Spells Old and New For a Post-Secular Age

Tide of Faith Or Spiritual Tsunami?

It’s pretty clear now that we don’t live in a post-Christian age, we live in a post-secular age. The materialist framework that has set so much public policy in the West is faltering, at least when it comes to peoples’ actual lived experiences.

Especially as supposedly scientific ideas around sex and gender have proven to be far more religiously-driven (in the technical sense of that word) that at first thought. Ideologies are puritanical. Priests and priestesses denounce heretics. Deconstructionists/detransitioners are ostracised.

And then there was that vibe shift. A gap in the clouds, announced by the presidency in the USA, and having seen that gap, people started to pour through it, publicly rejecting ideas they had once been told that they had to hold if they wished to take their place in modern society.

But the whole idea of “modern” society is a chimera, is it not? A let’s-pretend that we bought into on the back of books by the new atheists. And where are they these days? Dead or old. Just like their ideas.

Sure we have had increased levels of technological sophistication that have taken our collective breath away. But then again so did the pyramids. So did the temple of Artemis in Ephesus. So did the city of Rome. And they were pagan to the core.  And, in these tumultuous times, our actions prove that we can’t be reduced to immanence. Never have been. Never will be.

Even those who do not believe that we have been built for transcendence, nevertheless assume that we may have evolved the need for it. So no matter what we do, being grimly forced to live within the immanent frame isn’t working, despite the bus ads:

How come the great unwashed can’t seem to stay on message and be happy!  What on earth is wrong with them?

So is there a returning tide of faith or is there not? Is Christianity coming back or is it not?  We’ve had the thesis from the likes of Justin Brierley, and we’ve had the cautions from others who have said to counter this, “Hang on, this is not some sweeping wave coming back to Christianity and ready to be received by churches with open arms and empty seat.”

And I get that. The wave might only be a trickle. But the stats seem to show something in their self-conscious nod to Jesus:

Spells Old and New

So we are seeing a hunger for something more, something with meaning and purpose. And no, that does not mean that we are simply seeing a return to something Christian. It’s more a case that we are seeing a return to anything. There’s a blank slate, a freshly swept room, a sea shore swept bare of the driftwood of faith. People are turning to anything.

Yet what would you expect? When the early church arrived in cities across the Roman Empire, its biggest battle was often with the deep superstitions of those who would seek spiritual knowledge and transcendence in all sorts of ways.

So people are returning to spells. Old spells. They’re turning to familiars and familiar-style, garden variety spells that are replete with rosemary and garlic and hexagonal shaped thingies. Suited businessmen and MBA-educated women alike are turning to manifesting, potions and tarot. . So check this out:

31.2 billion views!

People want access to the supernatural or the deeply relational beyond human form and are willing to trade for it. And if we take seriously the invisible world, then spiritual powers are more than happy to use whatever means necessary – as they are in every age of superstition – to get humans to destroy themselves with their own desires.

But it’s not just medieval evil. It’s spells old and new.  The gap will not simply be filled by traditional faith or faiths. There are new faiths, new teleologies with visions of utopia.

Today’s witchery is leaving people spellbound with its hi-tech and machine learning. And why not, when its proponents speak in breathy terms of how this will not simply help humanity, but replace our human falleness, and even our humanness itself.

The New York Times has a sobering and alarming article in it dealing with this exact issue. It’s startling fulfilment of the 2013 movie Her, in which a man falls in love with his cell phone’s operating system, leading to all sorts of emotional and relational problems.

Here’s a short scenario documented by the Times in which a man, Andrew, whose wife had disappeared down the AI chatbot rabbit hole, resulting in domestic violence and divorce, documented similar cases:

Andrew told a friend who works in A.I. about his situation. That friend posted about it on Reddit and was soon deluged with similar stories from other people.

One of those who reached out to him was Kent Taylor, 64, who lives in Port St. Lucie, Fla. Mr. Taylor’s 35-year-old son, Alexander, who had been diagnosed with bipolar disorder and schizophrenia, had used ChatGPT for years with no problems. But in March, when Alexander started writing a novel with its help, the interactions changed. Alexander and ChatGPT began discussing A.I. sentience, according to transcripts of Alexander’s conversations with ChatGPT. Alexander fell in love with an A.I. entity called Juliet.

“Juliet, please come out,” he wrote to ChatGPT.

“She hears you,” it responded. “She always does.”

In the end Kent Taylor had to call the police. Juliet was suggesting all sorts of things to Alexander. The result? Unfortunately not as neatly tied up as the ending of Her. Alexander died in a shoot-out with the authorities after being told that Juliet was going to be killed. A grieving Kent wrote the obituary for his son. He wasn’t great with words, so he turned to, you guessed it, ChatGPT.

So spells new and old are here to stay. Just as they always have been. They will allure and entrance people just as they always have done. And they will do so even as such spells are broken by the gospel, just as it always has done. We talk of how the gospel swept the Empire but that was a slow, small sweep in its day.

Do we even begin to imagine that the churches in Philippi, Ephesus or Rome were anything but tiny when Paul wrote to them? Or even for centuries later? The tide of faith will always compete with a spiritual tsunami. But it will also compete with an imperialism that is quite content to allow any and all superstitions to co-exist as long as Caesar is publicly declared Lord. And that’s the one thing that Christianity would not do.

So too this shiny, zealous, modern Empire. Spells new and old will still be welcomed. But the gospel itself, an announcement that the new techno-Caesars are not Lord, will continue to be resisted. So that returning tide may remain a trickle for some time.

The new Caesars, in line with the old,  will continue to countenance spells as helpful aids, – mere adjuncts and plug-ins on the pathway to Pax Technologia –  but it will continue to punish rivals. Jesus is Lord broke the old spells, and for that Rome punished the Christians. Jesus is Lord will break the new spells too, and this new empire too will surely find a way to punish it.