Finding enchantment with God at the edge of religion
“A man who disbelieved the Christian story as fact but continually fed on it as myth would, perhaps, be more spiritually alive than one who assented and did not think much about it.”
- C.S. Lewis, Myth Became Fact
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A few months ago I shared briefly about my long and winding road to trying to trade in certainty for enchantment with God. Since then I’ve written a few things (see here and here) that speak to the growing disenchantment we see today. A snippet:
“Certainty is the source of so much sin and harm being done today. Yet I’m still not convinced the Christian answer is to run in the opposite direction into pure uncertainty. I think running toward enchantment is better. What does that mean? I’m…not sure. There are two things I feel good about directionally though.
The first is that absolute truth is real, but we humans are not capable of fully accessing or understanding most of it. Indeed, the existence of absolute truth puts certainty to death for humans. The second has to do with the quote from Garrett Green at the top: ‘Here is where the role of imagination becomes so important: by sharing his self-certainty with us, God enables us to imagine a truth beyond our ability to know.’ Only God has certainty; exactly how much I do not know. But what God has given us is imagination, individually and communally, in which we grasp at God’s Truth that is beyond ourselves.”
I also promised to write more about what I meant by enchantment. This is my first attempt and, admittedly, I’ve become stuck after running into the constraints of religion and language as I know them, as well as finding some conclusions I’ve drawn disquieting to my own sensibilities. I’ve tried to be careful with the words I’ve chosen, but I’m acknowledging on the front end there is likely better language for what I’m trying to communicate, probably in another Christian tradition than the one I came out of. If you have ideas on what that language could be feel free to drop your thoughts in the comments section below.
Regardless, what follows feels like an end point of sorts for almost six years of trying to figure out who God is and what being a Christian means. I still don’t have much by way of answers, but I want to share a little about that direction I’m finding helpful.
The limits of language and religion
I think I’ve come to understand that enchantment with God, as God is, requires not only parting ways with the language that we have, but also recognizing that structured approaches to experiencing God’s self tend to create more obstacles than paths forward.
The irony should not be lost on us that in some settings —especially in a lot of churches in Tennessee where I live— this is sadly done with intention. The Christian faith is debased into a set of beliefs, rules, hierarchies, and expectations about how life should be ordered as a means of cultural control and, frankly, wealth enhancement. Flowery language about God and purpose legitimize all of this, what I’m calling acceptable religion. When all the chips are down, a lot of Christians —especially evangelical men— have a faith that functionally looks in the mirror and calls the reflection God. The moral ruin that follows is predictable, one in which life’s purpose becomes about sin management and leading to harm done to friends and neighbors in a ressentiment attitude.
What I’ve been coming to grips with more recently is what feels like a much more uncomfortable problem: even in better circumstances, it seems inevitable that just about any religious approach and human language will keep us from experiencing a truer sense of God as God is, at least in what would be considered the more common forms of American Christianity. While using our imaginations to practice theology can help us break free of less than helpful restrictions that come with acceptable religion, human language remains a limited and very imprecise tool. If absolute truth is best summed up as perfectly accurate, factual statements that describe reality for what it is, then Ultimate Reality is the source and sum of all existence. On the plane of actuality and timeline we find ourselves, Ultimate Reality —or God as God is— seems inaccessible, as language itself prevents us from arriving at absolute truths, even if we can feel or sense something deeper.
This is neither a new nor controversial claim although some fundamentalists make it out to be. In churches the resulting and often harmful debate can be seen in everything from the Inerrancy Wars to circular arguments over how to further diminish the role of women in church decisions to battles over what style of worship and prayer are biblical, a term that now means little more than the culture I desire and seek to impose on others.
How the word inerrancy gets used is especially instructive with regard to the shortcomings of human language and religion. There are several ways the term gets tossed around; but, in a lot of churches, inerrancy means the Bible is without factual error. An honest reading of the first two pages of Genesis destroys that belief, as do the discrepancies between the Gospel accounts and how Israel’s leaders are presented differently in Kings and Chronicles. Sincere Christians will try to soften or change what they mean when they use inerrancy to account for Scriptural realities such as these when they become aware of them, such as saying a day must be an age with regard to Creation. Even in gentler spaces though, there is often a refusal to try to find better language to describe Scripture. Reasons for doing so abound: creature comforts, conflict avoidance, escaping anxiety…but all are telltale signs that religion, theology, and beliefs are merely human constructions.
As for human language more broadly, one merely has to look at our present political situation to see the limits and battles over language. Republicans call just about anything they don’t like progressive or liberal or communist or woke even when such things are historically Conservative, to the point that all of these terms have lost meaning. Similarly, the word fascist has been thrown around so much that, in moments something actually does begin to meet that definition, the term is too watered-down to have any lasting mobilizing effect. The incessant American impulse to bracket, identify, and other ends up making life overtly brittle just before it collapses into shrugged shoulders and exhaustion. Through it all we refuse to search for better language to describe our experiences. Politics is another human construct.
If language is how we interpret reality then our ability to grasp absolute reality is severely limited. Common words we use to describe God —omniscience, love, omnipotence, wrath…whatever— ultimately fail to capture God’s self simply by virtue of what they are: human words. Even in the best of circumstances our religious language will always fail us. Again, from C.S. Lewis:
“Human intellect is incurably abstract. Pure mathematics is the type of successful thought. Yet the only realities we experience are concrete–this pain, this pleasure, this dog, this man. While we are loving the man, bearing the pain, enjoying the pleasure, we are not intellectually apprehending Pleasure, Pain, or Personality. When we begin to do so, on the other hand, the concrete realities sink to the level of mere instances or examples: we are no longer dealing with them, but with that which they exemplify.
This is our dilemma —either to taste and not to know or to know and not to taste— or, more strictly, to lack one kind of knowledge because we are in an experience or to lack another kind because we are outside it. As thinkers we are cut off from what we think about; as tasting, touching, willing, loving, hating, we do not clearly understand. The more lucidly we think, the more we are cut off: the more deeply we enter into reality, the less we can think. You cannot study pleasure in the moment of the nuptial embrace, nor repentance while repenting, nor analyze the nature of humor while roaring with laughter. But when else can you really know these things? ‘If only my toothache would stop, I could write another chapter about pain.’ But once it stops, what do I know about pain?”
Who, then, is Christian?
An irony I sometimes sense in daily life is that I tend to feel more at home around de-churched Christians and people who think they have left the faith entirely. There’s a raw honesty here that, at least in my experience, is both hard to find and sorely needed in churches. You can talk about most anything with these folks, especially hard life experiences, the problems and shortcomings of common theology, and cultural challenges that acceptable religion frowns upon discussing.
De-churched people often have a greater reverence for the mysteries of God and fellow man, but also a severe frustration with the average religious person’s piousness and platitudes that do little more than assuage their own desires and fears. This de-churched frustration with those who are churched seems to center around two realities: (1) the accepted theology and church culture of the day has not been wrestled with in most churches, as we all seem to know subconsciously that if they were it would lead to a crisis of religion, and (2) there is little knowledge and even less appreciation for the struggles of people who live outside the walls of acceptable religion.
This begs the question: who is actually Christian in our situation? Is it the person who goes to church every Sunday with a mostly inward-looking, individualistic set of beliefs? Or is it the person who has left religion and even core beliefs behind, but who genuinely thinks and acts and feels more like Jesus did in the world? What about the people in between? And where is God to be found in all of this?
These are perennial questions and well-established critiques (see Jesus, Paul, C.S. Lewis, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Dallas Willard, etc.) What may make our moment feel unique is that such questions ring ever louder as modernity comes to a battered end. Since the Enlightenment, if not earlier, there has been an unhelpful tendency in large swaths of Protestant Christianity to believe that our growing intellectual tools can be used to capture the full essence of God and nail down every detail of how salvation works. Increasingly that feels like a fool’s errand, one made more apparent by the rampant religious disenchantment spreading around us.
As humankind has made significant material progress, albeit very unevenly and unfairly, the truth is that the world needs the God of acceptable religion much less than it once did. Science and other academic traditions now ask and answer questions humans once attributed to higher spiritual powers. In response, evangelicals —some of whom, long ago, were imperfect but admirable champions of social progress that benefited the masses— have largely withdrawn from such efforts and doubled down on an understanding of religion and salvation that attempts to legitimize who they want God to be in every day life: an authoritarian who will assuage their anxieties by recentering them in American society. Ironically, the end result functionally places God as Ultimate Reality outside their own modern understanding of reality. For a time salvation became more exclusively about saving souls and getting to Heaven in a world considered beyond redemption. The situation has worsened much further today. Acceptable religion is now chiefly known not for bringing souls to the Cross but gleefully nailing neighbors to metaphorical crosses and, increasingly, modern versions of real-world crosses. Idolatry to religious culture and political power are the new Golden Calf.
I’ve touched on this depressing culture that penal substitutionary atonement so often produces enough lately (see here, here, and here). But I do think it’s worth emphasizing again that the fundamentalist vs. modernist divide didn’t need to be a part of history, or at least in the hostile way it played out. Cooler heads should have prevailed. Maybe they couldn’t. I don’t know. In many ways we are still living in the aftermath of that divide even though more people rightly see that the best of faith and science are on parallel tracks and even complement each other.
The times are changing, but a lot of American Protestant Christianity is going to be dragged kicking and screaming into whatever the future holds, only sheepishly to discover later there was always going to be a place for us. The kicking and screaming actually began well before I was even born, ironically because the world has changed in many ways for the better, although these last several years have been a gloomier tale.
Glimpsing God at the edge of acceptable religion
The fundamental flaw in today’s acceptable religion is twofold: (1) we have no need to legitimize God in the world because, in Christ, God has already made space for God at the center of the world, and (2) because of that truth this world is already in the process of being redeemed. To deny either of these truths is to deny the Reality of Christ and his Lordship over all of Life. The irony should not be lost on us that it is real people inside of acceptable religion who are most adamantly rejecting Christ’s self as Ultimate Reality.
Lord, have mercy.
What is one to do when the wide roads of religion lead to moral ruin and disenchantment? If C.S. Lewis is right about our options of tasting or knowing —his description has been my experience in the world— then the beginning of true enchantment, or falling under the spell of God’s self as Ultimate Reality, begins on the blurry borders of where human language and acceptable religion ends, where the presence of God as God is can be felt and his love for this world tasted.
There are endless ways this can play out in our own lives, but I was recently struck by Elizabeth Bruenig’s piece in The Atlantic entitled The Evidence That God Exists. After describing the reasons for her own slow-moving disenchantment, she writes:
“This steady diminishing of faith probably would have continued indefinitely, were it not for one brisk autumn afternoon in 2011 when, standing alone at a bus stop, I happened to witness the presence of God.
The unevenly paved lane where I waited was a quiet one-way street tucked away in a clutch of trees. I gazed down the road, preoccupied with other things —midterm exams, campus-club minutiae— and expecting the bus to trundle around the bend. A sudden icy wind tore around the corner instead, sweeping into gray branches and climbing ivy to send a spray of golden birch leaves spiraling into the sky, taking my breath along with them. And I knew that my soul was bared to something indescribably majestic and bracing—something that overwhelmed me with the unmistakable sensation of eye contact. What I saw, I felt, also saw me. Before I could rationally account for what had happened, a verse of poetry from John Ashbery came to mind:
‘A look of glass stops you. And you walk on shaken: was I the perceived?’
That seemed to explain things perfectly, jarringly so. I was dazed in class as afternoon darkened to evening.”
Bruenig goes on to describe how she is still sorting through the ramifications of that experience, specifically in the face of ongoing efforts to prove God exists “within the rational frameworks we already employ” through apologetic methods. She finds this approach unconvincing. As do I. As do seemingly the ever-growing numbers of those disenchanted with acceptable religion. We’ve reached the point in which not even softer language can prop up today’s acceptable religion. In trying to prove God or our beliefs about God are correct, we ironically disenchant people away from religion entirely.
So much of the Christianity we have inherited says or acts as if it is our religious beliefs of God that saves us: omniscience, power, love, glory, wrath…pick your favorite word. But this is not true. The Bible itself points to the suffering and powerless God as who saves us (Mark 15:34). Indeed, embracing powerlessness is how God gains power in this world. It is God’s powerlessness that is our reality, one we seem too eager to reject as it means we must accept our own powerlessness (Philippians 2:1-11). Instead we cling to our little idols of religious, political, and theological projects, all of which have bled into so much of daily life that many Christians act as if they must possess power and wield proof to “help” the vulnerable, but this is not the way of Christ.
What if God’s self doesn’t actually show up in acceptable religion for most people? This would account for the many times we’ve felt and heard others say things like “my prayer life isn’t great” or “I’m really struggling with my relationship with God” or “it doesn't feel like anything is happening spiritually right now.” Instead, what if God shows up out in the world, such as at a bus stop, a place He is already at the center of? What would it mean to be in the world, as an enchanted community following Jesus as Ultimate Reality, as opposed to believing we are to claim ownership over this world, as our acceptable religion demands? From an imprisoned Dietrich Bonhoeffer, in the final months of his life on May 5, 1944:
“Hasn’t the individualistic question of saving our personal souls almost faded away for most of us? Isn’t it our impression that there are really more important things than this question (perhaps not more important than this matter, but certainly more important than the question!?)? I know it sounds outrageous to say that, but after all, isn’t it fundamentally biblical? Does the question of saving one’s soul even come up in the Old Testament? Isn’t God’s righteousness and kingdom on earth the center of everything? And isn’t Rom. 3:24ff. the culmination of the view that God alone is righteous, rather than an individualistic doctrine of salvation? What matters is not the beyond but this world, how it is created and preserved, is given laws, reconciled, and renewed. What is beyond this world is meant, in the gospel, to be there for this world—not in the anthropocentric sense of liberal, mystical, pietistic, ethical theology, but in the biblical sense of the creation and the incarnation, crucifixion, and resurrection of Jesus Christ.“
Some religious people that manage to make it through Bonhoeffer’s Letters & Papers From Prison are distressed to find passages like these. These questions not only upset the common, conservative American evangelical view of Bonhoeffer —one that Americanizes him into a cowboy-like hero that he definitely wasn’t— but are also an affront to our acceptable religion. But these words written in a prison in the bleakness of Nazi Germany do feel a little easier for us to relate with today, do they not? A gospel featuring individual salvation and a wrathful God, with hundreds of years of Christian religion shaping German culture, failed to halt the spread of Nazism; in fact, that very religion was handmaiden in the deaths of tens of millions of people. What evidence do we have to believe that our own gospel of individual salvation and a wrathful God, and hundreds of years of Christian religion shaping American culture, will safeguard us from evil, especially in light of so many Christians descending into nationalism, one with increasingly blood and soil vibes?
Regardless of how one answers these questions, Bonhoeffer’s point seems to be the beginning of needed repentance. Again, If Christ as Christ is were placed at the center of religion —instead of our perceived spiritual needs as individuals— would religion itself not look radically different? Would whatever it looked like even be considered religion? Maybe Jesus was serious when he said “Enter through the narrow gate, for the gate is wide and the road is easy that leads to destruction, and there are many who take it. For the gate is narrow and the road is hard that leads to life, and there are few who find it.” (Matthew 7:13-14)
We need to recognize that Christ is at the center of the world in our daily lives. And we would do well to stop lying to ourselves, in our theology and politics, that Christ is at the center of our acceptable religion, especially when the fruits are screaming that we’ve instead placed ourselves at the center.
Practical considerations
You’ve likely sensed by now that the ramifications of doing this at scale will inevitably lead to catastrophic levels of religious destruction. That’s enough to make a lot of people consider turning away from this path. It’s why so many people inside American evangelicalism especially who sense something is wrong hold their looming deconstruction at bay for as long as they do, until it becomes inevitable.
This is where the light starts to shine through though, I think. Today’s acceptable religion is already on the wide road to destruction. One can argue it’s time to be judged is arriving. There’s no way to prevent acceptable religion’s ongoing decline because this is the chosen path. It’s awful, truly, and countless people are being harmed. But it is in the harm that truth and reality are exposing what this really is: a human construction, just like all religion is.
If Christianity is rooted in historical events as so many evangelicals claim it is —something I happen to agree with, although likely in a different mode— then Christianity as a religion is subject to the same historical forces all religions are, whether we like it or not. Christianity is not holy because we call it holy. It is not unique because we say it is unique. Christ is not at the center of religion just because we claim it to be true. No acceptable religion of the day is above critique, especially historical and Scriptural critique. Indeed, if Christ is already at the center of the world and already redeeming it, then the Jesus story is the first to call our religion into question. Religion does not escape the judgement, perhaps even the redemption, of the Risen Savior.
What judgement and redemption look like for acceptable religion I do not know. It is not my place to know, for which I’m grateful. What I do know feels much more practical; but, in the short term, terrible. Pursuing a faith that recognizes Jesus at the center of the world is all but guaranteed to lead you to the edges of acceptable religion, at least it will in my neck of the woods. You’ll likely have to leave your church or will be pushed out. Friendships and even familial relationships will be gutted. You may lose your job. It means a core part of your identity will perish. The fact there is so much nationalism in churches will feel truly unhinged, especially as you come to grips with the truth that the American Dream is just another version of faith by works, yet another irony for those who boldly claim America at its best was a time when it was faithful to Protestant ideals. Again, Jesus’s words in Matthew 10:34-39 feel all too real.
And yet, this neither means the end of the Church nor that all belief must be jettisoned. It doesn't mean a new faith must be more conservative or more progressive —increasingly useless words, to be sure— just more real and able to changed and redeemed in Christ. It means seeing the spreading disenchantment with religion as people simply growing up and realizing we can think for ourselves (1 Corinthians 3). After all, in the history of Western Christianity, the American evangelical/fundamentalist blob is barely a teenager, if that. This understanding accounts for de-churched people who think they have left faith behind behaving in more Christlike ways than they did while inside religion’s walls. It certainly explains the petulance we witness in so many religious spaces today. This isn’t to say religious people can’t be adults. There are other, older Christian traditions that have long been more Christlike than the acceptable religion we inherited. But the starting place for many of us is miles behind where a lot of people who look like Jesus in the world are, including those who have left religion behind.
The Church is not acceptable religion, but the local church can become ensnared in acceptable religion far too easily. Shaking off the shackles of religion to participate in and taste the justice, charity, and hope of Christ means abandoning a culture that does little more than use language to prop itself up. Instead we lean into the world and toward Christ as he is at the center of the world. In his redeeming love we participate in the sacred and secular becoming one which, in some ways, because of Christ, they already are.
Closing Thoughts
At the outset I wrote some of this is disquieting to my own religious sensibilities. That’s in large part due to my evangelical background —which seems to always have a foothold in me no matter what I do to be rid of it— and being a hardcore institutionalist, probably to a fault. The last several years of society-wide institutional decay and collapse has been deeply jarring to me. I still believe that much of what we are living through did not have to come to pass. I know that some of what is being decimated today we will deeply regret destroying. But I’ve also accepted that we have structures and beliefs, including those found in acceptable religion, that are well past their shelf life. It’s past time for a lot of us to simply grow up.
Many of these problems stem in part from the old-guard aggressively resting on their laurels while refusing to pass the torch and help new generations safeguard the good that is being lost. The seemingly lesser observed and just as serious issue is too many of us seem to wrongly believe, still, that we are the masters of our destiny. Both Scripture and Science tell us it is supremely unwise to believe all knowledge is within reach. We act as if it were all the same. As we religious folk engage in this most ironic of heresies, others stand outside our borders, enchanted, looking with wonder upon Ultimate Reality found in Christ at the center of the world, the cosmos, or the face of the neighbor —as we can best understand all in this moment— and discovering great joy in asking questions of life’s endless mysteries.
Perhaps this is what is truly sacred and acceptable religion is what is truly secular. In the posture of sacred powerlessness people seem to discover their agency as it is, not as religious folk wish it to be. We find in Jesus that we are not supposed to embrace our feebleness as an excuse to do nothing. On that note, I was recently captivated anew by these words from Gandalf in The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King:
“Other evils there are that may come; for Sauron is himself but a servant or emissary. Yet it is not our part to master all the tides of the world, but to do what is in us for the succour of those years wherein we are set, uprooting the evil in the fields that we know, so that those who live after may have clean earth to till. What weather they shall have is not ours to rule.”
It is the unchecked desire to possess (think Gollum’s “my precioussss”) that gives way to so much of the brokenness and evil in Tolkien’s Middle Earth. This is a sharp insight from a man who fought in one of the most senseless wars in history. Tolkien’s tale is no allegory, but one is hard-pressed to avoid seeing this same desire ripping through our own lives, churches, beliefs, and governing institutions today. It seems to be the worst in the realm of acceptable religion, at least it is where I live. We refuse to till the earth we walk upon and falsely believe we can control the events of the present and future age. Yet the silver lining in all of this, both in our own primary world and Tolkien’s secondary one, is that the unchecked desire to possess is ultimately self-defeating. It eventually leads to overreach, which leads to its defeat. Even death.
Instead, we do what Gandlaf suggests, which also happens to be what Jesus did millennia ago. We respond to the needs right in front of us as best we can. We spend a lot less time caring if the way we are aiding others in daily life is acceptable to the siren’s call of acceptable religion. We embrace the truth that Christ, now the Ultimate Reality of this world, is most experienced in life outside of acceptable religion. Saving souls for some unknown future that we know next to nothing about or; much worse, for nationalistic goals that we believe benefits ourselves at the expense of others, suddenly looks laughable in comparison to the truth that Christ is here to redeem the world right now.
I don’t know what any of this means for acceptable religion or its language. My sense is both will still be there. Maybe they serve a purpose, as even the evil found in this world is good that has been corrupted. Maybe most of us have to first go through the labyrinths of acceptable religion and its language to reach enchantment (Matthew 7:13-14). I don’t even know if faith without religion is possible, but I’m not sure that even matters in the end. I’ll still be in church on Sundays because I don’t think religion and the Church are the same thing. Churches too easily fall into the trappings of religion, but they don’t have to.
If our two options are, as C.S. Lewis says, “to taste and not to know or to know and not to taste” I’ll take the former over the latter. I’d rather taste enchantment with God as God is today than have some doomed-to-fail head knowledge about God and keep my fingers crossed that I’ll be so lucky to experience something after I die. Why wait for redemption and enchantment when it is available to us today, when Christ invites us into his Ultimate Reality now (Matthew 11:28-30)?
If Christ is Lord and at the center of this world, then one day religion itself will serve no more use anyway. Surely that will be the day when our enchantment with God’s self fully replaces every doctrine, creed, belief, politics, theology, and religion we were able to come up with. I have no words for what that day will be like because it is beyond the realm of human language. Its beauty is ineffable, but we can get a taste of it right now: in real conversation among friends and in loving our neighbors. Along the way, we may just discover God perceiving us, even if it is only for a fleeting moment at a bus stop on a windswept road.
About Me
I explore faith, church culture, and formation in the American South from my hometown of Memphis, TN. I’m an institutionalist who believes the means are just as important as the ends. Everything on this site is an expression of my faith and love for the Church.
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