The Disenchantment Death Spiral: The Immanence Feedback Loop

In 2022, I wrote a series about how churches unintentionally disenchant themselves through habits of speech and practice. Since then, I've keep coming back to one particular reflection about what I called "the disenchantment death spiral." This death spiral is caused by what I described as the "immanence feedback loop." This loop creates ecclesial habits that slowly hollow out the life of faith. A church comes to speak of God, salvation, Jesus, and the gospel in language that slowly collapses inward, referring less and less to God and more and more to ourselves. The result is a church that, while still religious in vocabulary, becomes functionally atheistic in practice.

So, what do I mean by the "immanence feedback loop"?

We know our culture is moving steadily deeper into a post-Christian context. As I describe in Hunting Magic Eels, faith, even among the faithful, feels more fragile and precarious. Wanting to give faith more ballast and weight in an increasingly disenchanted age, we point toward human effort and material reality. We say, "You might struggle believing in God, but here at this church we just want to be good neighbors." In the midst of religious doubt this desire to be a good neighbor is something visible you can hang your hat on. You don't have to believe anything to get involved with the church. Basically, as an engagement, evangelism, and spiritual formation strategy, we disenchant the life of faith by connecting mission, Scripture, and gospel proclamation with human activities in the material world. Most of these efforts lead to a moralization, politicization, or therapization of the gospel, the gospel as loving care, social action, relational support, and therapeutic encouragement. 

Now, let me be clear, all of this is a part of the Good News. Church should be a location of loving care, social action, relational support, and therapeutic encouragement. But when the church and the gospel are reduced to these things, the church becomes disenchanted and functionally atheistic. For the simple fact that you don't need God to find loving care, social action, relational support, and therapeutic encouragement in the world. You can work at a non-profit, go to a therapist, become an activist, and cultivate a rich friend group. 

Here's where the immanence feedback loop comes in. 

Facing an increasingly disenchanted world, churches emphasize the immanent impact and relevance of their life and mission. They highlight what is visible, tangible, and materially verifiable. Not invisible religious realities, but concrete outcomes. Things you can see, touch, and measure.

But this strategy, meant to stabilize faith, has the opposite effect. By continually translating the gospel into immanent terms, we steadily demythologize it. We offer accounts of the church, Scripture, and salvation that no longer require a grounding in transcendent realities. The faith becomes intelligible on purely secular and irreligious terms. Which deepens the very disenchantment we were trying to resist.

And as disenchantment deepens, so does the pressure upon belief. Faith feels even more tenuous. In response, we double down, pointing again to immanent relevance and impact, precisely because these things demand little by way of faith. And so the loop closes.

Disenchantment leads us to emphasize immanent relevance and impact.

Emphasizing immanence intensifies disenchantment.

And this leads us to emphasize immanence even more.

The strategy becomes a spiral. A slow, steady descent begins as the church comes to call the justification for its own existence into question. The church comes to explain itself in ways that make God increasingly unnecessary. Over time, we talk ourselves out of existence.

That is the disenchantment death spiral.

This spiral is a large part of what happened to many mainline churches. Beginning with the social gospel, they entered the immanence feedback loop and gradually reduced their message to categories that no longer required transcendence. The thinning of the faith produced institutional decline as churches talked themselves our of existence.

And today, many moderate to progressive churches, across a range of denominations, appear to be entering or already caught within this same spiral. The danger here is not that these churches will stop doing good in the world. The danger is that, in how the explain that good, they slowly render God superfluous and unnecessary.