Rod Dreher

Raymond Oliver Dreher Jr. (born February 14, 1967), known as Rod Dreher, is an American expatriate writer and editor living in Hungary.

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 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.

He 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 National Public Radio's All Things Considered, and he has appeared on CNN, Fox News, MSNBC, Court TV, and other television networks.

Dreher was born on February 14, 1967, in Baton Rouge, Louisiana.

He was named after his father, Ray Oliver Dreher, a local landowner and parish sanitation official.

Dreher was raised in the small town of St. Francisville, the parish seat of West Feliciana Parish north of Baton Rouge.

The phrase "Benedict Option" was inspired by Alasdair MacIntyre's 1981 book After Virtue, and refers to the sixth-century monk Benedict of Nursia.

However, he transferred to Louisiana School for Math, Science and the Arts in Natchitoches at the age of sixteen, where he was part of the school's first graduating class in 1985.

In 1989 he graduated with a Bachelor of Arts degree in journalism from Louisiana State University.

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 the National Review.

In 2002, Dreher wrote an essay that explored a subcategory of American conservatism he defined as "granola conservatism", whose adherents he described as "crunchy cons".

He defined these people as traditionalist conservatives who believed in environmental conservation, frugal living, and the preservation of traditional family values, while also expressing skepticism towards aspects of free-market capitalism.

He portrayed "crunchy cons" as being 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 entitled "Crunchy Con"; the blog was renamed "Rod Dreher" in 2010, with a shift in focus from political to cultural topics.

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, per Vanity Fair, single-handedly funded Dreher's salary at the website in an unusual arrangement which also allowed Dreher to publish without an editor.

Ahmanson had become dissatisfied with the tone of Dreher's posts, describing them as "too weird", citing as the prime example one particular blog 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 intends to continue blogging on Substack and may also contribute to The American Conservative with editorial oversight.

During this time, Dreher worked as an editorial writer and columnist for The Dallas Morning News, which he left in late 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 in order to return to full-time writing.

In 2013, Dreher published a book titled The Little Way of Ruthie Leming, 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.

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.

Dreher's book on the subject, The Benedict Option, was published by Sentinel in 2017.

Reviews for The Benedict Option ranged from the laudatory to the highly critical.

David Brooks of The New York Times described it as "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 that "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 Moore, the president of the Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention, described Dreher's book as "brilliant, prophetic, and wise," while Alan Levinovitz, a religious scholar at James Madison University, described it as "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 3, 2020.

Various conferences and symposia have discussed the Benedict Option as an idea, as have Christian 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" on his blog.

The Catholic 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," while the Christian literary scholar Alan Jacobs has responded to these and other criticisms of The Benedict Option.