The Pharisee Option: Dreher, the New Right, and Communalism

Rod Dreher, a "conservative" cultural critic, recounts his conversion process to Christianity. Born in Louisiana, amid a somewhat enthusiastic village Methodism, Dreher becomes enamored with a more glorious vision of things :

It wasn’t until I stumbled into the Chartres cathedral at age 17, on a tour group, that I was confronted by a form of Christianity that overwhelmed me. Nothing in my life in small-town America in the late 20th century had prepared me for the grandeur of God made manifest in that Gothic cathedral. What kind of Christianity inspires men to build this kind of temple? That was probably the first time in my life that I was truly struck by awe, in the old-fashioned sense. I remember standing there, in the center of the labyrinth, looking all around at the stained-glass windows, the arches, and the vaults, thinking, “God does exist — and He wants me.”

The funny thing about this story is that none of this is specifically Christian. It is transcendental, existential, and religious, but Christianity is tangential. It's the architecture that inspires Dreher and leads him to become Roman Catholic. But he soon becomes tired of Rome because of Vatican II era changes. He becomes disillusioned as kitsch and hokey congregational life of average towney parishes made him cringe. Dreher is candid that his interest in Rome had severely waned by the time he jumped ship. The child sex abuse scandal was an excuse to leave, not part of some deep soul-searching. Dreher becomes Eastern Orthodox. Now, despite how the above sounds, Dreher claims his motivation to convert was a desire for a richer spiritual life and community. He notes that the beauty of Rome that had attracted Thomas Merton had simply ceased to be. However, I think it's instructive to note that Merton ended his days as someone deeply attracted to Zen buddhism and was in talks with the Dalai Lama. In other words, Merton was not exclusively Christian in any meaninful sense.

Dreher, I'm sure, believes Orthodoxy is the best faith, but his own thoughts reflect his rather muddled approach. In the original article about his NYT interview about "Weird Christianity", Dreher unfavorably compares the establishment mindset of a Southern Baptist to a Russian Baptist he met in Moscow. The former does not know sacrifice, whining about having to wear a mask to buy a toaster, whereas the latter knew true suffering under the Soviets (spending time in a gulag). Dreher additionally notes that the Russian Baptist does not fit well within contemporary Russian society either. In other words, Russian Baptists represent "weird Christianity" over there. Per the photo in the article, Dreher is friends with this Baptist, Sipko. The man stands as anomaly within Russian society, and Sipko leads his fellow Baptists to persevere in their own counter-cultural communities. Between US and Russia, the roles are reversed. In the former, Baptists are normal and Orthodox (of which Dreher is part of) are "weird"; whereas in the latter, Orthodoxy is the order of the land (though not exclusively so) and Baptists are subversive.

Of course, why Orthodoxy is such is because it is fundamentally tied to the nation. It is not simply Orthodoxy, but Russian Orthodoxy. Russia is Holy Russia. Though 80% of Federal Russia professes the Orthodox faith, only 10% of that number (according to recent surveys) attends the liturgy at least once a month. This superficial contradiction is manifest in a recent controversy about a new military chapel built outside of Moscow. The temple had a mural of Stalin in it, presiding over the victorious Red Army returning from Germany. For some, this inclusion was a bridge too far. For others, it was preserving history. Stalin did call the Orthodox bishops back from a persecuted underground to rally the Russian armies (though, in the process, made them KGB spies and government informers, which only continued a split within the Russian church). He did lead Russia to victory over the Nazi menace, preserving the people from conquest and extermination (Hitler's lebensraum brutally murdered Slavic peoples). Despite Russophobic and generally ignorant outside critics, Putin's embrace of Orthodoxy church-building is not theocracy. Putin is relatively liberal and not a closeted Duginist, seeking to rebuild a Third Rome Byzantine Russia. Nevertheless, Putin's rule does not exclude religion from the public sphere, even as it does not have any monopoly rights (Putin speaks warmly of Russian Jews and Muslims as part of Russia's ancestral faiths).

The problem here, for someone like Dreher, should be obvious. While Russia remains a level of social pluralism, it has cracked down on foreign movements within its borders. Jehovah's Witnesses have received prosecution for social subversion. Again, this is not Orthodox supremacy, as Russian Lutheranism has a small niche place within Russian society. Nevertheless, the weirdness of Jehovah's Witnesses, as well as Baptists, is that they are social aliens to the national project of Russia. And Orthodoxy, in the main, traditionally would agree with this exclusionary project. After all, Orthodoxy is the true faith and the one each nation should adopt to become part of Christ's body. There are canon laws (though probably all moribund) that prohibit friendship with heretics. How can Dreher see Sipko as a friend? The incoherence doesn't stop here. Dreher continues:

In Moscow, on the same day that I interviewed Sipko , I had dinner with Alexander Dvorkin, an academic who is an expert on cults. In talking about the potential for a new totalitarianism, he warned that a society in which there is a great deficit of solidarity is one that is prone to capture by a cultish mass leader. “There is a danger that the desire to belong will prevail over truth,” he told me. “All revolutions are carried out by people who have found [in their ideology] a strong sense of belonging.”

One way or another, Americans are going to rediscover a sense of belonging. The pandemic and the economic depression is revealing the radical insufficiency of our way of life — and, I would emphasize for my fellow Christians, the radical insufficiency of our way of Christian living. We need “weird Christianity,” in the sense of a deep and rooted Christianity that is countercultural. To be a countercultural church in America today is to be a church that practices solidarity, and is preparing its people to suffer the loss of status, the loss of material possessions, and maybe even the loss of freedom. To be a countercultural Christian in America today means being radical.

The above analysis is, quite frankly, bizarre. To the average Russian, Sipko the Baptist is a cultist. He's anti-social and weird. Yet it's precisely this "weirdness" that Dreher finds admirable about the Russian Baptists: they're willing to form communities outside the mainstream despite official hostility. Instead, the question of cults pivots to "totalitarian" (a great boogeyman) regimes around a "cultish mass leader". Dreher depends upon a whole host of assumptions about Jacobins and cultural purges. But he never tackles the elephant in the room: is he, or Sipko, in a cult? How is being counter-cultural not a recipe for producing the exact thing you despise? Wasn't Jonestown a cult? And yet they not only rejected main-stream society, but embraced a self-sufficient communalism. For Orthodoxy, Sipko is a purveyor of the same antisocial behavior. Cut off from the mainstream of society, the cult draws you further and further away from independent resources. Whether it's the peer-pressure of the communitarian village, or its the control of a single leader or a council, one becomes increasingly expected to live for the cause. These elements can apply to just about anything. Its quite natural for Christianity to have these elements, as well as being a part of any professional military. For Orthodox Russia, Sipko's "weird Christianity" should be chased out. The old Moral Majority coalition may have felt the same about Orthodoxy, an "oriental" den of potential spies (they were Slavs or Russians after all), with little-to-no root in America. What would Dreher say? Would he abandon Orthodoxy on these grounds? Certainly not, and yet his opposition to "cults" makes no sense. Counter-culture can produce "cults" as well as "religions". Dreher splits the difference.

The reality is that Dreher is simply an aesthete. He likes the idea of communal living, though I doubt he would ever really commit to it. "Weird Christianity" is a form of public theater, something demonstrated to show one's opposition to reigning paradigms. Formally, it's identical to the New Left's penchant for street theater and emphasis on demonstrable rejection of social norms. Wearing a prayer-rope around your wrist and growing a beard has its mirror image in a woman with a shaved head or a man with rainbow dye. It's simply a product of theatrical battle, whether its righteousness vs. wickedness or progress vs. reaction. Bot void the actual task of politics for empty postures. Thus, Dreher finds Sipko a kindred soul, in that he simply reflects a rejection of social norms (though I doubt Dreher would adjust well to the life of Russian Baptists).

Again, Dreher is simply a product of the New Right identity politics. Like the New Left, the New Right emphasizes cosmetics over substance, but focuses on a different set of issues. Both advocate a level of social pluralism within a congealed consumer movement. Where the New Left consumes sexual, racial, and gender identities, the New Right consumes religious and gender identities. The New New Left (a metastatization of the original movement) has room for gays, transgenders, feminists, even though its incoherent (i.e. if gender is fundamentally a social construct, what's so special about a woman's experience?). Similarly, the New Right's coalition of various faiths is also incoherent (i.e. How can Christians ally with Jews if they believe the latter go to hell? What about Rome's claims in relation to Protestants?). Both find ways to smooth over differences through making them utterly meaningless. Of course, both movements operate within a certain social consensus. In other words, they still shop at the same store, even if people can camp out in different aisles. New Left will draw the idpol line against pederasty (NAMBLA still on outs, even though they claim the same rainbow flag ideology). Similarly, New Right religious ecumenism does not accept Scientology (or Islam, for the time being). For Dreher, ultimately, Orthodoxy is not really about salvation; it's about civilization.

One might be inclined to ask whether Dreher, or many contemporary "conservative" Roman Catholics, are simply syncretists. But this approach misses the point. In a major way, the New Right (and the upcoming New New Right) is Pharisaical. Religion is about public performance. Rowan Williams (former archbishop of Canterbury) grasps this point well in defining what Scripture means by "hypocrisy". He notes that the "masters of suspicion" (Marx, Freud, Nietzsche) blame Christianity for a false quest for interiority. And while Christ admonishes us to be inwardly pure, it's not the same as it becomes per identity politics. In contrast, it's fundamentally inaccessible:

Matthew does indeed take it for granted that integrity belongs in an inner realm and that it is not to be constructed or construed in terms of patterns of action alone. But if he privileges truth in the inward parts, it is not, as in most of the more modern varieties of discussing interiority, so as to allow the inner to be deployed. If the interior is the place of truth, it can never be deployed; you cannot use it to win arguments, to ground anything about your or anyone’s identity, to establish sincerity of good intentions. The inner life, in this context, cannot be spoken; it silences moral defence and debate. If you do what you do to be seen by human eyes, you have your reward; your moral ‘audience’ is the Father en to krupto, the one whose habitat is secret places. Because of the Father’s secrecy, the divine judgement, the only one actually of any truthfulness or final import, remains beyond anyone’s power of utterance. It is not an esoteric truth —— which is what the appeal to interiority has so regularly become — but an inaccessible truth. In short, the appeal to the inner world is another strategy of disempowerment for the Christian moral agent.

Hence, of course, the injunctions about not judging. There is no secure access to the inner life of another, and if you judge by external standards, you may expect to be open yourself to equally shallow and unmerciful judgement. When Matthew’s Jesus uses the word ‘hypocrite’, as he so freely does in the Sermon, we must not think immediately of disjunction between inner and outer, of a problem about sincerity, but of the moral or spiritual weakness of someone who expects to be judged on external performance: in ch. 6, ‘hypocrites’ are not necessarily people who don’t mean what they do, or who are trying to conceal inner unfaithfulness; they are simply (as the Greek word implies) ‘actors’, agents who consciously construct themselves in the process of performance. The word’s negative resonance of deceit or simulation arises from the fact that, if selves cannot really be so constructed, the self that is evolved in patterns of behaviour is some way false. The ‘hypocrite’ has not learned that the self is not a sort of possessed object, to be refined or matured by conscious practice; the ‘hypocrite’ has to recognize the uncomfortable truth that the self’s standing, the self’s adequacy or excellence or attunement to God (‘blessedness’), is out of the agent’s control. Matthew foreshadows here the later Christian paradoxes explored in Gregory of Nyssa and Augustine, paradoxes concerning the systematically unknowable character of the self. But he has given this theme a more clearly defined moral edge by linking it with the prescription of judgement or, more exactly, of offering oneself for judgement by humanly perceptible criteria. [quoted from this blog-essay]

Archbishop Williams' definition should blow off the lid on the contemporary moment. Identity politics, left or right, is about performing one's righteousness, a sense of self wholly scripted according to some mythologized ideological matrix. Dreher's self-narrating is part of this scripted faux-transcendence, part of his self-delusion and becoming a tool for kulturkamf. Counter-culture is another word for street theater, part of the seemingly endless dialectic of neoliberalization. Questions about concrete policies disappear, replaced with an endless quest for civilizational glory (whether it's in the form of Moral Majority and its "Founders-as-Christians" myth, or Black Lives Matter and its 1619 Project legend). Likely Dreher will advance whatever particular form the New New Right will take over the coming decades. It will advance the basic dimensions of neoliberalism, even as it decries a vague straw-man of it (just as the "left" in the Democratic party has been doing). To the contrary, IdPol carries on the project: an empty gamification of all society, reduction of things to consumer choice, and global domination under a deepstate-tech-finance oligarchy of the revolving door. Of course, the purveyors of ideology will constantly mystify (and be mystified) how nothing ever seems to change and things get worse.

Per Williams, the point isn't that Dreher isn't sincere. Like his left-liberal shadows, the problem is precisely that he is sincere. This kind of religion is syncretistic, but ultimately in service to a vague social pluralism as temple. The eternal altar of Christ is tossed aside for the altar of civilization. American Christians are, many of them, enthralled to this endless culture war. They do not properly offer sacrifices, but confuse the Eternal Temple with performative religion. They gut Christianity of its significance, making it a hollow product one consumes (whether its "weird" Pentecostal emotivism version or, like Dreher, it's "weird" refined romanticism of an Orthodox temple). The "weirdness", like 90s Grunge, is part of the sell. I would wager the majority of people are generally not interested, any more than most people are interested in graphic displays of homosexual pride or transvestite drag (whatever their opinions on gay marriage). Nevertheless, media exposure (Dreher is a journalist) and a excited base (even if it's only 5-10% of the population on either side) keeps up the sense of chaos and frenzy. Devout and serious Christians are easy targets for this ideological weaponizing.

To be with Christ is to avoid the spectacle. Christ warned His disciples to tell no one who He was. He admonished those he healed to not speak about it. His resurrection happened outside the pages of scripture, an event that goes unrecorded. The significance of the crucifixion is beyond the public eye. The visage of dying man publicly executed masks the reality of the Logos conquering sin and death. Dreher's completely sincere faith is not in Christ, so much as in an ideological product.