Few today would deny that we live in a world marked by disenchantment. A term popularized by Max Weber, “disenchantment” captures the sense that nothing—including ourselves—has any great significance, that we’re at best cogs in some giant machine, whether political, bureaucratic, or economic.
There’s irony here: Human beings are exceptional—capable of feats, positive and negative, to which no other creature can aspire. We can produce beautiful art and develop cures for diseases; we can engage in acts of deliberate cruelty and have even produced weapons that could annihilate our species. Yet the net result of all this brilliance has been to render us small in our own eyes. Our intellectual and technical brilliance has all but eroded our sense of mystery not simply with the world in general but with ourselves in particular. We’ve become nothing more than raw matter, talented for sure but ultimately of no account.
In this context, it’s not surprising to hear calls for the reenchantment of the world. If the problem is that materialism has reduced us, then the answer is to find the depth in our existence that has been lost, to recapture a sense of the mystery of existence. Even in this disenchanted world, there are still hints of something deeper: Stories of great deeds still have the power to inspire, many of us still experience love for another, and even our dissatisfaction with disenchantment indicates we crave something more.
While the disenchantment/reenchantment model contains much truth, it’s ultimately inadequate both as an explanation of our world’s problems and as a solution to them.
Destroying the Sacred
Take, for example, the shift in language surrounding abortion. Thirty years ago, abortion advocates argued it should be “safe, legal and rare.” That’s the kind of approach we might expect in a disenchanted world. It has an air of resignation and of the acceptance that, in a world like ours, sometimes we have to do things that we find distasteful. It was a medical procedure, unpleasant but necessary in certain circumstances.
Quite a contrast with the approach to abortion that caught the headlines in the 2024 U.S. elections: Pro-choice advocates “shouted” their abortions, taking evident pride in having availed themselves of one. T-shirts proclaimed the fact to passers-by. And it was asserted as a basic human right—in short, to be denied access to abortion is to be denied something constitutive of one’s humanity.
The linguistic shift is eloquent because it indicates this world isn’t characterized simply by disenchantment. It’s also characterized by a delight in the destruction of things once considered sacred.
This world isn’t characterized simply by disenchantment. It’s also characterized by a delight in the destruction of things once considered sacred.
Life in the womb is just one example. The sexual revolution is another. It isn’t enough that society no longer subjects many forms of sexual immorality to judicial punishment or even social shame. Our culture now has to lionize those who pursue it and demonize those who stand for chastity, continence, and monogamous fidelity.
A recent stained glass window in Belfast City Hall bears the legend “Save Sodomy from Ulster.” Both the artistic and linguistic idioms used are religious in origin and yet represent a mockery of Christian moral convictions. This isn’t the ennui of disenchantment so much as the ecstasy of iconoclasm.
We might also point to the passion with which the tech bros pursue their transhumanist projects. The game seems less and less about enhancing human life by enriching human agency and increasingly about transcending humanity as a whole, defined by its various limits—physical, mortal, intellectual. This will come at a significant cost, first for the weakest of us and then possibly for all. But the projects are pursued regardless of the consequences. The exhilaration of overcoming humanity, even at the cost of its self-destruction, is simply too great to resist.
There’s a clear theological reason for this. Both Karl Marx and Friedrich Nietzsche saw in the 19th century that the killing of God was an intoxicating experience. For Marx, the destruction of religion and of the God who enforced it was a necessary prelude to liberating human revolution. And for Nietzsche, nothing made someone feel more powerful than having the blood of the divine dripping from his or her hands.
That led inevitably to attacks on the single most significant sign of God’s authority in this created realm: humanity. Human beings are made in his image, the symbol of God’s ownership of and rule over this world. Only by demolishing that image—by overcoming its limits, by creating our own rules and our own values—can the death of God be truly realized.
For Nietzsche, the Enlightenment philosophers, most notably Immanuel Kant, had failed to do this. They had removed God as a living, necessary presence but had smuggled him back in by asserting a moral structure to the universe, most notably in the idea of “human nature.” True liberation from this dead God would only be achieved by ridding the world of those sacred limits that defined what it meant to be made in his image.
From Disenchantment to Desecration
In this context, it’s no surprise that the body—something considered sacred in Scripture and central to who we are as God’s image-bearers—became a locus of desecration.
Babies in the womb are merely part of the woman’s body, of no more moral significance than toenails, to be removed whenever they’re even merely inconvenient. Sex, once surrounded with sacred significance and ritual, has become nothing more in the wider culture than recreation, even if our laws on sexual assault would suggest otherwise. Transgenderism as a philosophy denies the significance of the naturally sexed body, seeing it as a potential threat to the real person trapped inside. The body must be mutilated to conform with the ideology.
Death too has been trivialized by the entertainment industry and reduced to a matter of mere procedure by the medical practice of assisted suicide. Even the post-mortem treatment of bodies now presses us toward thinking of a corpse as a piece of refuse, not as something to be treated with honor and dignity.
Of course, this assault on the Christian notion of what it means to be human—embodied, limited, moral—hasn’t really liberated us at all. It has made us less, rather than more, human. As in the age of disenchantment, our technical brilliance and exceptional abilities have again served to make us less.
But while the reduction of humanity in disenchantment involved resignation, that in desecration involves exhilaration. From the promiscuous to the abortionists to the transhumanists, the path to human nothingness is marked with headlong and ecstatic enthusiasm. God is dead. We have killed him. And goodness, does that not make us feel good as we become nothing even in our own eyes.
Church’s Task
So where does hope lie? For the disenchanted, it lies in reenchantment. But that’s a vague and rather weak concept. If the problem is desecration, the answer is consecration: a realization of who we are as those made in God’s image. And that’s the task of the church.
This is good news. First, the church is a supernatural entity. She exists because of Christ’s work and therefore her power doesn’t rest on the knowledge and abilities of her members. Preaching, for example, isn’t simply lecturing on a religious topic. It involves the supernatural address of God to his people. That consecrates us.
When a husband tells his wife he loves her, he isn’t merely communicating information about a state of affairs; he’s performing an action that deepens their relationship. That’s analogous to hearing God’s call from the pulpit: It both reminds us of who we are and in a mysterious sense makes us who we are. When we participate in worship, we respond to God in the way that reflects our humanity, shaping our imaginations so we think and act in ways that indicate we are not our own but were bought with a price.
This assault on the Christian notion of what it means to be human—embodied, limited, moral—hasn’t really liberated us at all.
We sing praises, we take the Lord’s Supper, we join with others in acknowledging that, whatever categories the world uses to divide and objectify us, the gospel of Christ speaks to that deeper humanity that unites us in him. The church’s proclamation and the church’s worship draw us toward what it truly means to be human—that is, made in God’s image and now redeemed in Christ. It consecrates us.
That consecration doesn’t terminate at the benediction or at the church door. It spills out into the world. As ancient Israel was to be a light to the Gentiles, reflecting God’s character through her devotion to him, her treatment of her own members, and her hospitality to those outside, so that’s the role of the church today. If the world is committed to the destruction of what it means to be human through its acts of desecration of the same, we’re to be those whose words and actions, whose whole lives, demonstrate what it means to be made in God’s image.
The good news is that this isn’t particularly complicated. The church has many members. We can each play our part. Some are great teachers, some evangelists, some apologists. But every single one of us can worship God in the congregation and then treat others with the kindness and hospitality that acknowledges that stamp of the divine image in others.
Desecration is a heavy burden because it ultimately destroys even those who rejoice in it. Consecration is a light yoke, one that should be easy to bear, because it makes us truly human.
The Gospel Coalition