Enchantment Without Providence: _Childhood Film, Unattended Metaphysics, and the Aesthetic Grammar of Unbelief_

This essay argues that one path to unbelief does not proceed through disenchantment, reduction, or the collapse of wonder, but through a subtler imaginative formation I call enchantment without providence. In a cluster of childhood fantasy and animated films, beauty, myth, sacred feeling, and moral seriousness remain fully real, yet they are not secured by a benevolent cosmic order that guarantees rescue, justice, or preservation. Read retrospectively, such films helped form a sensibility in which the world remained luminous while divine supervision became emotionally unnecessary. The result is not nihilism but a spirituality of exposure: reverence without assurance, depth without guardianship, significance without providence. The essay develops this concept in conversation with Weber's disenchantment thesis, Taylor's immanent frame, Bennett's secular enchantment, and Tolkien's eucatastrophe, arguing that enchantment without providence constitutes a formally distinct alternative to each.