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Rod Dreher on Tucker Carlson Tonight

A few days ago, Rod Dreher was on Tucker Carlson Tonight to talk about his new book The Benedict Option which has finally been released.

If you follow Rod Dreher at The American Conservative, it seems like he has been blogging about The Benedict Option for years now. I don’t want to say too much about it until I have read the final product. I already know enough about The Benedict Option though to have mixed feelings about it.

1.) Rod Dreher is correct that Millennials have mixed feelings about Christianity. I know that is definitely true in our community. I’ve personally been alienated from Christianity. It is hard for our community to identify with Christianity given the stance its institutions have taken on race. Here in the South, this wasn’t an issue for our ancestors who didn’t see a conflict between their racial and religious identity, but now Southern Baptists are represented by the likes of Russell Moore who say polarizing things like we must choose between The Cross and the Confederate Flag.

2.) Rod Dreher is correct that Christianity is waning in American life. The Atlantic recently boasted about the decline of White Christian America. Since President Trump won the 2016 election though, I have noticed a sense of remorse developing on the Left about the decline of the Religious Right. They are now embroiled in a new kind of culture war.

3.) I have no objection to Christians decoupling their identity from the ideology of Americanism and the American state. Psychologically, the Alt-Right has already done so. What does Christianity have in common with liberalism as it exists today in the age of transgenderism?

4.) I am a big fan of Alasdair MacIntyre and agree with his analysis of the West’s moral decline.

Here is where I disagree with Rod Dreher:

1.) Rod Dreher comes across to me as a late 20th century American conservative. Everything he writes is colored by his time and place and ideology. It’s like he is pulled in two different directions. Intellectually, he is pulled away from the “mainstream.” Socially though, he has a deep desire to fit in with the “mainstream” and to be considered “respectable.”

2.) Rod Dreher subscribes to what some of us have labeled “Americanity.” He subscribes to a theology which is a product of late 20th century America. He fits in with Russell Moore’s crowd. He wouldn’t have fit it with Southern Christianity as it existed 100 years ago.

3.) Contrast Rod Dreher with Stonewall Jackson or Robert E. Lee or James Henley Thornwell or John C. Pemberton or Robert Lewis Dabney. Jackson and Lee were pious men. They were also STRONG men. If you look at Rod Dreher though, you see a WEAK man.

4.) Finally, Dreher has a completely different outlook on technology. The Alt-Right has been emboldened by technology. We have seized on technology to fight a culture war. In contrast, it seems like the Religious Right (or at least the Rod Dreher crowd) has lost its will to fight at the exact moment when liberalism has exhausted itself and has begun to show signs of weakness.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aQ9DUY801Wc

Hunter Wallace
the authorHunter Wallace
Hunter Wallace is the founder and editor of OccidentalDissent.com

29 Comments

  • post christian nation huh? organized religion maybe… but christianity is still very much installed in humans in the west…. this guy is not correct….

  • thou shall not kill. that’s where it lost me. for Christ’s sake we eat meat. we even keep em in cages till we are hungry. F that

  • As a Christian, I’ve thought about this for a long time: why is it Christianity’s argument against many of the Left’s evils has been so tepid, ineffective? A couple thoughts . . . Think about pornography, for example, or wife as traditional homemaker. In conservative Christianity, porn is wrong because it’s a sin; i.e. the Bible says lust is bad. Now, that perfectly fine and consistent. But White Nationalism argues that pornography is wrong because it exploits primarily White women and represents an industry that is run & financed primarily by Jews who seek our destruction. In the face of an agnostic/atheist, which argument is stronger? both are entirely correct, in my opinion, but the Christian argument just comes up lacking.

    Wife as traditional homemaker: the Christian can cite St. Paul’s teaching on women and men in I Corinthians and Ephesians, but is normally successfully shouted down as ‘misogynist!’ by the Left. White Nationalism boldly – and in unabashed patriarchal tone – proclaims that our very civilization in many ways stands or falls with our women; if our race does not have women in the home raising children with OUR values, then the culture WILL fall (in America it has already fallen, arguably, although not beyond repair). Which approach seems more confident? more convincing? The Left hysterically and frantically accuses White Nationalists of misogyny as well, but it rolls off like water on a duck’s back; we’re unfazed, all the while young, intelligent, beautiful women still keep joining our ranks. The Left’s position is cracking.

    Again, I’m not attacking Christian teaching or argumentation, I’m just suggesting that for atheists/ agnostics, or Pagans, who sense that something is poisonous in the air, it is the White Nationalist arguments that likely will win him over. In one sense, this is the cultural glue – the realization of what nature is – that allows Christians, Pagans, and atheists to come together in White Nationalism in a way that decadent liberal culture could never achieve. In our racial identity, we enjoy a unity that does not have to wear the mask of “tolerance” to survive; there is no “pretend to be unified” among us; the racially conscious Christians, Pagans, and atheists are unified because we are a people, a race, that is not hypothesized into existence, but rather proclaimed by nature and science; we are a distinct people.

  • Crunchy cons = we’re better than THOSE conservatives cuz we like artisanal cheese and wear hipster glasses.

    Benedict option = we’re better than THOSE conservatives cuz we’re holier-than-thou prissies who take our ball and go home.

    In Vox Day socio-sexual hierarchy terms, Dreher is totally a Gamma “secret king”.

    • Because Rod Dreher IS a hipster fag. I used to see ads for his shitty book on “Crunchy Cons,” rural Conservative SWPLs who eat organic food, in AmCon. I never thought this idiot would be editing a magazine that was launched by Pat Buchanan and Taki.

  • Religion shapes culture but also arises from it in the first place, and so when culture changes, religions does, also. Christianity is a clear example of this. When American men (North & South) had a solid identity, Christianity reflected that. But now that the available human raw material, so to speak, has been so eaten out from the inside by Liberalism and Progress, you get the pathetic difference between, say, the Christians of the Old South and Russell Moore. Or between Bishop Sheen and Rod Dreher. And as for Moore and his kind, it is a small step to demanding his church choose between the Cross and the Confederate Flag this week and next week between the Cross and the American Flag. When the West was Christendom, it was a great thing (and NONE of the insanity now passing for “decent” Christianity had a toehold). Now both the West and the Church are in tatters, infected by the retrovirus of Progress.

  • Before the era of the mass media, a pastor had a local congregation. Even the ones that rode the circuit, sold books, or were prominent in a seminary were tied to a local community.

    Since the mass media era, a pastor is competing with the likes of Oprah Winfrey. All of them dream of appearing on TV shows, having a best selling book, “church plants” and a hip youtube channel.

    Thus, they are basically less that worthless. They are no different than the teenage girls that do make-up tutorials to complete for youtube views and Facebook likes.

    One only has to look back to the Televangelists of the 1980s to see what happened – these were literally nothing more than money-making operations, scamming little old ladies with promises of “faith healing” and the like. The modern church is no different than a 1-900 Psychic hotline.

    In fact, the only people that take people like this Dreher guy seriously are the media. The GOP, in fact, finds less and less use for these pastors because they can’t bring out the voters like they used to.

    Considering the Catholic abuse scandals, the embarrassing spectacle of the Southern Protestant, or the cringe-worth “hipster” pastors like Mark Driscoll, if I were to meet someone who introduced themselves as “pastor” or a “priest” – I wouldn’t even shake their hand. It’s a disreputable occupation for perverts and scam artists.

  • Hard to believe AmCon, a magazine that once had Spencer, Buchanan, and Taki, has this irredemable Cuck Dreher editing it today.

    • I’d read it for years, though slowly leaving. Dreher’s recent criticism of Richard Spencer was the final nudge I needed.

  • The solution for Christianity in America is to embrace a CI/BI type of white Christianity for not only is it true but it gets us back to our root American religious identity although they never called it CI/BI

  • Most Whites will go through what Weev, and recently I discovered my brother, had gone through: Christianity–>Christian Identity–>Traditionalism–>White Identity.

    I was shocked to hear my brother was reading old texts in the native tongues and learning Swedish. He was a linguist in the military so learning a new language comes easy. That’s not the surprising part. The surprising part was seeing his worldview changing and how it was very similar to Weev. Like Weev he discovered that race matters. Once you realize race matters then any system of believe that ignores race or tells you to ignore race is worse than deceptive, it’s destructive.

    At any rate, I don’t believe Whites will find much help from the Church. The White America Christian will just counter-signal White people but offer no real solutions. They couldn’t stop Jews. They couldn’t stop gays. They couldn’t stop miscegenation. They couldn’t stop Muslims. And that’s why the Alt Right, Dark Enlightenment, and race realism grew outside of the Church.

    • I totally agree and we should wholeheartedly resist any Alt-Right-sympathetic “Christians” from co-opting our momentum and re-directing it towards some kind of New Christian Right.

      • Yeah, we should totally purge those Alt-Right, White Christians.

        Brilliant strategy. Keep Whites divided. Did you come up with that yourself, or did uncle Schlomo help you?

        • You said “purge”, not me. Like a typical Christian, create a straw-man argument, then attack me, then accuse me of working for Jews. I said we should resist their attempts to make the Alt Right ABOUT Christianity, not purge Christians FROM the Alt Right.

      • I hear what you’re saying, but there’s no need to fear a co-opting; race realism is successfully attracting Christians, Pagans, and agnostics, and is doing so for a reason. For many of us, Christianity is very much a part of our identity; for others the old gods of our fathers are very much a part of their identity; for others, no religious belief or sentiment resonates. What binds us is that Nature has dictated that we are a distinct people. Our unity is right there in our skin, in our minds.

      • Yea let’s exclude 90% of White people. That way we will be sure to succeed. Yo Lev we got some more goy in the bag!

  • “Finally, Dreher has a completely different outlook on technology. The Alt-Right has been emboldened by technology.”
    This is what I alternately hate and love about the Benedict Option. The Alt-Right must start a discussion about what the future will look like and what role will technology play in it. For example what would our faith, work and social communities look like while incorporating tech? We are hampered by a lack of long term vision.

    • Interesting quote from my husband after reading this.
      “Some people would say tech is a NECESSARY evil but technology is EVIL because it has destroyed how we relate to each other. Classically a friend was someone we had to work at being and having. We no longer have to go to the bank and talk to a person or even sit in a pew and sing words from a shared book Tech is the grand high archon in the temple of isolation and individualism.”

      • I don’t have a smart phone or any ‘tech’ attached to me because I reject technocracy.. even if I don’t embrace christianity I can see all these ‘organizations’ being tools for control.

    • Like Frank Herbert’s Dune novels?

      I don’t see the problem with a technological progressing civilization combined with a traditional social structure. And I think the emerging AI technology would support our intuitions about the things we Notice, as Steve Sailer says, regarding the differences between the races and the sexes. Deep learning systems have already caused liberal embarrassments by working on big data sets and identifying blacks and Hispanics as bad credit risks, for example, against their programmers’ wishes to remain “unbiased.”

      And if we have household robots, their programming could reflect an Alt Right sort of value system so that they would obey only certain kinds of orders from women – like, for example, helping with the housework – but not other orders which would help women deceive and cuckold their husbands, say.

      • Or how about reminding husbands when they are failing merde and fitness test. LOL. Nothing is more stressful to a marriage.
        Be that as it may, I am very concern about AI in the long run. Humans are creating an entity, in our own image, will it be just like us? If it is, and can process quicker than a human brain then I am glad I will probably not live to see it. We are talking Hal vs. Rosie.
        BTW my daughter loves your avatar. Do you speak Gaelic?

  • What a slob. He couldn’t dress any better to go on TV? I’ve seen old Vietnam vets after a full day of boozing at the Legion Hall who look more respectable. This is what self-hating cuckoldry looks like.

  • I understand, though, that the Benedict Option is also about separation and autonomy, right? I think our movement will ultimately involve those goals and to that extent Dreher’s ideas are useful.

  • There’s also something else wrong with this guy that you failed to mention Hunter. Those are the most egregious pair of problem glasses I’ve ever seen! Holy Shit brah, you wanna dial it back a bit there buddy.

    • As long as we’re kept out of the mainstream, and out of spotlight, I think we should probably be picking fights with all comers to our Left. Here, that would mean finding religious figures that carry traditional belief of supersession and deputizing them to go after their peers.
      The stupid cuck is content to fade into obscurity, the problem is he’s sitting in institutional seats of power. They need to be knocked out of those seats.
      More a broad effort of identifying peers to attack cucks than emphasizing and consolidating behind any one “leader”.

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