Elizabeth Oldfield speaks with writer and editor Rod Dreher. 30/10/2024
Rod Dreher and Elizabeth Oldfield delve into Rod’s journalism of the Catholic sex abuse scandal, converting to Eastern Orthodoxy, his views on immigration and Donald Trump and supernatural experiences.
Chapters
00:00 What is Sacred to you? Rod Dreher answers
06:28 Family, Place, and the Weight of Expectations
10:16 Moral Foundations and Personal Crisis
17:54 The Benedict Option: A Call to Intentional Living
26:25 The Journey to Orthodoxy and the Search for Transcendence
30:39 Living in Wonder: Rediscovering the Enchanted World
33:03 The Unseen Battle: Spiritual Awareness
36:44 Encounters with the Divine: Transformative Stories
39:41 Spiritual climate
43:03 Conservative politics, Trump and faith
48:42 The willingness to suffer for your beliefs
The Sacred with Rod Dreher
What is Sacred to you? Rod Dreher answers
Elizabeth
Rod, I want to know what bubbled up for you in response to this question, what is sacred to you?
Rod Dreher
Well, presumably we take outside of that, the Christian faith, that is my most sacred thing. But aside from that, the first thing that came to mind was the innocence of children. Now, I didn’t realize how important this was to me until, as a journalist back in 2001, I started writing about the Catholic sex abuse scandal, which ended up wrecking my spiritual life. But it was a fortunate fall, maybe we can get into that later. But I was just completely undone by the way children were treated, and it brought me back to my school years as a boy and being bullied in middle school. You’re about 12, 13, 14 years old then, and the feeling I had then, or the reality I lived, that the adults in charge saw what was happening and wouldn’t stop it. So, for me, not only the innocence of children, but the protection of the weak and vulnerable, that became a core value for me. Also, your question made me think about how much a sense of underlying order and hierarchy is sacred to me. And this, I think, comes from having grown up in the American South. I’m from a small town in South Louisiana, and the home that I had was a very traditional home with a strong father. My dad was very much about hierarchy. And you say that today, a lot of people think that must be scary, it wasn’t. It was comforting. He was a gentle father in most respects, but he was also a strong man. I watched the news a lot as a kid, and I was very afraid of the world outside. It was the 1970s, it was a time of great chaos, but our home felt so ordered, and not only ordered, but loving. And that gave me a sense of safety growing up, and it has helped me to understand why it’s so important to have a sense of order, especially for raising kids. It’s also the case that growing up in the South, we are so much more formal than most Americans. So I grew up in a time when, and it’s still the case today, when children say to adults, “Yes, sir. No, ma’am.”, that sort of thing. People from elsewhere in America think that’s bizarre, but for me and for my generation, and I would say probably kids there today, again, it gives you a sense of safety, you know where you stand with people. We had in our town in the mid–70s, they built a nuclear power plant of all things, and we had a big influx of workers from the North. They came in, their kids flooded our local school and, Elizabeth, these children did not say, “Yes, sir. Yes, ma’am”, they called adults by their first name!
Elizabeth
What!
Family, Place, and the Weight of Expectations
Rod Dreher
My younger sister and I, we couldn’t even talk about it. It was as if these kids had shown up in our school with bones through their noses! It could not have been more scandalous. So maybe we took it a little too far, but that sense of order and hierarchy underlying the world made the scary parts of the world seem less so.
I would also say a sense of humor is sacred to me, because that is so lacking in the world today. A sense of humor goes very far with me. I would much rather be with someone who completely disagreed with me on religion and politics, but who knew how to tell a funny story or appreciate a funny story, than with someone who agrees with me but it is very grim. And I think this comes from my uncle Murphy, who died in the 80s. He was such a joker. When I was growing up, we would go over to his and my aunt’s house, and you would climb the stairs to the house built on the side of a hill, and there would be a gravestone in front of the door. It said, ‘Murphy Andrew Dreher Jr, born 1932’ no death date and his epitaph. Well, he had won this in a card game. He was playing with an undertaker who couldn’t pay his bill. So he said to my uncle, I’ll make you a tombstone, will that settled the debt? My uncle said, “Sure!” He wrote the epitaph on a cocktail napkin and forgot about it. A few months later, the undertaker calls my uncle and says, “Your tombstone is ready.” My uncle sent his sons to North Louisiana to pick it up, and then he put it on his front doorstep. He would go out at night to pee on the tombstone! He was a drinker. You can see what kind of guy this is. This was his way of cheating death. And he even threw a party for the tombstone, because he said, “I’m not going to be here to enjoy my wake, so we may as well have a party now.” Well, when he died in the 80s, his kid said “We have to put this on his grave.” So if you go to the little country cemetery where I’m from, you’ll see this tombstone with the epitaph ‘This ain’t bad once you get used to it.’
Elizabeth
Nice.
Rod Dreher
So a sense of humor is hugely important to me. Finally, I would have said family and place, because those were sacred to me. And then when my younger sister died in 2011, I moved with my wife and kids back to my hometown in Louisiana from Philadelphia, not because I particularly wanted to live in a little village on the river, but because I wanted to be around my family and to serve them and to raise my children around family. But when we got there, we realized that my family rejected us. They did not welcome us. It was a close family growing up, but it turns out that I had changed too much for them, and they thought I had betrayed them by being different. Now mind you, we were all religious, we were all more or less conservative. But the fact that we were city people, as my late sister had raised her children to believe, meant that we were not to be trusted. This absolutely gobsmacked me. I developed a chronic autoimmune disease Epstein–Barr, which is Mononucleosis. The doctors didn’t know if I was ever going to recover. This, in turn, caused the collapse of my marriage, and I spent 10 years with my now ex–wife and I struggling with the marriage and I came to see trying to figure out what was happening to us that my now late father and my late sister, they made idols of family and place, so much so that they could not accept me and my family back because we deviated too much from the structure that they needed to make sense of the world. And so, tragically, that ended up destroying the whole family and even my marriage, so I got divorced in 2022.
I still think family and place are very important, but I was able to see, through my own sickness and through reading Dante of all people, God really helped me deal with my sickness by reading Dante and taking it deeply into my heart, I came to see that one of the reasons I’ve been hit so hard by this was I had made an idol of family and place. And my Father, who was the embodiment of both, once I realized what had happened to me and also, by the way, realized during all this that I had never really thought that God the Father loved me. I knew he loved me because he’s God the Father, He has to but I knew He was very disappointed in me. Once, reading Dante and praying my way through all this, I realized that I had inadvertently confused my father here on earth with God the Father, and I repented of that. I took it to confession actually, and said, “I need to confess this.” Everything began to change for me, and I was able to accept the love of God, because I realized God is not my dad. And there’s a happy story, my dad apologized to me before he died, and I was holding his hand as he died at home, and so that was good. But I bring this up only to say that family and place – I’d made them too sacred. And that was one of the great disasters of my life.
Elizabeth
I think that’s a really helpful insight Rod. Because I ask people what’s sacred to them, to surface these deep guiding principles that we all have, but we very rarely talk about. And as a way of building our ability to understand each other and have curiosity and empathy towards people who might be coming from very different political or metaphysical worldviews to us, not because I think the sacred is always wholly good, right? It really depends what we choose to live by. Can you think of a time where one of those values has been compromised or challenged, or you’ve had to use it to guide yourself in your life.
Moral Foundations and Personal Crisis
Rod Dreher
Well, you know, I remember some years ago, have you heard of Jonathan Haidt’s moral foundations test theory?
Elizabeth
Yes, the tastebuds theory thing?
Rod Dreher
It made it so clear to me about the way I had navigated through life. And as it turns out, you know that for listeners and viewers who don’t know, Haidt believes that all humans base their moral worldview on a series of intuitions, one of which is harm and care – the idea of how, how powerful that should be. There is fairness, there’s loyalty, there’s authority, and there’s purity or sanctity. Well, I took this test, and I scored way over the average on all of them, except loyalty, where I was under the average. And I thought that was really interesting. But you know what it did? It made me understand why I reacted the way I did to the Catholic sex abuse scandal. I had been a Catholic convert at age of 26 I very strongly believed in Catholicism for a long time, a decade, at least, when I had to start writing about the sex abuse scandal as a journalist in New York. And I really thought that, as long as I had all of the syllogisms clear in my head, that my faith could withstand anything, but it wasn’t true. Being exposed to these stories about the horrific sex crimes against these children, and bishops who covered it up, and you tried to grind families down. Elizabeth, this just pushed all of my buttons on the moral foundations thing, but especially purity and authority. Because for me, as I mentioned earlier, the idea of an underlying moral order in the world that was guaranteed in my own family life by our father and the idea of sanctity of purity, particularly of children, that was just overwhelming. And it ended up breaking me as a Catholic. Just talking to people like I remember this farmer, Horace, he’s in Kansas, and his son, Eric Patterson, he killed himself at age 19, and they found out just before he murdered himself, that he had been abused by a priest. Turns out there were five suicides connected to this same priest in the Diocese of Wichita, Kansas. And the diocese had known about this priest, but just kept moving him around. The priest died in prison a few years ago, but this was the first time I as a journalist had encountered something like that. And I remember sitting in my office in New York City with Horace on the phone telling me this story, and I just went numb because I was a new father then. My firstborn, a son, was at home, and I knew that I was in different territory. Well, years go by, and finally by 2005, I was so filled with rage and fear that I couldn’t do it anymore. As a Catholic, I had lost all sense of belief in the authority of the Catholic Church, and it was like trying to hold on to an iron skillet over a flame, right? And I just couldn’t do it anymore. My wife was in the same boat. She came to me crying, and said, “I feel like for the first time in my life, I’m losing Jesus.” She had been raised Southern Baptist in Texas, and she had converted to Catholicism because of me. So we ended up becoming Eastern Orthodox, but I was a very different kind of Orthodox Christian. I don’t regret at all my crusade as a journalist to clean the church up, but I had to lessen my respect for church authority, just so I could hold on to Christ. So as an Orthodox Christian, I have tried very hard to stay away from the institutional church, except when I have to do it. And I have realized too, that as a Catholic, I was really intellectually arrogant. That’s not the Catholic Church’s fault, that’s me. And I’ve realized, don’t be that guy. Don’t be triumphalist, and instead, spend more time praying and fasting and trying to be a kind person, and less time with your head stuck in theology books.
Elizabeth
I just want to fill in some gaps of your story for listeners who won’t be familiar with it, because we’ve seen this picture of you growing up in Louisiana, being very, polite, deferential to your family and your elders. You’ve spoken about feeling like a little bit of an outsider there, you know, not into hunting, Europhile bookish. A lot of listeners will recognize themselves, we’ve got quite a nerdy audience, in a good way, they’re our people. And this kind of writing of either writing journalism, investigative journalism, now with your Substack and your books, has been your kind of vocational activity, I guess. How do you think of it? What are you trying to do with it?
Rod Dreher
That’s a great question. And I guess I’ve never sat down and thought about the capital M Mission. I just write. I love telling stories. I’m so curious about the world. So I guess that, insofar as I have a mission, it is not only to tell stories about the world, but to comprehend the world, to understand the world, and to talk about how we should understand the world, and even come to think of it, how we should live in an ordered way towards that world. What is the right way to treat the natural world? What is the right way to treat others? How should we think about the food we eat, the people we love, that sort of thing? I believe that there are many mysteries buried in the world outside our head. And I think my writing, my vocation as a writer, has been to explore those mysteries and to, either make them clear to people, or help draw other people into them, as I myself have been drawn into them.
The Benedict Option: A Call to Intentional Living
Elizabeth
That’s really helpful, this kind of understanding this world and the storytelling. And you’ve done it by writing Crunchy Cons, which, for UK listeners, we don’t really use the term ‘crunchy’, sort of hippie cons, environmentally aware, homegrown conservatives. You’ve done it by this kind of investigative journalism, the film criticism. And then my understanding is that you really reached a much higher level of prominence through this book, The Benedict Option, which lots of people have opinions about the haven’t read I’ve come to realize! And my understanding of what it says from not having read it is now different from having engaged with it properly. Could you just say, in short form, what was the argument of that book?
Rod Dreher
The argument of the book is that we are living at a time today that is akin to the fall of the Roman Empire in the West. There is a sense of cultural dissolution and a sense of a loss of the things that unite us and help us make sense of the world, the loss of our story. And I thought about St Benedict of Nursia, who emerged out of that, and he ended up going to the city of Rome, realizing it was chaotic, he was going to lose his faith if he stayed there, and he ended up retreating to a cave and prayed and thought and wrote the Rule of Saint Benedict, which was a simple manual for how to run a monastery. Which is to say a community, a tight community that was an island of safety and order in a time of chaos and dissolution. Well, I began to wonder: if St Benedict were alive today, what would he have to say to us? Because, as I should have said, Elizabeth, the Benedictine monks spread like wildfire throughout the Middle Ages, and they were one of the main forces that helped bring civilization back to Europe. So I’m wondering, what would St Benedict have to say to us today? Because most of us are not called to the monastery. But how can we live in ways that keep us focused on the faith and allow us to create a habitus, a way of living so we can live the faith out in this time, this post–Christian era of chaos? And in the book, I talk about all the different ways we might do that. But as you’ve said earlier, people who never read the book thought I was saying, “We have to head for the hills like St Benedict and live in a cave!” I never said that. It’s not possible. There is no escape. But if we are going to be faithful Christians for this post–Christian world, then we Christians are going to have to live in different, more intentional and disciplined ways so we can be for the world whom Christ wants us to be.
Elizabeth
So it’s probably helpful here to communicate a real point of similarity with us in that I’m speaking to you from a very small, intentional community. And the funny thing is, I’ve never read your book because I had assumed I wouldn’t like it for those aforementioned reasons that my kind of understanding of how myself as a Christian, lots of my listeners aren’t Christian. But my posture as a Christian was not retreat from the world, but an attempt to serve it right, to be loving my neighbor, but that to do that, I needed some deep roots, right? And so we have a not officially Benedictine, but Benedictine and inspired rule of life. We’ve turned the garage into a chapel. We do morning prayer, we do compline, we do hospitality. And we also got there – my husband is a philosopher – from reading the end of After Virtue, by Alasdair MacIntyre
Rod Dreher
That’s where I got it from!
Elizabeth
Yeah, the last paragraph in the first edition, and then in the second or third edition, when he does the updated preface, there’s another ending paragraph, which is one of the most inspirational things we’d ever read. So it’s been really interesting to me how public conversations work, and where we position each other, and the stories that we tell about each other. And I guess I wanted to just reflect a bit on one possible just temperamental difference or posture difference, about what are these communities for? So we’ve made ours in the city, and deliberately so, because it felt like the kind of classic, both as Christians or not as the more kind of counter–cultural types do. The desire to sort of pull the escape chord and move to rural areas is really strong, and that is some people’s charism, right? That is their calling, brilliant. But for me, it felt like the city is, not least the Bible starts in a garden and end in a city, but there is something about being amongst our neighbors, so that we know their needs right? So we have shared vulnerabilities right, that we have a stake in our civil cloth of where we live. We need the deep roots so that we can maintain our particularity. But then we need this hospitality. We need the open doors. We need to be porous. I guess, the difference in our posture is maybe national and, in the UK, we have never really been the majority for a long time and so I don’t feel this strong sense of like the shaping of Christian ideas have ebbed. I feel like they were ebbing a long time ago, for better or worse. And also a desire almost to move towards the culture through these communities, rather than away from it. Does that make any sense? I’m afraid there’s sort of some random threads in there, but maybe you could just say what it makes you think about?
Rod Dreher
Well, one of the things I try to bring out in The Benedict Option is the idea that not everyone is called to the same thing. I mean, as we’ve been talking, I was raised in the country, could not wait to get out and tried to move back. It didn’t work spectacularly. So insofar as I could live in a Benedict option, it would need to be an urban one. And some people are made that way. Others, like my friend Paul Kingsnorth, I visited him and his wife and kids out in rural Ireland. That was a man who was made for the country because he loves the natural world. Me, that’s where the snakes are, and the bugs, and the alligators, and Bigfoot. So yeah, I think that we do have to follow where God calls us and play to our own strengths. At the same time, even living in the country where I grew up, my parents’ house, we had an open door. We were always having people over cooking for them. My parents were beloved in the community, and I really learned a lot from them about why it’s important to cook for people, and to have people stay over till after midnight, even on a school night or a work night, if the conversation is good. So that is something that can be with us wherever we live. And oddly enough, the loneliest I’ve ever been, I have to say, has probably been living in a city, not so much where I live. Now. I live in the heart of Budapest, but living in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, sort of in the city, but in a suburban type subdivision where you don’t even know your neighbors. So this loneliness is not so much a matter of where we live, but how we choose to live. I do think, and it’s important to emphasize that your attitude towards serving the world. That’s what I think of when I think of The Benedict Option, not withdrawing from it. But as you say, it sounds perfect what you’re doing. I didn’t know this about you until just now.
Elizabeth
It’s definitely not perfect.
Rod Dreher
No. But I mean the idea that we withdraw from the world so we can be Christ for the world in an authentic way. One of the monks in Nursia, St Benedict’s hometown, where there’s a monastery that was re–founded in the year 2000, one of the Nursia monks said, “Listen, we have 1000s of people who come here as pilgrims. They come for the mass, they come for spiritual direction, all sorts of things. And we love having them. We want to serve them. But if we don’t follow the rule, and close our doors, and go into prayer and scripture, reading and doing our work according to the rule, then we’re not going to be able to help them when they come to us with their problems.” There’s a lot of wisdom there. You know, look in Scripture. Christ would go into the wilderness to pray and fast before he would go out to minister. There’s a rhythm of life that requires withdrawing and then going forth. And I have found in my own life, there are times when I just have to shut the laptop, and read, and be quiet so I can know what I think
The Journey to Orthodoxy and the Search for Transcendence
Elizabeth
You mentioned that you now live in Budapest, and I know that that’s part of a longer journey that you’ve referenced about this conversion to Eastern Orthodoxy. And I’d love to hear both what you think was the kind of deciding factor for you and why we are seeing that path… And maybe there have quietly always been converts, but it feels like more and more public people, thinkers in the public square are finding the same thing as you, that this is the spiritual tradition in which they can find their home. What do you think is going on there?
Rod Dreher
That’s a great question. I became Orthodox in 2006 because for my wife and me as Catholics, we believed, as a Catholic Church teaches that the Orthodox Church has valid sacraments, the idea of the Real Presence in the Eucharist that’s there in Orthodoxy. And we began to visit the Orthodox cathedral in Dallas, Texas, where we were living, not intending to convert, but because we wanted to be in the Real Presence, though we couldn’t receive Communion without this overwhelming fear and anger that we had at the Catholic Church. And I got there and realized, Elizabeth, that, wait a minute, this is what I thought the Catholic Church was going to be when I converted as a young man! This overwhelming sense of reverence and transcendence in the liturgy, the sense, because so often in the American Catholic Church, anyway, you get this, you know, this Father glad–handing who’s there to tell a joke, and you just feel like take this seriously, please, would you? But we had that sense of reverence, and it was a tactile reverence. You know, there was so much incense, so many icons, candles, things that you have in the Catholic Church, but not like in the Orthodox Church, where it’s overwhelming. And at last, my wife said to me, you can go back to Catholicism if you want, but this is my home. And I realized, yeah, this is my home too now.
Living in Wonder: Rediscovering the Enchanted World
What’s happening, Elizabeth, is that people are so desperate for a sense of the transcendent and the sense of something old. When Covid happened in the US in our little Orthodox parish in Baton Rouge, we suddenly saw this influx of young people, people in their 20s, some married, some not. And we would tell them, “We’re happy, you’re here, but what brought you here?” Well, it turns out that Covid scared them. They began to see that the world is far more fragile than they thought it was, and they told us that they were coming mostly out of suburban evangelicalism. They said, “We know we need a deeper tradition for hard times ahead”, and they saw that Orthodoxy has withstood the test of time, but it’s also the case that it is as I was mentioning, the sense of beauty and the sense of God’s presence in beauty is just overwhelming. And also, I should say, the saints. I mean in Orthodoxy, we have such a rich tradition of the saints as does Catholicism. But in Orthodoxy, it seems like the saints of the Early Church and the patristic period are much more emphasized. And when you read their stories and you read the stories of their martyrdom, there’s something that draws people into that. They want to know what kind of faith gave experience of faith gave people the courage to live and to die this way.
And in my own case, too, the thing that finally pushed me to convert was something like six or seven years after this event, I met an elderly Catholic Monsignor who was so saintly, he radiated light and joy. He was in his 90s, and I went to interview him for the paper and asked him about his conversion. And he had had two miracles that happened to him many, many decades earlier that brought him back from atheism and then sent him to the priesthood. And when that old man talked about this, his tears were coming down his cheeks like it had happened last week. I realized sitting there at 24 years old, as someone who was convinced of Christianity but was afraid to submit. I said “This old man was a witness. He changed his life in a radical way because of what he saw. I’ve got to change my life too. I can’t put it off anymore.” So you have this bookend of encounter with beauty and the encounter with radical goodness in the person of this Monsignor. And that’s what made the propositions of Christianity come alive for me. And I think in Orthodoxy, you can have that to an incredibly intense degree today, and that’s what’s drawing people in.
Encounters with the Divine: Transformative Stories
Elizabeth
Yeah, let’s talk about wonder then. And I really liked the line in your acknowledgements where you said, “Ross Douthat had said to you, need to write your ‘woo’ book”. It’s a fascinating exploration of some things that a lot of mainstream readers are going to be like, wow, we’re really in it now. What felt so important for you to write about what it means to live in an enchanted world and to posture ourselves towards it in ways that maybe humans did for centuries and we’ve possibly forgotten how to do?
Rod Dreher
Well, you know, I’ve been telling ‘woo’ stories about exorcism, about miracles, things that I’ve encountered, or people I’ve come to know have encountered for years, and you can really get a room in the in the palm of your hand when you tell these stories. And I was wondering, what’s the point of them? Why should they matter to people? And I think they should matter to people because they reveal a hidden order. They reveal that there is transcendence, that the world is not what we think it is. I’ve lived that way for almost my entire Christian life because I happen to be a weirdo magnet! You know, I attract people who have these stories, but also they’ve happened to me. I mean, I’ll give you a mild example, when I was in Rome for Pope Benedict XVI’s funeral a couple of years ago. I was in my hotel room getting ready to go down to St Peter’s Square early the morning for the funeral. I heard this crash behind me, and I whirled around and my desk chair was sitting in a pile of pipes and fabric. It was not a wooden chair, it was not an old chair, but I noticed that a bolt that was holding it all together had been sheared in two. I thought, good Lord! But I don’t have time to think about it, I’ve got to get down to St Peter’s. The funeral happened, and I was really angered by the homily Pope Francis gave, which I thought was really disrespectful to Pope Benedict, the man I revere. That afternoon, I met two American journalists who covered the Vatican at a restaurant in Vatican City, and we were talking about what happened, and both of these men were telling me how difficult as Catholics, their jobs were covering the Vatican because, as they agreed, so little about what happens in that place has anything to do with Jesus Christ. Well, then I told them the story about the weird thing that happened in my room that morning. As I told the story, Elizabeth, the unoccupied chair at the table flips over backwards. No one was sitting on it, and everyone just fell silent. Well, I texted a friend of mine who’s an exorcist in the Vatican. I said, “This is what happened in the hotel room. This is what happened in the restaurant. What do you think’s going on?” He said, “The enemy is just letting you know he’s got his eye on you.”
And that’s a small story. I’ve got some big ones that come out in the book. But it’s just a reminder that we live in a world that is filled with mystery and the unseen. There’s a story in the book about a Catholic couple I knew, friends from my New York days, the woman, Emma, was possessed and only found out she was possessed late in life. It’s a long story. I won’t get into it here. These are Upper East Side people, fancy people. The husband works in finance. They were faithful, church–going, Catholics and yet this happened. I remember her husband, Nathan, walking me back to my hotel after I visited them, and she manifested demonically in front of me. I said, “How has this changed you? This whole crazy experience of working with an exorcist and your wife?”, he said, “Now, when I walk down the street in Manhattan, I realize there is a tremendous spiritual battle going on around me all the time, and we can’t see it, but it’s there.”
This long, roundabout answer to your question is, I want people to be aware of this, that this is really going on, that, as St Paul says, we really struggle against principalities and powers. But not only the dark side of it, but the light side of it. I mean, there’s a story I tell in the book. You know, the story about Stefano, the younger Roman Guy raised in an atheist family, communist family, hated God, but then mysterious synchronicities began to happen to him. And he’s getting out of his car one day, he was 19 years old with his cousin. It was just before Christmas, they were going to a to a party, and he sees this homeless man across the street. The homeless man looks at him in the eye, rises up, walks over to him and said, “Stefano, I finally found you. Jesus Christ sent me, and he wants you to know that you don’t have to be afraid anymore. From this day you will serve him.” And then the homeless man begins telling Stefano about his whole life. Stefano told me he was crying. He couldn’t figure this out. What’s going on? He told me even that if his cousin had not been standing there watching and listening to this, he would have thought he hallucinated it. Stefano asked the homeless man, “Are you an angel?” No answer, just a smile. He said, “Well, what’s your name?” The man said, “You can call me Felice de Natale” Meaning ‘Merry Christmas’. This was right before Christmas. Then Merry Christmas falls on his knees, raises his hands, and begins to say the ‘Our Father’. And after each line, he would add these elaborate praises of God. He finishes, stands up, bows, walks away and disappears. Stefano converted. He converted his entire family, even his hardcore atheist father on his deathbed. Those stories happen. They really do happen. And I can sit there and give them an apologetic argument for Christianity all day long, and they can just flick it away, but you tell them a story like that, and they listen, it opens doors in their hearts and minds.
Spiritual climate
Elizabeth
Yes, it was really interesting reading, because one of the things that I write and speak about a lot is just the centrality of encounter. I’m a kind of charismatic Christian. I kind of started there and then lost my faith and then found my way back to something very austere and rational and intellectual. And now I find it quite mischievous, because I’m often speaking about these things in settings that are not Christian or Christians. And I went to church on Sunday and had a really big cry and a dance and needed to speak in tongues because of my sense that the transcendent and the mysterious and these moments of encounter and breaking through are, I think you use the line the ‘heart or centre of all true religion’. I was saying the other day that with my more sort of sociology of religion hat on, and I spend a lot of time listening to people outside the church, saying that we’re moving from the non–religious default being kind of atheisty, although more like agnosticy to the default amongst the non–religious, particularly amongst younger people, and particularly amongst women (partly, I think, driven by the climate crisis and by psychedelics) to more default pagany. And ‘pagany’ is not a helpful sociological category, but it’s the best I’ve got at the moment. And what I’m observing in my friends who are not who are nominations or outside the church, particularly among young women, this uptake and interest in astrology and tarot and people talking about themselves being witchy. And what your book made me think is that there is something related, or parallel, or reacting to willingness in the church to talk more explicitly about what has always been the sort of Orthodox cosmology of angels and demons essentially. What do you think is driving that? Why now? Why is this moment of what you see as being a kind of re–enchantment of the world happening?
Rod Dreher
Yeah, as I write in the book, one of the big turning points in this project was when a young Anglican ordinand, Daniel Kim, approached me at Oxford a couple of years ago and told me just what you said. He said to me, “Your generation, Rod (I’m in my mid 50s), thinks that New Atheism is a default. That’s not the case anymore with my generation.” He was 27 at the time, and he said just what you did, that they’re turning to the occult.
Well, I think what they’re doing here is, and also Christians, younger Christians and Generation Z who are turning to the more numinous focused Christian traditions, is they realize that rationalism is not enough, it’s very dry and moralism is not enough either. I remember back in gosh, 2014, I think it was, I was talking to a sociologist of religion in the US, Christian Smith, who’s done the most work about the religious lives of younger people. And he was the one who came up with the term that many people know now, ‘moralistic therapeutic deism’. And he said, this is a de facto religion of young people in America, whatever their tradition is. And it’s a very shallow, weak form of religion that tells you God exists. He wants you to be nice. You only have to call on him when you need something. And it’s very therapeutic, but it is moralistic too, but it’s not Christian, whatever it is. I think, Elizabeth, that a certain number of people, are finally getting fed up with that. And if they can’t find a connection to the transcendent, a real connection, not just an idealistic connection, but they can’t feel and experience God and the Holy in worship and otherwise, then they’re going to turn to these pagan religions and even the occult outright that will enable them to do that. As this exorcist in Rome told me, he said, “The thing is, when you call on the demonic, it will come. It will destroy you, but it will come. You can have these experiences if you want them.” God doesn’t work that way. God is real. Sometimes God does send angels to help us, or works with us through the miraculous. But God cannot be commanded like you know, you send up the prayer and then down comes the miracle. It doesn’t work that way, but we can connect with God. And I think that whether it’s through Pentecostalism, or charismatic forms of Catholicism or Anglicanism, or through Orthodoxy, the religious traditions that will focus on the weird and the ‘woo’ and the supernatural, (which is there, look at the Bible, for heaven’s sake!) they’re the ones that are appealing to people today. Tom Holland the other day told Justin Brierley that Christians ought to be leaning into the supernatural, because that’s the greatest gift you have to give the world today.
Elizabeth
Thank you. I want to try something, and I need to premise it with we haven’t met in person, although you’ve been living in my head for weeks…
Rod Dreher
I’m so sorry. I hope I’ve kept a tidy place!
Conservative politics, Trump and faith
Elizabeth
You’ve been very polite, very Southern! So I speak to people on this podcast from radically different worldviews. And I always start with my kind of two–dimensional, semiotic placeholder for them in my head, and then in the research, and then in the conversation that complicates. And so the things that I think I will be in a different place to them sometimes change. I think I’ll find more things in common than I thought. But the point of these kind of conversations is not what you often find in podcast land is people just talking to people they completely agree with, or people arguing with people they completely disagree with. And I’m trying to do something slightly different, which to seek to understand. And I think the key place where we have some difference is in our political postures, or maybe just our political intuitions. I’m wondering if it’s connected to what you said about your sacred values, and the first two, which were the protection of the vulnerable, and then order and hierarchy. And so the key thing I’d love you to try and help me understand. I really need you to know it’s not adversarial, I really want to know I’m curious. Let’s narrow it down, and I was listening to you talking about Andrew Sullivan. I know that you’re not planning to vote for Trump in any simple way where you think he’s a good guy, right, but it’s a kind of pragmatic decision, but that’s where you’re headed politically with him. And then writing about Viktor Orban and his approach to immigration and some of the things going on in Hungary. My political theology is complicated. I don’t know what I am. I thought it was a post–liberal, but now I just don’t believe you can be ‘post’ anything. So I’m just an accumulation of everything.
Rod Dreher
Call Mary Harrington, she’ll get you sorted.
Elizabeth
Thanks. Yeah, I spoke to her too. She’s so interesting. But I know that one of my key kind of bricks in my political theology is this, the quartet of the vulnerable from Bruggeman, this motif in the Hebrew Bible: the poor, the widow, the orphan, and the alien, and the stranger. And so what I react to in both Trump and Orban is in their posture towards the vulnerable. I can’t see it as connected to where my faith is coming from. So given we’re starting from the same premises, I’d love to just hear more about your political intuitions, your worldview, how it connects to your faith. That’s my question.
Rod Dreher
I should start out by making clear to your listeners, I am going to vote for Trump, but I’m not doing it with any confidence in Trump. I don’t think he’s a good man. I think he’s a destructive man, but I think he represents lesser destruction than the Democratic Party does. I write about politics, but I have no faith in politics anymore. I’m much more interested in religion and culture. If you’re talking about the vulnerable, I’m presuming immigrants, right?
Elizabeth
So of those four, that’s one. The alien and the stranger is what I think about in that one.
Rod Dreher
Yeah. Well, I should preface this too by saying that my kind of conservatism doesn’t really jive with mainstream American conservatism, which is more like right–wing liberalism in the sense free market and all that. My conservatism has always been more European, of more Catholic influence and the sense that I believe the good society is a society that, as Peter Maurin said, makes it easy to be good, and that serves the family, helping the family get along. And those are the changes I would like to see happen in the Republican Party, in the US. But about the migrant thing, we can’t have an ordered community if we can’t control who comes in to that community. Here in Budapest, Hungary is often criticized for having a very strict anti–migrant policy. But we get people coming here to Budapest from the UK and Western Europe who walk around and they’re like, this feels like Europe used to be, you don’t have the crime that has accompanied so much migration. There’s a sense of order here that doesn’t require police on every street corner. You don’t see police often at all here, but there’s just this unspoken sense of order because the people here share so much in common. Now, I do believe that as Christians, a government has a duty of care to help those who are suffering, the people coming out of the Middle East, for example. In 2015 they needed, they had a right to our help, but that doesn’t mean they have a right to come into our country and settle there. I had a visit this summer with an American guy who had been a student in Germany for the last two years. He said, “You know, it’s so striking here in Budapest to see women walking alone in the street, even late at night, and they’re safe.”
He said, “That doesn’t happen in Germany.”
And I said, “Why doesn’t it?”
“Well, migration.” And a lot of these men come from cultures that are very aggressive towards women. Well, who is the vulnerable in this case? Aren’t the women vulnerable? The women who actually live there? That’s where I come from. I don’t believe at all in cruelty to migrants, but I don’t believe that we should be so open to migrants that we neglect to protect the people who are actually our neighbors today. That’s where that comes from. But the demonization of migrants, as you know, subhuman, of course that’s evil, and I would never support that.
The willingness to suffer for your beliefs
Elizabeth
Thank you. That really helps me understand. And maybe tying together some of these themes, as we look at your ‘crunchy con’ stuff and The Benedict Option, and then this real, beautiful call towards enchantment and living in wonder, what is your hope for how Christians might engage in public in these times where we’re so divided and so quick to assume the worst of each other, quick to hate each other, quick to move away from each other, rather than towards each other?
Rod Dreher
Oh, you ask the hard questions! This is going to sound trite, maybe, but I think we just have to be as fully ourselves in the public square as we can be as Christians. One of the things I learned from doing Live Not By Lies, which is a book about the people who came to the West to escape Soviet communism who are now amid the ‘great awokening’, starting to see some of the things they ran away from rising in a very different key in the West. In other words, you have to be afraid of what you say, you could have your life on and so forth. Well, I wrote a book to explore what they meant by that, but also the second half of that book was about traveling throughout the former Soviet bloc, asking Christians who stayed behind, how should we then live? And the key thing I found is, you have to be willing to suffer publicly. Why is that? Because that’s how you prove what your faith is. I remember talking to this woman, Camilla Bendova, in Prague. She and her late husband, Vaclav, were the only Christians in the inner circle of Vaclav Havel and the other top dissidents. And I remember asking her, I said, “Camilla, was it difficult for you and your husband to be part of this circle, because Havel and the others, they were all hippies on the Left and Camilla and her husband definitely were not?” She said, “No, Rod It was not hard at all, because when you’re faced with the sort of thing we were all facing, the greatest thing you need to look for in other people and people you draw close to is courage.” She said, “You mustn’t imagine that our fellow Catholics had courage, many, most of them didn’t. They kept their heads down and wanted to stay out of trouble. But my husband and I felt that we couldn’t live that way. As Christians, we had a moral duty to God and to the community and to our own children to stand up and protest, and we knew the ones who would stand by us were Havel and this other crowd. They would look after our children, if we got sent to prison.” And so on and so forth.
Elizabeth
That’s quite a statement to be able to say, isn’t it?
Rod Dreher
Yeah and I took that to heart, and I think we all have to take it to heart. But the importance of suffering, willingness to suffer, that is the key aspect of our Christian witness today. We don’t have Gulags now, nobody’s going to prison yet, although in the UK, it’s things seem to be accelerating, but nobody’s going to prison for their faith yet. Nevertheless, it’s hard to stand in the public squares and speak metaphorically and to proclaim your Christian faith, especially in ways that conflict with what the broader culture believes. Because we are in a post–liberal time where people are completely intolerant if you hold a traditional Christian view on abortion, on sexuality and so on. If we can bear witness through suffering and through suffering well meaning joyfully, I think that’s very powerful to people. This is not to say, run into the middle of Piccadilly Circus and start ranting at people. I’m not talking about that. I’m talking about bearing witness in small ways, through acts of kindness and mercy and forgiveness. This is something that I struggle with myself, because I can have a quick temper. I’m very sharp with words. People always say to me, “I didn’t know you were actually such a nice guy because of the way you write.” I need to work on that! But, but it’s really true though.
I think this going back to my dad, even though my dad and my family and I had a really bad falling out, seeing how much my parents, even though they had strong views, cared about people around them, really made a difference to me. I remember when I was in college, my father, born in 1934 in a rural part of the Deep South, he had all the racial views you would expect of people of that generation. And I would come home from college in the ‘80s and lecture him with the Ciceronian order about the wrongness of his views. The thing is, this occurred to me later is that I held all the ‘correct views about race’, but I never lifted a finger to help an actual black person. My father had all the incorrect views about race, but there were lots of poor black people who lived around us and my dad was helping them. He would help them out, and he didn’t see a contradiction there. It was a rebuke to me when I got older and less self–righteous, pay more attention to what people do than what they say and they believe. My dad, even though he was a racist, he saw his duty to help his fellow man who was suffering. And the older I get, the more I see how morally complicated people’s lives are. In my own life, the more I see that the act is better than the idea.
Elizabeth
There’s so much more we could dig into, but I want to honor your time today. So Rod Dreher, thank you so much for speaking to me on The Sacred
Rod Dreher
It was a great pleasure. Thank you so much.
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