Live not by a false sense of persecution

The one thing that kept me going through Rod Dreher’s latest book-length freshman term paper was the faint memory of a blog post. Dreher has been a house blogger for the American Conservative magazine for many years, and he’s used that platform to write constantly, instantly, and often intemperately about everything that grabs his attention. A few notions have escaped from the febrile pages of this blog to shape the wider American conversation on religion and public life, most notably Dreher’s proposal for a “Benedict option” of public withdrawal and internal renewal for conservative Christians, which he turned into an influential 2017 book. (See the Century’s review here.)

In February 2015, near the peak of American panic over the so-called Islamic State, Dreher wrote a post that I never forgot, called “When ISIS Ran the American South.” In it he compares ISIS’s spectacle murder by fire of a captured Jordanian pilot to similar spectacles of lynching in postbellum America. Noting that the Equal Justice Initiative, which extensively documented the lynchings, found ten instances in his home county of West Feliciana Parish, Louisiana, Dreher says that he wrote to the EJI to ask for the full report. “I want to know who was killed, and under what circumstances,” he concludes. “These were our fathers, grandfathers, and great-grandfathers, doing it to the fathers, grandfathers, and great-grandfathers of our black neighbors. Attention must be paid.”

Live Not by Lies is a bad book. But as a longtime reader of Dreher, I encountered it as a cliff-hanger. Would there be any echo of the 2015 blog post’s poignant and searching historical earnestness amid this slovenly new spin on American culture war politics? At the risk of spoiling the plot, the answer to that question is no. And therein, I suspect, lies a tale that concerns all of us.