Rod Dreher’s Amazing Admission
Rod Dreher has been pushing his “Benedict Option” (essentially being Amish with WiFi…H/T Roy Edroso) for years now and he is close to publishing a book that will…once and for all…give his followers the basics for how to survive the collapse of civilization that Rod has been predicting since…1995 or so?
Dreher has never been shy in discussing his contempt for American society and indeed, for much of western history (He cannot seem to decide on whether it all went off the rails with William of Ockham and the advent of nominalist theory, or was it as late as the Enlightenment, which for reasons never explained seems to have been an utter disaster in Dreherland)
Today, Rod dropped this little gem as a reply to a comment:
[NFR: It’s not up to me to say whether or not atheists go to hell. I don’t say that as a cop-out; I really don’t have the authority to make that call. I don’t think that any society can hold together without a general shared belief in a transcendent source of authority that can bind its members and call them out of themselves. I’m not really interested in what happens to atheists in the Benedict Option, or for that matter to liberal Christians. I’m interested in orthodox Christians. Come by, eat with us, have fellowship with us … but don’t expect our community to accommodate your atheism or heterodoxy, because if we do, we won’t survive. — RD]
Note that he is not just talking about his merry band of religious Galt Gulchers…he believes that a society by definition must hold vigorously to a single religion without deviation.
No wonder Rod was so admiring of that BBC reality show about living in Tudor times. Enforced religious observance and prosecution of heresy is his notion of the ideal society. Nobody else need apply. Heterodoxy indeed.
This is the atavistic, reactionary insanity that is pushing for “bathroom bills”, denial of women’s health care and the return to “Comstock laws” where states could outlaw birth control. Rod Dreher’s ilk not only believes in the supremacy of their belief, they would rewrite the Constitution if they could.