Rod Dreher


Ray Oliver Dreher, Jr., known as Rod Dreher, is an American writer and editor. He is a senior editor and blogger at The American Conservative and author of several books, including How Dante Can Save Your Life and The Benedict Option. He has written about religion, politics, film, and culture in National Review and National Review Online, The Weekly Standard, The Wall Street Journal, Touchstone, Men's Health, the Los Angeles Times, and other publications.
He was a film reviewer for the South Florida Sun-Sentinel and chief film critic for the New York Post. His commentaries have been broadcast on National Public Radio's All Things Considered, and he has appeared on CNN, Fox News, MSNBC, Court TV, and other television networks. The Benedict Option has been described as "the most discussed and most important religious book of the decade;" Dreher has been involved in multiple controversies regarding his views on race.

Early life and education

Dreher was born on February 14, 1967, in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. He was named after his father, Ray Oliver Dreher. He was raised in the small town of St. Francisville. He graduated with a Bachelor of Arts degree in journalism from Louisiana State University in 1989.

Career

Dreher began his career as a television critic for The Washington Times, and later worked as chief film critic for the New York Post and editor for the National Review. In 2002, Dreher wrote an essay that explored a subcategory of American conservatism he defined as "granola conservatism", whose adherents he described as "crunchy cons." He defined these people as traditionalist conservatives who believed in environmental conservation, frugal living, and the preservation of traditional family values, while also expressing skepticism towards aspects of free-market capitalism. He portrayed "crunchy cons" as being generally religious. Four years later, Dreher published a book expanding on the themes of this manifesto, Crunchy Cons: How Birkenstocked Burkeans, Gun-Loving Organic Gardeners, Evangelical Free-Range Farmers, Hip Homeschooling Mamas, Right-Wing Nature Lovers, and Their Diverse Tribe of Countercultural Conservatives Plan to Save America.
From 2006, Dreher maintained a Beliefnet blog entitled "Crunchy Con"; the blog was renamed "Rod Dreher" in 2010, with a shift in focus from political to cultural topics. During this time Dreher worked as an editorial writer and columnist for The Dallas Morning News, which he left in late 2009 to become the publications director for the John Templeton Foundation. On August 20, 2011, Dreher announced on Twitter that he was leaving the Templeton Foundation in order to return to full-time writing. In 2013, Dreher published a book titled The Little Way of Ruthie Leming about his childhood in Louisiana and his sister's battle with cancer. In 2015, Dreher published How Dante Can Save Your Life, a memoir about how reading Dante's Divine Comedy helped him after his sister's death. Dreher has maintained a blog at the American Conservative, where he is now senior editor, since 2008; in 2017 the blog received on average more than a million page views per month.

''The Benedict Option''

Dreher has written extensively about what he calls the "Benedict Option", the idea that Christians who want to preserve their faith should segregate themselves to some degree from "post-Obergefell" society, which he sees as drifting ever further away from traditional Christian values. Dreher suggests that Christians should endeavor to form intentional communities, such as Trinity Presbyterian Church in Charlottesville, the Bruderhof, or the School for Conversion. The phrase "Benedict Option" was inspired by Alasdair MacIntyre's 1981 book After Virtue, and refers to the 6th century monk Benedict of Nursia. The publication of Dreher's book The Benedict Option in 2017 was widely noted in both the secular and religious press, and earned Dreher profiles in The Washington Post and the New Yorker.
The Benedict Option was widely reviewed, and received responses ranging from the laudatory to the highly critical. David Brooks of The New York Times described it as "the most discussed and most important religious book of the decade," while also expressing concern that "by retreating to neat homogeneous monocultures, most separatists will end up... fostering narrowness, prejudice and moral arrogance." Rowan Williams, the former Archbishop of Canterbury, wrote that the prominence the book gives to "same-sex relations", as opposed to "poverty, racism and war," "reinforces the common perception that the only ethical issues that interest traditional Christians are those involving sexual matters." Williams nonetheless suggested that "The book is worth reading because it poses some helpfully tough questions to a socially liberal majority, as well as to believers of a more traditional colour." Russell Moore, the president of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention, described Dreher's book as "brilliant, prophetic, and wise," while Alan Levinovitz, a religious scholar at James Madison University, described it as "spiritual pornography", the soul of which "is not love of God; it is bitter loathing of those who do not share it."
The "Benedict Option", as a strategy for mission and renewal, has inspired wide-ranging debate in the Christian community, particularly that of the United States. Various conferences and symposia have been held to discuss the idea, and it has provoked exchanges between multiple Christian theologians and commentators. The Canadian theologian James K.A. Smith, for instance, has written a number of critical responses to the idea, including one in which he argues that the world Dreher laments of the loss of "tends to be white. And what seems to be lost is a certain default power and privilege." Dreher has responded at length to these charges on his blog, suggesting that Smith engages in "motivated reasoning." The left-wing Catholic writer Elizabeth Bruenig has argued that Dreher's strategy of "withdrawing from conventional politics is difficult to parse with Christ’s command that we love our neighbors," while the Christian literary scholar Alan Jacobs has responded to these and other criticisms of the "Benedict Option" in a range of publications. The writer Leah Libresco has published a guide to the practical aspects of building "BenOp communities".

Views on sexuality and gender

Dreher holds to what he describes as biblical Christian teaching on sexuality and gender, including on the sinfulness of same-sex sexual relations and the naturalness of male-female difference. While some writers have praised Dreher's insights into the fundamental nature of the social changes caused by the Sexual Revolution others have argued that Dreher has not sufficiently grappled with the problem of how conservative Christians should live alongside those whose lifestyles they disapprove of, and have criticized the language Dreher has used to describe gay people. Dreher has published numerous articles expressing alarm at the growing visibility of transgender people in American society, which he sees as part of a "technology-driven revolution in our view of personhood." He has been described in The Guardian as "a man who appears to view fomenting transgender panic more as a vocation than a job". In September 2018, Dreher was criticized for suggesting that Brett Kavanaugh should not be disqualified from sitting on the Supreme Court even if he had been guilty of attempted rape as a teenager, while having previously suggested, in a blog post entitled "Tips For Not Getting Shot By Cops", that the police killing of the teenager Michael Brown was justified, in part because Brown was a "lawbreaker" who "hung out with lawbreakers".

Views on race and immigration

Dreher is a critic of large-scale immigration to the United States and Europe; he has defended the concept of Western Civilization and condemned identity politics associated with race. He has been involved in multiple controversies relating to his writings on race and immigration. In 2001, Dreher published an article mocking the funeral celebrations of the African-American singer Aaliyah, and subsequently reported having received threatening phone calls from people with "black accents". Subsequent to the Charlottesville Unite the Right rally of August 2017, Dreher was criticized for arguing that left-wing identity politics had "summed the demons" of white nationalism, and for suggesting an equivalence between left-wing identity politics and white supremacism. In June 2018, Dreher attracted controversy for comparing African immigration to Europe to a "barbarian invasion". Also in June 2018, Dreher was criticized for devoting a blog post to reproducing a letter from a reader complaining that white liberals "want to give away their own country to non-whites", and warning of an imminent race war. While not endorsing the reader's comments, Dreher described them as "intelligent" and "debatable". In October and November 2018, Dreher was compared to the German Christians of the 1930s for writing with respect to a Central American migrant caravan, "If everybody is your neighbor, then nobody is," and asking, "How far would we go to defend the sovereignty of our nations from invaders who want to cross our borders not with weapons to conquer, but nevertheless to settle here?" Subsequent to the Christchurch mosque shootings of March 2019, Dreher strongly condemned the shooter's actions and aspects of his ideology, but also commented that the shooter had "legitimate, realistic concerns" about "declining numbers of ethnic Europeans" in Western countries; as a result of these comments, multiple scholars criticized the University of Wollongong's Ramsay Center for Western Civilization for inviting Dreher as a speaker. Dreher has said that his concerns about immigration stem from sympathy for the less well-off, whom he argues are most negatively affected it, and by a desire to preserve Western cultural traditions.
In January 2018, Dreher attracted widespread criticism for his defense of Donald Trump's comments regarding "shithole" countries, and in particular for his suggestion that readers would object to Section 8 housing being built in their neighborhoods because "you don’t want the destructive culture of the poor imported into your neighborhood." In response to these remarks, Sarah Jones of The New Republic described Dreher as having a "race problem". Her article also referred to Dreher's avowed admiration for Jean Raspail's 1973 novel Camp of the Saints, which has been described as "racist" by the Southern Poverty Law Center; Jones noted that Dreher has strongly criticized the novel's use of derogatory language to describe non-Westerners. Dreher's comments on Section 8 housing were defended by the columnist Damon Linker, who wrote: "Every time a wealthy liberal enclave takes a NIMBY position on affordable housing, it shows he has a point about the need for greater honesty on these issues".

Views on international affairs

Dreher has been a consistent critic of the role of Islam in international affairs, but has shifted in his view of the efficacy of foreign military interventions. Subsequent to the September 11 attacks, Dreher published numerous articles that were critical of Islam, including one in which he praised the Italian anti-Islamic writer Oriana Fallaci's book The Rage and the Pride as containing "much truth" to "shock awake a noble civilization hypnotized by multiculturalist mumbo-jumbo"; he also noted that the book contained a "few ugly parts". Fallaci's book has been described as exhibiting "extremely blatant racism" by the Canadian scholar Sherene Razack. In 2002, Dreher described the Dutch anti-Islamic politician Pim Fortuyn as a “martyr in the war on political correctness.” Dreher supported the Iraq War in 2003, but later came to believe that the invasion was a mistake; he now supports a non-interventionist foreign policy. He was critical of US President Donald Trump's decision to order missile strikes in Syria in April 2017.
Dreher has expressed support for various conservative governments and parties in Europe. He has written supportively of the government of Viktor Orban in Hungary, and has praised the French Front National politician Marion Maréchal-Le Pen. He has written that although Francisco Franco and his regime were not "without sin", he is "glad that Franco won" the Spanish Civil War.

Postliberalism

Dreher has been associated with a recent political movement that has been alternatively labelled "post-liberalism", "anti-liberalism", "national conservatism", or "the new nationalism". The movement has been defined in connection with a manifesto entitled "Against the Dead Consensus", published in First Things in March 2019, which Dreher was a signatory to, and which argues that the "pre-Trump conservative consensus" "failed to retard, much less reverse, the eclipse of permanent truths, family stability, communal solidarity", and "too often bowed to a poisonous and censorious multiculturalism"; the manifesto argues for a conservatism of national, communal, and familial solidarity. Critics of the movement have compared its proponents to the intellectual defenders of fascism in the 1930s, while those sympathetic to the movement have argued that "there is nothing shameful about love of one's own, the impulse that links individual self-regard and love of family to affection for one's own neighborhood, town or city, state, and political community as a whole."

Controversies

In the early 2010s Dreher involved himself in a controversy surrounding Metropolitan Jonah, then serving as the primate of the Orthodox Church in America, who had encountered resistance in his attempts to involve the OCA more heavily in political issues such as abortion and gay marriage. Dreher started an anonymous website called OCA Truth, which published alleged private information about an opponent in the controversy. Dreher's connection with the website was exposed when emails connected to the website were leaked. Dreher later described his involvement in the affair as "foolish".
In May 2017 Dreher published, without context, remarks of Professor Tommy Curry of Texas A&M University, quoting a single sentence from the remarks misleadingly to suggest that Curry had incited violence against white people. Curry was subsequently subjected to a wave of racist abuse and intimidation. Dreher said that he did not seek comment from Curry prior to publishing his blog post, and Curry received the support of his faculty colleagues and university president. In response to the controversy, the Purdue University philosopher Leonard Harris described Dreher as a "white nationalist". Dreher rejects this label and has defended his role in the controversy.

Satire

Dreher has attracted frequent satirical coverage on the popular political and humor podcast Chapo Trap House. The podcast's hosts have mocked what they see as Dreher's tendency to associate phenomena with which he disagrees, such as the breakdown of family life, transgenderism, the increasing availability of pornography, and immigration from Latin America, with demonic forces.

Personal life

Dreher has been married since 1997 to Julie Harris Dreher, and is the father of three children. He lives in East Baton Rouge Parish, Louisiana. Raised a Methodist, he converted to Roman Catholicism in 1993, and subsequently wrote widely in the Catholic press. Covering the Catholic Church's sex abuse scandal, starting in 2001, led him to question his Catholicism, and on October 12, 2006, he announced his conversion to Eastern Orthodoxy. At the time, Dreher had argued that the scandal was not so much a "pedophile problem", but that the "sexual abuse of minors is facilitated by a secret, powerful network of gay priests", referred to as the "Lavender Mafia".

Books