Crunchy Culture: Author Rod Dreher Has Defined A Political Hybrid

The Washington Post ^ | 5/3/06 | Hank Stuever

[steve-b]

Two succulent, naturally raised chickens with good farm references are in the oven, snuggled up in a roasting pan like doomed lovers. Fat, perfect carrots are peeled, chopped, seasoned and ready to simmer.

"Notice that I am literally barefoot, pregnant and in the kitchen," observes Mrs. Crunchy Con, and perhaps, she quips, she should have done her hair for the occasion like Phyllis Schlafly's. The li'l Crunchy Cons, boys ages 2 and 6, are out back in the warm Wednesday afternoon sun, making sculptures out of a bowl of ice cubes -- something constructive and home-schoolish, something very We're Not Watching TV....

"In my part of town, developers are tearing down older houses left and right, and putting up McMansions on small lots. . . . [T]he developers invoke the Free Market, as if it were the Magisterium of the Church. I remember watching on the late local news one night not long ago a developer saying that if people didn't want to buy these kinds of houses, they wouldn't be building them. As if consumer desire was its own justification...."

[steve-b]

Jonah Goldberg nailed it with his observation: "Crunchy conservatism strikes me now -- as it did back when I first heard about it -- as a journalistic invention, a confabulation fit for some snarking liberal reporter at the Washington Post 'Style' section."

Essentially, it's hippyism with an extra dash of rebellion against hippyism itself (e.g. by venerating the Virgin Mary instead of the Earth Mother), though not to the extent of entertaining any really discomfiting ideas (such as the notion that individuals are the best stewards of their own resources).

[Denver Ditdat]

When I hear "Crunchy Con", here's the image that comes to mind for me:

[WestVirginiaRebel]

I'm not Crunchy. Cranky sometimes, yes.

[Fairview]

Jonah does not know anything whatsoever about the values of traditional, non-urban life.

I'm a crunchy con. I live in the sticks, listen to early music, have a gun, raise my own vegetables, have family devotion time most nights, try to eat cows that haven't been fed the carcasses of other animals, sometimes fish for our supper, favor spanking, drink local wine, and am gradually getting more and more off the grid. I wear boots, not Birkenstocks (sandals aren't good around livestock), but prefer family antiques to reproductions and bread I've made to bread I bought. I have been a conservative since I was a kid, and I live in this traditional way for the same reasons I'm conservative.

A lot of other conservative country people are the same way. We're just reading about it now because a New Yorker with a journalism degree is writing about something he discovered day before yesterday, and another New Yorker with a journalism degree is sniping at him over it. And of course, because the first New Yorker's agent knows somebody at the Washington Post and was able to talk their assignment desk into sending a smartass writer to Dallas for an interview.

[steve-b]

ROFL!!

[jobim]

For those of you non-Catholics, Rod Dreher has made a name for himself as an orthodox, conservative Catholic, assuming that pigeonhole to be serviceable for the sake of discussion. He especially has been outspoken against the liberal, usually homosexually-driven underbelly of American Catholic clergy that has caused the Titanic transference of funds out of the church and into the hands of legalman, and of course into the hands of victims of those Catholic imposters.

But this crunchy con appendage has never sat proper for me, as much as I have admired Dreher's essays. It smacks of self-righteousness born of late-sixties privilege. The moral lense required through which one can only view this crunchy con Weltenschaung seems to me artificial.

As one whose college days commenced a week after Woodstock, I sense a link between those days of free-wheeling autocracy, when one's individualism was carefully analyzed by the tie-dyed politburo, with the present values-laden approach to the marketplace of the crunchy con mindset.

I don't see that virtue coheres in any specific way to choices one makes of a strictly material nature, such as how we choose to design our homes or our cities.

[roofgoat]

Good Book. Everytime I started to disagree with him, he would finish his idea/story line and I would agree with him.

I read many posts and threads about his book a month ago here; I doubt most read his book.

[Dumb_Ox]

Dreher's actually in a long line of conservative thinkers who concentrate more on "The Permanent Things" rather than macroeconomics or foreign policy. I'm grateful to him for reviving a localist dedication to the good things in life that are rarely voted upon, but are significant nonetheless.

[DManA]

In all these stories about crunchy cons, the subject quickly changes to urban planning. Is "Smart Growth" the abiding preoccupation of crunchy cons?

"In my part of town, developers are tearing down older houses left and right, and putting up McMansions on small lots. . . . [T]he developers invoke the Free Market, as if it were the Magisterium of the Church. I remember watching on the late local news one night not long ago a developer saying that if people didn't want to buy these kinds of houses, they wouldn't be building them. As if consumer desire was its own justification...."

[Tokra]

"Almost all on the religious right are Christians -- and in this broad sense, I am on the religious right -- but it's odd how we limit our political concern to sexual issues," Dreher writes. "Jesus had as much or more to say about greed as he did about lust. But you will not find most American religious conservatives worrying overmuch about greed."

Amen.

I have been preaching this same thought for quite a while. I've always found it odd how some Christians will pick out one or two particular sins and make an incredible big deal about them - and then totally ignore things that Jesus himself talked about.

For example - Jesus had not one word to say about homosexuality. He never mentioned it. Not once. He did, however say: " It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven."

Yet to many Christians - being rich is something to aspire to, while homosexuals deserve to roast in the eternal fires of damnation.

People can (and do) spin bible quotations into what they want them to mean - instead of taking Jesus words at face value. Usually these are the same people who insist that the Bible should be taken "literally", but will turn right around and say, "Well, what Jesus really meant was ....."

I once had a wealthy Baptist try to tell me that the "eye of a camel" was actually a gate in the city walls of Damascus, and what Jesus really meant was that it would be easy for a rich man to enter heaven, since it was easy for a camel to go through that gate.

The lengths people will go to to twist the words of Jesus into what they think he should have said is especially ironic coming from a Bible "literalist"!

[steve-b]

[T]he developers invoke the Free Market, as if it were the Magisterium of the Church. I remember watching on the late local news one night not long ago a developer saying that if people didn't want to buy these kinds of houses, they wouldn't be building them. As if consumer desire was its own justification...."

This is the element of Dreher's approach that I find particularly irksome -- on this issue, the man generates a smug cloud that could be seen from Jupiter.