Providing Christians with the intellectual weapons to survive the decay of post-Christian civilization is a mission Rod Dreher has pursued throughout his career as a journalist. His work acquired a new dimension with the publication, in 2017, of The Benedict Option : A Strategy for Christians in a Post-Christian Nation, followed by Live Not by Lies: A Manual for Christian Dissidents in 2020, two internationally acclaimed works translated into more than a dozen languages.

His latest book, Living in Wonder: Finding Mystery and Meaning in a Secular Age, available Oct. 22, completes this trilogy of sorts, which tackles all the major issues of our time from a political, philosophical and spiritual perspective. 

In Living in Wonder, Dreher explores the ways to rekindle the flame of the faith, drawing on the history of the early Church — which, through its mysticism and the many miracles it brought forth, massively turned souls away from paganism — and sifting through the various historical ruptures from the late Middle Ages to the present day that have led to the disenchantment of the Western world.

This book, which the author conceives as a manual, aims to teach the reader “how to seek and how to find” true enchantment: in other words, “to see the divine with a purified heart.”

Having himself returned to the faith after a transfiguring visit to Chartres Cathedral at the age of 17, followed by a decisive encounter with the artist-priest Carlos Sanchez in 1993, this Christian Orthodox, now 57, is convinced that “beauty and goodness open the door to truth,” as he stated in this interview with the Register. He also discussed the rise of the occult and neopaganism and the unpreparedness of the clergy in the face of this unprecedented scourge, as well as his thoughts on UFOs.

 

The civilizational dimension of the crisis facing European and American societies is no longer news to anyone. While essays and think tanks are multiplying to make diagnoses — most of them political — you’re swimming against the tide with an entirely spiritualist thesis. What prompted you to focus on the concept of disenchantment? 

My last two books — The Benedict Option and Live Not by Lies — both take on the challenges of being a faithful Christian in a post-Christian civilization. I didn’t initially conceive of a third book about this problem, but I was haunted by something the Notre Dame sociologist of religion Christian Smith said to me years ago. I asked him what we could do to win young people back to the faith. He said he didn’t know, but we certainly couldn’t do it with mere moralism. 

Okay, but what? I kept thinking about it. I realized at last that what had led me to faith, principally, was not apologetics arguments, but an encounter with great beauty and an encounter with unusual goodness — both of which led to my conversion. 

Benedict XVI said that, in our time, the best arguments for the faith are the art the Church produces and her saints. In other words, beauty and goodness open the door to truth. I know this is true because I lived it! 

I have been a committed Christian for over 30 years now. I have had a number of numinous experiences and even had a vision in 1993 that I lived to see come true. I became friends with several exorcists and have seen the demonic in action. These things strongly bolstered my faith by reminding me that the world is not what we think it is, that the material world is grounded in spiritual reality. At last it occurred to me that I should write a book about this. When I ran across the Karl Rahner quote from the 1960s — “The devout Christian of the future will either be a ‘mystic’ — someone who has ‘experienced something’ — or will cease to be anything at all” — I knew that it was time. 

You bring out the interesting concept of “WEIRD” to describe Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic people who worship the myth of progress. The U.S. would be the ultimate expression of this. Do you think the WEIRDs could still last a long time, despite the rapid upheavals facing the West? 

 Yes, absolutely. The “magic” of WEIRD culture is its technological power, which has produced great wealth. People will endure a lot of unhappiness before they would dare to surrender to Christ; this is what I learned from my own college years. I knew that my WEIRD mindset (though I didn’t have that term to describe it) was untenable, but the idea that I would sacrifice my freedom, especially my sexual liberty, for the sake of Jesus Christ seemed impossible.  

So I kept trying to make deals with God. It did not work because it could not work. As it was for me as a young man, so it is for people in WEIRD culture. We have all been trained from birth to think that Western man today lives at the pinnacle of human progress and enlightenment. We will have to fall very long, and very hard, before being broken of our subservience to the myth of progress.  

 

Most conservative Christian thinkers, in response to this epochal crisis of which de-Christianization is an obvious symptom, call for a return to doctrine and stricter, more demanding rules of life. But you go further, pointing out that “the only way to revive the Christian faith is … through mystery and the encounter with wonder.” What makes you think that? 

To be clear, I also believe in a return to doctrine and stricter, more demanding rules of life. But to what end? It’s better to live that way than to live a life with no moral structure or coherence. Yet in a society that has dismantled most of the moral structures that instill rules of life within its members, it is hard to stay faithful to the sacrifices one is called to make without the palpable conviction that there is something more than what we can see.  

As the historian Tom Holland says, the churches ought to lean heavily into the supernatural. It sets us apart. Older generations think it makes us look silly in the eyes of the world, but I think it makes us look spiritually serious in ways that churches that shy away from it are not.  

Besides, there is so much in Catholic and Orthodox history to share! The Catholic historian Carlos Eire, a Yale professor, published an amazing book this year, titled They Flew: A History of the Impossible. It’s about copiously documented cases in the early modern era of priests, monks and nuns levitating or bilocating. Eire reveals that there is an amazing amount of evidence to support these claims and that the only reason historians don’t take them seriously is because they have to do with religion. But these prejudices are collapsing now.  

  

 

You’re not soft on Reformation and Enlightenment, which, according to you, gave rise to the phenomenon of disenchantment, with the advent of scientism and other derivative ideologies in the West. The first theorists of the concept of disenchantment, Friedrich Schiller and Max Weber, both of whom came from a Protestant culture (and in Schiller’s case also from the Enlightenment) were undoubtedly ahead of their time in anticipating the excesses of their societies. What is your fundamental criticism of these currents? 

The history of the West over the last 500 years has been one of a steady disenchantment of the world. The philosopher Charles Taylor asks: Why was it hard to imagine in the year 1500 that God does not exist, but today it is hard to say that God does exist? The answer is disenchantment — that is, the gradual loss of the idea that there is a dimension beyond the material. Catholicism and Orthodoxy preserve a strong form of sacramentalism — the idea that the spiritual in some mysterious sense interpenetrates the material — but most Catholics and most Orthodox don’t live that way.  

We see this in the widespread acceptance of abortion, even among many Christians. Next comes euthanasia, which is spreading, and in transgenderism. These are gateways to transhumanism — the merging of man with machine — and the abolition of humanity. Ideas have consequences. If we do not reclaim, and fight for, the idea that matter matters, then we are going to collapse into this neo-gnosticism. All of this is happening very fast, and it is discouraging to see so few Christian leaders, clergy and lay alike, talk about it. John Paul II did. So did Benedict XVI. But it seems that most Christians are either clueless, or indifferent.  

 

Catholics, as you also mentioned, often avoid talking about angels and demons for fear of being superstitious, even the most orthodox of the faithful. Padre Pio nevertheless lived through the century of “the death of God” and atheistic totalitarianism, working numerous miracles. Is today’s West even less conducive to the emergence of such saintly figures than it was in the 20th century?

Ten years ago, I would have thought so. The New Atheism was popular then, and so many young people were leaving the Christian faith. The number of ex-Christians continues to grow, especially among the young, but there has been a significant and unexpected change. Atheism is mostly dead among the young — but they aren’t coming back to Christianity. They are going to various forms of the occult, as well as taking up using psychedelic drugs.

Why? Because they are desperate to have an experience of transcendence, of mysticism. They need to have an experience that tells them that there is more to life than mere materialism. As concerned as we should be about this development, it also offers us Christians an opportunity. It will continue to be hard — harder than ever, maybe — to convert people by using reason. But [we can make inroads] if we talk about the miracles of Padre Pio and others, if we talk about approved Marian apparitions, if we talk about the reality of spiritual warfare in the stories of people like the late exorcist Gabriele Amorth, and Father Carlos Martins, the popular American exorcist whose podcast The Exorcist Files is not only entertaining, but has lots of strong practical advice. 

 

You claim that today’s clergy are totally unprepared to welcome the many people who are coming out of occult, New Age movements or neopaganism. What do you think should be done? 

Living in Wonder is not just a book of theory, but a book of practical advice. One of the most discussed parts of the book, I think, will be what a former demon-worshipper, now a Christian convert who is also a highly trained scholar of religion, says that clergy and religious leaders should do. He says that religious leaders must read a lot more about the occult, but not so much as to demoralize them. 

The occult is widely accepted in popular culture today. You might not care about it, but it very much cares about your children. Go to a chain bookstore today and see the big sections of books teaching witchcraft and paganism to teenagers. This is a very big deal, because these are all doorways through with the demonic can access the souls of young people, who don’t understand what they’re getting into. This is not a joke.

Clergy should take far more seriously the work of exorcists. They live in a reality that most of us don’t see, but that exists. Spiritual warfare is a serious part of our life as Christians, and it is going to become more so in the years to come. 

You’ve stated your belief in the existence of UFOs, on which most Christian authorities take no position but which you tend to interpret as signs of the devil. What convinced you to believe this?

Until just over one year ago, I didn’t take UFOs seriously. Then a Catholic journalist I respect told me that I should reconsider it because there are some important spiritual issues being discussed in that field. I agreed to read a couple of books he recommended, and I had to admit that there was far more seriousness to this topic than I had realized. It astonished me to learn that very serious people at senior levels of the U.S. government — especially from the military and national security fields — took the UFO phenomenon seriously. It is also widely accepted as real in Silicon Valley, among tech elites.

Here’s the most astonishing thing: Very few of these people who accept UFOs as real believe that they are creatures from other planets. Rather, they believe that these are, in some sense, beings from other dimensions. It sounds like science fiction, but it’s true and some of these elites speak openly about it. 

But why do I think these things are demons, or at least demon-adjacent? Part of it was talking to ex-occultists — men who don’t know each other — who have said this. But I have also talked to exorcists who say that this is their experience. I believe that these “aliens” are part of a broader, long-term plan to cause a great, planet-wide spiritual deception. Forty years ago, the Orthodox Christian monk Seraphim Rose predicted this. When I first read Rose’s commentary on this back in 2006, I laughed at it. I’m not laughing now.