Rod Dreher

Rod Dreher

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Fighting the gay agenda

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Judge not

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That ye be not judged

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“”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

Raymond "Rod" Oliver Dreher Jr. (1967–) 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."

Early life and career

Dreher is from Louisiana and never shuts up about it. He began working in journalism after college and by the early 2000s was working for the New York Post. The paper received numerous complaints in 2001 when Dreher wrote an article criticizing R&B singer Aaliyah's funeral because it held up traffic.

Homophobia and racism

See the main articles on this topic: 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

See the main article on this topic: 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 Substack.

In March 2023, Vanity Fair 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 an heir to a banking fortune named Howard Ahmanson Jr. 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 the Mpox virus 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's 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 Pride 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".

Viktor Orbán apologist

See the main article on this topic: Viktor Orbán

“”"How is Orban's Hungary more free than most Western liberal democracies?"

—Rod Dreher, who has a strange doublespeak concept of the word "free"

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 Danube Institute 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".

Ancient Aliens A-Go-Go

Dreher has a new book coming out in 2024, "Living In Wonder: Finding Mystery and Meaning in a Secular Age". On a Substack post promoting the book, he wrote:

“”Jonah told me that the “ancient gods” told him their plan was to lead humanity to merge itself with machines, and through that, they (the entities) planned to enslave and destroy humanity. Sounds crazy, right? Except here’s the thing: this line keeps coming up from people who claim to be in touch with these entities. A Christian friend in publishing told me that a man who used to be close to him in their Christian college went on to do DMT, the ultra-powerful psychedelic, and to have a “de-conversion experience” — meaning, he renounced his Christian faith. That ex-Christian now claims to be in touch with “ancient gods” who are going to merge man with machine, and who are going to come back to defeat the evil God of the Bible. Look, if you’ve followed my career for any amount of time, you know that these people and these stories find their way to me. It’s why my friend Ross Douthat once asked me when I was finally going to write my “woo book.” So, maybe I just have had uncanny luck, if luck is the word, in meeting and hearing from people from all over who tell close variations of the same story: that the Ancient Gods are going to return manifesting as aliens, and are going to assault the God of the Bible — Baal, Moloch, and Ishtar strike back — and ultimately enslave humanity. Maybe I’m just a weirdo magnet. Or maybe something dark and extremely significant is underway right beneath our noses, and playing out in ways we have not anticipated, if we even thought about it at all.

This UFO theory is apparently a significant part of the book. Early reviews have been... unappreciative.

See also

• Toby Young (a Dreher lookalike with less hair)

External link

• Rod Dreher