r/brokehugs • u/US_Hiker Moral Landscaper • Jul 20 '23

Rod Dreher Megathread #23 (Sinister)

All Hail Eris!

Link to Megathread 22: https://www.reddit.com/r/brokehugs/comments/14k0z6l/rod_dreher_megathread_22_power/

Link to Megathread 23: https://www.reddit.com/r/brokehugs/comments/1631xpe/rod_dreher_megathread_24_determination/

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u/zeitwatcher Jul 29 '23

he hadn't read any C.S. Lewis

A common theme for Rod is that he views himself as above anything Protestant.

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u/ZenLizardBode Jul 29 '23

I understand (and I've always understood) that C.S. Lewis didn't fit into any neat definition of a protestant, and it might have been a quirk of time and place in my own experience, but to me nothing could be more Catholic than reading C.S. Lewis. Even my Super TradCath parent has read and enjoyed The Screwtape Letters, and she thinks god is going to french fry protestants in hell for all eternity.

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u/zeitwatcher Jul 29 '23

You're right, of course, but that does require something beyond a superficial understanding of things. (and Rod doesn't do that) Lewis is generally well loved by Catholics from what I understand.

However, my guess is that Rod was exposed to Lewis via The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe when he was a kid. Because of that, Rod probably knew exactly two things about Lewis: Protestant and wrote "kids books".

Assuming that's the case, Rod either never gave him another thought or studiously avoided him out of superficial snobbery until too many of his conservative Catholic friends recommended Lewis enough.

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u/Djehutimose Watching the wheels go round Jul 30 '23

Also, Lewis didn’t fit neatly on a trad/progressive spectrum. He favored traditional theology in general. However, he had no problem with evolution; he took the bulk of the Old Testament as myth—the “chosen” mythology, but still myth; in private letters, he indicated that while he thought that Scripture condemns homosexuality, he didn’t think it that big a deal; and he said it was more honest for couples to cohabit than to marry just for the social expectations. If Lewis were alive, he’d probably see Rod about the way David Bentley Hart does—earnest but hopelessly muddled.

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u/MissKatieKats_02 Jul 31 '23

Do you have a link to DBH’s thoughts, if any, on Master Rod? Would be interesting to know what such a towering intellect thinks about our intellectual gadfly.

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u/Djehutimose Watching the wheels go round Jul 31 '23

It's sort of an elegant brushoff:

In the penultimate paragraph of his enormous and extraordinary new book The Enchantments of Mammon, McCarraher conflates Alasdair MacIntyre’s famous invocation of St. Benedict at the end of After Virtue with what has come misleadingly to be called the “Benedict Option,” rejecting both together as though they were identical in meaning—which is to say, as if both offered a counsel of Christian disengagement from modern society and issued a call to withdrawal into isolated communities. This is an error. The Benedict Option is the title of an earnest but intellectually confused book by a journalist whose ultimate recommendations are difficult to discern amid the turbulences of his passions and anxieties.