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Rod Dreher

64 quotes

“[T]he establishment that promotes and encourages inflammatory racial views by racial minorities implicitly and unavoidably calls forth these demons from whites like Richard Spencer. Race hatred of any kind is never justifiable, and is not the way to any kind of future worth having.”
Rod Dreher (born 1967) first seen 2017 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Tommy Curry: An Aggie Palpatine" (2017), The American Conservative
“God does exist, and He does want us to be good. The problem with MTD, in both its progressive and its conservative versions, is that it’s mostly about improving one’s self-esteem and subjective happiness and getting along well with others. It has little to do with the Christianity of Scripture and tradition, which teaches repentance, self-sacrificial love, and purity of heart, and commends suffering—the Way of the Cross—as the pathway to God. Though superficially Christian, MTD is the natural religion of a culture that worships the Self and material comfort.”
Rod Dreher (born 1967) first seen 2018 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The Benedict Option: A Strategy for Christians in a Post-Christian Nation (3 April 2018)
“In high school, I was physically bullied by 17 y.o. boys, in a sexually humiliating way (but not sex). It affected the direction of my life. They never apologized. Still, I wouldn’t hold that against them if they were nominated for the Court. They were boys.”
Rod Dreher (born 1967) first seen 2018 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Twitter, 11:47 PM · Sep 17, 2018
“Is there anything that the new woke progressivism touches that it doesn’t destroy?”
Rod Dreher (born 1967) first seen 2019 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The Progressive Dystopia Of NYC Schools" (13 September 2019), The American Conservative
“[I]deas have consequences — that is, material realities derive from immaterial sources.”
Rod Dreher (born 1967) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“You cannot reform people who do not recognize that there is anything that needs reforming.”
Rod Dreher (born 1967) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Ross Douthat’s line can’t be said often enough: if you don’t like the Religious Right, just wait till you see the Post-Religious Right.”
Rod Dreher (born 1967) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“This story is not going to end with humanity completely vanquishing white supremacy, black supremacy, or any evil at all. Our hearts are too crooked for that. But we have it on good authority that the story ends — no thanks to us — with the defeat of evil and its poisoned fruit, death. It already has, for those with eyes to see and hearts willing to receive the good news.”
Rod Dreher (born 1967) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Remember this: "I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character"? That’s an ideal worth defending. But do liberals even believe it anymore?”
Rod Dreher (born 1967) first seen 2020 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Honky Cat Biden's Ugly Truth" (22 May 2020), The American Conservative
“I know it's a naive question at this point, but what the hell is wrong with people? Why are people so merciless, and take such pleasure in destroying others? Why do people demand that those we target on social media not be merely shamed, but gutted in every way possible? The mob is absolutely merciless.”
Rod Dreher (born 1967) first seen 2020 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Stoning Karen" (26 May 2020), The American Conservative
“If you believe a society built on raw force is going to be just, you are a fool.”
Rod Dreher (born 1967) first seen 2020 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Rioters Burning St. John's Church" (31 May 2020), The American Conservative
“There really is a difference between hard totalitarianism and soft totalitarianism. Totalitarianism is a mindset before it is anything else. Totalitarianism is the idea that there is no area of life that is free from politics — and that also means cultural politics.”
Rod Dreher (born 1967) first seen 2020 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: SCOTUS Routs Conservatives, Again" (15 June 2020), The American Conservative
“I fear that there will be blood. I hope and pray that there won’t be, and I will be looking for any way to avoid it.”
Rod Dreher (born 1967) first seen 2020 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Mao More Than Ever" (25 June 2020), The American Conservative
“To be able to see God and hear God requires faith. And faith requires humility, and commitment. You cannot know what the sea feels and tastes like if you will never leave the beach.”
Rod Dreher (born 1967) first seen 2020 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The Great Christian Sorting" (28 June 2020), The American Conservative
“[A] country whose elderly — considered by most societies to be repositories of wisdom and dignity — aspire to be perpetual rutting teenagers is not a country that has much to look forward to. If you want to have a future, you need a past.”
Rod Dreher (born 1967) first seen 2020 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: America’s Monumental Existential Problem" (30 June 2020), The American Conservative
“I am thinking about something a Dutch historian once told me about the cultural revolution that swept over the Netherlands in the 1960s. It had been such a settled, orderly, bourgeois nation. The Second World War and the Nazi occupation shattered something deep in the Dutch. After the war, they tried to rebuild what they had, but it was a feeble replica. When the winds of the counterculture began to blow, the establishment institutions collapsed, as if the revolution were inevitable.”
Rod Dreher (born 1967) first seen 2020 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: America’s Dostoevskian Moment" (2 July 2020), The American Conservative
“For all its problems, I can’t see any governing system available to us in our pluralistic, multiracial democracy than classical liberalism.”
Rod Dreher (born 1967) first seen 2020 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Diversity Is Not Our Strength: An Example" (3 July 2020), The American Conservative
“The cruelty, the injustice, the implacability, and at times the sheer stupidity of the imperial Russian government and social order in no way justifies all that followed—but it does explain why the revolutionary Russian generation was so eager to place its hope in communism.”
Rod Dreher (born 1967) first seen 2020 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Live Not by Lies: A Manual for Christian Dissidents (2020)
“[C]ircles have been contaminated by hatred and paranoia. Refuse and reject that right now. If you make room in your heart and mind for it, it will take you down, and take down all those that follow you.”
Rod Dreher (born 1967) first seen 2021 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Information and the Cultural Revolution" (January 2021), The American Conservative
“Day 6 of Covid. Now my wife and kids have it too. All of us vaxxed; wife and I both boosted not long ago. Everybody we know who has omicron was vaxxed; most also boosted. So I gotta ask: what's the point of vaccine passports now? Security theater? Prepping social credit system?”
Rod Dreher (born 1967) first seen 2022 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Twitter, 7:45 AM · Jan 16, 2022
“I am an emotional person, no doubt about it. The point of growing in maturity, and growing as a mature Christian, is to learn how to master your own passions, lest they master you. I will be struggling in this way until they day I die. All of us should be. One of the great lessons I learned from studying the testimonies of Christian political prisoners under the communist regimes is how even though they were treated unjustly, and even tortured, they never, ever gave in to self-pity, or hatred of their persecutors. How they did this is some kind of miracle — but it is vital wisdom for our time.”
Rod Dreher (born 1967) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“[W]e are post-Christian now. Mercy and pity are signs of weakness. Rage is a measure of one’s authenticity. The line between good and evil does not pass down the middle of each person’s heart, as Solzhenitsyn learned in the gulag, but rather, as we see it, between the races, between the secular and the religious, between economic classes, and so forth. We absolve ourselves in advance, and nurture grievance, because we think it gives our lives meaning.”
Rod Dreher (born 1967) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“[W]e live in a world in which people of the left and the right alike can be rewarded handsomely for making hate symbols of flesh-and-blood human beings, and causing others to give in to primitive hatred. The President of the United States does it, especially on social media — but don’t for a second believe that he is anything other than a product of this culture. There are leftists who quite rightly denounce him, but who are blind to the capacity for blind, destructive hatred in themselves.”
Rod Dreher (born 1967) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“There is no way — no way — that any faithful Christian can tolerate racial bigotry and still call himself faithful to Jesus Christ. Racism is a sin, straight up. You may not hate your brother because of the color of his skin, period. It is a compliment to Christianity that the white supremacist Sam Francis identified the Christian faith as an obstacle to the white racial consciousness that he wanted to see.”
Rod Dreher (born 1967) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The more I dug into Russian history, the better I understood where the radicalism came from. Ordinary Russian people had been kept down for so long that they were willing to believe that anything would be better than what they had. So, Russia had a revolution, and it got incomparably worse.”
Rod Dreher (born 1967) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“[W]e have become a country in which many people, regardless of their race, are willing to believe lies if the lies feel right to them, and suit their ideological preferences. Hannah Arendt said this kind of thing is a prelude to totalitarianism.”
Rod Dreher (born 1967) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It should go without saying that we must instruct our children that racism is evil. But this is part of any truly liberal education. What’s happening now is that ideologues, many of them not fully aware of what they are doing, are taking advantage of the persistence of an old and universal human evil — hating the Other by race — and using it to carry out a far more sweeping agenda. We cannot count on universities anymore.”
Rod Dreher (born 1967) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Don’t misunderstand: racism is a malignancy, and so is police brutality; decent people should stand up against them. But resisting these evils are going to occasion the embrace of other evils, masquerading as virtues and imperatives.”
Rod Dreher (born 1967) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“[W]e have moved into a new phase of ideological conflict, one in which leftist elites hold the high ground. One major difference between today and the period Roger Kimball refers to is that in 2020, Woke Capitalism is a thing; the radicals hold power within corporations. Daniel McCarthy calls out the hypocrisy of the big corporations. Nike, for example, is Very, Very Concerned about white supremacy in America. Concentration camp for Muslim Uighurs in China? Not so much.”
Rod Dreher (born 1967) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“[T]he coming battle will actually sideline many practicing Christians. That it will be between the Woke on one side, and white nationalists on the other. There is no way that authentic followers of Jesus Christ can endorse race nationalism of either the white or the black kind.”
Rod Dreher (born 1967) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Wishy-washy Moralistic Therapeutic Deism is going to be burned up, and is now being burned up. There is going to be no middle ground left. Churches will either go militantly woke, or may turn to a Christianized version of white nationalism. The rest of us believers will be doing our best simply to hold our churches and families together, and not lose our members to the passionate ideologies tearing the country apart.”
Rod Dreher (born 1967) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“They begin by destroying statues. They will end by destroying people.”
Rod Dreher (born 1967) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I’ve had it. My “Law of Merited Impossibility” (“It will never happen, and when it does, you bigots will deserve it”) was meant as a joke, but the reality it pointed to was serious. Now it’s not even funny in a black-humor way. It’s just true. I don’t believe there is any limiting principle to the destruction that progressives will bring.”
Rod Dreher (born 1967) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Bolsheviks actually had a vision of what they wanted to see replace the order they destroyed. Other than “defund the police,” the Woke do not.”
Rod Dreher (born 1967) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“They start with pulling down and abusing statues; they will end by doing this to people.”
Rod Dreher (born 1967) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“[S]omeone driving a Geo Metro in this day and age isn't rich.”
Rod Dreher (born 1967) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“[T]he deepest level of hell is reserved for traitors. Why traitors? Because they make life in community impossible. In medieval Italy, cities were in a frequent state of war with each other. When they closed the city gates at night, everybody in the city had to trust that no one would open the gates during the night and let in troops of the enemy. If you could not have that trust, you couldn’t sleep. You couldn’t live, for fear that your neighbor would betray you, and everyone, to the enemy. To render everyone isolated from everyone else, and living in fear — this was hell.”
Rod Dreher (born 1967) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The American left, abetted by the media, is racializing everything, in extremely toxic ways. I don’t say this as whatabouttery. You longtime readers know I have been saying for years in this space that the race-conscious left, by explicitly repudiating the liberal, MLK-era model of race relations, is calling up demons that they won’t be able to control. Well, those demons are now showing themselves. America is in for a terrible, terrible time.”
Rod Dreher (born 1967) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“[T]he only way for people in a multiracial, pluralistic, modern democratic society to live together is through the old-fashioned liberal principles whose most prominent advocate was Martin Luther King, Jr. The left, led by academic and media institutions, is pulling those principles down with the ideological fervor of fanatical iconoclasts. Nobody is thinking about where this cannot help but lead.”
Rod Dreher (born 1967) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“For as long as there are human beings, there will be prejudice. We are wired that way. It is impossible for most Americans to detect any difference at all between Serbs and Croats, but these ancient rivals very much see the difference between themselves. I could not detect the difference between an Ulster Protestant and an Ulster Catholic, but men have killed each other over that difference, until fairly recently, and, God forbid, may do again.”
Rod Dreher (born 1967) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“[R]emember that because everyone is made in the image of God, and therefore has inalienable dignity, everyone is also susceptible to deformations of virtue — that is to say, sin. This ought to make us all clear-eyed about human nature.”
Rod Dreher (born 1967) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The hearts of men are exceedingly complex, as are their lives. Men who were capable of great good and decency were also capable of the exact opposite. One does not cancel the other. That is a very, very hard lesson to learn...”
Rod Dreher (born 1967) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“This is not a popular truth to say right now, in this time of moral hysteria and purity trials, but it remains true. The color of your skin does not guarantee virtue or vice. Rather, as King taught, and as the Bible teaches, it’s what’s in your heart. Jesus condemned the Pharisees as “whited sepulchres” — tombs that were gleaming on the outside, but that concealed foulness within.”
Rod Dreher (born 1967) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The same mob that demanded the death of Jesus, and the release of Barabbas. The same mob that any one of us, whatever our race, could find ourselves standing in, pumping our fists and shouting, under the right circumstances. All of us could be tempted to pick up the stones and hurl them at a great sinner. Stones come in many shapes and sizes. If you don’t think you could brain a sinner with one, or egg on the stone-throwers, then you don’t know your own heart as well as you should.”
Rod Dreher (born 1967) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“These are some of the things the Church has to say to the public right now. We are all under judgment. We are all under mercy. There is none righteous, no, not one. But the One who was and is righteous — through obedience to Him, we can be healed.”
Rod Dreher (born 1967) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“[H]atred and tribal violence is endemic to the human condition. Cain slew Abel, and it’s been downhill from there.”
Rod Dreher (born 1967) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Everybody is afraid. The Gospel speaks to this fear! It offers a way out, and a way forward!”
Rod Dreher (born 1967) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“[T]he American media, whether it believes it is doing this or not, is seeding violent racial conflict — and that we are going to see it sooner rather than later.”
Rod Dreher (born 1967) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Hear me clearly: racism exists, it's a sin, and it should be resisted. But these SJWs, deeply embedded in institutions, and in command of the propaganda apparatus, are taking a genuine social problem — racism — that always needs attention, but construing it in a highly ideological way that has very little to do with addressing with this complex problem, and everything to do with advancing a narrative of command and control that demonizes an entire race of people as plunderers and parasites by nature, and incites others to despise them. We know from history where things like this go.”
Rod Dreher (born 1967) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“[C]laims of systemic racism in particular institutions are now accepted and repeated as fact, and that it is practically impossible to criticize or reject those claims in any way. "Systemic racism" is as fundamental to the construal of reality in the fast-emerging social order as “class conflict” was in Marxist social orders. It is the uncontestable axiom on which the entire ideological structure is built. Deny that, and you’re part of the racist system.”
Rod Dreher (born 1967) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source