Living in Wonder Involves Having Kids Around the Home

In Living in Wonder, Rod Dreher argues that we live in a disenchanted world, disenchantment being understood as the “loss of a meaningful sense of God’s presence and of the existence of meaning and purpose in the world.” Disenchantment results from “the evaporation of a sense of the supernatural within the world, and its replacement with a belief, sometimes unacknowledged, that this world is all there is.” 

More specifically, Dreher shows that our modern disenchantment was brought about by a long historical process involving the separation of the Eastern (Orthodox) Church and the Western (Roman Catholic) Church in the 11^th century, as well as the successive influence of nominalism in the 14^th century, the Protestant Reformation in the 15^th, the Scientific Revolution in the 16^th, the rise of modern Capitalism and Machinery in the 18^th and, last but not least, the emergence of “digital technology” over the past half century.

Quoting American philosopher Anton Barba-Kay, he notes that this latter technology is essentially a “spiritual technology” that leads us to seek “control of human nature through our control of what we are aware of and how we can attend to it.” In Dreher’s words, it claims to make us become “superhuman through the integration of our bodies and most intimate selves with technology.” In that sense, digital technology has the potential to act as a new religion since it “bears the full weight of our yearning for integration, participation, and incorporation in a larger purpose than our own”— that is, to make us into our own gods.

Dreher also reminds us that enchantment is very much a function of our ability to contemplate things rather than looking at them in terms of their instrumental value. To contemplate created things, whether they be mountains, works of art or “the intricate form of a child’s ear,” is to contemplate God through “the visible and invisible signs of his handiwork.” In support of this view, he quotes the medievalist and philosopher Umberto Eco, for whom the medieval mind saw the cosmos as “an immense theophanic harmony … (where) the face of eternity shines through the things of earth, and we may therefore regard them as a species of metaphor.”

Dreher believes that unless Christians learn to once again see the world “as metaphors in a cosmic book authored by God, we may never know enchantment.” This leads him to stress the need for Christians to rediscover the old medieval wisdom and to become aware that, contrary to the dictates of modernity, there is a connection between spirit and matter and that, indeed, we live “not in an impersonal universe but in a divinely ordered cosmos permeated by Logos.”  

Dreher’s concluding pages draw significantly from a long conversation he had with English writer Paul Kingsnorth, known for his critique of modern technology and his proselytizing on the need for Western man to reconnect with the natural world. Like Dreher, Kingsnorth is a convert to Orthodox Christianity and argues there can be no true enchantment without a rediscovery of the sense of mystery, which he believes has been best preserved by Eastern Orthodox Churches. Asked to explain what makes Christian life enchanting, Kingsnorth provides a good summary of his own and Dreher’s deepest belief:  

It’s a love of God and love of creation…Instead of becoming enchanted by what you’ve created, you become enchanted by what already exists. You become enchanted by nature. You become enchanted by the Creator of nature. You become enchanted by the liturgy, by storytelling. You become enchanted by something you can never fully understand. Enchantment comes from mystery. You have to have mystery – mystery and beauty. Enchantment is putting yourself in right relation to mystery.

And what should Christians and non-Christians do to experience a sense of mystery and a more enchanted life? That’s easy according to Kingsnorth (and Dreher): “Go to the Divine Liturgy and go into the woods.”  

Living in Wonder has received high praise from many reviewers, and rightly so. Each of its chapters highlights a fundamental issue of our postmodern world that very few contemporary writers dare to address. Dreher had already established himself as a worthy writer with the publication of The Benedict Option and Live Not by Lies, but this latest book is clearly a few notches above the latter.

That being said, Living in Wonder suffers from one grave omission: it ignores entirely the fact that for most people the greatest source of wonder lies in procreating new human life and seeing one’s progeny grow towards full adult maturity. Nowhere in his book does Dreher even allude to the dearth of births experienced by all Western countries over the past half century. More specifically, nowhere does he mention that the total fertility rate (the average number of live births per woman) in all Western countries is significantly below the replacement rate of 2.1 births per woman. And nowhere does he explain that this unprecedented historical phenomenon is largely due to the widespread use of artificial contraception over the past half century.

Not only are couples in the West refusing to have children or to have more than one, but those who do have children often find themselves in a situation where the children are not raised by a stay-at-home mum. For most married or unmarried couples, parenthood is an optional extra, and motherhood/fatherhood is nothing more than a part-time occupation, which means that the wonder of seeing a child grow and adapt to different stages of life is virtually absent. To use Dreher’s terminology, there is very little time allowed for contemplating the life of one’s children and simply enjoying being in their company. 

This raises an important question. What is wrong with contraception? In dealing with this question, it must first be noted that the Roman Catholic Church is the only institution in the world that still has the audacity to proclaim that there is something wrong with contraception. All Protestant denominations, as well as the Eastern Orthodox Church, consider contraception to be a morally acceptable means of family planning. 

More specifically, then, why is the Catholic Church against contraception? There can be only one reason, which is that contraception is against God’s purpose in creating human sexuality.  It makes children an option of married life rather than a normal, integral part of it. It encourages the separation of sex from marriage. It turns sex into a recreational activity rather than a profound and sacred act. It turns women into playthings. It undermines its unitive purpose. The contraceptive mentality inevitably leads to abortion, in part as backup for failed contraception (virtually every country that made contraception widely available has soon legalized abortion). 

Contraception also bears on how we understand God to be. Probably the earliest profession of Christian faith was “Jesus is Lord” (Rm. 10:9). To say Christ is Lord is to say He rules our lives, including our sexual life. What does God ask of us in sex? To honor His purpose in creating sex. The sexual act is nothing less than the mutual, loving, self-donating contemplation of spouses. Children are the fruit of enchanted contemplation. Contraception is the return to disenchanted, instrumental use of one’s spouse.

In the words of one author, contraception is tantamount to saying:

I am lord of this act. It serves my purposes. In this particular case it may be an expression of love, in another instance it may be simply for pleasure, in another instance it may be for having a child, but in every case, it is what I decide it to be. For I am the Lord of my sexual actions. It has no intrinsic nature given to it by God that I must respect.

In short, contraception displaces God as Lord of our sexual lives and actions – the very basis of His first commandment (“Be fruitful and multiply”) – and the means by which spouses co-create in making beings in His “image” and “likeness.”

Abandoning God as Lord and replacing Him with ourselves has ramifications – ramifications which have been working out their logic for decades. First, we deny there was an intrinsic telos (purpose) to the sexual act. Each couple individually decides on its purpose, without reference to the Creator of sex. Consequently, not only is the act of sex distorted, but even our embodied sexual nature evaporates. There is no longer the enchantment of romance of male and female, but a disenchanted collection of body parts which can be mixed and matched at technological leisure. Next, we will deny that there is an intrinsic nature to human beings at all, thus paving the way for the social acceptance of genetic engineering of humans.

This is a major reason why Christians experience such little enchantment in our modern world. And this is a point that is missing in Dreher’s otherwise fine book.

Living in Wonder: Finding Mystery and Meaning in a Secular Age
By Rod Dreher
Grand Rapids: Zondervan Press, 2024; 288pp

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