Protestant Reenchantment

Properly Understood, Protestantism Is an Enchanted Faith

Now when the attendant of the man of God had risen early and gone out, behold, an army with horses and chariots was circling the city. And his servant said to him, “This is hopeless, my master! What are we to do?” And he said, “Do not be afraid, for those who are with us are greater than those who are with them.” Then Elisha prayed and said, “Lord, please, open his eyes so that he may see.” And the Lord opened the servant’s eyes, and he saw; and behold, the mountain was full of horses and chariots of fire all around Elisha - 2 Kings 6:15-17

I’ve said several times recently that reenchantment seems positioned to be a major religious and cultural theme in coming years. We already see it in everything from the growth of Eastern Orthodoxy to the popularity of psychedelics to the rise of Jordan Peterson.

This would seem to put Protestant Christianity, a seemly disenchanted religion, at a disadvantage.

However, there are many ways to talk about Protestantism in an enchanted context. I see this in various theological debates attempting to recover a more robust sacramentology from the Reformation era, for example.

But there’s also enchantment present in a Protestant view of ordinary life, if we open our eyes to see it.

I will share a couple of stories from my life.

The first is the story of this newsletter.

My original plan was to start to for profit web site focused intestinal bacteria and microbiome health. I wanted to build new revenue streams since I was living on a non-profit salary in NYC.

But I knew things about the men and the church I didn’t see anyone else talking about. I prayed and decided to start this newsletter to write about them.

There were 33 people I originally asked who agreed to sign up for it. I said that if I reached 500 subscribers within a year by word of mouth, I’d keep it going. If I didn’t hit that number, I’d shut it down.

A year later I had 232 subscribers and decided to shut it down. Before doing so, I decided to send out my two best ideas on any subject. The first was my original three worlds article in newsletter #13. The second was a writeup on Nassim Taleb in newsletter #14.

After this, I emailed my original 33 subscribers to thank them for signing up and spreading the word, but that I was shutting the newsletter down. I bought a bottle of champagne and had my wife make pizza to formally celebrate having taken a swing of the bat and bring the project to a close.

A week later my family walked to get ice cream. While waiting in line, I pulled out my phone and saw 25 new subscription notifications. I deleted them, ordered our ice cream, and by the time we got to our table I had 15 more new subscription notifications.

I googled myself to see what was up, and learned that one of my readers had emailed my three worlds article to Rod Dreher, who had put up a big, positive post about it. Soon, Doug Wilson and others picked it up.

I ended up with over 1,000 new subscribers within a week, and this newsletter was back in business.

The second story was how I ended up working for Accenture in Chicago.

I was a finance major in college, largely by default. After dropping Russian because it was too much work, and then Spanish because the class was at 8am, I picked business as a major because other than phys ed, it was the only school that didn’t have a foreign language requirement.

My senior year I needed to find a job, but the idea of going to work as a loan officer in a bank or something made me want to blow my brains out.

Meanwhile, I’d gotten really into programming computers. I loved it, and I was really good at it. I used to sometimes spend all night in the computer lab hacking on various programs, some of which were used by thousands of people at school.

What I really wanted was to get a job working with computers. I heard about an opening at my school for a network administrator position paying $8/hour. So I applied for it because it was the only computer job I knew of.

I had a job as an audio engineer at our campus NPR/classical station, so I had lots of time to read or do whatever while a symphony or opera was playing. So I spent my days there praying to get that network administrator job.

To this day, I don’t think there’s any other specific thing I wanted that I prayed to get more than that. It was a big deal to me.

But, needing a job, I was signing up to interview at various companies. Everybody at the Indiana University business school at that time wanted to work as either a brand manager at P&G or as a consultant with Andersen Consulting (now Accenture).

I knew I wasn’t a marketing guy, so I signed up for an Andersen interview. This was the pre-web era, so I went to the placement office to get literature about the company to figure out what the heck they did. But all it said was things like, “We help our clients change to be more successful.”

When I got to my interview, my interviewer said, “Aaron Renn…Aaron Renn. Are you on the radio?” I explained that I was not on the air myself, but that I worked for the station and they sometimes said my name on the air in the credits.

We spent our 30 minutes talking about classical music and such (which I pretended to know more about than I actually did). He referred me on to an interview in Chicago.

I flew up to Chicago for a day of interviews. The first person I talked to was a partner who spent the entire time pounding his fist on the desk saying things like, “This is the best f—ing consulting company on the f—ing planet and you’d be an f—ing idiot to work anywhere else. Any questions?” Uh, No.

Then I was taken to lunch by a two younger guys so I could meet the kinds of people I’d actually be working with day to day. It turned out they had gone to college together at Illinois, and spent the entire time catching up with each other.

The rest of the day was similar until I got to another partner interviewer who was my “closer.” She just wanted to know if I had any questions that hadn’t been answered.

The answer was Yes, because I still didn’t know what this company actually did. But obviously I couldn’t ask that. So I just asked some anodyne question and went home.

Shortly thereafter, a very good job offer from them arrived in the mail.

Meanwhile, I’d interviewed for the network administrator job but hadn’t heard back. I’d already resolved that if I got it, I was going to turn down the Andersen offer because I wanted to work in computers that badly.

I finally emailed and asked them what was up. The manager told me they’d decided to hire somebody else.

I was disappointed to say the least. Still needing a job, I decided to accept the Andersen position.

After starting my new job in Chicago, I learned that what Andersen actually did was build and install computer systems for large corporations. I spent the next 15-18 years of my life doing technology development, implementation, and strategy.

Suffice it to say, I also made much, much more money than I’d ever have made if I’d gotten the job with the university. And moving to Chicago was one of the most personally transformative experiences of my life.

Thinking back, I’ve had so many things like this happen in my life, where random or unplanned occurrences had major consequences for my life.

Were these examples of reenchantment? At one level certainly not. There’s no evidence of anything supernatural at work, or anything that can’t be explained by ordinary reality.

One reason I’ve been so drawn to the work of Nassim Taleb is that his arguments about the role of randomness and black swans in life very much resonate with my own experience.

We should expect random chance to produce a certain number of outcomes like these. We should expect that one viral article has more impact than everything else we write combined. This is perfectly normal.

But if we open our eyes to see, and understand the way the world is providentially superintended by a sovereign God, maybe these are enchanted moments after all. See Deut 8:11-18, Hosea 2:8-13, Psalm 127:1-2, John 15:5 and elsewhere, for example.

Those who reject a spiritual understanding of these matters rarely adopt the alternative, which is a Talebbian world of random chance and black swans. They tend to have a high view of their own agency, particularly if they are successful.

But as Taleb notes, randomness alone should be expected to produce many millionaires, billionaires, and other successful people. Yes, those people might be talented, have worked hard, etc. But we don’t see all the other talented, hard working, etc. people who failed or didn’t achieve that outsized success. The deciding factor was ultimately chance.

Or, if we open our eyes, the sovereignty of God. There’s an enchanted world right in front of us perfectly compatible with a Protestant theological view of the world.

Perhaps we should start talking about that more.

Cover image: Hans Speckaert, The Conversion of St. Paul