Preparing for ‘Weimar America’
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What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
It's your day to play. It's your morning to make the most of.
It's your way to love.
It's your climate to consider.
It's your answer to what should I watch? It's your money to save.
It's your song to analyze line by line. It's your 10 ways to find a little calm. It's your world to understand. The New York Times.
Find out more at nytimes.com slash your world. I'm not saying AI is demonic. Yes, you are.
No, no, you are. No, I've read your work. Yes, you are saying that. Yes.
Rod Dreher, welcome to Interesting Times.
At last, Ross, you've scraped the bottom of the barrel.
I've hit bottom.
You've hit bottom.
And I've found you. But it's a pleasure. It's a pleasure to find you there. Because if someone were to write a history of religious conservatism in the 21st century, I think they could probably do it just by tracing your career. Twenty years ago, you were a Catholic convert having a crisis of faith brought on by reporting on the sex abuse crisis, and then you converted to Eastern Orthodoxy. Your book, Crunchycons, anticipated the Maha movement. You wrote a book called The Benedict Option in the mid-2010s that crystallized a sense of sort of Christian disillusionment with politics and disengagement with politics. But then, when Christians became enthusiastic about political possibilities— After the election of Donald Trump, there you were living and working in Viktor Orban's Hungary.
And then your latest book, Living in Wonder, was about the return of the supernatural, but also about anxieties, about an AI future. So you've covered a lot of ground, but always with a consistent theme. Which is? Doom, right? The decline of America, the decline of the West, maybe the apocalypse, the book of Revelation. Yeah. Mama says, we in Revelations. That's right. This is a touchstone. So we're going to start with your most consistent form of pessimism, which is the idea that the decline of Christianity, the religion that both you and I share, will be bad, bad for America, bad for everybody, bad for the world. Just talk to an audience that isn't Christian or is lukewarmly Christian. Why should people in that category worry about
about what comes after a Christian culture?
Well, I would direct them to Tom Holland's great book from a few years ago, Dominion.
What personal background and themes does Rod Dreher introduce at the start of the episode?
Tom Holland, secular liberal English historian, set out to tell the story about how the Christian faith made the Western world. And what Tom says in the book, and says it better than anybody I've seen, is that everything that he valued as a secular liberal came out of Christianity and nothing else. And he talks about the idea of equality, the equality of everyone before the law, human rights, all of these sort of things that secular liberals take for granted. We wouldn't have them if it weren't for Christianity. Now, that is not a reason to convert to Christianity, but Ross, we have been living in the West on the fumes of Christianity for a long time. And now we've pretty much gotten to the bottom of it.
And we can see the outlines of what a truly post-Christian society is like. And if people think that it's going to be this sort of happy, clappy, new atheist, everyone's nice, we're not bothered by God anymore, they should have another thing coming. Nietzsche, I didn't imagine we'd get to Nietzsche so soon in this, but-
I was anticipating Nietzsche high up in the conversation.
Friedrich Nietzsche famously said, late 19th century, God is dead and we have killed him. Now, Nietzsche didn't believe in God. He was talking about the idea of the Christian God in Western civilization. Nietzsche was not a romantic about this. He saw that it would be very dark and difficult for humanity to find some sense of meaning if God were dead. And And he was right. You know, we can't make our own meaning. Nietzsche was not a Nazi, but, you know, the sort of ideological convulsions that came in the 20th century with Soviet communism, with Nazism in Germany and so forth, all of them are products of the death of God.
All right. So give me the outline, though, of what you see happening now.
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