R.R. Reno > Quotes

“It’s also true that religious people are more censorious than nonreligious people, and I submit that this trait, rather than the actual effects of religion on civic life, is the source of faith’s bad reputation today. Religious people are judgmental in the sense that they have definite views about right and wrong.”
― R.R. Reno, Resurrecting the Idea of a Christian Society

“Educated, well-to-do Baby Boomers are disciplined in their hedonism, careful that their peccadillos don’t impede their scramble for success. For the most part, the rich have developed a relatively safe and moderate approach to drugs, and for the few who haven’t, well, there’s professional help. Decriminalization of marijuana won’t hurt the strong. But what about the weak? Kids who use marijuana regularly get lower test scores, are more likely to drop out of high school, and are less likely to go to college. And who are they? A 2011 study reports that children of parents who have not completed high school are twice as likely to smoke marijuana as children of those who have completed college. Again, new freedoms harm the vulnerable. The”
― R.R. Reno, Resurrecting the Idea of a Christian Society

“The stable ground is disappearing. You’re either going up or going down. The upshot is widespread unhappiness. Even the successful are consumed by a spirit of anxious striving. Too often despair overtakes those struggling, stumbling, and falling behind. We”
― R.R. Reno, Resurrecting the Idea of a Christian Society

“A recent book by University of Chicago professor of philosophy and law Brian Leiter outlines what I believe will become the theoretical consensus that does away with religious liberty in spirit if not in letter. “There is no principled reason,” he writes, “for legal or constitutional regimes to single out religion for protection.” . . . Evoking the principle of fairness, Leiter argues that everybody’s conscience should be accorded the same legal protections. Thus he proposes to replace religious liberty with a plenary “liberty of conscience.”

Leiter’s argument is libertarian. He wants to get the government out of the business of deciding whose conscience is worth protecting. This mentality seems to expand freedom, but that’s an illusion. In practice it will lead to diminished freedom, as is always the case with any thoroughgoing libertarianism.”
― R.R. Reno

“Progressivism is a luxury of the one percent.”
― R. R. Reno

“The reconstitution of elite WASP culture as post-Protestant and ethnically diverse but intellectually homogeneous is the most important change in American society of the past half-century. It explains the culture wars of recent decades far more effectively than the standard overemphasis of the role of the Religious Right. Conservative”
― R.R. Reno, Resurrecting the Idea of a Christian Society

“empirically well established. Sociological studies show that faith is strongly correlated with social bonding. Religious commitments encourage civic involvement and build social capital.”
― R.R. Reno, Resurrecting the Idea of a Christian Society

“We want a culture of the people, by the people, and for the people, not defined by white European traditions, male preferences, or any other form of group identity.”
― R.R. Reno, Resurrecting the Idea of a Christian Society

“Our hearth gods are health, wealth, and pleasure. Cigarette smoking among college students has fallen to all-time lows, surpassed by the use of marijuana. The god of health requires sacrifices that are compensated for by the beneficent ministrations of the god of pleasure.”
― R.R. Reno, Resurrecting the Idea of a Christian Society

“Christian society does not compel faith or install priests in positions of public authority. But it affirms that we are fully human and more genuinely free when we give ourselves to something higher. A”
― R.R. Reno, Resurrecting the Idea of a Christian Society

“We [postmodernists] can safely navigate the danger of life, detached from the true and everlasting dangers of obedience and commitment, for nothing has the right to make a claim on our souls.”
― R.R. Reno

“When a culture of freedom becomes a cult of freedom, injustice, suffering, and social dysfunction get explained away as “choices.” The”
― R.R. Reno, Resurrecting the Idea of a Christian Society

“The West needs to restore a sense of transcendent purpose to public (and private) life. Our time—this century—begs for a politics of loyalty and solidarity, not openness and deconsolidation. We don’t need more diversity and innovation. We need a home. And for that, we will require the return of the strong gods.”
― R.R. Reno, Return of the Strong Gods: Nationalism, Populism, and the Future of the West

“Today, the greatest threat to the political health of the West is not fascism or a resurgent Ku Klux Klan but a decline in solidarity and the breakdown of the trust between leaders and the”
― R.R. Reno, Return of the Strong Gods: Nationalism, Populism, and the Future of the West

“But there’s a dark side to our national character. A deep sadness comes when we realize, finally, that we’re on our own, which is where secular individualism brings us in the end.”
― R.R. Reno, Resurrecting the Idea of a Christian Society

“Pursuit of truth requires the courage to consider all the evidence.”
― R.R. Reno

“Christians are called not to win debates and elections but to build a civilization of love—never”
― R.R. Reno, Resurrecting the Idea of a Christian Society

“Dignity—the kind the poor kids in Putnam’s study so often desire for themselves and those they love, however inarticulately they express it—was once widely accessible. Now it’s not. At”
― R.R. Reno, Resurrecting the Idea of a Christian Society

“This small, almost innocent, yet typical episode of therapeutic hauteur reflects our society’s division by a moral inequality as severe as—and in all likelihood more damaging than—income inequality. The psychologist uses her authority as an expert to undercut a straightforward exercise of parental authority (positional control). She asks instead for a sophisticated verbal exchange between mother and child (personal control). This may be well-meaning, but it is an exercise in class dominance.”
― R.R. Reno, Resurrecting the Idea of a Christian Society

“Relativism is not a philosophical theory. It is a spiritual truth, a protective dogma designed to fend off any power that might claim our loyalty. It is a habit of mind that insulates postmodern life from the sober potency of arguments and the force of evidence, from the rightful claims of reason and the wisdom of the past.”
― R.R. Reno

“In American Grace: How Religion Divides and Unites Us, Robert Putnam and David Campbell illustrate the political implications of the rise of the Nones. They found that 50 percent of those who say grace before meals identify themselves as Republican, 40 percent as Democrats, and 10 percent as independents. No surprise there. It’s common for the media to speak of religious conservatives as the base of the Republican Party. What’s striking, however, is the intense partisan loyalty of those who never say grace—70 percent of them identify as Democrats and only 20 percent as Republicans. A”
― R.R. Reno, Resurrecting the Idea of a Christian Society

“Having forsaken higher things, we undermine the basis for freedom. We think that what people lack is money, when the rich themselves are enslaved to the meritocratic machine of their own invention. Our secular high priests preach materialism, but it’s a counsel of compliance, not freedom.”
― R.R. Reno, Resurrecting the Idea of a Christian Society

“Putnam, echoing Charles Murray, points out that America has become rigorously segregated. The functional insulate themselves and their children from the dysfunctional. Imbued with a therapeutic ethos that softens the rigors they impose on themselves and their children, and often cowed by multiculturalism, today’s rich won’t speak up for a common culture that imposes standards on personal behavior. They won’t support the traditional common culture that helped Jesse’s parents achieve their goal of raising a dignified man. Instead, they quietly and covertly pass on social capital to their children. Their kids go to schools that, for all their celebration of “diversity” and “inclusion,” are ruthlessly segregated by social class, ensuring that no “unhealthy” or “anti-social” attitudes infect their charmed world of pleasures without penalties and permissions without punishments. In this controlled, segregated environment, rich kids are prepared for success in today’s hypercompetitive meritocracy. C”
― R.R. Reno, Resurrecting the Idea of a Christian Society

“Today, self-giving and decency are remote, inaccessible ideals for many poor people in America. Basic human dignity seems out of reach.”
― R.R. Reno, Resurrecting the Idea of a Christian Society

“Libertarians see these changes as gains for freedom. No longer under the thumb of traditional marriage and religion, people can make up their own minds about how to live their personal lives, believing what they wish about religion and morality. Maybe so, but that’s no basis for a free society. Codified rights offer limited protection. If the Supreme Court can find a right to same-sex marriage in the Constitution, then it can find anything, including dramatically different (and reduced) rights of speech, association, and religion. The most powerful limits to government power are found below and above political life: a strong culture of marriage and family, and robust, assertive religious institutions. A free society depends on strong family loyalties and faith’s indomitable resolve.”
― R.R. Reno, Resurrecting the Idea of a Christian Society

“And so the American dream of freedom inevitably contradicts itself: We must deploy the coercive power of government to promote freedom; we must limit freedom for the sake of freedom.”
― R.R. Reno, Resurrecting the Idea of a Christian Society

“Friedrich Hayek wrote his classic The Road to Serfdom during World War II in the hope of shaping the postwar reconstruction of society. The West, he believed, faced a decisive choice: to affirm individual freedom or to embrace central planning and socialism. Today, however, our greatest threat is untethered individualism. We’re living in a dissolving society, not a collectivist one. In”
― R.R. Reno, Resurrecting the Idea of a Christian Society

“The Faithful are much more likely than other parents to “completely agree” that a woman should put family above career, but they also insist with equal vehemence that the same holds for men. Family trumps personal needs and desires.”
― R.R. Reno, Resurrecting the Idea of a Christian Society

“When we can’t imagine alternatives, most of us remain loyal to the ideas that dominate our minds, even when we know they’re false. We can change our minds only when we are able to envision a more powerful truth.”
― R.R. Reno, Resurrecting the Idea of a Christian Society

“Yale University is famous for its Sex Week. It does not have a Dignity of the Worker Week or even a Save the Planet Week. This self-involved focus speaks volumes about the preoccupations of today’s ruling class.”
― R.R. Reno, Resurrecting the Idea of a Christian Society