Rod Dreher Explains His Christian Principles
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| Appearances matter, politically. |
With friends like these [picture of Mike Huckabee], religious liberty needs no enemies
Now, let's keep in mind Rod Dreher is a blogger, pundit, memoirist, ::coughanonymouscatholicfifthcolumnistcough:: and, most recently, to help ends meet, a ghost writer, while frenemy of religious liberty Mike Huckabee is a magna cum laude college graduate, Baptist minister, former Governor of Arkansas, and former and current presidential candidate.
So clearly Huckabee's qualifications to speak on religious liberty and politics are not at all on a par with Rod's.
What I’m trying to get you to understand is how the Kim Davis thing looks to many people who don’t live inside your bubble. Appearances matter, politically.
Appearances also matter desperately if one is trying to beat the bushes to drum up support for one's signature Benedict Option, a proposition rooted ultimately in Christian hopelessness and despair about the world we live in.
A county clerk fighting back against a Supreme Court decision, even futilely, a social conservative running for the Presidency unapologetically as a social conservative - these things are like garlic to a vampire with respect to any sort of immediacy needed to drive interest in a book about your last, only Benedict Option.
As long as other Christians are taking a stand, any drehery Benedict Option dhimmitude is always something one can think about mañana.
Well, clearly mañana won't put any Benedict Option book wine and oysters into our ghost writer's belly any time soon, so just as clearly any blade of resistant grass that dares raise its head on the barren plains of Benedict Option despair can dependably count on being immediately Millmaned as thoroughly as possible.
Because, you know, appearances matter, politically.
Dreher has a LOT of nerve throwing stones at anyone by name-calling them "Christian, Inc.". A LOT of nerve. What are Crunchy Conservatives again? Who is going to buy the Benedict Option book again?
ReplyDeleteRod is the spokesman for Orthodox, Inc,; he sees himself as the Cadillac to Christianity, Inc.'s Chevrolet.
DeleteBesides the Benedict Option is soooo yesterday. Much like he moved from "Peak Oil" to "Peak Localism" to "Peak Orthodoxy" now that he's moved on to "Peak Western Civilization". I suspect the Benedict option will have to wait until after the Reconquista Option, where Rod singlehandedly defeats the Muslim Hoard armed only with a bottle of Le Beaujolais Nouveau and a copy of Let it Bleed.
-The Other Anonymous Guy
Let's remember that it hasn't been all that long ago that Rod began test-marketing religious liberty as his signature issue, religious liberty then undefined by him as just about anything that upset the equilibrium of social conservatives.
ReplyDeleteNow, ironically, religious liberty ends up being antimatter to the Benedict Option: if one has or can regain one's religious liberty, the Benedict Option, if anything, starts to look like nothing more than some weird, obsessive "prepping" laminated over simply practicing one's Christianity.
Thus, for Rod, religious liberty, like some daughter discovered and deemed to be a pregnant embarrassment, must be relocated to some indeterminable glen of reality where her bulge cannot ever be discovered and intrude unexpectedly into the councils of despair.
Rod ends his post with "Our side has no leadership, only opportunists leading the mob". Well, yeah.
George Neumayr at The American Spectator
ReplyDelete“I think that when statesmen forsake their own private conscience for the sake of their public duties they lead their country by a short route to chaos,” says Thomas More in the Robert Bolt play. It is curious to hear the Christian critics of Kim Davis reverse this argument and fret over the chaos that might result should conscientious Christians in government forsake their duties, as if the stability of a government separated from God’s law is more crucial to the common good than is the moral truth to which that disobedience gives effective witness.
Without that moral truth, all of government descends into chaos and civil disobedience becomes a corrective to it. By exposing herself to jail, Davis has helped reveal the increasingly coercive character of secularism, which will not rest until all Christians bow to its dictates or disappear from public life. For her Christian critics, in the midst of this purge, to be worrying about the propriety of her actions looks like a case of straining at the gnat and swallowing the camel.
Kim Davis' role isn't to make social conservatives look agreeable to Rod's substantial gay and liberal blog readership, nor is it particularly relevant whether or not she has a legal leg to stand on.
Kim Davis' chosen role is civil disobedience - that middle course between docile obedience and martial disobedience, putting two in the chest and one in the head - and civil disobedience need only be civil and disobedient, disruptive, a persisting problem, sand in the gears of what is being objected to, ideally to the point that eliminating the civil disobedience finaly trumps persisting in the courrse of action being objected to.
But as nothing more than a career opportunist farming religion and conservatism for whatever it might yield him, it's easy to see how all that might escape Rod.
Rod doesn't like Kim because the Cool Kids don't like her. Fight for religious liberty just took a back seat. It is always about acceptance by the Cool Kids. And they won't let Kim Davis sit at their lunch table, so neither will Rod.
ReplyDeleteYes, that's pretty much it in a nutshell.
ReplyDeleterelstprof says:
ReplyDeleteSeptember 10, 2015 at 2:09 am
NFR to Engineer Scotty, 9/9, 8.58 pm:
“A fundamentalist Christian woman from rural Kentucky and her overalls-wearing husband may be saints of God, and they certainly don’t offend or disturb me by their appearance. But from a political messaging standpoint, trying to change the minds of a popular culture that harbors all kinds of prejudices against rural people and fundamentalist/Pentecostal Christians, well, they’re straight out of central casting.”
But the “change of mind” Socons are after here is the salubriousness of religious liberty for all, right? Perception of rural whites isn’t the issue. While I don’t agree with those supporting Davis (or opponents to SSM in general), their consternation about your rhetorical ambiguity has merit.
First Things supports her on principle. (They have nothing better to do.) You seem to be suggesting that those for religious liberty ought to find an acceptable person/scapegoat willing to “take one for the team” to further the cause.
Shall she be a Vanderbilt-grad soccer-mom with 2.3 kids and an SUV? Phi Beta Kappa, too? Or just someone NLK, “not like Kim”?
Of course this raises the question whether BenOp communal virtue is virtue if one is thinking this way. What could BenOp be, if it’s concerned with this? As I take you at your word, Rod, another way of interpreting your position is that you’re hoping through luck, or God, that someone acceptable to great swathes of the American public steps up to the plate for religious liberty. That might be a very long wait.
Let us also remember that chief among his "Christian Principles" is to bash the Catholic Church every day of the week, http://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/livy-catholic-bishops-australia-abuse
ReplyDeleteJonathan, Rod doesn't have principles, he only has reflexive psychological urges driven mostly by his limbic hindbrain: hunger, fear, selfishness, avarice, jealousy, revenge, etc. And at least enough lust to have fertilized his wife three times.
ReplyDeleteIn an earlier post, an anonymous Orthodox commenter asks
This Orthodox Christian is very tired of DreRod. I wonder how he will milk his father's death ?
Rod responds without delay:
1. Come to my Walker Percy Festival.
2. Remember my book about my dead sister? Buy my book.
3. I'm lecturing on Dante next week in Tennessee. Want to know where? I dropped a tease so my dependable commenter Hank Hondo could ask me where and I could then answer without looking like I was pimping myself directly.
4. I couldn't figure out how to work the Benedict Option into this post as well, but because I already covered it in the post immediately preceding this one, I'm probably good for this morning.
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To call Rod Dreher at the same time a grave robbing pimp and a whore is certainly unfair to whores, some of which are nice ladies, if not to pimps as well.
And...yes, Rod Dreher-as-Benny, fake-Catholic author of The Benedict Post, is still quiet. No doubt, like his late St. Francisville Bonnie Blue Review, a bridge of manic and ill-considered ambition too far.
ReplyDeleteThat High-Pitched Whine Is Rod Dreher
ReplyDelete