[00:00:00] Speaker A: There's a certain kind of man or woman to whom beauty converts or it breaks the waves. It becomes this sort of ice ax that chops through the hardness and the coldness and warms the heart and draws it to the Lord. That awakening, that desire, that eros. I'm not talking about sexual eros, but just the desire within people for something. And that something was the Lord.
[00:00:29] Speaker B: Welcome to X Skeptic, where we hear unlikely stories of belief. I'm your host, Jana Harmon. And here we explore the remarkable stories of those who were once atheists or skeptics, but who became Christian against all odds. In each episode, we dive into their journeys. We see how they wrestled with life's biggest questions and what led them to find faith in God. You can discover over 100 of these amazing stories on our
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Have you ever felt that lingering sense of wanting something more? Something beyond the familiar routines of life or even religion? We often settle into what seems safe or known. Yet deep down, we remain restless and unsatisfied, thinking perhaps there's something more waiting to be uncovered about God, about ourselves, about the world we live in. In today's episode, we're joined by Rod Dreher, an acclaimed author and thinker who has wrestled deeply with ideas and faith and the search for meaning. After stepping away from a cultural form of Christianity and embracing agnosticism, Rod had extraordinary encounters with the transcendent that rekindled his nearly dormant faith. Today he shares how he moved from doubt to. To wonder, from skepticism to a vibrant relationship with God. His journey invites us all to open ourselves to the possibility of something more. I hope you'll come along to hear his story.
Welcome to Ex Skeptic Broad. It's so great for you to be with me today.
[00:02:10] Speaker A: It's great to be here. From this late afternoon in Central Europe. The sun's going down any second now and it's only 3:10.
[00:02:19] Speaker B: Wow. Yes. And it's morning here in Atlanta, Georgia. So we are on opposite ends of the day. So I appreciate you joining me from across the world.
As we're getting started, Rod, I'd love for you to introduce yourself, tell us a bit about your wonderful history as a writer, author, thinker.
[00:02:38] Speaker A: Well, I'm 57 years old. I live here in Budapest on the Danube river, capital of Hungary. And kind of funny that I would find myself here at this point in my life, but this is where I am and I do my work at an institute called the Danube Institute, a think tank I started out though, in South Louisiana. I'm from a small town called St. Francisville on the Mississippi river, but always had a bug to travel and see the world. Became a journalist, worked in Washington, New York, Miami, Dallas, Philly. Moved back to Louisiana for a while and, and here I am now in Budapest.
I've been an opinion journalist for all my career. Went to as a film critic at the New York Post, but then went into pure opinion journalism at National Review, the Dallas Morning News, then at the American Conservative for a long time. But I also write books. I'm best known probably for the Benedict Option. A book about how to live as a Christian in a Post Christian world. Came out in 2017. It's in 11 languages now. Followed that up in 2020 with a book called Live not by Lies, which was about how Christians who came to the US from the Soviet bloc during the communist period were starting to see in our country what sort of the some of the same things that they had run away from. And they were explaining why they believe that the US Was going in a totalitarian direction and also gave advice for how we can resist it as believers. And finally, I just have a new book out about a month ago from Zondervan called Living in Wonder. It's about Christian re. Enchantment. And I know we'll get into that, some of that more because this has a lot to do with how I found my own faith in Christ.
[00:04:25] Speaker B: Yes. And I have it right here. It's a beautiful, not only a beautiful book, but it's a beautiful cover as well. Kudos for you. Thank you to you for that. It's really gorgeous and the content is, is wonderful too. And I'm so glad we're going to talk a little bit about that as we investigate your story. You're sitting here as someone who has dealt with some skepticism in your life and but had come to a place of very strong and fully orbed belief and you live in wonder. So I would, I'll, I'll be looking forward to get in, getting into some of the content of your book as we go. But let's start with your story. Rod, you said that you are from a small town in Louisiana. Take us back there and talk to us about what your, your childhood look like, especially with regard to your family and your faith.
[00:05:14] Speaker A: You know, this was really important, I think, because I think my experience has been the experience of a lot of people of my generation. I think I was raised in a family, a happy family out in the countryside in Louisiana. We were Methodist, but we weren't big churchgoers. We were Easter and Christmas Methodist. And you know, every now and again we would go to church. But my family didn't seem to think that we needed church because we believed in God, right? We can communicate with God wherever he is.
And that's how I was raised. And this is why I was so weak in my faith later on. I remember when I got to be a teenager, like 15 or so, I became really skeptical, like a lot of teenagers are. And the, the church didn't have any answers for me. And you know, this is a sweet little church, but I, with good people in it, but I just wanted more. And I remember thinking with disdain that this is basically just the southern white middle class at prayer. You know, it's all about social conformity and being nice. And I thought the only options for me as a Christian were that or Jimmy Swaggart, the TV evangelist was really, he was a big deal back in.
[00:06:30] Speaker B: The 80s, you're right, he sure was. He was.
[00:06:34] Speaker A: This was like, if I'm 15, that means, gosh, I'm a journalist, I can't do the math. It was around 1981, 82. And so I just walked away from faith. It was never a conscious decision. I do not believe.
But it was effectively that, because it just seemed that Christianity had no power. You know, the only power it had was what I thought was anti intellectual and fanatical, the TV evangelist stuff. So I thought, well, I guess I'm just not going to believe. But, you know, I ended up going off to a boarding school in Louisiana. For my last two years it was a public boarding school for gifted kids, one of the first of its kind in the nation. And I remember even when I was there and I was at my farthest point from God, I would always fall asleep at night saying the Lord's Prayer, the Our Father, because I did not want to lose that last little connection because you never know. And during that time I was super interested in questions of meaning, of spirituality. Even though I wasn't a Christian. I just wanted to know more because I sensed somehow there must be more to life than consumerism, materialism, but I didn't know how to find it.
[00:07:41] Speaker B: Yeah, that's, that's pretty amazing. So you grew up in this culturally Christian presumption that God exists and, but it seemed to me that through your experience of the church, what, what little there was, it didn't provide the substance that you were looking for. It sounds like both intellectually and with regard to those bigger questions of meaning did it sounds like you weren't actively engaged other than on those special occasions.
Did you, did you have people in your life? Were there Christians in your life other than what you saw on the televant, you know, the televangelists, or are those kind of nice social Christians at church? Did you have anyone that seemed to embody something different in your life? Or was it just those two reference points?
[00:08:35] Speaker A: No, it was just those two reference points. You know, the philosopher Sren Kierkegaard, the 19th century Danish philosopher, said that when everybody is a Christian by virtue of being born into a Christian society, then Christianity pretty much ceases to exist. Now what he meant by that was that Christianity is a choice. It is a personal relationship with Jesus Christ. But if you think it just, it's something that you become part of just because you were born into a society, it may function as a vaccination against that choice. And that's what happened to me. You know, I feel almost guilty criticizing the good people in my church and in my family, but they just never stopped to consider, at least none I met to consider, what it really meant to be a Christian. It was just all about psychological comfort. Being part of the community. And I remember in particular asking questions was frowned upon. It wasn't so much that it was anti intellectual as it was just that's just not what we do here. We're not here for that. Christianity was just such a social thing and it wouldn't have occurred to most people there to question their Christianity because it had been handed down to them and they were going to hand it down to their kids and everybody was going to be happy and nothing was going to change. This, by the way, is what has set up our country for such a crisis of faith in the subsequent generations. Because it was really impossible in the 70s growing up there to encounter an atheist. This was long before the Internet. I remember. You and I are old enough to remember Madeline Murray O'Hare. She was the head of American Atheist. That woman, she was like a witch, you know, look, look, a witch. If she got on tv, it was just unthinkable. The world that my mom and dad grew up in and raised us in just does not exist anymore. It started to go away with cable TV and with the Internet. It is gone. And just social Christianity of the sort in which I was raised is nowhere near enough for people. If we're not raising our kids now, this is me on my soapbox. But if we're not raising our kids now, to be affirmatively and counterculturally Christian, then we're going to lose them to the world of materialism and everything that follows.
And this is one of the lessons of my childhood, frankly.
[00:11:03] Speaker B: So as you were walking away from Christianity because it wasn't providing what you thought it should or what you were looking for, or they weren't answered, answering the questions, what were you walking toward? Did you have any idea of what that was?
[00:11:18] Speaker A: No, no, nothing at all.
I was just curious, you know. I was really. When I went to this boarding school for the gifted kids, it really opened me up intellectually to the world beyond our small town in every positive way. I was encountering new books, new ideas, and I didn't, I wasn't afraid. In fact, I was curious. It whetted my curiosity more. But the turning point for me came when I was 17 years old. I was totally in love with Paris and European culture. When I was a really small boy, I had these two elderly aunts who lived in a cabin out there in the country in pecan orchard. And they were so old, I called them my aunts, but they were actually the aunts of my grandmother. That's how old they were. They had been Red Cross nurses in World War I. When I was a little boy, I would go up there, this is before kindergarten, and would spend the day with them and they would tell me about their years serving in France and traveling in Europe. And it just, just put this curiosity for wandering in me, this wanderlust. Well, when they were gone, by the time I was 17, they had passed. But I was still so curious to go to Paris and see where Hemingway lived in the art museums. My mother won a trip in a church raffle, a guided tour to Europe. She didn't want to go, but she knew I really did. And so she sent me, her 17 year old son, the only young person on a bus full of elderly American tourists. I didn't care. I was going to Paris. The bus stopped on its way to Paris, an hour outside the city to go look at an old church. You can imagine restless 17 year old American boy doesn't want to go dragging through another old church in Europe. But I did it anyway, because who wants to sit on a bus for an hour? This was the cathedral at Chartres in France.
And I didn't know this at the time, growing up in a small town, south Louisiana in the late 20th century. But this cathedral, this Gothic medieval cathedral, is one of the great architecture, architectural wonders of the western world. I walked into that place not knowing what to expect and there I encountered God.
Nothing had prepared me for the glory of God made manifest in the stones, the stained glass. I mean, it was just overwhelming. I was standing there, overwhelmed by awe. And I remember standing there in the labyrinth. There's a famous labyrinth in a mosaic in the floor of the nave of the church. And I looked around and I knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that God was real. And not only that he was real, but that he was personal, that he was calling me. Now, I wish I could tell you I walked out of that church as a Christian, but I didn't. I walked out of there, though, on a search, because I couldn't unsee what I had seen. There was something. It wasn't an intellectual sort of thing. It was more what they call numinous or emotional, intuitional. But beyond that, God was there. And somehow he communicated to me, first of all through the stones and the glass, through the material things, he communicated his presence, but also in my heart and in my imagination. I walked out of there into a new world. I couldn't tell you what else happened in Paris on that trip, but that's the thing I remember the most, that my journey towards a real faith in Christ began when I stumbled into that church as an arrogant teenager who thought he knew everything.
[00:14:45] Speaker B: And a profound experience, no doubt. I'm curious, just right before you walked in there, you had characterized yourself as someone who maybe didn't forsake your belief in God completely because you were praying Our Father before you went to bed at night, but there was some doubt or skepticism. You had walked away from the cultural Christianity that you knew because it was insufficient, it was lacking, it was shallow, but you had come to a place of new ideas and been. Been exposed to other things, intellectually speaking, before you walked in, were you just agnostic, skeptic about the. The presence, the possibility of a God like this existing?
[00:15:34] Speaker A: Yeah, I think that's fair. You have to remember I was a teenager, you know, and I had lots of strong ideas, none of them particularly well thought out. But what I don't know now when I look back is was I a true agnostic or was I someone who really hoped God existed but doubted it? And if he did exist, I don't know how I can find him. Because remember the examples of Christianity I had in front of me to that point in my life just were either unappealing because I just wasn't interested in them again, the social conformity, the niceness, or they really made me angry and I rejected them. TV evangelist and my imagination, based on my Experience in life was so narrow that I just didn't see any other choices. Now, when I went into that cathedral at Chartres, which is a Catholic cathedral course, I just, what is this? Who is the God that inspired men whose names we've lost 800 years ago to build this thing, this temple to God's glory?
It just cracked me open. It was a different paradigm. And what I wanted to know was not just was I on a search for God, but I wanted to know, who is this God to whose temple this is built? Now, I'm not saying that Catholics worship a different God than Protestants. I'm not saying that at all. What I'm saying, though, is the vision that Christians 800 years ago in that time and place, had of God produced that kind of glorious art to his glory. Architecture to his glory. And we, even though we're so much wealthier today, I think we've lost completely the ability to create beauty like that for God. But it reached me in an overwhelmingly powerful way. And I'm always be so grateful to God for walking into that church that day and frankly, to my mom for buying a church raffle to be nice and give some money to the church fundraising thing, because I don't know where I'd be without it.
[00:17:39] Speaker B: Yes. You know, I think there's something to be said for these transcendent experiences, Right. Especially with regard to if anybody has had the opportunity to go to Europe and step foot in something that takes you to a transcendent place. I think these, these Gothic cathedrals were designed with that in mind. Just an utter reference for the person of God, you know, that makes. Makes the Lord feel so large and you so small and him so wondrous and so beautiful and so majestic, you know, you find your place, yes, that's it. In yourself, when you walk into a place of such, again, majesty.
And I think that's why when you walk into a place, you automatically sense quiet and reverence and awe because you know, you're in a. In a place that reflects the one who is greater.
[00:18:39] Speaker A: You have crossed a threshold into a new place.
And that's not something I was prepared for. In the United States, we try so hard in contemporary times to make the church user friendly, the church buildings user friendly, to make it like every day.
In this case, when I walked into that cathedral, I was there with thousands of other tourists, but I was in another place. And it took me in my imagination to a more enchanted place. And I would learn many years later, decades later, working on this book, living in wonder About Christian re. Enchantment. That is such a key thing to be able to experience that sense of wonder when you encounter. When a non believer encounters great art or architecture that's filled with the spirit of God and created to glorify God, or they encounter someone who is holy, you know, and who is living in a different way in a way that is so attractive. What they're doing is meeting in an incarnated version of beauty and goodness. And that opens their mind up, their closed mind to truth. And that's exactly what happened to me. I didn't know it was happening, but when I went into the cathedral at Chartres, the overwhelming presence of God in that beauty consecrated to his glory, glory bypassed my closed mind and made me hunger for the truth. That's why I say I went out of there on a search. Beauty was the doorway, was the portal to the truth of the gospel.
But it took a while. You know, Lord, make me Christian, but just not yet, because I still had college to go through.
And that meant. And that meant. I mean, I have to be honest here, because this was my experience. I. When I got to college, you know, I had. I was moving closer and closer to God, but I was still super, super depressed that freshman year about a girl, what else? And I was. I had. Any grace I had gotten from that experience in Shotra had started to recede for me because I wasn't interested in keeping it. I'm sorry to say I had this. I tell the story in my book Living in Wonder. I've kept it to myself for so long because I'm ashamed of it. But. But now that we are in the cultural moment we're in, I need to tell it. I had this new roommate, this sort of happy, go lucky Jewish hippie from New Orleans who we moved into the dorm together and he offered me some lsd. Psychedelic. And not being a believer or anything, I said, why not? I was depressed, I didn't care. And so he and I both did this drug. He had a good time. But me, it changed my life. It took me out of my depression and I felt it sort of opened the veil of perception. I suddenly could sense God's presence everywhere in a way that I hadn't since Shotra. Now I've kept that to myself because I do not want to encourage people to do this. I think they're dangerous. I've done research on this. When you mess with those drugs, you are opening up spiritual portals that should not be opened. Nevertheless, it would be a lie for me not to admit that this is something that the Holy Spirit even used that to get to me. Because on Monday morning, we did this on Saturday night. On Monday morning, I went straight to the college bookstore to look for books about God because I felt that I had been blinded. I had caught a glimpse at Shatra of reality and the beauty of God in that church. I'd fallen back into my despair and depression and just fooling around like only a college boy can do. But now I wanted to get back on track. I ended up finding a book about Kierkegaard, the theologian I mentioned earlier, who was a Protestant, read the book about his thought and prayed the Sinner's Prayer for the first time in my life that weekend. And things really began to change for me then.
[00:22:37] Speaker B: Yeah. That's amazing. So you had this experience in Chartres. I can't say that.
[00:22:45] Speaker A: In New Orleans they called Chartreuse Street Charters. So go ahead.
[00:22:49] Speaker B: So it was an induced experience, in a sense, so that you had this otherworldly sensation again of God's presence everywhere.
But like you say, it's a little bit dangerous, but it reminded you that. Yes, but then you said you started reading Kira.
What was it about him and his writings that connected with you to want to actually give your life to God, a God who you knew was real.
[00:23:16] Speaker A: Right. Well, Kierkegaard has this basic philosophy of human psychology. He says there are these stages on life's way. He said that a lot of people live in the aesthetic stage. They're seeking pleasure, experience, beauty, but not in a serious way. They're seeking it simply for the sake of its own. Simply for its own sake, frankly, or for enjoying it. For them, boredom is the root of all evil, and they're constantly running here and there to avoid getting bored. That was where I was at that time in my life. The next higher stage is what Kierkegaard calls the ethical stage. It's where people bind themselves to a moral code and an ethical code and seek to live a moral life by what society tells them is right. That's higher and more serious than the ethical. But it has problems too. And at its worst, this is what Kierkegaard was up against as a. In Copenhagen, the 19th century. It becomes society at prayer. Right. It's not about finding God and living in communion with the living God. It's more about following the rules. Better that than the synthetic guy. But that's ultimately not how we're created. For Kierkegaard said the highest mode is the religious mode, which combines both the aesthetic and the ethical. And transcends them by, through a living relationship with God. Now it's very complicated him getting into that. But what this did for me when I read it for the first time, I saw myself in the aesthetic mode that that's who I was as a college undergraduate. And I saw the ethical mode and could see that that's insufficient too. But again, my imagination was such that I didn't think I had a choice. Kierkegaard showed me to live an authentic religious life is to live encompassing both of them and transcending them. And that made me sense possibility, and that's all I needed to keep going.
The problem is though, that I told you I chased girls. And the thing I did not want to give up was my sexual freedom. Not that I made much use of it at the time, but by gosh, I'm a red blooded American man in the 1980s and this is. I thought that that's what I had to do, that it was just impossible to give up because all the messages in the culture around me were that saying that. But I also was getting serious enough on my journey to Christianity to know that this is a lie. Either Christ is going to be the Lord of my life or I'm living a lie. I tried going as an undergraduate to an Episcopal church there on campus because I knew they weren't going to hassle me about my sex life. And they didn't. They were nice people. But I also knew that I was lying to myself, that if my faith was going to be real, it was going to have to involve sacrificing everything to God. So I was starting to move closer and closer to the Catholic tradition because it was so satisfying to me intellectually. But I knew that ultimately it's not an intellectual thing. Propositions aren't going to save us. It's the propositions embed us in the experience of Christ. But I could not surrender my will. I wanted to make deals with God, say I'll believe in you, I'll go to church, and all that, but just leave this to me. And then two years out of journalism school, I was still there in Baton Rouge, working at the local paper.
I realized what a mess I was making in my life by not living in a godly way, dating women the way I was. And then my newspaper sent me to interview this elderly Catholic Monsignor, Carlos Sanchez. Sanchez had been born in the 1890s. He was very old in the rest home and he had been early in his life a well known art professor and even an artist himself.
And Then he converted to. He became a priest in his 50s. And this must have been like back in their late 40s. And that was really unusual for a man to become a priest then. But the paper was interested in what his life was like as an artist. So they sent me, the young feature writer, to talk to him. I go there to his apartment. He lets me in, and it's like I'm with some sort of Catholic Yoda. He was so. He was short, and he had just glowing. It was such a piece that passes all understanding about that sweet old man. We sat down. I asked him to tell me his life story. Now, I won't drag it out here. I know our time is limited, but he had come to America from Guatemala. His father was a wealthy coffee planter who sent his son to America for an Ivy League education. It was at Dartmouth and then later at Yale that he lost his faith, his Catholic faith. But he didn't tell his parents because he loved them and didn't want to hurt them.
He ended up becoming an art professor teaching at Dartmouth. And one day he went back to the cathedral in Guatemala for a family service of some sort. He didn't believe in any of it, but he didn't want to upset his parents. So he knelt to receive Communion. And I don't know if what your viewership is, your listenership is, but Catholics believe that the Christ is truly present in a mysterious way in the Eucharist, the consecrated bread of communion. The priest held the Eucharist out to put on his tongue. And Monsignor Sanchez said, suddenly a light burst out of it. And I heard. It enveloped me, this light. And I heard a voice say out loud, I have always loved you. Instantly, he reconverted, went back to the US Would wake up. You know how pious Spanish piety can be mortifying. He would get up at 4 in the morning in the winter and take cold showers in New Hampshire. That's how repentant he was.
[00:28:53] Speaker B: Yeah, okay.
[00:28:54] Speaker A: And so he goes on to. He goes. He throws himself into his faith, and he begins to think he might be having a call into the priesthood. Goes back to Guatemala. Same thing happens. This time, the voice says, why don't you do as I ask? So he knew he had to do it. Now, the old man. There was more to the story, but the old man was sitting there telling me these events that changed his life over 50, 60 years ago, tears rolling down his cheeks. And I'm sitting there, like, 23, and I'm like, oh, my gosh, I'm in The presence of a witness. This man saw what he said he saw, and I can't fool around anymore. It's Christ or nothing. These were the bookends of my long, twisting, difficult journey to faith. The God, this theophany, this God showing forth of himself through the architecture of Shatra. And then at the end, the other bookend was God showing himself to me in the testimony of these miracle stories, of this dear old man who was glowing with the love of Christ.
I owe everything to what God did for me through those men and they gave to that old man and through the men whose names I'll never know, who built Shatra, because they burst through my willfulness.
Not just my inability to believe early on, but my unwillingness to believe, to sacrifice my own passions for the sake of Christ. Until I met that old priest and realized what the stakes were.
[00:30:21] Speaker B: Yeah, I suppose the question that was posed to him, when will you do what I say?
Really came to you.
[00:30:30] Speaker A: It did. You got it.
[00:30:32] Speaker B: You got it at that moment. And so it became a very pivotal moment. And I'm curious, Rod, through this, and it may be just a moot point, really, or question. When you experienced God in that cathedral, and then obviously, through this beautiful embodied example of Christ in this, in this man, was there ever a question of who God was? I mean, because it seemed to when you're talking about your story, there's a presumption that it is the Christian God or Christianity or Jesus. Was there any thought to, well, who is this God? Could he be someone else?
[00:31:12] Speaker A: That's a great question. And, you know, it never did occur to me. Maybe if I had been fully, intellectually honest, I would have thought about it. But I guess I just. As a product of this culture and this time in this place, I figured if God existed, of course, it's the Christian God, because I couldn't think beyond, beyond that. And I'm glad of that, frankly, because, you know, there are people who are professional seekers, it seems they never seem to want to light on something they forget that you seek to find. And the truth is, though, even if you are a completely honest seeker, there's not enough time in a human life to search, dabble a little bit in this religion, a little bit in that religion, waiting for something, some kind of revelation. I'm grateful, even though I've been critical of the way I was raised, I'm at least grateful that I did have that cultural Christianity to set the boundaries for my imagination. Now, it set them far too narrow at first, but it did. I just There was no religious life outside of Christianity that made sense to me. If I had walked into an ordinary Our lady of Pizza Hut Catholic church, I never would have found God. I walked into Shatra. Now, not every church can be shatra, but beauty, there's a certain kind of man or woman to whom beauty converts or it breaks the waves. It becomes this sort of ice axe that chops through the hardness and the coldness and warms the heart and draws it to the Lord. That awakening, that desire that eros. I'm not talking about sexual arrows, but just the desire within people for something. And that something was the Lord. And I knew it when I walked into Shotra. And that happened to me. I ran away from the implications of that because I did not want to lose control of my life.
But as I, as I've just explained, there was a time finally, years later, when I wanted that more than I wanted myself. Glory to God. But it started there with beauty, right?
[00:33:16] Speaker B: So you came to that place of surrender, you know, and beauty can be as simple as a garden in a. In a tin, right? With. With C.S. lewis. The. The. The beauty of, of nature gave him such a sensation of joy and a pointer towards the transcendence that he was. He chased, trying to capture, trying to find.
But it wasn't the, you know, the. He found that it wasn't the experience in itself, but it was a pointer. Just like that church. The beauty of the church was a pointer towards the one who was seeing you and revealing himself to you in some way. It's also interesting to me in a lot of the stories that I'm hearing, that there is a.
A sense of sudden knowing. It wasn't as if the, The Lord has to explain himself. You know, when you encounter the. This transcendence, you, you know, there's like this, you know, that, you know, and, and so you don't have to go out and say, I wonder which God that is because, because there's a revealing of. Of himself. And so it's this sudden, like we talked about, this experience of, of. Of awe and, and proper reverence and, and understanding of yourself in light of who that is. And you just, like you say it took you a moment to, to get to that place of surrender, but then it became more valuable than every other pleasure that you had been seeking.
[00:34:44] Speaker A: It has led me into such a deep relationship with Christ. I just. And I want to share it, and I do in this book, living in wonder with my Christian brothers and sisters. I'm not setting out to convert people. I'M just saying this is what the Lord has done for me. I would not have come to Christianity if people had appealed to me directly. It had to be indirect for me, because all my defenses were up. But it's that indirection and that people. When people see what a difference God has made in your life, whatever your tradition or church or denomination is, that I think is the kind of thing, that authenticity that draws people in, that people don't like being sold something.
[00:35:23] Speaker B: You have witnessed things on the inside. As a journalist, you saw the ugly. You know, you were. You saw the underbelly. All churches are imperfect because they're made of imperfect people.
But the way that you frame it is that because of Christ, how were you able to, in a sense, separate the person of Christ, who He is, and his imperfect bride? How were you able to maintain a faith, not only maintain it, but actually go deeper?
[00:35:59] Speaker A: Because by God's grace, I was given a deep prayer life as a Catholic, as an adult Catholic, and also I have seen miraculous things, experienced miraculous things. I had as a journalist, also come to know exorcist, Catholic exorcist, and I've seen the demonic at work. So I knew that beyond a shadow of a doubt that the world of spirit was real, both good, good and bad, angels and demons. That, you know, however imperfect, the churches, I say not only the Catholic Church, but the churches, those who. They're necessary. We need the churches. God chose the church to be his chief agent on earth. I really believe that. And we can argue about how that works, but we can't do without the church. This is the sort of thing, the lie that my late father told himself to excuse himself from showing up at church. Well, I can meet God anywhere. Well, yeah, you can, but you also need to go worship together with the community. And we didn't receive communion in the same way in the Methodist Church, the Catholics and Orthodox do. But you need this stuff. You need the life of the church.
But I had had such direct experience of God's presence, mostly through prayer. That's how most people experience him. But also in the case of these miracles, I had seen or had happened to friends close to me, things that had happened to me, and also, again, the demons that I knew that the world of the Spirit was real. I just. And I couldn't give that up. And it can get to the point where the sense of disgust and anger you feel at these huge sins, and we're not talking small ones. There was more that I learned as a journalist than I could report, because the People telling me wouldn't go on the record.
It just gets to the point where you just want to run away. You can't deal with it. But God wouldn't let me go, and I wasn't willing to let him go either. But I knew that if I was going to hold on to Christ, I was going to have to make some changes myself, because I could not get out of the Catholic frying pan and go into an Orthodox fire. Even though the Orthodox Church in the US at least doesn't have the abuse problem that the Catholics do, it has its own problems. There's no church free from sin, and I don't expect it to be anymore.
[00:38:15] Speaker B: You know, it's obvious that you have not only. You don't only talk about having an embodied faith, but you live it. You were inspired by it.
And that is the choice that you've made of a choice of living in a place of surrender, but you're also writing about it. I mean, the title of your book is Living in Wonder. It's not just thinking about wonder. Yeah, yeah, yeah, right.
You are encouraging us as Christians to live in a place of wonder. And what does that mean, really, from your own life? And what does that mean for us as Christians or anyone who's actually just seeking more than what the flat, imminent world has to offer?
[00:39:02] Speaker A: Well, you know, it's a complicated story in the book, but basically, what I mean by enchantment is not like sprinkling some sort of sanctified pixie dust on the world, and suddenly everything seems brighter and happier. That's not it. By enchantment, I mean having a visceral awareness that the Holy Spirit is everywhere present and fills all things, and that life has meaning and that we are loved by God, who is not an idea in our head or not far away, but he's close to us. And the way you get this enchantment, there's no formula for it. It's. It's something that you learn like you learn how to play the violin. I remember when I was first becoming Orthodox, I went to the priest at the church and said, okay, Father, what do I need to read to learn what it is to be Orthodox? He said, well, you can take these books here, but that's not how we do it. This is something that's going to be learning a way of life and relating to God. It's going to take you about 10 years of coming to church, saying your prayers, doing the fast, and all of these things to really inhabit the Orthodox life. I thought that was Silly, just come on, let me master the argument. But of course he was right. And I think that's true generally with the idea of Christian enchantment. Whatever your denomination, I quote in my book, I quote this steal from a Harvard professor talking about education. I make it for enchantment. Enchantment is not a matter of conveying information from teacher to student. Enchantment is like teaching the students how to be staring at the right corner of the sky when a comet goes by. What I mean by that in my usage is that God will show himself to you every day in every different way, but you've got to be prepared spiritually, mentally and emotionally to perceive Him.
Perception of the enchantment that is already there is the big thing. And I talk in the book about practical ways, psychological ways, ways of anthropology, things like that, about how we. We distance ourselves from the ability to perceive God and how we can increase that. But in the end, it's not magic. God is going to show up on his own time, and our task is only to be ready not only to perceive him. And how with a still, small voice or in something we see or feel, it may come to us in another person, but we also have to have cultivated a heart, ready to sacrifice all to follow his call.
A cautionary tale here. One of the reasons I wrote this book is the younger generation now is getting so misled by the occult and by psychedelic drugs. The two are often so interrelated. That's why I thought it was important that I be honest about my 1980s college boy fooling around with LSD, even though I'm ashamed of it. But I want to tell people, when I tell you, don't do this, I mean it. But I also, I speak from experience. But I also had to say to them, it can open you up to sensitive, make you more sensitive to higher realities, however temporary. But once you open those doors, you tear those barriers down. You don't know what's going to come come through them. But anyway, the occult is happening. It's exploding among the young. I was approached in 2022 in Oxford in England, by a young Anglican seminarian, 27 years old. He said, sir, I know you're working on this enchantment book. I want you to know something that most people in your generation don't. You think that the big problem we're dealing with is atheism. It's not, not with my generation. Nobody cares about the new atheist. It's all about the occult. Because young people are desperate for a sense of mystery, of Transcendence of. Of woo, you might say. And they don't think they can get it in the Church. In many churches, we've downplayed that so much to try to make the faith a matter of good works and intellectual cogitation and so forth. We've downplayed the supernatural side of our faith. Or they don't want to go to the church looking for it because they know that to experience it in Christianity, it's going to require sacrifices. Them, they can't be themselves. They don't belong to themselves anymore. The occult promises instant gratification. As one exorcist at the Vatican told me, the difference between the devil and God is anytime you call the demons, they will come. They'll come to enslave you, but they'll come and make you think that. That you're really special. God, though, doesn't work that way. He hears our prayers, but he will come in his own time because he wants a relationship of love to us. He doesn't want to sweep us off our feet with the promise of mystical power. Anyway, the young man in Oxford said that. I know I'm going to be dealing with this for the rest of my life as a man of God, as a priest. But your generation and the leaders of the Church of your generation don't even know what we're dealing with now. So one of the reasons I wrote this book is to warn the Church of this, but also to talk about our apologetics, our apologetics approach, what worked in the 80s and 90s. It does not work anymore. Whatever our tradition, we need to lean hard into wonder and awe, which usually manifests itself through beauty and through the lives of the saints, of holy men and women of whatever faith in whom the spirit of God lives so strongly and burns so brightly that we think, I want that. And once you've encountered people like that, just as I encountered Monsignor Sanchez or encountered places like Shatra, it does open even a closed mind to the truth of the faith. And so we can ultimately try to integrate goodness, truth and beauty into one, into a heart that is given over to the service of the Trinity.
[00:45:02] Speaker B: That really is beautiful. I appreciate that. I think that as you're. As you're speaking, I'm. So. I'm saying internally, Amen. Because.
Because we are not just merely rational beings and we seek after meaning. We're trying to make sense of our lives. And it seems to me that so many, like you say, are looking for meaning and love and beauty and significance in all the wrong places. There you used words like openness and willingness and. And unfortunately, the openness and will is leading a lot of people to a lot of dark places, a lot of false places, dangerous even, that are places that lead them to destruction, whether it's psychedelics or the occult or whatever. But yet again, back to your story of this beautiful embodied gentleman that was so significant for you when you encountered the real, you know, the authentic of Christ in and through someone, that it caused you to want to surrender as well. And that's a good word for us as Christians that we need to seek after Christ and in a full embodied way. And back to your whole issue of surrender in a surrendered way that Christ can actually live in through us.
[00:46:27] Speaker A: That's so key because if you are not willing to surrender and to sacrifice everything, enchantment won't work. Christian enchantment won't work. God is still there. But if you try to control your experience in the sense that to set conditions for God, as I try to do in college, I'll follow you, but only so far. Leave this to me. It can never work because if God is God, then we must surrender to Him. And if we don't surrender to him, then we ultimately are our own gods. And that's the thing nobody wants to hear. Everybody wants to go to heaven, but nobody wants to die. You've got to die to yourself in a real way so you can live in Christ. But when I say that, I'm not saying that conceptually like a good idea. I mean that literally.
The great Canadian media critic Marshall McLuhan, who's mid 20th century, he didn't talk a lot about this publicly, but he was a deeply devout Christian, went to Catholic mass every day. He once said that he had this idea that there are two ways of taking in information as a human being. One is percept, something you perceive directly from direct experience. And the other is as concept. It's like the abstract version of that. We have to have both to live in the world. But he said that people forget that religion at its core is percept, the perfect perception of God. The normal way people do that is through prayer. But there are other ways too. He said everybody I've known who lost their faith ultimately did it when they stopped praying because then they ceased to have this perceptive relationship with the Holy Spirit. It all became concept, it all became abstract thought and it died. What I'm trying to do with this book is remind people of the truth of that. My fellow believers and also agnostic people who, or atheists who are curious want to let them know there's so much more to this world than we think, both good and bad. There's a mysterious level of reality that we have access to. There's some dark levels of that that will try to draw us into and are drawing many people in. But our God is a God of light and he wants to know us and he has given us ways to do that. But we are never going to know this, this undiscovered country unless we're willing to surrender and start walking into it. Like I walked into that church in Shatra one day and I found something.
[00:48:59] Speaker B: Yes, if. If somebody is curious enough and, and they are, they are listening to you and they're saying he has something, he understands something on a level that, that I don't. And, and they would like to step into this reality in a tangible way. What would be a. A way forward for them to experience or to inhabit or to open themselves to the. The possibility of God. What would that look like? Would it be going to a church? Would it be opening the Bible? Would it be praying to God? Where are you? You know, I'm here. What would that look like?
[00:49:37] Speaker A: Prayer. Prayer has to be the first thing and the thing we do the most.
But also pray quietly. Pray to listen. You know what? One of the things I found when I was working on this book is how important the ability to sustain and focus attention is on enchantment, on experiencing God. There are psychological reasons for that. I wasn't aware of it until I did research. It's all there in living in wonder. But people whose attention is fragmented, and that's all of us today in the age of the Internet, especially young people who are on their phones all the time. You know, it's like the Internet is a disenchantment machine because it breaks your attention into a thousand million pieces. And it makes hearing the still, small voice so much more difficult. Get out of your head, into the world outside your head. That's where it starts. I would also recommend that we immerse ourselves not just in books of theology, but maybe it's more important to listen to sacred music, whether it's classical music, whether it's. Or something of the past, not just contemporary worship music, but something from another era that raises us higher.
And there's so much you can find on Spotify or on the Internet. Also read religious poetry, anything to embody the experience of God. We all live in a time of radical disenchantment, A world that is re enchanting very quickly and we're behind. We're really behind. The enemy has. Is so far ahead of us on Enchantment. The good news is the Lord has given us so many treasures deep in our Christian past that we can draw on to get to know him in a visceral, mysterious, enchanted way.
[00:51:24] Speaker B: Now, I love that you, you know, we are spiritual beings living in a spiritual world, right? We're, we're primarily soullish in nature with a body, as C.S. lewis would say. And I think of your story and I think of how you started and Christianity was just mundane. It was routine, it was cultural, it was, there was some flatness to it. It wasn't intriguing, it wasn't inviting for you existentially, spiritually, it didn't draw you in. But yet here you are.
You found that you have found something so other, other worldly in all the best ways. And I think that we're all called to that. And I think we can get so routine, even as Christians, into just settling for, oh, we just go to church on Sundays and we do, you know, two songs and a prayer and a sermon and then we're gone. Or, or a homily or whatever, you know, and it, and it becomes just so flat. Yeah, but, but I love that your story, Rod, is calling us to something richer, something deeper, as CS Lewis almost would say, further up and further in.
[00:52:40] Speaker A: If your eyes aren't open, if your mind isn't open, if your heart isn't open to being surprised by joy, surprised by enchantment, it's not going to happen to you. But you got to surrender that control and just be open.
[00:52:54] Speaker B: Yes, that's a beautiful way to end. Rod, thanks so much for encouraging us, inspiring us to think bigger, larger, more transcendent, to be open and willing.
The time with you is so invaluable and I know so many people are going to be longing for more. Thanks so much for coming.
[00:53:13] Speaker A: Thanks for having me.
[00:53:15] Speaker B: Thanks for tuning in to X Skeptic to hear Rod Dreher's story, to learn more about his books and explore his resources. Be sure to check out the show notes. If you have any questions or feedback about today's episode, we'd love to hear from you. Feel free to reach out via
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