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44 THE CATHOLIC WORLD REPORT, April 2006 INTERVIEW Crunchy Cons in the Catholic Church The “crunchy con” ethos rejects consumerism and materialism and promotes a focus on family and the local community, giving echoes of the writings of Pope John Paul II and G.K. Chesterton. Interview by Ben Wiker Why don’t we begin with the rather arresting title. Give us a bit of an explanation. Rod Dreher: The title—it’s like a litany, isn’t it?—is meant to be funny. It’s sup- posed to pique the curiosity of potential buyers by giving them an intimation of the patchwork and even paradoxical quality of the crunchy con phenomenon. This thing, crunchy conservatism, is claimed by people whose sensibilities set up all kinds of penny-ante culture clashes. The “gun-loving organic gardener” really exists—she works for the National Rifle Association, but she also loves organic gardening, which she learned from, get this, her Communist parents in San Francisco. She told me that at one point in her life, she convert- ed to Christianity and ended up as a political conservative, but she didn’t see the need to give up organic gardening. It made sense for her. The “Birkenstocked Burkean”—well, that’s me. Birkenstock sandals are such a clichéd symbol of crunchy-granola lib- erals, and that’s why I refused to consid- er owning a pair when my wife suggest- ed I try them to help my aching feet. But when I finally did put a pair of those hippie shoes on, I found them to be the most comfortable shoes I’d ever worn. I might be a reader of Edmund Burke, the great English conservative, but I’m also a wearer of Birkenstocks. I kept finding people like this, folks who had something quirky about them that didn’t fit the stereotypical mold of “conservative.” I heard from a self-iden- tified crunchy con who says he’s a Buddhist, and he just wants to find somebody with whom he can discuss the virtues of George W. Bush over a bowl of dal. The evangelical free-range farmers— they’re real too, and make up the bulk of the chapter on food. I had always thought farmers interested in raising livestock in a free-range way—that is, not penned up or caged like industrial agriculture requires—were the kind of people who lived for the Peter, Paul, and Mary concerts at PBS pledge drive time. But right here in my own backyard in north Texas, I found these two evangeli- cal Christian families doing this kind of farming, while raising large families, and homeschooling them, not because they’re closet liberals, but because they are staunch conservatives who believe God has called them to live this way. I see that Catholics didn’t make it into the subtitle. Is the number of crunchy-con Catholics negligible? Dreher: Oh, I very much doubt that. In fact, the kind of people who are most likely to understand the book’s sensibili- ty are orthodox Catholics, as well as faithful Eastern Orthodox believers, because the entire metaphysical approach of the book is sacramental. I simply couldn’t figure out a way to shoe- horn Catholics into that already over- stuffed title. But Catholicism is at the base of this entire traditionalist phenom- enon I celebrate and explore. I say “tradi- tionalist” in the cultural and political sense, not in the strict sense used in the Church, meaning “Latin Mass-going Catholics.” I suspect many admirers of the traditional Mass fit into the crunchy con category, especially if they have large families, and are willing to live with the relative material poverty that bearing witness to the goodness of children requires in this culture. But I do want to be clear that the neo-traditionalism I advocate refers to the kind of political sensibility that Catholics like Russell Kirk wrote about in the 1950s and later. But this “political sensibility” does fit well with Catholic Granola-crunching conservatives? Environmentalist Republicans? Organic food-loving orthodox Catholics? Howling contradictions? No, argues Rod Dreher, such “crunchy conservatives” present, not a contradiction, but a Chestertonian paradox revealing deep, neglected truths about human nature and even our Catholic faith. And that means, not a new kind of conservatism, but recovering a very old one. CWR0406 Interview-PP 4/4/06 1:24 AM Page 44 THE CATHOLIC WORLD REPORT, April 2006 45 theological and social teaching. Dreher: Very well indeed. Kirk’s defini- tion of a conservative required a belief in God, in transcendental truth. We don’t have the right to make up all our social and political arrangements as we go along. He believed that culture mat- tered more than politics, and while he believed private property was the foun- dation of secular liberty, he was deeply skeptical of big business and commer- cial culture. I imagine that combination confuses many today who automatically associate political conservatism with complete, unambiguous affirmation of big business and commercial culture. What caused Kirk’s skepticism? Dreher: He feared—correctly, I think— that the kind of worship of the free mar- ket that we have in American culture corrodes virtue, and makes it hard to conserve many of the things worth con- serving in life. Kirk’s kind of traditional- ism does not condemn the market, cer- tainly, but it insists that our relationship to it should be rightly ordered, and that there are some very important things that would be harmed by the con- sumerist mentality. We have so given ourselves over to the culture of consumerism today, and the radical individualism that goes with that, that even the Right, which is most- ly libertarian today, has lost touch with its true conservative roots. John Paul II was only the most recent pope to warn about the soul-killing dangers of materi- alism. The West by and large ignored him, I’m afraid. But while Kirk’s kind of conservatism does fit well with Catholicism, you didn’t want to aim for only a Catholic audi- ence for your book, I assume. Dreher: I didn’t want to make Crunchy Cons an overtly Catholic book, because in truth, any serious orthodox religious believer, even an Orthodox Jew, will find a lot in the book to which he can relate. But because Catholicism and Orthodoxy are both sacramental, and profoundly incarnational, I think it’s fair to say that the book is saturated with the Catholic worldview. Even so, it does seem to me that Catholics should be especially interested in your book, since you appear to be hearkening back to the Distributist thought of Belloc and Chesterton, as well as to John Paul II’s con- cerns about consumerism and the environment. Dreher: Absolutely. The theoretical basis for Distributism is Catholic social teaching, and especially the view that the traditional family and its extension is the fundamental unit of society. And capitalism, as they understood it, undermined the traditional family? Dreher: Yes, and that is, in part, why Belloc and Chesterton suggested a kind of third way between pure capitalism, which concentrated the means of pro- duction in the hands of a few capitalists, and socialism, which concentrated the same in the hands of the state. Under the Distributist scheme, com- merce and economic activity would be spread as wide as possible. We’d have an economy made up primarily of small business owners, small farmers, arti- sans, and the like. This is the most humane way to run a society and an economy, and the way most likely to support the family and the community. It plays right into the Catholic concept of subsidiarity, which is the principle that social matters ought to be resolved at the lowest possible, or local, level, rather than at a high level of centralized authority, which is to say, of abstraction. What this all gets back to is a pro- found conviction about human nature, and how we can and should arrange our society to serve the best interests of the human person. I think we in the prosperous West fall into the temptation of thinking we live in the best of all pos- sible worlds, and that our wealth is a sign of our righteousness. But John Paul warned us time and time again that yielding to the material- ism of our consumer culture would, in time, destroy us. I was really struck by what the Holy Father had to say in Centesimus Annus, back in 1991, about how modern man regards the natural world. He said that we have come to live in a seriously disordered way, out of harmony with nature. John Paul wrote, “Man thinks that he can make arbitrary use of the earth, subjecting it without restraint to his will, as though it did not have its own requisites and a prior God- given purpose, which man can indeed develop but most not betray.” Of course the Church teaches that man himself has a prior God-given purpose, which we can develop but must not betray. An econo- my, and a way of thinking, that believes there is no such thing as human nature, and that whatever man wants man should have, is a betrayal of fundamental anthropological truth. Distributism is simply a way to provide man with the kind social and economic environment in which it is possible to live virtuous and free. Did your Catholic faith lead you to being a crunchy con, or was it the other way around? Dreher: Without a doubt it was practic- ing my faith that led me to this kind of conservatism. I was already a conserva- tive when I became a Catholic in 1993. I married in 1997, and Julie and I had our first child in 1999. I wouldn’t say that I sat down, read Catholic social teaching, and consciously altered my politics to fit the Church’s prescriptions. It was much more subtle than that. It’s something that grew organically, no pun intended, in our minds and in our hearts. You know, the thing about Catholicism is it’s so complex. Everything relates to every- thing else, and it’s impossible to reduce it to a series of propositions. But once you start living it out, you find that all these disparate parts start falling into place. That’s how it was with our faith and how it changed the way we thought about politics and culture. For example, when we married, we started doing Natural Family Planning. To do it right, or at all, you have to pay a lot more attention to the woman’s body and its rhythms. This means you have to start thinking about the way food affects the body, which in turn got us to thinking about food not simply as fuel, as ballast. We started to think about the quality of our food. Later, when Julie Author Rod Dreher, Crunchy Cons: How Birkenstocked Burkeans, gun- loving organic gardeners, evangelical free-range farmers, hip homeschooling mamas, right-wing nature lovers, and their diverse tribe of counter-cultural conservatives plan to save America (or least the Republican Party) New York: Crown Forum, 2006, 272 pp. COURTESYOF CROWN FORUMCWR0406 Interview-PP 4/4/06 1:24 AM Page 45 46 THE CATHOLIC WORLD REPORT, April 2006 had Matthew, she nursed him for a long time, which caused us to seek out health- ier food, and to prepare it at home. And that led you, a conserva- tive, right to the organic food market, where, so we are told, only political liberals hang out? Dreher: Yes! At that time, we were living in Brooklyn, and because we were keen on buying good food for ourselves and our child, had come to start getting our vegetables for most of the year through something called a CSA, for “community supported agri- culture,” co-op. They were organic, which was fine by me, but I liked them for the fresh-picked taste, and even bet- ter, I liked knowing that our consumer dollar was going to support farm fami- lies in rural New York who lived the agrarian lifestyle—and not to some anonymous factory farm. By that time, we’d come to love our little neighborhood, where we had to shop at the mom-and-pop stores. Because we had no car, like most people there we were dependent on the neigh- borhood merchants. But this was really great, because these merchants became our friends. We weren’t anonymous to them. Our transactions weren’t merely commercial. It began to dawn on us that the feeling of well being, of social bonds, of shared civic responsibility, that made our neighborhood such a great place to live was sustained in part by those commercial relationships with small merchants. You’re sounding suspiciously like G.K. Chesterton. Dreher: With good reason! We began to understand the wisdom of subsidiarity, of Distributism, and how the deeply American habit of thinking about com- mercial relations solely in terms of find- ing the cheapest price undermined civil society in subtle but definite ways. I could go on, but the larger point is, if you accept the Church’s metaphysics, which say life is sacramental, that we should strive for holiness in every aspect of our spiritual and material lives, then that principle will even- tually transform your life in ways you scarcely can anticipate. I am a conservative, yes, but I am a Christian first. You say in your book that the two main sins engendered by capitalism are greed and envy? Is it then impossible to embrace capitalism without in turn em- bracing these two deadly sins? Dreher: Yes indeed. I am a capitalist, in the sense that I believe in the free mar- ket. I don’t think it is sinful to want to improve one’s material condition. In fact, as the experience of socialism shows, enforced egalitarianism leads to poverty and tyranny. The challenge we now have is figuring out how to discipline our desires within a free, and free-market, society. E.F. Schumacher observed that it was the tragedy of Western economics that it was built on exploiting greed and envy. He’s right about that, but it only becomes a tragedy if we refuse to subordinate it to higher truths. The old Protestant bour- geois virtues of thrift, self-discipline, and delayed gratification helped build our extraordinary wealth. But as the Bible teaches, as does history, wealth and com- fort are inherently corrupting. It’s just a law of the universe, it seems. Adam Smith, the father of modern capitalism, taught that it could only work if the people it served were moral. There is nothing wrong with wanting to get ahead, but not at any cost. The love of money, as we know, is at the root of all evil—which is to say, the love of materi- al things and material pleasures. If we rein in our materialist impulses through virtue and devotion to holiness, there is no reason to fear prosperity. Yet I assume from the tenor of your book, that you think con- temporary Americans, perhaps, don’t fear prosperity enough— especially many of those who call themselves conservative Republicans? Dreher: I’m afraid not. For example, here in north Texas, Collin County, just north of Dallas, is one of the wealthiest counties in America. It is the most Republican county in Texas, by voter registration, which should tell you how conservative it is. And it has a big churchgoing population of Catholics and Protestants. And yet, the personal bankruptcy rate there is extraordinary. I talked to a divorce lawyer there who told me that his business is booming, and family financial problems are at the root of so much of it. Pastors told The Dallas Morning News that they’re look- ing out at their congregations and see- ing families, good people all, spending themselves into financial crisis in a des- perate effort to keep up with the Joneses. This materialism is destroying families, it’s hollowing out faith, and it’s producing an ever-building crisis. So, oddly, economic boom, but moral bust? Dreher: America’s economic boom is built on a consumer binge that’s being funded by overseas creditors. The per- sonal savings rate in America is nil. Sooner or later, we’re going to face a reckoning over our reckless ways. And when that crash comes, people are going to blame capitalism. It’s not capitalism that’s doing this to us. It’s capitalism divorced from morality. Taking up on that point, please explain your assertion that “man does not exist to serve the economy, but the economy exists to serve man.” Dreher: It’s amazing to see how in this culture we have come to think of the free market as a god whose inscrutable ways must be obeyed without question. Look, the free market has proved itself to be the most efficient and the most humane way of providing for human needs, and for human wants. But the desires it sat- Catholic high school students in Illinois take part in a recycling project sponsored by their school. KATHRYNNE SKONICKI/CATHOLIC EXPLORER/CNSOrganic produce for sale at store in Paris, where the organic ethos is catching on. PHOTOPQR/LE TELEGRAMME/CLAUDE PRIGENTCWR0406 Interview-PP 4/4/06 1:24 AM Page 46 THE CATHOLIC WORLD REPORT, April 2006 47 isfies are material, and we have it on good authority that man does not live by bread alone. We can’t lose sight of the fact that man is both physical and spiritual, and that the way we arrange our economic life must serve both his material and spiritual needs, as best as it can. The “market” is a mechanism to allocate goods and services that people actually want; it cannot tell us whether or not people should want them. And living for prosperity and the fulfillment of material desires somehow deforms us in more ways than we realize? Dreher: It can’t be denied that econom- ic arrangements shape our social and individual characters. If we allow the market economy to have laissez-faire power over our social arrangements, we make things that are important to an authentic human life—the stability of communities, the integrity of families, and the like—difficult to protect. For example, whenever somebody objects to, say, pornographic movies, it takes about two seconds to say, “But we’re just giving the people what they want.” And that is true. It makes perfect economic sense. But that desire, that wanting what they should not want, is corrupting, and it will corrupt the com- munity if it goes too far, which it has. But it is very hard to rein back in, because most people, it seems to me, have been convinced that fulfilling consumer desire is a sovereign right—and they have, by default, made serving the econ- omy the most important thing in their lives. How rare is it that you hear of any- body in our culture deciding to turn their back on something that could make them rich, for the sake of standing up for virtue, or for the sake of the community! You express concern about the “Wal-Marting” of America, especially in regard to the destruction of community and the family. What do you have in mind as an alternative? Dreher: Building local economies, as much as we are able, by patronizing small businesses, buying direct from small farmers, and so forth. Practice Distributism as you can. This is very hard to do, I’ll admit, but whenever we are given the opportunities to do so, we should take them. One big problem is that the kinds of Catholics and others who believe in the crunchy-con sensibility are probably struggling to live on one income, because the mom stays home, and they probably have more than the standard 2.1 children, which makes it even hard- er to make ends meet. So you have to become a bargain shopper. I’ve got no problem with that. We shop at Wal-Mart when we have to, because we’re living on one income in a small house, and we’re not made of money. I think it’s far more important to live so that mom can be home with the kids, even if that means shopping at Wal-Mart, rather than maintain an unreasonable sense of purity. Crunchy conservatism is not a dogma or an ide- ology, but a sensibility that recognizes real life is about trade-offs. Still, I hope people would start think- ing about how the way we use our con- sumer dollars really does have social consequences, and that they would shift, as much as is practicable, their resources to helping build small local businesses. We need to recover the older understanding of commerce as being about human relationships, not mechanical exchanges. As a general principle, we need to refuse bigness and abstractness in every way. We need to swim against the tide of the times, which encourages people to think of themselves as consumers first. To think of ourselves as consumers is just not human, and it’s certainly not Catholic. Let’s end with your “Crunchy Con 10-point Manifesto.” What two points do you think most important for Catholics to consider? Dreher: Probably, No. 8—“The relent- lessness of media-driven pop culture deadens our senses of authentic truth, beauty, and wisdom”—and No. 9, “We share Russell Kirk’s conviction that ‘the institution most essential to conserve is the family.’” If you put your family, and its protec- tion as well as its thriving, at the center of your politics, it will change the way you think, and shop, and live, and maybe even vote. All of us conserva- tives think of ourselves as having pro- family values. But that’s got to mean more than simply being pro-life. I’ve become a lot more “green” because hav- ing a child with asthma has made me think of the environment as a family- values issue. Julie and I can’t raise our boys in isolation; we need a strong social environment for them to grow up in. This puts us, as conservatives and Christians, in opposition to the libertar- ian crowd within conservative ranks. That’s fine. My faith and my family matter infinitely more to me than the Republican Party’s fortunes. Secondly, I’ve become convinced that the only way to live an authentically Christian life is to withdraw to a serious degree from popular culture, which propagandizes for lust, for greed, for envy and for selfishness. There are so many great books to read, so much great music to listen to, so many conver- sations to have with family and friends, so many meals to cook together and games to play. That’s what real life is about, not immersing ourselves in this corrupt and corrupting popular culture that deadens our sensibilities for the sake of selling us something. To hell with that! Choose life! In the end, crunchy conservatism is not about the search for a more authentic way to be conservative. It’s about the search for a more authentic way to be human. And for me, that means a more authentic way to be a follower of Christ the Lord. Fraternal support group for inactive priests who left the active ministry for worldly pursuits but whose hearts have turned and now desire to support the Holy Father and Magisterium. Our membership consists of spiritually wounded inactive brother priests. It also includes active priests, both those who are tempted to take the same unfortunate path and those who simply wish to help us in this apostolate. We extend fraternal help to each other in our struggle to live the life of grace and to love the Church. Retreats. STANDING WITH PETER PO Box 2230 • Brattleboro VT 05303 • cumpetro@adelphia.net CWR0406 Interview-PP 4/4/06 1:24 AM Page 47
