Looking For Comets

Are We At A 'Living In Wonder' Moment?

Sorry, brethren and sistren, but I’m going to have to interrupt your Saturday for even more content from Your Working Boy, who woke up to find that Ross Douthat had written about him and his new book in his weekend column, which posted this morning. Ross is writing about three new books about God that he found exceptional, and the fact that they appear in context of a social landscape that is somehow both post-Christian and post-atheist.

Ross says that the New Atheist moment happened not because Dawkins, Hitchens, et al. came up with brilliant new arguments for their position. It happened because for various reasons, society at that time was prepared to entertain those arguments in ways they had not previously been. Ross:

By seizing their opportunity, the anti-God polemicists pushed secularization and de-Christianization farther than they might otherwise have gone. It’s just to emphasize that success in the battle of ideas is often about recognizing when the world is ready to go your way, when audiences are suddenly primed to give your ideas a fuller hearing than before.

Such an opportunity confronts religious writers today. The new-atheist idea that the weakening of organized religion would make the world more rational and less tribal feels much more absurd in 2024 than it did in 2006. Existential anxiety and civilizational ennui, not rationalist optimism and humanist ambition, are the defining moods of secular liberalism nowadays. The decline of religious membership and practice is increasingly seen as a social problem rather than a great leap forward. People raised without belief are looking for meaning in psychedelics, astrology, U.F.O.s. And lately the rise of the “Nones” — Americans with no religious affiliation — has finally leveled off.

So the world seems primed for religious arguments in the same way it was primed for the new atheists 20 years ago. But the question is whether the religious can reclaim real cultural ground — especially in the heart of secularism, the Western intelligentsia — as opposed to just stirring up a vague nostalgia for belief.

Ross cites three new books — one by David Bentley Hart (which I haven’t read); Spencer Klavan’s terrific Light Of The Mind, Light Of The World, which I have read, and which dazzled me with its arguments for how scientific findings (particularly in quantum mechanics) point the way to God; and, of course, Living In Wonder.

Ross steps off from his description and praise of Klavan’s book to say this about Living In Wonder:

[Klavan’s argument] is wild stuff from a materialist perspective, but in my experience with open-minded skeptics, it’s not the place where they hit their limit. That’s more likely to happen when you proceed one step further, into the territory of the real old-time religion, and start talking about the more personalized and unpredictable ways that supernatural mind might shape material reality — the realm of miracles and revelations, visions and portents, legit angels and real demons.

This realm is the subject of the last book in my troika, Rod Dreher’s “Living in Wonder: Finding Mystery and Meaning in a Secular Age.” It’s partly a how-to guide for seekers after the more mystical relationship to reality that most human societies have enjoyed but ours has unwisely amputated. But it’s also a collection of anecdata about the persistence of enchantment even under allegedly disenchanted conditions, the supernatural happenings that flower constantly in our notionally secularized world.

This means that of the three, the Dreher book is the most fun, it tells the best stories, and it covers aspects of human life that are more fundamental to religion’s resilience than any argument or theory — above all, the fact that even in societies that exclude any hint of supernaturalism from their systems of official knowledge, strange experiences just keep on breaking in.

But from the perspective of the keepers of official knowledge, the supernatural is often the place where I’m interested gives way to I just can’t. A God of the philosophers or physicists is one thing, but a God of exorcists, miracle workers and near-death experiences is just a bit too disreputable — at least until you have such an experience yourself.

From the religious perspective, of course — Hart’s and Klavan’s no less than Dreher’s — it’s all the same God. So the test for all their arguments is whether a world that’s unhappy in its unbelief can be pushed all the way to this conclusion — or whether contemporary disillusionment with secularism is enough to draw people to the threshold of religion, but something more than argument is required to pull them through.

I find it hard to believe that I myself am more amusing and entertaining than Spencer “Professor Doctor Fun” Klavan, but I’m tickled that Ross thinks my book is funner’n his (but seriously, Klavan’s is elegantly mind-blowing, and you should read it).

I’ve been waiting to see what Ross had to say about my book, because in the first line of its acknowledgements, I thank Ross (a friend for almost 20 years now) for nudging me for so long to write what he calls my “woo book” — this, after having heard me tell wild stories of mystical bedazzlement and demonic derring-do. I really appreciate the way he has characterized Living In Wonder — as leading a charge for God at the vanguard of a cultural moment. Nothing would give me more delight than to be at the front of the anti-Ditchkins cavalry charge!

It’s self-serving, maybe, so I don’t trust it, but I believe Ross is right about the cultural moment being right for all this. Sebastian Morello said so in his glowing review of Living In Wonder, and so did Tim Stanley in his five-star Telegraph review. Just last night, after the Paul Kingsnorth event at Samford University (a prestigious Southern Baptist college), I found myself talking to an undergraduate there, and asked him about the thesis of my book that his generation is way more open to the occult and to paganism than any previous one.

Emphatically yes, he said. Then he told me that he knows a fair number of female undergrads there who have taken on Greek gods as their personal mythological spiritual allies. They associate these personalities with themselves, in what sounded like the way Catholics and Orthodox have patron saints.

“Wait,” I said, not quite believing it, “you mean at a Southern Baptist college, students do this?!”

“Yes sir,” he said, serious as a heart attack.

“More than a couple?!”

“Oh yeah.”

Something very big is going on, and the churches are mostly clueless. So is my generation and the Boomers. I hope Living In Wonder changes that.

Last word before I head out to the breakfast with Kingsnorth and me at the Greek Orthodox church: I’ve been signing early copies of my book with the phrase “Look for comets!” That comes from this paragraph in the opening chapter (read the entire opening chapter here):

The philosopher Elaine Scarry says that education is the process of training people to be looking at the right corner of the sky when the comet passes. This book is what I worked on while I waited, hoping that through the things I would discover along the way I would learn how to see what is right in front of me—which is to say, to perceive in the everyday and the commonplace the comet blazing across the night sky.

The world is not what we think it is. It is far more mysterious, exciting, and adventurous. We have only to learn how to open our eyes and see what is already there.

Well, I learned earlier this week that a new comet has been discovered, and it is visible for a short time in the night sky. Won’t be back for another 80,000 years — but you can see it now in the night sky. In fact, it’s going to be most visible over the next few days — in Living In Wonder’s launch window.

Some people might say that’s a sign, a synchronicity. I might be one of those people.

Stream the audio of Chapter 9, the Signs & Wonders chapter, if you like, for free. There’s still time to register for my Monday night book launch event at Samford. If you haven’t ordered the book yet, now is the time! And look for comets!