A strange thing happened to Rod Dreher in the summer of 2002. From the bowels of the modern conservative movement itself, he, a young writer for the National Review, published an online column that rang out as a call-to-arms. In “Birkenstocked Burkeans: Confessions of a Granola Conservative,” Dreher disclosed that he and his wife “have more in common with left-wing counterculturalists than with many garden-variety conservatives.” Among the tell-tale signs were a taste for organic food, a deep suspicion of big business, and a conviction that environmental conservation is a great good. “Somebody’s got to pioneer these things” on the Right, he declared. “Dare to dream, you Birkenstocked Burkeans, and pass the hippie carrots.”
They did more than dream—they deluged him with email. The article sped through cyberspace and into the homes of thousands of like-minded folk, leading Dreher, less than four years later, to enlarge his modest column into a pop manifesto, Crunchy Cons, with a subtitle that parodies the bombast you can find on thousands of book-jackets these days.
The subtitle is more than cute—it’s instructive. Dreher, now an editor at the Dallas Morning News, seeks to use all of his considerable charm and wit to provide ballast for a movement he’s discovered to be well underway. As the subtitle’s mock-grandiosity hints, though, it’s not the usual political movement for which and to which he’s trying to speak. Rather than outlining a policy driven program, he’s sketching “a sensibility, an attitude, a fundamental stance toward reality,” one that might lead more and more toward a “secession of sorts from the mainstream” in order to “conserve those things that give our lives real weight and meaning.”
At the very center of this brazenly countercultural vision is an effort to “see life sacramentally,” to understand “the physical aspects of our lives”—food, place, woods, lakes—”as being inseparable from spiritual reality” and, indeed, the mediator of it. Sacramentality thus emerges as one of Dreher’s two key thrusts, whether he is criticizing contemporary culinary practice (beware the “better-living-through-chemistry propaganda”) or coming out on global warming (“the most serious crisis overtaking mankind as a result of our refusal to live within our means”). With the intelligent enthusiasm of the Catholic convert he is, Dreher urges a reorientation at the deepest levels of perception.
His other major thrust is less convincing. Think of it as “the hunt for true conservatism.” Throughout the book Dreher persistently calls the reader toward a life that more faithfully hews to the conservative tradition in which he, hippie carrots notwithstanding, continues ardently to position himself. While conservatism, he believes, is ultimately about “creating anew,” the economic practices and cultural habits of Republicans, he’s convinced, consistently militate against a renewal of a more moral, sensible way of life. So Dreher bombs away at the gop mainstream. The “big-haired Republican types,” the “Babbitts,” the contented members of the “Party of Greed”: these receive just as much (if not more) of his rhetorical fire as the liberals do; indeed, he sees the two sides as in most respects the same, united in a reckless, shallow, heedless individualism.
Dreher’s intent to erect a truer standard is refreshing. And it’s refreshing because it’s right. A profoundly sacramental vision must indeed lead us to straighten all aspects of our lives. Apart from a deeply rooted sacramental consciousness, humans live with a disposition not to receive grace but to dispose of its effects. Cultures that neglect to cultivate a sacramental experience of the world, in other words, default necessarily to an instrumental consciousness, with its narcissistic, self-deifying impulse toward consumption, whatever the cost.
But in the face of our persistent failures as a race to achieve this sublime vision of earthy, heavenly peace, how are we to live? This is where Dreher’s political tradition fails him. For in this broken world, sacrament must always be complemented by that other deeply Christological, eminently political s-word: sacrifice, the laying down of one’s life on behalf of the other. Crucially, outside his vision for the family, Dreher’s political landscape is devoid of any such thing.
Take a typical passage: Dreher warmly remembers a house that made him “feel at home in the world and enchanted by goodness and harmony,” and urges us to think about homemaking, architecture, and aesthetics in this light. Given the sorry mixture of glitz and dullness that today defines our look and style, it’s a word in season, to be sure. But are there not other dimensions of our common life that citizenship—whether Christian or American—requires us to consider, especially in our age? In a book about fundamental moral and spiritual reorientation, does not the looming presence of injustice, inequity, poverty, and disease merit some attention?
America would be a better place if Dreher’s crunchy conservatism won out, I’m sure. But not good enough, and maybe not even that good for very long, in our expiring times. For both “liberalism” and “conservatism” are traditions with a shelf-life. They are time-sensitive, and their time is out. It’s not that nothing of worth remains within them—quite the contrary, as Dreher’s book attests. But the modern era that called these political traditions into being—and that they, indeed, helped create—has defeated them. At this late date, being “conservative” is an inadequate ideal for humans to aspire to—as is being “liberal.” What our moment requires instead is a politics more deeply human, more truly radical, something both old and new, a moral vision that might teach us anew what any healthy family, church, neighborhood, or nation already knows: how to conserve and liberate at once.
Two sources in our past come to mind for help in learning to aim for this vital tension. In the American vein, the populist tradition has much to teach any who seek to nest sacrifice and justice within a broadly sacramental understanding of life. Check out Christopher Lasch’s magnificent 1991 rendering of American populism in The True and Only Heaven: Progress and Its Critics, or track down Tinseltown, Pierce Pettis’ folk album of the same year. Dig up a few of William Jennings Bryan’s speeches. Dip into anything by the writer and farmer Wendell Berry. Each of these voices whispers persuasively that populism’s vitality is just a movement away.
Dreher nods in the direction of another, more deeply Western source when in his final chapter he points us toward St. Benedict, who in an earlier age helped keep alive “the light of knowledge, of faith, of virtue, through centuries of chaos and despair.” But with the same hope and for the same reason we might also look to the early Franciscans. With their devotion to radical charity and self-abandonment, Francis and his band sought, in Chesterton’s marvelous phrase, “to astonish and awaken the world.” And awaken it they did—one lasting sign of which is what Chesterton calls the “Catholic Democratic” tradition, so crucial to the story of the West.
If the awakening and renewal Dreher longs for is to occur in our midst, it will surely be because somewhere some people dared to embody a moral vision deeply sacramental and sacrificial at once. It will not be because they chose to be, simply, “liberals” or “conservatives.”
Eric Miller is associate professor of history at Geneva College in Beaver Falls, Pennsylvania, and a contributing editor of the webzine The New Pantagruel.
Copyright © 2006 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine. Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.
