One Enchanted Reality

Dave Brisbin 2.15.26 The number of people in South America who say they no longer affiliate with a religion has doubled over the past decade, but unlike the US and Europe, the number of atheists and agnostics has not grown from a small part of the population. With no loss of faith, Latin people continue to pray, meditate, and participate in rituals drawing from Christian, Indigenous, African, and Eastern traditions, redefining what constitutes a religion. More religiously unaffiliated people in Latin America say they believe in God, pray daily, and consider religion very important than do those who identify as Christian in European countries. What is going on? Scholars say Europe represents religion grounded in doctrinal belief and formal religious practice, while Latin Americans have an effervescence of religious experiences that go far beyond the purely rational. Latin American culture emphasizes believing in something beyond the material world, an enchanted reality, a dimension of life that we can’t explain only by what we can see. Their trend toward religious disaffiliation is not secularization, but a change in how they approach belief itself—an enchanted view of the modern world, creating a vibrant spiritual and religious society doing things to engage with the unseen world. When Jesus says unless you become like children, you will never know the kingdom; when he always makes time to play with children, merge back into their enchanted reality, saying that such as these are kingdom itself, his is telling us that kingdom is not a place into which we are admitted if we believe or act correctly. It is the herenow experience of life when we merge back into the enchantment of the un-self-aware experience we once knew as children and forgot as adults. We don’t need to practice a mixture of traditions as Latin Americans may, but we do need to unforget the enchanted reality of our children. Sixty years ago, a famous theologian said that the Christian of the future will be a mystic or will not exist at all. Rational belief will not sustain us. Only the personal experience of the enchanted reality of God’s presence can do that.