Rod Dreher is a writer of non-fiction books and former senior editor at The American Conservative magazine. His writing focuses on the intersections among religion, culture, and politics. Dreher has been a columnist for the New York Post, the Dallas Morning News, and National Review, among other publications. His books include New York Times bestsellers The Benedict Option (2017) and Live Not By Lies: A Manuel for Christian Dissidents, published in Hungarian in 2022., as well as volumes on topics as diverse as Dante Alighieri, and traditional conservatism in the modern world. His latest book, Living in Wonder: Finding Mystery and Meaning in a Secular Age, was published in 2024.
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Where did you vote, at the embassy?
I did not vote because it turned out that I waited too long to ask for a ballot. I was very sad that I went out of time. I’ve never had to vote overseas before. So I missed the chance to vote. But everything turned out like I wanted it. And I tried in my opinion journalism to advocate for Trump and JD Vance.
You didn’t like Trump before.
No, I wasn’t crazy about Trump, and I’m not a big fan of him even now, but he’s the only one who fights for us, you know? And in the same way JD Vance did not like Trump in 2016, but then when he saw what the left did, he changed his mind on Trump. It happened to me too. I don’t expect Trump to be the pastor or the pope. I expect him to be a politician who fights for what’s right. And he does. And as someone who lives in Hungary, who loves this country and who hates the way the United States government has abused Hungary, I was very, very happy to see Donald Trump win.
Didn’t Orbán gamble to put everything on Trump’s victory, as David Pressman said?
What choice did Viktor Orbán have here? The American government made it completely clear that they hate him and they will punish him. In fact, during the election campaign, I heard from three different people in Washington that if Kamala Harris wins, it’s going to be a disaster for Hungary because they are going to make an example of Hungary, meaning they are going to punish him. I was warned personally by a friend in Washington who was very well connected that if Harris wins, you, Rod, will be in trouble as an American in Hungary who is sympathetic to the Orban government. That’s scary.
What about China?
About China, I mean, I’m much more sympathetic to Trump on China than Orbán is. But what I have to say regarding why Hungary has gone to China so strongly is: what choice did they have? The American-led world order and the EU as a lapdog for America, they refused Hungarian sovereignty. They pushed Hungary to do this, to go to China. Three years ago I was at a conference in Rome for Catholics, Catholic lawmakers. And I had breakfast one morning with three Ugandan parliamentarians, all women, all Catholics. And they said to me, you don’t know how hard it is for us in Africa. Whenever Europe and American officials come, they want to give us money to develop our country, but they say we have to accept LGBT, we have to accept abortion. They said that when the Chinese come, they make none of these demands. Now, of course, the Chinese aren’t doing it because they’re purely charitable. They have their own interests, but at least they leave the Africans alone to be sovereign in their own country. The arrogant West doesn’t do this.
‘The Democrats have become the party not only of social liberalism but of Wall Street and the big corporations’
News came out that a Harris campaign figure said the internal polls had never showed that she would surpass Trump, and they didn’t tell it even the DNC leadership societies.
No, and they got billions of dollars from Democratic donors who gave in good faith, and they wasted all that money. I mean, the corruption inside the Democratic Party is crazy, they really need to clean this up. I saw this fantastic interview with James Carville. Carville was Bill Clinton’s strata. He’s from Louisiana like me and he speaks with this Cajun accent, very thick. He was so angry that Kamala Harris refused to go on Joe Rogan’s podcast because some of her young staffers said: ‘Oh, he’s Hitler.’ Carville said that’s not what a campaign is for. If I was running a campaign and a 23-year-old progressive said that to me, I would fire that person. He’s furious because he knows one of the Democrats—because he knows his own party has surrendered themselves to the opinions of ignorant young progressives. And that’s one of the reasons they lost.
That’s why I wanted to ask what if the Democratic Party goes back to the middle, for example, where most of their voters are, especially regarding their small but significant loss in the Black and the Hispanic population, and women.
Hispanic fathers do not want their sons to have their balls cut off thanks to a teacher in school who convinced them. And do you know that in some American states run by the Democrats it is the law that a minor, meaning someone who’s not an adult, an older teenager, is to be taken by the state from their parents if they want to be transitioned and start the transition? The Soviets did not even do that. But they do it in California, and in some of the more liberal states, like Washington State and Oregon. Do working class people want that for their child? No. And the fact, too, that Trump has become less of a free market fundamentalist than you expect from Republicans. That makes it possible for working-class people to vote for him, because in the past, you might have said it was in their cultural interest to vote Republican, but not their economic interest. Well, now that’s changed. The Democrats have become the party not only of social liberalism but of Wall Street and the big corporations who are shoving wokeness down everybody’s throat.
So the Republican’s party’s transformation is complete now?
I think it will be complete if JD Vance becomes president in 2028. I mean, as you know, I’m a personal friend of JD. I’ve known him before he started his political career. He’s a good man. And because he’s only 40 years old, he does not have the burden of Reaganism. I don’t say that to criticize Reagan, who was the right man for that time, but the world has changed. In the Republican Party, people of my generation, so-called Generation X and the baby boomers, they can’t think beyond Reagan. It’s like the Democrats were in the 1970s and 1980s: they couldn’t think beyond Franklin Roosevelt. So that’s why they kept losing. Well, in the same way, JD Vance, because he’s so young, he’s not burdened by Reagan. So he can think as he does, what is good for the family? It’s a much more European style of conservatism. I try to tell people in America when they ask me about what is the politics of Hungary, I said, well, the Fidesz party has lots of policies. One of the things you can say about them is they want to strengthen the Hungarian family. And that’s one of the things I think that American conservatism can learn from Fidesz. Well, JD Vance, who converted to Catholicism, he’s already there. This guy takes Catholic social teaching very seriously. And so I think if he becomes the next president in 2028, I think the Republican Party will be absolutely changed. It has probably changed irreversibly now, but it will be complete in 2028.
Some of Kamala Harris’ campaign men advise her to run again in 2028.
And there is not one Democrat donor who will give one dollar to her. She was always a terrible candidate. The fact that she was a candidate shows how the Democratic Party with its bankrupt ideology of wokeness did it to itself. The Democrats were so intellectually corrupt not only because they chose her, but also because they all knew Joe Biden was not mentally capable of doing this, but they didn’t dare say it until it could not be denied anymore, after the first debate with Trump. And they deserve what they got. It’s their own fault. And if they don’t want to fail again, they better understand that.
‘We Christians have to be careful not to completely equate our politics with our faith, but also not to apologize for the fact that our faith informes our political decisions’
Is there such a thing as political Christianity?
Of course, and there always has been. I mean, the left in my country, the left doesn’t mind at all when you’re a Christian and you say we need more migration. We need to be tolerant to LGBT+ because Jesus wants it, etc. They’re happy with that. But when the right says it for pro-life or for other things, then they say the church should not be political. Yeah. I don’t believe that the church should be the Republican party at prayer, because the church is more important than that. The church must resist that because the church will lose itself, lose its essence if it becomes allied with one party or the other, left or right. But the kind of left-wing people who criticize political Christianity, they’re being very cynical about it and I think they know what they’re doing. Besides, one of the things I admire about Viktor Orbán is that he has said Christianity is the basis for Western civilization. Of course he’s right. It is very controversial to say that today, but he’s right. A few years ago, this English historian Tom Holland, who was not a Christian, wrote a book called Dominion in English, and it’s about how all of the things that we love about Western civilization, the rights of the individual, all of these things come out of Christianity. I remember standing at the Carmelite Monastery a couple of years ago for the St Stephen’s day’s firework and seeing the cross of the drones over the Danube. I almost had tears in my eyes because I know that in America, which is more Christian than Hungary in terms of practising, we could never do that. They did it here. And it inspired me. And I think that the West will never recover unless there is some serious recovery of our Christian roots. Hungary and maybe Poland, though not in its government, are the only ones holding the line here. So I think we Christians have to be careful not to completely equate our politics with our faith, but also not to apologize for the fact that our faith informes our political decisions.
How you see the shape of Western Christianity now?
Well, it’s in very bad shape. I converted to orthodoxy in 2006 after a bad crisis that cost me my Catholic faith, but I’m a man of the blessed. I really believe that the West will never flourish unless it recovers its Christianity and, in fact, unless it recovers its Catholic Christianity, because I think simply as a matter of sociology that without the Catholic Church being strong, the West won’t be strong. But the Catholic Church is extremely weak. So much of its leadership is progressive and corrupt, intellectually and spiritually. If you look at this new cathedral in Berlin, St Hedwig’s, it’s a disaster. It is a temple to nihilism. But the German bishops just praise it as something glorious and progressive. In the scripture, Jesus condemned the whitewashed tombs. This Catholic Cathedral in Berlin is a whitewashed tomb. And this is what Catholicism is at the leadership level in Europe and in some cases in America. We have to change this now, but I don’t think that it is enough simply to return to the morality and the strong doctrine. That’s important. But in the end, religion is most deeply about a living relationship with God. Marshall McLuhan said that religion is mostly percept. That’s the word he used, meaning the thing you originally perceived. But when it becomes concept, that is nothing but ideas. I quote in the book this Jesuit theologian of the 20th century, Karl Rahner, who said the 21st century will be mystical. The Christians must be mystics or they won’t exist at all.
‘One of the things I admire about Viktor Orbán is that he has said Christianity is the basis for Western civilization’
Your new book is about re-enchantment. What is that?
To be re-enchanted is to know that everything has deep meaning and not only that, but that God is here and God is present, and he never leaves us. That’s what we need most of all. One of the two books before this, The Benedict Option, talked about more practical ways to build a Christian community and deepen Christian faith, and my other book, Live Not by Lies, talked about the experience of the Christians who resisted Soviet communism and how that can help us facing the soft totalitarianism of wokeness. But Living in Wonder is the deepest one, because it says that even if we live in freedom, if we don’t have this real relationship with God, it doesn’t matter. And going back to Viktor Orbán, one of the things he once said that made the deepest impression on me, and he said that as a politician, was that I cannot give you meaning. I can give you things, meaning laws that help institutions flourish, maybe subsidies for churches. But if these institutions, the churches, the schools, the arts organizations, families, if you don’t step up and do your part, then nothing I do matters. And that’s where I see the biggest problem today. So many people, even proper conservative people who go to church on Sunday, they want something to be done for them. They want to be passive and allow somebody else to fix it and maybe all they do is tweet something out or maybe they vote for the right guy. Nothing will ever change unless you yourself have a personal conversion and commit your life to serving God and serving the people around you as a Christian, otherwise it’s all lost. And I don’t know if we have it, we in the West have it within ourselves to have the courage to live that way.
I came to see over time, over the last decade or so, how important the spiritual life, the mystical life is: it’s the foundation of everything, of all of our Christian life. Once Christianity ceases to be about mysticism at the bottom and becomes about only moralism or intellectualism or politics, it begins to die, because the mystical experience is the fountain that waters everything. When I say mystical experience, I don’t mean things like seeing angels or having miracles. That’s part of it. But ordinary mystical experience, like in prayer and in worship. And so that I began to feel that this was an important part of the mission I have as a writer because the thing I care about most of all in this world is saving the faith in our civilization. I can sense that there’s a shift in our civilization and our culture where people are exhausted with materialism. They know that it’s a lie. Even if they won’t admit it to themselves, deep down they believe it.
Are there new rivalst to Christianity?
This was confirmed to me in 2022, when a 27-year-old Anglican seminarian approached me at Oxford, and he said: ‘I know you’re working on this book. You need to know that atheism, the new atheism is not the issue for my generation. That’s your generation.’ I’m 57. ‘So what’s the problem?’ He answered that neopaganism and the occult. And he told me a story about how in his office in London, before he went to seminary, nobody was Christian other than him. But there were no atheists either. Everyone else was involved in paganism or the occult in some way, because he said they are desperate for some sense of mystical experience, for some sense that there is more than just what we see, but they don’t think they can find it in the church. And that young man went on to say: ‘I know that when I become a priest, I will spend the rest of my life dealing with this issue of paganism. Christians are people leaving the church to become pagan.’
‘I can sense that there’s a shift in our civilization and our culture where people are exhausted with materialism’
The world is becoming re-enchanted whether we want it or not. We have to make sure it is becoming re-enchanted from a Christian perspective, not just from a neo-pagan perspective. And if we go to young people with nothing but moralism, we’re never going to win. We’re never going to reach them. I don’t want to say morality is not important. Of course it’s important, but it’s not the basis of faith.
Aren’t you afraid of people saying you’re not scientific?
I don’t care. I know what I’ve seen with my own eyes. I know what I’ve heard from people I believe about the mystical and spiritual element of reality, not just a Christian reality of reality. I’m old enough now at age 57 not to care. I’m going to say what I think is true. And if they don’t like it, too bad. That’s something that comes with age, I think, and the fact that I’ve written already three New York Times bestsellers. So I have a certain amount of standing in a similar way. By the way, as a side note: there’s a man I quoted there named Carlos Eire, who’s a Yale historian. He won the National Book Award; he’s very distinguished. He published a book last year about the levitating saints of the Counter-Reformation, the Catholic Church. He talks in the book about how we have so many records of people signing their names, saying they saw it. Eire said, as a historian, there is no other area other than religion in which historians would completely discount signed testimony saying this happened. Eire simply calls on us to open our minds up and realize that human experience is much broader than the materialists may have us think. Well, that is true and it’s true in the church as well. I think that so many people within the church try to do as you say, try to deny the reality of spiritual power, dark and light, because they want to maintain control, not control in a political sense, but a sense that reality is manageable. Yeah, it’s manageable. We can build the fence. Understand the rationality. And so they don’t take this stuff seriously. But it’s real.
You have chapters on the occult and you have exorcism stories. At Hungary priests usually say that we shouldn’t think too much about the Devil.
On the recent Joe Rogan podcast, a big Silicon Valley guy, Marc Andreessen said that a medieval peasant probably would be better able psychologically to deal with the era in which we have now entered, because the medieval peasant understood that there were spiritual realities that are beyond us. It was a normal part of their experience. Andreessen is not a Christian of any sort, but he understands that there are mysterious forces from AI and all these things arising that need to be part of our psychology. Now I am a Christian and I know because I’ve seen it happen to people and I’ve heard so many stories from exorcists that this stuff is real. It is not the primary reality, spiritual warfare, we call it English. It’s not the primary reality, but it is real. God is good. He intends good for us. We should focus on the good. But if we close our eyes to the reality of evil, then we’re only getting half the picture and we’re allowing ourselves to stumble into dangerous things.
Do you have miraculouos experiences?
As I mentioned, the last 10 years of my marriage in 2012 to 2022 were really, really difficult. And I was very depressed throughout it. After my wife filed for divorce in 2022, in a way it was a relief because the pain stopped but I had a new kind of pain because nobody wants to be divorced, especially a Christian. And for all of this time I kept having suicidal thoughts. I wasn’t at risk for suicide. I believe suicide is very wrong. But the thoughts, I couldn’t escape them. And I was just so depressed and I couldn’t find happiness again. So back at the end of September, I was in the US at a conference. I told my spiritual father, an Orthodox priest who is also a trained exorcist, what I was suffering. I said, Father, I have an intuition that maybe there is some spiritual darkness here. Maybe I’m wrong about it, but just in case would you pray over me if we delivered from this? He said, of course. Well, he put his hands on my head and prayed for 20 minutes. I don’t know what he said because he was mumbling. I felt nothing. I said good night. The next morning, I woke up in a different world. I could feel in my body that something had lifted, and that was months ago. I have not had a single suicidal thought since then and I feel so close to God. I genuinely believe that in some way there was spiritual darkness attached to me. I don’t know why it was there, but it was there. Now, I could do the normal thing and say, well, there must be a psychological reason. No, I had thought through all of this psychologically for so many years and I couldn’t conquer it through psychology and therapy. And even my own prayers couldn’t conquer it. Even my own prayers didn’t help. For some reason, the prayers of this exorcist over me for 20 minutes solved everything. If God did this for me through the prayers of an exorcist, how can I be silent about it?
You have some scary stories about exorcism, right?
I tell a story in the book about a friend of mine in New York. I call him Nathan. He’s a Wall Street stockbroker. His wife became possessed. They were both normal Catholics. She became possessed because one of her ancestors in Italy was a Freemason who was involved with the occult. And she was later delivered and freed from her possession. I went to their apartment and visited them when she was possessed and the demon manifested through her. It was shocking. I’d never seen that before. Nathan was walking me back to my hotel room after visiting them at their apartment. And again, this guy’s a normal Catholic Upper East Side bourgeois stockbroker. I asked, how has this experience changed you? He said, now when I walk down the streets in New York, I realize there’s a spiritual battle going all around me and we can’t see it. That’s what I want people to take away from my book, that we have to be aware of this. It’s a reality. We shouldn’t become too curious. If you become too curious, you can be drawn into a very dark place. But we need to know that this stuff is real.
‘We as Christians, whatever our tradition, we have to seek that deep connection with the mystical Christ’
You have and interesting story from Rome, the burial of Pope Benedict.
Even though I left the Catholic Church in 2006, I really love Pope Benedict. I think he was a great hero of our time. I even have a photo of him in my bedroom at home. I wanted to go to his funeral to pay my respects. So I was standing in my hotel room in Rome the morning of the funeral. It was early in the morning. I wanted to get to St Peter’s Square early to get a seat. Just fixing my scarf I heard a boom behind me. I turned around and saw the chair at my desk was collapsed on the floor. Now it was a metal chair. It wasn’t a wooden chair. It had some metal, a metal frame. And there it was. I picked up the pieces and saw that a bolt was thick as my finger and then cut in half. But I was late to get to St Peter’s, so I didn’t stick around. After the funeral I went to a lunch around 2pm in the afternoon, a late lunch with two Vatican journalists I know, at a restaurant inside Vatican City State. And I told them the story about what happened. As I was telling the story, there were three of us at the table, one chair, no one was sitting in, flipped over backwards. It didn’t break, it just turned over. Everyone got very quiet. Later, back in my hotel, I texted my Vatican exorcist friend and told him everything that happened that day. I said, what do you think this means? He said it just means that the enemy is telling you you’re on his territory and he’s watching.
What is the main message of the book?
The world is not what you think it is; there is a dimension to reality that modernity denies, but it’s still there and we have to reconnect with it because our own spiritual and cultural survival depends on it. There was a reason why we got to this place in the West. And if we understand that, we can return to what our ancestors knew to be true. The second message is that there are ways to become re-enchanted to recover a sense of meaning and mystery that are raw and dark and subductive. The occult is the first among them, but also through high technology, as I discussed there. This is a path to death, spiritual death, and we must refuse it.
Re-enchantment is coming whether we want it or not. It is the responsibility of Christians and all men and women of good will to make sure that it is holy re-enchantment, not the darkness. There’s no such thing as neutrality in this fight. Jesus Christ said, If you’re not for me, you’re against me. One of the stories that I love most of all, and this serves as a real symbol for this book, is that of St Thomas Aquinas, the greatest intellect the Church of the West ever produced. At the end of his life, he had this vision. He was sayin mass, but he told his secretary that after what he had seen, he realized that everything he had written is like straw. And he died a year later. He didn’t write anything else. All theological thought, although very important, compared to the mystical vision is nothing. We as Christians, whatever our tradition, we have to seek that deep connection with the mystical Christ. And that is our calling.
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