There are two narratives of the conservative Christian writer Rod Dreher that I hold in creative tension. One is that he is in touch with something deep in both himself and the culture that leads to insights that a secular liberal like me will always miss. From his first book, 2006’s Crunchy Cons, to his latest, this year’s Living in Wonder: Finding Mystery and Meaning in a Secular Age (Zondervan, 2024), he has been especially attuned—according to this narrative—to the ways that modernity and materialism corrupt our souls, selves, and societies. And he is able to articulate this corruption in a particularly evocative way because he metabolizes it within himself. Again and again, he is waylaid by his own frailty and imperfections, cast into despair by painful experiences he then exposes to the world through writing, bringing payloads of wisdom back from the depths. He is a real spiritual soldier, albeit of a faith to which I don’t subscribe.
The other narrative is that he’s a hot mess, a psychologically arrested person who keeps enacting versions of his primal trauma while persuading himself each time that he is going deeper into the truth. He keeps making idols of different ideas, people, or structures—his family, the Republican Party, the Catholic Church, small town America, Eastern Orthodoxy, Dante, Hungary, the wisdom of anti-communist dissidents, etc.—and when, one after another, each idol lets him down, he has a crisis. He gets depressed, questions everything, and loathes himself for his previous naiveté and delusions. At the point of despair where we’d hope he’d buckle down for the long, incremental work of genuine introspection and maturation, he instead flinches back from the pain, anesthetizing it once again with a big new epiphany, a shiny new idol. The whole drama begins anew.
Toward the end of the interview below, which we conducted via email, he gives me an almost perfect example of the kind of Dreherian psychodrama that can be so fruitfully interpreted via either narrative. I ask him to describe his “most recent encounter with the supernatural,” and in response he talks openly and with great vulnerability about his divorce, his recurring bouts of severe depression, his painful relationship with his late father, and his frequent thoughts of suicide. He connects that to a theory of demonic “infection,” of traumatic cracks in our psyche, that seems plausible if you grant that dark spirits exist in the world (which I don’t, but still). Then he talks about asking a spiritual mentor to pray over him in the hopes of cleansing a lingering spiritual infection. The man agrees, but the low-key exorcism doesn’t seem to work. The next morning, however, Dreher wakes to a new world.
“I was filled with lightness and energy,” he says. “It was as if a heavy wet woolen blanket that I had been wrapped in all my life was suddenly gone. It was like the black cloud that had been over my head for as long as I could remember had dissipated. And it felt like the veil between God and me had become almost transparent.”
Is this a real encounter with the divine, the kind of experience that surely happens to people if God is real? Or is it the kind of cheap epiphany that is always happening to a certain kind of psychologically damaged person? Is it somehow both at the same time?
I keep reading Dreher, book after book, year after year, because although much of the time I find him absurd and alarmist, I never doubt his desire to live thoughtfully and authentically in the world, and I never doubt that he’s in touch with interesting cultural vibrations, even if they may not be the ones he thinks they are. He may be prophetic, or he may be alarmist in ways that are revealingly symptomatic of larger cultural pathologies. He may be on to something big, or he may be utterly missing the point in ways that help us illuminate something big. Either way, the encounter is one I value.
Daniel Oppenheimer: What is the very brief elevator pitch for Living in Wonder? What is it about?
Rod Dreher: In modern times, we have lost a sense of “enchantment,” which is to say, the sense that God is not only real, but that He is everywhere present, and filling all things. This is the culmination of a long historical process, but it is a false view of reality—one that many Christians live by, even if they don’t realize it. How did this happen—and how can we reverse it? I explain both, and how pre-modern forms of Christianity show us the way back. There are real dangers of false forms of enchantment, namely: through the occult, through psychedelics, and through technology.
DO: You’re a believing, practicing Christian. Living in Wonder is written primarily for other Christians, including those who may have fallen somewhat away from the faith. It’s also very clear in its critique of certain New Agey, woo-ish practices that it sees as dangerous paths away from God. But is there a pitch to be made to potential readers from other faith traditions, the old school ones?
RD: I don’t know enough about Islam to say, but having read Abraham Joshua Heschel, I am certain that there is a way to re-enchantment for Jews too. But I don’t feel confident that I know enough to go in depth. The keys are a) belief that God is real, and that He wants a living relationship with us; and b) that opening ourselves up to a perceptible relationship with God depends on what we think, and what we do—that is, through practices of prayer, worship, and spiritual discipline. If Rabbi Heschel wasn’t enchanted by God, nobody is. He had a profound sense of mysticism, and of sacralizing everyday life—one that I have learned from as a Christian.
DO: I’ve now read every one of your books except Live Not By Lies (which I’ve skimmed). Do you see a direction to your journey, from Crunchy Cons in 2006 to Living in Wonder in 2024, and how would you briefly describe that direction or progression? How or toward what have you evolved, in other words?
RD: Ah, Live Not By Lies is by far my biggest seller! The through-line is a search for authenticity, which entails shedding false ways of being. Crunchy Cons is probably my least overtly religious book, but even it is grounded in religious commitment. I was a Catholic when I conceived and wrote it, and based it on how living out a traditional Catholic faith put me and people like me at odds with Republican Party orthodoxies. For example, I don’t see how any faithful Christian can possibly be as hostile to environmental conservation as many Republicans are. As I saw it then, and still do see it, a true conservative is one who seeks to live his life in harmony with what T.S. Eliot called “the permanent things”—eternal verities that may or may not coincide with political ideologies.
My next book, The Little Way of Ruthie Leming, was a memoir based on the life and death of my younger sister, who lived her life in our small Louisiana town. We were very different people. She returned after college, married her high school sweetheart, taught in the local public school, had kids and raised them in a house across the gravel road from our parents. I left and had a successful journalism career, mostly on the East Coast. But when she was struck down by cancer in her early forties, I saw through her cancer fight the deep value of what I had left behind in a small town, including closeness to family. My wife and I decided at her funeral that we should leave Philadelphia and move to this town to raise our kids around their family, and to enjoy the blessings that Ruthie had.
But we discovered after moving that my family had a hidden secret: they would never accept us, because to them, we were “city people” who were not to be trusted; because to them, we were too different. This absolutely shattered me, but I ended the book with the hope that we could work through our differences, in love.
How Dante Can Save Your Life is pretty much a book of literary self-help, in a Christian vein. The shocking rejection of me by my Louisiana family caused me to fall chronically ill with mononucleosis. I had it for over three years, and it was caused (said my rheumatologist) by deep anxiety over my family situation. In the middle of that dark wood, Dante’s Divine Comedy fell into my lap, and I read it like a map that might lead me out of my personal dark wood. The book led me on a deep pilgrimage into the depths of my heart, and revealed things I had done that set me up for that great fall. I found healing once I realized that I had made idols of family and place—and especially of my father, who embodied both. He and I found reconciliation shortly before he died, in large part because of the things I learned from Dante.
Then, in 2017, I published The Benedict Option. I had been thinking about it for many years. It was my response—at least my first response—to the profound civilizational crisis we are now in. Specifically, I see that we are in an age of massive civilizational transformation, including the loss of the Christian faith as the basis for Western civilization. With the philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre, I see the loss of a shared sense of meaning as the core of the disintegration of the West. I do not believe there is a political solution to this crisis. To me, the most important thing is to preserve the faith through this storm. I based the book on the model given by the early Benedictine monks, who without meaning to hit on a formula for building resilient communities of faith able to weather the chaos and violence of the early medieval period (the “Dark Ages”), and suggested ways that we lay Christians in the twenty-first century can adapt them to our own lives.
In 2020, I published Live Not By Lies, a guide to resisting the “soft totalitarianism” I see overtaking our societies and civilization. I was tipped off to this first by men and women who fled West to escape Soviet communism during the Cold War, and who now sensed a version of what they left behind emerging in the West. Through interviews with them and deep reading, I both explain how this new form of totalitarianism is more like Huxley’s Brave New World than Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, and the kind of practices Christians need to adopt to hold on to the true faith, even amid persecution. By happenstance, this book appeared in September 2020, six months or so into the COVID-19 pandemic, and after the violent period following George Floyd’s killing, which caused an ideological backlash that became markedly totalitarian in its thinking and practices. The book received virtually no media attention, but sold 200,000 copies in the U.S., mostly through word of mouth.
This new form of totalitarianism is more like Huxley’s Brave New World than Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four.
My new book, Living In Wonder, is more hopeful. In it I talk about the same issues of civilizational collapse, particularly the abandonment of Christian faith, and identify “disenchantment”—that is, the loss of a numinous sense, and the capacity for awe—as the main driver of this process. In the book, I talk about how we lost the mystical heart of the Christian faith, and how we might get it back. I also write about what I consider to be false forms of enchantment that are becoming very popular: the occult, psychedelic drugs, and various forms of technology.
Again, the connecting theme is a search for living in truth, not comfort, and building the kind of life that is worth living. A strong secondary theme is responding to the disintegration of Western civilization, the meaning crisis, and how to preserve Christianity amid the destructive forces of what Zygmunt Bauman calls “liquid modernity.” In Orthodox Christianity, to which I converted in 2006, we believe that the proper goal of all human life is “theosis”—achieving ultimate unity with God, not just in an intellectual sense, but in mind, body, and spirit. Living In Wonder is the book of mine that most directly addresses theosis, but really, the search for theosis is there in all of my books.
DO: You seem to me to be a figure of fascination on the left. There’s the nasty version of it (e.g. the Chapo Trap House guys have an eight-hour supercut on YouTube of them just ragging on you), and there’s a more sympathetic version of it (e.g. two long profiles of you in The New Yorker), and everything in between. Does this seem right to you, that you fascinate the left? And if so, why? What’s your theory?
RD: Crazy, isn’t it? My guess is that I am a bone in their collective throat. I am a right-winger who is the worst kind of right-winger: a religious conservative. And yet, I don’t seem like their preferred caricature. I actually seem to like people, and enjoy life. They hate that. Plus, I am sincere, which is anathema to the ironic contempt they have for most everything. The sympathetic lefties recognize in me, I think, that I am a flawed human being who wears his heart on his sleeve, and who is searching for something real. They also share that quest for authenticity, and at least respect that in me, or so I surmise. I don’t spend a lot of time thinking about it, to be honest. I try to take people as they come. I would a thousand times rather spend an afternoon drinking beer with a liberal atheist who tries to live not as an ideologue, but a fellow human being trying to make sense of this wild, wonderful, tragic, mysterious condition into which we have all been thrown, than I would hanging out with somebody who shared most of my political and religious views, but was an ideologue about it. I’m drawn to people who experience life as a poem, not as a syllogism.
DO: How do you decide how seriously to take someone else’s story about encountering the supernatural (or whatever word you want to use to describe it)? Some of the people you talked about meeting sounded, from your description, like pretty grounded people. I imagine that I’d be inclined to take them seriously, even if I, as a secular type, found it hard to accept some of their truth claims. But other people you talk about meeting sound deeply unstable to me. I’d be much more inclined to treat their stories with extreme skepticism. And then other people you mention in the book, you don’t really know at all. You just met them briefly and had a conversation. What distinctions do you make? It can’t all be true, right? I meet people all the time who believe crazy shit. Surely there are some people who believe they’re following the Christian path who are too psychologically unhealthy to perceive the divine clearly. There are so many people out there who have bizarre theories of the world, most of which are wrong. Surely some of those people think of themselves as Christians, but are still profoundly misguided. Or am I thinking about it wrong?
RD: Well, it’s a matter of faith, isn’t it? I don’t mean that glibly. I did meet with people who shared with me their stories, but something about them didn’t ring true. It wasn’t that I thought they were lying to me, but that they had probably been deceived, or were deceiving themselves. Those people didn’t go into the book. Nor did the fullness of our conversations make it into the book—the kinds of details that helped me figure out whether or not to trust them. In the end, though, I had to make a guess. I am not a materialist. I believe that crazy-sounding things can and do happen to people. Most of the people I met and talked to are people who were vouched for by others I know, who made the introduction, and who judged their stories to be sound.
I think you are right to be generally skeptical of these things. I once had a friend who believed God communicated with him every day, and told him what to do. This was a highly educated man who I came to believe was a very kind and gentle soul, but who had no sense at all of skepticism and discernment. After some time, I came to believe that he unconsciously baptized (so to speak) the things he wanted to do. That is, he followed his desires, and convinced himself that God had led him to accept or to do this or that. He made some pretty big mistakes, too. I’ve been a practicing Christian for over thirty years, and I like to think that I have a pretty good sense for when people are lying to me, or lying to themselves, about this stuff. But again, I’m probably wrong about some of these people.
The thing is, I’m not just guessing. I try to apply principles of discernment. But I also accept that some of the stories I tell will strike some readers as impossible to believe. That’s fine. We are not talking here about science. A lot of it is intuition. The thing is, some of my friends are such hardcore skeptics about spiritual and numinous experiences that they contort themselves into knots trying to find materialist explanations for certain things. These skeptics strike me as having an inverse kind of “faith.”
I’m drawn to people who experience life as a poem, not as a syllogism.
In my own life, whenever something numinous or seemingly spiritual happens to me, I always question it at first, because there is more risk in believing that a false spiritual experience is true than in rejecting a true spiritual experience as false. But you know, there are cases—I mention two in my book, involving public people who told these stories on themselves—in which individuals had jaw-dropping experiences of the numinous, but who rejected them because they knew that to affirm them would mean that they would have to change their lives in ways they did not want to do.
I am deeply fascinated by how we know what we know. I am haunted by how all-in I was for the Iraq War in 2002 and 2003, truly convinced by authorities I trusted, and my own conscience, that the war was necessary and just. It was only later that I had the painful realization that as someone who had watched the south tower of the World Trade Center fall with my own eyes, and who lived through that excruciating autumn of 2001 in New York City, I really just wanted to see some Muslim SOBs suffer like we had all been made to suffer. That was deeply immoral and dishonorable, and had I recognized that in myself in the march-up to the war, I never would have supported it. But I cloaked my low motives in high-mindedness. The thing is, I honest to God believed that I was right and the war’s opponents were wrong—either fools, cowards, or both. This was an extremely painful lesson to learn. It humiliated me intellectually, but I like to think it gave me more humility than I had before.
DO: Help me reconcile two versions of you that I feel that I encounter as a reader. One of them is the author of your books. I disagree deeply with his political beliefs, and I think his perceptions of the state of the world are astoundingly alarmist, but he seems like a gentle, thoughtful soul who is able to be deeply respectful of the beliefs of others, even if they’re living lives he believes to be profane in some important way (I’m thinking, for example, of your friendship with Andrew Sullivan). The other Rod Dreher is the guy on Twitter, and often on your blog. That guy seems comfortable mocking people on the other side, affirming sentiments from really disgusting people if they’re broadly aligned with you politically, and acting as though he’s girding for war. This Rod Dreher seems not so thoughtful, not so respectful of the beliefs and intentions of people who disagree with him, and not so gentle. One Rod, in other words, comes across as a good Christian, the other not so much. Help me reconcile these two Rod Drehers, or tell me why I’m perceiving you incorrectly.
RD: Well, I’m a complicated person. Sometimes a sweetheart, and sometimes an asshole. Like most people, I guess. You know that old Warner Brothers cartoon that features the wolf and the sheepdog punching in the time clock to start their day doing combat with each other, and then at the end of the day, they stop fighting, punch out, and depart as friends? I’m kind of like that. Andrew and I strongly disagree about some issues—sexuality mostly—but I like and respect him as someone who is genuine, and who has a big heart. I think he is wildly wrong about some things, but I learned something about him from the late David Kuo, the Bush White House official who died of brain cancer. David was a conservative evangelical who worked in a Republican administration, but when he was wracked with nausea and convulsive vomiting from his chemotherapy, Andrew, who didn’t know David personally, heard about this through Washington friends, and sent him over some pot to smoke to relieve his symptoms. Think about what kind of courage it took on Andrew’s part to take that chance to show mercy to a suffering man who was not an ideological ally. David told me that story himself before he died, and talked about how much that meant to him. That told me something about Andrew Sullivan’s character that you wouldn’t necessarily see if you judged him only by what he writes.
We live in a deeply stupid, destructive, and malicious age, and I don’t feel bound by my Christian faith to pull punches all the time. Do I go too far at times? No doubt. Don’t we all? I try to be quick to apologize if someone tells me I’ve crossed the line, and I agree with them. But these lunatics who, for example, are trying to force us to consent to, say, the sexual mutilation of children in the name of advancing transgender rights—I don’t feel obliged to treat them with kid gloves.
I guess you’re talking about Donald Trump, a man I neither like nor respect, but who I supported for president this year. I believe that the other side is so far gone in doing things that I believe are both bad, and in some cases, evil, that I concluded that I couldn’t stay on the sidelines for the sake of not getting my hands dirty. Kamala Harris has made common cause this year with Dick Cheney, a highly respected member of the establishment who is also a chief architect of the catastrophic Iraq and Afghanistan wars. Give me the short-fingered vulgarian any day over the clubbable warmonger Cheney! Though in the end, if I found myself at the bar with Dick Cheney, I could have a beer with him and talk to him. I would be curious to know more about how he sees the world.
The priest, in my view, was a moral and theological conservative, but also a coward. He wanted to be seen by his congregation as a nice guy.
One thing I really hate about our therapeutic age is how the compulsion to be nice has disarmed our moral instincts. Look, I was raised in the South, where many of us have an almost Japanese compulsion to maintain social harmony. I don’t like conflict, believe it or not. But I believe that Flannery O’Connor, one of my favorite writers, was onto an important truth when she said “tenderness leads to the gas chamber.” O’Connor certainly was not against tenderness itself. What she objected to was the sentimental posture that said tenderness is the only virtue. Tenderness has allowed Canada to accept euthanasia, which has led to the self-murder of seventy thousand people by now. Tenderness towards children suffering from gender dysphoria has led to thousands of children being permanently mutilated, sexually, by well-meaning parents and physicians who want to relieve their suffering at any cost. Tenderness towards so-called “vulnerable minorities” has created a soft-totalitarian society in which we cannot speak the truth about some things, on the grounds that to do so could cause someone to feel hurt, excluded, and whatnot.
I don’t think this is license to be cruel, and I regret the occasions on which I have gone too far. It’s a professional hazard in the age of social media. But I think about the priest I once met who refused to help his congregation figure out how to deal with transgenderism and children, because, as he told me, “I don’t want politics in this church!” Well, yeah, I don’t think politics belongs in church either, in most cases, but this isn’t a political issue, or at least it’s not only a political issue. The priest, in my view, was a moral and theological conservative, but also a coward. He wanted to be seen by his congregation as a nice guy. I get it—no normal person actually wants to be hated—but in his case, I believe he was a coward. His tenderness might well end up leading some family in his church to make terrible mistakes with their suffering child. I find that hard to take.
Anyway, I know that you’re onto something with that question, because from time to time I’ll meet a left-winger at a social event, and get to talking to them, and they’ll say something like, “I thought you would be angrier than you are.” I have a preternatural ability to compartmentalize, I guess. In the end, I want to punch the clock and go to the bar and hang out and listen to music and tell stories. The liberals I’m closest to are like that too. We don’t agree with each other, but we also believe that there are more important things in life than politics.
DO: Imagine yourself forward to, say, 2054. You’re eighty-seven. What if America is more or less how I expect it to be, which is not that different from 2024? Some social trends will look better, some will look worse. The left will have some new crazy ideas about human nature and society that the mainstream institutions take too seriously, and the right will still be trying to demonize others who are different while mostly trying to cut taxes for rich people, but overall the level of social and political stability and economic prosperity looks decent from the perspective of 2024. Does that falsify your current sense of where things are headed? What if it’s even a little better in thirty years? Families are having more kids. Marriage rates are up slightly. More Americans are going to church every Sunday. There’s a bit less economic inequality and less addiction? Et cetera. How does that scenario influence your perspective on things? Would it suggest, looking back, that you’re wrong about some important things in 2024?
RD: Well, look, I certainly hope I am wrong about things. I don’t think I am, but it would be fantastic to reach the end of my life and to realize that I had been too alarmist. I don’t actually want these awful things to happen! I have adult kids, and I hope one day to have grandkids. I want the world to be good for them. But I just don’t see it happening, based on current trends, and my reading of history. I believe that we are like the people in the title of historian Edward Watts’s book The Final Pagan Generation. It’s about the Roman pagan elites of the fourth century, the century when the empire became Christian. Watts makes a case that these elites were complacent and lacked imagination; they thought things would come right again if only they stayed quiet and waited the Christians out. I fear that’s us Christians today—and not just us Christians, but all of us (like you, it sounds) who think that we are bound to just muddle through.
Living in Hungary, I dwell among a people who entered the twentieth century with high hopes. They have what might be the most beautiful parliament building in the world, absent Westminster. They built it at the turn of the twentieth century, when Austria-Hungary was riding high, and Budapest was booming economically and culturally. And then came World War I, the settlement of which cut away two-thirds of their national territory. And then came the political and economic tumult of the interwar years, World War II, Nazi occupation, the Holocaust, and the Siege of Budapest (which destroyed or severely damaged 80 percent of the capital). After that, they had forty years of Soviet occupation and communist dictatorship. That was their twentieth century. I look at that gorgeous parliament building on the banks of the Danube and see it as a monument to tragedy. One of the great things about us Americans is by contrast to the peoples of Eastern Europe, we have so much energetic optimism. But that is also our liability: we have no sense of tragedy to bound our hopes.
Several of the reviews of Living In Wonder have noted that Dreher has an uncanny ability to sense what people are about to be talking about in a given cultural moment. If that’s true—and the sales of my last two books suggest that there’s something to that—then it’s because I try to think deeply about the currents of culture and history, and to draw conclusions. A pastor from Portland, Oreg., approached me backstage at an event in Nashville in 2020. He told me that when he read The Benedict Option three years earlier, he thought I was an alarmist. Now, he said, he knows I was prophetic, based on what they’re living through as Christians in that militantly progressive city. Maybe having been so shattered intellectually by my complete confidence in the Iraq War, and in America’s victory, in the victory of liberal democracy, and all that End of History nonsense, has made me a lot less willing to credit the blind optimism that we Americans take in with our mother’s milk.
In the end, I think the most dangerous thing facing humanity is the surrender of our humanity to technology, specifically to AI. I don’t see anything in either the Left or the Right prepared to resist this. Most of us are devotees of the cult of Progress, and to the idolatrous belief that we are our own gods. I believe that the Holocaust was the most important event in modern times, and one of the most important events in all of human history. Why? Because the most technologically and culturally advanced nation on earth surrendered to utter barbarism, and put all its scientific might to work building a factory for the mass murder of the Jewish people, and others it found unworthy of life. There was nothing uniquely evil about the Germans. I believe that any people on earth could do that, given the right circumstances. This is human nature.
If we lose the insight of the Bible—the Hebrew Bible and its Christian addition—that tells us that we are made in the image of God (and thus possess inviolable dignity), and that we are fallen, capable of all kinds of sinful behavior, then what is to stop us from creating tomorrow’s Holocausts? The Germans had Christianity as their ancestral legacy, and they still did it! What will stop us when the Bible as the authoritative myth that told us who we are, and what we are supposed to do, has been forgotten by most people? When Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and Jesus of Nazareth and St. Paul, have gone the way of the Roman gods? That is what I fear we are facing. In his final interview before death, Martin Heidegger was so pessimistic about humanity’s ability to manage the destructive potential of its technology that he said, despairingly, “Only a god can save us.” What do we do when the only god we obey is the one in the mirror?
DO: Can you describe your most recent encounter with the supernatural? And I don’t mean a general feeling of enchantment or communion with the divine—I’m thinking more in the realm of spirits, demons, etc.
RD: Yes, it happened only a few weeks ago. As my readers know, my marriage collapsed in 2012, under the pressure from my chronic illness, and my Louisiana family rejecting me and my wife. I gutted it out for a decade, as did my ex-wife, for the sake of the kids. In 2022, though, she surprised me with a divorce filing while I was out of the country. There’s never a good time to learn that your life has been blown apart by divorce, but while out of the country, and never having once discussed divorce—that was especially hard. There was no infidelity or anything like that. These things just happen sometimes, though I never imagined that it would happen to a nice, conservative, religious couple like us.
I had been struggling with depression since 2012, because the thing I had wanted more than anything—a happy marriage—had suddenly turned irreparably bad. Nothing worked to fix it. I was extremely lonely and struggled to hang on to a shred of hope. And then came divorce.
I thought about suicide, almost compulsively. To be very clear, I was never at risk of suicide. I am a Christian, and believe it would be a very great sin. Plus, I love my kids too much to do that to them. Nevertheless, I often thought about my own death, as a way to relieve the hopelessness of my situation. I could not shake this stuff, and these deep feelings of unworthiness. People ask me all the time, “How do you write as much as you do?” The answer is that when you see a drowning man struggling to keep from going under, you don’t ask him why he is flailing his arms so much. That’s a little histrionic, but it’s not far from the mark. Everything I’ve written since 2012, from my books to blog posts to Substack entries—at least five a week for the past four years—has been produced under a dark cloud of depression.
About six weeks ago, in prayer, I had an intuition. I have always struggled with shame, with a deep and abiding feeling that I’m not good enough. It comes from childhood, from my desperation to make my father happy. Daddy was a good father in most respects, even tender and loving. But he was a proud man, and a country man. He loved hunting and athletics, but his only son—indeed his namesake—had a tender heart towards animals, and was awful at sports. I also had high emotional intelligence, and knew that deep down, I was a disappointment to my father, the one person I wanted to be proud of me more than anybody else in the world.
We began to fight when I became a teenager, and were never as close again as we had been when I was a boy. Still, we loved each other, and I greatly respected him. As I wrote in my Dante book, it was only after I had been nearly destroyed by his rejection when I brought my wife and kids back to live near him, out of love and filial duty, that I finally faced the fact that I had made an idol of him, and the idea of family. Renouncing that, in a sacramental confession, brought me a lot of healing. But there was still a lot left to do.
Anyway, all the research I did for Living In Wonder about exorcism and the work of exorcists taught me that sometimes, evil spirits latch onto traumatic breaks in the psyche to exacerbate the wound, and to convince the person that their case is hopeless, they are worthless, and life is not worth living. I wondered if there might be some evil spirit harassing me. As crazy as it sounded, I knew from the testimonies of exorcists, and from a friend who had been possessed, that this actually happens. To be clear, it is not the case that mental illness is always of demonic origin. I think that is rare, actually. It is more commonly the case, my research showed, that demons can take advantage of the psychic wounds we carry, and attach themselves to us like spiritual infections that will never heal.
I was in Chicago in September for a religious conference, and saw my confessor there. He is an Orthodox priest who is also a trained exorcist. I shared my concerns with him, and asked him if he wouldn’t mind praying over me to cast away any dark spirits that might be harassing me—in particular, a spirit of shame. He prayed over me for twenty minutes. I felt nothing.
But the next morning, I woke up in a different world. I was filled with lightness and energy. It was as if a heavy wet woolen blanket that I had been wrapped in all my life was suddenly gone. It was like the black cloud that had been over my head for as long as I could remember had dissipated. And it felt like the veil between God and me had become almost transparent.
People ask me all the time, “How do you write as much as you do?” The answer is that when you see a drowning man struggling to keep from going under, you don’t ask him why he is flailing his arms so much.
That was six weeks ago as we talk now, and it is still holding. I can’t explain it, except to say that yeah, I really do believe that I was tormented by dark spirits. Not possessed—that’s very rare—but somehow afflicted by them, and their lies. I haven’t had a single thought of suicide, or even self-hatred, since that night in Chicago. This was all so personal that I thought for a while I had better not say anything to anybody. But then I realized that God had delivered me from a painful heaviness that I had carried with me for all my adult life—that the exorcist’s prayers had done for me in twenty minutes what years of therapy had not done, and strangely enough, what my own prayers for myself had not been able to do. Why? I don’t know, but I can testify that this really happened to me. The Holy Spirit really gave me this gift, through the prayers of a priest. Maybe somebody else can benefit from my story.
DO: Who keeps you honest? You’re putting yourself out there as a spiritual leader of some kind, and I would think there are all sorts of risks to that—pride, grandiosity, approval-seeking. Do you worry at all about that, and if so, what do you do, or who do you rely on, to make sure you’re on the right path?
RD: Me, a spiritual leader? I hate that you put it that way. If I’m any kind of leader, it’s only as a beggar showing the other beggars where to find the bread. I try to be as open as I can about my own faults, so people know that I’m not holding myself out there as any kind of model. If I tell you any good thing in me is only because of Christ, it’s going to sound like pious hokum, but it’s actually true. At least I believe it is. My friends know that I find public speaking and being in public really hard. I just did a short and undemanding book tour in the U.S., and came back to Budapest exhausted. I fell into bed and slept for 14 hours. And then slept about the same the next day. I don’t like being in the public eye, which is a very weird thing for a bestselling writer to say. If I could write under a pseudonym and never go on TV, I would. I’m weird that way. Nevertheless, the only thing I know how to do is to write. This is my vocation, so I want to do it well. I would like to tell you that I have a gift of humility, but in truth, it’s not that. It’s neurotic self-doubt. Maybe the prayer in Chicago healed the bad side of that, and I can actually find my way to being virtuously humble, as opposed to a head case. Besides, I’ve seen three things I put a lot of faith in fall to pieces in my life: organized conservatism, with Iraq and the 2008 Wall Street crash; the Catholic Church, which I left in 2005, spiritually wrecked by the scandal; and my Louisiana family, which I idolized. I sometimes wonder if I had never led my wife and kids back there, if I would still be married today. I tell you all this to know that I believe I have a strong sense of my own limitations, though God knows there are probably more humiliations ahead of me, more loss of pride. If that’s what it takes to save my soul, then so be it.
I cannot begin to express how painful the slow loss of my Catholic faith was between 2002 and 2005. It was like having the flesh stripped off of me, stripe by stripe. And yet, it was a severe mercy. I had been so intellectually arrogant as a Catholic. This was on me, not on the Church. I had been so sure that as long as I had all the reasons and arguments clear in my head, that my faith was safe in an unbreachable citadel. But I was wrong. I learned in an excruciating way that the Psalmist was right when he said that God desires a broken and contrite heart. If that’s so, I must be one of his favorites, because after the last dozen years or so, I sure do specialize in cultivating a broken heart. Again, though, if that’s what it takes to save my soul, then I thank God for bringing me to my knees. That’s a hard thing to say, and to mean, but I do. I would trade all my success as a writer to have never gone through the events of 2012 that caused the collapse of my marriage, but life can only be lived forward. And life is tragic—but tragedy can be redeemed. That’s the Christian story, isn’t it? Alasdair MacIntyre, the philosopher, said that we can only know what we are supposed to do when we first know of which story we are a part. Well, that’s my story, and I’m sticking to it. What else is there?