In the space of a decade, Rod Dreher’s life — and relationships with his family — unraveled devastatingly. In 2011, he’d moved back to his hometown of St. Francisville, Louisiana, with his wife and three children after his sister died of cancer. But instead of a warm welcome, he was met with rejection from his family.
“They saw the fact that I had moved away as an unforgivable sin,” Dreher told me recently over Zoom, speaking from Budapest where he now lives.
The pain from the fracture with his birth family was compounded by another loss. In the spring of 2022, while on a fellowship in Budapest, he received an email from his wife saying that she had filed for divorce. He was about to fly out to Jerusalem for a research trip during Holy Week. After years of trying to salvage the marriage, the news caught him off guard.
“This is the worst feeling, the most intense pain I have ever felt,” he wrote in a blog post that spring. That week, Dreher, who is Eastern Orthodox, found himself praying at the hill of Golgotha.
Dreher, now 57, cultivated a loyal following as a writer and editor at The American Conservative, where he worked for 12 years. He remains a contributing editor at the magazine and has more than 21,000 subscribers to his Substack.
Since that moment on Golgotha, Dreher has tried to make sense of his suffering, writing for The American Conservative, “Maybe the destruction I’m living through now can be turned to good somehow, by helping others find God, and find harmony and integration.”
He felt flickers of hope as he dove deeper into his latest quest: how believers can reclaim a life, and a faith, that’s open to wonder and enchantment amid things we don’t fully understand. A vision of a life with God’s visceral presence in it brimmed with meaning and purpose, and the idea offered Dreher the hope of healing.
In his latest book, “Living in Wonder: Finding Mystery and Meaning in a Secular Age,” Dreher makes the case that the world is full of the wondrous and the strange — we’ve just become anesthetized to it. He exhorts other believers to rediscover awe and transcendence in a post-modern culture that prioritizes scientific avenues for knowing.
Materialism and technology have sapped life of enchantment, he argues, distancing us from the more transcendent dimensions of faith — mystery, beauty and the sense of the sacred. This erosion has left people feeling disconnected and empty, yearning for a deeper, more meaningful relationship with the world. In this spiritual vacuum, according to Dreher, younger generations have turned to counterfeit expressions of the transcendent: psychedelics, witchcraft, astrology and the occult.
Religious faith, he believes, begins with the experience of awe and wonder. Ultimately, it’s when fueled by the transcendent that our faith can infuse our reality, however grim, with meaning.
“True enchantment is simply living within the confident belief that there is deep meaning to life, meaning that exists in the world independent of ourselves,” he writes. For Dreher, there is an urgent need for Christians to rediscover this. Both political and cultural renewal, he believes, are downstream of a renewed spiritual connection with God.
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A confessional voice
Dreher and I spoke the week before the 2024 presidential election. Since separation from his wife, he’s been living in Hungary, where he is a visiting fellow at the Danube Institute, a conservative think tank with ties to Hungary’s prime minister Viktor Orbán.
In the prior weeks, Dreher had been vocal on X and his Substack about his support for Donald Trump. “It’s not that Trump’s vision for America aligns with mine,” he told me, “as the Democrats’ vision for America is a complete opposite of mine.”
He laments the Democrats’ “militant” embrace of wokeness and diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives, and disagrees with the left’s policies on war. Trump is not Dreher’s ideal leader of the nation: he’s not pro-life enough, according to Dreher, and has a roughness about him that Dreher dislikes, but “he’s the good enough for right now.” What Dreher is really excited about, however, is J.D. Vance, who he considers a personal friend. “For me, the most exciting thing about a Trump presidency is that it could be a gateway to two terms of President Vance,” said Dreher, whose 2016 interview with Vance about his book “Hillbilly Elegy” went viral.
Dreher is best known for his 2017 book “The Benedict Option,” which encouraged Christians to adopt a more intentional, community-oriented approach to living out their faith in the secular world. For a subsequent book, “Live Not by Lies,” he interviewed believers in the post-communist countries about faith in restrictive conditions, and warned Christians and other traditionalists about growing ideological pressures.
As with most soldiers in the culture war, he’s received his fair share of criticism. Critics have argued that Dreher’s view of modern Western society is excessively bleak, often framing secular culture as incompatible with Christianity. His alignment with European nationalist figures like Orbán sparked controversy, with critics arguing these alliances contradict democratic values. (”Of course this is not dictatorship at all. This is what is called responsible conservative government,” Dreher wrote of Orbán’s government.) Dreher’s traditional views on sexuality, like his opposition to same-sex marriage, have also been contentious, and are seen by many as exclusionary and outdated.
For some readers on the right and on the left, Dreher has become a kind of point of fixation. “We all know we’d do better to just ignore his existence, but we can’t stop watching The Rod Show,” author Phil Christman wrote for Jacobin in 2023.
To his fans, part of Dreher’s appeal is his confessional writing style, said Frederica Mathewes-Green, an Orthodox Christian author and Dreher’s friend, who’s known him for 30 years. “He’s so guileless,” she told me. “He’s talking about himself like he’s your best friend.” He’s also able to be both clear-eyed and hopeful about the future. “He has a disposition to be positive about things. It’s funny to say, because he’s a catastrophist,” she said. “He has a zest for life, and I think it’s reassuring.”
In his review of Dreher’s book in “First Things,” writer and philosopher Matthew Crawford wrote that followers of Dreher’s polemical style “may be surprised to find here a theologically serious, psychologically sophisticated diagnosis of the spiritual condition of the West.”
He continued: “More than diagnosis, Dreher gives us wise counsel. His aim is not to divert our gaze to the next world, but to equip us with reasons to throw ourselves more fully into this world, alert to God’s presence.”
For Dreher, who writes compulsively, churning out lengthy posts on his Substack nearly every day, writing is how he processes the calamities that happen in the world — and also inside himself.
From intellectual faith to wonder
Home has always been complicated for Dreher. His father was a hunter, fisherman and athlete. Dreher, on the other hand, says he was bad at sports, gravitated toward books and loved animals. The tensions between the two have caused Dreher to internalize a sense of shame that he didn’t live up to his father’s expectations. He preferred spending time with his two elderly aunts.
As a kid, he’d walk across the pecan orchard to listen to Lois and Hilda tell him stories of France during the Great War and teach him the names of various plants in the garden. Although these encounters were not religious, they cracked open a vision of the world that was rich with wonder if only you looked closer.
“They taught me that there was so much meaning in the world beyond just what we could see,” Dreher told me. He left his hometown at 16 to go to a state boarding school, a move that felt like an escape.
The first time Dreher felt awakened to a sense of spiritual wonder was when, as a 17-year-old, he walked into the Chartres Cathedral, a medieval Gothic church about an hour away from Paris. His mother won a trip to Europe in a church raffle, but instead sent Dreher, who read Hemingway and daydreamed of Paris. Dreher’s family was Methodist, but they weren’t big churchgoers. From early on, God and religion felt more intellectual and social — like “the white Southern middle class at prayer,” he said.
But standing in the middle of the labyrinth pattern on the church’s stone floor, underneath the vaulted ceiling, Dreher felt with certainty that God spoke to him. “This was the first time that God touched me in such a visceral way through material objects,” he told me. But conversion took time. He went on to college at Louisiana State University, where he studied journalism and started his career as a television critic for the Washington Times, later becoming a film critic for The New York Post and an editor at National Review.
In 1993, at 27 years old, Dreher converted to Catholicism, a faith he thought embodied the greatest capacity for mysticism and beauty. But the faith that he had thought was rock solid was shattered when Dreher began reporting on the sex abuse scandal in the Catholic Church in the early aughts. The last straw was learning of similar allegations involving the priest of his own parish in Dallas, where he and his wife were living at the time.
“That was when something broke in us,” he told me. “I learned the insufficiency of a faith that is primarily intellectual and cerebral — because I saw how weak it was.”
Dreher found a new spiritual home in the Eastern Orthodox tradition with his conversion in 2006. Since then he’s tried to unlearn the old patterns of intellectualizing God and instead open up to the unexplainable and enchanted aspects of living a Christian life.
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What Dreher means by enchantment is not Disney fairy dust or an artificially generated mystical experience, he said. True Christian re-enchantment is about cultivating a posture oriented to the possibility of God’s presence, wherever and however it may occur. “There is no such thing as a formula for enchantment,” he told me. “It’s more like learning to be staring at the right corner of the sky when a comet flies by.”
In the absence of the divine, Dreher warns, our innate longing for meaning and transcendence can lead us to the false sources of enchantment. The greatest threat to Christianity is no longer the new atheism movement that emerged in the 2000s led by figures like Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens. Instead, younger generations are gravitating toward the occult and “more intuitive and organic” ways of connecting with the world — paganism, witchcraft and even Satanism, he said.
“Young people are desperate for a sense of the mysterious, a sense of touching something beyond what they can see,” Dreher told me. And the church, he said, often fails to provide that sense of wonder in the Christian experience, and the idea of trading personal freedom for rules and commitments holds little appeal for many young people.
In his earnest spiritual quest, Dreher veers into some ideas that might make some modern Christians uneasy — that demons can possess sinners and a battle between good and evil beings is a real and intense ongoing struggle that can influence the moral direction of society as a whole. More controversially, he interprets the accounts of UFO encounters as not necessarily extraterrestrial but rather encounters with non-human intelligences, possibly even demonic.
But at its core, the central idea of “Living in Wonder,” while fresh, is not as controversial. “From an orthodox perspective, he’s proposing not just that every once in a while God reaches in and does something surprising,” said Mathewes-Green. “But that actually all of creation is filled with his presence. And that’s not a familiar idea to Western Christians, but it’s totally taken for granted in orthodoxy.”
‘Get out of your head’
So how do we reclaim the true enchantment, the kind that comes from God?
“Get out of your head” is Dreher’s advice — that, and put down your phone. Harness your focus and attention through prayer. Look for beauty in art, architecture, poetry. (“Beauty has the power to pierce the gloom of hopelessness,” he writes.) Surrender the belief that everything can be known through reason.
“If you want to experience enchantment, if you want to experience the presence of God in a mystical way, you’re going to have to disengage the rational brain to a certain extent, not shut it down, but just disengage it, so you can see what God is doing in front of you,” he told me.
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In Hungary, Dreher has been attending a Serbian Orthodox church down the street from his apartment, and although he’s familiar with the liturgy, he doesn’t understand the language. He’s missed the convert-friendly Orthodox churches in the U.S. “I’m so hungry for a church community,” Dreher said.
About two months ago, after closely studying enchantment and talking to people who experienced it, Dreher decided to turn to an Orthodox priest he knew, who was also a trained exorcist, hoping he might help relieve the shame he’d been carrying from the feeling of not being “good enough” for his father and the depression following his divorce. For 20 minutes, the priest recited prayers of deliverance over him. Dreher described the change he felt the next morning: “This dark cloud that had been over me for all my adult life as far back as I can remember — gone.”
Dreher acknowledges the rational explanations for his depression, rooted in the calamitous fractures in relationships with people he loved. But he also believes that a priest’s intercession delivered him of the crippling emotional burden he’d been carrying.
“There is no escape from the suffering,” Dreher told me. “But there is redemption.”
