Hillbilly Blasphemy
by Elon Green
In an April 2022 post headlined, “Tears at Golgotha,” the conservative author Ray Oliver “Rod” Dreher Jr. blogged about an unwelcome email he had received from his wife. Though he wrote the post from Jerusalem, where he had gone to do research for a book, Dreher was then living in Budapest, while his family—including his three children—kept the home fires burning in St. Francisville, Louisiana.
“It pains me more than I can say to announce that my wife recently filed a petition of divorce,” he wrote. “We have agreed that I won’t be talking in public about the circumstances leading up to the divorce. That would be unfair to her, because she has no platform, and cruel to our children, who remain our greatest concern.”
Golgotha is the hill where Jesus was crucified, and though he takes care to make clear in the post that he has been praying inside the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, which is situated there, it is very like Dreher to compare his own martyrdom to that of Jesus Christ. He is an extraordinarily self-involved man. Assuring readers that he will be continuing to blog, just as usual, “about news events and cultural trends” despite his grief, he intones: “Remember that writing is how I deal with pain.”
This would be the unremarkable news of a failed marriage, except that Rod Dreher has long been among the conservative religious movement’s most visible writers; he is also closely connected with Vice President JD Vance.
Dreher’s fame has garnered profiles in The New Yorker, the Washington Post, and The Atlantic. As a longtime observer, I can say with confidence that these portraits do not give readers the man in full. They tend to focus on his books, in which Dreher promotes nature-loving, back-to-the-earth conservatism (Crunchy Cons), moving back to one’s hometown (The Little Way of Ruthie Leming), and the creation of Christian communities to combat creeping secularism (The Benedict Option). What interviewers have consistently failed to put across is a sense of Dreher’s weirdness, raging homophobia, transphobia, racism, and what can only be described as perversity.
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