Rod Dreher has some advice for you. First, put down your phone, close your laptop, and turn off the television. Next, begin to pray. Don’t pray just anything; recite the Jesus Prayer, preferably hundreds of times. Now you are positioned to begin your quest. The object of the quest is beauty. Seek to behold divine glory in the work of the Lord’s hands, whether in his creation, icons, or saints. If you have eyes to see, each of these is a mirror reflecting the light of Christ in a dark but not forsaken world.
In a word, you must become a “practical mystic.” If you don’t, you’ll lack the resilience to weather a godless, disenchanted culture. You and your children will lose hold of the faith. Like the apostle Peter, you will sink beneath the waters; unlike him, no one will lift you up. Or so argues Dreher in his new book, Living in Wonder: Finding Mystery and Meaning in a Secular Age.
Dreher is an Eastern Orthodox journalist and blogger from Louisiana who has published five previous books and now writes a Substack with more than 20,000 subscribers. For 20 years he has commanded a sizable, committed, and diverse readership. Many factors explain his success, but four stand out and deserve attention before we turn to Living in Wonder.
The first is his restlessness, which is both tangible and infectious. Dreher is a lifelong seeker. He’s a pilgrim in search of the truth, and he won’t sleep until he finds it.
The second is his existential urgency. Utterly unfeigned, this energy corrals readers into a kind of compulsive vicarious participation in the trials and burdens, victories and defeats of Dreher’s many adventures.
The third is his transparency. Dreher’s writing is never detached; it is always autobiographical. Far from presenting a happy or successful façade, Dreher is vulnerable to a fault, consistently self-critical, and never the hero of the tale. At best, he is the mouthpiece of an experience or perspective, whether his own or another’s.
The last is his relevance. Dreher has always had his finger on the pulse of the culture. He has coined phrases now in common currency (“the Benedict Option” and “the law of merited impossibility,” for example); he has crowned politicians (a 2016 interview boosted JD Vance’s name recognition; political strategist James Carville touted his influence in Politico); and he has forged connections with a variety of public figures loosely bound by concern over the state of Western culture (Ross Douthat, Jordan B. Peterson, Jonathan Pageau, Paul Kingsnorth, and more). Even Dreher’s unhappy, on-again, off-again relationship with conservative politics is a symptom of the times.
If Dreher is indeed a prophet of the Zeitgeist—whether heralding its advance or proclaiming its doom—then a new book from him is worth pausing to consider. And this one happens to be about angels, demons, exorcists, aliens, UFOs, visions, dreams, miracles, witchcraft, and the internet.
A disenchanted age
There are three major elements to Living in Wonder: a metanarrative of decline; an overarching diagnosis, prognosis, and prescription; and a set of practices for the individual reader. I began above with the third, so now I will focus on the first two.
Dreher argues that the contemporary West is disenchanted. This term can mean many things, but Dreher defines it as “the evaporation of a sense of the supernatural within the world, and its replacement with a belief, sometimes unacknowledged, that this world is all there is.” A disenchanted society is materialistic, rationalistic, individualistic, and hedonistic. It is unspooky. It is not open to the transcendent, the divine, the mysterious, the inexplicable. It is closed off by design.
How did we get here? By a lengthy series of social, cultural, economic, scientific, and intellectual transitions, beginning in the late Middle Ages. We lost a sense of “the givenness of things,” to use Marilynne Robinson’s phrase. We began to think things are what we make of them rather than gifts from God to be cherished and stewarded. We strapped nature to a chair and tortured her for secrets. Alluding to Yuval Noah Harari, Dreher writes that “the story of modernity is of humankind exchanging meaning for power.”
We got power, all right. But was the exchange worth it? Dreher suggests not. In fact, he says, the tradeoffs are so drastic that, while we can’t go back, we can’t stay where we are, either.
Are things really so bad, though? Dreher grants all the objections: the lives of countless people improved by medical science, lifted out of poverty by markets, and ennobled by the franchise. Nevertheless, his reply is that of Jesus: “What good will it be for someone to gain the whole world, yet forfeit their soul?” (Matt. 16:26). The sum of all our progress amounts to nil if we lose God, and thus our own souls, in the bargain.
Dreher wants us to look around. The aura of autonomy and freedom has blinded us to our fetters. Self-creation is not liberation but bondage. Who, we might ask, is the self whose authenticity I am meant to serve? Who is the inner me whose birth I am supposed to midwife? By what measure or power am I to fashion myself—and in the image of what, except myself?
Stanley Hauerwas writes that “modernity names the time when people came to believe they should have no story determining their lives except the story they chose when they had no story.” The internet only supercharges this belief, Dreher says as he dubs it “a vast disenchantment machine.”
Online and off, this life of disenchanted self-creation hasn’t brought us the general satisfaction we expected. It has brought anomie, acedia, torpor, decadence, loneliness, anxiety, depression, pornography, addiction, deaths of despair, and declining rates of marriage, childbirth, and church attendance. Instead of doubling down on our errors, better to double back and see where things went wrong.
Angels We Ignore On High
Rediscovering enchantment
Such is Dreher’s diagnosis and, short of drastic change, prognosis: “Living in disenchantment is killing us and destroying our civilization. … Either we will stop it or it will stop us.”
How to stop it? Dreher’s answer is re-enchantment:
Christian re-enchantment is not about imposing fanciful nostalgia onto the world, like coating a plain yellow cake with pastel fondant frosting. Instead, it is about learning how to perceive what already exists and reestablishing participatory contact with the really real. God has already enchanted the world; it is up to us to clear away the scales from our eyes, recognize what is there, and establish a relationship with it.
Here and throughout the book, Dreher draws on theologian Hans Boersma and others to articulate a “sacramental ontology.” As psychologist and blogger Richard Beck puts it in his 2021 book Hunting Magic Eels: Recovering an Enchanted Faith in a Skeptical Age, “‘Sacramental ontology’ is about how everything around us, everything that exists, points us toward God. All the world is a sign.”
This can be acted upon in one of two ways. The first is to deploy it as a lens to observe everyday life. God is no longer distant but can be found anywhere and everywhere, whether at Walmart or the auto shop, the voting booth or a neighbor’s backyard. Re-enchantment becomes a devotional or epistemic program for the individual believer, a matter of curating one’s routines to be mindful of the omnipresent Lord. Beck’s approach leans this way.
The second is to bite the bullet and proclaim, fingers uncrossed, that God works signs and wonders in the world today, just as he did in the times and stories of Holy Scripture. In this view, angels intervene in mortal affairs; demons assault and possess unsuspecting sinners; terminal illnesses are healed by divine miracle; young men see visions; and old men dream dreams (Acts 2:17). None of these things ever ceased. Christians in the West merely lost the desire or ability to see them.
Dreher wants to marry both approaches to a sacramental view of the world. Signs and wonders are occasional but not exceptional, he believes. They distill the essence of reality so that, having once beheld or believed in the extraordinary, our eyes might be open to it in the daily grind—we will, as the book’s title promises, live in wonder.
For this reason, the book is filled with story after story of the numinous and remarkable. The stories are not only others’ experiences but also Dreher’s own. He is neither defensive nor apologetic. His guard is all the way down. As he writes at one point, “I’m too old to care what people think.”
Hence the chapter on UFOs. Diana Pasulka uses the phrase “epistemological shock” to describe what happens to anyone who moves from skepticism to openness regarding aliens and other paranormal phenomena. But Dreher’s life as a Christian has been one long shock to what he thought he knew, and this book is where he lets it all hang out.
He’s in good company. With Jacques Vallée, Jeffrey Kripal, and Carlos Eire, Pasulka is part of a vanguard of thinkers unwilling to follow modernity in preemptively writing off the atypical, the paranormal, and the mystical. Andrew Davison, an Anglican priest and systematic theologian, last year published a book called Astrobiology and Christian Doctrine: Exploring the Implications of Life in the Universe. The careful, subtle arguments of Davison’s impressive scholarship might be boiled down to say, “Christians should be in the alien business.”
Dreher is already there. His position is simple: Whatever the nature of the encounters to which so many people across so many cultures and continents bear witness, these stories are one more reason to resist disenchantment. Reality is not what the secular West supposes. The official story is false. Christians of all people should be the first to realize it. In fact, they should be leading the charge against it.
Let me put my cards on the table: I think Dreher and his allies are right on enchantment generally. I don’t have any difficulty believing the miraculous testimonies he shares, nor do I see why any Christian should. As Blaise Pascal wrote long ago, “How I hate such foolishness as not believing in the Eucharist, etc. If the gospel is true, if Jesus Christ is God, where is the difficulty?” That doesn’t mean everything Dreher reports actually happened, only that it’s possible.
But the one place I think Dreher begins to lose his moorings is in his discussion of aliens, the government, and Silicon Valley. By all means, these topics belong in the book. But Dreher is too confident in his assertions, too deferential to insiders, too quick to offer detailed hypotheses about what “they” are up to and why. On aliens—unlike angels—the apostle Thomas should be our model. Here, it is a virtue to doubt first and then verify.
Light from the East
The danger for every grand story of decline is that it overwhelms the reader. There’s not much to do at the end of the world except watch it go down. Thankfully, Dreher avoids fatalism and despair. We find ourselves, at most, “at the end of a world”—not the world, much less the only world.
If some of Dreher’s earlier work could be read as conflating the church with Western culture so that the future of one determines the future of the other, not so here. In a surprising twist, Living in Wonder turns out to be the book I always imagined when I first learned about The Benedict Option. Sex and politics are mostly missing in action. Dreher isn’t trying to intervene in worldly affairs; he’s trying to throw a lifeline to the lost, lonely, and adrift. The ethos of the book is not so much apolitical as post-political.
What matters instead, he argues, is attending to the world God has made, sacrificing our wills on the altar of Christ, and submitting to the power of the Spirit in the age of the Machine. If we do this, God is faithful and will keep us. Our seeming spiritual impotence, inherited from modernity, will not condemn us to alienation. The life of God is more powerful than that.
Moreover, the life of God is the whole ballgame. Moral rules, political order, social justice—these are goods the church nurtures and pursues. But they are not the end of the Christian life. God alone is our end, the final end of all creation. As Dante writes, “There is a light above, which visible / Makes the Creator unto every creature, / Who only in beholding Him has peace.”
But to see God requires repentance. In Dreher’s words, “If we want to live, we have to turn our lives around and walk away from the false parts of the Enlightenment and toward the true Light.” Such a total revolution is not primarily intellectual but affective and bodily: “We cannot think our way back to enchantment or unity with God. We can find it only by participating in his life,” that is, “by using our entire selves” in worship.
We must be wary of cheap substitutes, though. Dreher warns that churches “forever seeking the Next Big Thing to keep people entertained and in the pews” will not last in the long run. Sure, it’s “fun and exciting for a while, but it’s hard for church-as-spectacle to keep the show endlessly exciting. It comes to seem shallow and gimmicky, because, well, it is.”
At the same time, the solution isn’t “powerful exegesis of papal encyclicals, erudite sermons about the mechanics of salvation, five killer apologetic arguments to use against atheists, or any other canned strategy.” Rationalism is no alternative to emotionalism. Each is a misreading of what people in the West—especially young people—are seeking.
“They want to know whether life has any meaning or this is all there is,” Dreher recognizes. “They don’t want to know about God; they want to know God.”
At times, Living in Wonder reads like a tract for Eastern Orthodoxy. A convert himself, Dreher is likely to lead others eastward. So be it: I’m not converting, but neither will I gainsay him. The best books are not dispassionate treatments of neutral subject matter; they reach out from the page and seize the reader by the lapels. That’s what Dreher has done. He wants your soul for Christ.
Maybe you should consider giving his advice a try. Get offline. Go to the woods. Bring a Bible, a candle, maybe an icon. Say the Jesus Prayer without ceasing. Ask for a sign. Ask for the Lord. Ask for power. Then wait—and see what happens next.
Brad East is an associate professor of theology at Abilene Christian University. He is the author of four books, including The Church: A Guide to the People of God and Letters to a Future Saint.
