On an April night final 12 months, Rod Dreher sat within the entrance row of an auditorium on the Heritage Basis, in Washington, D.C., giddy with delight and happiness. He was there for the screening of a brand new documentary sequence primarily based on considered one of his books, Dwell Not by Lies, about Christian dissidents from the previous Soviet bloc—however first, a particular visitor was making his manner towards the stage. J. D. Vance arrived on the podium to a roar of applause and instructed the group that he wouldn’t be the vice chairman of the USA if not for his buddy Rod.

It was Dreher, Vance mentioned, who latched on to his memoir, Hillbilly Elegy, a decade in the past and promoted it on his weblog for The American Conservative, serving to to vault the e-book to the best-seller listing. Dreher then turned a buddy and adviser to Vance as he launched his political profession. After praising Dreher for 10 minutes, Vance invited him onstage. The 2 males hugged, every of them saying, “I really like you, man.”

Not like many within the crowd, Dreher, then 58, was not a staunch Donald Trump supporter; he had lengthy criticized the president and got here round solely at first of his second time period, after concluding that Trump’s crude vitality was wanted to defeat progressive concepts. However Dreher has been giving voice to the yearnings and frustrations of non secular conservatives for a few years—as {a magazine} blogger with greater than 1 million pageviews a month, an writer of best-selling books, and a deliriously verbose author on Substack. In January he joined The Free Press as a daily contributor. Greater than anybody else I do know of, Dreher affords a full-fledged portrait of the cultural despair that haunts our period, a despair that has helped pave a street towards tyranny.

Dreher emerged from the conservative blogosphere within the 2000s and gained followers together with his each day stream of testy opinions and unguarded anecdotal writing. He appears virtually allergic to ideological consistency, has lengthy had readers on the left in addition to the proper, and generally adjustments his thoughts over the course of a single paragraph. He might be mean-spirited at occasions, however is fast with a heartfelt apology when he thinks he has made a mistake. His columns are sometimes a collage of quotes from the day’s information and from an eclectic solid of literary and philosophical idols: Dante, maybe, or Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, or the thinker Alasdair MacIntyre.

When Dreher turned a distinguished determine a decade in the past, he appeared resigned to the concept that non secular conservatives like him had misplaced the political battle. In The Benedict Possibility—the 2017 e-book that put him on the map—he endorsed a patiently monastic method to Christians who felt that their religion was endangered in a relentlessly secularizing period. Drawing inspiration from Saint Benedict of Nursia, who based thriving monasteries within the sixth century as Rome decayed, he wrote of a future by which dedicated Christians “should be considerably minimize off from mainstream society for the sake of holding on to the reality.”

From the January/February 2020 difficulty: Emma Inexperienced on the Christian withdrawal experiment

However over the previous decade, the rightward shift of politics has made clear that Dreher’s intuitions are extra broadly shared than he as soon as thought. Take his curiosity within the supernatural and the demonic, the theme of his newest e-book, Dwelling in Marvel. “The world just isn’t what we expect it’s,” Dreher writes. “It’s so a lot weirder.” We should disavow our scientific materialism and be taught “to open our eyes to the fact of the world of spirit and the way it interacts with matter.”

Such concepts seem to have fueled a number of the extra apocalyptic currents on the Trumpist proper, resembling Peter Thiel’s musings on the anti-Christ and the ravings of Dan Bongino, the previous deputy director of the FBI, who has mentioned that demons are actual. Earlier than Tucker Carlson went public in 2024 together with his story about being attacked in mattress by a demon, he confided in Dreher.

I first started studying Dreher’s Substack a few years in the past and felt as if I’d stepped into one other world. Dreher spends a lot of his time with monks, back-to-the-land theologians, and exorcists. He believes that a fantastic non secular battle is below manner: “As religion has receded, and curiosity within the occult and pornography has grown, so has demonic exercise.” He continues, “Clergymen should perceive that they’re coping with discarnate beings—fallen angels—who’re vastly extra clever than mortals.” Dreher typically speaks of AI as a portal to the demonic, and he feels equally concerning the trans-rights motion, which he sees as a symptom of a progressive dystopia by which there are not any “buildings of reality outdoors the selecting self.”

To a secular ear, all of this supernatural discuss can sound like helpful idiocy that serves solely the autocrats Dreher generally praises—individuals resembling Viktor Orbán, Hungary’s authoritarian chief, who’re all the time in want of a disaster, non secular or in any other case, to justify their most excessive measures. Dreher moved to Budapest in 2022 and is on acquainted phrases with Orbán and different European conservatives.

From the Might 2025 difficulty: Anne Applebaum on how America’s future is Hungary

But when Dreher is any type of courtier—a suggestion he would angrily reject—he’s totally honest in his beliefs, and his deepest considerations are extra non secular than political. He appears tempted by the concept that Trump’s wrecking ball may clear the bottom for a cultural rebirth. “I had by no means been obsessed with Trump,” Dreher instructed me, “however I used to be obsessed with him this time as a result of it appeared like solely anyone like him may put a cease” to “wokeness and the insanity of transgenderism.”

Dreher’s writing is a helpful indication of simply how indignant and pessimistic even probably the most considerate conservatives have turn into in recent times. He appears to see America as a hellscape, drained of faith and hope, drugged and distracted by the false gods of the web. The renewal he imagines just isn’t the sunlit, future-oriented conservatism of the Reagan period, and he doesn’t look to the Founding Fathers for inspiration. If something, Dreher’s compass factors in the other way. He desires his nation to show again towards Europe—not the homogenized, secular continent of as we speak however premodern Christian Europe, earlier than the Enlightenment and the disenchantment set in.

I met up with Dreher in early June outdoors the Church of Saint-Sulpice, in Paris. We have been surrounded by hundreds of excited younger Catholics making ready for the beginning of an annual pilgrimage from Paris to Chartres, organized by devotees of the standard Latin Mass. The pilgrimage is a rallying level for conservative Christians from throughout Europe and past; Catholic political figures generally be a part of the pilgrims for a stretch.

“That is my world however not my world,” Dreher instructed me as we ambled by way of the group. He meant that he’s Christian and conservative, however now not Catholic. He left the religion 20 years in the past, disgusted by the Church’s dealing with of the sex-abuse scandal, and have become an Jap Orthodox Christian. However he nonetheless feels an affinity with Catholics, particularly the theological conservatives who adhere to the Latin liturgy that was common within the Church till the Vatican II reforms of the Nineteen Sixties.

“I can’t consider the final time I felt so completely happy,” Dreher mentioned, in a drawl that evokes his Louisiana origins. His pleasure was partly a measure of his long-running preoccupation with the way forward for Europe, the place the broader tradition has been steadily marching away from Christianity. Fewer than 1 / 4 of French individuals ages 18 to 23 establish as Catholic. The continent’s eroding non secular traditions and cultural loyalties, and its surging inhabitants of Muslim migrants, are a relentless and gloomy obsession in Dreher’s posts. However right here, surrounded on this morning by Christian pilgrims, he felt sparks of hope.

A Mass started contained in the church, and loudspeakers broadcast the sounds of a choir to the overflow viewers outdoors. All discuss ceased, and hundreds of individuals crossed themselves and knelt on the pavement. It was a really totally different Paris from the one most vacationers and even Parisians see.

Dreher’s pleasure concerning the pilgrims turned out to be mutual. A variety of them rushed as much as greet him because the journey started. His work has gained a following in France, particularly amongst younger individuals who grew up in a totally secularized Europe and are hungry for a extra conventional or mystical expertise. “Rod allowed the French to pose the query of religion in a brand new manner,” Yrieix Denis, a 34-year-old Catholic author and marketing consultant who helped get The Benedict Possibility printed in French, instructed me. Dreher’s perspective was refreshing, Denis mentioned, as a result of he had no stake within the political arguments that consumed and divided older French Catholics; he simply wished to assist individuals maintain their religion in a hostile local weather. And his warnings about demons lurking in our cellphones and laptops appear to resonate with the youthful technology.

From the Might 2024 difficulty: Robert F. Price on Russia, Ukraine, and the approaching schism in Orthodox Christianity

Dreher’s concepts concerning the decline of Christianity in Europe—as soon as seen as a bit conspiratorial—at the moment are changing into one thing just like the official view of the Trump administration. When Vance attended the annual Munich Safety Convention as a first-term senator, in 2024, he obtained fed up with the European Union bureaucrats and took off early to reconnect with Dreher, who had come from Budapest, over beer and sausages. A 12 months later, Vance returned to Munich as vice chairman and vented his emotions concerning the conceitedness of Europe’s ruling elite and the hazards of mass immigration in a speech that would virtually have been written by Dreher, accusing the European leaders seated earlier than him of betraying their very own civilization. These themes have been echoed in December, when the Trump administration launched a brand new Nationwide Safety Technique warning that Europe was in peril of “civilizational erasure.”

The pilgrims marched westward out of the town, carrying crucifixes and flags bearing the names of native saints. They might be tenting outside for 2 nights on their option to Chartres, however Dreher wouldn’t be becoming a member of them. “I’m a crotchety outdated bastard who gained’t camp,” he’d instructed me.

Dreher’s telephone lit up typically as we strolled by way of the newly empty streets towards the Latin Quarter. He presents a peculiar mix of gregariousness and interior solitude—related to many individuals world wide but profoundly lonely. His marriage broke up years in the past, and he’s now largely estranged from his former spouse and two of his three kids. He lives alone in Budapest.

His each day routine, Dreher instructed me, is a visit to a neighborhood café adopted by hours of studying and writing. Later he’ll stroll across the metropolis, his solely type of train, and maybe meet associates for drinks or dinner. Throughout the 5 days I spent with him in France, he wrote and printed 4 on-line columns, every a number of thousand phrases lengthy. After I expressed shock at his output, he mentioned: “It’s all I do.”

Dreher didn’t shrink back from questions on his perception within the supernatural. He instructed me that he had as soon as seen a lady possessed by demons whereas he was visiting her and her husband at their Higher East Aspect house, a narrative he recounts in Dwelling in Marvel. The demons weren’t themselves seen: One in every of them shouted obscenities by way of the girl’s mouth, the best way a demon possessed Linda Blair’s character in The Exorcist, till her husband managed to silence it with a “relic of the True Cross” hidden in his pocket. The girl apologized for the demon’s outburst, saying, “That wasn’t me.”

Dreher rattled off different encounters he’s had with poltergeists and varied anonymous spirits. On the identical time, he made clear that he wasn’t positive how actual these experiences have been or what they meant, and famous that this was exactly the purpose: We must always not stay “locked in an iron cage of scientism and rationality.”

I obtained the sense that, for Dreher, the demonic is partly a metaphor, a manner of speaking concerning the psychic disturbances of our age. At his finest, he’s able to shedding gentle on these disturbances, and never in narrowly non secular phrases. Dreher has a present for articulating the unease that many individuals, together with thinkers on the left, really feel concerning the fast erosion of borders and traditions of every kind and the delivery of a web-based panorama that appears to vow infinite autonomy however is in actual fact a “huge disenchantment machine.”

To Dreher, these adjustments usually are not simply the queasy unwanted effects of a world that’s shedding outworn guidelines and changing into freer. They signify the fraying of a social and cultural order constructed on Christianity, and are accountable for a litany of troubling signs: loneliness, rising charges of hysteria, political polarization. “In case you wished to create a society and a tradition that’s assured to make individuals depressing,” Dreher instructed me, citing the psychiatrist Iain McGilchrist, “you couldn’t do higher than what we’re dwelling in now.” Dreher typically invokes the expertise of fourth-century Romans, who couldn’t see that the ageless pagan world they’d inherited was at an finish, and that they have been on the verge of a radically new and fewer secure period.

Lately, Dreher’s premonitions have caught on with a lot of secular-minded individuals who have concluded that the West wants Christianity to guard it from an array of perceived threats, together with the unfold of Islam. Some, such because the Somali-born writer and former atheist Ayaan Hirsi Ali and the British comic Russell Model, have transformed to Christianity. Others, resembling Jordan Peterson and Joe Rogan, appear ambivalent or opportunistic. (Rogan mentioned in 2024 that, “as time rolls on, individuals are going to grasp the necessity to have some type of divine construction to issues.”) Maybe Dreher’s most shocking ally is the evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins, the writer of The God Delusion and different atheistic broadsides, who has declared that he’s now a “cultural Christian.”

However these days Dreher’s insights have include an ominous political corollary. He believes our establishments are so rotten that they want a great slap from individuals like Trump and Orbán, even when it means shedding a few of them. “Possibly what’s being born now can be worse, I dunno,” he wrote as Trump and Elon Musk have been utilizing DOGE to dismantle the federal paperwork in early 2025. “We’ll see. However deliver it on. I’ve had it.”

Dreher didn’t all the time discuss this fashion. In early 2017, he instructed an viewers on the Nationwide Press Membership that Trump’s election urged a weak spot within the religion of the numerous Christians who had voted for him. Trump was one other symptom of a “consumerist, individualistic, post-Christian society that worships the self.” The author Andrew Sullivan, who has been a buddy and occasional sparring accomplice of Dreher’s for many years, instructed me he believes Dreher hasn’t actually modified. “The politics got here to him greater than the opposite manner round,” Sullivan mentioned, suggesting that Dreher was radicalized by his opposition to the trans-rights motion, Black Lives Matter, and different progressive causes.

The previous decade could have been a really profitable one for Dreher—he printed three books and gained a a lot wider following—nevertheless it has additionally been a time of deep struggling, as anybody who reads his posts is aware of. His household broke aside in a number of methods, culminating in a divorce that took a horrible toll and left him virtually totally alone. After I first met Dreher, over dinner at a Sichuan restaurant in New York in April, he appeared careworn, with indicators of fatigue across the eyes. I couldn’t assist questioning whether or not Dreher’s prognosis of a “civilizational disaster,” demons and all, was partly a measure of his personal emotional turmoil.

The story of Dreher’s private Calvary begins together with his father, who appears to be the important thing to his lifelong wrestle to get nearer to God. Ray Dreher was a rural public-health officer and a cussed authoritarian who anticipated his kids to spend their life within the Louisiana city of St. Francisville (inhabitants 1,557), the place they grew up. Rod, his solely son, beloved books and dreamed from an early age of getting away to Europe. As an adolescent, he scorned the narrowness of his dad and mom’ lives, their views (Ray seems to have been a member of the Ku Klux Klan), and their bland Methodism—“Christianity as psychological and social wallpaper,” as Dreher put it to me. He obtained out as quickly as he may, going to varsity at Louisiana State College after which transferring to the East Coast. His father by no means actually forgave him for it.

Dreher traveled removed from St. Francisville over the next a long time, as an interior restlessness led from one non secular incarnation to a different. He began off as a secular liberal, however in his mid-20s he felt drawn again to religion, thanks partly to a one-night stand that led to a short being pregnant scare. He transformed to Catholicism on the age of 26 in St. Matthew’s Cathedral in Washington, D.C. In 2006, he discovered a brand new dwelling in Jap Orthodoxy, an much more tradition-bound department of Christianity.

In 2011, as Dreher was constructing a nationwide repute as a columnist, he determined to maneuver again to St. Francisville together with his spouse and youngsters. He had gained a brand new appreciation for his hometown after his youthful sister, Ruthie, was recognized with Stage 4 lung most cancers. Dreher was dwelling in Philadelphia on the time, and through visits again dwelling, he found that she had turn into a sort of native saint, revered for her charity and love of God. Ruthie’s funeral—which he described in a protracted submit for The American Conservative and later in a e-book, The Little Manner of Ruthie Leming—introduced out a deep sense of neighborhood. The love he noticed there, he wrote, was “a factor of such intense magnificence it’s onerous to look upon it and maintain your self collectively.” Dreher wished to be a part of it, and to reconcile together with his father.

The return was a spectacular failure. His father refused to relinquish his grudge, as Dreher noticed it, and his mom all the time went alongside together with her husband. Dreher instructed me the rift wounded him so badly that, for 4 years, he was largely bedridden with continual mononucleosis, sleeping 4 to 6 hours in the course of the day. “The factor that I wished greater than the rest on the earth,” Dreher wrote years later, “and have wished from the time I used to be a bit boy, is to really feel at Dwelling on this world, with a father who approves of me. That was to not be mine, besides, by God’s grace, in heaven.”

He stayed in Louisiana for greater than a decade, struggling to take care of a wedding that was failing for causes that Dreher has by no means totally spelled out (he says he must respect his household’s privateness). Dreher says that solely his religion in God sustained him. His writing about all of that is a few of his finest and most susceptible. “It appears like that generally, that God has forgotten me, has forgotten us males who wished to be good husbands and good fathers,” he wrote in 2023. “Flannery O’Connor has a personality who says she thinks she may be capable to be a martyr in the event that they kill her fast. Yeah, me too. However the very sluggish martyrdom of the girl who bled out for twelve years, and for women and men who are suffering the pains of marriages gone dangerous, and divorce—that’s tougher, I feel.”

In Paris, we skirted the sting of the Luxembourg Gardens, and the stony grey dome of the Panthéon turned seen forward. “I hate the Panthéon,” Dreher mentioned. For a second, I used to be baffled, however Dreher defined: The constructing the place France inters its biggest patriots and public figures is an emblem of the secular religion that unfold after the French Revolution, a reminder that the rot in modern Europe, as he sees it, goes again to the beliefs of the Enlightenment—liberty, scientific inquiry, individualism.

He started speaking concerning the revolutionary mobs of 1793 as if they’d swept by way of yesterday. “Genevieve had all the time been the town’s native saint,” he mentioned. “However the mob got here and took her relics and burned them.” Dreher led me to the Church of Saint-Étienne-du-Mont, not distant, which incorporates what’s left of her tomb. As we entered the dim sanctuary, he crossed himself and knelt to the touch the ground in deference, an Orthodox custom. We made our option to the chapel dedicated to Saint Genevieve, the place Dreher lit a candle for her, kneeled, and prayed.

Dreher can provide the impression that it has all been downhill for humanity for the reason that 14th century. In his writing, he affords a potted historical past of how we fell away from a luminous medieval wholeness, when sacred and secular have been as one; when, as he has written, “your entire universe was woven into God’s personal Being.” Dreher is effectively conscious that this reactionary outlook strikes many individuals as ludicrous. He typically refers to himself in his columns as “Your Working Boy,” a winking allusion to the half-mad protagonist of John Kennedy Toole’s 1980 comedian novel, A Confederacy of Dunces. That character, Ignatius J. Reilly, is a grotesque, overweight shut-in who reveres the sixth-century Roman thinker Boethius and claims to be writing a “prolonged indictment in opposition to our century.”

I hear an echo of Ignatius Reilly when Dreher inveighs, as he typically does, in opposition to progressive orthodoxy, writing incendiary posts with titles resembling “One other Day, One other Killer Tranny.” When he champions “normie” values and sensibilities in opposition to the “mushy totalitarianism” of wokeness, he appears closest to the aggrieved ethos of the MAGA base.

However I noticed little proof of Ignatius Reilly throughout my time with Dreher. He didn’t appear motivated by hatred or bitterness however as a substitute got here off as sort and humble, with an endearing behavior of telling humiliating tales about himself. He appeared virtually desperate to have his personal views challenged, and genuinely saddened by the lack of a few of his friendships with liberals in recent times.

When Dreher wrote The Benedict Possibility, through the Obama presidency, his major concern was tips on how to preserve religion alive at a time when Christianity gave the impression to be fading away. After it was printed, his concepts took a darker flip: The portal to the demonic was getting bigger, and Western civilization itself was in danger. Dreher instructed me he typically meets odd Europeans who imagine that civil battle is simply across the nook. There are actually individuals who really feel that manner, however studying Dreher, it’s onerous to keep away from the sense that he desires a civilizational crack-up, a cleaning storm that may push back evil forces and permit for Christian renewal.

This sort of discuss has political penalties. How far is he keen to go? Dreher instructed me firmly that he may by no means condone a spiritual perception being pressured on anybody, and he has frequently mentioned in his columns that he opposes a totalitarianism of the proper as a lot as one of many left. He instructed me that genuine Christianity “can’t exist if liberal democracy goes away.” Dreher has written some scathing issues in latest months about Trump’s tariffs and his general fecklessness, and has misplaced Substack subscribers consequently, he mentioned.

Dreher has additionally spoken out forcefully in opposition to the rise of anti-Semitism and the white-nationalist trolls within the MAGA base generally known as “Groypers.” In November, he warned Vance concerning the pattern throughout a go to to Washington. After Dreher criticized Tucker Carlson for internet hosting the Hitler-loving commentator Nick Fuentes on his podcast, Dreher revealed that Carlson had written to him privately to assault him and that their friendship seemed to be over.

However Dreher has additionally given loads of rhetorical help to Trump’s demolition agenda. In February 2025, he wrote: “The System is collapsing? Good. It’s about time.” He hopes for a equally daring assault on the liberal governments of Western Europe; he wish to see its white, native-born inhabitants stand up and struggle in opposition to the dilution of its Christian heritage. In July, he wrote a melancholy submit asking why the British are “acquiescing in their very own demise as a individuals.”

Learn: Make America Hungary once more

After which there’s Dreher’s choice to maneuver to Budapest. I requested him concerning the worth of Orbán’s rule—the shameless undermining of democratic establishments, the rampant corruption, the weak financial system, the kowtowing to Vladimir Putin. Dreher instructed me he doesn’t help every thing Orbán has carried out, however he was filled with reward for the Hungarian chief, whom he credit with having rescued his nation’s social and cultural integrity by limiting immigration. “The person is an actual visionary,” Dreher instructed me. The 2 have met solely three or 4 occasions, he mentioned, however Dreher has been affiliated since 2021 with the Danube Institute, a state-backed suppose tank that has been a automobile for disseminating Orbán’s political concepts.

Dreher used his ties with Orbán to assist Carlson get an interview, which aired in August 2021. After Carlson gushed about Orbán’s avowedly intolerant method to governance, American conservatives started making common visits to Budapest, and references to “the Hungarian mannequin” turned a typical function of Trumpian politics. Dreher bears a share of accountability for all of this.

After two days of climbing, the pilgrims arrived in Chartres wanting sweaty and exultant. Dreher was there to greet them, after an hour-long practice journey from Paris. We entered the sanctuary, with its cool scent of historic stone. Dreher led me to a spot on the middle of the nave and gazed down. This, he instructed me, was the precise stone on which he’d been standing when he had his first true non secular expertise, on the age of 17. His mom had gained a round-trip ticket to Paris at a church raffle again in Louisiana, and she or he handed it on to him. Younger Rod went off to France by himself, and on a go to to Chartres, standing within the nave of the cathedral, he was overcome by a obscure however highly effective sense that God was actual.

Dreher has all the time sought solace in locations which are rooted in custom and much faraway from trendy life: airtight non secular communities, island monasteries, European cathedrals. His biggest admiration is reserved for individuals who commit themselves to “a set place and lifestyle,” as he wrote about Saint Benedict.

But Dreher appears resigned to dwelling as a rootless exile, shorn of his household and condemned to wander a panorama of what the thinker Zygmunt Bauman—considered one of Dreher’s favourite thinkers—known as “liquid modernity.” I generally obtained the sense that every one of his pilgrimages amounted to failed efforts to recapture the Edenic solidity of St. Francisville.

I accompanied him on one other of those journeys after the Chartres pilgrimage. This one introduced us to Rocamadour, an impressive medieval city in Occitania, set on a cliffside above a tributary of the Dordogne River. Dreher had wished to see the medieval chapel of Notre-Dame de Rocamadour for years, and for a curious motive: It’s the website of a vital scene in Michel Houellebecq’s controversial 2015 novel, Submission, by which the protagonist makes a failed try at non secular conversion. The novel portrays France as a spot so spiritually exhausted that it provides in to Islamic rule with out a lot of a struggle. Houellebecq is a famously cynical determine, and an odd bedfellow for Dreher. However the story made a deep impression on him.

We climbed the outdated stone steps towards the chapel. Above one entryway, a sword is lodged within the stone, mentioned to have discovered its place there within the eighth century after being thrown greater than 100 miles by Roland, the hero of the medieval chanson that bears his title. (This sword was truly a duplicate. A 12 months earlier, the unique had been stolen.)

The sanctuary was darkish and silent. On the far wall, framed by a red-and-gold Gothic arch, was the Black Virgin, a doll-like wood determine that pilgrims come to see. It’s right here that Houellebecq’s antihero, François, feels the stirrings of one thing divine. However the feeling fades, and he dismisses it as an impact of hypoglycemia and goes dwelling. Dreher knelt in one of many pews and prayed.

He instructed me later that he’d been drawn to Houellebecq’s novel due to “what it says concerning the disposition one wants towards mystical experiences.” Many individuals, he mentioned, lack the braveness to behave on their non secular intuitions. Dreher himself should be poised between perception and unbelief, struggling to interrupt by way of the boundaries of the secular world he lives in. “Generally I ask, Am I fooling myself ? ” he instructed me at one level. However when he sees one thing just like the Chartres pilgrimage, “I do know I’m onto one thing.”

Late that afternoon, we obtained within the automotive and drove away. The route took us alongside rural roads with views of sun-gilded fields and hillsides. Dreher fell right into a pensive temper. I requested him what classes these holy locations may maintain for America. He mentioned he wasn’t positive. However the query led us again to his friendship with Vance, and he recounted a wierd dream he’d had the evening earlier than: “I used to be presupposed to marry Arianna Huffington,” he mentioned, “and J.D. was presupposed to marry the lady I had a crush on in highschool, however couldn’t have. I organized issues in order that we switched brides. However then I used to be uncovered and felt humiliated.”

To me, the dream urged that Dreher sees Vance as a sort of secret sharer, in addition to a doable automobile for the mysteries he was chasing among the many monks and pilgrims. Vance is the sort of determine who may assist create the situations for a reenchantment of American life, or so Dreher hopes. “That man is the way forward for America,” Dreher wrote in April. If Trump represents Armageddon, Vance for Dreher could also be one thing just like the Rapture.

After the 2024 election, a lot of individuals urged Dreher to maneuver to Washington, saying he may capitalize on his friendship with Vance and double his readership. I sensed that Dreher had thought of the concept, nonetheless briefly. Have been Vance to turn into president, the temptation to return could be even stronger. Dreher is likely to be supplied honors, or distinctive entry to the administration as a author. Would he seize the prospect?

He instructed me he wouldn’t. He’s extra helpful to Vance at a distance, he mentioned. In any case, he isn’t searching for a political messiah. He desires the true factor.

This text seems within the March 2026 print version with the headline “Rod Dreher’s Demons.” Whenever you purchase a e-book utilizing a hyperlink on this web page, we obtain a fee. Thanks for supporting The Atlantic.