Right-Wing in New York
Rod Dreher on Counterculturalism
Living as an observant young Catholic family in New York City is to embrace counterculturalism to a degree that wouldn’t be necessary down South, whence my wife Julie and I came two years ago. It’s not that we’re more observant here than we would be anywhere else. It’s just that the kinds of things that are considered more or less normal in Baton Rouge or Dallas, our hometowns, are thought of here as weird, and maybe even dangerous.
Friends and acquaintances are often shocked to find out we go to church every Sunday. Just last week I was talking to the woman who cuts my hair about the freak spring snowstorm the city had the previous Sunday. “So we dressed for mass, and then . . .”
“Wait, wait,” she said. “You go to church?”
“Yeah.”
“Like, every Sunday?”
“Yeah.”
“Omigod. That takes such discipline. You should be so proud of yourselves.”
This is embarrassing, of course, but revealing. To this young woman, the practice of religion is something extraordinary one tacks on to one’s life, like yoga or running, for the purpose of self-improvement. To us, as to all sincerely religious people, it is our life, and it’s done out of love. But I mustn’t be hard on her.
She meant it sincerely, and I was grateful that she didn’t flash me that unguarded look that so many New Yorkers do upon discovering the dark secret of their otherwise normal comrades. It’s a furtive glance of the suppressed shock and stifled disgust that might cross your face at a formal dinner party, upon discovering that the entree you are in the midst of enjoying is in fact kippered wharf rat. We’ve grown used to it, as we so often find ourselves in situations where otherwise good-natured people let fly with unthinking anti-Catholic, anti-Christian bigotry, simply because they can’t imagine that anyone they would deign to associate with would harbor such retrograde and antique beliefs.
When they find out that Julie quit her job to stay home and raise baby Matthew full-time, they typically react as if she’d confessed to having taken up Chinese foot-binding. We’ve both learned to be extremely reluctant to talk about our pro-life views outside the company of religious or political conservatives, unless we’re prepared to endure the swift collapse of social comity. And if even our friends knew that we practiced Natural Family Planning out of obedience to the Church, they’d consider us little more sophisticated than Appalachian snake-handlers.
Rod Dreher is a contributing editor to Touchstone. He is a writer and blogger and the author of several books, including The Benedict Option (2017) and Live Not by Lies: A Manual for Christian Dissidents (2020).
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24.1—January/February 2011
Ruminations on the Monstrous Envy of the Soul-Devouring State by Anthony Esolen
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