Crunchy Cons: How Birkenstocked Burkeans, gun-loving organic gardeners, evangelical free-range farmers, hip homeschooling mamas, right-wing nature lovers, ... America by Rod Dreher
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I shouldn’t be doing this—too many papers to grade. But I have to get this review out of my system. So here goes.

Now that I have three children who will have to make their way in this world, I’ve found myself thinking a lot lately about the direction our culture is headed. So in the last couple years, I’ve started to read writers like Wendell Berry (What Are People For?) and others who critique American values and offer a better vision for the future. As a result, I became interested in reading Rod Dreher’s Crunchy Cons. I don’t think I would have been interested in this book before age 30, but a man has to grow up at some point.

Specifically, what got me interested in this book was the eighteenth-century thinker Edmund Burke. I touch on Burke’s thought in one of the classes I teach, and I’ve come to see Burkean conservatism as far superior to the crassly individualist/libertarian values of Fox News and Rush Limbaugh, where economics tends to be king. That kind of conservatism has little regard for culture, aesthetics, our local communities, or creation itself. But Dreher is a Burkean.

So anyway, I picked up his book. Although the title of this book makes it sound political, Dreher isn’t really discussing politics here. He’s talking about a way of life—one that he calls “sacramental.” (As a Protestant, I would have preferred a term like “pervasively sacred,” but that’s not the issue here.)

According to Dreher, sacramental living isn’t about politics, but about recognizing the sacredness and inherent spiritual value of all people, all aspects of life, and all of creation. This includes things that we often don’t think of as sacred: our work, our families, our homes, our daily meals, our communities, and the natural world. Sacramental living simply involves recognizing and valuing the inherent dignity of these things. As we do, our daily activities take on meaning—activities like choosing where to shop (big impersonal chains vs. local merchants), deciding what to eat (food from massive factory farms vs. food provided by small, local farms where the people have an affection for the land and for God’s creatures), and educating our children. Each of these activities actually has great spiritual significance.

Dreher says that sacramental living leads to several things: a rejection of American consumerism; an appreciation for beauty in the home, at work, and in our places of worship; a high priority on our families (which, in Dreher’s view, often means homeschooling and at least one parent at home full-time); love for and support of our local communities; and a healthy respect for the natural world. (It’s no coincidence that Dreher became very popular after a commentary on “Crunchy Conservatism” on National Public Radio a few years ago.)

But as Dreher shows, many conservatives (such as Rush Limbaugh’s “dittoheads”) show little sense of the sacredness of these things by the way that they live. Here are some of Dreher’s critiques of mainstream conservative values:

• “We right-wingers grimace at the lust celebrated by mainstream culture, but we rarely stop to think that greed is no less deadly a sin, no less destructive of human dignity. We look down on the liberal libertine who asserts the moral primacy of sexual free choice, but somehow miss that the free market we so uncritically accept exalts personal fulfillment through individual choice as the summit of human existence.”

• “[Conservatives seem to believe] that individual fulfillment is the point of life. Conservative, perhaps, in their sexual views, they are, however, libertarian in their economic principles, and believe that the free market should be the guiding light of our lives together. Thus they believe that a merchant or a manufacturer owes no loyalty to his community, nor the community to that merchant or manufacturer. They feel no particular responsibility to be good stewards of communal life or the natural world; if something of real value has been lost because of economic decisions, hey, that’s the free market.”

• “We conservatives are big on bashing the public schools, which mostly deserve it, but please don’t ask us to think about what education is for. For many of us, it’s about no more than making sure our kids get into the right college, meet the right people, and go on to have a good (read ‘lucrative’) career.” (As someone who lives in Wisconsin and sees what Scott Walker, the Republicans, and the Democrats in our state want to do to higher education, I have to agree with Dreher’s critique here.)

• “We poke fun at the sanctimony of environmentalists, and try hard to convince ourselves that the sprawling crapulence of big-box stores, strip malls, monotonous housing developments, and other degrading manifestations of our built environment somehow represents progress. We abandon or bulldoze old buildings and human-scaled neighborhoods, then create fake environments … to recreate what we have destroyed.”

• “We have unwittingly allowed a consumerist mentality to shape the way we think about nearly all aspects of our private and public lives.”

Dreher gives an example from 9/11 that sums up typical American conservative values: “As the fires in the collapsed towers still raged, [both New York mayor Rudy Giuliani and President Bush] had this advice for us: ‘Go shopping.’”

Sadly, Americans don’t value their own communities, but things. We want personal affluence, and to be left alone. That’s why we build backward-facing “McMansions” in the suburbs. The front porch has disappeared.

This lifestyle has consequences: “Consumerism . . . sees its expansion as unambiguous progress. A culture guided by consumerist values is one that welcomes technology without question, and prizes efficiency. . . . A consumerist society encourages its members both to find and express their personal identity through the consumption of products.” As a result of these values, local communities, the environment, our families, and our quality of life are being destroyed.

But Dreher is not merely critical. On the contrary, the book is actually very positive, since Dreher lays out a wonderful vision of sacramental living. And he shows that many people are, in fact, living this way today. A sacramental life is about quality, and Dreher demonstrates what a good quality life looks like in his chapters on food, the home (in which he includes a fantastic contrast between good architecture and the McBuildings being built today), education, the environment, and religion.

By changing the ideological reference point from economics to a sense of the sacredness of this world, Dreher draws on an older conservative tradition, one that involves thinkers such as Russell Kirk, Edmund Burke, and T. S. Eliot. He also draws frequently from writers like Wendell Berry (whom he interviewed at length for this book), E. F. Schumacher, William Morris, and G. K. Chesterton.

Dreher’s conservatism is one with beauty and imagination. It has an appreciation for good art, good music, good food, and good fellowship. It places a high priority on showing compassion for people, because human beings are sacred. It also recognizes the importance of the family, and it desires to make our local communities strong once again.

To give you an idea of where Dreher is coming from, here is his Manifesto:

1. We are conservatives who stand outside the conservative mainstream; therefore, we can see things that matter more clearly.

2. Modern conservatism has become too focused on money, power, and the accumulation of stuff, and insufficiently concerned with the content of our individual and social character.

3. Big business deserves as much skepticism as big government.

4. Culture is more important than politics and economics.

5. A conservatism that does not practice restraint, humility, and good stewardship — especially of the natural world — is not fundamentally conservative.

6. Small, Local, Old, and Particular are almost always better than Big, Global, New, and Abstract.

7. Beauty is more important than efficiency.

8. The relentlessness of media-driven pop culture deadens our senses to authentic truth, beauty, and wisdom.

9. We share Russell Kirk’s conviction that “the institution most essential to conserve is the family.”

In a few places, I think Dreher is a tad over-opinionated, as well as alarmist. But overall, I really appreciated this book, and I benefited greatly from reading it. Highly recommended.

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