R.R. Reno > Quotes

“Educated, well-to-do Baby Boomers are disciplined in their hedonism, careful that their peccadillos don’t impede their scramble for success. For the most part, the rich have developed a relatively safe and moderate approach to drugs, and for the few who haven’t, well, there’s professional help. Decriminalization of marijuana won’t hurt the strong. But what about the weak? Kids who use marijuana regularly get lower test scores, are more likely to drop out of high school, and are less likely to go to college. And who are they? A 2011 study reports that children of parents who have not completed high school are twice as likely to smoke marijuana as children of those who have completed college. Again, new freedoms harm the vulnerable. The”
― R.R. Reno, Resurrecting the Idea of a Christian Society

“It’s also true that religious people are more censorious than nonreligious people, and I submit that this trait, rather than the actual effects of religion on civic life, is the source of faith’s bad reputation today. Religious people are judgmental in the sense that they have definite views about right and wrong.”
― R.R. Reno, Resurrecting the Idea of a Christian Society

“The stable ground is disappearing. You’re either going up or going down. The upshot is widespread unhappiness. Even the successful are consumed by a spirit of anxious striving. Too often despair overtakes those struggling, stumbling, and falling behind. We”
― R.R. Reno, Resurrecting the Idea of a Christian Society

“Progressivism is a luxury of the one percent.”
― R. R. Reno

“We want a culture of the people, by the people, and for the people, not defined by white European traditions, male preferences, or any other form of group identity.”
― R.R. Reno, Resurrecting the Idea of a Christian Society

“A recent book by University of Chicago professor of philosophy and law Brian Leiter outlines what I believe will become the theoretical consensus that does away with religious liberty in spirit if not in letter. “There is no principled reason,” he writes, “for legal or constitutional regimes to single out religion for protection.” . . . Evoking the principle of fairness, Leiter argues that everybody’s conscience should be accorded the same legal protections. Thus he proposes to replace religious liberty with a plenary “liberty of conscience.”

Leiter’s argument is libertarian. He wants to get the government out of the business of deciding whose conscience is worth protecting. This mentality seems to expand freedom, but that’s an illusion. In practice it will lead to diminished freedom, as is always the case with any thoroughgoing libertarianism.”
― R.R. Reno

“empirically well established. Sociological studies show that faith is strongly correlated with social bonding. Religious commitments encourage civic involvement and build social capital.”
― R.R. Reno, Resurrecting the Idea of a Christian Society

“The reconstitution of elite WASP culture as post-Protestant and ethnically diverse but intellectually homogeneous is the most important change in American society of the past half-century. It explains the culture wars of recent decades far more effectively than the standard overemphasis of the role of the Religious Right. Conservative”
― R.R. Reno, Resurrecting the Idea of a Christian Society

“Today, the greatest threat to the political health of the West is not fascism or a resurgent Ku Klux Klan but a decline in solidarity and the breakdown of the trust between leaders and the”
― R.R. Reno, Return of the Strong Gods: Nationalism, Populism, and the Future of the West

“Our culture wars are driven by the rich, who insist that our shared moral culture serve their interests by promoting freedoms that benefit them and harm the poor. No”
― R.R. Reno, Resurrecting the Idea of a Christian Society

“The West needs to restore a sense of transcendent purpose to public (and private) life. Our time—this century—begs for a politics of loyalty and solidarity, not openness and deconsolidation. We don’t need more diversity and innovation. We need a home. And for that, we will require the return of the strong gods.”
― R.R. Reno, Return of the Strong Gods: Nationalism, Populism, and the Future of the West

“When a culture of freedom becomes a cult of freedom, injustice, suffering, and social dysfunction get explained away as “choices.” The”
― R.R. Reno, Resurrecting the Idea of a Christian Society

“Religious people are more generous and more involved. And not just a little more. Religious”
― R.R. Reno, Resurrecting the Idea of a Christian Society

“The sort of person inclined to say that morality is a psychological projection of the superego or a patriarchal social construction or the upshot of evolution is also likely to affirm an extensive menu of “human rights,” suggesting less a rejection of moral truth than a shift in its focus.”
― R.R. Reno, Resurrecting the Idea of a Christian Society

“Today’s “progressive” is committed to expanding lifestyle freedom, which the rich tend to manage, like economic freedom, to their advantage. But while the benefits of economic freedom do in fact extend even to the poor, what trickles down from lifestyle freedom is dysfunction, disorder, and disarray. The”
― R.R. Reno, Resurrecting the Idea of a Christian Society

“we need to discipline our public witness. Let us shun rhetorical victories that rely on distortions or half-truths. Prevarication produces an atmosphere of distrust. We should likewise face up to the implications of our own positions.”
― R.R. Reno, Resurrecting the Idea of a Christian Society

“Yet the life expectancy for white people without a high school diploma has dropped catastrophically since the 1990s—down by five years for women, three years for men—suggesting a cultural crisis among poor whites akin to that in Russia after the Soviet Union collapsed. Yet the morally preening powerful, confident in their supposedly progressive views, largely ignore this collapse and the people suffering from it.”
― R.R. Reno, Resurrecting the Idea of a Christian Society

“Christians are called not to win debates and elections but to build a civilization of love—never”
― R.R. Reno, Resurrecting the Idea of a Christian Society

“Relativism is not a philosophical theory. It is a spiritual truth, a protective dogma designed to fend off any power that might claim our loyalty. It is a habit of mind that insulates postmodern life from the sober potency of arguments and the force of evidence, from the rightful claims of reason and the wisdom of the past.”
― R.R. Reno

“In American Grace: How Religion Divides and Unites Us, Robert Putnam and David Campbell illustrate the political implications of the rise of the Nones. They found that 50 percent of those who say grace before meals identify themselves as Republican, 40 percent as Democrats, and 10 percent as independents. No surprise there. It’s common for the media to speak of religious conservatives as the base of the Republican Party. What’s striking, however, is the intense partisan loyalty of those who never say grace—70 percent of them identify as Democrats and only 20 percent as Republicans. A”
― R.R. Reno, Resurrecting the Idea of a Christian Society

“Our danger is a dissolving society, not a closed one; the therapeutic personality, not the authoritarian one.”
― R.R. Reno, Return of the Strong Gods: Nationalism, Populism, and the Future of the West

“Deviation from a set pattern of “individuality” is unlikely, as anyone who has spent time at an elite university knows. The goal in Belmont is to blend an appropriate (to use a pervasive weasel word) conformity with genuine (another weasel word) individuality.”
― R.R. Reno, Resurrecting the Idea of a Christian Society

“But there’s a dark side to our national character. A deep sadness comes when we realize, finally, that we’re on our own, which is where secular individualism brings us in the end.”
― R.R. Reno, Resurrecting the Idea of a Christian Society

“Dignity—the kind the poor kids in Putnam’s study so often desire for themselves and those they love, however inarticulately they express it—was once widely accessible. Now it’s not. At”
― R.R. Reno, Resurrecting the Idea of a Christian Society

“This small, almost innocent, yet typical episode of therapeutic hauteur reflects our society’s division by a moral inequality as severe as—and in all likelihood more damaging than—income inequality. The psychologist uses her authority as an expert to undercut a straightforward exercise of parental authority (positional control). She asks instead for a sophisticated verbal exchange between mother and child (personal control). This may be well-meaning, but it is an exercise in class dominance.”
― R.R. Reno, Resurrecting the Idea of a Christian Society

“Pursuit of truth requires the courage to consider all the evidence.”
― R.R. Reno

“Christian society does not compel faith or install priests in positions of public authority. But it affirms that we are fully human and more genuinely free when we give ourselves to something higher. A”
― R.R. Reno, Resurrecting the Idea of a Christian Society

“Having forsaken higher things, we undermine the basis for freedom. We think that what people lack is money, when the rich themselves are enslaved to the meritocratic machine of their own invention. Our secular high priests preach materialism, but it’s a counsel of compliance, not freedom.”
― R.R. Reno, Resurrecting the Idea of a Christian Society

“Putnam, echoing Charles Murray, points out that America has become rigorously segregated. The functional insulate themselves and their children from the dysfunctional. Imbued with a therapeutic ethos that softens the rigors they impose on themselves and their children, and often cowed by multiculturalism, today’s rich won’t speak up for a common culture that imposes standards on personal behavior. They won’t support the traditional common culture that helped Jesse’s parents achieve their goal of raising a dignified man. Instead, they quietly and covertly pass on social capital to their children. Their kids go to schools that, for all their celebration of “diversity” and “inclusion,” are ruthlessly segregated by social class, ensuring that no “unhealthy” or “anti-social” attitudes infect their charmed world of pleasures without penalties and permissions without punishments. In this controlled, segregated environment, rich kids are prepared for success in today’s hypercompetitive meritocracy. C”
― R.R. Reno, Resurrecting the Idea of a Christian Society

“Today, self-giving and decency are remote, inaccessible ideals for many poor people in America. Basic human dignity seems out of reach.”
― R.R. Reno, Resurrecting the Idea of a Christian Society