Hubble, Bubble, Toil and Trouble: Halloween and the Desire for Re-enchantment

Hubble, bubble, toil and trouble. Which witch is which?

Okay, so most of Halloween seems kinda silly. Never really worried about it, or celebrated it. Skeletons, cauldrons, non-recyclable faux spiderwebs covering the front verges of our self-righteously recycling inner west Sydney suburb.

Christians quibble over it. Some don’t care. Some are horrified.  It’s either silly or satanic. Or perhaps both. Or perhaps neither.

But it’s interesting that as this Halloween is upon us (as well as All-Saints Day), we are witnessing a rapid rise in the desire for a re-enchanted universe.

Just on the weekend I was speaking at a church in rural NSW with some young key workers at a regional hospital. They stated that everything that I had said over that weekend about the increasing desire for “something more”, an invisible reality rather than mere materialism, rang true with their friends and work colleagues.

Not that their colleagues were seeking Jesus. As if!  It seemed they were seeking enchantment just about everywhere else.  Tarot. Manifesting. Crystals. Palm readings.  You name it, they were into it.

The star signs have made a comeback on the news on TV. Now, not the nightly news on TV. That would be too far a stretch. But the morning news programs that are full of infotainment.  It’s star signs before every ad break right after the weather.

Who woulda thunk? What Christians would have predicted that two decades ago when the four horsemen of the New Atheism were on the ride? We were crafting apologetics and arguments and videos and books to counter this rapid rise in a materialist only universe.

Peak new atheism was Richard Dawkins – or “Richard who?” as most young people will say today, and his launch alongside Polly Toynbee of the notorious bus advertising campaign by a humanist society in the UK:

Richard Dawkins with someone who is clearly NOT Polly Toynbee, yet who gives off the impression she is indeed enjoying life.

Problem of course, there’s just as much probability that there is a God. Not “gods” – they went out a while ago. But God? No one seems to be able to shift that one.

And as for the rest of that statement? The conclusion from that fact/probability? Stop worrying and enjoy your life? Well if the last twenty years in the West has seen a fall in the belief in God it has certainly not witnessed a corresponding rise in the level of enjoyment. Or the lack of worry.

We live in an anxious age with much to be anxious about. And much not to be anxious about, but let’s be anxious about it anyway. Whether that is personal anxiety or whether that is societal and global anxiety, anxiety is back on the menu. Big time.

Which brings us back to Halloween and the desire for re-enchantment. Halloween 2024 is coinciding with a rejection of materialism as the foundation stone of our existence.  And it’s been a topic that is being visited by some great books I have been reading. Dr Sarah Irving-Stonebraker’s Priests of History is one I have mentioned often.

Atheist academic historian that she was, Dr Irving-Stonebraker found that she could not stop worrying. That the lack of a God in not merely probably, but in certainty, was not compelling. She was looking for more. For something transcendent.

She begins her journey to re-enchantment this way, even while she was ostensibly fulfilled and climbing the ladder of academic success:

I had few external points of reference as I went about pursuing my desires and aspirations. I had no larger narrative that might give me a normative vision of human flourishing, a transcendent grounding for morality, or even a means of addressing life’s ultimate concerns.  Indeed, as an atheist, I believed that there was no such thing as ultimate meaning and nothing was transcendent. I was proudly authentic, but ultimately rootless.

It was this nagging feeling that led her to re-enchantment, and more specifically the one in whom all enchantment is held, Jesus Christ.  What happens next? Go buy the book!

Another book that has caught my attention on the same matter comes from a more unlikely source, Rod Dreher of The Benedict Option and Live Not By Lies fame.

If I had my money on a topic for Dreher’s next book it would have been more of the same. In other words, what to do about the culture wars. How to navigate them etc, etc. It would be political. But that’s not what we get. Or at least that’s not the thrust.  Instead, here’s what we get:

Living In Wonder!  Not living in anger? Not living in fear? No!  There is a deep confidence to this book, along with a deep longing for people to rediscover the enchanted world – the orthodox and Orthodox enchanted world I might add – that infuses it. And that’s the right word to use “infuse”.

Filled from the outside in. Here we are living the “buffered self” of Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age, and all along people want something from outside themselves to break in. We’re not just psychologies trapped inside a meat cage after all.

Of course Taylor talks about the cross-pressured age in which we live, in which competing forces and competing senses of unease about reality leave us storm-tossed and doubting ourselves. But there’s a sense in which no-one’s really buying the “There’s probably no God, so stop…” trope all that much.

Dreher’s book is a mix of “Yep I can believe that” and “Nope, that seems a stretch too far!”, but at its core it’s exactly what it says on the cover. And it lines up with Sarah Irving-Stonebraker’s desire.

Dreher states:

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.

Big call. Dreher’s not saying we need to get superstitious (though the icons things is a bit grating at times). He says that superstition is what you get when you suck orthodox enchantment out of the world and expect people to get by with a materialist worldview.

Is that working in the modern West? At one level. But daytime TV and nighttime visits to the psychic indicate that something is amiss in the West.

And that means Halloween may be more enchanted. More weird and more dark – as Dreher would put it – than we might imagine. For while CS Lewis’s claim that the primary trick of the devil is to get you to believe that he does not exist, that’s not true everywhere.

It would seem the primary trick of the devil in those parts of the world that have never lost their affinity to enchantment is that the devil does exist. His primary trick there is to get you to believe he is all powerful.

And in the end, in the West, a lot of our enchantment with enchantment will come down to power. We live in a world that is seemingly out of control. It is rapid discontinuous change. It is war out there, strife out there. It is war in here. It is strife in here (taps heart as he says it).

Enchantment offers the promise of power, which tells you were much modern enchantment projects will end up. Loosed from the safety net of the gospel, and with blind guides leading the blind, we will end up in dark places, as regular columnist Ross Douthat writes in The New York Times in an article entitled Be Open to Spiritual Experience. Also, Be Really Careful:

So from any religious perspective, there’s reason to worry about a society in which structures have broken down and masses of people are going searching without maps or playing around in half-belief or deploying, against what remains of Christianity, symbols that invoke multiple spiritualities at once. Some element of danger is unavoidable. The future of humanity depends on people opening doors to the transcendent, rather than sealing themselves into materialism and despair. But when the door is open, be very, very careful about what you invite in.

Plenty of reason to worry. I’m writing a lot about the future of the church and what a future proof church would look like.

My book Futureproof deals with a lot of the pressures we are facing, though perhaps I could have dialled up the more confronting aspects of our spiritual complexities a little more. Here’s one thing the future church will look like: Weirder.

The evangelical tradition I belong to has long played down the weird in order to be seen as sensible in order to be able to speak into the bus ad campaign people, in order to get a hearing from the modernist people riding the bus on the way to working at Ernst and Young.

And where are those modernist people on the weekends? Getting Tarot readings, that’s where, whilst on the way to the restaurant or party.  We’ve played down the weird at just the wrong time.

What will happen when someone such as Douthat describes turns up at your church door having not been careful at all about what they invited in?

Someone who’s been dabbling in some “Hubble, bubble, toil and trouble?” and found to their chagrin that the power they were attempting to harness is a dark power and is being used against them?

That’s the point in time you’d probably need some “weird” to sort it out. Some gospel “weird” to be sure. And maybe not of the types we see in some freaky establishments today. But not a mechanised, materialist version of the gospel. That won’t cut it.

For here’s the irony: at the very time those countries in which satanic reality is assumed are getting online and buying our technologies, our countries in which such reality are not longer assumed, are about to engage in a great exchange.

We’ve swept the floor clean of enchantment, but as Jesus said:

“When an impure spirit comes out of a person, it goes through arid places seeking rest and does not find it. Then it says, ‘I will return to the house I left.’ When it arrives, it finds the house swept clean and put in order. Then it goes and takes seven other spirits more wicked than itself, and they go in and live there. And the final condition of that person is worse than the first.” (Luke 11:24-26).

And boy have we swept the floor clean!  Take a bow Richard Dawkins!

Sure, the devil is happy for us not to believe in him, if it gets him power over us. But if believing in him – or giving ourselves over to dark enchantment will achieve the same results? There is, after all, more than one way to skin – or sacrifice – a cat.

So enjoy or endure Halloween as you will in 2024. But remember too, the godly enchantment of All Saints Day. And sing with the gusto these words (or look them up if you’re not familiar):

For all the saints who from their labors rest,
who Thee by faith before the world confessed;
Thy name, O Jesus, be forever blest.
Alleluia, Alleluia! …

…And when the strife is fierce, the warfare long,
steals on the ear the distant triumph song,
and hearts are brave again, and arms are strong.
Alleluia, Alleluia!