The Fantasy Genre Both Requires and Reinforces Disenchantment

The science fiction genre cannot come into existence until scientific and technological progress has reached a certain point. While we can tell stories of hoverboards, teleporters, and shrink rays without those things actually existing, some things do need to be technologically possible before we can even imagine them. Electricity, at a minimum, seems crucial, and it may be the case that other technological inventions are just as necessary.

But what about the fantasy genre? No modern inventions are needed to imagine elves, giants, incantations, and portals to other worlds. Even so, I’m convinced that fantasy is just as much a distinctively modern genre as science fiction is. Rather than technological progress, though, the specific aspect of modernity that makes the fantasy genre possible is disenchantment.

In Charles Taylor’s account of Western secularization, “disenchantment” means that we no longer experience the world as populated by all kinds of extraordinary beings. This includes God, angels, saints, and devils as well as nature spirits, fairies, goblins, and other creatures that we would now assign to the realm of fantasy. According to Taylor, however, medieval Europeans’ belief in the Christian God existed alongside beliefs that, depending on your point of view, might be called “folklore” or even “pagan.” Of course, “believe” isn’t quite the right word here. Rather, Taylor asserts, these pre-modern humans experienced their world as always enchanted. (They would not have used that term, though. For them, it was just the way the world was). Not only that, but they experienced their very selves as porous. That is, they saw themselves as subject to forces and influences external to themselves that might be benevolent (God, angels, and saints), malicious (devils), or largely indifferent (nature spirits and fairies) with regard to human welfare.

Taylor’s confident claim to accurately report “the mental worlds of premodern humans” has been contested. But the argument here rests not on his claim, which may be ultimately unverifiable, but on its flip side, which we can confirm directly. It is indisputable that we today experience the world as disenchanted and our selves as buffered. After all, we “WEIRD” moderns don’t spend much energy thinking about how to avoid getting on the wrong side of nature spirits. That’s just not a pressing concern for us anymore.

What does all of this have to do with the fantasy genre? One of many reasons we tell stories is to pass on knowledge about the way the world is and how to live safely and well within it. For example, I tell my one-year-old the stove is hot so he won’t touch it and burn himself. I do so because I believe the stove really is hot and that touching it will actually harm him. In an enchanted world (be it one that really existed in the human past or one imagined as a foil for our modern disenchanted age), stories about spirits and fairies work just the same way as stories about hot stoves: here is something true about the world, here is the correct way to relate to it, and here is how you will be helped or harmed depending on how you relate to it. There is no metaphor, allegory, or second/higher/deeper/hidden meaning.

Not so in our disenchanted world. We don’t tell each other stories about talking lions, magic rings, and portals to other worlds in order to prepare us for actual encounters with such things. But there are plenty of other reasons to tell such stories, like:

• They awaken us to the wonder that’s already present in the “real” world.
• They allow us to tell something true that would otherwise go unheard.
• They allow us to explore possibilities that would otherwise be closed.
• And finally, they are just plain fun.

But we reach for these reasons precisely because fantasy stories are not true in the most literal sense. This is the case even if the story is meant to be just plain fun. Conversely, the story I tell my son about the hot stove isn’t just fun; it’s serious, even deadly so. Though I may try to make it more fun to help him remember, perhaps by making up a rhyme about it, it can never be just fun. Likewise, stories about spirits, fairies, angels, and devils are never just fun for porous selves living in an enchanted world. But for us today, they often are.

A friend recently astonished me by pointing out a crucial corollary to this conclusion. If the fantasy genre requires disenchantment, as I have argued, then it also reinforces disenchantment. For example, our society situates and understands stories like Harry Potter and Agatha All Along as entertainment and not as instruction—either for or against—concerning the actual practice of witchcraft. Because of this framing, when we read or watch these stories, and especially when we enjoy them, we further confirm to ourselves that they are not literally true no matter what deeper truths they may contain about enduring human themes of friendship or courage. (Whether such stories lead some individuals to explore actual witchcraft for themselves is a separate question.) However, our porous forebears might reasonably consider our modern fascination with the fantastic to be naïve at best or foolhardy at worst.

As Taylor points out in A Secular Age:

Perhaps the clearest sign of the transformation in our world is that today many people look back to the world of the porous self with nostalgia. As though the creation of a thick emotional boundary between us and the cosmos were now lived as a loss. The aim is to try to recover some measure of this lost feeling. So people go to movies about the uncanny in order to experience a frisson. Our peasant ancestors would have thought us insane. You can’t get a frisson from what is really in fact terrifying you.

Or as Brad East recently wrote, “the pagans are absolutely right: the world is a dark and terrifying place in which humans are constantly harassed, assaulted, and tormented by numberless, nameless hostile intelligences that cannot be stopped or silenced apart from the name and the power of Jesus Christ.” We have forgotten that to be a porous self is to be vulnerable to all sorts of external influences, only some of which are beneficial or holy.

White people can freely choose to take up concern for racial justice and then freely choose to set it down again with little concern for how that decision affects their well-being, whereas such justice is a constant, inescapable lived reality for people of color. In similar fashion, fantasy stories allow us to imagine what it might be like to encounter spirits and magic without ever fully relinquishing the sense of control that we enjoy as buffered selves. Thus, a sense of enchantment is not a widely shared social imaginary that impinges, willy-nilly, upon our immediate, pre-reflective perception of our place in the universe. Rather, it becomes one more way that we, in Tara Isabella Burton’s evocative phrase, “remix” our own bespoke spirituality.

What does this imply for “mythmakers” like C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, and their many imitators who want to use fantasy precisely to point the way to Christian truths and reveal that there is more to this world than meets the eye? By using a genre that reinforces a felt experience of disenchantment in order to point secular audiences to the spiritual world, could it be that these storytellers actually end up undercutting their own goal? Taylor argues that Christian reform efforts (both Protestant and Catholic) paved the way for secularization: by calling all believers to a high level of piety and holiness, they inadvertently pushed many half-committed or cultural Christians away from the faith entirely. Are Christian fantasy authors repeating this mistake—if it is a mistake—today?

If the only intention of Christian fantasy is to awaken a desire for the supernatural realm, then perhaps so. As the great Christian apologist Blaise Pascal pointed out, “deism [is] almost as far removed from the Christian religion as atheism” (Pensées). Secular audiences can experience stories about Aslan, Santa, and Jesus with equal enjoyment—and equal lack of belief. But fantasy stories can do so much more than encourage nonspecific spiritual yearnings through fantastic settings and characters.

Much more fundamentally, their narrative shape can awaken imaginations to categories of grace—self-sacrifice and eucatastrophe, repentance and forgiveness, humility and hope—that are quickly becoming forgotten in our increasingly secular culture. It is this cruciform narrative, and not their otherworldly settings, that make stories like Andrew Peterson’s Wingfeather Saga, Jonathan Rogers’ Wilderking Trilogy, and N. D. Wilson’s 100 Cupboards trilogy more than just “spiritual” or “enchanted,” but distinctly Christian.