Living in Wonder: Finding Mystery and Meaning in a Secular Age by Rod Dreher
A Second Drafts Book Review
Dear Reader,
As I continue to tweak and improve Second Drafts, I’m following your feedback in keeping book reviews separate from my normal every-other-week newsletter. I’m also giving myself permission to write and send them out when it’s convenient; hence, today’s surprise Saturday publication instead of the normal newsletters on Fridays.
But enough about all that. Let’s get to the review.
Rod Dreher is an American journalist and a contributing editor at The American Conservative. He was senior editor at TAC for twelve years. You can read a slightly more colorful bio at Wikipedia, but as the brief official vitae goes,
“A veteran of three decades of magazine and newspaper journalism, he has also written three New York Times bestsellers—Live Not By Lies, The Benedict Option, and The Little Way of Ruthie Leming—as well as Crunchy Cons and How Dante Can Save Your Life. Dreher lives in Budapest, Hungary.”
In a Best of 2023 Review in last January’s Second Drafts, I included a link to Rod Dreher’s Diary for being among the top five Substack newsletters I read weekly:
“I’ve read all his books, heard him speak, and even had dinner with Rod at a fancy Italian restaurant in Bozeman. The man is an absolute prolific writer whose output is sometimes as many as 5-6 dispatches a week (and we’re not talking a little paragraph or two each). Dreher has always been a ‘canary in the coal mine’ type of thinker, which often gets him (mis-)labeled as a ‘slippery sloper,’ but the guy has been right a lot more than he’s been wrong about cultural and societal matters, so I’m glad to give him the benefit of the doubt.”
In this book review edition of Second Drafts, I give the same benefit of the doubt to Dreher’s latest, Living in Wonder: Finding Mystery & Meaning in a Secular Age. I also address intriguing recent events that eerily fall within the scope of his new work and only hope you won’t think Dreher (or me) too crazy for doing so. Enjoy.
Craig
PS: When you finish reading, please take the one-click survey at the end. Thanks.
Living in Wonder: Finding Mystery & Meaning in a Secular Age
“This is a book about living in a world filled with mystery. It is about learning to open our eyes to the reality of the world of the spirit and how it interacts with matter. This is a world that many Christians affirm exists in theory but have trouble accepting in practice…It’s a book about the profoundly human need to believe that we live and move and have our being in the presence of God—not just the idea of God, but the God who is as near to us as the air we breathe, the light we see, and the solid ground on which we walk.” (pgs. 3, 7)
If you’ve ever been on YouTube with time to kill (which, let’s be honest, killing time is a primary reason most of us are on YouTube), you’ve come across at least one or two unexplainable videos that stick in your craw. I’m not talking about the “What were they thinking?” unexplainable ones that end up with someone writhing on the ground in pain. I’m talking about the “What the heck?” unexplainable ones of amazing or scary phenomena that seem almost magical (I’ll refrain from posting a link to let you enjoy searching for your own favorites).
Some of these videos, of course, are just elaborate tricks made by folks who love special effects and have access to too many easy-to-use digital tools to replicate them. But an increasing number of clips seem genuine and almost miraculous in content, as if the person who was filming pressed “record” while standing along some thin, porous, invisible line dividing the natural and supernatural worlds.
Standing along this line is where Rod Dreher meets us in Living in Mystery, and enchantment—or more accurately, re-enchantment—with God is what he’s after. But this is also where things get weird, not because Dreher makes them so, but because, well, they are so, at least to those of us post-17th century types (which is all of us) who have grown up on this side of the Enlightenment. Dreher writes:
“Many theologically conservative Christians today who profess a basic supernatural outlook have denatured it under the weight of modernist presuppositions. Modernist Catholics find talk of angels, demons, and miracles to superstitious and embarrassing. Theologically conservative Catholics may confess belief in these things but prefer to avoid thinking too much about them, while theological liberals lean hard into good works and political change.”
But, Dreher says, it’s not just Catholics who are conflicted:
“On the evangelical side, Bible scholar Michael Heiser devoted the last years of his life to teaching his fellow evangelicals how to recover the ‘supernatural’ worldview of the ancient Israelites—a view entailing vigorous belief in angels, demons, and other entitites. Heiser contended that modern Protestants process their experiences ‘ through a mixture of creedal statements and modern rationalism,’ in a way that leads them to a ‘selective supernaturalism’ that is unfaithful to the Bible’s actual teaching about the strangeness of creation. The truth is that our modern evangelical subculture has trained us to think that our theology precludes any experience of the unseen world,’ he writes. ‘Consequently, it isn’t an important part of our theology.’” (p. 31)1
In other words, believers may be comfortable with the concept of a spiritual reality, but not the experience of one. We may believe that angels and demons (not to mention the rulers, the authorities, the cosmic powers over this present darkness, and the spiritual forces of evil per Ephesians 6:12) populate the heavenly places—and some may even pray invoking angelic protection or denouncing demonic influence—but if an actual angel or demon made themselves known, we would be the first to dismiss (or at least question) our own experience.
Thus, our modernist disenchantment—what Dreher defines 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”—turns us into mere materialists, tempting us with false enchantments and the dangers thereof:
“The point cannot be overstated: the world is not what we think it is. It is so much weirder. It is so much darker. It is so, so much brighter and more beautiful. We do not create meaning: meaning is already there, waiting to be discovered. Christians of the first millennium knew this. We have lost that knowledge, abandoned faith in this claim, and forgotten how to search. This is a mass forgetting compelled by the forces that forged the modern world and taught us that enchantment was for primitives. Exiled from the truths that the old ones knew, we fill our days with distractions to help us avoid the hard questions that we fear can’t be answered. Or we give ourselves over to false enchantments—the distractions and deceptions of money, power, the occult, sex, drugs, and all the allure of the material world—in a vain attempt to connect with something beyond ourselves to give meaning and purpose to life.” (p. 13)
Preparatory PSYOPS?
Technology combined with the occult, Dreher posits, is one of these disenchantments and a new hybrid religion made possible by the (formerly) New Atheists of twenty years ago. Human belief abhors a vacuum, and in seeking to convince people of a non-existent God, the New Atheists’ efforts made room for “the old gods” (Baal, Ishtar, Moloch) to make a comeback in new and technologically-advanced forms.
On pages 70-71, Dreher ends a particularly rich section (and really entire fourth chapter titled, “Why Disenchantment Matters”) with this summary:
“The age-old dream of conquering the limits of nature through technology and liberating individuals from any non-chosen obligations has never been more real for as many people. And yet we are miserable. It’s as if we are all asking ourselves the question, What’s it all for? Or doing whatever we can to avoid asking the question at all.”
The origin of the technology Dreher talks about is complicated. In his sixth chapter of the book, “Aliens and the Sacred Machine,” Dreher begins with a general discussion about UFOs (“unidentified flying objects”), but this past December’s strange flurry of UAPs (“unidentified aerial phenomenon or unidentified anomalous phenomenon,” which is an alternative term to “UFO” used to describe observations of events in the sky that can’t be identified as aircraft or natural phenomena) in New Jersey and other places around the world made reading this chapter seem more than just speculative. From page 111:
“What are they? I don’t know. Nobody seems to. Yet the most subversive thing I discovered about UFOs was that the most intelligent and highly placed people who investigated the phenomenon do not believe that they are aliens from other planets. Rather, most appear to think that they are discarnate higher intelligences from other dimensions of reality.”
An interesting development in all this is the legitimacy given by government and tech big wigs to a new religious syncretism. Dreher continues on page 112:
“There are a startling number of quite intelligent and influential people who believe that these intelligences are coming to us as ‘gods,’ to solve our problems and lead us to an age of enlightenment and progress. ‘Aliens’ are the kinds of godlike beings that a secular society—one in which science and technology hold supreme authority—can believe in when they have discarded the God of the Bible.”
He’s not wrong, though he’s not completely buying it, either, at least not in terms of who these “aliens” might actually be. Dreher ultimately believes (as do I) that any such beings shilling for false religion are demonic, not extraterrestrial nor inter-dimensional. Anticipating eye rolls, he writes (again, quoting Heiser),
“Put out of your mind the idea that ‘UFOs are demonic’ is the kind of thing only rural fundamentalist preachers say. Michael Heiser, a sophisticated Bible scholar who before his 2023 death from cancer became famous for urging his fellow evangelicals, on biblical grounds, to take such things more seriously, strongly believed that UFOs were both real and of demonic origin.” (p. 116)
The larger point Dreher seeks to make takes him back to Father Seraphim Rose’s 1975 book, Orthodoxy and the Religion of the Future, and Rose’s insistence that the religion being proffered (regardless of who is doing the proffering) would appeal to the highly scientific, highly pragmatic elite similar to what we have now in government and tech spheres. Recounting Rose’s prognostication, Dreher writes,
“The priest-monk predicted a coming false religion based on shamanic spiritual experience that teaches contact with these so-called higher entities as a route to wisdom and a better life. The new religion will appeal to the post-Christian world in part because it does not require asceticism—the ancient Christian discipline of self-denial and repentance—but is instead a religion of easy therapy. It will be a religion with scientific trappings—the rise of the sci-fi film2 and literature genre is preparing us for that, he said—and will be a religion based on pragmatism, on ‘what works.’” (pgs. 115-116)
New Jersey drones and AI as preparatory PSYOPS for covert demonic worship?
I didn’t have that on the Bingo card for 2025…but somehow Dreher did.
Two Quibbles
There are plenty more interesting chapters with intriguing ideas about enchantment and disenchantment in the world. Dreher’s chapter on the occult is particularly good, as are his chapters invoking and applying Kirkegaard, as well as pushing back practically against disenchantment through intentional attention and prayer.
If there are any quibbles I have, they are primarily two: 1) Dreher’s misplaced confusion of the Reformation and the Enlightenment for Modernity’s sway in disenchanting out wonder and mystery; and 2) Dreher’s tendency (as good as he is at it) to extrapolate broad conclusions (as interesting as they are) from little more than a few narrow one-off conversations.
The Reformation as Anti-Enchantment?
Dreher’s knocking of the Reformation as the first of several “disenchantments” (others he includes: science and modernity, capitalism, the Internet, the self) is first mentioned on page 30:
“The modern West—that is, culture dominated by the Reformation and its secular successor, the Enlightenment—established a rigid framework within which numinous phenomena are to be evaulated. If they cannot be verified according to the scientific method, they cannot be counted as real. Thus, a large body of written testimony in modern times by people who witnessed and experienced uncanny events has been out by materialist fundamentalists.”
Later on page 60, Dreher writes (almost ironically as he refers to the 16th century Roman Catholic Church the Reformers were seeking to reform) that,
“We need to change the way we know the world, to make it less abstract and more participatory. The anthropological ground for this is widely accessible in the history of humankind’s religious experience. The Christian theological ground for this was everywhere present in the Christian church of the premodern era, ending only when a series of events in the West—intellectual, technological, and economic—gradually and then suddenly, with the Reformation, severed the perceived link between spirit and matter.” (p. 60)
Less abstract? More participatory? Severing the link between spirit and matter?
Seriously?
Before the Reformation, long had the Roman Catholic Church gone off the rails—diminishing the authority of Scripture, elevating the Papacy and its works-based indulgences, and keeping the Word of God out of the hands (and language) of the people. As scholar and theologian D.A. Carson has said, “The Reformation was an unfortunate necessity.”3
However, the fire that Martin Luther lit in 1517 was indeed a fire—wonderful, wild, mysterious—one the medieval Luther held in one hand while cursing demons and translating the Bible into German with the other. His was no abstract or spiritually non-participatory campaign (certainly not when you read the accounts as recorded in Heiko Obereman’s Luther: Man Between God and the Devil). When Luther experienced demonic attack, he did not try to explain it away; rather, his was a full-contact spiritual battle that was anything but only academic.
Likewise, John Calvin, who often gets a bad rap as the OG Frozen Chosen, may not have written or waltzed with demons as seemingly often as Luther, but neither did he dismiss them or their boss’ influence on the world and its whirlwinds. Calvin recognized and took quite seriously the supernatural, as illustrated by this particular statement in his commentary on Job 1:13-19:
“A man might demand how it happened that fire came down from heaven to burn up Job’s cattle. For the devil hath not the lightning and tempests in his power: we grant him no such sovereignty as to have dominion in the air to raise whirlwinds and tempests at his pleasure. The answer hereunto is easy… although the winds be God’s heralds to execute his will, and that the lightning have like nature, yet the devil worketh by them when God useth his service…. Then let us think it not strange that God should give the devil such a liberty as to be able to raise up lightnings, whirlwinds, and tempests. For he is not able to do it as much as he himself liketh, but God serveth his own turn by him as it pleaseth himself.”4
Dreher’s point—that “the crisis of the modern soul is largely a crisis of the modern mind” (p. 60)—is accurate and well-taken, but the culprit he’s looking for is the Enlightenment that came after the Reformation, not the Reformation itself.5
Extrapolation
Living in Wonder is not the first of Dreher’s book I would critique for his tendency to suggest or at times even insist that something is or isn’t true for all based on just one or (maybe) two corroborating conversations, emails, or interviews. This is when Dreher can seem out on a limb—even kooky or spooky—to non-regular readers.
In the book, Dreher makes the statement that,
“A number of Silicon Valley people—how many is impossible to say—appeal explicitly to gods and higher intelligences to help them do their work of changing humanity. A California venture capitalist friend tells me that everyone he knows in Silicon Valley holds regular rituals to summon the ‘aliens’ to give them technological wisdom. Blake Lemoine, the Google whistleblower fired for going public with his belief that LaMDA, its AI program, had achieved consciousness, told a podcast host that he and others involved LaMDA in a ritual committing it to the ancient Egyptian deity Thoth. Lemoine said this wasn’t a big secret; it’s just that journalists never ask about it.” (p. 123)
Anecdotally interesting, but again, a bit of an extrapolation to quote too seriously.
The good news for Dreher (and his regular readers) is he has great instincts for news, culture, and the truth of what connects them. These, when combined with his breadth and depth of reading, his interview doggedness, his research chops, and his profuse amount of daily online writing incorporating community feedback make for eventually better-supported elaborations and occasional needed adjustments that benefit his book writing.
But he can still seem kooky or spooky. Maybe it’s the glasses.
Conclusion
All this brings us back to Dreher’s main point, namely that the degree to which we’re comfortable/uncomfortable talking about any of this is probably a good indicator of how much/little wonder and mystery is actually part of our lives.
Part of my own lack here is a guard against the overspiritualization and “demon behind every rock” language and leanings of the Charismatic and Pentecostal movements I encountered when I first came to Christ in the mid-80’s. Perhaps in reaction, I see my evangelical Presbyterian self in the group Dreher describes as having full faith in the existence of the spiritual realm, yet reticent for reasons of rationalism to jump too quickly to a bear hug embrace of it.
And yet, I’m challenged by Dreher’s middle-of-the-road attempt to be more aware and open to living in wonder, to find (not just talk of or assume) mystery and meaning in our secular age. After all, as Fox Mulder reminded his FBI partner Dana Scully in the 1998 movie, The X-Files: Fight the Future,
“If we fail to anticipate the unforeseen or expect the unexpected in a universe of infinite possibilities, we may find ourselves at the mercy of anyone or anything that cannot be programmed, categorized, or easily referenced.”
To be sure, the Truth is out there. Perhaps Dreher can help us get closer to Him as we are more open to the world of His wonder and mysteries.
“No matter how intellectually satisfying the theological treasures within a particular Christian tradition may be, if they do not lead to an ongoing personal relationship with Jesus Christ, what good are they?” (p. 240)
Rod Dreher, Living in Wonder: Finding Mystery and Meaning in a Secular Age
After stints in Protestantism and then Catholicism, Dreher found his spiritual home in the Orthodox Church. His take on his fellow Orthodox brethren concerning this topic of the supernatural: “Though Orthodoxy in principle retains all the old beliefs, far too often we Eastern Christians live as if we didn’t. For example, in the United States, I know of only two Orthodox exorcists—and one of them, a friend of mine, had to go to Rome for training. Our clergy will speak of the reality of demons but are content to let news of spiritual warfare remain a rumor.” (p. 31)
“It may shock you, though, to learn that the world’s leading authority on the UFO phenomenon, computer scientist and venture capitalist Jacques Vallée, also believes something close to [Rose’s views]…
…Vallée, who was the model for the French scientist played by François Truffaut in the Steven Spielberg film Close Encounters of the Third Kind, is not a Christian or a conventional religious believer of any kind. But a lifetime spent investigating UFO phenomena has led him to assert that the entities are real. After six decades of studying them, Vallée is unwilling to say precisely what they are—but he has concluded that they are unlikely to be creatures from other planets.
Rather, in Vallée’s estimation, they are probably higher intelligences coming to us from a dimension beyond space and time. And they come with malevolent intent. They are choosing to manifest as being from space, he theorizes, as a strategy of control—to reprogram humanity for some other purpose. And they have been at it for a long time.” (p. 112-113) I don’t know about you, but that sounds like demonic behavior to me.
For a very engaging but concise discussion about why the Reformation matters today, watch this nine-minute table discussion among Carson, John Piper, and Tim Keller.
John Calvin, Sermons of Master John Calvin Upon the Book of Job, trans. Arthur Golding (London: Lucas Harrison and Georger Bishop, 1574), 27.
Later in the book, Dreher writes, “The Reformation’s despiritualization of the material world (unintentionally) advanced the metaphysics of technique. If there was no intrinsic meaning in matter, then we are free to do with it whatever we can to bend it to human will. This led eventually to the Scientific Revolution.” (p. 119) “Despiritualization of the material world” by way of the Reformation? Seriously?