Charged with the Grandeur of God: Cultural Apologetics as a Christian Approach to Re-Enchantment
By Megan Rials
For Christians, the Ouija board symbolizes the unholy, occult attempt to contact the world of the dead. Such necromancy is strictly prohibited in Scripture as an abomination. How, then, have we reached a moment where the “Holy Spirit Board”—a rebranded version of the Ouija Board—is not only created and marketed to Christians, but where, according to Amazon reviews, Christians are actually embracing its promise of offering “a new way to pray” to “directly contact our lord and savior Jesus Christ”?
The mere existence of this board, with its attempted mashup of Christianity with the occult, speaks to the widespread loss in the perception of meaning, which philosophers and cultural commentators refer to as the contemporary “meaning crisis.” The modern world perceives itself as having been drained of divine meaning; in the words of Hamlet, it seems “weary, stale, flat and unprofitable.” Our experience of the world is disenchanted, and our society is now searching for a way to recover meaning, to re-enchant the world. A Google search of the term “re-enchantment,” for example, reveals a variety of recent publications on the subject, with approaches ranging from the sociological to the artistic to the theological. Depending on approach, the definition of “enchantment” varies, but generally speaking, “enchantment” revolves around reviving belief in meaning: in other words, in the transcendence that imbues the world and our lives with value. To be dis-enchanted, then, is to view the world and its material objects as essentially meaningless. Hence, the “Holy Spirit Board”: if the category of the sacred does not exist, then neither does the category of the profane. The categories are meaningless, and so nothing can be desecrated. In the words of Dostoevsky, “everything is permitted”—even the attempt to contact a holy God through a profane, mass-produced board game.
Addressing this uniquely postmodern mindset is the concern of this periodical, the Shadowlands Dispatch. The Christian must understand meaning as flashes of God’s presence in the world through its goodness and beauty, love and mercy, community and self-sacrifice. God’s creation is packed with symbolism reflective of cosmic realities. Thus, things mean things, and we cannot mix the sacred and the profane with abandon.
Despite the postmodern belief that the world has lost its meaning, we as believers know that the world brims with God’s truth—that, as poet Gerard Manley Hopkins wrote, “The world is charged with the grandeur of God.” Thus, sociologist Max Weber was wrong to proclaim in the early 20th century that the world is disenchanted. We as Christians must understand that the fault lies not in the world or its supposed loss of meaning, but in us. It is not the world that needs re-enchantment, but rather, the postmodern imaginative conception of it. We have, as Christian journalist G.K. Chesterton put it, “sinned and grown old, and our Father is younger than we.” In other words, we have lost our sense of wonder and grown sinfully bored with God’s awe-inspiring creation. Therefore, we must focus on cultivating the recognition of God’s meaning as He has embedded it in the world.
As C.S. Lewis notes in his essay “Bluspels and Flalansferes,” the imagination is the human faculty that identifies meaning, and it must have a “rightness in…itself” by accurately reflecting God’s reality if we are to know truth. In other words, our imagination provides the meaningful images that lay the foundation for our perception of the world. For our view of the world to be grounded in truth, our imaginations must accord with reality.
Thus, for Christianity to participate successfully in the re-enchantment project, we must aim at rehabilitating the imagination and orienting it toward the meaning of the Logos Himself, the One who pervades and sustains all reality. We should welcome the recent surge of interest in re-enchantment as an evangelistic opportunity to witness to our disillusioned society. But how do we offer a taste of Jesus’ living water to a world hungering for re-enchantment, yet stripped of any sense of meaning?
Here at the Shadowlands Dispatch, we work to address the meaning crisis through the practice of cultural apologetics. As its name suggests, cultural apologetics uses the products of the culture around us to show the truth of the Gospel, with a focus on the ability of rich narrative experiences to give their audience a taste of the Christ story, of the Great Myth that became Fact. Particularly, cultural apologetics seeks to expose the falsities in our culture’s warped understanding of meaning and instead rehabilitate the imagination to perceive once again the Good, the True, and the Beautiful. Before we can know whether something is truthful or deceptive, we must first know how to read its meaning. By digging into the meaning of things, cultural apologetics equips Christians to use theology and philosophy to assess the truth value of cultural products such as novels, films, songs, architecture—and even game boards. In this way, we follow the approach of Paul, who, while at the Areopagus, used the Greeks’ statue to an unknown god as a launching pad to proclaim the Gospel (Acts 17). We at the Shadowlands Dispatch seek to imitate this approach by engaging all aspects of culture to root out lies, illuminate the Logos, and share the truth of Christ.
Lewis notes that when a child reads a fairy tale,
It stirs and troubles him (to his life-long enrichment) with the dim sense of something beyond his reach and, far from dulling or emptying the actual world, gives it a new ‘dimension of depth. He does not despise real woods because he has read of enchanted woods: the reading makes all real woods a little enchanted.
In the same way, the practice of cultural apologetics equips Christians to participate in the re-enchantment project by restoring the proper conception of meaning and evaluating the meaning found in the cultural products around us.
This is the mission of the Shadowlands Dispatch. Please join us each month for insightful new articles, reviews, and recommendations that orient us toward God’s cosmic truth through meaningful representations of reality.
—Megan Rials is Editor-in-Chief of Shadowlands Dispatch. She is a writer, literary scholar, and poet. She holds a Juris Doctor from the Louisiana State University Paul M. Hebert Law Center and is working toward completion of a Master of Arts in cultural apologetics from Houston Christian University. She serves as Content Editor and Scholar in Residence on the Leadership Council of the Society for Women of Letters. Her work has appeared in Christ and Pop Culture, Dappled Things, VoegelinView, Mere Orthodoxy, Fare Forward, An Unexpected Journal, The Worldview Bulletin, and Perichoresis. You can find her website here, and her X page here.