Top 80 Rod Dreher Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “There are three kinds of people who run toward disaster, not away: cops, firemen and reporters.”

— Rod Dreher

2. “No Christian has the power to avoid suffering entirely. It is the human condition. What we do control is how we act in the face of it. Will we run from it and betray our Lord? Or will we accept it as a severe mercy? The choices we will make when put to the ultimate test depend on the choices we make today, in a time of peace.”

— Rod Dreher

3. “Ideology is a partial truth masquerading as the whole truth.”

— Rod Dreher

4. “It is better to choose to know the painful truth rather than settle on a comforting lie. Resolve to look for and to accept the truth, no matter how much it hurts. Nothing built on lies lasts.”

— Rod Dreher

5. “The cacophony of contemporary popular culture makes it hard to discern the call of truth and wisdom. There is no area in which practicing asceticism is more important.”

— Rod Dreher

6. “The moment the Benedict Option becomes about anything other than communion with Christ and dwelling with our neighbors in love, it ceases to be Benedictine,” he said. “It can’t be a strategy for self-improvement or for saving the church or the world.”

— Rod Dreher

7. “To live is to suffer. To become fully human is to overcome suffering by allowing it to give us wings. Stop thinking about how your struggles are weighing you down, and start thinking, with humility, about how they can lift you up, and make you more compassionate and merciful. Changing your attitude can turn a burden into a blessing.”

— Rod Dreher

8. “If family is so important to us conservatives, why do so many of us bring into our daily lives so many things that take away from family life?”

— Rod Dreher

9. “According to Hannah Arendt, the foremost scholar of totalitarianism, a totalitarian society is one in which an ideology seeks to displace all prior traditions and institutions, with the goal of bringing all aspects of society under control of that ideology. A totalitarian state is one that aspires to nothing less than defining and controlling reality. Truth is whatever the rulers decide it is.”

— Rod Dreher

10. “It is up to us today to take up this challenge, to live not by lies and to speak the truth that defeats evil. How do we do this in a society built on lies? By accepting a life outside the mainstream, courageously defending the truth, and being willing to endure the consequences.”

— Rod Dreher

11. “It is always better to live in truth. However, I was very nearly destroyed. I now knew that I would never be able to return home.”

— Rod Dreher

12. “The overweight person diets not to punish him- or herself for being heavy but to become healthier. The athlete works out not because he feels guilty for sitting around watching TV but to train his body for competition. So it is with monks and their asceticism – and so it must be with us lay Christians.”

— Rod Dreher

13. “The testimony of anti-communist dissidents is clear: Only in solidarity with others can we find the spiritual and communal strength to resist. The longer we remain isolated in a period of liberty, the harder it will be to find one another in a time of persecution. We must see in our brothers and sisters not a burden of obligation but the blessing of our own freedom from loneliness, suspicion, and defeat.”

— Rod Dreher

14. “Propaganda helps change the world by creating a false impression of the way the world is.”

— Rod Dreher

15. “At some point in this death-penalty debate, the sanctity of innocent life demands that men and women of conservative conscience have to say: Enough.”

— Rod Dreher

16. “The number one advice I give to my students is to be a culture creator, not a culture consumer,” he continued. “You have to have time to create, and to create, you have to get rid of those things that steal your time. TV is the great time-stealer in American life.”

— Rod Dreher

17. “We want God back in the public square, but for too many of us, religion is a pious veneer over our own unconscious worship of materialism. We want a faith that makes us feel good about ourselves, not one that makes demands we’d rather not obey. We’ve turned religion into another consumer good. Our faith does not help us stand against the money-driven materialist culture, but instead baptizes our participation in it.”

— Rod Dreher

18. “History gives us no clean, straight causal lines binding events and giving them clear order. History is a poem, not a syllogism.”

— Rod Dreher

19. “Ideology is the enemy of joyful community life, and the most destructive ideology is the belief that creating utopia is possible.”

— Rod Dreher

20. “A church that looks and talks and sounds just like the world has no reason to exist.”

— Rod Dreher

21. “Our food is a sign of what we’ve lost in general. I think if we could start slowing down for food, and rebuilding the quality of our plates, we could start rebuilding what we’ve lost in our culture. As my boss says, culture starts in the kitchen, not in the opera house.”

— Rod Dreher

22. “I quite often feel that my greatest task as a father is to raise children who love what is good, true, and beautiful, and who are therefore aliens in this popular culture.”

— Rod Dreher

23. “Watch the speech. Really, watch: if this man gets his party’s nomination, he’s going to be the next president. By a landslide. And he is going to transform this country. If I were a Republican, I’d be very, very afraid. Oh wait, I am a Republican.”

— Rod Dreher

24. “I began to wonder what, exactly, mainstream conservatism was conserving. It dawned on me that some of the causes championed by my fellow conservatives – chiefly an uncritical enthusiasm for the market – can in some circumstances undermine the thing that I, as a traditionalist, considered the most important institution to conserve: the family. I.”

— Rod Dreher

25. “The commentaries on the Commedia also began stacking up at my bedside and on the bookshelf next to my chair in the den. There was Charles Williams’s The Face of Beatrice, Harriet Rubin’s Dante in Love, Yale scholar Giuseppe Mazzotta’s Reading Dante, and later the galleys for English Dantist Prue Shaw’s Reading Dante: From Here to Eternity. Most important of all, I began listening to the Great Courses audio lectures by Bill Cook and Ron Herzman, which made the poem come alive like nothing else.”

— Rod Dreher

26. “Though Donald Trump won the presidency in part with the strong support of Catholics and Evangelicals, the idea that someone as robustly vulgar, fiercely combative, and morally compromised as Trump will be an avatar for the restoration of Christian morality and social unity is beyond delusional. He is not a solution to the problem of America’s cultural decline, but a symptom of it. The.”

— Rod Dreher

27. “Christians must embrace suffering because that’s what Jesus did, and because they have the promise, on faith, that to share in his suffering will bring glory in the next life.”

— Rod Dreher

28. “If there is going to be authentic renewal, it will have to happen in families and local church communities.”

— Rod Dreher

29. “They stood up for truth and justice not out of an expectation of achievable victory in their lifetimes, but because it was the right thing to do.”

— Rod Dreher

30. “Church leaders don’t know how to deal with this chronic crisis; as with the out-of-touch Orthodox hierarchy and clergy of the late imperial period, many don’t seem to realize what’s happening, much less how to address the decay.”

— Rod Dreher

31. “If we are going to be for the world as Christ meant for us to be, we are going to have to spend more time away from the world, in deep prayer and substantial spiritual training – just as Jesus retreated to the desert to pray before ministering to the people. We cannot give the world what we do not have.”

— Rod Dreher

32. “A time of painful testing, even persecution, is coming. Lukewarm or shallow Christians will not come through with their faith intact. Christians today must dig deep into the Bible and church tradition and teach themselves how and why today’s post-Christian world, with its self-centeredness, its quest for happiness and rejection of sacred order and transcendent values, is a rival religion to authentic Christianity.”

— Rod Dreher

33. “The kind of Christians we will be in the time of testing depends on the kind of Christians we are today.”

— Rod Dreher

34. “If everyone, including himself, loved as they should love, they would love God more than they loved themselves and their passions.”

— Rod Dreher

35. “The first part of saving your life is coming to understand how you endangered it by loving wrongly, and living under the rule of your passions.”

— Rod Dreher

36. “Put another way, if you don’t educate your children for metaphysical truth and moral virtue, mainstream culture will do it for you. Absent shared commitment to these spiritual and moral verities, it is hard to see how we renew our families, our communities, and our country with an ethic of duty, self-restraint, stewardship, and putting the needs of people, not the state or corporations, first.”

— Rod Dreher

37. “Jesus Christ promised that the gates of Hell would not prevail against His church, but He did not promise that Hell would not prevail against His church in the West. That depends on us, and the choices we make right here, right now.”

— Rod Dreher

38. “This kind of thing is why more and more Christian parents are concluding that they cannot afford to keep their children in public schools. Some tell themselves that their children need to remain there to be “salt and light” to the other kids. As popular culture continues its downward slide, however, this rationale begins to sound like a rationalization. It brings to mind a father who tosses his child into a whitewater river in the hopes that she’ll save another drowning child.”

— Rod Dreher

39. “The fact is, all education is directed to some end, and if parents don’t make conscious decisions on what that end is, they are simply abdicating their role in setting the direction” of their children’s lives.”

— Rod Dreher

40. “Christians often talk about “reaching the culture” without realizing that, having no distinct Christian culture of their own, they have been co-opted by the secular culture they wish to evangelize.”

— Rod Dreher

41. “Contemporary culture encourages us to make islands of ourselves for the sake of self-fulfillment, of career advancement, of entertainment, of diversion, and all the demands of the sovereign self. When suffering and death come for you – and it will – you want to be in a place where you know, and are known. You want – no, you need – to be able to say, as Mike did, “We’re leaning, but we’re leaning on each other.”

— Rod Dreher

42. “But American Christians are going to have to come to terms with the brute fact that we live in a culture, one in which our beliefs make increasingly little sense. We speak a language that the world more and more either cannot hear or finds offensive to its ears.”

— Rod Dreher

43. “We cannot hope to resist the coming soft totalitarianism if we do not have our spiritual lives in order. This is the message of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, the great anti-communist dissident, Nobel laureate, and Orthodox Christian. He believed the core of the crisis that created and sustained communism was not political but spiritual.”

— Rod Dreher

44. “If you are not rock solid in your commitment to traditional Christianity, then the world will break you. But if you are, then this is the solid rock upon which that world will be broken. And if those solid rocks are joined together, they form a wall of solidarity that is very hard for the enemy to breach.”

— Rod Dreher

45. “Because we are finite creatures who live in time, we cannot see things clearly. Be careful in judging others because the truth of their character and their situation may be hidden from your eyes. Only God knows the whole truth and only God knows the future. Don’t expect all the answers now, but be patient and trusting and seek to grow in love. Each act of love is one more step in the long journey to our true and only home, unity with God in eternity.”

— Rod Dreher

46. “Be grateful for holiness when you find it among churchmen, but do not expect it. As Flannery O’Connor wrote, “All human nature vigorously resists grace because grace changes us and the change is painful. Priests resist it as well as others.”

— Rod Dreher

47. “Love is the only way we will make it through what is to come. Love is not romantic ectasy. It has to be a kind of love that has been honed and intensified through regular prayer, fasting, and repentance and, for many Christians, through receiving the holy sacraments. And it must be a love that has been refined through suffering. There is no other way.”

— Rod Dreher

48. “Developing the cognitive control that leads to a more contemplative Christian life is the key to living as free men and women in post-Christian America. The man whose desires are under the control of his reason is free. The man who does whatever occurs to him is a slave. Untold.”

— Rod Dreher

49. “In a time when people have forgotten how to be neighbors, simply sharing a meal or a movie together is a political act.”

— Rod Dreher

50. “Faithful Christians must work for social justice, but can only do so in the context of fidelity to the full Christian moral and theological vision through which we understand the meaning of justice. Any social justice campaign that implies that the God of the Bible is an enemy of man and his happiness is fraudulent and must be rejected.”

— Rod Dreher