Rod Dreher quotes

Rod Dreher is an American writer, editor, and culture critic, best known for his commentary on religion, politics, and society. His works often explore Christian traditionalism and the challenges facing believers in modern Western culture. He has authored several influential books, including "The Benedict Option" and "Live Not by Lies." Here are 23 of his quotes:

Don't get me wrong: I believe that people who circumcise for religious reasons should have the right to do so.

Rod Dreher

In high school, I was physically bullied by 17 y.o. boys, in a sexually humiliating way (but not sex). It affected the direction of my life. They never apologized. Still, I wouldn't hold that against them if they were nominated for the Court. They were boys.

Rod Dreher

You cannot reform people who do not recognize that there is anything that needs reforming.

Rod Dreher

Remember this: "I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character"? That's an ideal worth defending. But do liberals even believe it anymore?

Rod Dreher

If you believe a society built on raw force is going to be just, you are a fool.

Rod Dreher

To be able to see God and hear God requires faith. And faith requires humility, and commitment. You cannot know what the sea feels and tastes like if you will never leave the beach.

Rod Dreher

For all its problems, I can't see any governing system available to us in our pluralistic, multiracial democracy than classical liberalism.

Rod Dreher

Day 6 of Covid. Now my wife and kids have it too. All of us vaxxed; wife and I both boosted not long ago. Everybody we know who has omicron was vaxxed; most also boosted. So I gotta ask: what's the point of vaccine passports now? Security theater? Prepping social credit system?

Rod Dreher

[W]e live in a world in which people of the left and the right alike can be rewarded handsomely for making hate symbols of flesh-and-blood human beings, and causing others to give in to primitive hatred. The President of the United States does it, especially on social media - but don't for a second believe that he is anything other than a product of this culture. There are leftists who quite rightly denounce him, but who are blind to the capacity for blind, destructive hatred in themselves.

Rod Dreher

[W]e have moved into a new phase of ideological conflict, one in which leftist elites hold the high ground. One major difference between today and the period Roger Kimball refers to is that in 2020, Woke Capitalism is a thing; the radicals hold power within corporations. Daniel McCarthy calls out the hypocrisy of the big corporations. Nike, for example, is Very, Very Concerned about white supremacy in America. Concentration camp for Muslim Uighurs in China? Not so much.

Rod Dreher

Wishy-washy Moralistic Therapeutic Deism is going to be burned up, and is now being burned up. There is going to be no middle ground left. Churches will either go militantly woke, or may turn to a Christianized version of white nationalism. The rest of us believers will be doing our best simply to hold our churches and families together, and not lose our members to the passionate ideologies tearing the country apart.

Rod Dreher

Bolsheviks actually had a vision of what they wanted to see replace the order they destroyed. Other than "defund the police,” the Woke do not.

Rod Dreher

[T]he deepest level of hell is reserved for traitors. Why traitors? Because they make life in community impossible. In medieval Italy, cities were in a frequent state of war with each other. When they closed the city gates at night, everybody in the city had to trust that no one would open the gates during the night and let in troops of the enemy. If you could not have that trust, you couldn't sleep. You couldn't live, for fear that your neighbor would betray you, and everyone, to the enemy. To render everyone isolated from everyone else, and living in fear - this was hell.

Rod Dreher

For as long as there are human beings, there will be prejudice. We are wired that way. It is impossible for most Americans to detect any difference at all between Serbs and Croats, but these ancient rivals very much see the difference between themselves. I could not detect the difference between an Ulster Protestant and an Ulster Catholic, but men have killed each other over that difference, until fairly recently, and, God forbid, may do again.

Rod Dreher

This is not a popular truth to say right now, in this time of moral hysteria and purity trials, but it remains true. The color of your skin does not guarantee virtue or vice. Rather, as King taught, and as the Bible teaches, it's what's in your heart. Jesus condemned the Pharisees as "whited sepulchres” - tombs that were gleaming on the outside, but that concealed foulness within.

Rod Dreher

[H]atred and tribal violence is endemic to the human condition. Cain slew Abel, and it's been downhill from there.

Rod Dreher

Hear me clearly: racism exists, it's a sin, and it should be resisted. But these SJWs, deeply embedded in institutions, and in command of the propaganda apparatus, are taking a genuine social problem - racism - that always needs attention, but construing it in a highly ideological way that has very little to do with addressing with this complex problem, and everything to do with advancing a narrative of command and control that demonizes an entire race of people as plunderers and parasites by nature, and incites others to despise them. We know from history where things like this go.

Rod Dreher

"Do you believe in the civic religion of America?” Think of it like this: how could the Catholic Church hold itself together if a significant number of Catholics decided that Jesus Christ, St. Peter, and St. Paul were villains? It couldn't. A nation is not a religion, but it has to hold its founders in esteem - and this is especially true of America, which was not founded on a tribe, as most other nations were. You don't have to believe that Washington, Jefferson, and the Founders were without sin - of course they weren't - but you do have to believe that what they did was good, even heroic. Certainly not villainous.

Rod Dreher

[H]istorians will look back at this era of American politics and find it absolutely deranged that the political left, and mainstream institutions, embraced antiwhite identity politics at the same time that the United States desperately needed to strengthen its traditions of classically liberal civic nationalism, which offers the best hope for a racially pluralistic democracy to hold together. But that's not what's happening.

Rod Dreher

Here's what Viktor Orban knows: that "liberalism” has produced a society and a culture that despises itself, and is committing suicide. It hates the traditional family. It hates Judeo-Christian religion and moral norms. It hates the history and traditions of the countries where it governs. It hates certain people because of the color of their skin, and loves others because of the color of their skin - in both cases, irrespective of the content of their character. It has no respect for free speech, freedom of religion, and other traditional liberties. It believes that it has the right and responsibility to spread its beliefs globally. It has conquered every institution in the West - most importantly, Big Business - and is using soft power to silence and marginalize the "deplorable” people who disagree. The news media lie by commission and omission in order to prop up the Narrative. This is not liberalism. This is illiberal leftism, which wears liberalism like a skin suit.

Rod Dreher