Bespoke Religion and the Occult

Our heart is restless until it rests in God.

A few weeks ago I saw the movie Nosferatu. I had seen the 1922 silent film by the same name and wanted to compare the two. (SPOILER ALERT TO FOLLOW.) The spiritual world of the 2024 movie is alive and robust, chaotic and powerful, dark and arcane. In vampire movies of generations past, one might battle the undead with crosses and holy water. In this movie, however, the Christian God lurks in the background like the Platonic One—distant, removed, uninvolved in the affairs of this world, and entirely unhelpful. In the battle against spiritual evil, the church and its accouterments are irrelevant at best. And, of course, there is no resurrection following the death of the protagonist. Death is the end, except for the very, very evil, who might live on in the joyless, hateful, lustful world of vampires. The movie paints an absurdist picture of a chaotic spiritual world bereft of a loving God. It is perfectly suited for a neo-pagan age. It is a movie for and of our times. It is also entirely hopeless.

The recent interview with Rod Dreher on the Civitas podcast is a worthwhile listen. If you’re not familiar with Dreher, he’s best known as a former columnist for The American Conservative and the author of The Benedict Option. The latter has sparked no small conversation among Christians regarding the utility of its claims. At one point in the interview, he describes a conversation with a younger seminary student (in his 20s). The student told him that, for people of his generation, the “New Atheists” just aren’t a going concern. They are significant for Dreher’s generation (Gen-X), but for younger Christians, a far more pressing issue is the occult. The student felt he would be ministering to people who were, or had been, involved in the occult for the rest of his career.

As I’ve argued before, I don’t think it’s quite right to call this era of Western culture “secular.” According to a 2022 article from NBC News,

In 1990, Trinity College in Connecticut estimated there were 8,000 adherents of Wicca. In 2008, the U.S. Census Bureau figure was 342,000. A 2014 Pew Research Center study increased that projection several times over in assessing that 0.4% of Americans identified as pagan, Wiccan or New Age. (Most modern pagan worship, of which Wicca is one type, draws on pre-Christian traditions in revering nature.) By 2050, it said, the number of Americans practicing “other religions” — faiths outside Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Hinduism and Buddhism — would triple “due largely to switching into other religions (such as Wicca and pagan religions).”

Fewer of us participate in organized religion, but many people create bespoke spiritual practices to suit their tastes. We sometimes describe these folks as “spiritual but not religious.” According to the Pew Forum, about 22% of people in the U.S. fall into this group. I’d suggest that they are in fact religious, but not aligned with any one tradition. Bespoke religion is consistent with cultural trends like fast fashion. It is the tyranny of the self made manifest in the spiritual realm. Take a few dabs of Buddhism, mix with some early-twentieth-century spiritualism, flavor with burning sage, add tarot cards to taste, and voila—we have our own, personal religion. Look out, universe!

An astrological chart. Don’t use this. BloomyFractal, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

Why didn’t the predictions of secularism’s inexorable march through the West come true? Please forgive the utter lack of originality, but I suggest that secularism—an entirely immanent worldview—is unnatural for us. We may train ourselves to believe that there is nothing other than the material world, but belief in the spiritual world sprouts up like weeds through the sidewalk. We are fascinated by the otherworldly. We are, by nature, religious creatures. We are drawn to mystery. We yearn for something beyond what we can see and touch. Our spiritual senses may lie fallow for a time, but they yearn for engagement. Atheism not only fails to make sense on a rational level but fails the test of intuition as well. It is not those who believe in another, unseen world who traffic in fantasy, but those who reject such a world.

The Christian faith recognizes our spiritual yearning and says, “Yes, this is a good thing. You were made for something besides this world. What we can see and touch matters, but there is more to life than this. There is a God who loves you, who became like you, who gave himself for you. And this God can and will fulfill your spiritual longing in a way that no one and nothing else can.”

The Bible gives us a picture of a transcendent God who is surrounded by created, heavenly beings. Isaiah 6 describes the prophet’s vision:

I saw the Lord sitting on a throne, high and lofty; and the hem of his robe filled the temple. Seraphs were in attendance above him; each had six wings: with two they covered their faces, and with two they covered their feet, and with two they flew. And one called to another and said: “Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of hosts; the whole earth is full of his glory” (vv. 1-3).

At times the Bible describes the unseen, transcendent world becoming manifest in this one. Mary encounters the angel Gabriel and becomes pregnant with Jesus by the work of the Holy Spirit (Luke 1:26-38). Throughout Matthew, Mark, and Luke, Jesus wages war on the demonic. At Pentecost, the Holy Spirit falls on those waiting for him in keeping with Jesus’ instructions (Acts 2:1-4). The Revelation to John is a glimpse of the interplay between the immanent and the transcendent. Scripture testifies consistently to a realm beyond the perception of our physical senses that nonetheless comes to bear on every aspect of our lives.

This transcendent world is not morally neutral. It is not a cafeteria from which we should pick and choose our spiritual diet. It is ordered by the God who brought it into being. At times we encounter spiritual chaos because we live in the time in between Christ’s redemptive work on the cross and its fullness in the age to come. Yet God is making all things new, bringing peace and order to the places that have been disordered by evil. When we align ourselves with the divine will, we can experience that peace that only God can bring.

In his great mercy, God has given us guides to help us perceive his will for our lives, the church, and the world. Scripture and the church’s sanctified reason across the centuries—which we call “tradition”—are pathways into the life of God. They are means of grace. They are channels through which God makes us holy. A religion of our own making, a collection of appealing insights from various traditions and philosophies, cannot do what God has done through self-revelation in history and scripture. It cannot supplant the wisdom of saints and martyrs and teachers across the centuries.

We were made for God. Our heart is restless until it rests in him. Bespoke religious practices may bring some reprieve to the stress of daily life, but they cannot save us. They cannot bring us into alignment with the will of God and thus fill us with peace. In fact, over time they may do quite the opposite.