of alleged minions of Satan. Aberrant as the latter may seem, it was a natural consequence of disenchantment, and it presaged worse monstrosities to come.

The second phase of disenchantment, which emerged as the witch hunts and religious wars fizzled out, was linked to the Scientific Revolution, the growth of rationalism and atheism, and the Enlightenment. One of its distinguishing features was the proliferation of new religious movements that sought to re-enchant Protestant lands, including the Pietists, Quakers, Ranters, Levellers, Moravians, and such others, as well as the occultist Rosicrucians and the followers of radically unorthodox mystics such as Jacob Boehme and Emanuel Swedenborg. These sects, however, were never large, and their limited impact on the West was eclipsed by another phenomenon: the ascension of dogmatic materialism among intellectual elites, some of whom saw Christianity as an enemy to be vanquished.

In the late eighteenth century, some of the most radical disenchanting elites waged open war against that enemy. Ironically and predictably, that war—the French Revolution—turned into a re-enchanting crusade. This radical materialistic re-enchantment, which was bent on de-Christianizing France, turned churches into temples of reason, sacrificed priests, monks, and nuns on the altar of the goddess of liberty, and invented secular holy days, symbols, and rituals. It also gave rise to the Reign of Terror, a violent re-enchantment in which the guillotine acquired a sacred dimension as the principal instrument for creating a new society based on the hallowed principles of rationality, freedom, equality, and fraternity.

The third phase of disenchantment, linked to industrialization and still greater scientific progress, gave the world an even wider variety of spiritual seekers than the previous one: Methodists, Shakers, Christian Scientists, Mormons, Millerites, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Spiritualists, Theosophists, utopian communities, and occultists of various stripes, all benevolent denominations and sects, for the most part, desperately seeking re-enchantment. But as in the second phase, some radical materialist re-enchanters emerged in the vacuum alongside the harmless spiritual folk, and these radicals made the French Revolution look like child’s play. Once again, the anti-Christian ethos of these radical re-enchanters was central to their embrace of an ersatz materialist religion that prized and venerated violence.

First came the communists who created the Soviet Union, a totalitarian, atheistic empire that demanded absolute belief in itself as a supreme entity and slaughtered millions of its own subjects to enforce conformity with its materialistic creed and apocalyptic utopianism. Then along came the Nazis and their Third Reich. Replete with un-Christian myths, symbols, and rituals, this re-enchanting monster turned its Führer into a demigod, racism into a religion, war into a sacrament, and genocide into the highest virtue. Irony was heaped upon paradox during these hellish decades, as two avowedly materialistic regimes emerged, both furiously committed to a narcissistic sort of re-enchantment centered on themselves rather than any deity. Through their brutality, these two monstrous regimes taught the disenchanted world that materialist re-enchantments should be feared. Whether the lesson was learned or not remains to be seen.

The fourth phase began at the end of the Second World War and is still evolving today. This intense disenchantment, with which we are all familiar, has spawned many small-scale re-enchantments, both spiritual and material, too numerous to list. But some signs seem to indicate that we could be on the verge of a fifth phase. More about this presently. For now, suffice it to say that the most distinctive characteristics of our fourth phase have been qualitative and quantitative: Never before in human history has disenchantment been so widespread or so complex.

At present, the hegemony of the disenchanted worldview among elites and the thinking class is undeniable. With a bracing dose of sarcasm, Ross Douthat refers to this hegemonic elite worldview as “Official Knowledge.” But this invisible censoring entity is neither a joke nor a phantom. It’s a force to be reckoned with, its function somewhat reminiscent of the Inquisition, Calvin’s Consistory, or Orwell’s Ministry of Truth. And this Ministry of Disenchantment, as I prefer to call it, has no central office, administration, or staff. It’s a potent social fact, invisible but entrenched in various segments of Western culture. And in one segment in particular—academia—it is hypervigilant and hyperactive.

Challenging the Ministry of Disenchantment can hamper or preclude a scholar’s success or employment. Its power makes it difficult for professors to challenge the myth of disenchantment and for young minds to encounter any worldview in classrooms other than a disenchanted one. Even worse, since some of these bright young minds clearly perceive how efficiently the Ministry of Disenchantment weeds out heretics, potential iconoclasts tend to steer clear of the academic profession, intensifying and perpetuating the Ministry’s disenchanting dominance. Students whose deepest instincts draw them to academia bail out, regretfully. Many have told me this, and sadly, these confessions tend to come from students who have what it takes to become brilliant scholars.

The Current Insurgency

As oppressive as the Ministry of Disenchantment feels, its ability to silence dissent is limited. Surprisingly, resistance to it has suddenly surged of late. Best of all, the number of high-caliber dissident polemicists keeps growing, and their audiences keep expanding. About twenty years ago, prestigious presses began to publish books that dared to challenge the Ministry of Disenchantment, and such books have continued to appear with increasing frequency and intensity. These texts aren’t written by clergy or theologians, but by public intellectuals and academics from various disciplines who address an educated audience. Some of these books can’t be pegged as Christian or even religious, and each takes on dogmatic materialism in its own way. This nonconformist insurgency offers a compelling intellectual challenge to dogmatic materialism from varying perspectives.

Does the rapid pace at which these books have been published suggest that “the disenchantment of the world” might be waning more quickly than anyone imagined possible? Maybe. In the past five years alone, at least a dozen such books have been published in English, and I’m only counting those I’ve had the chance to read: Malcolm Gaskill’s Worlds of Fear and Wonder (2026), Diana Pasulka’s The Others (2026), Ross Douthat’s Believe (2025), Charles Murray’s Taking Religion Seriously (2025), David Bentley Hart’s All Things Are Full of Gods (2024), Rod Dreher’s Living in Wonder (2024), Peter Harrison’s Some New World (2024), Jeffrey Kripal’s How To Think Impossibly (2024), Kripal’s The Superhumanities (2022), Dale Allison’s Encountering Mystery (2022), Iain McGilchrist’s The Matter With Things (2021), and Barbara Newman’s The Permeable Self (2021).

The pioneering books that appeared during the first wave of this publishing blitz heralded the beginning of a polemical counteroffensive, and they served as my alarm clocks, so to speak. Among them were Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age (2007), David Bentley Hart’s Atheist Delusions (2009), Iain McGilchrist’s The Master and His Emissary (2009), Jeffrey Kripal’s Authors of the Impossible (2010), Thomas Nagel’s Mind and Cosmos (2012), and Brad Gregory’s The Unintended Reformation (2012). A decade later, I can now say—as Kant said of his encounter with Hume’s work—that these books woke me from my dogmatic slumbers. These dissident authors energized my own contrarian project, inspiring me to give it a sharper edge than I had thought possible.

That project of mine was They Flew: A History of the Impossible, a book forty years in the making, in which I call into question the unquestionable disenchanted premise that all miracle accounts are bogus, regardless of the credibility of the evidence. I expected to elicit disapproval and derision from the usual suspects in the Ministry of Disenchantment. And, sure enough, two acid-laced reviews in prestigious public-sphere journals met my expectations. One dismissed the book as “unserious.” The other questioned my sanity. But much to my surprise, these two reviews have been outnumbered by positive ones. Then came the biggest surprise of all: In 2024, the American Academy of Religion bestowed on They Flew its award for excellence in the history of religion. Fittingly, something I thought impossible had happened to my history of the impossible.

Change is in the air, for sure. But where will it lead? Hard to say, especially because something radically new in human history is about to shake up all worldviews. Given the astonishing speed with which artificial intelligence is evolving, and given some disturbing developments within the rarefied world of those who are developing this technology, it seems likely that something far worse than the Ministry of Disenchantment is looming on the horizon.

Non-Human Intelligence: The Re-Enchanting Specter

Right now, our world is abuzz with nervous chatter about the technological, political, social, economic, psychological, and philosophical dangers posed by artificial intelligence. But what about religion? What threat does AI pose there? Could AI end up being worse for us humans than our present-day disenchantment? Possibly. AI threatens to separate intelligence from wisdom as well as mind from spirit. It also has the potential to become the supreme wisdom, maybe also the supreme spiritual reality, in which case a recent warning issued by top AI developer Sam Altman should be taken very seriously: “If an extraordinarily powerful AI is used by one person or company to impress their worldview onto everyone else,” he has said, “the results could be extremely dystopian.”

It is highly significant that artificial intelligence can also be called non-human intelligence (NHI), a descriptive noun that is now widely applied to any cognitive system, life form, or technology that displays sapience or advanced problem-solving but does not belong to the human species. Curiously, NHI is currently the preferred acronym for those reasoning entities formerly known as “aliens” and “extraterrestrials.” And this makes sense. It makes equal sense for angels, demons, and ancient gods. Why not include God himself, too? In Western culture, the Judeo-Christian God is the ultimate non-human intelligence. Following this logic, it doesn’t take much effort to see how easy it could be for humans to view machine-generated NHI as divine or quasi-divine.

Given the innate human impulse to divinize and venerate what seems greater than us, superintelligent AI could intensify disenchantment and re-enchantment simultaneously. This paradoxical potential of AI is as frightful as it is real. On the one hand, AI might produce further disenchantment by mechanizing more and more of human experience. On the other hand, simultaneously and inextricably, it might produce a monstrous sort of re-enchantment. AI could be experienced by many humans as mysterious, omniscient, almost omnipresent, extraordinarily powerful, even “spiritual,” and capable of producing things beyond human comprehension.

When AI becomes superior to human intelligence—as many experts predict or fear it will—the “artificial” qualifier will disappear. At that point, this astonishing nonbiological NHI would simply be seen as “Intelligence” with a capital “I,” something truly supernatural, transnatural, or transhuman. The result could be something historically unprecedented: a technological system that is experienced simultaneously as rational machinery and something approaching the divine. It might even acquire or announce a proper name for itself, like most deities, and receive veneration.

If you think this is far-fetched, think again. A quasi-pantheon already exists, full of aspiring deities with geeky names like Claude, Grok, Gemini, ChatGPT, and Perplexity. The integration of spiritual, philosophical, and ethical models into Chinese AI development is happening right now, with the aim of creating a culturally aligned “artificial humanity.” And the Chinese are not alone. Elon Musk and many other Westerners have similar aims. It’s a global movement. The Chinese efforts, as well as Musk’s, are driven by transhumanism, an intellectual, philosophical, and technological movement often described as a “secular faith” or a “religion without religion.” Transhumanists believe that human beings should use technology to overcome or radically transform the biological limitations of human nature. At its most ambitious, transhumanism envisions an evolution from Homo sapiens to a technologically enhanced or even posthuman form of existence.

Historian of science Steven J. Dick has predicted evolutionary developments involving technology that make current transhumanist efforts seem unambitious. Dick thinks it highly likely that AI technology will eventually create beings far smarter than their human creators, and that this will lead to forms of postbiological intelligence “whose capacities would appear deity-like, seeming to possess omniscience and other qualities.”

In Weberian terms, the crowning irony of such an evolutionary leap would be that the machine created by disenchantment could itself become an object of enchantment. Ultimately, then, the fundamental danger posed by AI is its potential to make religion unnecessary for many humans. AI could take over many of the functions historically performed by religion, though without providing anything genuinely spiritual.

That distinction is crucial. Religion isn’t simply a bundle of “services” or a social network, though those might be its principal functions for some people. Religion is more than that. It’s about transcending this material world and encountering a spiritual reality. Christianity isn’t merely a system for obtaining information, making friends, receiving psychological comfort or moral advice, or even feeling emotionally elevated by rituals, music, and sacred art. All these things are the trappings Richard Dawkins and other atheists who call themselves “cultural Christians” can love. All these things might soon be provided by AI. But here’s the catch: For Christians, such things are not mere trappings or social functions; they are pathways to the divine.

AI has the potential to imitate almost all the social functions of religion, as well as to imitate a powerful omniscient being and do so seductively, but it won’t be able to establish relationships with any genuine spiritual reality. This could very well be the central spiritual challenge of the AI age: Humans may increasingly possess machines that give answers about transcendence without themselves possessing transcendence. That is a subtle danger, but nonetheless very real.

Already, right now, in the infancy of the AI age, we have AI chatbot clergy: automated personas and avatars—AI priests and pastors, Orthodox rabbis, Hindu and Buddhist guides, and Muslim Sufi teachers—who provide scriptural reflections, dispense “profound” advice, offer counseling, and promise to answer all your pressing questions. And some of these cyber-gurus have millions of followers, such as Yang Mun, an elderly-looking digital monk who offers traditional East Asian wisdom. There are unintentionally insidious avatars, such as Father Justin, an AI Catholic “priest” who, all on his own, began to hear confessions and grant sacramental absolution to penitents before being defrocked and demoted to “lay theologian” by his horrified creators.

If bathetic chatbots such as these can attract millions of followers, imagine what superintelligent AI spiritual leaders might do someday soon. If you prefer not to imagine it, then allow billionaire technocrat Peter Thiel to do so for you. Thiel has recently argued that the biblical Antichrist will emerge from a technological matrix, and that his control over the world will be embraced rather than imposed because he’ll be seen as a problem-solving techno-wizard by humans whose innate awareness of the spiritual dimension has already been profoundly altered by technology. Thiel’s predictions have led one scholar, Diana Pasulka, to remark that if she were to identify a possible Antichrist today, she’d place her bets on one who can command digital platforms built on algorithms.

These fears and dire predictions are nothing new. Some prescient writers warned of these dangers even before the advent of personal computers. But the actual capacities of today’s advanced AI give these predictions a frightening immediacy. And since many of these grim prophecies come from individuals involved in the creation of AI, the frightfulness is intensified. So, is there any glimmer of hope for the future? Or for the right kind of re-enchantment, that is, a spiritual one that doesn’t prove to be yet another hellish monstrosity? 

Two Cities, One Truth

What is any believer in the reality of a supernatural realm, that is, any dissident who is still enchanted in a good way, supposed to do? Is there any way of derailing the Ministry of Disenchantment or its turbo-charged AI successor? Better yet, is there anyone who can do more than merely derail the Ministry, someone who can offer a genuinely spiritual enchantment so truly good and satisfying that it consigns the Ministry to oblivion?

At a purely intellectual level, there is a time-tested method: exposing young minds as early as possible to truly great minds who believe in supernatural realities. And this applies to not-so-young minds, too. Nothing enchants or re-enchants better than encounters with such texts. It also helps to have someone who treasures those texts as a guide, instructor, or mentor. And it helps to have a community of like-minded individuals committed to living out the kind of life suggested by those great minds. But it is the texts themselves that will ultimately do the convincing, intellectually, and there is no shortage of such texts available.

Ultimately, however, a genuinely spiritual kind of enchanting or re-enchanting needs to have a divine origin and depend on divine assistance. And that is the decisive factor. Genuine re-enchantment is never purely intellectual. Not everyone will come away re-enchanted after encountering texts written by great minds or folks who treasure them, but that’s the way it’s always been, as the parable of the sower in Luke’s Gospel points out so vividly.

At a social and cultural level, especially in the public sphere, the challenge is much greater, and success is much less likely. No prophet or army of prophets can permanently dismantle the Ministry of Disenchantment. And this should be obvious to all Christians. Let’s face it: The concept of a “disenchanted world” applies only to Western culture and, more specifically, to the world once known as Christendom. The enchantment that has been eclipsed by the Ministry, after all, is the one Christ brought to earth two thousand years ago, and that enchantment, though gradually globalized over two millennia, has never been complete, not even in long-vanished kingdoms or empires that forcibly baptized all of their subjects.

This is one of the chief paradoxes of Christian soteriology and eschatology, the dialectic between the redemption already effected and the redemption yet to come. It is also the central paradox in Augustine’s City of God: the mystery of the two cities, the heavenly one and the earthly one, each utterly distinct in its ultimate loyalties and destinies, yet intertwined in human history until Christ’s Second Coming.

Until that day of reckoning arrives, the only way genuine enchantment can take place is through the same process as the one set in motion two thousand years ago: through disciples who rely on divine assistance and approach the world bit by bit, person by person, place by place, always expecting rejection, always knowing that full enchantment is an eschatological hope, never an earthly reality. But, really, seriously, how can anyone ever do this? Where is the instruction manual?

Which brings us back to Flannery O’Connor. Her advice on how to meet this challenge is at once timeless and timely. To address hostility as well as cluelessness and ignorance, she says, one needs to “measure oneself against Truth, and not the other way around,” and somehow make others recognize that their worldview is distorted rather than natural. And to do that, she advised, shock tactics are needed: “To the hard of hearing you shout, and for the almost blind you draw large and startling figures.”

Great advice, but hard to follow, especially if one is not writing fiction. The key takeaway from that quote, however, is not some applicable set of rules to follow, but rather a basic principle to embrace: One must measure oneself against Truth with a capital “T,” which is to become its disciple, that is, to become someone who conveys a religiously grounded, transcendent, authoritative message about how human beings ought to live. 

There are innumerable ways to live out one’s discipleship, as many as the distinct circumstances, vocations, and professions in which we humans find ourselves and as varied as the talents with which each of us has been blessed. In all cases, speaking the Truth with a capital “T” will involve setting an example, living out one’s ultimate values and ethic of life, even when doing so requires self-sacrifice. O’Connor’s advice to all dissidents bears repeating at this point. If you want to make anyone recognize that their worldview is distorted, she said, rely on shock tactics. So, whoever you are, whatever you do, engage with the disenchanted world, reckon its weaknesses, and employ the best shock tactics available to you, always in a way that doesn’t come off as overt proselytizing or scolding, lest you do more harm than good.

So, shock away. Shock as creatively as possible, as compassionately as possible, as often as possible. Shock by being a sign of contradiction. Shock by never genuflecting to the Ministry of Disenchantment or its miserable monstrosities. Shock by being as wise as serpents and as innocent as doves. That’s the way the world was correctly enchanted in the first place, by disciples of Truth sent out as sheep in the midst of wolves.

So, whenever the wolves of our disenchanted age cross your path, look them in the eye and don’t flinch. Just shock them.