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Rod Dreher's Diary
Fish Who Know What Water Is:
Thinking At The Midwestuary About The Rise Of Nihilism And The Quiet Revival
Rod Dreher
Aug 22, 2025
Good afternoon from the Midwestuary conference in Chicago. Imagine my total delight when I arrived at the church that’s the conference venue, and saw tables from Eighth Day Books in Wichita! Any conference where Eighth Day is the bookseller is exactly the place you need to be. Before I even got registered, I bought two books about Tarkovsky. Eighth Day Books is the best Christian bookstore in the world, if you ask me (and you should ask me, because I love love love talking about this extraordinary bookstore).
I’ve never been to an Estuary event. (Look here to find out more about what the Estuary is.) The movement began when Paul Vander Klay, a Presbyterian pastor (CRC) in northern California, got into Jordan Peterson some years back, and found his way to Jonathan Pageau, the Orthodox artist and thinker, and cognitive scientist John Vervaeke. Paul does a lot of his ministry outside the church, via his popular YouTube channel.
Paul Vander Klay
Estuary is a movement for all people — not only Christians — who want to have real conversations about the meaning crisis, and related topics. They have meet-up groups all over the US, and even in Europe. They follow a “protocol” for these guided conversations. I went to my first Estuary group this morning. Most people there were Christians — Catholic, Orthodox, Evangelical — but also a young woman from California who was raised atheist, and who, along with her partner, is not now a theist, “but we can never go back to being atheist.” I talked to a man this morning, an Orthodox Christian, who began his journey to faith while living among village Muslims in Mali, and being so impressed by their piety and graciousness that he started looking for God.
Well, these are my people: the curious and the searching, people who want to have real discussions, in vulnerability. From what I can tell so far, everybody here is searching for solid meaning, and most people believe that only a spiritual revolution of some sort can rescue us. Vervaeke is not a religious believer, but as I’ve written here recently, he is very, very interested in contributing to the discussion about the Meaning Crisis, from a scientific perspective. I’ve already written the first chapter of my next book, and draw on Vervaeke’s insights.
There are so many people here I can’t wait to talk to. Later today, Vervaeke and Pageau will be among the speakers. Me too. I am learning that some of you readers of this newsletter are also here. Fantastic! So glad to be here! Today is Friday, so the last day of the week for me to publish a newsletter, but I might drop a newsletter tomorrow if I can get enough information here I want to share with you. Or, I’ll put it in Monday’s newsletter.
Paul Vander Klay
Here is an unpaywalled link to David Brooks’s column today about “right-wing nihilism.” I strongly encourage you to read it. Brooks is not my kind of conservative, and might not even call himself a conservative anymore, but this is a really good piece. Here’s how it begins:
Democratic friends, let’s try a thought experiment. Imagine you woke up one morning and all your media sources were produced by Christian nationalists. You sent your kids off to school and the teachers were espousing some version of Christian nationalism. You turned on your sports network and your late-night comedy, and everyone was preaching Christian nationalism.
That’s a bit how it feels to be more conservative in the West today — to feel drenched by a constant downpour of progressive sermonizing. What would you do in such circumstances? Well, at least at first, you’d probably grit your teeth and take it while silently seething.
In 2018, I happened to watch the Super Bowl at a sports bar in West Virginia. President Trump was about a year into his first term, and the corporate advertising world was churning out ads with vaguely progressive messages. I watched the guys in the bar sort of hunch over, grim-faced, their body language saying: This is the crap we have to put up with to watch a football game.
The next year I helped organize a conference of people building local communities. We made sure that at least 30 percent of the participants were from red states. But during our discussions, the progressives in the room seemed to assume that everybody there thought like them. They dominated the conversation and left almost no space for other opinions. I watched the red-state folks just hunch over. For three days they barely spoke.
Oh yeah, been there. Because I’ve been a public conservative as a writer for thirty years, I’ve never had the luxury of being able to “hunch over” like those men. But so many times in my life I’ve been in public spaces where I’ve kept my mouth shut for the sake of avoiding a fight. True, one doesn’t always have to speak; it’s important to learn prudence. But because I have lived much of my professional life in spaces dominated by liberals, I’ve experienced many, many times how liberals shut down conversations because they are so certain that they are RIGHT about everything, and that those who disagree with them are not only wrong, but evil.
And, as wokeness began its malignant rise, liberals have created structures in which they can inflict real punishments on dissenters. You can lose your job, for example, if you don’t agree with everything they believe. They don’t even see what they’re doing. Yesterday I wrote about NPR interviewing Nikole Hannah-Jones about Trump’s attack on Smithsonian museums. NHJ is, of course, a powerfully ideological activist. Bringing her on air to talk about Trump and museums is like inviting Volodymr Zelensky on to talk about the origins of the Russia-Ukraine war. It’s not that one shouldn’t hear Zelensky’s opinion; it’s that you will not gain any real insight at all into the nature of the controversy. You will get only a highly committed ideological viewpoint from someone who is deeply committed to one side.
There was, as I wrote, no critical questioning of NHJ by the NPR host. She just assumed that everything NHJ said (that Trump is a RACIST) was obviously true. In this comment on my X thread about the NPR interview, the Washington journalist Dave Weigel, who is not conservative, nailed the mindset here, regarding the museum controversy:
Yes, exactly. That’s what Brooks is writing about today. Right now in Britain, the population is beginning to rebel against the liberals (both left-wing and right-wing) and progressives who have done to millions of them what Brooks cites. I found out last night something shocking about Josh Herring’s forthcoming book about C.S. Lewis and gender. Apparently the C.S. Lewis estate is trying to stop publication of the book, because Herring uses Lewis’s teachings about the meaning of gender to criticize transgenderism. I don’t have details (yet), but this is an outrageous attempt to silence a scholar exploring Lewis’s views on gender in a way that violates the progressive narrative. The book was supposed to have been published last week, but it’s on hold as the publisher deals with the Lewis estate. I cannot imagine what grounds the estate has to stop publication, but until I know more about the situation, I won’t speculate.
The thing is, their attempt to control the discourse through punishments, and through marginalizing all dissent, is failing now. Trump has a lot to do with it, but I think he is as much a symptom as he is a catalyst. What’s happening in the UK right now — people all over flying the flag of England, to protest what the cultured elites who despise them demand, is an example of that. Civil war is likely to come to Britain, and the rest of Europe, over these things. Really and truly.
If the idea sounds crazy to you, then I urge you to listen to Prof. David Betz. Civil war is his academic specialty. In 2023, he published this essay in an academic journal arguing that civil war is coming to the West. More recently, he’s been all over the Internet talking about it (see here, for a good example). The fact that you cannot imagine this happening likely says a lot about how silo’d you are from what’s going on — like the older Roman pagans in the later 4th century who didn’t see the ongoing triumph of Christianity. All the institutions of paganism were still present, all their friends were pagan, and besides, Rome had always been pagan, right?
Anyway, back to Brooks:
Most of us, when you put us in an environment with a stifling political orthodoxy, just learn to cope. Forest Romm and Kevin Waldman are psychology researchers at Northwestern University. They conducted 1,452 confidential interviews with undergrads at Northwestern University and the University of Michigan.
They found that an astounding 88 percent of the students said they pretended to be more progressive than they are in order to succeed academically or socially. More than 80 percent of the students said they submitted class work that misrepresented their real views in order to conform to the progressive views of the professor. Many censored their own views on cultural issues — on gender and family issues, for example.
A system in which people are unable to say what they believe to be true is a system that is fragile. You will remember the story I was told by a man in Moscow about how he first realized that the Soviet Union was going to collapse when, as a young man working as a young technician with the TV crew covering the Moscow Olympics in 1980, and his team was unable to do their job because the KGB would not allow them to set up lights needed to illuminate the Politburo at the opening ceremonies, because the team hadn’t gone through the proper protocol. It ended with the Politburo sitting in the darkness on the live global broadcast. The man told me that the inability of important information to circulate through the Soviet system meant that it could not survive.
That’s where we are now in the West.
More Brooks:
Other people, of course, don’t just cope; they rebel. That rebellion comes in two forms. The first is what I’ll call Christopher Rufo-style dismantling. Rufo is the right-wing activist who seeks to dismantle D.E.I. and other culturally progressive programs. I’m 23 years older than Rufo. When I was emerging from college, we conservatives thought we were conserving something — a group of cultural, intellectual and political traditions — from the postmodern assault.
But decades later, with the postmodern takeover fully institutionalized, people like Rufo don’t seem to think there’s anything to conserve. They are radical deconstructors.
Brooks goes on to talk about Rufo and Curtis Yarvin, the latter of whom he describes as a nihilist — as someone who wants to burn everything down, for the pleasure of watching it burn. In Brooks’s telling, Rufo wants to change the status quo. Yarvin, by contrast, is far more radical.
Brooks:
Skyler told me that in his community he is watching many people lose faith in the Rufo method and make the leap into pure nihilism, pure destruction. That is my experience, too. A few months ago, I had lunch with a young lady who said, “The difference is that in your generation you had something to believe in, but in ours we have nothing.” She didn’t say it bitterly, just as a straightforward acknowledgment of her worldview.
In other words, nothing left to conserve. If I were living in Britain today, I would look around me and wonder what there is left to conserve. In conversation recently with an intelligent British conservative, I told him how shocked I was to have heard a young British male say recently that “only fascism can save my country.” The man told me that one hears that a lot now in the UK, and that Nigel Farage of the Reform Party, for all his flaws, is the only thing standing between Britain and fascism.
As I said, the young Englishman’s remark shocked me — and I’m somebody who likes to think of himself as fairly well aware of what’s happening. (You might have heard my recent conversation with Bari Weiss about the rise of far-right racism and anti-Semitism on the Right, among young men — this, based on what I’m hearing from fellow Christian conservatives who teach in high school and college.) But I am realizing how little I actually know about what’s really going on in America — and not just because I live in Europe.
Brooks notes that nihilism in mid-19th century Russia eventually resulted in the Russian Revolution, and the establishment of a totalitarianism incomparably more murderous and oppressive than the Tsarist order it overthrew. Dostoevsky warned his readers that this was coming. Solzhenitsyn said that none of the respectable intellectuals of the pre-Soviet period saw it coming:
If the intellectuals in the plays of Chekhov who spent all their time guessing what would happen in twenty, thirty, or forty years had been told that in forty years interrogation by torture would be practiced in Russia; that prisoners would have their skulls squeezed within iron rings, that a human being would be lowered into an acid bath; that they would be trussed up naked to be bitten by ants and bedbugs; that a ramrod heated over a primus stove would be thrust up their anal canal (the “secret brand”); that a man’s genitals would be slowly crushed beneath the toe of a jackboot; and that, in the luckiest possible circumstances, prisoners would be tortured by being kept from sleeping for a week, by thirst, and by being beaten to a bloody pulp, not one of Chekhov’s plays would have gotten to its end because all the heroes would have gone off to insane asylums.
Solzhenitsyn also warned the West that to comfort oneself with the thought that what happened in Russia can’t happen here, is to live in self-deception. It could happen anywhere on earth, under the right conditions.
When people ask me, as the author of Live Not By Lies, if I think that the woke “soft totalitarian” menace has passed now that Trump is in power, I tell them no. It’s not just because wokeness could come back (and if it does, there won’t be anything soft about it), but also that we could face a right-wing totalitarianism. Fascism, for example — which, as I’ve said, some young people on the Right long for. I don’t want to live under right-wing totalitarianism any more than I want to live under left-wing totalitarianism. But it is all still very much a live option, because the conditions that Hannah Arendt identifies as giving birth to totalitarianism are all very much with us, among them: mass alienation and loneliness; loss of faith in institutions and hierarchies; a willingness to transgress for the sake of transgressing.
The long dying of Christianity in the West has everything to do with this. Sure, Christianity is still quite common, at least in the US. But it’s a faith shorn of its power. The key factor, as Philip Rieff discerned, is the loss of religion’s capacity to bind people’s behavior. As you know if you’ve been reading me, the fake Christianity that is Moralistic Therapeutic Deism is a form of the faith that is solely for therapeutic comfort — for making you happy, calm, and nice. If we ever really do face the rise of a new form of fascism or communism, MTD Christianity will conform or collapse. Only a faith that is capable of inspiring people to endure suffering, even death, for the sake of the Truth, can survive.
One more clip from David Brooks:
It’s hard to turn this trend around. It’s hard enough to get people to believe something, but it’s really hard to get people to believe in belief — to persuade a nihilist that some things are true, beautiful and good.
One spot of good news is the fact that more young people, and especially young men, are returning to church. I’ve been skeptical of this trend, but the evidence is building.
You’ll recall my Free Press piece about this year’s annual Chartres pilgrimage. From that report, in which I talked to the young pilgrims (average age: 19), all of them Catholic, about why they are drawn to the three-day walk, and to the Latin mass:
The reasons for the quiet revival of Catholicism among the young vary, but they all come down to the search for meaning, purpose, stability, and identity. These new converts—or “reverts,” for the baptized who have rediscovered their faith—are drawn to ancient forms of Christianity because these traditions are more rooted, and more demanding, than the looser, therapeutic model of contemporary Christianity. They also rely much more on liturgy and beauty to incarnate theological principles—“smells and bells,” as some have it. These things have stood the test of time.
Why are so many young Catholics in France drawn to traditionalism? One academic expert I interviewed said:
Some of it is practical: Traditionalist parishes and movements tend to be more actively engaged in reaching out to the youth, and in organizing social events for them. But, says Cortez, her fieldwork also finds that Catholic traditionalism offers the young an opportunity to reclaim what life in modernity has taken from them.
“Many describe the homilies in traditionalist parishes as more profound, less anecdotal or performative than what they’ve encountered elsewhere,” she explains. “Many young adults who are mentally exhausted by the modern world find in these places a form of rest, rootedness, order, and mercy.”
One young woman I talked to told me that her generation was raised “with nothing.” As terrible as this was, it freed them from the blinders of their parents’ generation, which could not allow them to see value in traditional Catholicism. Another way to look at it: Everything that gives life meaning, purpose, structure, and community has already been destroyed in the lives of these young people, by atheism, secularism, feminism, gender ideology, capitalism, socialism, and all the other forces of liquid modernity. So why not go back to what worked for many, many generations of their forebears?
That is my hope and prayer for the West. In fact, my next book — I got the idea for it among the incredibly hopeful young masses at Chartres — is on this point, from an angle I haven’t yet explored.
Reading Brooks today, in light of what I’m hearing from various sources (e.g., a prominent conservative Catholic scholar telling me just last week that he’s being poleaxed by how fast anti-Semitism is spreading among young Catholics of the Right), I’m realizing that this quest is far more urgent than I had thought.
In this light, I’m also seeing the value, still, of The Benedict Option. The book is not a call to withdraw completely from the world, and hide out in a bunker of the pure. It is, instead, a call to the Christian laity to model ourselves in the 21st century as the early Benedictines did: to create groups and disciplined ways of life that sustain Christianity, so that when we go out into the world, as we must, we can be authentically Christian. Reading the Catholic historian Christopher Dawson’s Religion And The Rise Of Western Culture, I see that the medieval monasteries were not only spiritual powerhouses for the surrounding communities, but they served and indeed formed the lay communities in myriad ways. They were not hidden away from the world, with no contact.
The monasteries not only served to create communities in the ruins of the fallen western Roman Empire, but they also worked to reform and revitalize Christianity after the initial burst of Christian civilization, they also played a key role after a second crash, as the empire of Charlemagne declined:
The despair of the representatives of the Carolingian tradition may be seen in the dark picture of the state of the Church which was drawn up by the prelates of the province of Rheims at Troslé in 909.
The cities are depopulated, the monasteries ruined and burned, the land is reduced to a solitude. As the first men lived without law or constraint, abandoned to their passions, so now every man does what pleases him, despising the laws of God and man and the ordinances of the Church. The powerful oppress the weak, the land is full of violence against the poor and the plunder of the goods of the Church. Men devour one another like the fishes in the sea. In the case of the monasteries some have been destroyed by the heathen, others have been deprived of their property and reduced to nothing. In those that remain there is no longer any observance of the rule. They no longer have legitimate superiors, owing to the abuse of submitting to secular domination. We see in the monasteries lay abbots with their wives and their children, their soldiers and their dogs.
Nor does the council spare the bishops themselves:
God’s flock perishes through our charge. It has come about by our negligence, our ignorance and that of our brethren, that there is in the Church an innumerable multitude of both sexes and every condition who reach old age without instruction, so that they are ignorant even of the words of the Creed and the Lord’s Prayer.
The church — especially the monasteries — got busy, and rebuilt the thing. St. Francis and St. Dominic had something to do with it too, as founders of new religious orders. Dawson writes of the early Benedictines:
It was the disciplined and tireless labour of the monks which turned the tide of barbarism in Western Europe and brought back into cultivation the lands which had been deserted and depopulated in the age of the invasions. As Newman writes in a well-known passage on the Mission of St. Benedict: “St. Benedict found the world, physical and social, in ruins, and his mission was to restore it in the way not of science, but of nature, not as if setting about to do it, not professing to do it by any set time, or by any rare specific, or by any series of strokes, but so quietly, patiently, gradually, that often till the work was done, it was not known to be doing. It was a restoration rather than a visitation, correction or conversion. The new work which he helped to create was a growth rather than a structure. Silent men were observed about the country, or discovered in the forest, digging, clearing and building; and other silent men, not seen, were sitting in the cold cloister, tiring their eyes and keeping their attention on the stretch, while they painfully copied and recopied the manuscripts which they had saved. There was no one who contended or cried out, or drew attention to what was going on, but by degrees the woody swamp became a hermitage, a religious house, a farm, an abbey, a village, a seminary, a school of learning and a city.”
This is our task too, my fellow Christians. And we had better be about it soon, with earnest, because the shadow of Mordor has fallen over the West.
The Estuary movement is not explicitly religious, though many of the people involved with it are Christians. But they are Christians who are seeking truth and community with other people who are seeing the Meaning Crisis, and saying to each other: “You too? You see it too?” We don’t often find people in our own churches who see. In fact, more than a few of our fellow believers are determined not to see it.
Yesterday I saw this story about a Catholic parish in the Archdiocese of Denver that has risen up against its young priest. Excerpt:
When the Rev. Daniel Ciucci stands before his Denver parish to deliver a homily, he looks out onto a congregation divided over whether he’s fit to lead.
A rift within the Most Precious Blood Catholic Church parish fueled a petition with more than 750 signatures calling for Denver Archbishop Samuel Aquila to address Ciucci’s leadership, accusing the pastor of eroding a vibrant, welcoming faith community with “fire and brimstone,” dogmatic messaging and a refusal to listen to parishioners.
Former Most Precious Blood parishioners said the fracture within the church since Ciucci was installed four years ago — in part because of more progressive Catholics clashing with a traditionalist priest — represents a microcosm of what’s happening within the local archdiocese.
“There has been a liberal schism in the Denver Archdiocese,” said David Thomas, a former Most Precious Blood parishioner. “I really view this as a problem with Aquila and not a problem with Daniel. I think Daniel is a symptom. The bigger problem is the overreach or micromanagement of the parish from Aquila in order to reel it back into compliance with his personal philosophy about what a Catholic parish ought to be.”
After reading the online petition and dozens of accompanying testimonials, Ciucci delivered a homily earlier this month — titled “Why Hell Is Welcoming” — that he said was inspired by the conflict. He lectured about the dangers of putting anything or anyone above God and the sin of not attending Mass every Sunday.
Dear Lord, what a monster! The dangers of putting anything ahead of God! Now, to be fair, I don’t know anything more about this situation than what I read in the story. There could be more. It is possible to be fully orthodox in doctrinal ways, but a terrible pastor — the Father Wrapped Too Tight syndrome. But from the people quoted, it sounds like liberal Boomers getting mad that their young priest is actually Catholic. This quote from a 71-year-old man:
“With Daniel, it was more about making us feel bad — regret and penance and guilt,” Thomas said. “He came in with all this hellfire and damnation stuff.”
This parish’s donations are down 75 percent, so there’s a huge cost being paid for the priest’s Catholic orthodoxy. Nevertheless, if this parish doesn’t change, and change in ways that Father Daniel represents — that is, preaching a substantive, demanding Christianity — it’s going to fade away. You might not want it to be that way, but that’s how it is. That’s reality. Nobody cares about liberal Christianity anymore. Twenty, thirty years from now, it won’t be here anymore. There’s no there there.
Put another way, there’s nothing at all in this kind of Christianity (including its conservative version) that can stand up to the nihilism of the age, and the strong gods rising to fill the vacuum left by the demise of binding, authoritative Christianity. These are the times in which we live. If you will not allow troubling information about the instability of our world penetrate your protective wall, you’re not going to make it.
There is hope. But you’re not going to find it unless you first open yourselves to communities like the Estuary, which is sort of a semi-secular Benedict Option. We need community. We need to be serious. And, we need God. We need to be fish who know what water is.
