Towards a Protestant Rivendell

Aaron Renn's Thread on Mysticism, Mystery, and Re-enchantment

Introduction

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone! Yesterday,

Aaron Renn

shared an open thread on Mysticism, Mystery, and Re-enchantment. It was interesting to me to read about Renn’s experience with re-enchantment. It was quite different from my experience, but here we both are.

At the end of his thread, Renn posed some questions for discussion. I think that they’re very good questions and for those of you who have followed my work over the past three years, you know that I’ve spent a lot of time talking about this topic. Instead of replying to his post with long responses to each, I wanted to take the opportunity to share some longer thoughts on those questions here. The questions that Renn asked were:

• Do you see Orthodoxy gaining traction or not?

• What’s drawing people to convert?

• What do you think about the idea of re-enchantment?

• How have you personally experienced re-enchantment?

Here are my thoughts.

Do You See Orthodoxy Gaining Traction or Not?

I think it’s unquestionable that Orthodoxy is gaining some kind of traction. Just this year, Francis Rocca wrote an article for The Wall Street Journal titled “Eastern Orthodoxy Gains New Followers in America.” The article shares stories of people like Michelle Jimenez who is a former New Agers and Zen Buddhist who ended up becoming a convert to Orthodoxy.

This isn’t just a thing that’s happening in places like Mexico. It’s happening even in rural Appalachia. Over the years, I have made acquaintances with pastors all over our tri-county region. One of those acquaintances is Father Joseph Hazar who is the dean of St. George Cathedral in Charleston, West Virginia. He and I have spoken off and on over the past two years and he has personally told me that over the past several years they have seen a significant influx of new attendees at St. George. Not only have they seen a significant influx of people, but the influx of attendees was not folks who were Cradle Orthodox. These were new Appalachians who had no connection to Orthodoxy.

On top of this, Holy Cross Monastery in Wayne County, West Virginia is in the process of building its first temple on the monastery grounds. They’ve outgrown their little wooden chapel. Their monastic community has more than doubled in size and the flow of pilgrims is larger now than at any time in the past. They just released a video a month ago titled Appalachian Orthodoxy which has exceeded 245,000+ views. Think about it for a moment. This isn’t an Orthodox Temple being built in urban New York. It’s rural Wayne County, West Virginia.

So yes, Orthodoxy is certainly gaining traction. I do believe that what my friend

Bnonn Tennant

has said is true — that Orthodoxy attracts people who make decision more intuitively rather than analytically.

Orthodoxy is also appealing right now because of people like Jonathan Pageau and podcasts like The Lord of Spirits. They have made Orthodox thought more accessible than it’s probably ever been. About 12 years ago, I encountered Orthodoxy for the first time. There was a man trying to plant an Orthodox mission church in the Coalfields and it failed. At the time, when I was trying to get a better understanding of Orthodoxy, the only things out there that were really accessible were the Orthodox Study Bible and Kallistos Ware’s The Orthodox Church: An Introduction to Eastern Christianity. And even then, they were difficult for me to comprehend because I had no knowledge of the Eastern Church prior to that moment, so it really was like learning about a foreign world.

We also cannot discount the Jordan Peterson phenomenon here either. The Pageau brothers and their friendship with Peterson has certainly helped them in getting the message of The Symbolic World out to people who would have never heard it otherwise. People like Pageau and The Lord of Spirits podcast have made Orthodox thought much more accessible to curious people.

What’s Drawing People to Convert?

So the question now is what’s drawing people to convert?

To sum up my answer, I would say that it’s the disenchantment of Protestantism.

In 2020, the world changed, including the world of the church. My assessment is that year, there really were two responses to the pandemic. One was to trust the establishment, to mask up, and to stay at home for a few years until everything went back to normal. The other was to be faithful to the Lord regardless of the cost.

That year was disorienting. For me, people I had trusted for years and had even shared fellowship with like — Al Mohler, Mark Dever and the SBC, Ligon Duncan and the PCA, Matt Chandler and Acts 29, and many others started talking about not just masking up and loving your neighbor, but also George Floyd, white guilt, Critical Race Theory, and African American 7’s and Anglo 8s. My response during that time was not only could I not trust the establishment, but I could no longer trust these people either because they were a part of it. Big Eva was real, and she would gaslight the daylights out of you and exclude you from the group if you disagreed with her papal-like decrees.

In my experience, I know that I was not alone and that there were countless others who experienced the same thing. So, people like us went the route of Reactionary Traditionalism. We returned to the land by planting gardens and raising livestock, and we returned to the tradition of Christendom as well.

I think that for a lot of us, that was the year that many of us became aware of Modern Protestantism’s flat, damn near secular view of not just how things were supposed to go culturally, but also with the cosmos. Many of us learned the hard way that Protestantism, for the most part, had been the strange bedfellow with the Spirit of the Age and as a result, we were living in a secular hellscape run by the bugmen and that The Gospel Coalition was just their religious arm. Some of us stayed Protestant and cut whatever connections we had left with Big Eva vowing to reform these errors, and some left altogether and became Roman Catholic or Eastern Orthodox.

I think that 2020 was a huge catalyst for people converting. But, there are other things too. Add that on top of all of modern Protestantism’s skepticism of the supernatural and the miraculous, its non-existent angelology and demonology, its disgusting abuses in worship that manifest themselves in singing Hillsong, Bethel, and Elevation Church that turns the Lord’s Day gathering into a me-centered, emotional concert, and all of the doctrinal chaos gutting entire denominations right now and you have a recipe for people leaving for something that has roots, black and white answers in terms of faith and practice, and enchanted cosmic imagery.

What Do You Think About the Idea of Re-enchantment & How Have You Personally Experienced Re-enchantment?

I have said very loudly for 3+ years now that re-enchantment is inevitable. I hope the fact that Rod Dreher is apparently about to write about it in his upcoming book is even more proof that this thing isn’t slowing down any time soon.

And most people know about my encounter with re-enchantment. You can find it in the docu-series Dark Holler. I don’t feel like I need to rehash all that now.

But, here’s what I want to close this with. Unless Protestants get their arses in gear, people are going to continue to go elsewhere to find faith with roots.

Bnonn Tennant

has said in his reply to Renn that Orthodoxy is wrong on its major theological points and demonstrably so. I agree, and it’s the reason why when the crap-shoot of 2020 went down that I never went to Constantinople or Rome. The valid insights in Orthodoxy can be integrated into a true, exegetically-derived Reformed Theology. Folks like he and I are currently working on that.

My biggest concern, though, isn’t Constantinople, per se. I do have doctrinal concerns obviously as a Reformed Protestant, but my biggest concern is that if Protestantism doesn’t get out of bed with modernism then we’re going to lose people to the dark pagan forest where the wild things roam. Look around, it’s already happening.

We need something — A Center for Protestant Re-enchantment or something along those lines. Something by Protestants and for Protestants. Something like a Rivendell — a last homely house where the lost lore of our enchanted tradition can live. I’m also a writer for Pageau’s Symbolic World, but I realize that I’m just a visitor there and that it’s not my house. The closest we have now is Theopolis Institute and Canon Press, but they’re not there yet. Maybe after Dreher releases his upcoming book, they will be.

But, Protestants need their own house. I hope to be a part of that when and if it happens. Hopefully, if it does, we’ll be able to unite all of the little bastions of Protestant re-enchantment in one place.