We must learn to pray again

In The Spectator’s basement kitchen a few weeks ago, I cornered a young colleague, Angus Colwell, and asked him what he made of Rod Dreher’s new book Living in Wonder. The thrust of it is that we are not in an age of enlightenment so much as “endarkenment” (Dreher’s term) and that, having turned our backs on God, we have become easy pickings for demonic forces.

“Oh Lord,” said Angus, turning wearily away, “I’m so sick of demons.”

This delighted me then and still delights me, both because it’s so surreal and also because it rings so true. If you’d told me ten years ago that young political types in 2024 would be talking knowingly about the ancient devil-gods of the Mesopotamian region — Moloch, Ishtar and Baal — I’d have said your vape was spiked. But sure as Donald Trump is back in the White House, serious talk of angels and demons is now almost normal in conservative circles.  

Tucker Carlson, the former talk show host and a friend of Trump announced recently in an interview with Dreher that he had actually been “mauled by a demon” when lying in bed one night. The attack left him bleeding, he says, and with scars from the demon’s claw marks. And almost the strangest thing about this story was how very little attention it received. The new vice president, J.D. Vance, is a friend of Dreher’s too, and did a fascinating interview with him for the Lamp magazine in which he explained that he’d converted to Catholicism in response to the “civilizational crisis.”

It’s easy to sneer, but, as Dreher points out, the humanist worldview that honors liberty and natural rights all emerged from Christianity and the haunted world of faith, prayer and demons. And it’s far from a given that our ethics, our “kindness,” will survive Christianity’s decline. “Put simply,” Dreher writes, “we really are living in a crucible, as the fourth century was for the pagans of Rome. Either we will recover enchanted Christianity or we will succumb to chaos and cruelty.”

Dreher himself is a convert to orthodox Christianity, by way of Catholicism, and Living in Wonder is a sort of sequel to his best known book to date, The Benedict Option. In that, he urged fellow Christians to follow the example set by Benedict of Nursia and form self-sufficient communities — little pockets of resistance to the prevailing culture. This latest book addresses a wider audience: those of us who know in our bones that there’s something deadening about the way we live but not how to set about fixing it; those of us who’ve quite forgotten how to pray.

To describe the state we find ourselves in now, Dreher borrows a term from a Harvard anthropologist, Joe Hendrick, who has labeled us WEIRD: Western Educated Industrialized Rich and Democratic. We WEIRDos have until recently imagined ourselves to be at the very cutting edge of human existence: advancing, inventing, and banishing suffering. But the optimism of the 1980s has now given way to despair. Liberalism has collapsed into nut-job narcissism and the po-faced mania for choosing your own “identity.” The young are anxious and the old are lonely and it’s hard to argue with that.

The consensus solution emerging among the middle classes is that the West can recover if it only learns to live without smartphones again. We must limit their use for children, ban porn and “let kids grow” — meaning, let them briefly out of our sight.

For Dreher, this is a pitifully inadequate response. Living in Wonder is a great blast of a book, an exhortation with the urgency of biblical prophecy. God is real, insists Dreher, and we’re born to be in communion with Him. We’ve become like fish flopping and gasping in the open air, living in the wrong medium. We need to flop back into the water. In other words, we need to learn to pray again properly and meet our maker in prayer.

Smartphones do actually come in for a kicking in the book but in a slightly unusual way. Prayer requires focus and mental commitment, says Dreher. But because God is a being, not just a fix, his presence cannot be commanded. “The best we can do is to keep ourselves in a state of watchful waiting.” But how can you wait watchfully, or even pray, when you’re doomscrolling and your brain is trained to require constant stimulation? You can’t. I’m a smartphone addict and this much I really do know.

So if Dreher’s right, and the devil is abroad, then he’s played a blinder. In hooking us on smartphone-scrolling, he’s well on his way to destroying our ability to pray. Like a psycho in an old-fashioned thriller, he’s severed the landline before he enters the house. This thought has chilled me almost more than all the exorcisms and demonic clawing.

This article was originally published in The Spectator’s UK magazine. Subscribe to the World edition here.