Rod Dreher Quotes

They begin by destroying statues. They will end by destroying people.

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.

[T]he coming battle will actually sideline many practicing Christians. That it will be between the Woke on one side, and white nationalists on the other. There is no way that authentic followers of Jesus Christ can endorse race nationalism of either the white or the black kind.

[t]he forces of disintegration are far more powerful than this rhetoric implicitly acknowledges. Roger Kimball, the author of Tenured Radicals, certainly does not need to be educated in the toxicity of progressivism. He gets that. What I’m not sure that he gets is how resisting it is going to require much more than countercultural education. It is going to require forming generations henceforth in the awareness that if they hold on to their religion and their traditional beliefs — including a belief in the virtues of the Western tradition — they will be regarded by the dominant culture as moral reprobates, as outlaws. They will be hated, and in many cases made to suffer.

[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.

Don’t misunderstand: racism is a malignancy, and so is police brutality; decent people should stand up against them. But resisting these evils are going to occasion the embrace of other evils, masquerading as virtues and imperatives.

It should go without saying that we must instruct our children that racism is evil. But this is part of any truly liberal education. What’s happening now is that ideologues, many of them not fully aware of what they are doing, are taking advantage of the persistence of an old and universal human evil — hating the Other by race — and using it to carry out a far more sweeping agenda. We cannot count on universities anymore.

[W]e have become a country in which many people, regardless of their race, are willing to believe lies if the lies feel right to them, and suit their ideological preferences. Hannah Arendt said this kind of thing is a prelude to totalitarianism.

The more I dug into Russian history, the better I understood where the radicalism came from. Ordinary Russian people had been kept down for so long that they were willing to believe that anything would be better than what they had. So, Russia had a revolution, and it got incomparably worse.

There is no way — no way — that any faithful Christian can tolerate racial bigotry and still call himself faithful to Jesus Christ. Racism is a sin, straight up. You may not hate your brother because of the color of his skin, period. It is a compliment to Christianity that the white supremacist Sam Francis identified the Christian faith as an obstacle to the white racial consciousness that he wanted to see.

[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.

[W]e are post-Christian now. Mercy and pity are signs of weakness. Rage is a measure of one’s authenticity. The line between good and evil does not pass down the middle of each person’s heart, as Solzhenitsyn learned in the gulag, but rather, as we see it, between the races, between the secular and the religious, between economic classes, and so forth. We absolve ourselves in advance, and nurture grievance, because we think it gives our lives meaning.

I am an emotional person, no doubt about it. The point of growing in maturity, and growing as a mature Christian, is to learn how to master your own passions, lest they master you. I will be struggling in this way until they day I die. All of us should be. One of the great lessons I learned from studying the testimonies of Christian political prisoners under the communist regimes is how even though they were treated unjustly, and even tortured, they never, ever gave in to self-pity, or hatred of their persecutors. How they did this is some kind of miracle — but it is vital wisdom for our time.

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?

[C]ircles have been contaminated by hatred and paranoia. Refuse and reject that right now. If you make room in your heart and mind for it, it will take you down, and take down all those that follow you.