Crunchy Cons Quotes

“A CRUNCHY CON MANIFESTO
1. We are conservatives who stand outside the conservative mainstream; therefore, we can see things that matter more clearly.
2. Modern conservatism has become too focused on money, power, and the accumulation of stuff, and insufficiently concerned with the content of our individual and social character.
3. Big business deserves as much skepticism as big government.
4. Culture is more important than politics and economics.
5. A conservatism that does not practice restraint, humility, and good stewardship—especially of the natural world—is not fundamentally conservative.
6. Small, Local, Old, and Particular are almost always better than Big, Global, New, and Abstract.
7. Beauty is more important than efficiency.
8. The relentlessness of media-driven pop culture deadens our senses to authentic truth, beauty, and wisdom.
9. We share Russell Kirk's conviction that "the institution most essential to conserve is the family.”
― Rod Dreher, Crunchy Cons: How Birkenstocked Burkeans, gun-loving organic gardeners, evangelical free-range farmers, hip homeschooling mamas, right-wing nature ... America

“Our food is a sign of what we’ve lost in general. I think if we could start slowing down for food, and rebuilding the quality of our plates, we could start rebuilding what we’ve lost in our culture. As my boss says, culture starts in the kitchen, not in the opera house.”
― Rod Dreher, Crunchy Cons: The New Conservative Counterculture and Its Return to Roots

“We are told that small-scale farming is inefficient— this is true—and that because our factory farms feed the masses, and do so cheaply, we should be satisfied. And that's a deal that makes sense to nearly all of us: just keep the stuff showing up in produce bins and under cellophane in the supermarket cooler, and keep it relatively cheap, and we'll ask no questions. But in striking that devil's bargain, we sign away our responsibility for what's in that food, how it got there, and what was done to human communities to close the deal. To participate in a system and a way of thinking in which the act of eating is merely a commercial transaction is to sell out our spiritual and cultural patrimony. I understand the free-market reasons why Americans do this. But I don't understand why it is called conservative.”
― Rod Dreher, Crunchy Cons: How Birkenstocked Burkeans, gun-loving organic gardeners, evangelical free-range farmers, hip homeschooling mamas, right-wing nature ... America

“The fact is, all education is directed to some end, and if parents don’t make conscious decisions on what that end is, they are simply abdicating their role in setting the direction” of their children’s lives.”
― Rod Dreher, Crunchy Cons: The New Conservative Counterculture and Its Return to Roots

“we are spiritual beings first and foremost, and it is impossible to thrive in a culture that does not honor and nurture things of the human spirit over and above material concerns.”
― Rod Dreher, Crunchy Cons: The New Conservative Counterculture and Its Return to Roots

“A few years ago, there was a popular stage play in London—you’ll have to pardon me, but I’m quoting accurately—titled Shopping and F***ing. That’s an apt description of the passions of our era, the goals most of us, liberal and conservative, aspire to. Democrats are the Party of Lust, Republicans the Party of Greed—both are individualist and materialist to the core.”
― Rod Dreher, Crunchy Cons: The New Conservative Counterculture and Its Return to Roots

“People long for God, and more of them than we might think are willing to accept the idea that getting close to him might be painful. The church needs to worry less about coddling our superficial tastes and impulses and more about giving us the whole truth.”
― Rod Dreher, Crunchy Cons: The New Conservative Counterculture and Its Return to Roots

“The number one advice I give to my students is to be a culture creator, not a culture consumer,” he continued. “You have to have time to create, and to create, you have to get rid of those things that steal your time. TV is the great time-stealer in American life.”
― Rod Dreher, Crunchy Cons: The New Conservative Counterculture and Its Return to Roots

“Small, Local, Old, and Particular are almost always better than Big, Global, New, and Abstract.”
― Rod Dreher, Crunchy Cons: How Birkenstocked Burkeans, gun-loving organic gardeners, evangelical free-range farmers, hip homeschooling mamas, right-wing nature ... America

“if one’s religion is to mean anything, if it is to last, it has to stand outside of time and place. Its truths have to be transcendent. And though we moderns have to find a way to make the tradition livable in our own situations, we must never forget that we don’t judge the religion; the religion judges us. To be blunt, a god that is no bigger than our own desires is not God at all, but a divinized rationalization for self-worship.”
― Rod Dreher, Crunchy Cons: The New Conservative Counterculture and Its Return to Roots

“Put another way, if you don’t educate your children for metaphysical truth and moral virtue, mainstream culture will do it for you. Absent shared commitment to these spiritual and moral verities, it is hard to see how we renew our families, our communities, and our country with an ethic of duty, self-restraint, stewardship, and putting the needs of people, not the state or corporations, first.”
― Rod Dreher, Crunchy Cons: The New Conservative Counterculture and Its Return to Roots

“If family is so important to us conservatives, why do so many of us bring into our daily lives so many things that take away from family life?”
― Rod Dreher, Crunchy Cons: The New Conservative Counterculture and Its Return to Roots

“We want God back in the public square, but for too many of us, religion is a pious veneer over our own unconscious worship of materialism. We want a faith that makes us feel good about ourselves, not one that makes demands we’d rather not obey. We’ve turned religion into another consumer good. Our faith does not help us stand against the money-driven materialist culture, but instead baptizes our participation in it.”
― Rod Dreher, Crunchy Cons: The New Conservative Counterculture and Its Return to Roots

“The cacophony of contemporary popular culture makes it hard to discern the call of truth and wisdom. There is no area in which practicing asceticism is more important.”
― Rod Dreher, Crunchy Cons: How Birkenstocked Burkeans, gun-loving organic gardeners, evangelical free-range farmers, hip homeschooling mamas, right-wing nature ... America

“The undeniable fact is that free-market, technology-driven capitalism, for all its benefits, tends to pull families and communities apart by empowering individuals and encouraging—even mandating—individualism.”
― Rod Dreher, Crunchy Cons: The New Conservative Counterculture and Its Return to Roots

“the goal is not to get rid of technology, but to limit its use “to restore a more integrated life, where you have the physical, the social, the mental, and the aesthetic aspects of life blending as seamlessly as possible.”
― Rod Dreher, Crunchy Cons: The New Conservative Counterculture and Its Return to Roots

“The television medium is by its very nature a force against tradition, against continuity, against permanence and stability.”
― Rod Dreher, Crunchy Cons: The New Conservative Counterculture and Its Return to Roots

“It’s amazing to me to see parents who have money, and who think they’re conservative, abandon their children to the culture, and then turn around and express shock at what the culture does to their children,”
― Rod Dreher, Crunchy Cons: The New Conservative Counterculture and Its Return to Roots

“we should start thinking seriously about why we have become the richest and most free society ever to exist, yet our wealth and personal liberty have bought us so little happiness.”
― Rod Dreher, Crunchy Cons: The New Conservative Counterculture and Its Return to Roots

“Both mainstream liberalism and conservatism are essentially materialist ideologies, and we should not be surprised that both shape a society dedicated to the multiplication of wants and the intensification of desire, not the improvement of character.”
― Rod Dreher, Crunchy Cons: The New Conservative Counterculture and Its Return to Roots