R.R. Reno > Quotes

“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 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

“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

“This shift away from patriotism is masked by Americans’ sense that, since our country dominates the world, to be an American citizen is to be a global citizen. But we should not be deceived. As we continue “coming apart,” the most powerful and successful Americans increasingly see that their interests lie with a global future, not a national one. A Fortune 500 CEO has more in common with other Davos worthies than with the son of an unemployed steel worker in Youngstown, Ohio. Educated at institutions steeped in multicultural ideology, the elite rise above local loyalties, serving as richly rewarded functionaries in a global empire that has no place for patriotism because it has no patria.”
― 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

“Freedom comes when we bind ourselves to something worth serving. Martin Luther King, Jr. recognized this in his letter from a Birmingham jail, an evocation of the double-barreled authority of America’s founding principles and God’s revealed word. A culture of freedom requires legitimate authority. Freedom is fullest not when it serves itself but when it serves truths freely held.”
― R.R. Reno, Resurrecting the Idea of a Christian Society

“Taken in isolation, the American dream produces the conditions for ever larger government, more coercive laws, and a culture of denunciation and censure that limits freedom, though always for the sake of a supposedly greater freedom.”
― R.R. Reno, Resurrecting the Idea of a Christian Society

“In round numbers, regular churchgoers are more than twice as likely to volunteer to help the needy, compared to demographically matched Americans who rarely, if ever, attend church.” Financial”
― R.R. Reno, Resurrecting the Idea of a Christian Society

“But statistics tell an overall story, not personal ones.”
― R.R. Reno, Resurrecting the Idea of a Christian Society

“As G. K. Chesterton observed, the real meaning of “my country right or wrong” is “my mother drunk or sober.”
― R.R. Reno, Resurrecting the Idea of a Christian Society

“The paradox of Belmont’s official nonjudgmentalism is that while it rejects old-fashioned moral strictness, it nevertheless demands conformity to 1950s-style bourgeois norms. Everybody is an individual—in pretty much the same way. As”
― R.R. Reno, Resurrecting the Idea of a Christian Society

“The well-to-do often scoff at “family values,” but they live by them. They know that family values bring stability, prosperity, and much better chances of a happy, fulfilling life, but they won’t say so in public.”
― R.R. Reno, Resurrecting the Idea of a Christian Society

“To be free to achieve our most cherished goals we need authorities we can trust, assent to, and make our own.”
― R.R. Reno, Resurrecting the Idea of a Christian Society

“A healthy political culture needs a spirit of innocence as well. Christians must speak the truth even if it is politically inexpedient.”
― R.R. Reno, Resurrecting the Idea of a Christian Society

“The most pressing social justice issue today is the moral exploitation of the poor and vulnerable by the well off and powerful, an exploitation masked by the rhetoric of liberation. P”
― R.R. Reno, Resurrecting the Idea of a Christian Society

“We must seek to order public life in accord with metaphysical truths higher than the ersatz ends of maximizing utility, encouraging dialogue, and promoting diversity. S”
― R.R. Reno, Resurrecting the Idea of a Christian Society

“The standard story of cultural conflict in America has conservative Christians defending established forms of social authority, while Progressives see themselves as challenging established norms and institutions, a self-assessment that the media accept at face value. The reality is the opposite. The counter-culturalism of the Faithful gives them an independent spirit. The committed core of Christians in America increasingly lives on the peripheries of cultural and institutional power. The Engaged Progressives, in command of civic institutions, are the establishmentarians. A”
― R.R. Reno, Resurrecting the Idea of a Christian Society

“As our shared civil life is diminished, a Christian seeks the common good. He criticizes America, but with a spirit of loyalty, resisting the post-patriotic mentality. We mustn’t seek the social weightlessness that liberates the rich and powerful while atomizing and disempowering most citizens. To love our neighbor we need to love our neighborhood.”
― 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 led.”
― R.R. Reno, Return of the Strong Gods: Nationalism, Populism, and the Future of the West

“Belmont parents won’t refer to “illegitimacy,” but they succeed in socializing their children to marry before having children.”
― R.R. Reno, Resurrecting the Idea of a Christian Society

“Today’s culture warriors on the left trumpet their commitment to justice, but they lord it over the weak, redefining our public culture in countless ways, claiming to serve the marginalized but always empowering those adept at post-conventional enhanced codes—which is to say, themselves. A”
― R.R. Reno, Resurrecting the Idea of a Christian Society

“It’s hard to get it together when you’re in a community dominated by behavior that tears life apart. Putnam”
― R.R. Reno, Resurrecting the Idea of a Christian Society

“We resist the gospel because we fear all powers that effect change in us, even as we live in a society that constantly champions progress and development.”
― R.R. Reno

“And so the American dream of freedom inevitably contradicts itself: We must deploy the coercive power of government to promote freedom; we must limit freedom for the sake of freedom.”
― R.R. Reno, Resurrecting the Idea of a Christian Society

“Friedrich Hayek wrote his classic The Road to Serfdom during World War II in the hope of shaping the postwar reconstruction of society. The West, he believed, faced a decisive choice: to affirm individual freedom or to embrace central planning and socialism. Today, however, our greatest threat is untethered individualism. We’re living in a dissolving society, not a collectivist one. In”
― R.R. Reno, Resurrecting the Idea of a Christian Society

“The Faithful are much more likely than other parents to “completely agree” that a woman should put family above career, but they also insist with equal vehemence that the same holds for men. Family trumps personal needs and desires.”
― R.R. Reno, Resurrecting the Idea of a Christian Society

“When we can’t imagine alternatives, most of us remain loyal to the ideas that dominate our minds, even when we know they’re false. We can change our minds only when we are able to envision a more powerful truth.”
― R.R. Reno, Resurrecting the Idea of a Christian Society