Scholars sometimes talk about this supernaturalization as a kind of “re-enchantment” of the world — as a growing awareness that the modern world is not stripped of the magical, as the German sociologist Max Weber and so many others once thought, but is in some ways more fascinated than ever with the idea that there is more than material reality around us. In part, I think, this is because skepticism has made the supernatural safe, even fun. It turns out that while many Americans may think that there are ghosts, they often don’t believe that ghosts can harm them.Jeez isn't that encouraging...
There is, however, a deeper reason. Just as spiritualism became a means to hold on to the supernatural claims of religion in the face of science in the 19th century, the supernaturalism of our own time may enable something similar. The God that has emerged in the post-1960s “renewalist” Christianity practiced by nearly a quarter of all Americans is vividly supernatural — a Jesus who walks by your side just as Jesus walked with his disciples. This assertion that the supernatural is natural helps to make the case for God in a secular age, because it promises people that they will know by experience that God is real.
Perhaps technology plays a role as well. Our world is animated in ways that can seem almost uncanny — lights that snap on as you approach, cars that fire into life without keys, websites that know what you like to read and suggest more books like those. The Internet is not material in the ordinary way. It feels somehow different. Maybe this, too, stokes our imagination.
This suggests there may be even more supernaturalism in years to come.
I think it all goes back to our biological nature.
