Preparing for ‘Weimar America’

Summary

Podcast Summary: “Preparing for ‘Weimar America’”
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
New York Times Opinion – July 9, 2026
Guest: Rod Dreher

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Episode Overview

In this thoughtful, winding conversation, host Ross Douthat interviews writer and commentator Rod Dreher about cultural, religious, and political decline in the West—often with a dose of dark humor. The discussion ranges from the crisis of Christianity and meaning in the modern era, through the parallels between past totalitarianisms and perceived “soft totalitarianism” in the contemporary West, to Dreher’s personal quest for rootedness and faith amidst a fractured world. Dreher shares cautions about the future ("Weimar America"), reflections on both European and American politics, and the prospect of dark enchantment in the age of AI—all told in a candid, story-driven mode.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Dreher’s Career of “Consistent Doom”

[00:50–2:07]

• Douthat introduces Dreher as a bellwether for the evolution of religious conservatism, tracing his movements from Catholicism to Orthodoxy, and covering the recurring theme of “decline: America, the West, the Apocalypse.”

2. Crisis of Meaning in a Post-Christian West

[02:07–07:42]

• Dreher argues public values like equality, human rights, and the rule of law are rooted in Christianity (referencing Tom Holland’s Dominion).
• He warns that “living on the fumes” of Christianity is ending:

  “People just don’t seem to have any reason to go on. And I think it all ultimately goes back to…a loss of a sense of transcendence.” (Dreher, [05:24])

• Ross steers Dreher into aesthetics: Dreher laments the loss of beauty and organic connection in modern art/architecture as symptomatic of spiritual emptiness.

3. From Meaninglessness to Political Pseudo-Religions

[07:42–13:51]

• Douthat suggests political movements might fill the void once occupied by religious meaning.
• Dreher recounts interviews with refugees from communist regimes who see “soft totalitarianism” in American wokeness:

  “What wokeness is, is a sort of pseudo religion. It’s a way of imposing moral order…and punishing the heretics.” ([11:14])

• He distinguishes this from classic Orwellian totalitarianism:

  “The totalitarianism we have is not the police state, pain, terror, cruelty of Orwell, but the therapeutic totalitarianism of Huxley…” ([11:36])

4. Free Speech, Immigration and European “Soft Authoritarianism”

[13:51–16:22]

• Dreher describes European speech restrictions as driven more by ruling-class fear—especially concerning migration—than by ideology.
• Cites the rise of far-right parties & governmental church/media reaction as evidence of political dissatisfaction and looming unrest.
• Warns that suppressing debate cannot contain underlying social pressures forever:

  “We are going to see—God forbid—violence, because…they cannot use the mechanisms of the state or the ruling class that runs the churches and the media organizations and the universities…to keep a lid on it forever.” ([15:43])

5. Immigration, Islam, and the Future of Meaning

[19:55–24:25]

• Dreher: European immigration is mainly Muslim—clashing with secularism and increasingly perceived as filling the religious void.

  “If we don’t recover Christianity in the West…then Islam will be the heir. Because you can’t fight something with nothing.” ([21:43])

• Discusses Michel Houellebecq’s Submission as a novel expressing the malaise of secular France more than a warning about Islam per se.

6. Christian “Re-enchantment” and the Limits of Politics

[24:25–30:18]

• Dreher insists that religious renewal must be organic, not political or “therapeutic.”

  “We’re not going to re-Christianize the world by moralism or…by politics. Viktor Orban’s Hungary is a perfect example of that.” ([25:41])

• Tells of a pilgrimage to Chartres as a longing for rooted meaning among young traditional Catholics.

7. Illiberal Experiments: Hungary & Orban

[30:18–37:04]

• Dreher relates his experience living in Hungary:

  “This man [Orban] is not a far-right thug. He’s incredibly intelligent and articulate…The thing that interested me…was to see if his experiment would work.” ([27:20])

• Outlines Orban’s “Christian democracy”—pro-family, pro-Christian legal framework—but notes it failed to spark religious revival:

  “They were pro-Christian…couldn’t turn it around.” ([30:18])

• Admits to government corruption and a form of “soft authoritarianism,” yet suggests Hungary’s society remained more free in some ways than the U.S.

8. American Parallels: Trump and the Temptation of Authoritarian Tactics

[37:04–41:18]

• Douthat draws parallels to Trump’s willingness to wield government power against ideological enemies.
• Dreher notes populist anger over cost of living and corruption will eventually catch up, just as with Orban:

  “It came back to bite them. And I think it’s gonna happen in America, too.”

9. The “Weimar America” Hypothesis

[41:35–45:17]

• Dreher is writing on the subject, warning that America has all the psycho-social factors of the Weimar era:

  “Social atomization is…by far…the most important factor. We have done this with our young.” ([41:56])

• Cites the rapid swing toward extremes in 1930s Germany, driven by middle-class disillusionment and crisis.
• Douthat challenges the inevitability of this scenario, suggesting the fringe may stay fringe without a catastrophic shock.

10. Religious Reaction and “Orthobros”: Seeking Intensity vs. Doom

[47:30–49:10]

• Dreher: Youth are turning to intense forms of religion seeking belonging/meaning—sometimes carrying baggage like misogyny and antisemitism.

  “A lot of them really are looking for some way to live better, more healthy, masculine lives…but the churches have no real answer for them.”

11. Dreher’s Personal Journey: Failed Rootedness & Family Upheaval

[50:07–55:56]

• Douthat prompts a personal account: Dreher moved “back home” to Louisiana for Christian rootedness—only to face chronic illness, family rejection, the death of his sister, and divorce.

  “It didn’t work because we were rejected by my family there.” ([50:56])

• Reflects that earlier reliance on grand systems (politics, church, family) led to successive disappointments:

  “The idols I had made for myself…the Republican Party, the conservative movement, the Catholic Church, my family and my father…all failed. And so what am I left with now?” ([55:56])

12. Pessimism vs. Pilgrimage

[55:56–57:20]

• Douthat reads Dreher’s arc as either deepening pessimism (always on the brink of the abyss), or as Augustinian wayfaring—a kind of faith found only after systems fail.

13. "Dark Re-Enchantment", AI, and the Demonic

[59:01–63:32]

• Dreher foresees AI feeding the human hunger for the transcendent—but in counterfeit, even dangerous forms:

  “People are going to be so desperate for transcendence that they want it easy. And people will turn to AI to create what they consider to be enchanting experiences. But it will be false enchantment.” ([59:01]) “I believe that AI is going to be used as a vector for the demonic.” ([61:16])

• Generational use of AI as “oracle” anxiety over loss of agency, authenticity, and the real.

14. Closing Mood: Stagger On, Rejoicing

[63:32–end]

• Despite chronic pessimism, Dreher affirms his rooted faith and joy in life ("stagger on, rejoicing").

  “Life is good. God is good. God loves us. Jesus Christ rose from the dead. Hallelujah…that’s how I try to live.” ([64:05])

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On the decline of the West:

  “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.” (Dreher, [02:38])

• On soft totalitarianism:

  “The totalitarianism we have is…the therapeutic totalitarianism of Huxley where they give you everything you want…but you just have to surrender your humanity.” (Dreher, [11:36])

• On Islam as the next inheritor of Western meaning:

  “If we don’t recover Christianity in the West…then Islam will be the heir. Because…you can’t fight something with nothing.” (Dreher, [21:43])

• On failed Christian politics:

  “We’re not going to re-Christianize the world by moralism or…by politics. Viktor Orban’s Hungary is a perfect example of that.” (Dreher, [25:41])

• On the “Weimar America” risk:

  “We have created in America today…the psychosocial conditions of Weimar without having suffered the traumas that Germany did.” (Dreher, [41:47])

• On AI and dark enchantment:

  “People will turn to AI to create what they consider to be enchanting experiences. But it will be false enchantment…AI is going to be used as a vector for the demonic.” (Dreher, [59:01; 61:16])

• Douthat’s closing balance:

  “The Apocalypse is always happening…Maybe. But we’re always living through it.” (Douthat, [63:37])

• Final note:

  “We stagger on. But life is good. God is good. God loves us. Jesus Christ rose from the dead. Hallelujah.” (Dreher, [64:05])

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• [02:07] – Why the post-Christian world is unstable
• [05:24] – The crisis of meaning and birth rates
• [07:42] – The political search for meaning; wokeness as pseudo-religion
• [11:36] – From Orwell to Huxley: “therapeutic totalitarianism”
• [13:51] – European speech restrictions and the fear of social unrest
• [21:43] – Islam as the successor to Christianity in Europe
• [25:41] – Chartres pilgrimage and organic re-enchantment
• [27:20] – Dreher’s personal experience of living in Hungary
• [30:18] – Why the Orban plan didn’t re-Christianize Hungary
• [37:04] – Trump’s Orban-like tactics in America
• [41:35] – Dreher’s “Weimar America” hypothesis
• [45:17] – Radicalization amid economic/AI-induced crisis
• [47:30] – The “orthobros” and searching for meaning
• [50:56] – Dreher’s failed experiment in rootedness
• [55:56] – The limits of ideology and the deeper journey of faith
• [59:01] – AI, demonic enchantment, and the new spiritual risks
• [64:05] – “Stagger on, rejoicing”: faith amid decline

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Summary Tone

Throughout, the exchange is candid, at times bleakly humorous, but always earnest. Dreher’s self-awareness softens his dramatic analysis, while Douthat alternates between pushing back and drawing out deeper themes. The conversation seamlessly blends the personal and the political, pessimism and hope—leaving listeners with a sense of fragility and possibility in both Western society and the fate of the individual soul.

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Transcript

[Narrator]

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[Ross Douthat]

It is on a scale no one's ever seen before.

[Narrator]

An enormous accomplishment.

[Ross Douthat]

The world turned upside down.

[Narrator]

It's global history on the grandest scale.

[Rod Dreher]

All wars changed the world, but none of them like the Second World War did.

[Narrator]

Unlike any World War II docuseries before. World War II with Tom Hanks. New episode Monday at 8, only on History next day on the app.

[Rod Dreher]

I'm not saying AI is demonic.

[Ross Douthat]

Yes, you are. No, no, you are. No, I've read your work. Yes, you are. You are saying that.

[Unidentified Guest]

Yes.

[Ross Douthat]

Rod Drear, welcome to interesting times.

[Rod Dreher]

At last, Ross, you've scraped the bottom of the barrel.

[Ross Douthat]

I'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, Crunchy Cons anticipated the Maha movement. You wrote a book called the Benedict option in the mid2010 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.

[Rod Dreher]

Yeah, Mama says we in Revelations.

[Ross Douthat]

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 what comes after a Christian culture?

[Rod Dreher]

Well, I would direct them to Tom Holland's great book from a few years ago, Dominion. 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, 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 think coming. Nietzsche didn't imagine we'd get to Nietzsche so soon on this, but I did.

[Ross Douthat]

I was anticipating Nietzsche high up in the conversation.

[Rod Dreher]

You know, 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 he was right. We can't make our own meaning. Nietzsche was not a Nazi. But the sort of ideological convulsions that came in the 20th century with Soviet communism, Nazism in Germany and so forth, all of them are products of the death of God.

[Ross Douthat]

All right, so give me the outline though of what you see happening now. We're not living under Nazi rule, we're not living under communist rule. Those were, I think, in different ways post Christian experiments that led to tremendous human suffering and ultimately failed. But in Western Europe and the United States, we're 70 or 80 years past peak totalitarianism. We're less religious than we were before. We're richer than we were before. People seem unhappy with the state of things. I think that's pretty clear all over. But what is the concrete loss or crisis right now in 2026?

[Rod Dreher]

I think that we are living through at the bottom, a crisis of meaning. People don't know why they should go on. We have been raised by consumerist culture and both the left and the right have a role to play in this. To believe that more freedom, more wealth is going to make us happy. And it hasn't. It's made us more miserable. And you can look at the birth crisis, the fertility crisis. I know that concerns you a lot. Me too. People just don't seem to have Any reason to go on. And I think it all ultimately goes back to a sense, a loss of a sense of transcendence. Losing the transcendent sense of life has been deadly for us spiritually and morally and aesthetically.

[Ross Douthat]

Talk about aesthetics for a second before we get to politics.

[Rod Dreher]

Well, there was one of the most popular architects of the 20th century, Christopher Alexander. He wrote a book called A Pattern Language, talking about how his study of what architecture thrives, what aspects of it make people feel good and feel connected to the whole. And he found out that through whatever culture it is, they all follow certain patterns that you can find in nature and people have an intuitive, positive response to it. Whereas with modern architecture, where you know, the genius architect comes in and he's got this vision and he's going to execute it, and people hate modern architecture. Well, Christopher Alexander said that's not an accident that we have lost a sense of or organic ness to the buildings we make, the art we create. We have come to believe that art and architecture is about expressing our individual will, not connecting to any higher truth, or not allowing a higher truth to be refracted through ourselves, but rather just imposing will. And I think we've reached a dead end over the course of the centuries. We lost that intuition and a sense of connection with truth that cannot be approached logically or through reason alone, but has to be approached through art, through beauty, through ritual, through religion. And this is our problem now. We have made ourselves miserable.

[Ross Douthat]

So there's a dystopia that comes out of this, of drift and meaninglessness and anomie, right, where people don't have kids, they live in ugly buildings, they're well off enough, society is stable enough, but they're deeply unhappy because they don't think human life has transcendent meaning and a transcendent point.

[Sports Commentator (Paul Tanorio)]

And.

[Ross Douthat]

But I think your assumption, which is, I think, a commonplace assumption, maybe strongest on the political right, but not only on the right, is that that kind of scenario then leads for a desire to impose meaning through politics, to find in politics the narrative that's been lost through a religious crisis. And one of your books was arguing that wokeness and progressive politics is itself a form of. Of soft totalitarianism. Can you make that case to an audience that might think Wokeness went too far, but would also think calling it totalitarian was weird or extreme?

[Rod Dreher]

Sure. Well, the idea for the book came to me in 2015, which is the Woke era. We're only a couple of years into it, I would say. I don't even know that we had that name for it then. But I found out from a doctor in the Midwest, a cardiologist, who said, look, my mother escape from communism. She had spent several years in a Czech prison for being a Vatican spy, which is to say she refused the government's order to stop going to Mass. She got out, came to America, and she said, son, the things I'm seeing happen in America today, 2015, remind me a lot of what it was like when communism came to my home country. And that struck me as kind of crazy. But the more I started meeting in my travels, to conferences, things like that, with people who had come to America from the Soviet, I would say, hey, with the speech codes, cancel culture and all that, does that remind you of what you left behind? Every one of them said, yes. And if you talked to them long enough, they would tell you how angry they were that Americans just didn't see it. And so I started investigating this. What are the similarities between old school totalitarianism and what are the differences? Basically, our idea of totalitarianism in America today is conditioned by the Soviet experience, Right? And From George Orwell's 1984, well, we don't have that. But guess what?

[Ross Douthat]

What don't we have? We don't have.

[Rod Dreher]

We don't have a police state, right?

[Sports Commentator (Paul Tanorio)]

Yes.

[Rod Dreher]

And we don't have breadlines. We don't have the secret police. We think that's not totalitarianism. But look at the effect when people had to fear that they might lose their job because they were on the wrong side of the ruling ideology, or they said the wrong thing, told the wrong joke, et cetera. That's what totalitarianism is. And the more deeply I dug into it, I saw that what wokeness is, is a sort of pseudo religion. It's a way of imposing moral order on people and punishing the heretics. I travel throughout the former Soviet bloc talking to Christians and others who had stayed behind and resisted Communism. The key moment for me came on a tram in Budapest. I was traveling with my interpreter Anna, a Catholic woman and 30s then, and we were just going between interviews, and she said, you know, as a Catholic, I really struggle to talk to even my Catholic friends about the things happening in my life. For example, if I tell them that my husband and I have been arguing a lot lately, they'll cut me off and say, oh, you've got to get a divorce, you've got to go back to work. You deserve to be happy. She said, I can't make them understand. Wait. I love my husband, I love Being married, but a happy life is not a life that's without friction. I said, anna, it sounds like you're fighting for your right to be unhappy. She said, that's it. Where did you get that? Chapter 17 of Huxley's Brave New World. And then it clicked for me. The totalitarianism we have is not the police state, pain, terror, cruelty of Orwell, but the therapeutic totalitarianism of Huxley where they give you everything you want. All the drugs, the porn, the sex, entertainment, taken care of, but you just have to surrender your humanity. Point is, this is the totalitarianism we have. We have created a world, and especially with the generation raised on digital culture, in which they cannot bear any friction. They see any friction as intolerable suffering and they will surrender their liberties and even I think ultimately their humanity to escape that anxiety.

[Ross Douthat]

But in Huxley, there is a world state, right? There is a controller, even if he's, you know, gentle and kindly compared to the, you know, the police state brother. Right? In, in 1984, Huxley assumed that this kind of therapeutic control would be. Control, right? That it would be political control. And I, I think the case that there is a political element in this is stronger for Europe than the United States. But just say something about what you think the actual condition of free speech is in Western Europe.

[Rod Dreher]

You know, I lived for almost five years in Hungary, traveled widely throughout Europe and the uk and it made me so grateful for the First Amendment to our constitution that guarantees us freedom of speech in Europe that doesn't exist anywhere. And the way I see it, broadly speaking, is the ruling class in all of these countries in continental Europe and in the uk they are so terrified of the migration problem and of civil wars and civil conflict by people, ordinary native born Europeans complaining about things like rape, gangs, mass migration, et cetera, that they would rather shut down any debate on this and punish those who notice and complain. And at least in America, we can still complain about it.

[Ross Douthat]

Yeah, I mean, I think it, I think if you look at the UK in particular, there is, I think, a trend that Americans would find surprising in the number of people who are arrested, investigated, fined and imprisoned for stating strong opinions about immigration, crime, race and so on on social media. It happens on both the further left and the further right. There was a sort of cause celebre case recently where the UK banned Hasan Piker from entering the UK because they felt that he was sort of inciting anti Semitism with his critiques of Israel. So it seems to me that the European elite, it sort of understands that it's created a kind of multicultural, multiracial society that is itself divided and kind of like a powder cake. And it's using speech restrictions essentially to try and like tamp things down all over.

[Rod Dreher]

Right.

[Ross Douthat]

But that, that is a little bit different, right, from a totalitarianism that's trying to force everybody to be an atheist, hedonist, nihilist, you know, sort of empty pleasure seeker, Right. Like it seems to me that, that it's more motivated by fear than by any sort of idea of what the best society should be.

[Rod Dreher]

Well, I'll give you an example. Last night I was having drinks with a friend from Germany, a Catholic who's been an activist for many years, and she was telling me about the AfD, the alternative for Germany party. She said that the German government has gone so far to marginalize and demonize that party and its voters, and not just the German government, but the Catholic Church in Germany and so forth, because they see them as the second coming of the Nazis.

[Sports Commentator (Paul Tanorio)]

But.

[Rod Dreher]

But said this German woman, she said the problem is the crisis with migrants and migrant crime is becoming so overwhelming that people are becoming radicalized anyway because the established parties, the parties of the center refuse to deal with the problem. That's happened in England, it's happening in France right now. And eventually we're going to see, God forbid, but I think we're going to see violence because they cannot use the mechanisms of the state or the ruling class that runs the churches and the media organizations and the universities. They can't keep a lid on it forever.

[Ross Douthat]

What kind of violence? I mean, we're in the uk. The UK has had a sequence of what you might call sort of ethnic riots, race riots over the last few years, some of them involving debates over immigration. There have been conflicts between different immigrant groups. There have been riots by native populations, sometimes connected to high profile crimes. When you're talking about violence, is that what you're talking about? Just sort of ongoing civil unrest?

[Rod Dreher]

Civil unrest, small acts of local terrorism, things like that. But if you follow David Betts, the Civil War academic expert at King's College London, he's been warning for a couple of years that in all of the countries of Western Europe and the UK and even to some extent the us the ingredients are there for an explosion. They're just waiting for the spark. And he's not saying this from any sort of crazy conspiracy theory point of view. He's citing the literature from the academic study of civil wars. I think the core idea is that we no longer feel like we belong to the same society and the ruling class is not going to defend the native population. But that's what frightens me, that when people feel that they are living in a lawless situation or a situation of injustice, whatever color of religion they are, and that there is no hope for this to be resolved through law, then we run the risk of civil unrest. Now, a lot of people try to tell me, oh, you just want this to happen. No, I don't. I don't want this to happen. But it will happen if those in charge don't take it seriously and act meaningfully to head it off at the pass. Lemonade Multi Pet discounts are way better than multi pet group chats.

[Ross Douthat]

Hey, it's Bubbles.

[Megan Lorum]

Your cat.

[Ross Douthat]

Your idiot dog Jingles just barfed up a sock puppet.

[Rod Dreher]

Hey, it's Jingles. I'm fine. Just that stupid sock was looking at me fun. Oh, he's doing it again.

[Sports Commentator (Paul Tanorio)]

Jingles.

[Ross Douthat]

He ate it again and puked it up again.

[Megan Lorum]

He might need a vet.

[Rod Dreher]

Yeah, I might need a vet. With Lemonade Pet insurance, you save 10% per policy when you protect multiple pets. Get [e-mail] Pet hi, I'm Megan Lorum,

[Megan Lorum]

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[Ross Douthat]

why does immigration loom so large in this story? I mean, we started talking about de Christianization and a crisis of meaning. Immigrants to both the US And Western Europe tend to be more religious than native populations. Right now. We were talking about purposelessness and drift a minute ago. I would say that in many cases, immigrants to the U.S. and Western Europe come with more purpose and drive and less drift again than native populations. So why is Immigration part of the crisis of dechristianization to you, rather than either a neutral phenomenon or maybe a potential solution in Europe.

[Rod Dreher]

Unlike the United States, a great deal of immigration into Europe has been from Islamic countries. And Muslims have been. By and large, you don't want to generalize it. By and large, the ones who have caused problems are young Muslim men who will not assimilate. Now, it is also true that European countries are much more difficult than the US to assimilate into. I mean, having lived in in Europe and I was treated with nothing but kindness, but I'll never be European. That said, the problem with Islam in Europe is Muslims by and large know what they believe and they set themselves in an antagonistic place to the secularism of Europe. In fact, I've talked to Muslims who said we would respect you more if you were Christian, if you were really Christian. And I think that what the religiosity of practicing Muslims has come to mean in Europe is it makes a lot of the secularists worried because they don't have the same commitment that the Muslims do. If we don't recover Christianity in the west in some meaningful way, not just a nominal way, then Islam will be the heir. Because people, you can't fight something with nothing. Now, this is the message that Michel Welbeck famously articulated in his book Submission. It was wrongly perceived as an anti Muslim book. It's not the enemy in that book is the malaise, the sort of layabout French secularist.

[Ross Douthat]

Right. This is a dystopian novel in which Islam takes over France. Right. It's a peaceful takeover to future French election where an Islamic party wins. And I agree with you. I think you come into the novel imagining that the point is going to be that the Muslim society is terrible. But in fact the dystopia in the novel is the secular society where nobody cares about anything anymore and Islam is welcomed ultimately as a source of meaning,

[Rod Dreher]

as a kind of solution.

[Ross Douthat]

As a kind of solution. But would you, as a Christian, prefer an Islamic Europe to a secular Europe?

[Rod Dreher]

You know, I'm an Eastern Orthodox convert of 20 years.

[Ross Douthat]

Eastern Orthodoxy and Islam, well, no, no. Yeah, They've had their problems and have their differences.

[Rod Dreher]

If you speak to Arab Christ or Christians who have lived under the Islamic yoke in centuries past, you can't possibly say that you would prefer Islam living under actual Islam to even the corruption and the malaise of the secular west today. But I hope.

[Ross Douthat]

But don't Muslims obey the first commandment? Like don't Muslims honor God? Isn't that from a religious perspective, isn't that, that very, very important? And wouldn't. I'm just trying to

[Sports Commentator (Paul Tanorio)]

play it out,

[Ross Douthat]

right, Because I think the dilemmas of being part of a formerly dominant religious culture that has lost power and influence, which is generally where Christianity is in the Western world, means you're always sort of choosing between which option am I going to take. Right. And it seems like especially in European politics, you have Christians who are simultaneously saying we hate the secular malaise and we hate sort of anti Christian influence in the culture and all of these things, but we're also terrified of an Islamic takeover. But does that mean that you end up propping up the secular order? What do you actually do?

[Rod Dreher]

Yeah, well, to paraphrase T.S. eliot, if you will not pay your respects to the God of the Bible, then you had better be prepared to pay your respects to Allah. And what I mean by that is that Europe is going to become re enchanted. I mean that in a sociological way, one way or the other, because this malaise cannot last. What I tell people to do, what I would suggest they do, is rediscover our ancestral faith, not in a sort of consumerist, therapeutic way, but in all of its transcendent majesty. For example, last summer I went to the pilgrimage to Chartres, the cathedral in France. 20,000 traditional Catholics, they take a three day walking pilgrimage from the center of Paris to the cathedral in Chartres. They camp on the way, they pray, they sing hymns, they celebrate mass. And they were all so joyful and not in any sort of weird Jesus campy way, but just very natural. And I was interviewing them, I said, so what brought you here? And it was all some version of the same story. Our parents generation gave us nothing to live on. We're here to seek meaning, we're here to seek purpose. We're here to seek community and transcendence and ultimately God. We're not going to create utopia on earth. Whether it's a Catholic utopia, Orthodox utopia, Islamic utopia, it doesn't exist. But we can create a better society than we have now. And I think that Christian re enchantment, which is the point of my last book, Living in Wonder, I think that's something we have to do because we're not going to re Christianize the world by moralism or certainly not by politics. Viktor Orban's Hungary is a perfect example of that.

[Ross Douthat]

Well, good, let's talk. So let's talk about Viktor Orban's Hungary, since you brought it up, because. Right. You wrote your most recent book, Living in Wonder about the re Enchantment of the world. And one of your most famous books, the Benedict Option, was about rebuilding Christian community in a secular age and not relying heavily on politics. It wasn't. I'm not gonna say that. It was a book about fleeing to the hills.

[Sports Commentator (Paul Tanorio)]

Thank.

[Ross Douthat]

I know you hate that. But it was a book about stepping back from politics, focusing on religious institutions and communities. In between those two books, you went and lived in Hungary. You were connected to a think tank funded by Viktor Orban's government. You left after his defeat. What were you doing there?

[Rod Dreher]

Well, Ross, I had first gone to Hungary and to Central Europe in 2019. As I was traveling through that region, researching Live not by Lies, really liked it. And the only thing I knew about Viktor Orban was what I had read in the American media, that he was a far right thug.

[Ross Douthat]

He rose through Hungarian politics, running on anti immigration campaigns, his party compared to an open dictatorship.

[Rod Dreher]

He's espoused Christian nationalism and he's opposed to LGBTQ rights. It is screwed up that any American president would want anything to do with that autocratic thug. I got to Hungary, I'm like, wait a minute. This doesn't seem quite right. What's going on here? I was invited back by the Danube Institute, the think tank to which you referred earlier on a fellowship, like a four month fellowship in 2021. And so I get to Hungary and I was there like the first few weeks, and I thought, what are people talking about? This seems like such a normal place. It feels like. I don't know. Minneapolis, 1995. It was beautiful, but it was safe. The streets were clean. There was street life. And it was such a pleasure to me to welcome Americans and Brits to Budapest for the first time and to watch the scales fall from their eyes. Whether or not they agreed with the Orban program or not, they saw that they had been lied to. This man is not a far right thug. He's incredibly intelligent and articulate. But the thing that interested me as a conservative about him was to see if his experiment would work. He famously.

[Ross Douthat]

Or infamously so what is the experiment? What is the Orban program? Right.

[Rod Dreher]

He was elected in 2010 and had this 16 year run in 2014. He infamously said that he was after creating an illiberal democracy.

[Ross Douthat]

A line that was then quoted on many occasions. Yes, for understandable reasons.

[Rod Dreher]

But he later clarified, he said, I mean a Christian democracy. Which is to say, I reject liberalism as what it has come to mean in Europe, which is militant secularism, sexual permissiveness. Et cetera, et cetera. He and his members of the Fidesz party, they wrote a constitution, but they put in there the idea that the family, not the individual, but the family, is the building block of society and the law should be there to support the family. And they also put into the constitution that this nation was founded on Christianity. The constitution was religiously tolerant. I mean, there was no place in Europe where Jews were safer today than in Budapest. But Christianity was the framework there, and they governed according to that. It was not religiously coercive at all. But the Orban government put a lot of money into subsidizing the creation of bigger families to turn the fertility crisis around. Well, it didn't work. And it didn't work because, turns out the reason people aren't having children only, I think tangentially, has to do with not having enough money. I think it has more to do with religion and loss of religion.

[Ross Douthat]

And the Orban program did not lead to a religious revival.

[Rod Dreher]

Exactly, exactly. Hungary is mostly Catholic and Calvinist, but the churches there are moribund. I'm sorry to say it, but in the 16 years Orban was in power, I mean, they were pro Christian to the extent that many of us American religious and political conservatives could only dream of, and they couldn't turn it around.

[Ross Douthat]

So I'm not sure, though, it's as simple as they tried to create a context for re Christianization, and it failed. It seems like part of what happened was that they created a governmental and party system that came to be widely seen as oppressive and corrupt. For instance. Right. The government did not. The Orban government did not eliminate the free press in Hungary, didn't make it impossible to criticize criticism, to issue criticism of the government, but it used a lot of licensing rules and government pressure, right, to consolidate control of media institutions in the hands of Orban's friends and allies. So I agree with you that he wasn't a dictator, not least because dictators are not normally removed from power in democratic elections. But would you agree that he or his government abuse their powers in a way that, just to use your own language, is soft authoritarianism?

[Rod Dreher]

I can see that you have something of a point. I mean, you can't deny that the Orban system was corrupt. In fact, when I first arrived in Central Europe in 2019, just traveling through the area, I had lunch with an American diplomat who had spent his career in each of those countries. And he said, look, the thing you have to keep in mind is you're a conservative journalist. You're going to Come here and be tempted to see what you want to see. Liberal journalists do the same thing. He said, the thing that none of you American journalists really understand is that corruption is the name of the game in all of these post communist countries. And when there's elections, things shift from left to right. It just changes who the corruption, corrupt beneficiaries of corruption are. Well, and I think that's a fair criticism and I think.

[Ross Douthat]

But it isn't just corruption, Right? So let's say there was corruption in the way that allies of the Orban government took over various institutions. That's corruption. Sure, people are making money off state contracts and so on, but it's also actual oppression if the effects of it are to reduce the power of people to criticize the government freely. Right. I mean, I'm just saying it goes a bit beyond people are self enriching themselves. It goes into actual questions of how free is this society? How free a society was Hungary under Orban really?

[Rod Dreher]

You know, it's interesting you ask that. In my first 2021, my first fellowship there, I went to see an academic, Peter Krekow, who is really good man, very liberal, one of the leading opponents of the Orban government. And I went to ask him, help me understand from the opposition point of view why you're all against Orban. And he said, well, you know, there's this, there's that. He said, I'm pro lgbt. This government is not. And he went on and on, he said, but at the end of the day, I can stand in my classroom, in my university, denounce the government and nothing will happen to me. I said, peter, that's really interesting you say that. I believe you. But in many American universities, if you said something that offended the political views of certain privileged students, they could bring a case against you, you would have to fight for your job and you could lose your job. And he didn't realize that. Now, I'm not saying this as a defense of Orban, but what I'm saying is there was a lot more freedom there than you seem to realize.

[Ross Douthat]

I mean, I guess this just seems like, let's say, a recurring dilemma in situations where you start out in what you feel to be a marginal position and then you attain political power. Right? You say, okay, well, you know, the other side had a cartel and that was bad, but the temptation to create a new cartel becomes very powerful very quickly. Right? Yeah. But do I mean, just on the university question, right. The Viktor Orban government in fact closed a university, Right. Or sort of migrated it out of Hungary, and it was a university funded by George Soros that was clearly hostile to the values that the Orban government had. But it wasn't like, oh, you know, Viktor Orban is standing up for free speech in Hungarian universities. Right.

[Rod Dreher]

Okay. But here's something interesting about that, and that troubles me, too. As an American who believes in academic freedom, what I came to understand when I was there is Hungary is a nation of 10 million people, very small. What George Soros wanted to do and tried to do was establish a university that would be the training ground for the new Hungarian elite. In Soros, internationalist ideas, pro migration, social liberalism, et cetera, et cetera. Viktor Orban regarded this as an assault on Hungary's sovereignty, even though Soros was born in Hungary. And I don't like what Orban did with ceu, which, by the way, the oldest drear son just graduated from CEU in Vienna. I'm very proud of him.

[Ross Douthat]

Congratulations to him.

[Rod Dreher]

But he's on the left. We ought to pray for this guy. But seriously, I can understand why he did it, because it's not like the United States, where we have a massive. It's a huge country in Hungary, if the elites are all educated at the same place according to the same ideology.

[Unidentified Guest]

Right.

[Rod Dreher]

I can understand why he did it.

[Ross Douthat]

Doesn't the Orban experience show that you don't have to be a dictator to be authoritarian?

[Rod Dreher]

Well, Ross, I mean, the term authoritarian is heavily loaded. Viktor Orban governed with great authority. He was the man. At the same time, when you compare him to the countries in Western Europe, where it's more systematic, the authority than personal, as in Orban's Hungary, I don't see a heck of a lot of difference, to be honest. And we have to remember, Orban won four elections. He did. And he had the mandate of the people. The Hungarians are not the same as the French, Swedes or the Spanish. Orban said, we don't want you all to be Hungarian. You be you. Let us be us. But the European Union was not willing to settle for that. And I think this has an analogy of what Donald Trump has.

[Ross Douthat]

Good. Yeah. So tell me the analogy to Donald Trump.

[Rod Dreher]

The analogy is that with the second Trump administration, I think he sort of followed the Viktor Orban playbook, whether. Whether consciously or not, and sending doge after usaid going after the universities and things like that, because prior to Trump, the Republicans, they were always so soft. They were terrified of touching the universities. And so they presided over allowing our universities, our leading universities, to become sort of Woke madrasas. That's maybe a little bit of an overstatement, but not much of one. At the same time, when the Democrats were in power, they would use the government's power under Title 9 or whatever, to push progressivism on the universities. Trump realized that we on the right were fighting with one hand behind our back. Now, I would love to live in a classical liberal world where the government did not get involved with universities and that universities were left alone to govern themselves. But look at what has happened in my lifetime and yours. You've seen faculties go from being predominantly liberal to being almost wholly liberal. And at some point, the people who actually vote and whose money supports universities through federal funding, don't they get a say? I mean, how does one respond to that?

[Ross Douthat]

I mean, I think I respond to it first by saying there are things that the Trump administration has done regarding universities that. That I think are completely reasonable and, in fact, have been secretly welcomed by people in universities themselves. The best things the Trump administration has done have been different and less extreme than some of the things that Orban did in Hungary. But there's also a parallel here, right, where you told a story about Hungary, where you said, okay, Orban, he tried to sort of establish a political basis for a Christian revival, push back against wokeness and progressive authoritarianism, but it ended up not working. Right. And the Hungarian public voted him out of office. There was no Christian revival. And by the way, along the way, his government became very corrupt. The Trump administration is very corrupt right now. Right?

[Rod Dreher]

I don't disagree with that.

[Ross Douthat]

It's quite corrupt. It's quite unpopular. You know, I had Vice President Vance on this program and asked him to sort of describe what is most Christian about the Trump administration. And people can go watch that episode and make their own assessment of his answer. But I don't think the Trump administration is profoundly Christian in its public engagement, except that it does things like put out social media posts celebrating the Feast of the Immaculate Conception or something like that. Right. So isn't the Trump administration just sort of, in an American way, repeating things that ultimately came to grief in Hungary?

[Rod Dreher]

That has occurred to me. The reason Orban lost was primarily because the economy was stagnant for the last four years after Covid. And so when people weren't making money, people were a lot richer under Orban, the ordinary Hungarian, than they were under the socialist predecessor. But when that gravy train stopped, suddenly, people started looking around like, wait, why am I struggling to pay my bills? When the Nepo babies of oligarchs are driving around in Maseratis and that came back to bite them. And I think it's gonna happen in America, too. I've been back in the US for almost a month now, Ross. It has blown my mind how expensive the cost of living is. I moved to Birmingham, Alabama, which is deep trumplandia. Right. All people talk about is how expensive life is. I was talking with an American friend last night here at the conference who also lives in a very conservative part of the country. That went heavily for Trump. He said they're starting to see now signs pop up on people's lawns saying, this was not my idea of America first.

[Ross Douthat]

What about deeper problems on the right beyond corruption and the cost of living living? Like, what are you worried about that might come after Trump? That is maybe a mirror of soft totalitarianism on the left?

[Rod Dreher]

I'm worried about Weimar America. That's the title of the next book I'm working on. And the first thing people say when they hear that is, oh, is this a Trumpist Hitler book? No. Trump barely figures in this book. When we hear Weimar, we think of the film Cabaret and corruption, and we think it all ended up in Nazism. But that is a superficial understanding of it. We have created in America today, perhaps throughout the west, the psychosocial conditions of Weimar without having suffered the traumas that Germany did. Losing the First World War, hyperinflation, and then the Great Depression. Well, what I mean by that, and this also goes back to Hannah Arendt in her famous 1951 book, the Origins of Totalitarianism, she. She tried to explain how it was that right wing totalitarianism in Germany and left wing version in Russia rose. And she said, these are the factors. Social atomization is by far, said Arendt, the most important factor. We have done this with our young. And not only that, but the loss of trust in institutions, a feeling of wanting to tear it all down. There's nothing for me there. It's all here. And it made me think, it made me fear that we are one economic crash away from something very ugly. It may not be Hitler 2.0. It may not be Stalin 2.0. It might be something all American, but it's not going to be what we're used to. And people of my generation and yours really don't understand what's happening. One of the things that shocked me about my historical research is that as late as 1928, the Nazi party was still a fringe movement in Germany. It got only 2.6% in that year's elections. The next year 29 comes the great Depression, which hit Germany much harder than America. In 1930, the Nazis went from 2.6% to 18%. Two years after that, they even doubled. Which was the demographic group that ran towards the Nazis. Educated middle class men in their 20s, because these were men who had been raised in the chaos of Weimar Germany. They were too young to have fought in the war. They were raised in the chaos. They saw their parents lose everything in hyperinflation. They saw how fragile their own futures were, and they saw a new future for themselves. And after the Great Depression hit, that's when they gave up any belief in liberal democracy and the centrist powers. Many of them went to the communists. But there were far more right wingers in Germany at that time than there were left wingers. And I think this could be the risk that we're running today. I don't conclude this book by saying, therefore, we're going to have an American Nazism, but we're going to have something.

[Ross Douthat]

But if, I mean, your description is conditional on the Great Depression or some kind of similar crisis, and we're talking about pessimism as a mood. The Orban government sort of re Christianization ideas ended in corruption and defeat. You don't seem entirely enthusiastic about the arc of the second Trump administration, but then you sort of leap to, well, if this doesn't work, totalitarianism right around the corner. But couldn't it just not keep working for a long time? I look at someone like Fuentes and he seems like a creature of a particular kind of Internet hothouse, Right. That has a certain kind of power there. But it just seems to me like you'd really have to have a profound social transformation for him to escape from that hothouse and become a kind of Hitlerian figure.

[Rod Dreher]

Right. Well, I think Fuentes is too ridiculous to become a real Hitlerian figure, but he's a symptom. Right? And your comment makes me think of a conversation I recently had with a friend down south. South. He's a religious conservative in his 50s. His son, his early 20s, raised in a prosperous household, had all the advantages of being upper middle class, religiously and politically conservative. And he's gone off the far right deep and into anti Semitism. And his dad is like. And so many of my friends are like this with their kids, like, what happened to you? Well, it's all from online. Doomscreen. That's it. He has come to believe, these young people have come to believe that they have no agency, that the sense of anxiety they feel about their Lives about whether or not they'll have a job, have a partner, have a family. It's all somebody else's fault, which is a lie. Now, there are structural problems. We need to take care of that. But it's almost like a drug. They take the sense of powerlessness. It's a sense of feeling powerful through victimization, which is exactly what we saw on the left. Right. And what makes me worry, Ross, is Dario. What's the guy from Anthropic?

[Ross Douthat]

Amadei.

[Rod Dreher]

Amadei had prophesied that within five years, half the white collar jobs will be taken by AI. Well, that seems pretty dire, but I

[Ross Douthat]

think it's a prophecy.

[Rod Dreher]

It's a prophecy.

[Ross Douthat]

They don't always come true.

[Rod Dreher]

They don't. Please, let's not. But if that happens, there'll be nothing that will radicalize the middle class both to the left and to the right than something like that. And I don't know what Christianity has to say in those cases. Not because Christianity in theory has nothing to say, but I think about what Dietrich Bonhoeffer's criticism of the German churches were during the rise of the Nazis. He said they were all about comfort, what Bonhoeffer calls called cheap grace. And I think that accurately describes a lot of American religion today, Catholic, Protestant and even Orthodox.

[Ross Douthat]

Well, but it seems like you also have forms of religion, especially online mediated religion, that are reaching for intensity, right? Are reaching for strong commitment. But how do you separate that reach, which I think you're in favor of, from the doom scroll reach to the apocalyptic? Because strong religion and an apocalyptic sensibility often go together, right? Well, Christianity and antisemitism have often gone together. Right.

[Rod Dreher]

Well, here's what I think you're getting at. We're seeing in the Eastern Orthodox parishes in America the rise of the so called orthobros, which are young men in their twenties who've been drawn to Orthodoxy by online apologetics. They get there and they come in with their head full of all kinds of misogyny, maybe antisemitism, racism. And the priests have to deprogram and say, hey, that's not what we're about. And I'm told that some reformed congregations are dealing with this and some traditional Catholic congregations are too. I think the key thing, though, is not to condemn these men outright. A lot of them really are looking for some way to live better, more healthy, masculine lives.

[Sports Commentator (Paul Tanorio)]

Lives.

[Rod Dreher]

But they don't know what to do because the institutions in their lives, their fathers, the other institutions, are telling them they're no good. They're the problem. And the churches have no real answer for them.

[Sports Commentator (Paul Tanorio)]

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[Unidentified Guest]

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[Sports Commentator (Paul Tanorio)]

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[Ross Douthat]

Talk about, just for a second, your own personal experience trying to get away from the realm of politics, where around the time when you wrote the Benedict Option, you had yourself moved with your family back home to Louisiana, where you were from. You had left the liberal, secular realms of Philadelphia, I think. Right. Washington, D.C. and you were essentially trying to live out, I feel, like a narrative of your own life in which you could sort of build a Christian culture in a kind of rooted environment

[Rod Dreher]

in an organic way.

[Ross Douthat]

In an organic way. Right. And it didn't succeed. Right.

[Rod Dreher]

Personally, it didn't succeed. And I've written extensively about this, but in my book, the Little Way of Ruthie Lemming, which is about my dead sister, she died of cancer. And that's what I.

[Ross Douthat]

Right. You moved back to help take care of her while she was dying of

[Rod Dreher]

cancer, of her family. We moved back after she died. And we wanted to, my wife and I wanted to, as you say, establish rootedness there. I mean, I'm a city guy, I like city life. But we wanted as an act of love to go back and move to the country, to be with family, raise our kids there. And it didn't work. It didn't work because we were rejected by my family there.

[Ross Douthat]

And it's really for being a snobbish cosmopolitan, basically. Yeah.

[Rod Dreher]

And. And it's a really tragic thing because my father, the strong patriarch, one of the men I respect most in the world, he had watched his Daughter who was his favorite child. I don't say that with any hostility, but she was she.

[Ross Douthat]

Hostility?

[Rod Dreher]

No. No, I don't. Because she was a son he never had, Right? He named me after himself, and he wanted me to be an athlete, a hunter, a good old boy and all that. And I just had my head in a book and wanted to go to the movies, right, and go to the city. But my sister, two years younger, she. She was a homecoming queen who really did know how to skin a buck and run a trot line. She married her high school sweetheart, they built a house across the gravel road from my mom and dad, and all was bliss. Well, my wife and I saw from Philadelphia as she was dying, the goodness of this small town, St. Francisville, Louisiana. And we decided we wanted that for ourselves and our kids. We moved back, and the people of St. Francisville were fine to us. You know, it was a beautiful town. We helped start a literary festival, Walker Percy Weekend. But I had a problem with my family, and I think about it a lot. My dad died in 2015. I think that he was a man of strong will. Not strong faith, but strong will. And he thought that if you just do the right thing, follow the code, all good things would happen, only good things would happen. He expected me to fail by leaving the family, by moving away. My sister did everything right and died early of lung cancer, though she never smoked a day in her life. So I think my dad, without even knowing what was happening, he and my mom, they all struggle with that. Why is he alive? He did everything wrong. Not that they wish me dead, but I think that was part of it. And it led to me getting chronically ill for four years from chronic mononucleosis, stress induced. And it led to the collapse of my marriage, and it was horrible.

[Ross Douthat]

And I mean, it's one reason you ended up in Hungary, right?

[Rod Dreher]

That's right.

[Ross Douthat]

It wasn't just the charms of the Orban regime. It was that you were sort of fleeing a personal disaster.

[Rod Dreher]

Yeah, personal disaster. My older son went with me to Hungary to flee the collapse of divorce. And without being too personal, I wouldn't have chosen to leave America. But the circumstances into which we were thrown, my son and I saw no better alternative.

[Ross Douthat]

Do you think that you are like your father insofar as when you write and think about politics and religion, you are looking for a system or a theory that if you followed it, would just sort of lead automatically to the revival of Christianity?

[Rod Dreher]

I think that that's probably accurate of me 15, 20 years ago. But the crash and burn of my family, a moving back that, that cracked me. Let me back up even further. Ross, as you brought up at the beginning. In 2002, I began writing about the abuse scandal as a faithful right wing paid up, triumphalist Catholic. Three years later, my faith was absolutely shattered by all the things I had learned and I just couldn't believe it anymore. It wasn't a matter of, oh, I found the flaw in the logic. I just was exhausted by the fear and the anger. And we ended up becoming Eastern Orthodox, not because we thought Orthodoxy was free of problems, no religion is. But when I became an Orthodox, I was a very different sort of Christian. I'd been so intellectually arrogant as a Catholic. And that's not on the Catholic Church, that's on me. I was 100% in favor of the Iraq war. You know, I was in New York as a journalist on 9 11, saw the South Tower fall with my own eyes, believed every word that came out of George W. Bush's mouth. And I only realized years later what a fool I had been in because I wanted someone to suffer. And I bring all this up not to, I don't want to drag it out, but just to say that the idols I had made for myself, the Republican Party, the conservative movement, the Catholic Church, my family and my father most of all, all failed. And so what am I left with now?

[Ross Douthat]

You know, so as a student of your work, right, I feel like one answer is that you came into professional life with a certain pessimism, but maybe you're left with a deeper pessimism where it's like one thing after another fails and what is left is Weimar America and the abyss of totalitarianism. But the other alternative is that the Rodrier story is. It's a kind of Augustinian story, right, About a man, a man sort of trying to find a home in the city of man and not finding a home and sort of ending up as a kind of pilgrim wayfarer.

[Rod Dreher]

A wayfarer, as Walker Percy would say, right.

[Ross Douthat]

Because that's, I mean, that's sort of, to me, that's where again, you've written in public about all of your personal stories and struggles. I think this is one reason why there's, there's a world of. There's a world of liberals and progressives and non Christians who don't like you at all. There's a sexual rhetoric, but then there's a world that sort of like you've been profiled in the Atlantic and the New Yorker, right? Like there's a world of fascination. But I think that the sense of sort of, you know, the man who is loved by God and therefore is always seeing systems collapse around him, that seems to be part of, of it, yeah.

[Rod Dreher]

I mean, at the risk of sounding overly pious, the one thing I've been thrown back on is Jesus Christ and my faith in Jesus Christ, a man of sorrows and suffering. The most important lesson I learned from interviewing all of the Christians who stayed behind in the Soviet sphere and resisted. None of them believed they would live to see the end of communism. They, they suffered because it was the right thing to do and because they were suffering for the truth. And all of them testified to me, and this is in live not by lies, that if we in the west, if you in the west, they said, don't recover the ability to suffer, well, then you're not gonna make it. Side note, I think one reason why I tend to be very pessimistic, but I'm not joyless is because I'm from Louisiana. You know, the hurricanes coming, oh God. Batten down the hatches, then get out the gumbo pot, ice down beer, let's have a party. That's actually how I live. And I think that's one thing that liberals, while they're fascinated with me, is they expect me to be grim. And I'm just not. I'm more Chestertonian.

[Ross Douthat]

Okay, say something prophetic for me since I introduced you as a prophet. Before we go, you mentioned earlier you brought up AI and in your book Living in Wonder. There's a lot of. Of optimistic writing about re enchantment and spiritual experience and encounter with God. But there's also a lot of material about what you might call dark re enchantment. And you think there is dark re enchantment associated with technology right now. Say what you mean by that.

[Rod Dreher]

What I mean by that is that people are going to be so desperate for transcendence that they want it easy. And people will turn to AI to create what they consider to be enchanting experiences. But it will be false enchantment. And in the same way, on a parallel track, they'll start turning more and more to the occult. We're seeing this happen now. And if I can give a shout out to the New York Times, please, you want to hear that often from me. But the Times did this incredible 20, 30 minute discussion a few weeks back between a 66 year old, twice divorced woman and her grown son. And the son, it's a dialogue. And this son is really worried about Mom. He says, mom, I think you're losing touch with the reality because mom has an AI boyfriend, Max. And mom basically says at one point, listen, I know he's fake, but he makes me happy. He makes me feel good. If he makes me feel good and he's not hurting you, why do you care?

[Ross Douthat]

What I'm trying to say is, is that you can't. You can't necessarily modify a person, but

[Rod Dreher]

you're comparing it to a person. I don't want a person, okay? I want an AI I think that's where the dark enchantment happens when people will prefer something they know is false to the anxiety and the messiness of real life. I think this is going to be the greatest temptation facing our society in the next 10 years.

[Ross Douthat]

But you think this, by the way, though, in a. There's a lot of people who think this, but you think this in a religious frame where you think there is a demonic element.

[Rod Dreher]

I think it's demonic. I'm not saying AI is demonic.

[Ross Douthat]

Yes, you are. No, no, you are. No, I've read your work. Yes, you are.

[Megan Lorum]

You are.

[Ross Douthat]

You are saying that.

[Rod Dreher]

Yes, okay, but. No, I.

[Ross Douthat]

You can take ownership.

[Rod Dreher]

But here's the thing. It's so weird to. I don't want people to misunderstand. I mean, I check facts on Grok, you know, I don't think I'm consorting with D, but I do believe that CSV.

[Ross Douthat]

That's how they get you. It starts with the fact checking.

[Rod Dreher]

Yeah, it's like I use the Ouija board to check.

[Ross Douthat]

I mean, we check facts with the Ouija board on this show, as a rule. But. No, go on.

[Megan Lorum]

Sorry.

[Rod Dreher]

But I believe that there is a world of the demonic. I'm well acquainted with exorcist and spiritual warfare, and if you know any actresses and have spent time with them, you know how real this stuff is. And I believe that AI is going to be used as a vector for the demonic. It's not to say every instance of AI is demonic, but I believe that people will come to see it as an oracle. It's already happening now, people granting it, godlike powers. An academic from Virginia told me that. She said, oh, the situation with AI is worse than you realize. My. My students are using it as a personal concierge. Like, what are you talking about? She said, they ask it what they should wear to school that day, and she's like, 30 years old. She said, what worries me is they're out. They're just offloading all of their thought, even trivial forms. Of thinking to the machine. They're merging man with the machine. Now, I'm a much more cheerful person than Paul Kingsnorth is, but he ain't right wrong about the great danger of merging our humanity with the machines so that our humanity is effaced. And AI Is the chief way of doing that because it's so human.

[Ross Douthat]

Like, we had Paul Kingsnorth on this program. And I think. Yeah, I think his view of AI Is quite similar to your view of AI you're both open to the possibility that it's a way of expressing demonic influence. You're both open to the possibility that it's a form of Antichrist Christ. Right. And you're both open to the possibility that we're living through, you know, the end of the modern world, at least, if not, if not the end of the world. But I know you a bit better than I know King's North. But King's north is the guy who goes off, you know, he successfully goes off the grid and comes back sort of as the austere prophet. Right. And you're the guy who's issuing warnings about the apocalypse while, you know, living life. Right. Enjoying whatever remains of civilization.

[Rod Dreher]

Yeah. I mean, kind of like the world might be ending, but always make sure we have ice for our drinks.

[Ross Douthat]

Yes. But also maybe it's not ending. Terrible things in your life can just happen through illness or your family seeming to reject you or your marriage breaking down, or you have to move to Hungary. Right. But also, life can be lived happily and with great interest and enjoyment. And this could continue. Right. Like the Apocalypse is always happening. Maybe. But we're always living through it.

[Rod Dreher]

There's always an apocalypse for somebody. We're all going to die someday. You know, one of my favorite poets, W.H. auden, has this great line, stagger on, rejoicing. And that's how I try to live. That's how I want to live. You know, we stagger on. We stagger on. But life is good. God is good. God loves us. Jesus Christ rose from the dead. Hallelujah. And if that makes me sound like a pious old country preacher, well, I do come to the south. And I do love flattery o', clock, Connor. But I really believe this.

[Ross Douthat]

All right, Rodrier, thanks for joining me.

[Rod Dreher]

My pleasure, Sam.