A Conversation with Rod Dreher

Discussing the GOP, populism, and the future of American Christianity.

Few Christian writers are as prolific or provocative as Rod Dreher. A senior editor at The American Conservative and veteran of the journalism industry, his body of work ranges in focus from the American political Right to Twitter regulation to the theology of the Seven Churches of Revelation. After years of living in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, Dreher recently relocated to Budapest, Hungary in a move he described as an “exile.” Writing from Budapest, Dreher took a look back at some of his most famous works, including New York Times bestsellers The Benedict Option and Live Not By Lies, as well as sharing thoughts on the rise of both wokeness and nationalism, the current state of the Republican Party, and the biggest challenges for American Christians going forward.

Let’s start with your move to Hungary. What laid the foundations for that—what was the tipping point that convinced you to move and what are you hoping to accomplish there?

I first came to Hungary a few years ago as an invited speaker at a conference on religious liberty. The speakers were invited to meet Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, which was quite a surprise. I figured it would be a meet-and-greet, take a photo, and say goodbye kind of deal. Nope: Orbán spent an hour and a half answering our questions in good English, with real intelligence and depth. This was not who our media had led me to believe he was.

I came back in 2019 to do research for my book “Live Not By Lies,” which is about the lessons that Christians who had resisted Communism in the Soviet bloc have for Christians today. I came to admire the people of Eastern Europe. And then, in 2021, I came over for a four-month fellowship with the Danube Institute, a think tank in Budapest. I grew quickly to admire what the Orbán government is doing, and to a great degree how it’s doing it. In short, Orbán is a nationalist, a Christian, and an anti-globalist—and he’s effective. I returned for a second fellowship in early 2022, and deepened my ties here, and my understanding of the region.

Sadly, towards the end of the 2022 fellowship, my wife e-mailed me to say that she had filed for divorce. This was a real shock, as we had never once discussed divorce. But it was not a surprise, because our marriage had been in terrible trouble for about a decade. I was committed to sticking it out at least until our youngest child left for college in 2024, but my wife had other plans. As a result of the bomb going off in our family’s life, things are very tough between me and my two kids still living with their mom, and I am powerless to do anything about that. I received a job offer from the Danube Institute, and once I found out I could still write for The American Conservative, I came over. My older son is going to join me soon, after he finishes his undergraduate degree back home.

At Danube, my role is to travel around Europe building a network of Christian conservatives—intellectuals, pastors, writers, and cultural figures—for the sake of conferences and mutual collaboration at the Institute. Privately, I hope to lay the groundwork for a separate network of small-o orthodox Christians to get to know each other well, across denominational lines and national borders, for the sake of mutual support if persecution comes, as I fear it will.

In your work on national conservatism, you mention the term common sense populism, particularly in reference to Florida governor Ron DeSantis. Define common sense populism: how does it differ from the conservatism championed by thinkers like Russell Kirk and William F. Buckley?

Kirk and Buckley were products of the postwar era, when the greatest threat to conservative principles and liberty for all was, broadly speaking, the leviathan state. They viewed capitalism and capitalist entities—businesses, chiefly—as necessary counterweights to state power. This made sense at the time. But we now live in an era in which Big Business is one of the greatest threats to both liberty for all, and to conservative principles. Conservatism has to change to reflect that reality. I don’t believe that government, per se, is the problem—not in an era when the private sector wields so much unaccountable power over public and private life. 

For example, in the Buckley-Kirk past, a conservative would have bristled at Gov. DeSantis’s use of state power to punish Disney for getting out of its lane and involving itself in Florida’s decision to regulate LGBT material presented to elementary school students. But DeSantis was acting on behalf of parents who don’t believe public schools should be presenting that kind of material to such young children. And you know what? In a national poll taken shortly after DeSantis signed that bill into law, a strong majority of Americans agreed with DeSantis—even 53 percent of Biden voters! That’s common sense populism: using state power to protect the interests of common people from powerful private actors. 

A strict ideological libertarian would oppose this, but libertarian ideology can be insensitive to actual conditions in public and private life. Now that the ideological, illiberal left has captured every major American institution, including Big Business, a common-sense populism is a politics that simply defends the values and liberties of the little guy by pushing back hard on these institutions. I have been defending Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán’s approach to governance, precisely because of this. The populist Orbán is demonized by the US and western European media, but the truth is, he understands well how power actually works today, and how immensely powerful unaccountable transnational institutions—like the European Union bureaucracy, and NGOs—are in real life. And he understands that state power is the only way ordinary people, whose beliefs and ways of life are viewed with contempt by those power elites, can be compelled to respect the liberties of these despised masses.

The recent Twitter Files revelations show how Yoel Roth, an Ivy-educated queer activist who served as the chief censor of the world’s most important social media platform, used his privilege to suppress and censor conservatives. Roth once publicly denounced the unwashed proles of flyover country. These extraordinarily powerful people truly hate traditional Christians and all others who dissent from their views, which are common within elite circles, but extreme by the standards of most people. Standard postwar conservatism of the Buckley-Kirk variety is largely powerless against these threats. I don’t say that to criticize Buckley and Kirk, but only to point out that circumstances have changed radically since their day, and political conservatism must change too.

Moving to another force that threatens to derail Republicans: what’s it going to take to break Trump’s stranglehold on the GOP? If Trump wins the nomination in ‘24, do you think DeSantis still has the ability to be the party leader in ‘28 and beyond? Or will another election cycle of Trump leave him too damaged?

Boy, I wish I could tell you. It is astonishing to me that the MAGA diehards don’t grasp what a liability their hero is. I am encouraged, though, by the dismal midterm election results. If it hadn’t been for Trump’s influence over the GOP primary process, which for the most part resulted in lousy candidates for the general election, the Republicans probably would have captured the Senate as well as the House. I think this has to be sinking in with at least some of the MAGA cultists. Plus, Trump’s recent meeting with the anti-Semitic Kanye West and Nick Fuentes, who is a stone-cold racist, has caused some people who defended Trump in the past to question Trump’s political judgment. Then Trump called for suspending the Constitution over what he regards as the stolen 2020 election! I mean, look, this is insane. You have to be crazy to think that a man who behaves like that can be anything other than a liability to Republicans at this point.

It helps that in DeSantis, Republican voters have a good alternative. He’s an actually accomplished governor who won re-election in a blowout. He’s also a relatively fresh face, not one of the dullard Washington Republican drones. I hope he runs in 2024, but if not, then the post-Trump GOP will be begging for him to take over after that. DeSantis is young. He’s got time. But I don’t know how much time the GOP has, given how toxic Trump’s brand is. I think the only Republican Joe Biden can beat in 2024 is Donald Trump. Nevertheless, should Trump get the GOP nomination and win the election, I fear that he will be so unmoored from reality in a second term that the damage Trump will do to the Republican brand will be very hard to recover from. I had thought that if Trump is the 2024 nominee, I would probably grit my teeth and vote for him, simply because the Democratic record under Biden is so bad that even Trump would be better. But then he called for suspending the Constitution to serve his own interests. I mean, what are you supposed to do with that? It’s berserk.

You’ve written that “[i]f DeSantis is the 2024 GOP presidential nominee, we will have a great national argument about issues.” There are a great deal of positives if the GOP nominates DeSantis in ‘24—what are the biggest negatives of this strategy? What’s the biggest liability of the Republican Party more generally?

DeSantis is not particularly charismatic, and we know that matters in American politics. I am not aware of any specific liabilities he has in terms of his governing record, but there may be some. More broadly, the GOP’s liabilities include its contemptible refusal to defend social conservatism, and its slavish stance towards Big Business. Washington Republicans still haven’t gotten the message that they can never be socially progressive enough for the media, and that Big Business despises the kind of people who vote for them. It seems that the establishment GOP will go along with whatever the social and cultural left wants, as long as it gets pro-business and pro-war policies.

And the Republican Party lacks vision and courage. I cannot understand why they won’t defend classical liberal principles against the progressivist racism that is tearing our country apart. It should be easy to stand up for the principle that people should be judged not by the color of their skin, but the content of their character. But how often do we hear Republican politicians doing this? It should be easy for Republicans to stand up for families and children who are being exploited by gender ideologies in power, but they rarely do, at least not effectively. Why not? Eric Kaufmann, a political scientist in London, has argued this year, based on his research findings of young voters preferences, that if conservatives don’t fight the culture war above all other things, there won’t be a space for conservatism once the illiberally left-wing Generation Z gets into power. But Republican politicians lack the guts to do this. Why is it that activists like Chris Rufo and Matt Walsh are doing the work that ought to be done by Republican elected officials of conviction? What is the Republican Party for, anyway? 

On the cultural front: the term ‘wokeness’ sometimes seems to be used by the right the way terms like ‘racism’ are by the left—a catch-all for things that contradict political orthodoxy. What’s a solid working definition of wokeness for conservatives to use?

I have said, in my book “Live Not By Lies” and on my blog, that the best way to see wokeness is as a left-wing political pseudo-religion. It makes dogmatic, illiberal assertions about the way the world is, and acts on those dogmas. It sees its opponents less as political opposition and more as heretics who challenge the revealed moral order, and who therefore must be suppressed. Wokeness, broadly speaking, believes that the world must be interpreted in terms of power relations. It believes that the line between good and evil runs not down the middle of every human heart, as Solzhenitsyn famously said, but rather between social groups. Like Bolshevism, it is an apocalyptic millennial political cult, though it is admittedly less extreme, for now, than Bolshevism was. I mean that it conceives of politics in zero-sum terms, as a struggle between Good and Evil, and holds that justice will not be achieved until the world is cleared of the Evil people. We should take woke professors, like that Rutgers woman, seriously when they talk about how evil white people are. This is exactly how the Bolsheviks talked about their political opponents—and when they took power, they liquidated them. To conceive of politics in this way is extremely dangerous.

So, what would a solid working definition of wokeness be? How about this: wokeness is the animating philosophy behind an illiberal, anti-democratic left-wing political religion that identifies justice with regulating power relations among groups, and that moralizes politics to a totalitarian degree.

Let’s move from the strictly political stuff and dive into some of your earlier work, starting with 2006’s “Crunchy Cons: The New Conservative Counterculture and Its Return to Roots.” What happened to the crunchy cons? Has the image of the “counter-cultural but traditionally conservative” voter changed since writing Crunchy Cons?

My literary agent said that I have a gift for writing books that are ahead of their time—which is an ambiguous compliment, which you would know if you saw the sales figures for “Crunchy Cons.” I do think that the book anticipated a broader alienation among conservatives from the GOP establishment. Back in 2002, when I worked for National Review and first came up with the idea, there was a fierce internal battle at the magazine over whether or not to let me write about it. Jonah Goldberg, who was then NR’s star, argued that the magazine shouldn’t run my crunchy cons stuff, in part because it would give liberals the idea that conservatives weren’t unified. Seriously, he said that. 

Well, the truth is, there really were dissenters in conservative ranks. The conservative establishment Goldberg was defending has been shattered, though admittedly it hasn’t been replaced by crunchy cons. In the sixteen years since the book was published, it has become easier to be a crunchy con, though certainly we couldn’t say that the sensibility is anything more than niche. Where its legacy has been most important is in homeschooling, I think. The homeschooling movement has exploded since 2006. Plus, whenever you see conservatives enjoying farmers’ markets, or the joys of traditional forms of religion, like the Catholic Latin mass, you can figure that they are crunchy cons, even if they’ve never read the book or heard the term. If we see the emergence of an anti-corporate Right in the next few years, I will feel some satisfaction that crunchy conservatism had something to do with it. 

Since writing The Benedict Option, what’s been the biggest change in your thinking on the intersection of politics and religious community? What’s one thing you wish you could go back and change in The Benedict Option?

I wish I had paid more attention to the effective ways religious conservatives can engage in politics. In my disgust with the way my tribe—religious conservatives—had sold ourselves to the GOP, I was too broad in talking about how we should step back from electoral politics. Contrary to what some critics (who hadn’t read the book) said, I did not say that religious conservatives should drop out of politics. But I didn’t articulate a good argument for how we should recalibrate our involvement in politics, even as we quite rightly quit placing so much hope in politics. 

I finished the manuscript just after Trump’s election, which I, like most people, did not foresee. I wrote it assuming that Hillary Clinton was going to win. I not only didn’t anticipate Trump, but I didn’t foresee how much worse wokeness would be in reaction to that. I said in the book that religious conservatives have to stay involved in politics, if only to protect religious liberty, but if I had it to do over again, I would be a lot more detailed about the kind of electoral politics we should pursue. Then again, post-2016 wokeness really has changed the landscape.

Similarly, I wish I had been more pointed about the changing workplace, and how Christians should think about how far they can go in burning a pinch of incense to DEI. Then again, things were bad then, but not nearly as bad as they have become in many workplaces. If I had it to do over again, I would probably be a lot more specific about political goals Christians should push for to protect workers from woke commissars. 

I still believe, though, that our political task as conservative Christians is primarily defensive: in robustly protecting the rights of individuals and institutions against illiberal leftism. We are not going to legislate our way to a Christian country, or even a country that looks moral by conservative Christian standards. I still believe that for the past thirty years, most Christians of the Right have foolishly and lazily assumed that our primary problems could be solved through law and politics, and who therefore allowed the hard work of discipleship and culture formation go unattended. We are now paying the price.

In Live Not By Lies, you wrote that “relative to Soviet Bloc conditions, life in the West remains so free and so prosperous is what blinds Americans to the mounting threat to our liberty.” It’s been 2 years since its release—as elements on the political left continue to pose huge threats to individual liberty, do you see ideologies like national conservatism/common-sense populism as potential sources of threats to religious liberty?

I suppose any political movement could be a threat to religious liberty under the right circumstances, but I don’t really see it coming from the Right in any meaningful sense today, at least not by comparison to the threats coming from the Left. The one exception is the emergence of Christian nationalism. The truth is, every society has to have a broadly shared, essentially religious ideal around which to organize itself. I recently visited the sites of the Seven Churches of Revelation, in Asia Minor, which occasioned my digging more deeply into the conditions that the early church faced as minorities in the pagan Roman Empire. I saw that the Christians really were a threat to the established pagan order. Of course I don’t at all support the persecution of the early church, but I did have to recognize that the pagans weren’t wrong to see Christianity as a serious threat. The Romans understood that they needed a religious basis to govern their highly diverse empire, so in the imperial stage, they introduced emperor worship. It wasn’t enough. 

Now, we live today in a post-Christian civilization. Of course I don’t mean that there aren’t Christians around, but I do mean that as a civilization, we no longer look to the Bible as the story that tells us who we are and what we should do. Wokeness is an attempt to supplant a broadly Christian, though secularized, model of social and political life. I support what Yoram Hazony, the founder of national conservatism, believes, which is that we should aim for a society that generally favors Biblical religion as the framework within which we should administer our society. This is a difficult task, though, given that Western civilization is becoming ever more post-Christian. 

What do we do about it? If by “Christian nationalism” we mean a broad support for Biblical standards, as in contemporary Hungary—not a religious nation, but one that still believes in the culture of Christianity as a source of lawmaking and public standards, then yes, I support that. But I have only recently started to pay attention to what some people advocate as Christian nationalism. I was involved recently in the Thomas Achord affair, in which the headmaster of my kids’ old Christian school was exposed as having a secret online life in which he advocated racist, anti-Semitic views, and said that he wanted to use his rising position inside the classical Christian education movement to redpill students for those viewpoints. This was horrifying to me, and woke me up to the Trojan horse within. This is something that we Christian conservatives who are outside of intra-Protestant debates had not recognized, though Protestants like Brad Littlejohn and Alastair Roberts did, and exposed it. If Christian nationalism means racial (white) particularism, I want no part of it. It would be a threat to religious liberty, among other liberties.

Because I am a former Catholic, and have been an Orthodox Christian since 2006, I had been more focused on Catholic integralism. That’s a 19th century movement advocating for a specifically Catholic, authoritarian political order. I’m against that, but it’s also the case that it is primarily an online phenomenon among a small group of hard-right Catholic intellectuals. It has no chance of ever taking power. The Christian nationalism of someone like Achord’s ideological collaborator Stephen Wolfe, however, does have more potential.

The problem Christians like me have is that ultimately, we cannot have a Christian politics without a basis in shared Christian faith. Any attempt to impose Christian values on a non-Christian public can only be autocratic. I don’t want that. Yet how realistic am I about all this? Is it really possible to be classically liberal about these matters in the absence of a widely shared, generic Christianity, of the sort we had in America prior to the 1960s? I don’t know, but I doubt it. This is a very big challenge. 

Authors often talk about feeling trapped writing about particular issues after building up a significant readership base. What’s one thing that you’d like to write about but haven’t, particularly something more outside of the realm of your typical topics?

My blog at The American Conservative used to be more varied. I wrote about big political and cultural issues, but also often digressed into more narrowly religious posts, and took forays into writing about food, travel, and art. I miss those days. Why did I change? Well, after 2017, with the acceleration of wokeness—in particular, the virulent rise of left-wing racism, and the weaponized politics of LGBT advocacy, the threats to fundamental values of American life, in particular Christian values, was like nothing we’ve ever seen. I write far more frequently about culture war topics, because I genuinely believe that social and religious conservatives are fighting for our very existence in this country.

I ended up starting a Substack newsletter, titled Rod Dreher’s Diary, for my purely spiritual and aesthetic writing. I don’t believe that I should be a religious advocate on my TAC platform, but on Substack, I can be as Christian as I want to be. People who subscribe to my Substack—and you have to pay to read it—often note the jarring difference in tone and content between my blog and my newsletter. The newsletter focuses on hopeful, non-combative topics. I intentionally never write about the culture war there, because I try to force myself out of combat mode. I need that outlet to stay balanced. 

In an interview on why you became Orthodox, you discuss how your conversion involved letting go of pride and “idolization of the intellect.” Do you think having pride in an intellectual tradition is a widespread issue among American Christians? Or is it the opposite problem—idolization of being “relatable” at the expense of doctrinal deepness?

What an insightful distinction. Yeah, I think the general problem of American Christianity is a lack of intellectual seriousness, and a lack of doctrinal deepness. In my recent trip to Asia Minor, I came to understand in a way I had not before why St. Paul was so adamant in exhorting the early church to keep itself unstained by the pagan world. He grasped that if the early church allowed itself to be assimilated to pagan norms, as was very, very easy in that world, that they would cease to be meaningfully Christian. When I returned to Budapest from Turkey, I started reading an academic book about sexual culture in Rome of the New Testament era. It’s really startling how much we today have in common with Rome back then. I can see too how fatal the “seeker-sensitive” movement in Christian churches, and the compulsion to be relatable, has compromised the Church’s witness and its very life. 

But that was not my problem as an adult convert to Christianity, and particularly Catholic Christianity. Like so many young male Christian intellectuals—Catholics and Reformed Christians are especially susceptible to this—I was enamored of the System. That is, I prized the intellectual rigor and depth of Catholic Christianity, and without meaning to, came to believe that as long as I kept all the syllogisms undergirding Catholicism clear in my head, that my faith could survive anything. I was wrong. There’s nothing wrong with intellection, of course, but it is not the same thing as a converted heart. In the same way you can’t create a Christian culture on the basis of legislation alone, you can’t create a strong Christian life on the basis of intellection alone. In both society and the individual, if the heart isn’t first converted, intellectual conversion will always be brittle and precarious. I learned that when I was put to the test by the Catholic abuse scandal. I tell all Christians now—Catholics, Protestant, and Orthodox—that without integrating Christian ideas, doctrines, and principles into lived experience—that is to say, without meaningful discipleship—we are much weaker than we think. 

You’ve been a Christian in journalism for decades. What’s been the most convicting/useful piece of advice you’ve received in your career that you think all Christians in the media should keep in mind?

I alluded to it above. When he emerged from the gulag, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, who became a Christian in prison, said that he discovered there that the line between good and evil ran not between groups, but down the middle of every human heart. That’s a profoundly Christian insight, based on the universal fallenness of man. It matters to journalists because it gives us a realistic basis on which to judge the world we cover, and the people in it, and also ourselves. It also helps keep us humble, realizing that those we write about, even bad people, are, in the end, people made in the image of God, and have some goodness in them, however slight. And the heroes we write about also have a shadow side, however hard it might be to see in the light of their accomplishments. It’s a matter of realism, you know. It puts us at a disadvantage within a highly ideologized profession, in which very many of our secular colleagues see no enemies to the Left, and in which tribalism has overwhelmed old-fashioned professional standards of fairness. It’s a huge temptation, one that I’ve often felt, to respond to the way left-wing ideology in the profession binds and blinds most of our professional colleagues, by surrendering to the same thing on our side. That way lies the abyss. We Christians cannot lose sight of the fact that we are ultimately accountable to the Lord. 

When I began writing as a Catholic, in 2002, about the emerging abuse scandal, I caught hell from some conservative Catholics, even some prominent ones, for hurting the Church by airing its dirty laundry in public. I didn’t care. I saw my responsibility as a Christian who had been given the gift of a journalistic platform to tell the truth, and let the chips fall where they may. It ultimately ended up costing me my Catholic faith.

If I had it to do over again, I would have prepared myself much better spiritually for staring into that particular abyss, but I would not change a thing about what I wrote. I will have many sins on my conscience when I stand before the Lord in judgment, but suppressing the truth because it stood to hurt my ecclesial allies is not one of them.

This interview was published in edited form for Cogitare Magazine.