The radical left is building a world in which there is no longer room for criticism or questions, warns American conservative writer Rod Dreher. Hate speech disguised as legal protection is idle in many places. Under the pretext of protecting the blacks or the Palestinians, it is now possible to openly whitewash or de-Jewish. But the order, the police, and even natural science became enemies, and this is no accident, since biology is not defined by words, but by laws, the laws of nature. BLM is not based on tolerance, it grew out of critical race theory. Rod Dreher gave an interview to Kossuth Rádió's Sunday Newspaper program.
Vúj: When you use Benedict, the 6th century monk, as an example in your book, is your goal to set a path for conservatives in the United States and around the world to follow, to encourage them, or is it to depict the realities and what are their possibilities?
The purpose of the book is twofold, on the one hand, to outline the current cultural problems and to show a possible way out of them. We cannot avoid the crisis, we are already in it, it is a crisis of civilization. I compare the present age in which we live today with the era of the collapse of the Western Roman Empire in the 5th-6th centuries. century. From that crisis emerged Saint Benedict, Benedict of Nursia, who found a way out of the crisis in the foundation of a new religious order, which became the Benedictine order.
He wanted to provide a place for people to live and preserve their faith in a time of chaos, in disciplined communities. Europe and Western civilization owe a lot to Benedek and his activities. They were the monks who helped convert Western Europe to Christianity. In their monasteries, they preserved knowledge, knowledge of the classical world, religious knowledge, but also practical knowledge, for example, the science of viticulture or various crafts. In my book, I say that in our time today we obviously live in completely different conditions than the people of the early Middle Ages, but we also have to face the collapse of civilization, and people are looking for ways out, and in this the persistence of faith can play a special role in the crisis at the time of I wrote my book not so much for conservatives as for American Christians who follow traditional forms of Christianity; Catholics, Orthodox and Protestants. I think we need it - as XVI. Benedek said - we belong to the creative minority.
Vúj: Are people interested in these things, if we can talk about people in general? We are indeed living in very chaotic times, in a world of confusion and rapid change, but do people generally care? Or do you primarily address your words to believing Christians?
Well, yes, a lot of people think that this chaos is a kind of liberation. As I have already said, I wrote the book primarily for Christians, and not for all Christians, but for those who are willing to read the signs of the times and act based on them, in defense of their church and family. And strangely enough, I've had quite a few very positive responses from Orthodox Jews and Muslims in America who have said; although we are not Christians, we face the same problems in our communities and we need help.
Vúj: The other question is whether the group of Christians to which you addressed your thoughts has such a role as to be able to influence society as a whole, or do they remain a small and closed group?
That's a great question, because you know, a lot of criticism of my book is that this Dreher is suggesting that everyone build bunkers and hide. However, this is not true, and I know that whoever says this has not read my book. I am talking about the fact that we are not monks and nuns, we live in this world and we must live in this world, we are called to this. However, if we are to live in such a post-Christian world, we must retreat to a certain degree in order to remind ourselves of who we are, what we must do, and what our story is. We need to sink our roots deeper, because in America today the knowledge related to the Christian faith is shallow, but it is probably the same in Europe. We need to strengthen the bonds of community as the modern world shows signs of dying everywhere.
Vúj: Most people like to think of themselves as a good person. The only question is what it means to be a good person. If, say, someone thinks of himself as tolerant and accepting of others, these are positives. The question is, when you think of yourself as a good person and display a rainbow flag on your social media page, is that enough, so what defines goodness?
This is a key moment, because the definition of what is good has changed. It is no longer based on the Bible. It started with Christianity, and then with the Enlightenment we started to build a civilization that is based on rationality and not on enlightenment. Today, even among Christians, we see that faith has been reduced to a therapeutic tool, a collection of words, abandoning its true religious roots. This is true for Christianity as well as Judaism and Islam. What has come to the fore is that there is a God who wants you to be happy and kind - and that's it. And what it means to be good and what is correct behavior is determined by popular culture. And popular culture is very self-centered, egocentric. The research of religious sociologist Christian Smith reveals that the vast majority of young Americans today believe that the essence of life is to be happy and rich. Few of them say they want more than that. So even those who consider themselves Christians are very far removed from the idea of what it means to be good based on Christian values. We have arrived at a period that seriously worries me. We are here in the era of genetic engineering, but we are also here with euthanasia. And values serve therapeutic purposes; whatever it is, the point is to have fun. But how can we stop processes that I consider otherwise evil, genetic engineering, euthanasia, and the like, if we consider the highest human value to be simply to have fun? Then we have nothing to base it on.
Vúj: If we now think of the so-called mainstream. Those who, for example, try to draw attention to the protection of life or the negative effects of the idea of euthanasia, are stigmatized by this mainstream as not receptive enough or not open enough to changes in society. Things were on top of their heads.
"That's right, things went completely upside down." Today in Valencia, Spain's third largest city, you see signs on government order - I was just there, I saw - that "In Valencia there are men with female genitalia and women with male genitalia" - yes, you can read that, so really things turned upside down, when biology no longer matters, when it is already something bigoted. This is also part of the confusion of our age. My latest book also talks about this, a kind of soft totalitarianism.
In the US, if you try to insist that biology does matter, you will be condemned as a hater, lose your job, and have your life completely ruined. This is not normal, despite all our money, all our education, all our sophistication, we live in a dark age and are heading towards a period of moral darkness and intellectual confusion.
Vúj: And how can you answer? Last year, BLM, the Black Lives Matter movement, started to become more and more widespread and vocal. It was born in the name of tolerance, but on the other side, what can be done?
"That's a lie." First of all, you have to recognize the lie in it, because BLM also grew out of critical race theory, and yet it is already there in churches, even though it is a falsification of Christian thought. Twenty years ago, the French philosopher René Girard wrote about the phenomenon that these new left-wing religious supplements are counterfeits of Christianity. They highlight some elements of Christian teaching, the protection of the weak, the downtrodden, and those pushed to the margins of society, and make this an absolute value. They try to be more Christian than Christians, and in the process they have become totalitarians, because - speaking of BLM - when you say that you are against racism, but you do not agree with this movement, you are told that you have no right to speak. It is necessary to see how evil and totalitarian this approach is, which we must fight against. We will suffer this, but if we don't, we will really lose.
Rod Dreher was previously interviewed by hirado.hu, you can watch the interview by clicking HERE
Source: hirado.hu
Cover photo: MH/Tamás Purger
