Some bad news from Rod Dreher today, more personal than political. But to me it feels existential. In all honesty this is hitting me harder than it should. Rod Dreher was an enormous influence on my own journey from atheism to Christianity. And although it might seem shallow to admit this, it was Rod’s portrait of his own life that captured my imagination as a young agnostic. Dreher’s blog made me
Apr 23, 2022·edited Apr 28, 2022Liked by Dave Greene
I appreciate very much that u came to Christ because of Dreher. That's it. You seriously overestimated this guy. Yes he has one mantra and it is not a good one in my humble opinion. I'll go farther and call him a pseudo-intellectual and a pseudo-conservative. It's okay to let go.
Does an author's personal life matter? To my mind, that depends on the subject of their authorship. If they are advocating a lifestyle, particularly one that claims spiritual or moral authority, then yes it absolutely does.
I'll barely shrug when someone like Foucault is outed as a diabolical paedophile, primarily because his general philosophical analysis can be divorced from who he was (to an extent. If anything the logical outcome of his analysis was the lifestyle, so it seems rather pathetic to scream hypocrisy at him). Ditto with Nietzsche being a 19th century incel or Marx treating his servants appallingly. They all have analysis of how the world works that can, in my mind, be divorced from who they were as people.
However someone like Ravi Zacharias (a prominent christian apologetic) being posthumously discovered as a sexual predator casts a shadow over his entire work. Ditto for similar scandals in the Catholic church. A lifestyle was explicitly sold (not implicitly the way someone like Dan Savage or other progressives do) and the sellers did not see fit to apply it in their own lives. What does that say to all those who bought from them?
Jordan Peterson's benzo fuelled breakdown doesn't invalidate something like maps of meaning but it does make one double take at the reheated stoicism hawked in '12 rules for life' regardless of whether they are good principles in general.
Part of that pain is, as you have mentioned, the fact that these people are ambassadors of a faith and a lifestyle to the outside world. We on the inside are taught not to put our faith in men as you mentioned, but on a pragmatic level it tosses ammunition to opponents, good and bad faith ones alike.
I have followed Dreher since reading the Benedict Option. The jet setting didn’t really match the localism and culture formation he preached. I knew something was seriously wrong when he entered his Orban phase. Who spends months in Hungary away from the wife and kids?
All of this is to say I wish his desire for slow, patient, and quiet spiritual formation had been granted him-and his family.
I always wonder when people talk about the value of traditions, what they actually think about the truth of the traditions. I can understand converting from protestant to orthodox because you see "value" there, but if your beliefs about Mary, intercession of the Saints, organizational authority can change so quickly; how strong and grounded were they before really?
I find myself trusting the "big brains" more, or the "slightly autist" that are going to be more honest with you about what they actually believe and why.
Ravi Zacharias and Jordan Peterson always gave off the classic midwit vibes of never being able to move off their basic talking points in any discussion or expanding on them. While William Lane Craig keeps tackling difficult subjects in theology like free will, God and time, historical Adam (placing Adam 750k years ago), quantum mechanics.
As time marches on "just conserve the 1990s" position will keep growing weaker and weaker.
Any marriage break up is sad. But we are fallen souls in a fallen world. I think there is a tendency for us all to place too much on the shoulders of high profile individuals. My own path to Christianity, tracked almost exactly that of Paul Kingsnorth - combative green lefty, Anglo-Saxon pagan (not Wiccan) and finally the Catholic Church (rather than orthodoxy). We're the same age and entered into this new life at more or less the same time (during Covid). I have managed to get three of my four children and cradle Catholic wife to come with me....but it is a struggle doing more than simply going to church on Sunday. I try to pray everyday with my girls. I'm a university professor and the context of my life is progressive to the nth degree - very uncomfortable. And my marriage - although very solid and loving certainly has its ups and downs....And I suppose my response to reading of Rod Dreher's situation is to pray and say 'there but for the grace of God'. Nobody ever said it was easy. And so far, I haven't been martyred. I think all that we can do is to look for models of political economy and society that make it easier for individuals and families to live productively and generously in their faith. The only model that makes sense for me is a strong civic-national state, rooted in a political economy of subsidiarity and distributism (rather than the collectivist, top down welfare state) and predicated on reciprocating households and families rather than simply entitled individuals with rights
Actually the reason I found this website was doing more research on Dreher. He is going to be speaking at the synod for the ACNA church coming up first week of May-- For which I have canceled my attendance because of Dreher. I do not understand why they asked him to speak. If most of the people who attended the synod had actually seen many of his blog entries in the last few years they would have NOT agreed with him. Also I do not agree that we are Christians in exile sitting on some scrolls in a cave waiting for the bad things to blow over so we can Breathe new life into Christianity. Speaking for myself and many others we are in a fight for souls In the here and now. We are also in a fight to save our children. There is no exile going on and there will not be any exile going on. As much as Satan would like it... it is not so.
I watched Ravi Z's personal life come to light, and honestly, it wasn't surprising. I've come to cynically accept that anyone in the spotlight is going to go down this path, it's just a question of how serious their transgressions will turn out to be. I don't know if its a spiritual issue pertaining to the Falleness of the world or if its psychological on the part of people who "hit it big", but its a pretty steady pattern. Personally, I've been all that impressed by Dreher, so I can't say that parting ways with him ought to be all that big a deal. We should be engaging with the writings of the Saints, not the blogs of pseuds, after all.
Why was the story of Peter denying Christ three times included in the New Testament?. More importantly, why did Peter himself make sure it was included?
Few of us can live up to the quality of our ideals. That says nothing about the value of the ideal, or about our personal strivings towards that ideal.
All human heroes have feet of clay. Admire what is good about someone, but never forget there is also bad. The bad may be invisible, but it is surely there. Be cautious about your judgment about what is bad. Do the same for yourself. Pray for wisdom, for discernment, for courage.
I hadn't heard about this. That is disappointing. I'd never actually followed Dreher that closely. Live Not by Lies was very good, but I might have thought less of it if I'd been privy to those "boomer" posts you refer to. In some ways, I think I feel the same way about my father, a basically decent man and a believer but nevertheless a too-comfortable-with-this-world hedonist. I feel myself drawn to a what asceticism I am able to manage. My father is what they might have previously called a "man of letters," full of fine words and fine sentiments, but as I've grown into manhood, it's come to seem hollow, a facsimile of something virtuous. I think that through these struggles, we are going further, understanding our circumstances better, becoming more serious, becoming more and more the genuine article. I'm a long time fan of your work Dave, but I'd not found my way here. Thanks for writing this.
I didn't take the same path you did with Dreher--but I can appreciate this post. I discovered Dreher through Andrew Sullivan--another blogger I can no longer read--and although I never really thought anything he wrote made much sense--I could see that he earnestly believed it--and his moments of humility and reflection could sometimes be really insightful.
In those moments, I did learn things and see the human side of Rod and could perceive the kind of vision that he might be following.
But that vision was never actually fleshed out in any kind of realistic way. Granted--as long time atheist (since I was a kid and discovered Santa wasn't real)--but also culturally catholic one who believes that you are only a good person if you do good stuff in the world--and also an engineer (bachelors) and Historian (masters & Ph.D)--I have some pretty high standards for believing in theories/worldviews/etc... and Rod's work was always ESPECIALLY WEAK in these areas. The Benedict Option was just pure hogswash when it came to any kind of analysis or even for ideas for how to move forward. Perhaps if Rod had ever taken a moment to realize that the greatest threat to the Christian worldview was not the Woke-Left activists (who have no real power outside of time-limited college experiences for rich coasties)--but rather was from the kind of rabid short-term oligarchic capitalism championed by the politicians that Rod saw as a necessary evil --then he might have created something worthwhile.
But he didn't. And he turned to the dark side of hatred and bile a long, long time ago. That's when I stopped reading him because , really, there was nothing more to learn. He was taking the easy path at that point--and it is hard not to believe that it didn't then also shade into his personal life. When you spend so much of your time finding ways to disdain folks--and you make your living from that--then it will affect you.
Anyway... I hope his family is okay and that Rod maybe thinks about how he got to where he is today. My rational mind thinks this is unlikely--as Rod stopped apologizing for mistakes a long, long time ago.. and for all of his talk about Virtue ethics, his actual attempt to live such virtues is hard to see.
Finally--as someone who doesn't believe but who totally doesn't care if you do believe (and only really cares that people try to help others!) --I hope that you do keep on trying to make the world a better place despite Rod's failings. An old Engineering professor I had--Prof. Kuznetsov who was a Russian Jew who escaped the Soviet Union in the early 80s I believe--once told us that while it is good to learn from one's own mistakes--it's better to learn from the mistakes of others.
I don’t know Ron or really follow him, though I’ve followed your channel and projects. I think you need to step back and look at what he’s written and why it resonated with you. The good that Ron has done for people like you is still good, even if Ron has turned onto a bad path. If (god forbid) you turned out to be some despicable monster I wouldn’t let that take away from your points about the problems of modernity. It wouldn’t invalidate your thoughts on magical words.
You’re a pretty smart guy, and if you saw some truth in Ron’s writings it was probably there. I know you’re able to disagree with him and criticise him, so you aren’t some kind of sycophant. Don’t let his mistakes drag you down.
I discovered Dreher reading an article, years ago, that he wrote during Lent, noting his Orthodox faith within it, and recounting his charming interactions with his parish Priest. Looking him up, I was shocked that he had converted from Catholicism to Orthodoxy, as intellectually, given his beliefs (and I'm a Catholic) it wasn't really possible to reconcile. In his writings he remained very Catholic, enough so that I once heard a Catholic commentator sort of mention it with irritation to the effect that Dreher needed to concede that he remained a Catholic.
I quit reading him quite awhile back as he evolved somehow from a writer to be taken seriously, into something else. Right around the time he wrote The Benedict Option, I really began to doubt him, although I have not read it. More recently he's seemed to slide into the very bitter and flirting with dangerous political ideas, although I'll still read one of his columns from time to time.
Am I disappointed (I just read of the divorce here for the first time)? No, not really. I won't judge him either. . . unless he were to remarry, at which time I'd regard that as hypocritical. As a Catholic, I'm in the no divorce camp, but I recognize that civil divorces do occur in our current society. But, saying that, I'd note that I have a cousin very close to my own age, who gave up being a devout Catholic to become an Evangelical Christian in order to marry. . . and then went on to cheat on his wife. They reconciled, but I've always thought that if you can cheat of a faith you are convinced of in an existential way, well the door is pretty much open to anything.
Well, I hope he reconciles with his family and that he can reconcile his conscience to where he needs to return to.
No, it's not self flagellation: it's a lack of Christian love. Please Mr. Greene, "take the plank out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to remove the speck from your brother’s eye..”
Oh for Christian leaders who are humble rather than self aggrandizing, who choose reconciliation over judgment, and most importantly who put put God's glory above their own piety.
It warmed my heart when you said you were praying the rosary with your wife. I wish you the best
I appreciate very much that u came to Christ because of Dreher. That's it. You seriously overestimated this guy. Yes he has one mantra and it is not a good one in my humble opinion. I'll go farther and call him a pseudo-intellectual and a pseudo-conservative. It's okay to let go.
Hi Dave,
Does an author's personal life matter? To my mind, that depends on the subject of their authorship. If they are advocating a lifestyle, particularly one that claims spiritual or moral authority, then yes it absolutely does.
I'll barely shrug when someone like Foucault is outed as a diabolical paedophile, primarily because his general philosophical analysis can be divorced from who he was (to an extent. If anything the logical outcome of his analysis was the lifestyle, so it seems rather pathetic to scream hypocrisy at him). Ditto with Nietzsche being a 19th century incel or Marx treating his servants appallingly. They all have analysis of how the world works that can, in my mind, be divorced from who they were as people.
However someone like Ravi Zacharias (a prominent christian apologetic) being posthumously discovered as a sexual predator casts a shadow over his entire work. Ditto for similar scandals in the Catholic church. A lifestyle was explicitly sold (not implicitly the way someone like Dan Savage or other progressives do) and the sellers did not see fit to apply it in their own lives. What does that say to all those who bought from them?
Jordan Peterson's benzo fuelled breakdown doesn't invalidate something like maps of meaning but it does make one double take at the reheated stoicism hawked in '12 rules for life' regardless of whether they are good principles in general.
Part of that pain is, as you have mentioned, the fact that these people are ambassadors of a faith and a lifestyle to the outside world. We on the inside are taught not to put our faith in men as you mentioned, but on a pragmatic level it tosses ammunition to opponents, good and bad faith ones alike.
Such is the way of these things unfortunatley.
I have followed Dreher since reading the Benedict Option. The jet setting didn’t really match the localism and culture formation he preached. I knew something was seriously wrong when he entered his Orban phase. Who spends months in Hungary away from the wife and kids?
All of this is to say I wish his desire for slow, patient, and quiet spiritual formation had been granted him-and his family.
I always wonder when people talk about the value of traditions, what they actually think about the truth of the traditions. I can understand converting from protestant to orthodox because you see "value" there, but if your beliefs about Mary, intercession of the Saints, organizational authority can change so quickly; how strong and grounded were they before really?
I find myself trusting the "big brains" more, or the "slightly autist" that are going to be more honest with you about what they actually believe and why.
Ravi Zacharias and Jordan Peterson always gave off the classic midwit vibes of never being able to move off their basic talking points in any discussion or expanding on them. While William Lane Craig keeps tackling difficult subjects in theology like free will, God and time, historical Adam (placing Adam 750k years ago), quantum mechanics.
As time marches on "just conserve the 1990s" position will keep growing weaker and weaker.
Any marriage break up is sad. But we are fallen souls in a fallen world. I think there is a tendency for us all to place too much on the shoulders of high profile individuals. My own path to Christianity, tracked almost exactly that of Paul Kingsnorth - combative green lefty, Anglo-Saxon pagan (not Wiccan) and finally the Catholic Church (rather than orthodoxy). We're the same age and entered into this new life at more or less the same time (during Covid). I have managed to get three of my four children and cradle Catholic wife to come with me....but it is a struggle doing more than simply going to church on Sunday. I try to pray everyday with my girls. I'm a university professor and the context of my life is progressive to the nth degree - very uncomfortable. And my marriage - although very solid and loving certainly has its ups and downs....And I suppose my response to reading of Rod Dreher's situation is to pray and say 'there but for the grace of God'. Nobody ever said it was easy. And so far, I haven't been martyred. I think all that we can do is to look for models of political economy and society that make it easier for individuals and families to live productively and generously in their faith. The only model that makes sense for me is a strong civic-national state, rooted in a political economy of subsidiarity and distributism (rather than the collectivist, top down welfare state) and predicated on reciprocating households and families rather than simply entitled individuals with rights
Actually the reason I found this website was doing more research on Dreher. He is going to be speaking at the synod for the ACNA church coming up first week of May-- For which I have canceled my attendance because of Dreher. I do not understand why they asked him to speak. If most of the people who attended the synod had actually seen many of his blog entries in the last few years they would have NOT agreed with him. Also I do not agree that we are Christians in exile sitting on some scrolls in a cave waiting for the bad things to blow over so we can Breathe new life into Christianity. Speaking for myself and many others we are in a fight for souls In the here and now. We are also in a fight to save our children. There is no exile going on and there will not be any exile going on. As much as Satan would like it... it is not so.
I watched Ravi Z's personal life come to light, and honestly, it wasn't surprising. I've come to cynically accept that anyone in the spotlight is going to go down this path, it's just a question of how serious their transgressions will turn out to be. I don't know if its a spiritual issue pertaining to the Falleness of the world or if its psychological on the part of people who "hit it big", but its a pretty steady pattern. Personally, I've been all that impressed by Dreher, so I can't say that parting ways with him ought to be all that big a deal. We should be engaging with the writings of the Saints, not the blogs of pseuds, after all.
Why was the story of Peter denying Christ three times included in the New Testament?. More importantly, why did Peter himself make sure it was included?
Few of us can live up to the quality of our ideals. That says nothing about the value of the ideal, or about our personal strivings towards that ideal.
All human heroes have feet of clay. Admire what is good about someone, but never forget there is also bad. The bad may be invisible, but it is surely there. Be cautious about your judgment about what is bad. Do the same for yourself. Pray for wisdom, for discernment, for courage.
Pray for mercy.
I hadn't heard about this. That is disappointing. I'd never actually followed Dreher that closely. Live Not by Lies was very good, but I might have thought less of it if I'd been privy to those "boomer" posts you refer to. In some ways, I think I feel the same way about my father, a basically decent man and a believer but nevertheless a too-comfortable-with-this-world hedonist. I feel myself drawn to a what asceticism I am able to manage. My father is what they might have previously called a "man of letters," full of fine words and fine sentiments, but as I've grown into manhood, it's come to seem hollow, a facsimile of something virtuous. I think that through these struggles, we are going further, understanding our circumstances better, becoming more serious, becoming more and more the genuine article. I'm a long time fan of your work Dave, but I'd not found my way here. Thanks for writing this.
I didn't take the same path you did with Dreher--but I can appreciate this post. I discovered Dreher through Andrew Sullivan--another blogger I can no longer read--and although I never really thought anything he wrote made much sense--I could see that he earnestly believed it--and his moments of humility and reflection could sometimes be really insightful.
In those moments, I did learn things and see the human side of Rod and could perceive the kind of vision that he might be following.
But that vision was never actually fleshed out in any kind of realistic way. Granted--as long time atheist (since I was a kid and discovered Santa wasn't real)--but also culturally catholic one who believes that you are only a good person if you do good stuff in the world--and also an engineer (bachelors) and Historian (masters & Ph.D)--I have some pretty high standards for believing in theories/worldviews/etc... and Rod's work was always ESPECIALLY WEAK in these areas. The Benedict Option was just pure hogswash when it came to any kind of analysis or even for ideas for how to move forward. Perhaps if Rod had ever taken a moment to realize that the greatest threat to the Christian worldview was not the Woke-Left activists (who have no real power outside of time-limited college experiences for rich coasties)--but rather was from the kind of rabid short-term oligarchic capitalism championed by the politicians that Rod saw as a necessary evil --then he might have created something worthwhile.
But he didn't. And he turned to the dark side of hatred and bile a long, long time ago. That's when I stopped reading him because , really, there was nothing more to learn. He was taking the easy path at that point--and it is hard not to believe that it didn't then also shade into his personal life. When you spend so much of your time finding ways to disdain folks--and you make your living from that--then it will affect you.
Anyway... I hope his family is okay and that Rod maybe thinks about how he got to where he is today. My rational mind thinks this is unlikely--as Rod stopped apologizing for mistakes a long, long time ago.. and for all of his talk about Virtue ethics, his actual attempt to live such virtues is hard to see.
Finally--as someone who doesn't believe but who totally doesn't care if you do believe (and only really cares that people try to help others!) --I hope that you do keep on trying to make the world a better place despite Rod's failings. An old Engineering professor I had--Prof. Kuznetsov who was a Russian Jew who escaped the Soviet Union in the early 80s I believe--once told us that while it is good to learn from one's own mistakes--it's better to learn from the mistakes of others.
So let us all learn from this what we can.
I don’t know Ron or really follow him, though I’ve followed your channel and projects. I think you need to step back and look at what he’s written and why it resonated with you. The good that Ron has done for people like you is still good, even if Ron has turned onto a bad path. If (god forbid) you turned out to be some despicable monster I wouldn’t let that take away from your points about the problems of modernity. It wouldn’t invalidate your thoughts on magical words.
You’re a pretty smart guy, and if you saw some truth in Ron’s writings it was probably there. I know you’re able to disagree with him and criticise him, so you aren’t some kind of sycophant. Don’t let his mistakes drag you down.
I discovered Dreher reading an article, years ago, that he wrote during Lent, noting his Orthodox faith within it, and recounting his charming interactions with his parish Priest. Looking him up, I was shocked that he had converted from Catholicism to Orthodoxy, as intellectually, given his beliefs (and I'm a Catholic) it wasn't really possible to reconcile. In his writings he remained very Catholic, enough so that I once heard a Catholic commentator sort of mention it with irritation to the effect that Dreher needed to concede that he remained a Catholic.
I quit reading him quite awhile back as he evolved somehow from a writer to be taken seriously, into something else. Right around the time he wrote The Benedict Option, I really began to doubt him, although I have not read it. More recently he's seemed to slide into the very bitter and flirting with dangerous political ideas, although I'll still read one of his columns from time to time.
Am I disappointed (I just read of the divorce here for the first time)? No, not really. I won't judge him either. . . unless he were to remarry, at which time I'd regard that as hypocritical. As a Catholic, I'm in the no divorce camp, but I recognize that civil divorces do occur in our current society. But, saying that, I'd note that I have a cousin very close to my own age, who gave up being a devout Catholic to become an Evangelical Christian in order to marry. . . and then went on to cheat on his wife. They reconciled, but I've always thought that if you can cheat of a faith you are convinced of in an existential way, well the door is pretty much open to anything.
Well, I hope he reconciles with his family and that he can reconcile his conscience to where he needs to return to.
No, it's not self flagellation: it's a lack of Christian love. Please Mr. Greene, "take the plank out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to remove the speck from your brother’s eye..”
Oh for Christian leaders who are humble rather than self aggrandizing, who choose reconciliation over judgment, and most importantly who put put God's glory above their own piety.
It is just dumb to think you can save your country by adopting the Christianity of President Putin, however much you admire him.
Rod Dreher makes up fake audience members who allegedly send him messages that he responds to.