Rod Dreher > Quotes

“A church that looks and talks and sounds just like the world has no reason to exist.”
― Rod Dreher, The Benedict Option: A Strategy for Christians in a Post-Christian Nation

“I am a college-educated American. In all my years of formal schooling, I never read Plato or Aristotle, Homer or Virgil. I knew nothing of Greek and Roman history and barely grasped the meaning of the Middle Ages. Dante was a stranger to me, and so was Shakespeare. The fifteen hundred years of Christianity from the end of the New Testament to the Reformation were a blank page, and I knew only the barest facts about Luther's revolution. I was ignorant of Descartes and Newton. My understanding of Western history began with the Enlightenment. Everything that came before it was lost behind a misty curtain of forgetting. Nobody did this on purpose. Nobody tried to deprive me of my civilizational patrimony. But nobody felt any obligation to present it to me and my generation in an orderly, coherent fashion. Ideas have consequences - and so does their lack.”
― Rod Dreher, The Benedict Option: A Strategy for Christians in a Post-Christian Nation

“Be grateful for holiness when you find it among churchmen, but do not expect it. As Flannery O’Connor wrote, “All human nature vigorously resists grace because grace changes us and the change is painful. Priests resist it as well as others.”
― Rod Dreher, How Dante Can Save Your Life: The Life-Changing Wisdom of History's Greatest Poem

“And this is the thing about soft totalitarianism: It seduces those – even Christians – who have lost the capacity to love enduringly, for better or for worse. They think love, but they merely desire. They think they follow Jesus, but in fact, they merely admire him. Each of us thinks we wouldn’t be like that. But if we have accepted the lie of our therapeutic culture, which tells us that personal happiness is the greatest good of all, then we will surrender at the first sign of trouble.”
― Rod Dreher, Live Not by Lies: A Manual for Christian Dissidents

“They stood up for truth and justice not out of an expectation of achievable victory in their lifetimes, but because it was the right thing to do.”
― Rod Dreher, Live Not by Lies: A Manual for Christian Dissidents

“To live is to suffer. To become fully human is to overcome suffering by allowing it to give us wings. Stop thinking about how your struggles are weighing you down, and start thinking, with humility, about how they can lift you up, and make you more compassionate and merciful. Changing your attitude can turn a burden into a blessing.”
― Rod Dreher, How Dante Can Save Your Life: The Life-Changing Wisdom of History's Greatest Poem

“Accept the limitations of a place, in humility, and the joys that can also be found there may open themselves.”
― Rod Dreher, The Little Way of Ruthie Leming: A Southern Girl, a Small Town, and the Secret of a Good Life

“Christians often talk about “reaching the culture” without realizing that, having no distinct Christian culture of their own, they have been co-opted by the secular culture they wish to evangelize.”
― Rod Dreher, The Benedict Option: A Strategy for Christians in a Post-Christian Nation

“HOW TO REFUSE DEFEAT Life is fragile and uncertain. Sooner or later, you will experience a great loss in life, when suffering reveals that the world is not the place you think it is, and that your dreams will not come true after all. What then? Don’t blame others for what happened to you, even if it might well be their fault. This is a dead end. And don’t settle for stoic acceptance of your fate. Merely bearing up under strain is noble, but it’s wasting an opportunity for transformation. You have the power to turn your burden into a blessing. What if this pain, this heartbreak, this failure, was given to you to help you find your true self? Make adversity work for you by launching a quest inside your own heart. Find the dragons hiding there, slay them, and bring back the treasure that will help you live well.”
― Rod Dreher, How Dante Can Save Your Life: The Life-Changing Wisdom of History's Greatest Poem

“It is better to choose to know the painful truth rather than settle on a comforting lie. Resolve to look for and to accept the truth, no matter how much it hurts. Nothing built on lies lasts.”
― Rod Dreher, How Dante Can Save Your Life: The Life-Changing Wisdom of History's Greatest Poem

“Though Donald Trump won the presidency in part with the strong support of Catholics and Evangelicals, the idea that someone as robustly vulgar, fiercely combative, and morally compromised as Trump will be an avatar for the restoration of Christian morality and social unity is beyond delusional. He is not a solution to the problem of America’s cultural decline, but a symptom of it. The”
― Rod Dreher, The Benedict Option: A Strategy for Christians in a Post-Christian Nation

“It masks its hatred of dissenters from its utopian ideology in the guise of helping and healing.”
― Rod Dreher, Live Not by Lies: A Manual for Christian Dissidents

“Contemporary culture encourages us to make islands of ourselves for the sake of self-fulfillment, of career advancement, of entertainment, of diversion, and all the demands of the sovereign self. When suffering and death come for you--and it will--you want to be in a place where you know, and are known. You want--no, you need--to be able to say, as Mike did, "We're leaning, but we're leaning on each other.”
― Rod Dreher, The Little Way of Ruthie Leming: A Southern Girl, a Small Town, and the Secret of a Good Life

“Not all of us are called to die a martyr’s death,” he wrote, “but all of us are called to have the same spirit of self-sacrifice and love to the very end as these martyrs had.”9”
― Rod Dreher, Live Not by Lies: A Manual for Christian Dissidents

“Ideology is the enemy of joyful community life, and the most destructive ideology is the belief that creating utopia is possible.”
― Rod Dreher, The Benedict Option: A Strategy for Christians in a Post-Christian Nation

“A CRUNCHY CON MANIFESTO
1. We are conservatives who stand outside the conservative mainstream; therefore, we can see things that matter more clearly.
2. Modern conservatism has become too focused on money, power, and the accumulation of stuff, and insufficiently concerned with the content of our individual and social character.
3. Big business deserves as much skepticism as big government.
4. Culture is more important than politics and economics.
5. A conservatism that does not practice restraint, humility, and good stewardship—especially of the natural world—is not fundamentally conservative.
6. Small, Local, Old, and Particular are almost always better than Big, Global, New, and Abstract.
7. Beauty is more important than efficiency.
8. The relentlessness of media-driven pop culture deadens our senses to authentic truth, beauty, and wisdom.
9. We share Russell Kirk's conviction that "the institution most essential to conserve is the family.”
― Rod Dreher, Crunchy Cons: How Birkenstocked Burkeans, gun-loving organic gardeners, evangelical free-range farmers, hip homeschooling mamas, right-wing nature ... America

“If there is going to be authentic renewal, it will have to happen in families and local church communities.”
― Rod Dreher, The Benedict Option: A Strategy for Christians in a Post-Christian Nation

“Because we are finite creatures who live in time, we cannot see things clearly. Be careful in judging others because the truth of their character and their situation may be hidden from your eyes. Only God knows the whole truth and only God knows the future. Don't expect all the answers now, but be patient and trusting and seek to grow in love. Each act of love is one more step in the long journey to our true and only home, unity with God in eternity.”
― Rod Dreher, How Dante Can Save Your Life: The Life-Changing Wisdom of History's Greatest Poem

“If we are going to be for the world as Christ meant for us to be, we are going to have to spend more time away from the world, in deep prayer and substantial spiritual training—just as Jesus retreated to the desert to pray before ministering to the people. We cannot give the world what we do not have.”
― Rod Dreher, The Benedict Option: A Strategy for Christians in a Post-Christian Nation

“Our food is a sign of what we’ve lost in general. I think if we could start slowing down for food, and rebuilding the quality of our plates, we could start rebuilding what we’ve lost in our culture. As my boss says, culture starts in the kitchen, not in the opera house.”
― Rod Dreher, Crunchy Cons: The New Conservative Counterculture and Its Return to Roots

“If you are not rock solid in your commitment to traditional Christianity, then the world will break you. But if you are, then this is the solid rock upon which that world will be broken. And if those solid rocks are joined together, they form a wall of solidarity that is very hard for the enemy to breach.”
― Rod Dreher, Live Not by Lies: A Manual for Christian Dissidents

“The overweight person diets not to punish him- or herself for being heavy but to become healthier. The athlete works out not because he feels guilty for sitting around watching TV but to train his body for competition. So it is with monks and their asceticism—and so it must be with us lay Christians.”
― Rod Dreher, The Benedict Option: A Strategy for Christians in a Post-Christian Nation

“In the coming soft totalitarianism, Christians will have to regard family life in a much more focused, serious way. The traditional Christian family is not merely a good idea—it is also a survival strategy for the faith in a time of persecution. Christians should stop taking family life for granted, instead approaching it in a more thoughtful, disciplined way. We cannot simply live as all other families live, except that we go to church on Sunday. Holding the correct theological beliefs and having the right intentions will not be enough. Christian parents must be intentionally countercultural in their approach to family dynamics. The days of living like everybody else and hoping our children turn out for the best are over.”
― Rod Dreher, Live Not by Lies: A Manual for Christian Dissidents

“It is up to us today to take up this challenge, to live not by lies and to speak the truth that defeats evil. How do we do this in a society built on lies? By accepting a life outside the mainstream, courageously defending the truth, and being willing to endure the consequences.”
― Rod Dreher, Live Not by Lies: A Manual for Christian Dissidents

“Developing the cognitive control that leads to a more contemplative Christian life is the key to living as free men and women in post-Christian America. The man whose desires are under the control of his reason is free. The man who does whatever occurs to him is a slave. Untold”
― Rod Dreher, The Benedict Option: A Strategy for Christians in a Post-Christian Nation

“Love is the only way we will make it through what is to come. Love is not romantic ectasy. It has to be a kind of love that has been honed and intensified through regular prayer, fasting, and repentance and, for many Christians, through receiving the holy sacraments. And it must be a love that has been refined through suffering. There is no other way.”
― Rod Dreher, The Benedict Option: A Strategy for Christians in a Post-Christian Nation

“we are spiritual beings first and foremost, and it is impossible to thrive in a culture that does not honor and nurture things of the human spirit over and above material concerns.”
― Rod Dreher, Crunchy Cons: The New Conservative Counterculture and Its Return to Roots

“The first part of saving your life is coming to understand how you endangered it by loving wrongly, and living under the rule of your passions.”
― Rod Dreher, How Dante Can Save Your Life: The Life-Changing Wisdom of History's Greatest Poem

“We are told that small-scale farming is inefficient— this is true—and that because our factory farms feed the masses, and do so cheaply, we should be satisfied. And that's a deal that makes sense to nearly all of us: just keep the stuff showing up in produce bins and under cellophane in the supermarket cooler, and keep it relatively cheap, and we'll ask no questions. But in striking that devil's bargain, we sign away our responsibility for what's in that food, how it got there, and what was done to human communities to close the deal. To participate in a system and a way of thinking in which the act of eating is merely a commercial transaction is to sell out our spiritual and cultural patrimony. I understand the free-market reasons why Americans do this. But I don't understand why it is called conservative.”
― Rod Dreher, Crunchy Cons: How Birkenstocked Burkeans, gun-loving organic gardeners, evangelical free-range farmers, hip homeschooling mamas, right-wing nature ... America

“In the Commedia, recall, sin consists not only in loving and desiring bad things but also in loving and desiring good things in the wrong way.”
― Rod Dreher, How Dante Can Save Your Life: The Life-Changing Wisdom of History's Greatest Poem