Is America in 2025 What Disenchantment Looks Like?

Photo by Justus Menke on Unsplash

I’VE ALWAYS FOUND the performative use of religious language, as an excoriation or a scold, to be laughably ineffective. To call someone “godless” was a way to make me curious, not a way to convince me that someone was morally problematic. But since January I somehow find myself using this sort of language a lot—if only to myself. This is the most godless presidency in American history, I think to myself. Or, more often, I find myself thinking about how it was that Elon Musk came to sell his soul to the devil. It’s the only language that feels morally loaded enough. Because if I had to come up with one word to describe someone like Elon Musk, the one that jumps to mind is “evil.” I need language that feels more enchanted: that harbors within it the possibility to throw out a genuine curse.

I know that some people are confused by Christians who offer Trump their unquestioning allegiance and support. But these Christians, perhaps none more than JD Vance, have made it clear that all they need from Trump is the strategic political advantage he gives them. The rest is details. Because believers like this practice a mercenary sort of faith. More than a spiritual tool, it’s a political weapon used to carve out, and seize, territory. It’s a deeply disenchanted, and deeply utilitarian, sort of Christianity. This sort of Christianity is at least as old as the Christianization of the Roman empire. But it seems well-suited to our fading post-industrial world, where everything feels a little too messy and out of control. There are forms of Christianity that are more enchanted: they see magic at work in things. But this form of Christianity is more modern, more rational, more focused on the bottom line. It’s more disenchanted, we could say.

DISENCHANTMENT CAN be a sort of fighting word, in my academic field. For a long time the narrative held, both within and outside of my field, that modernity offers us a disenchanted lifeworld: that disenchantment is precisely what modernity produces, as a side effect. The origin of this idea is often taken to be the late 19th century German scholar Max Weber. But perhaps the master text of this argument is the Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor’s influential 2007 book A Secular Age. From the way that we think about time, to the way that we think about ourselves, Taylor argued that everything about our modern—less religious, more secular—life had become disenchanted. This is what it means to be modern, Taylor argued, and he experienced this disenchantment as a loss. He’s not alone. There are endless laments about the effects of disenchantment, filled with a sense of longing for a more enchanted lifeworld. More than just modernization and rationalization, science itself is often held responsible for this disenchantment.

But perhaps, if we feel like we’re living in a disenchanted world, we’re just looking at the wrong things, or in the wrong places. That’s how I se it, at any rate. In his 2017 book The Myth of Disenchantment, Jason Josephson-Storm argues that the theory of disenchantment has always been a myth. As a story that we tell, about science and modernity, this myth has functioned like a “regulative ideal”, he suggests. Disenchantment was a device for producing (rather than describing) a break with the past. More than anything else, being modern is a position of “discontinuity with the past.” Josephson-Storm argues that the modern bifurcation of religion and science gave rise not only to a mythical cultural battleground. More, it facilitated the emergence of a powerful third term—magic—which was thought to harbor both the best and the worst of both sides. Magic has been both derided (as mere superstition) and desired (as a kind balm to soothe the conflict). But it also sparked, more importantly, forms of paranormal research, and consistent attempts to “spiritualize the sciences.” Magic kept certain corners of the sciences enchanted.

From where I stand, much of contemporary American Christianity does look pretty disenchanted. It seems ever more self-serious, hungry for mainstream legitimacy, and ever less oriented around wonder. Enchantment, in my view, seems at its most potent in and around conversations about ecology (which is where I tend to gravitate) or in esoteric and often utopian corners of the tech world (which I find more disturbing). Perhaps contemporary American Christianity has been subjecting itself to that old regulative ideal—disenchantment—to achieve the legitimacy it craves.

THERE’S A REASON why I’m talking about disenchantment. I’m not pulling it out of nowhere. It’s something I’ve been chewing on since listening to a New York Times interview with Curtis Yarvin—the neo-monarchist ideologue who’s supposedly been an intellectual inspiration for this new administration. There’s a claim that Yarvin made, in that interview, that’s stayed with me. He argues that what progressives can’t understand about the right today is the extent to which it’s disenchanted. And he takes this disenchantment to be a good thing. “Fully enlightened, for me, means fully disenchanted,” he says. “When a person who lives within the progressive bubble of the current years looks at the right, or even the new right, what’s hardest to see is that what’s really shared is not a positive belief but an absence of belief.”

It did seem to me, briefly, after listening to this interview that I was seeing this disenchantment at work. I could see this sort of disenchantment at work in so many corners of contemporary American Christianity, of course. But I could also see this disenchantment at work as its own kind of aspirational—and regulatory—ideal in the new administration. What Musk and Trump share, perhaps, is a cold void at the core of their being. This “absence of belief”—or perhaps a refusal to be seduced by awe or wonder—seems like it would be perfect for whatever social or political condition we find ourselves in right now: lost at the end of one era and blindly wandering into another. They are ready to break things, and to use disenchantment to do it.

Threats like AI, and the feeling that we’re at the dawn of a technocratic oligarchical moment in here in the US that threatens to remake our labor market and economy, have many of us feeling a little nauseated by the future. We all know that it’s the end of one age and the beginning of another. But we don’t really know what’s coming. It seems natural that people would reach into the past, to cling to relics or cultural inheritances that might help us determine what to do next. So there’s something sort of predictable about Yarvin’s celebration of this relic of an almost bygone modernity: disenchantment.

Think of all that this radical rupture with the past could still do! What if disenchantment could really work this time? A real disenchantment could enable the most jaded and inhumane political decisions. There’s no magic spell to be caught up in, but only strategic political decisions about power to be made. A real disenchantment could truly break people down. It could finally make them far too embarrassed to be caught dreaming. It could subject them to a rawer contact with reality as such. It could make them face into hard facts without bothering to flinch.

With broken spirits like that, think of all that the people would be willing to give up! What better way for Americans to become so disenchanted by the state—for instance—so disillusioned by it, so convinced of its total powerlessness, that they will welcome the lowest bids that people make to portion it off. What better way to get them excited about the brute land grabs Trump threatens to make? What better way to get them to desperately and fearfully support some new global real estate state in Gaza, where citizenship can be purchased for the highest bidders, possibly in cryptocurrency?

THERE’S SOMETHING SORT OF clever, or witty, in the claim to be disenchanted. It makes you look as if you’re very rational, as if you’re someone who refuses to make emotional decisions, as if you’re really open to information, as if you’re a purely strategic thinker with a minimal sense of obligation to the past. You’re enlightened. But is someone like Yarvin actually disenchanted? Is Trump? Is Musk? Or are they just your standard issue enchanted dupes, wielding a disenchantment device like a chainsaw and trying to do something with it? My money is on the latter.

Yarvin’s enchantments may not be obvious to him. But, given that disenchantment has long served as a device for displacement, I suspect that he’s probably just displaced it and kept it hidden. It seems to me that he (and Trump, and Musk) are deeply enchanted by power: the possibility of holding and wielding it, the possibility of having more than anyone else, the possibility of using it to carve out space and territory and reshape it in their own image. They’re intoxicated by this enchantment, I think—by the idea that, in this new world where everything is falling apart, they can become kings. Of course they wouldn’t want us to see their enchantment: if we caught sight of it, we might want some of that power they’re hoarding.

But they haven’t read enough fairy tales. They don’t seem to remember that it’s so often the king who falls. And the very worst things happen to the worst of kings. You can learn that sort of thing, when you’re enchanted enough to read fairy tales. But they do recognize a kind of magic, even in their own story. And they’re doing all they can to banish it. Maybe this is why the current administration is so terrified of science. We can see their terror in their massive elimination of science funding, their disconnection from the World Health Organization, their installation of Robert F Kennedy Jr, their decimation of education.

What could be more terrifying to a monarchist than a powerful global network of scientists who don’t respect national boundaries (as the Dalai Lama, for one, has heaped praise upon scientists for)? A network of people who, unless they are captured by a particular corporate or national interest, can be convinced to dedicate their work and research to the common good—to mitigating the damage that common diseases might do for even the poorest of people, to providing data about who is decimating our commons and how, to developing technologies without a necessary eye to their commercial application. Think about how terrifying a powerful network of researchers who are bound not by a centralized political actor, but by a deep curiosity about the strange and wondrous matter in and around us, could be. These kinds of networks could threaten to ruin everything for the bargain basement nationalism that this administration is after.

Most people wouldn’t accept me—someone trained in theology—into this network of science people. And I don’t really believe that theology was once the queen of the sciences, as that old myth about the field goes. But I do know that theology is a genuine attempt at a form of scientific thinking. It’s a communal field that’s based on evidence gathering, observation, experimentation, analysis. Of course, at the core of the field is that big black hole where all data goes to die, and lose itself in radical unknowable mystery. So, I understand why some people think of theology as anti-science. But I don’t really care. It just makes me reckless enough to be unashamed about my enchantments. I refuse to let my spirits be broken by any prophets of disenchantment. Don’t let them disenchant you.

Enchantment isn’t exactly a practical solution to real problems. I’m not saying that. And it’s not inherently a force of the good. I’m not saying that, either. But it does do something. It can animate us, and this can help us as we struggle. There are signs of wonder all around us. We don’t have to lose sight of this, even when things are very bad. And we can celebrate the people who help us see and feel and understand the sources of that wonder, even if the political world we’re living in wants to break them down. I’m holding on to all of the little enchantments that I can. Especially when they keep me tied to the world that I inhabit in the flesh: the living world around me, the brown eyes of my dog, the sound of wind rattling through the old dry leaves on trees, the smell of turning soil as new green begins to emerge from the underworld. They can pry that enchantment from my cold dead hands.