Rod Dreher: To Russia with Love

[Cleopatra7]

If you've been anywhere around the portions of the fundie blogosphere that fancy themselves to be "intellectual," you've probably heard of Rod Dreher, who was once a noisy convert to Catholicism who is now a noisy convert to the Eastern Orthodox Church. Dreher's schtick is railing about how the awful secular, social justice warrior, feminists are oppressing "traditional Christians" like himself, which is an odd thing to say, since there is nothing "traditional" about a guy raised as a Southern Methodist deciding to convert first to Catholicism and then to Orthodoxy; the ability to change one's religion is itself part of the modern self-fashioning that Dreher claims to abhor, but takes for granted in his own case. His other schtick is promoting what he calls "the Benedict Option," where white conservative Christians (non-white Christians appear to be social problems to Dreher, rather than fellow believers) withdraw from American society to live life on their own terms. Frankly, it comes off as a fundie version of Helter Skelter, since the fundies expect to emerge from their hermetically sealed communities after we horrible secular "pagans" have ruined everything beyond repair, and resume their place at the top of the social, political, and cultural heap.

Anyhoo, when Dreher isn't going to the fainting couch over unisex bathrooms or the existence of trans people, he's swooning in the arms of Vladimir Putin's manly authoritarian embrace, especially since Putin's regime is known for jailing opponents of the Russian Orthodox Church, which includes LGBT activists, the Pussy Riot collective, and now a young Russian atheist who played Pokemon Go in church:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2016/09/07/the-pussy-riot-inspired-russian-law-that-got-a-pokemon-go-player-arrested/

(a decent article about the incident)

http://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/why-make-russia-our-enemy/

(Dreher's nutty commentary on the incident)

I honestly don't get what this guy did that merited five months in prison. It doesn't seem like he was standing up on the altar or rifling through consecrated vessels. I would imagine that a lot of people play video games in church when they get bored, and if we're going to criminalize that, then there won't be prisons to hold everyone. Like many conservative Putin fans, Dreher wishes that the US could be as aggressive against "enemies of religion" as Putin is:

Quote

They say he faces up to five years in prison. I find that excessive, but I don’t feel sorry for this jackass. His fellow atheists committed mass murder of and terror against Orthodox Christians when they were in power during the Bolshevik tyranny.

...

What I’m praising Russia for is defending its sacred spaces. It would be fine with me if the local priest or bishop asked the state to waive the charges, and they did so. It’s the principle. Note well that he did what he did knowing full well that he was breaking the law.

Of course, Dreher assumes that anyone who identifies as an atheist must be in the "Bolshevik" model, as if there are no other non-theistic philosophies or lifestances out there. Something that Dreher fails to mention is that the Russian Orthodox Church had a very complicated relationship with the Communist regime, something that I certainly don't feel I can do justice in this post. However, I will say that during WWII, Stalin patronized the ROC with privileges and money, because he saw it as a useful tool for encouraging patriotism.  In fact, many modern Russians still admire Stalin, including those in the Russian Orthodox Church:

http://www.pri.org/stories/why-so-many-russians-stalin-again

The ROC even made a Stalin calendar back in 2014, so believers could have twelve whole months of Stalinist hotness:

http://www.rferl.org/content/russia-stalin-calendar/25224022.html

Putin himself said something to the effect that any Russian who doesn't lament the end of the USSR has no heart. Thus, if Dreher wants to rail about individuals who praise Stalin in 2016, he should criticize his co-religionists. The main thing I get from Dreher is that many fundie Christians would impose jail sentences for those of us who would dare challenge their religious beliefs, no matter how minor, and that they are looking for a Putin-like strongman to do it. I guess this is where Trump comes into play.

[Mercer]

Quote

They say he faces up to five years in prison. I find that excessive, but I don’t feel sorry for this jackass. His fellow atheists committed mass murder of and terror against Orthodox Christians when they were in power during the Bolshevik tyranny.

Wait... what? Sokolovsky is twenty-one years old; he was born well after Perestroika. How is he in any way responsible for crimes that happened before he was born?

Quote

What I’m praising Russia for is defending its sacred spaces. It would be fine with me if the local priest or bishop asked the state to waive the charges, and they did so. It’s the principle. Note well that he did what he did knowing full well that he was breaking the law.

Russia is not defending its sacred spaces; it is defending political hegemony through enforced religious and cultural uniformity. This is not about some guy who played a video game in church. (If it was, he would simply have been asked to either shut his phone off or leave the building.) It's about punishing dissent by jailing people who don't get with the program.

Even people who don't care about video games or Pussy Riot's music should be concerned about what's happening in Russia because these losses of liberty are an assault on the freedom to disagree with the people in power. 

Dreher is naive if he doesn't realize that by supporting government tyranny when he thinks it's enforcing religion, he may find himself on the receiving end someday when the government agenda no longer coincides with his personal flavor of religious fervor. 

[hoipolloi]

Thank you for this -- about time that someone did a snark-a-gesis of Rod Dreher's stupidities though there are a LOT. So much stupid, so little time.

I've been following him on and off since reading Crunchy Cons, written while Dreher was still at the Dallas Morning News. He was still a Roman Catholic, bought a craftsman house in Dallas, started a garden, bought CSA, yada, yada, yada. Somewhere in there he converted to the Orthodox church then moved to Philadelphia to work for the non-profit John Templeton Foundation, about which he bragged extensively as is his wont. [If you didn't know, Rod Dreher epitomizes the old story of "Every thing the good man does is always right."] Dreher continued to blog for a bit at his Crunchy Cons blog but then the Templeton Foundation shut him down hard so there was radio silence from Mr. Holier-than-all for at least a year or so until he moved back to Louisiana & started blogging at the American Conservative.

He's a smarmy, fundamentally dishonest, racist jackass who, unfortunately, has quite the bully pulpit at the American Conservative.

 

 

[Cleopatra7]

I'm pretty sure Dreher was canned from the Templeton Foundation for running an "anonymous" blog/sock puppet account that complained that the "lavender mafia" within the Orthodox Church in America was conspring against Metropolitan Jonah for being a culture warrior. Presumably, this happened before Dreher eventually soured on Jonah. Like a lot of people, I think Dreher is the author of the "anonymous" reader letters and other accounts that detail how good white fundies are being oppressed by hordes of roving trans people and other Jack Chick-esque scenarios, since he has a history of sock puppeting:

http://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/america-at-the-movies-2016-transgender/

[hoipolloi]

Interesting. Didn't know about Rod's history as a sock puppet but not surprised given his wildly dishonest approach to nearly everything. 

The linked column is classic Dreher -- his idea of factual reporting is to (re)print some fantastic anecdote and present it as a statistical fact.

Revised opinion: Rod Dreher is a liar and a fucking asshole.

[Howl]

2 hours ago, hoipolloi said:

He's a smarmy, fundamentally dishonest, racist jackass who, unfortunately, has quite the bully pulpit at the American Conservative.

He also really likes to hear himself, because he goes on, and on, and on, and on, an on...yawn -- I never got to the end of the article on the Benedict Option. 

[older than allosaurs]

Credit where it's due: Dreher has gone after Doug Wilson--at length--for Stephen Sitler's marriage, for plagiarism, for general fatuous self-absorption. He accuses him of pastoral malpractice and says he has "not a shred" of credibility.

Is there no honor among racist jackasses?

 

 

[Cleopatra7]

3 minutes ago, older than allosaurs said:

Credit where it's due: Dreher has gone after Doug Wilson--at length--for Stephen Sitler's marriage, for plagiarism, for general fatuous self-absorption. He accuses him of pastoral malpractice and says he has "not a shred" of credibility.

Is there no honor among racist jackasses?

 

 

Doug Wilson's brand of patriarchalism isn't going to go over well with someone in a liturgical church. Not that I don't appreciate Dreher for speaking out against Wilson (a stopped clock is right twice a day), but it seems like Wilson's "kirk" is exactly the kind Benedict Option community that he's always advocating. The problem is that these tiny, insular communities are terrible at policing themselves, especially when it comes to sexual abuse, whether it's Hasidic Jews in Brooklyn or the Gothardite world. Dreher has yet to explain how his proposed Benedict Option community would do any better in this regard, and given how he's openly advocating for authoritarian "protection" for Christians, one would do well to ask who will watch the proverbial watchmen in his ideal society. If Dreher is advocating jailing a young man for just playing a video game in church, it shouldn't come as a surprise that so many secularists and non-fundie Christians find his vision for society objectionable and are pushing back against him and his ilk.

[Pravda_Iskra]

Too bad he doesn't realize that Putin's alliance with the Russian Orthodox Church only happened because he saw it as politically advantageous...

 

Putin does nothing without considering how it advances him politically and on the world stage.