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DISENCHANTED RELIGION AND SECULAR ENCHANTMENT IN A CHRISTMAS CAROL

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 August 2015

Joshua Taft
Joshua Taft*
Affiliation:
University of Central Missouri
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Extract

The Victorian age has long been considered a time of disenchantment. Beginning with Max Weber's seminal “Science as a Vocation,” secularization theory has argued that belief within modernity is marked by “rationalization and intellectualization and, above all, by the ‘disenchantment of the world’” (155). In this account, modernization makes the “enchanted” world fall apart, changing it from a realm of “mysterious incalculable forces” into an empty space governed by nothing more than “technical means and calculations” (139). Religion, this narrative claims, inevitably fades away. It may attempt to survive disenchantment by downplaying its supernatural roots, but this rationalized religion nevertheless gives way to secularism. And although recent scholarship has challenged the assertion that the Victorian age simply marked the decline of faith, the disenchantment narrative remains a powerful one; even critics who dispute aspects of the theory acknowledge its force. Colin Jager's The Book of God, for instance, describes Weber's narrative of disenchantment as “a powerful account of the way in which science gradually demystifies the universe” (18), and George Levine's Darwin Loves You concedes that Weber's work, whatever its flaws, survives because it was “fashioned so powerfully and convincingly” (xiv).

Type
Research Article
Information
Victorian Literature and Culture , Volume 43 , Issue 4 , December 2015 , pp. 659 - 673
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Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2015 

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