Rod Dreher



The cultural point remains: the more people from alien cultures you have moving into your own, the more fragile and vulnerable your own culture becomes, especially if it is held with less force than the aliens hold their own.

Rod Dreher is an American Conservative Christian and homophobe who opposes equal rights for LGBT people and dislikes African people. He is senior editor and a former blogger at The American Conservative. Dreher describes himself as a "Righty journalist, Orthodox Christian, Southerner, Europhile, Ignatian (Team Reilly), eclecticist."

Homophobia and racism
Dreher believes that Christians must be granted the right to discriminate against LGBT people whenever their religion demands it. He is author of the book The Benedict Option, arguing anti-LGBT Christians should withdraw into cult-like isolation modelled on a medieval Benedictine monastery, where they are free to indoctrinate their children in peace.

In 2018, Dreher attracted widespread criticism for his defense of Donald Trump's offensive comments regarding African countries as "shitholes".

Dreher calls African people “barbarians” but insists that isn’t racist because it is a “perfectly just” description. Dreher took an African-American professor’s remarks out of context, stirring up a racist mob against him in the process.

Dreher supports TERFs, and defends the right of Christians to discriminate against transgender people.

Dreher is a fan of the right-wing Quillette magazine. In March 2020, Dreher wrote an article supporting "race realist" Bo Winegard who was fired from Marietta College.

Theistic evolution
Dreher's exact position on evolution is hard to pin down. He believes that the Christian God created the world but says he does not personally believe in young earth creationism. Although he disagrees with the YEC position he has defended creationists saying "I admire their bullheadedness" and has written articles supporting them.

To his credit, Dreher is not a Biblical literalist but he does cherry-pick what bits he wants to believe from the Bible. He has written that "there may not have been a literal garden of Eden, but at some point there was a metaphysical and spiritual event called the Fall."

Dreher has never written that he accepts the evidence for common descent. Until 2011 he worked for the Templeton Foundation which supports theistic evolution.

P. Z. Myers has commented that Dreher is “totally ignorant of science”. Dreher has also drawn criticism from Jerry Coyne.

Too weird for the American Conservative
On February 24 2023, Dreher announced on his American Conservative blog that it was ending at that location, and that he was taking his "culture war" blog to

In March 2023, reported the purported reason for this change: Dreher's blog had simply gotten too weird. According to Vanity Fair, the blog was unique in that it was entirely financed by a heir to a banking fortune named who admired Dreher's work. However, the benefactor started souring on Dreher when Dreher's writings went too far.

Among the problematic articles were several about homosexuals and that attracted criticism from other bloggers (in a tweet, for instance, Andrew Sullivan simply called one of these articles "evil".) In the articles, he gleefully and luridly depicted the disease effects, demanded that public health authorities "shut down gay sex festivals and gay sex clubs", and speculated without evidence that two other children who contracted monkeypox got it from "being poked by those strangers on  weekend".

Another "red flag" article was a strange musing on circumcision. In this article, he mused about one kid in his elementary school (third grade) class who was black and had been born at home, and therefore was not circumcised. Dreher bizarrely (and with a hint of racism) described the kid's penis as a "monstrous" "primitive root wiener".

Orbán apologist
"How is Orban's Hungary more free than most Western liberal democracies?" In the early 2010s, Dreher moved back (with his wife and children) to the rural Louisiana parish where he grew up, where his estranged family of origin still lived. Reportedly the results were terrible for Dreher's personal life; the relationship with his origin family remained estranged, while the move wrecked his own health and his marriage. After the subsequent divorce, Dreher, who while at a four month fellowship at the Hungarian in 2021 developed an admiration for the "Christian conservatism" politics of Viktor Orbán, decided to move to Budapest in October 2022.

Since this move, Dreher has become an apologist for Orbán. However, Dreher's strange thoughts about what "freedom" is like matches well with Dreher's inexperience with reporting while within an authoritarian regimes. In late January 2023, Dreher was invited to a small press office consisting entirely of Orbán sycophant reporters. There, Orbán (among other anti-immigration, anti-Islam, Hungarian Catholic nationalist musings) described how he detested the European Union, and shilled for Vladimir Putin in the context of the ongoing Russian invasion of Ukraine. Naively, Dreher published these remarks in his American Conservative blog, not knowing that in an authoritarian country, you cannot publish exactly what you hear if it goes against the interest of politicians. The article ended up causing much outrage, particularly in Ukraine, where Dreher's unfiltered reporting actually helped cause a diplomatic scandal. In the fallout from the incident, Dreher scrambled to rewrite the article and attempted to bury the controversial unfiltered comments by Orbán, calling them a "joke".

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 * Rod Dreher