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This chapter addresses the complex question of how the possible impact of ANiS could be assessed. It argues that an initial important effect of ANIS meetings and programmes is that on it's own members; this strengthens the movement internally. The degree to which the rationalists’ lectures and programmes impact upon their audience is difficult to assess but may not be that far-reaching. More important to consider are the immediate impacts of their legal activities, which would be heightened with the potential passing into law of the Anti-Superstition Bill. Finally, the question is raised as to what degree the general worldview, as well as the concrete activities of the rationalists, have a more subtle, mediate impact on wider society as part of larger processes of disenchantment and rationalisation.

This chapter examines the concept of depoliticization in detail. It seeks to show how it has played an increasingly important role since the election of New Labour in 1997, and how it raises fundamental questions about the nature of ‘the political’, the limits of democracy, and the existence of more positive choices in the face of growing public disenchantment with politics.

This chapter studies the biblical sources of secularization, showing how three pivotal elements in the biblical faith have each given rise to one aspect of secularization. The disenchantment of nature begins with the Creation; the desacralization of politics with the Exodus; and the deconsecration of values with the Sinai Covenant, especially with its prohibition of idols. The chapter argues that far from being something Christians should be against, secularization represents an authentic consequence of biblical faith. This is why it is no mere accident that secularization arose first within the culture of the so-called Christian West, in the history within which the biblical religions have made their most telling impact. As such, rather than oppose it, the task of Christians should be to support and nourish it.

Te may be culturally conservative, but it is by no means impervious to change. While the mechanisms for dealing with limited change have been discussed in previous chapters, the Conclusion examines the more substantial developments that are likely to come about as a consequence of “radical transcendence.” The resulting disenchantment—to use Weber's term—entails the irrevocable retreat of “sublime values” from a rational and secularised world. Evidence for this process in Te is found by re‐examining its laws and identifying the disappearance of some of the most complex institutions that were seen to be central to its civil religion. However, using analogies from Indo‐European linguistics and the status of transcendence in European religion, it is suggested that the conspicuous phenomenon of disenchantment is constantly balanced by a less visible process of re‐enchantment, and evidence for the latter can be found in the case of Te.

Disenchantment is a condition resulting from the unwarranted elevation of scientific and rational strategies of analysis to the level of determining the general position of people in the world. This dissolves the basic relations people have with their world and allows for the exercise of power and extension of self‐interest. He counters with proposals that would allow for the reenchantment of the world.

Disillusion with American culture became widespread during the Vietnam War as protesters condemned the immorality of the war and the military industrial establishment that supported it, and supporters of the war condemned the protesters. A sense of moral and spiritual disenchantment accompanied these culture wars, along with widespread criticism of American claims to being a nation chosen by God. In addition to describing the end of “victory culture,” and the dismantling of stereotypical distinctions between good cowboys and bad Indians, this chapter points to the important contributions made to American society by the civil rights movement. This discussion of civil rights focuses on the influence of the school of religious thought known as personalism on Martin Luther King Jr. and its linkages to long‐standing American trends of religious individualism.

This chapter explores the alienation of many modern intellectuals. Perhaps the modern world is bereft of meaning, but the affluence provided by modern science means that for the vast majority of people, the world has probably never been so enchanted. The romantic nostalgia so characteristic of modernist ideas is unlikely to have any general appeal once industrial conditions have been established. Curiously, there is very little empirical investigation into the purported misery of modern men and women, and certainly few findings to back up the view that disenchantment dominates most of social life. In contrast, there is a massive amount of evidence supporting the view of people being distracted from questions of meaning by the demands of status competition. This leads to the central point: artists and intellectuals have their own particular worries, and so may not give an accurate report on modern social conditions.

A society's system of values is sustained by the allegiance of its inhabitants. A pervasive sense of disenchantment is the most serious problem for the cultural dimension of values as it exists in contemporary Western societies. Many religiously committed thinkers argue that our present disenchantment is the result of the widespread rejection of religious belief and the secularization of Western life. This chapter provides a secular alternative to the religious view and argues that the cultural dimension of our system of values has ample resources for coping with such disenchantment as there is. The alternatives center on exemplars that exemplify inspiring ideals of a large variety of conceptions of well‐being. The nature and identity of exemplars is discussed and explained.

The Introduction provides an overview of the structure and arguments of the book. On the basis of a brief description of the Indian rationalist movement and the relevance of the work of Ulrich Berner, Charles Taylor, Max Weber and various post-colonial scholars, the introduction highlights the ways in which Disenchanting India makes an important empirical as well as theoretical contribution to a field of study that has widely been neglected: the spectrum of non-religiosity and unbelief in India, from religious indifferences to outright criticism of religion(s).

The third chapter distinguishes between the notions rationality, rationalism, and rationalisation as employed by Max Weber and reviews the way in which Weber and Charles Taylor understand the concept of disenchantment. The argument here is that Indian rationalists’ attempt to disenchant India on the basis of their belief that there are no mysterious incalculable forces that exist in the world. According to them, all things can, in principle, be explained by modern science. Further, reasons are given as to why some of Taylor's insights are drawn on in the ethnographic section in particular, without a full subscription to his larger theoretical approach.

This chapter gives an ethnographic account of how ANiS activists use their science-vans to “disenchant India”, i.e. they conduct programmes at schools, colleges and villages with the aim of “spreading scientific temper” and “eradicating superstition”. After a description of the science-van, the general structure of an ANiS programme is provided, with a special focus on the way in which ANiS activists expose and explain alleged miracles performed by godmen. It also discusses why the rationalists aim to inculcate doubt and a “spirit of inquiry” amongst their fellow Indians. Finally, the chapter analyses the specific perspective taken by ANiS activists on issues such as the existence of ghosts, the reasons for spirit possession, and also addresses the issue of a gendered rationalistic discourse.

The epilogue raises three questions which help to contextualize the description and analysis of ANiS within a broader context: Raised first is the empirical question as to what degree the Indian rationalist movement can be seen to be part of a global rationalist movement which spread from the 19^th century onwards and which also includes, for example, “New Atheists” such as Richard Dawkins. Secondly, on the basis of various materialistic and instrumentalist perspectives on death, the theoretical question is raised as to what degree the concepts of disenchantment and rationalisation help to situate the aims and activities, as well as the specific mode of unbelief of the Indian rationalists, within a larger trans-cultural and trans-historical perspective. Third comes the meta-theoretical, reflexive question of the role of the narratives of disenchantment and rationalisation and the debates around “rationality” within the Cultural Sciences, as well as in Indian intellectual life and cultural politics, and what consequences these might have for attempts to research rationalism in a wider perspective.

The growth of pentecostalism in South Korea since the 1950s, fueled largely by divine healing practices, is symbolized by the Yoido Full Gospel Church, the world’s largest Christian congregation, founded by David Yonggi Cho. Korea is second only to the United States in number of overseas missionaries. Ironically, divine healing first emerged in Presbyterian churches founded by “cessationist” Western missionaries who believed miracles had ended. Despite the “disenchantment” of the Western worldview, because missionaries emphasized native initiative in church planting, Korean evangelists were able to use divine healing and exorcism in conversion. In 1923, the Korean Presbyterian Church abandoned the doctrine of cessationism. Pentecostalism was appealing because it drew on traditional Korean cosmology of spirits and the supernatural and also presented Christianity as more effective than other religions in meeting this-worldly needs. It is misleading to reduce Korean pentecostal healing to “shamanism”; healing is better understood as indigenization of Christianity.

In this chapter, the author reflects on culture and what he calls “liberal anxieties.” He begins with a little autobiography, mentioning his education to make a general point about the idea of meritocracy and the pursuit of excellence. Liberalism has a natural affinity with meritocracy; it is attracted to an aristocracy of talent and critical of an aristocracy of birth. The author proceeds by discussing three major anxieties from which liberalism has suffered for 200 years, along with the fear of brutalization in Britain and America, anxiety about secularization and disenchantment, and the liberal response to terror. He also examines the interrelationships between politics, culture, and education before concluding with some remarks about the virtues of science and poetry as foundations of a liberal education.

This chapter seeks to address the present political tendencies within scholarship on the prima donna in order to investigate the strategic volatility of notions such as sublimity, excess, realism, transcendence, transgression, and narcissism—terms that have had a particularly weighted presence in the ongoing prima donna discourse, and which also remain sites of important political contestation within the ongoing problematic of capitalist modernity. The chapter points out that in the 1990s, scholars were concerned to focus on excess, while recently they have turned to a more sober kind of materialist disenchantment. Framing its argument within certain themes of contemporary political culture, this chapter questions this latter position, without denying the potential threats that themes of excess can hold for those (like female opera singers) they are used to represent.