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Hidden Forces
Living In Wonder: Finding Mystery and Meaning in a Secular Age | Rod Dreher
00:57:11
In of Hidden Forces, Demetri Kofinas speaks with religious writer Rod Dreher about the crisis of modernity and how to open our eyes to the reality that life and the world are far more mysterious, exciting, and adventurous than we have been led to...
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- [00:01]
Demetri Kofinas
What's up, everybody? My name is Demetri Kofinas, and you're listening to Hidden Forces, a podcast that inspires investors, entrepreneurs, and everyday citizens to challenge consensus narratives and learn how to think critically about the systems of power shaping our world. My guest in this episode of Hidden Forces is Rod Dreier, an American conservative writer who has written about religion, politics, film, and culture in the American Conservative, National Review, the Weekly Standard, the Wall street, and other notable publications. He's also the author of several extremely successful books on Christianity and religion, such as How Dante Can Save youe Life, the Benedict Option, Live not by Lies, and his most recent book that we are Here to talk about today. Living in Finding Mystery and Meaning in a Secular Age, Rod and I spend the first hour of our conversation engaging on fundamental questions about the nature of existence, the nobility of God, the centrality of love, and how to find mystery and meaning in a world that for many, has come to feel empty and soulless. In the second hour, Rod and I discuss what the Eastern tradition of Christianity can tell us about how we should live in the world, how those lessons apply to the culture wars, how to confront evil, and the appropriate role he thinks Christianity should play in policy and politics. If you want access to that part of the conversation and you're not already subscribed to Hidden Forces, you can join our premium feed and listen to the second hour of today's episode by going to HiddenForces IO. Subscribe all of our content tiers give you access to our premium feed, which you can listen to on your mobile device using your favorite podcast app, just like you're listening to this episode right now. If you want to join in on the conversation and become a member of the Hidden Forces Genius community, which includes Q and A calls with guests, access to special research and analysis, in person events and dinners, you can also do that on our subscriber page. If you still have questions, feel free to send an email to infoiddenforcesio and I or someone from our team will get right back to you. And with that, please enjoy this incredibly evocative and thoughtful conversation with my guest, Rod Dreier. Rod Dreier, welcome to Hidden Forces.
- [02:28]
Rod Dreher
It's great to be here. Thanks for having me on.
- [02:30]
Demetri Kofinas
I'm super stoked to have you on. Rod. I apologize to listeners for my voice. I've been dealing with a cold the last week or so, but I think we'll be fine and it's definitely worth the conversation to have. So Rod, as I said, I'm super excited to have you on. I found your book initially when I was perusing Amazon some months ago, and I put it on a list, a long list of books that I wanted to read and to reach out to the authors. But what actually motivated me to have you on was that a member of our genius community posted one of your substack articles about UAPs and NHIS to our genius community on Circle. And it so resonated with me on multiple levels, and so has your book. And we're going to have a chance to talk about that. But before we do, I'd love to learn a little bit more about you. You have a very long Wikipedia page.
- [03:16]
Rod Dreher
One of the longest pages, and some of it is actually accurate. Demetri.
- [03:20]
Demetri Kofinas
So tell me what is accurate? What can you tell us about your background?
- [03:24]
Rod Dreher
Well, I'm coming to you today from Budapest in Hungary, which is a long way from where I was born, a small town in south Louisiana on the Miss Mississippi River. And I've just sort of traveled a lot as a journalist. I started my journalism career in Washington and then moved to New York, was a film critic in New York and a columnist. Moved into Dallas, Texas, to work for the Dallas Morning News on the editorial page and ended up back in my hometown in 2012, a town of like 2,000 people. After my younger sister died, I wanted to get close to the family and be part of that. Moved there with my wife and kids and it all went to hell. It's kind of a Southern gothic story about the dark secret of the family, you know, and turns out that they didn't actually want us back there. And I got really sick from the shock of all this. Got chronic mono for three years. And the thing that brought me out of it more than anything else was reading Dante, the Divine Comedy, and reading it at a very deep level, trying to apply the lessons of the commedia to my own life. And I did, after three years, find healing. But all of that just destroyed my marriage. My wife and I, now ex wife, we fought the good fight for 10 years to try to save the marriage, but it just couldn't be done in the end. So after she filed for divorce, I moved with our older son to Europe. And I work for a think tank in Budapest now, and my son's in graduate school in Vienna. And I write books and I write a daily substack. And the stuff that interests me more than anything is religion and its intersection with culture and politics, things like that. I've written about six or seven books, but the ones that I'm best known for are my last three, the Benedict option, which came out in 2017. It's in 11 languages, live not by lies. 2020. I had the great good fortune, if that's the right phrase, to publish it during COVID and after the summer of George Floyd. And it's a book about what people who came to America to escape Soviet communism. They were starting to see totalitarianism, a different form of it, emerge in Americ with Wokeness and all of that. And they were trying to warn Americans, but nobody would listen to them because our idea of totalitarianism was based on George Orwell, 1984, the Soviet Union. And what we're dealing with is a different kind of totalitarianism. I call it soft totalitarianism. Well, unlike the Benedict option, which got tons of media coverage in 2017, this one got zero mainstream media coverage because it was calling out Wokeness as totalitarian. But it sold far more than any of my other books. It sold 210,000 copies in the US and a lot overseas. In fact, a documentary film is about to come out from Angel Studios in April based on this. We actually went back to Eastern Europe and interviewed some of these Christians who had stayed behind and resisted totalitarianism. Some of them went to prison for it. And then, of course, this third book that came out in 2024, Living in Wonder. It's sort of the capstone of what I didn't intend to be a trilogy, but has turned out to be, and a trilogy about how to be faithfully Christian in a post Christian, postmodern world. And this is about recovering enchantment. And what I mean by enchantment is the sense that as we Orthodox say, and you grew up Orthodox?
- [06:47]
Demetri Kofinas
I grew up Greek Orthodox.
- [06:48]
Rod Dreher
Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm an Orthodox Christian, a convert. We say that God is everywhere, present and filling all things. And I think that's true. That's a metaphysical truth. And what I'm trying to do in this book is open the eyes of Christians in the modern west, which has become very desacralized, very disenchanted in the sense that people don't have a sense of the sacred everywhere around them. I want to turn that around because I don't think the faith will survive without it. But also I go into some pretty weird places I know we'll get into in today's conversation. But you can't have enchantment, good enchantment, light enchantment, without dark enchantment as well. When you take down the buffers, the psychological buffers that modernity has provided against the idea of the spiritual world. You can let God back in, but you also let in darker spirits. So Anyway, I'm living, 58 years old, living in Budapest, enjoying writing and just seeing what's going to happen next. And this is, of course, Demetri, an incredibly exciting and scary time to be alive. I was just in London at the ARC conference, Alliance for Responsible Citizenship, the Jordan Peterson thing. There were 4,600 people there from all around the world. Not everybody agreed on everything. And there were people there. I saw Curtis Yarvin, Mencius Mulbug in the audience. And there were also some Christian leaders there. There was a Coptic archbishop and David Brooks of the New York Times, Neil Ferguson and others. But everybody's coming together because there is a sense that the story that we've all been living by in the post war period, the sort of managerial liberalism that's both on the left and the right, has come to an end and we don't know what's next. It was fun to get together with these people and make friends, talk about things and figure out where we go from here.
- [08:41]
Demetri Kofinas
So that was a wonderful answer. You mentioned a number of things that I intend for us to talk about. And I do want to talk about some of the political implications or some of the policy questions that come out of some of the practical questions that come out of engaging in the subject that we're going to talk about today. But I'd like to at least spend the first hour trying to set a foundation for the discussion. And I think maybe the best way to do that, as I mentioned that I'd read an article that one of our members shared from your substack where you mentioned UAPs and NHI. So my first question ties into that, but it also deals directly with this idea of living in wonder, because in the first few pages of the book, you tell a story of a man who you call Nino, who had a series of paranormal encounters with what some today might call UAPS or nhi. His accounts sound very similar to some of the encounters described by people like Dan and Pasola Dulka, who's been on the podcast in her book Encounters. Same thing with Jim Kasky in Skinwalkers at the Pentagon, as well as Lou Elizondo, who ran the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program. In his book Imminent, he actually describes encounters that he had as a result of his trying to investigate this phenomenon. What's interesting is for people that haven't actually trying to understand what these folks are actually talking about, much of what this Phenomenon is described as sounds a lot more like paranormal events, more like Ghostbusters, than like externals. In any case, as a result of these encounters, Nino came to a realization that, quote, materialism is false and that the core of the world is not what we think it is. And that phrase, the world is not what we think it is, gets to one of the core arguments of your book, which you say is about living in a world filled with mystery. Unpack that for me. And let's start first with what is it that you think most Westerners think that the world is, and how is that tied up with materialism?
- [10:35]
Rod Dreher
Yeah. Well, there's a guy. You might have even had him on your show once, Jeffrey Kripal. He's an academic at Rice University who writes about religion, and he decries what he calls the iron cage of rationality that we all live in in the contemporary world, meaning that we are so bound by an Enlightenment way of seeing the world, this disenchanted way of seeing the world, that we just push outside of our consciousness and outside of taking seriously anything that goes against the idea of materialism, which is to say that the world is made up entirely of matter, that matter doesn't have any meaning, and there's nothing that, if you can't measure it scientifically, it doesn't really exist. Well, Kripal is not a Christian, but he's been fighting against us for most of his career. He. And I agree with him. I am an orthodox Christian, but I think he's completely right. And even a lot of Christians in the United States today and in the west live a fundamentally disenchanted life. We tend to think of Christianity as nothing but morals, ethics, and, of course, prayer. God is up there, but he doesn't bother too much with the material world. And, you know, the idea of angels, demons, that sort of thing just seems archaic to a lot of people, and they don't like to talk about it. Well, I think we have to talk about it because this stuff is real. There's a fantastic book that came out a year or two ago called they Flew F L E W by Carlos Ayer. I think E I R E. He's a Yale University historian, National Book Award winner, a really solid, respected guy, and he writes about how, getting into the archives, the Counter Reformation in Spain, he saw many, many, many written testimonies, signed in some cases by hundreds of witnesses who saw monks, nuns, priests fly. Like, we don't know why it happened, but it happened. And what ere. I mean, he's writing As a distinguished historian, he said that there is no other area of intellectual inquiry in which we would completely dismiss written testimonials like this from lots and lots of people, other than religion, other than things that violate the tenets of materialism, and the fact that Eyre wrote this, being a man of his stature. And it's parallel paradigm changing. And this connects with the whole UAP NHI thing in ways that I hadn't anticipated when I started working on the book. I mean, the book also has a chapter about exorcism. I've known Exorcist for many years. And the more you talk with them, I've been with some of them on their. On their rounds. And you have to work really hard to dismiss this all and come up with some sort of materialistic explanation for the things they see all the time and that I've seen in their company. But when I was working on the book, Demetri, I got this email from a friend who's a Vatican journalist, Catholic, and he said, look, I know you think that the whole UAP NHI thing is nonsense, but I'm telling you, there's a lot going on here that you don't realize, and it is fundamentally a religious story. I said, okay, fine. What should I read? Well, the first thing he told me to read was Diana Pasulka's book, American Cosmic. All right? I picked it up. I read it on a flight to Brussels for a conference, and it knocked me flat. I realized that my own understanding of UAPs, that old world, was basically stuck in the early 90s, first season of X Files, and I didn't take it seriously. But you can't read that book and hear the testimonies of people like Gary Nolan, Dr. Gary Nolan, and others without realizing that something's going on and that this stuff is being taken seriously at high levels of the U.S. government. And so that it made me finally decide to write another chapter about this. And I had started tweeting about it when I first read the book. And that's when this Nino guy reached out to me. He's a lawyer in his 30s, very conservative, Catholic, and he wrote me the story. It's the first story in the book, in fact. And I wanted to go there as the first story and not tell a conventional Christian story of miracles, because it speaks to this moment of enchantment that we're all in now of re. Enchantment of the entire culture. Nino said that when he was a teenager growing up in New England, he was driving down a country road, saw A huge spaceship hovering over a field he pulled, or what he thought was a spaceship. He pulls over and stares at it, then drives on. Doesn't tell a soul because he thinks they won't believe him. Seven years later, he's sitting in his apartment, he's in law school, and he's studying for a test at his kitchen table. Suddenly, a portal, as he describes it, opens up on the bare wall of his kitchen. And through this portal came two shimmering humanoid beings that looked like they were made out of energy that's flowing like water. And he said they communicated with him telepathically. And it wasn't anything important. They just said things like, a bird is about to land on your windowsill. That happened. A car is about to backfire on the street. That happened. Then they went away. Well, Nino, as a good rationalist, though a Catholic, a rationalist, he goes straight to the hospital, demands a brain scan, demands a blood test. He thought he was losing his mind, but he was fine. Well, these things kept coming back, usually in periods, he said, of emotional stress in his life. And he said that after he got married, his wife saw them too. So he knew this wasn't a hallucination. When he reached out to me, he was just at the point of great distress over this. He and his wife had just gone on vacation to Colorado. And you know all this poltergeisty type stuff that you hear all the time in these UAP or NHI encounters that was happening to them. He said, I want to tell my priest, my parish priest about this, but I'm afraid he's going to laugh at me. And I said, well, let me tell you that in talking to exorcist for researching my book, this happens to a fair number of Christians who encounter these things. And I said, let me ask you, you're a man of prayer. Did you ever pray in the presence of these things? Well, yeah. So what happened? Well, they went away. I said, did that not indicate to you there might be something demonic here? He said he hadn't thought of it that way. He thought if they were demons, they'd want to fight him. Said, look, bypass your parish priest. Call the exorcist of your archdiocese, because in the Catholic Church, every diocese is supposed to have an exorcist. Then let me know what happens. So he did this. The exorcist told him, yeah, we've seen this before. Prayed over him. They never came back. I met him in person a year later. I said, so what happened? He goes, I found so much peace. Those Things tried to drive me away from Christ, but they actually drove me to Christ. So I put that in the book, Demetri, because I want the reader who's maybe picking it up in a bookstore to understand that when we talk about re enchantment, we're not simply talking about miraculous healings, the appearance of angels, things like that. We're talking about the appearance or reappearance of the paranormal and the uncanny. I recently heard. I listened to Marc Andreessen's podcast, most recent one on Joe Rogan, and he mentions to Rogan that he was talking to a Catholic university professor who said to him that a medieval peasant would be better able psychologically to cope with the world that is fast moving towards us than an average modern person. Well, it turns out this professor, I found out later, is a friend of mine. I said, so what did you mean by that? He said that in the Middle Ages, the average peasant understood that we lived in a world where we weren't the only intelligence, that there's God, there's angels, there's demons, there's all kinds of things. But he knew that this was something that had to be navigated. It didn't freak him out that there were ways of navigating through this world that you could do without losing your mind or losing your soul. That's the sort of mindset, said my professor friend, that people today are going to have to develop. And it's not just about demons and nhi. It's about things like artificial intelligence, which is progressing so quickly that people will start to treat them as if they were gods, even if they believe that these are merely machines. They're going to. We can get into this later if you want, but they're going to establish themselves as godlike entities and. And we're basically being re enchanted in a medieval way, whether we want it or not. The question is, are we as a people, as Christians, and as non Christians, are we prepared for this?
- [19:08]
Demetri Kofinas
So there are so many things to respond to there. First, I want to give voice to those in the audience who heard some of what you had to say about the presence of apparitions and other paranormal phenomena and who are struggling with really taking that in. And I want to say that I too, have a difficult time relating to this, probably because I've never had an experience like what you've described, and it's hard for me to take your comments literally, despite the fact that this is not the first time I've heard stories like this. Lua Lozando shared something similar with me when he was on the podcast. And I've explored themes like these to various degrees with folks like Joshua Schrei, Megan O', Giblin, Tara Isabella Burton, and even Ian McGilchrist, who I love very much and whose work has had a profound impact on me, as I know it's had on you. Maybe the best way for me to approach this subject, than to try to penetrate it from a perspective that does resonate with me, is to do so via a critique. And that would be a critique of the mainstream materialist or materialist atheist or materialist secularist view that science has anything definitive to say at all about the ontological nature of the world and the nature of our own existence. This is a view, the view that science can give us answers about these sort of foundational truths that I have long rejected. And it's one area where Iain McGilchrist's framework works so beautifully. Because while science can help us build models of the world that we can use to make predictions and exercise power over, cannot tell us who we are. It certainly cannot speak to the mystery of existence or to the nature of reality, and certainly it cannot say anything about the existence of God. So I'm curious how you would answer the assertion or respond to the assertion that science cannot make definitive statements about ontological truth, so we cannot reason our way to God or to knowledge about the nature of reality, and that only through revelation and the truth of authoritative experience can such knowledge be conveyed to us.
- [21:26]
Rod Dreher
Yeah, that's a massive question. I'm so glad that you're familiar with Iain McGilchrist's work. He's been a huge influence on me and he's one of the heroes of. Of my book, Living in Wonder. Well, I was just last weekend in Cambridge in the UK and present at a talk Jordan Peterson gave at Clare College, and he was talking about this himself. And he said that science presents us facts, but we have to know which facts to which we should attend and in what degree to which we should attend to them. And you can't really do that without focusing your attention. Well, how do we know to what we should attend? The way we make those decisions are about the stories that we have in our head. Right. And for me, let me go back to my college years when I was wrestling with Christianity. I wasn't a Christian. I was raised Methodist, but we were Easter and Christmas Methodist. When I got to be a teenager, my faith. What faith? I had dissolved. But, you know, I went to the cathedral at Chartres when I was 17 years old. And was just completely bowled over by the glory of God in that medieval cathedral. I knew nothing about that cathedral. I'd never seen a cathedral. I was 17 year old kid, raised in 1970s and 1980s America, small town America. And I perceived at some deep level that God is present here. And all of my teenage agnosticism just went right out the door. Now I didn't leave there as a Christian, but I left there on a search. I felt like there was some truth, some presence there that I could not account for intellectually in the sense of, you know, rationally. And that sent me on a search. One of the big points of my pilgrimage was when I was in college and read Kierkegaard for the first time. You know, the Danish 19th century Protestant philosopher. And he's famous, probably most famous for something he said. Truth is subjectivity. Now when I first heard that I thought, he's saying that there is no such thing as truth. That, you know, we all have our own views. That's not what he meant by it. What he meant by the kind of truths for which we live and we die are truths that can only be known by the heart, by the perceiving subject, by. I forget the phrase he used. He was a difficult writer. It's like passionately appropriating a truth claim inwardly. That's how you know what's true. And that made sense to me. And I thought, you know, I keep trying to find the right argument that's going to convince me to be a Christian. But Kierkegaard saying, there is no argument, the argument is living. And you're not going to be able necessarily to demonstrate this with logical propositions and premise, premise, premise, conclusion, but you can still know it. I ended up becoming a Christian in my mid-20s. But it wasn't really until reading Iain McGilchrist many years later. I first discovered McGilchrist a few years ago that I understood what Kierkegaard was trying to say. And it was this, that there are domains of truth, that we have the left brain and the right brain. The right brain is the perceptive faculties, or as orthodox would say, the noetic faculties of the human person by which we take in sense data from the outside our heads. It refers it to the left brain, the analytical side, which analyzes it. And in a properly working brain, the left brain sends it back to the right for integration into a picture of the world. Well, McGilchrist says, as you well know, I don't know if your audience is familiar with him.
- [25:04]
Demetri Kofinas
Yeah, he's been on the podcast.
- [25:05]
Rod Dreher
Okay, good. Well, so as you know, then he says that our problem in the west is we've gotten stuck in the left brain because it's given us a lot of power. Yuval Noah Harari has this great phrase in which he says that in modernity, we exchanged meaning for power in early modernity, which is to say, if we decide that there is no meaning outside our heads, only the meaning that we choose to give it to the material world, then we can do whatever we want with the material world. And that is the basis of the scientific revolution. And that has given us immense practical power over the world. It's made us rich and power all of these things. But it has now, in the 21st century, it has left us on a blasted heath, to use Shakespeare's phrase, where we don't know what to believe. We've lost a sense of purpose, we've lost a sense of wonder, and we are falling apart. So I would say to sort of wrap this up, that to think about there being two ways to understand truth. I mean, all truth is one, ultimately. But McGilchrist says that there are truths that can only be known through the senses, like the truths that come to us through music, through dance, through liturgy, through art, through religion, through a participation with the truth. This is what Kierkegaard meant to about truth is subjectivity. And this is what is at the basis of enchantment. It's not to say scientific truth is lesser, but it is to say that it's a different kind of truth, a different way of engaging with ultimate reality. And we need both to be not only fully human, but we need both to be to learn as much about the nature of reality as we possibly can and our limited condition as human beings trapped in time.
- [26:52]
Demetri Kofinas
So I'm going to try to speak to a few things. First of all, I couldn't agree more. I think, again, this is the challenge. What do we mean when we talk about knowing something in our hearts, right? Like, do we literally mean the beating heart that we understand that's made up of atoms and flesh and blood, or do we mean something else? Or maybe it's both of those things, but there is something there that resonates with me. I also think there's something that's true about knowing versus being able to prove, being able to provide a logical proof of something. And you may not be positive. Here's actually a great line from a movie I was called to watch again after reading your book, which was the movie Contact. Do you remember that movie with Jodie Foster.
- [27:32]
Rod Dreher
Yeah, yeah, yeah. I saw it recently, too.
- [27:34]
Demetri Kofinas
Right, perfect. So Matthew McConaughey was a priest, and Jodie Foster played this sort of like, rational left brain scientist. And there was this beautiful scene where they were out in the balcony. I don't know if you remember this. They were out in D.C. at some function. And I also love that they're both sort of attracted to each other. And she's very hesitant. She's like, why am I attracted to this barbarian priest? And she's trying to convince him to not believe in God. It's very interesting. She's trying to work him over to sort of renounce his religion. And she says at one point, how do you know that God exists? I would want proof. And then he says to her, did you love your father? And she says, very much. He goes, prove it. And I love that line. And it speaks to something that I think philosophers like Kurt Godel and Ludwig Wittgenstein have both spoken to Godel through his incompleteness theorems, and Wittgenstein in his comments about the limits of language, the limitations of our ability to capture the totality of the world and all of its essence within the descriptive confines of logical forms. And McConaughey's character's challenge is a perfect example of that. You know, prove to me that you love your wife. Prove to me that you love your father. You can't.
- [28:53]
Rod Dreher
So the question is, before we go away from that, though, let me jump in here. This is something that we struggle with, we English speakers, because we only have one word for to know. But in French and in German, they have different words for to know, for the verb to know. In French, it's savoir and conneto. To know something in the savoir sense is to know it as a fact. But to know something in the conntre sense is to know it personally. Like, you and I would know each other in the conitre sense, but I would know that you are a podcaster, a Greek, American podcaster. That's a savoir sense. And religion is primarily about conitra, knowing God in the quinetra sense. Marshall McLuhan, the great Marshall McLuhan. Many people don't know that he was a faithful daily Mass going Catholic. You know, this great media theorist, he said that this speaks to what we were just discussing. He said there are two ways of understanding truth. Truth as percept and truth as concept. It's right brain, left brain. He said that people forget, academics especially forget that religion is primarily percept. And if they forget that. If religion becomes nothing but concept, but propositions and dogmas, things like that. And that's all it is. It has to be that at some level. But if that's all it is, it begins to die. McLuhan said that every person he ever knew who lost the faith did so by first ceasing to pray. Ceasing to open themselves up to the perception of the presence of God. And they thought that it was enough to think the right thoughts. And eventually their faith disappeared. If English had better words to help us understand what it means to know, I think the problem and the solution to the problem would be clearer.
- [30:42]
Demetri Kofinas
So I love that when I was a young man, I was very interested in epistemological questions and questions about the nature of the world. Less so about questions of ethics. And maybe because I was Greek and I grew up in a Greek home, I was especially attracted to Plato's philosophy. And what happened to me in my college years was that I got to this place where I think I became very nihilistic. Because I had this idea in my head that I could reason my way to God. That I could sort of use my mind to figure out the nature of existence. And also the subtext here was that I didn't want to die. So I also wanted to find some way, some explanation that eased my existential angst. And what I came to realize later in my life through experiences that I've talked about. I'm a survivor of a brain tumor. I had surgery and radiation after losing. I had developed severe dementia. And something I learned that I didn't know until I had to go through this experience was that. That you cannot know God or you cannot know again. I also feel uncomfortable using the word God. Because I feel like, for me, it's more of a. This is probably too big of a can of worms to open. But it's more of a metaphor for me, that transcends human thought. Again, it brings us back to the limitations of my mind. But I've come to believe that you can only know that mystery through revelation. That the only things you can know rather definitively about the ontology of the world, about the nature of reality, are things that can be revealed to you through revelatory experience. Through the authoritative experience, and not through reason. And I think that unless you've had that experience or something proximate, you struggle to be able to understand what I'm saying. I feel like whenever I have conversations with people that haven't. That don't sort of intuitively get that? We struggle to have a conversation because everything ends up being. Has to be premised around certain scientific and logical constructs. So I'm curious how that relates to you and how you've seen that in your own life.
- [32:38]
Rod Dreher
Yeah, man. That's so profound and important. Well, I'll tell you this. I came to believe in God as a Christian. The journey started in Shatra with this revelation of awe and wonder that I wasn't expecting. And that told me there is something beyond and it is real and it wants to know you it. And finally I came to a conclusion, decided I've got to commit my life to Jesus Christ. Seven or eight years later, when, as a young journalist, I was sent to interview an elderly Catholic monsignor who was in a nursing home. He was in his mid-90s. He had been born in the 1890s. He was in his mid-90s. And my editor sent me to talk to him because before he became a priest in midlife, he had been an artist of some renown and an art scholar. And they just wanted to know about that part of his life. So I went to see this old man. I go into his apartment and. And he's like Yoda, right? He's a little short man, very old, but he's had so much light in his face, very gentle. Invited me to sit down. I just started asking him typical journalistic questions. And he told me his life story and how he had come to America from Guatemala to study in the Ivy League, lost his faith, was an atheist for a while, then went back to Guatemala when his father was dying. His father was a coffee planter, and they had a mass of reconciliation with the church. Monsignor Santos. Carlos Santos was his name. He told me that when he went to kneel to receive communion, he didn't believe any of it, but he wanted to honor his parents by hiding from them that he was an atheist. The priest held the host out the consecrated wafer. A burst of light came out and covered him. And he audibly heard a voice say, I have always loved you. Instantly, he was reconverted. He comes back to America. He was teaching at Dartmouth, begins living a life as a diligent Catholic, and then after a few years, begins to feel a calling for the priesthood. But he kept putting it off and thinking, it doesn't make sense. This was like the 1940s. They didn't need priests like they do today. It made no sense. Goes back to Guatemala later for a second visit of the family knelt to receive Communion, this time as a Believer, same thing happened, but this time the voice said, why don't you do as I ask? Well, he knew then he had to become a priest. He did become a priest, ordained at the age of 51, which was really strange in those days. But he had to come to America because in his home country there was a communist revolution underway or a rebellion. They put his name on a hit list. Now, I tell you that story because I was sitting there listening to this as a 24 year old man and watching this elderly Guatemalan priest sob as he's telling this story. These are about events that happened 50, 60 years ago, and it might as well have happened last week. And I realized this man is a witness. Something happened to him and I could accept the truth of what he had to say because he had radically changed his life. He had become a Catholic priest because of it. Now, could I prove it? No. But I felt that this was the bookend to what had begun the journey that had begun at Shatra. When I had a revelation of God's presence, I felt it was happening a second time through the life and the presence of this man. Now, I ended up becoming a Catholic. I started studying to be a Catholic and I was received into the Catholic Church in 1993. I was 26 years old. I was in Washington D.C. and I became a very conservative Catholic, very ideologically Catholic. And I thought, because I was thinking all the right Catholic thoughts and I went to church, I prayed, I did all of that, that my faith was fine, nothing could destroy it. And then we get to 2002. I was working in New York for National Review and the abuse scandal happen. And I remember talking to a priest back then, a good man, Father Tom Doyle, who had basically sacrificed his clerical career to defend victims. After our interview, he said, look, Rod, I can tell you're serious about your faith. And I want to warn you that if you keep going down this path of investigation, you are going to go to places darker than you can imagine. I said, well, Father, I appreciate that, thanks for the warning, but I feel like I have to do this as a Catholic, as a journalist, and as a new Father. He said, well, look, God bless you. I'll help you any way I can, but you better get ready. This is going to be dark, Demetri. I had no way of knowing how dark it was going to be. I couldn't write but about a tiny bit of what I learned because people, priests and others would tell me stories, but they wouldn't go on the record. I knew they were true. I wouldn't go on the record. Three years later, my faith, my Catholic faith, was in ruins. But I learned something important about epistemology in that I ended up becoming Orthodox. Not, by the way, because I thought the Orthodox Church was without sin, no church is, but because that was the only option open to me. I just lost my capacity to believe as a Catholic. But I learned this, that I had always thought that my faith would be unassailable if I had all the logical arguments for Catholicism solid in my head. It didn't work out that way. What I did not realize until I was put through that agonizing test is that all sorts of facts and collections of facts, they can be completely airtight, but if your heart is unable to integrate them into your life because of whatever, it doesn't matter. So when I became an Orthodox Christian, I had been intellectually humiliated, frankly, by the way I had believed as a Catholic. But I came in saying that I cannot allow myself to be stuck in my left brain with my faith. It's not to say you should never think deeply and intellectually about religious matters as an Orthodox Christian or any Christian, but it's rather to say, be humble and realize that the way to know God and to integrate God into your own heart and yourself into the life of God is not primarily through mastering propositional arguments, but by praying and going to liturgy and living the life, fasting, doing good works for people and allowing the faith by doing so to be sedimented into your bones. And I'm not capable of believing in an institution as I once believed in an institution as a Catholic. But then again, I knew so many of my Catholic friends were just as outraged about the scandal as I was. But they didn't lose their Catholic faith, and I think they didn't lose their Catholic faith because they had lived a much less cerebral Catholic life than I had done. Done.
- [39:13]
Demetri Kofinas
Again, so many questions for you, and I'm trying to do my best to think about how to walk this conversation in a constructive way. Let me ask you this. We've mentioned now the Eastern and Western traditions a few times. How would you describe what the distinctions between those two traditions are, and what is the story you would tell that would explain how these two traditions broke off from each other? What explains the different ways in which each branch of the Church tackles and has tackled these questions about the nature of the world and our own existence?
- [39:47]
Rod Dreher
Yeah, that's a great question, and it's one that I thought I understood from the outside as a Catholic, but I really didn't I mean, I just assumed that Orthodoxy was basically an Eastern form of Catholicism, maybe a little more mystical, but basically the same. And that's just not true. And I say that as someone who has great love and respect for the Catholic Church, like, I'm a man of the West. And even though I'm an Eastern Orthodox Christian, the fate of the West, I believe, rests primarily on the health of the Catholic Church. So I don't want to discourage Catholics. Nevertheless, when I was received into the Orthodox Church in 2006, I remember talking to a priest in the cathedral in Dallas where I came in, and I said, give me some books to read so I can learn how to be Orthodox. And he just smiled at me and said, well, I can give you some books to read, but it's going to take you 10 years to be Orthodox. Like, what does that mean? And he tried to explain to me that being Orthodox is not about mastering a set of facts, theological facts, about Orthodox Christianity. It's about living it. It's about absorbing knowledge through lived experience. Of course, it's important to read things, of course, read the Bible, but also read the Church Fathers and educate yourself about your faith. But knowing about the faith and knowing God are two very different things. And I think that speaks to a basic difference between Eastern and Western Christianity. The west is so analytical in its approach to Christianity and everything else. That's one of the strengths about the West. But it's very, very easy to fall into thinking as a Western Christian, to fall into thinking that you know God when in fact you really know about God. And in the east, it's so much more about convers of the heart. Now, I would have thought, as a Western Christian hearing that from the outside, I would have thought that sounds very emotional and simplistic, but that's not it at all. It all has to do with the way the Church of the east thinks about who the human person is. I mentioned earlier the word noetic faculty. Well, when Orthodox Christians talk about the heart, they don't mean the organ in your chest. They're talking about the quality of the human mind that is sort of like the receiver for things of the Spirit. And to be a sinner is to have a nous N o u s. It's a Greek word that is somehow blocked, that the Holy Spirit cannot flow into you as you purify yourself through holy living, through repentance, and all of the things, your noose becomes more clear. A saint is someone whose noose is almost entirely clear and he's filled with the presence of God. I would say that elderly Catholic priest, Monsignor Sanchez, the fact that he just seemed to have so much light coming out off of him was a sign of a man whose noose had been greatly cleared, which is to say his heart. Now, these are really complicated and way beyond my pay grade to talk about philosophically and theologically what the particular differences are. But I think it is really less about intellectual differences between east and west and more about experiential differences. Because there are Catholics, Eastern Rite Catholics in Ukraine and elsewhere, who, in my experience, are much more like the Orthodox than they are like Western Catholics. They still use The Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom, by the way. But when you talk to Catholics of the Middle east, for example, they, in the experience of the Orthodox, are much more about the noose, about the heart, knowing God that way. And it is not, as Westerners might have it, all about sentimentality and emotion. That is a fundamental misconception that people in the West. I was the same way. Have about Orthodox Christianity.
- [43:36]
Demetri Kofinas
So I think, again, just to sort of aid listeners here, I think also many Westerners are familiar with this mode of knowing the mystery through things like meditation or some of the other Eastern traditions, like Vedic traditions or Buddhism. And anyone that's been in a deep state of meditation where there's an awareness that arises, an awareness of the mind and the thoughts that you're having and the compulsive thoughts that you're having, can, I think, in some ways relate to what we're describing here. I want to go back to something I mentioned at the beginning, which was when I started analytical philosophy in college, and I had this sort of existential crisis in my life as a senior, and I became kind of very solipsicistic, I would say I experienced existential dread and terror because I got to this place of analysis where I realized that according at least to the methodology I was applying to my analysis, that I had no proof of anything other than my own existence. The only thing that I could say definitively was that I exist and nothing else. Exactly. Which I think explains people's fascination with the simulation hypothesis. Because as a thought experiment, if we were in fact living in a simulation and it were convincing enough, we'd have no way to prove it. Which goes back to my earlier point that science cannot provide you with definitive truths about the ontological nature of the world. That truth can only come to you through revelation. And something that was revealed to me through my experiences of suffering that we touched on earlier is that love is true truth, that somehow this presence or source energy that's at the heart of creation and our own consciousness that we've been referring to as God in this conversation is somehow tied up in love. Not Eros, not romantic love, but love in the deepest sense of the word, God's love. Does that resonate with you? And where does love factor into this conversation, in your opinion?
- [45:37]
Rod Dreher
Yeah, boy, that's a massive question there. Well, in the book In Living in Wonder, I use the model that this wonderful contemporary orthodox theologian Timothy Patitzis talks about in his book the Ethics of Beauty, where he talks about finding our way to God through beauty, through desire for beauty and through arrows for beauty. And he says that that's one thing that we all have. We have desire. That's what makes us human. We usually use the word Eros to describe sexual desire, but that's not the whole of it. You know, you can have Eros for food and just desire, but through purification, through the Christian, the ladder of climbing, the ladder of perfection, it gets purified to love for others and eventually gets to the highest form of agape, which is completely self sacrificing love. And that's what the truth church says that Christ gave for us, he poured Himself out for us. And if you take it from a Christian perspective, I mean, here is the incarnate God coming to earth to take on the finitude of human existence for the sake of saving us. Kierkegaard calls this the absolute paradox. The idea that the infinite could become finite, the eternal could become temporal. Christ is the absolute paradox. And not only did he incarnate, but he took on the worst of our suffering so he could defeat death. You might remember from your Orthodox churchgoing as a child, at the Paschal liturgy, at Easter liturgy, we sing, Christ has risen from the dead, trampling down death by death and upon those in the tombs, restoring life. This is something that was kind of new to me when I became Orthodox 19 years ago. The idea that Christ conquered death. I'd heard that in Western Christianity, but it's taken so seriously in the east that all of the effects of death had been conquered by God loving us so much that he took on death to defeat it for us. So you asked about love. That is the purest expression of love imaginable from the source of love itself, God. And I can only really understand love in a Christian framework because that's really the only way. I've thought about it for most of my adult life. And it has to require sacrifice. I think of this scene in the great Terrence Malick film A Hidden Life. Did you ever see that?
- [48:10]
Demetri Kofinas
I didn't. I've seen the Thin Red Line. I've seen Tree of Life. What was the movie that you said?
- [48:14]
Rod Dreher
Oh, it's called A Hidden Life. It came out five or six years ago. It's based on a true story of an Austrian farmer, Catholic farmer, Franz Jagerstader. And Franz really lived. In fact, his case is up for canonization now. He lived in an Alpine village in northern Austria and went to church like everybody else. And then the Nazis came to town. Almost everybody in town became a Nazi, but not him. Not him and his wife. He couldn't do it. He thought that swearing in allegiance to Hitler would be like swearing allegiance to the Antichrist. There's a scene in the film where he goes, and this is pure Kierkegaard, Malick invented this himself. But Franz the farmer goes into the village church, and there's an artist there painting biblical scenes on the wall. And Franz compliments him on that. And the old artist says, you know, people come in here all the time looking at these biblical scenes, and they admire it. They admire the artwork. They admire Jesus for all the good things he did. The problem is, said the artist, Jesus did not come to call admirers. He came to call disciples. And the way to tell the difference between an admirer and a disciple is willingness to suffer. Well, this is a foreshadowing of what Franz goes through. He eventually was arrested by the Nazis and executed as a traitor. And, you know, this going into the film, because he really did live. And so what the film is trying to illuminate is the hidden life inside this simple Austrian farmer. Why was he the only churchgoing Catholic in that city who resisted the Nazis? It's because of his faith. It's because he loved God so much that he was willing to die to himself in everyday life. So that when he was put to the test, he passed it. And there's an aspect of love in that, you know, in my book Live not by Lies. When I went into Eastern Europe and into Russia to talk to Christians who suffered under communism, and I talked to this one man in Alexander Ugorodnikov in Moscow. His face is partially paralyzed from the beatings he took from the guards. They all said that the only way that they got through prison and kept onto their faith was their ability to bear suffering, because they knew that no matter what, God was real. And he loved them. And they loved him so much, they were willing to take on the sufferings of Christ for the sake of that love. If you can do that in prison, having the hell beaten out of you by guards, then how much easier is it to do it in everyday life with your family, with your neighbors, with the people around you? Answer is, it's hard. I struggle with this all the time. But this is why we must become perfected in love. And this is why, when you believe that God is ultimately love, as I do as a Christian, you have to know that. That love makes demands on you. And those demands are often sacrificial.
- [51:05]
Demetri Kofinas
One more question before we move into the second hour, Rod, since we're talking about suffering, is suffering necessary, in your view, for spiritual growth?
- [51:13]
Rod Dreher
Absolutely. You know, when I was here in Budapest in 2019 doing interviews for Live not by Lies with Christians who had suffered in Hungarian communist prisons, I was on a tram with my translator. She's a young Catholic, and she said, you know, Rod, I really do struggle. I can't even talk to my Catholic friends about what I'm going through in life. And if I tell them that, oh, my husband and I are fighting lately, or our little boy is not letting us sleep, we don't know what to do with his behavior problems, they cut me off and say, oh, you got to get a divorce. You got to put your kid in daycare. You deserve to be happy. And she said, I'll tell them, wait, I am happy. I'm happily married. I'm happy being a mom. But a happy life is not a life without anxiety, without stress. But they don't even understand that. I looked at her and said, ana, it sounds like you're fighting for your right to be unhappy. She said, that's it. Where'd you get that phrase? It's chapter 17 of Huxley's Brave New World. I don't know when the last time you read that was, but that's the chapter when John the Savage, the dissident from this perfect society, is dragged before Mustafa Mond. He's the world leader for Europe. And then, unlike in Orwell's dystopia, which is a dystopia of fear and torture and police, Brave New World is a dystopia of perfect pleasure. They keep you entertained. They give you drugs to be happy. Everything is taken care of. And Mustafa Mond brings John the Savage there and says, why won't you come join us? I mean, we give you everything you want. Mustafa even describes their society as, quote, christianity without tears. Well, John the Savage, who's been raised in the woods reading nothing but Shakespeare, he tells Him. That's the problem with you people. You could stand to have more tears. And what he goes on to say, John does, is that we have to have suffering, the prospect of suffering, to have love and beauty and art and poetry and all the good things in life, the things that make us fully human. It's not to say that suffering is a positive good, but it is to say that we do need that suffering and that that struggle in order to purify ourselves, to perfect ourselves, and to live a fully human life. Well, you would think that if this were 1984 or was 1984, you would have had O' Brien torturing Winston Smith to make him accept Big Brother. But Mustafa man doesn't say that to John the Savage. He just says it sounds like you're fighting for your right to be unhappy. You're welcome to it. Goodbye. So that answers your question. I think Demetri, John the Savage had it. Aldous Huxley, the author of Brave New World, understood that there is something about struggle and suffering and dealing with imperfection and pain that is required to make us fully human. And I'll end with this. The Live not by Lies is coming out. There's a documentary coming out in April from Angel Studios. And in it we talked to this young man, Timo Kryshka, in Bratislava. He was a filmmaker and a photographer who was raised after communism. And he got involved in a project to go interview elderly Christians, Catholics who had suffered in communist prisons. Many of them are living in great poverty today. They never really recovered from it. But as he went and talked to these people, he realized that almost all of them had an inner joy and an inner peace that had completely escaped him, even though he was raised in liberty and prosperity. And that drew him in so much deeper into realizing how because they were able to offer their suffering to God, it purified them and left them not broken, but healed in a paradoxical way. And it affected him so strongly that today, Timo Krishka, we stayed friends since he's studying to be a Greek Catholic priest.
- [55:04]
Demetri Kofinas
So, Ron, I'm going to move us to the second hour. I do want to touch a bit more on the simulation hypothesis and why you think this age old thought experiment that goes at least as far back as Plato's allegory of the cave is showing up in this new technological form. Is it just because this is the language of the time, or is there something more going on here? I'd also like to discuss the practical implications of what we've been talking about today and how your Christian faith applies to politics and the culture war which is raging across Western societies as people, I think, try and grapple with both the speed of cultural change and their need to find meaning in a world that has come to feel for so many devoid of it. For anyone new to the program, Hidden Forces is listener supported. We don't accept advertisers or commercial sponsors. The entire show is funded from top to bottom by listeners like you. If you want Access to the second hour of today's conversation with Rod, head over to HiddenForces IO. Subscribe and sign up to one of our three content tiers. All subscribers gain access to our Premium feed, which you can use to listen to the rest of today's conversation on your mobile device using your favorite podcast app. Just like you're listening to this episode right now. Rod, stick around. We're gonna move the rest of our conversation onto the Premium feed. If you wanna listen in on the rest of today's conversation, head over to HiddenForces IO. Subscribe, subscribe and join our Premium feed. If you want to join in on the conversation and become a member of the Hidden Forces Genius community, you can also do that through our subscriber page. Today's episode was produced by me and edited by Stylianos Nicolaou. For more episodes, you can check out our website at hiddenforces IO, you can follow me on Twitter cofinas, and you can email me at Info Hidden Forces IO as always, thanks for listening. We'll see you next time.