open up!

The best running joke in The Innocents Abroad involves European tour guides. Whenever a guide shows the American visitors some representation of a great and famous European, the Innocents look thoughtfully at it and say, “Is — ah — is he dead?”

“Ah, look, genteelmen! — beautiful, grand, — bust Christopher Colombo! — beautiful bust, beautiful pedestal!”

The doctor put up his eye-glass — procured for such occasions: “Ah — what did you say this gentleman’s name was?”

“Christopher Colombo! — ze great Christopher Colombo!”

“Christopher Colombo — the great Christopher Colombo. Well, what did he do?”

“Discover America! — discover America, Oh, ze devil!”

“Discover America. No — that statement will hardly wash. We are just from America ourselves. We heard nothing about it. Christopher Colombo — pleasant name — is — is he dead?”

I’ve developed my own version of this response when reading some of our current celebrants of re-enchantment. Paul Kingsnorth, for instance, wrote a long series on his Substack about the holy wells of Ireland. Centuries of pilgrims visiting them; thin places; spiritual auras. To which I say: “Yes — very nice — but is, ah, is Jesus Lord?” Because if He isn’t then I don’t give a rat’s ass about holy wells. Even if you tell me about angelic and/or demonic forces at loose in the world, I say: “Wow! Amazing! But, uh, is … is Jesus Lord?”

I understand the thinking behind this approach: it concerns what the great sociologist of religion Peter Berger called plausibility structures. The idea is that if people are open to the possibility of something beyond the strictly material, they will eventually become more receptive to the Christian gospel. And by calling attention to phenomena inexplicable by current science, maybe you shift the Overton Window for religious belief. From this point of view it’s a very good thing that, as Matt Crawford says, “America is ready for weirdness.” Weirdness as a gateway drug to Christianity.

In one very general sense I’m in this camp. I too have long wanted to make Christianity a live possibility for people who do not believe. But I have taken a very different approach. Instead of commending spiritual experience I have tried to make the core beliefs of Christianity comprehensible to a world for which such beliefs are strange to the point of outrageousness. Thus my book on the idea of original sin. Thus my work to explain and illuminate the works of Christian writers and thinkers who flourished in the mid-twentieth century. Even my recent essay in Harper’s on myth and myth-making is an exercise in the same vein, though two or three steps back from Christian faith as such. (However … for those with ears to hear, you know.) And so on.

There are, I think, three major problems with the “openness to spiritual experience” route.

The “science can’t explain this” trope is highly vulnerable for reasons Dietrich Bonhoeffer (famously) pointed out long ago: “How wrong it is to use God as a stop-gap for the incompleteness of our knowledge. If in fact the frontiers of knowledge are being pushed further and further back (and that is bound to be the case), then God is being pushed back with them, and is therefore continually in retreat. We are to find God in what we know, not in what we don’t know.”

It seems to me highly unlikely that anyone will readily move from “spiritual experience” to “Trust in the Lord Jesus Christ and you shall be saved.” As C. S. Lewis, writing around the same time as Bonhoeffer, said about the then-common idea that there is a cosmic “Life-Force” beneficently guiding the affairs of this world, “All the thrills of religion and none of the cost. Is the Life-Force the greatest achievement of wishful thinking the world has yet seen?” Wouldn’t you prefer the cost-free frisson of “spiritual experience” to Paul’s experience of being “crucified with Christ” (Galatians 2:20)? I know I would.

As Ross Douthat wrote last year, “If the material universe as we find it is beautiful but also naturally perilous and shot through with sin and evil wherever human agency is at work, there is no reason to expect that any spiritual dimension would be different — no reason to think that being a psychonaut is any less perilous than being an astronaut, even if the danger takes a different form.” Or, as another wise man said, “Are you frightened? Not nearly frightened enough. I know what hunts you.”

But back to Paul Kingsnorth. Recently he gave the Erasmus Lecture in New York City, and if you listen to that talk (it starts around the 28-minute mark) you’ll be quite clear about whether he thinks Jesus is Lord. Now that’s what I’m talking about.