Gregory Thomson’s review of Rod Dreher’s new book is spot on and very accurately describes and denounces the “bespoke dissidence” that characterizes much of “Christianity” and “conservatism” today.
While, as the Cold War films of the 1980s showed us, this Manichaean rendering of history makes for inspiring theatre, as a serious account of contemporary American culture, it is profoundly misleading. In the end, Dreher’s account is the fruit of neither careful labour nor of chaste discernment, but of curated anxiety. And all who seek to clearly understand and faithfully engage our own cultural moment ought to renounce it. This is because in addition to being historically reductive and rhetorically self-interested, it is finally self-defeating. Why? Because it places Dreher in the position of cultivating hysterical fear over a hypothetical totalitarian regime while remaining utterly silent about the illiberalism of the regime that we actually have. And this, of course, is not dissidence. It is complicity. . . .
…Dreher’s account of the church is inescapably embedded in and instrumental to his larger project of self-protective withdrawal. This is yet another occasion when Dreher knows the words but does not know the tune. The fruit of this is to take some of the most beautiful aspects of Christian faithfulness—aspects that we absolutely must cultivate—and to twist them by turning them inward, by reinterpreting them not through the joyful light of Christ’s love but through the haunted shadows of Cold War terror. The distressing effect of this reinterpretation is that at the very moment when our culture most needs a missional church, a self-sacrificial community driven by the joy of the resurrection, Dreher prescribes its virtual opposite: a self-protective community driven by a fear of the cross. . . .
It is this commitment [to the work of reimagining both the world and our lives within it] that leads me so forcefully to reject Dreher’s book and to urge the church to do the same. Why? Because it nurses fears of propaganda even as it misrepresents history. Because it invokes liberalism while holding others in contempt. Because it denies the oppression of others while heralding its own victimization. Because it decries therapeutic culture while indulging in self-actualization. Because it affects dissidence while remaining silent before a destructive regime. Because it assumes a Christian identity while failing to embody Christian practice. Because, in sum, Dreher has produced a historically reductive, relationally tribal, intellectually superficial, and profoundly self-absorbed work that actually performs what it protests. In the end, this is not a work of Christian dissidence, but of Cold War anxiety. It is the work not of Vaclav Havel’s heir but of J. Edgar Hoover’s. Because of this, Dreher’s book, far from being dissident, actually reflects the essence of the spirit of our age. Living not by lies, it turns out, is not quite the same thing as living by the truth.