Advent and the Winter of Our Disenchantment

The Protestant-evangelical enchantment deficit has made it difficult for Christians to celebrate the church's sacred story, especially Advent. Advent asks us to face the very things left behind in order “to know better:” the cosmic struggle between good and evil, angels, visions, dreams and miracles. For that reason, many evangelicals find Advent to be “too much like the old churches,” and refuse to celebrate it. Those who are more liturgically minded, struggle to convey Advent's message of a cosmos longing for deliverance from spiritual darkness. For all of us, Advent and Christmas have been merged into one happy story, leaving us with what Russell Moore recently described as the “unbearable lightness of Christmas.”