Ray Oliver Dreher Jr. (born February 14, 1967), known as Rod Dreher, is an American conservative writer and editor. He was a columnist with The American Conservative for 12 years, ending in March 2023, and remains an editor-at-large there. He is also the author of several books, including How Dante Can Save Your Life, The Benedict Option, and Live Not by Lies. He has written about religion, politics, film, and culture in National Review and National Review Online, The Weekly Standard, The Wall Street Journal, and other publications.
Dreher was a film reviewer for the South Florida Sun-Sentinel and chief film critic for the New York Post. His commentaries have been broadcast on NPR's All Things Considered, and he has appeared on CNN, Fox News, MSNBC, Court TV, and other television networks.
Early life and education Dreher was born on February 14, 1967, in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. He was named after his father, Ray Oliver Dreher, a local landowner, parish sanitation official, and member of the Ku Klux Klan. https://www.theamericanconservative.com/a-darkness-revealed/
Dreher was raised in the small town of St. Francisville, the parish seat of West Feliciana Parish north of Baton Rouge. He attended the Louisiana School for Math, Science and the Arts in Natchitoches, where he was part of the school's first graduating class in 1985. In 1989 he graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in journalism from Louisiana State University.
Career Dreher began his career as a television critic for The Washington Times and later worked as chief film critic for the New York Post and editor for National Review. In 2002, Dreher wrote an essay that explored a subcategory of American conservatism he defined as "granola conservatism", whose adherents he called "crunchy cons". He defined these people as traditionalist conservatives who believe in environmental conservation, frugal living, and the preservation of traditional family values, but are also skeptical about aspects of free-market capitalism. He portrayed "crunchy cons" as generally religious (typically traditionalist Roman Catholics, conservative Protestants, or Eastern Orthodox). Four years later, Dreher published a book expanding on the themes of this manifesto, Crunchy Cons: How Birkenstocked Burkeans, Gun-Loving Organic Gardeners, Evangelical Free-Range Farmers, Hip Homeschooling Mamas, Right-Wing Nature Lovers, and Their Diverse Tribe of Countercultural Conservatives Plan to Save America (or At Least the Republican Party).
From 2006, Dreher maintained a Beliefnet blog called "Crunchy Con"; the blog was renamed "Rod Dreher" in 2010, with a shift in focus from political to cultural topics. During this time, Dreher worked as an editorial writer and columnist for The Dallas Morning News, which he left in 2009 to become the publications director for the John Templeton Foundation. On August 20, 2011, Dreher announced on Twitter that he was leaving the Templeton Foundation to return to full-time writing. In 2013, Dreher published The Little Way of Ruthie Leming, a book about his childhood in Louisiana and his sister's battle with cancer. In 2015, Dreher published How Dante Can Save Your Life, a memoir about how reading Dante's Divine Comedy helped him after his sister's death. Dreher began writing a blog for the American Conservative in 2008; in 2017, the blog received on average more than a million page views per month.
In March 2023, funding for Dreher's blog at The American Conservative was withdrawn. According to Vanity Fair, the departure was prompted by a withdrawal of support for Dreher by philanthropist Howard Ahmanson Jr., who single-handedly funded Dreher's salary at the website in an unusual arrangement that also allowed Dreher to publish without an editor. Ahmanson had become dissatisfied with the tone of Dreher's posts, calling them "too weird", citing as the prime example a post where Dreher reminisced about a Black elementary-school classmate of his who had an unusual-looking uncircumcised penis that Dreher described as a "primitive root wiener". Dreher said he intended to continue blogging and might also contribute to The American Conservative with editorial oversight.
The Benedict Option
From 2015 to 2021 Dreher wrote about what he calls the "Benedict Option", the idea that Christians who want to preserve their faith should segregate themselves to some degree from "post-Obergefell" society, which he sees as drifting further away from "traditional Christian values" (particularly those regarding sex, marriage, and gender). Dreher says that Christians should try to form intentional communities, such as the Bruderhof Communities or the School for Conversion. The phrase "Benedict Option" was inspired by Alasdair MacIntyre's 1981 book After Virtue and refers to the sixth-century monk Benedict of Nursia. Dreher's book on the subject, The Benedict Option, was published by Sentinel in 2017.
Reviews of The Benedict Option ranged from laudatory to highly critical. David Brooks of The New York Times called it "the most discussed and most important religious book of the decade" while also expressing concern that "by retreating to neat homogeneous monocultures, most separatists will end up [...] fostering narrowness, prejudice and moral arrogance." Rowan Williams, the former Archbishop of Canterbury, wrote that the prominence the book gives to "same-sex relations", as opposed to "poverty, racism and war", "reinforces the common perception that the only ethical issues that interest traditional Christians are those involving sexual matters." Nonetheless, Williams suggested, "The book is worth reading because it poses some helpfully tough questions to a socially liberal majority, as well as to believers of a more traditional colour." Russell D. Moore, the editor-in-chief of Christianity Today, called Dreher's book "brilliant, prophetic, and wise". Alan Levinovitz, a religious scholar at James Madison University, called it "spiritual pornography" the soul of which "is not love of God; it is bitter loathing of those who do not share it." Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito cited The Benedict Option in a court ruling in favor of the freedom of hiring by two religious schools on July 8, 2020.
Various conferences and symposia have discussed the Benedict Option as an idea, as have theologians and commentators. The Reformed philosophical theologian James K. A. Smith, for instance, has written a number of critical responses to the idea, including one in which he argues that the world Dreher laments the loss of "tends to be white. And what seems to be lost is a certain default power and privilege." Dreher has repeatedly called these charges "motivated reasoning". The writer Elizabeth Bruenig has argued that Dreher's strategy of "withdrawing from conventional politics is difficult to parse with Christ's command that we love our neighbors". The Christian literary scholar Alan Jacobs has responded to these and other criticisms of The Benedict Option. The writer Leah Libresco has published a guide to the practical aspects of building "BenOp communities".
Dreher's experience as a 2021 fellow at Hungary's Danube Institute and his observation of Viktor Orbán's government persuaded him that Christian conservatives could still win and wield substantial political power. "Orbán was so unafraid, so unapologetic about using his political power to push back on the liberal élites in business and media and culture", Dreher told The New Yorkers Andrew Marantz in 2022. "It was so inspiring: this is what a vigorous conservative government can do if it's serious about stemming this horrible global tide of wokeness." Dreher also argued that the U.S. Republican Party needs "a leader with Orbán's vision—someone who can build on what Trumpism accomplished, without the egomania and inattention to policy, and who is not afraid to step on the liberals' toes."
Political views
Views on sexuality, sexual assault, and gender Dreher holds to what he calls biblical Christian teaching on sexuality and gender, including on the sinfulness of same-sex sexual relations and the naturalness of male–female difference. Some writers have praised Dreher's insights into the nature of the social changes caused by the sexual revolution; others have argued that Dreher has not sufficiently grappled with the problem of how conservative Christians should live alongside gay people, and have criticized the language Dreher has used to describe them. Dreher has published numerous articles expressing alarm at the growing visibility of transgender people in American society, which he sees as part of a "technology-driven revolution in our view of personhood." The Guardian has called Dreher "a man who appears to view fomenting transgender panic more as a vocation than a job."
In September 2018, during Brett Kavanaugh's U.S. Supreme Court confirmation hearing, Dreher sided with those conservatives who minimized the importance of an alleged sexual assault by Kavanaugh when he was 17. He tweeted: "I do not understand why the loutish drunken behavior of a 17 year old high school boy has anything to tell us about the character of a 53 year old judge."
Views on race and immigration In a 2014 blog post titled "Tips for Not Getting Shot by Cops," Dreher wrote that Michael Brown was shot by police in part because Brown was a "lawbreaker" who "hung out with lawbreakers", although "None of this means that Wilson was justified in using deadly force against Brown" and "it doesn't mean that there aren't big problems with policing in Ferguson."
Dreher is a critic of large-scale immigration to the U.S. and Europe; he has defended the concept of Western civilization and condemned identity politics associated with race. In 2001, Dreher published an article mocking the funeral celebrations of the African-American singer Aaliyah, and subsequently reported receiving threatening phone calls from people with "black accents". He later expressed regret for his comments on the funeral. In 2018, Dreher compared African immigration to Europe to a "barbarian invasion". After the Christchurch mosque shootings of March 2019, Dreher strongly condemned the shooter's actions and aspects of his ideology, but also said the shooter had "legitimate, realistic concerns" about "declining numbers of ethnic Europeans" in Western countries; as a result of these comments, multiple scholars criticized the University of Wollongong's Ramsay Center for Western Civilization for inviting Dreher as a speaker. Moses writes that Dreher "concedes too much" (p.213) to the Christchurch shooter, and that Dreher and others who advance "an alarmist 'decline of the West' narrative need to think carefully about how they are intellectually equipping those with catastrophized subjectivities to take their proclaimed state of emergency as a green light for desperate measures." (p.212) Dreher has said that his concerns about immigration stem from sympathy for the less well-off, whom he argues are most adversely affected by it, and by a desire to preserve Western cultural traditions.