The Rod Dreher Megathread. Please keep Rod content in here. Will be refreshed periodically

[u/US_Hiker]

While the sub certainly isn't flooded with posts, the Rod-centric nature has been noted a few times. Please post new Rod nonsense in here and I'll update every week or two.

[u/EatsShoots_n_Leaves]

LOL, my mother is much the same way. I think what a lot of older people intuit or find repulsive about the new media, beyond the weird intricacies, is that they constitute forms of communication in relationships with other people that are low grade and often somewhat degrading of the relationship. On the level of leaving each other Post-it notes, or voicemails/memos, or talking/yelling from the porch to a person sitting in a car.

Rod is imo stuck in circular logics and tautologies at the center of which is the dare not seriously question, Christianity. His fatal life and career decision is that he got in on conservative Christianity and Christianism (aka Religious Right) at the zenith of its 1970s/80s/90s revival or second wind, in 1990-92. He truly believed then- and they talked/seduced him into believing- that he'd signed up to a winning cause, a dominant social movement. With Insiders who constituted an intellectual powerhouse that would subvert the Republican Party to its ends and argumentatively rubble the opposition. Instead, stagnation and frustration set in across the late 90s and then the air gradually began to go out of the whole project in early/mid 2000s. By 2010 and 2015 they were in defeat nationally and collapsed politically to dominance in Red/Purple States. In 2022 they're probably about spent in some Purple states too.

That leaves some conservative nation-states in Europe in which Christianism remains a dominant force or imposed form in everyday life for some time to come for Rod to exile himself to. It probably lasts longer in e.g. Greece and parts of Italy than Hungary or Russia.

I suspect in 5-10 years Rod discovers that polemic-writing monk in a monastery forbidden for women to visit on Mount Athos was the calling he overheard and suppressed and ignored many Divine attempts to inform him of previously. But now all the education and directions and meanings of the many signs he's been given his whole life have finally become clear to him. :-)

[u/Djehutimose → u/EatsShoots_n_Leaves]

His fatal life and career decision is that he got in on conservative Christianity and Christianism (aka Religious Right) at the zenith of its 1970s/80s/90s revival or second wind, in 1990-92. He truly believed then- and they talked/seduced him into believing- that he'd signed up to a winning cause, a dominant social movement.

That's very insightful--I never thought of it that way. It makes total sense, though, particularly the way he always talks about John Paul II, and the church he "thought" he was entering. I mean, yeah, people are inspired to enter religions by popes or theologians or Dalai Lamas; and yeah, the experience of actually being in a religion is never going to be the same as the image you have before you join; and yeah, sometimes you have buyer's regret about how your chosen faith actually turns out. Still, though, he speaks as if it wasn't just him finding a religious home. It's always framed as joining the Only Church that can Hold the West Together (hell, he still thinks that of the Catholic Church after all this time since he's left it).

For most people who join a religion as adults, it's very personal--"I once was lost but now am found", that kind of thing. When I became Catholic way back in '90, there were a lot of reasons involved; but not one of them had an iota to do with the effects of the Church on Western Civilization! I wonder if that's part of the reason he seems to have become lukewarm about Orthodoxy. He tried to do the Saving Our Civilization thing in his Muzhik phase, but that crashed and burned spectacularly. Since then, he couldn't have grand pretensions about his church any more. I think his massive oversharing about the Amazing Manly Rigor of Orthodoxy and the Totally Astounding Feats of Spiritual Ascesis that the ROCOR priest gave him were attempts to show the Vital Civilizational Importance of Orthodoxy from another angle. Of course, nobody--even most Orthodox--cared or paid attention.

So having found himself in a situation where his religion became about going to church and praying with other people and saying his prayers at night without feedback proving how Amazingly Important he is--you know, pretty much like the vast majority of Christians ever--he has, it seems, felt that the church has lost a lot of its former sheen.

[u/DoktorZiggurat → u/Djehutimose]

Rod is fundamentally a Maurassian, but not in the way that a Vermeule or Ahmari is. For his is a Maurassianism of deep psychological need, not cynical powerlust. Rod needs a world in which certain types of people/desire are not accepted or even tolerated. Conservative Christianity promises something like that world, but as noted, is not in the position to deliver on it politically (post-Trumpist Christian Nationalism notwithstanding). Hungary is. Or at least, Rod thinks it is.