“Rod Dreher is stirring a controversy that has been too long in coming. He has climbed to the top of the ivory tower and started clanging an alarm bell. It is a wake-up call that all who care about conservative ideas should heed.” —Wick Allison, former publisher of National Review

Rod Dreher is a writer and editor at the Dallas Morning News, and a conservative journalist who has worked for National Review, the New York Post, and the Washington Times. He bought his first pair of Birkenstocks in 2000 and never looked back.

Chapter One

What Are Crunchy

Conservatives?

When we were young, the countercultural people had long hair, no socks, and didn't trust anyone over 30. Now, we are the countercultural people. —John Buck, Arkansas psychologist and crunchy conservative

A few summers ago, in the National Review offices on the east side of Manhattan, I told my editor that I was leaving work early so I could pick up my family's weekly delivery of fruits and vegetables from the neighborhood organic food co-op to which we belonged.

"Ewww, that's so lefty," she said, and made the kind of face I'd have expected if I'd informed her I was headed off to hear Peter, Paul and Mary warble at a fund-raiser for cross-dressing El Salvadoran hemp farmers.

Lefty? Moi? But on the subway home to Brooklyn, I had to admit she was right.

A taste for organic vegetables is a left-wing cliche, and here I was, a writer for the premier conservative political magazine in the country, leaving my post on the front lines to consort with the liberals in my neighborhood as I filled my rucksack with the most beautiful and delicious broccoli, carrots, greens, and whatnot in the city. What's up with that?

And come to think of it, what's up with those Birkenstock sandals on my feet? It just about killed me to buy them the summer before, given what Birkenstocks symbolize (you know, patchouli, pot, and ponytails on men). But New Yorkers walk a lot, and my sensible wife persuaded me that durable, comfortable Birks made sense for hot summer sidewalks. She was right. So that's how a pair of hippie shoes found their way onto my right-wing feet, which--alas!--had begun marching to a different beat than many of my conservative chums. Funny, I didn't feel any more liberal.

The summer before, I had been just like my editor, making fun of my wife's friends from her neighborhood moms' group for going once a week to a local church to pick up their vegetables driven in from farms in rural New York State. Just like liberals, I thought, having to have their politically correct eats. And then one day, one of Julie's friends told her that we could have her family's delivery that week, because they would be out of town. Julie and I were knocked flat by the freshness and intense flavors of the co-op's produce. Who knew cauliflower, the Sansabelt slacks of vegetables, could taste so good? I had always thought of it chiefly as a delivery platform for ranch dip and cheese sauce.

We were no doubt responding to the just-picked freshness of the produce, not its organic status, but no matter. At some point, I started hearing more about the kind of lives the farmers who supplied us were living, and the values of simplicity, community, and self-reliance they honored. In all candor, these people were probably to the left of Ralph Nader, but they reminded me of the kind of older farmers and gardeners I grew up around in rural southern Louisiana--deeply conservative folks whose last Democratic presidential vote likely went to JFK.

As city people who nevertheless dislike factory farms, shopping malls, cookie-cutter chain stores, and all the pomps and works of mass consumerism, we admired what the scrappy New York farmers were trying to do. In my Louisiana hometown, some farmers spent the go-go nineties selling their pastures to developers, and the torrent of cash caused McMansions to pop up like toadstools after a summer rain. It's hard to blame folks for cashing in, I suppose, but the community in which I was raised was changing rapidly as economic growth caused it to become a bedroom suburb of Baton Rouge. In their own way, the New York farmers were doing what farmers in my Louisiana birthplace were not: conserving agrarian communal traditions by, to paraphrase William F. Buckley describing the founding mission of the National Review, "standing athwart history yelling Stop!"

Besides, their produce was vastly superior to what was available in the local supermarket. We didn't mind paying a little extra for food this good. The next summer, we joined the co-op, and Julie got a kick out of picking up our weekly deliveries in her National Review tote bag. When you get to our age, you have precious few opportunities to shock the middle class, so you take them where you find them.

Now, it had never occurred to me, except in a jokey way, that eating organic vegetables was a political act, but my editor's snarky remark got me to thinking about other ways my family's lifestyle was countercultural, and why, though we were thoroughly conservative in our morals and our politics, we weren't a good fit on either the mainstream left or right.

Three years earlier, Julie had left a fulfilling position as a magazine editorial assistant to stay at home and raise our young son, Matthew. As much as she loved her job, as useful as that extra paycheck was, and for all the grief she took from other New York women who disdained her for "wasting" her college degree, we both felt strongly that we had a responsibility to our son to put his needs first, as much as we were able.

Once, when Matthew was still an infant, a kind woman in late middle age stopped us to offer admiring comments about our son. She talked about what a disappointment her son was to her, how she and her husband had put him in an expensive private school, but he had become a pothead and a troublemaker. The poor woman lamented how she fought with her husband over disciplining their son, with the boy's father insisting that kids will be kids, and besides, dear, didn't you and I fool around with drugs back in the day? After all that, she asked Julie and me if we had made plans for Matthew's schooling yet--a perfectly rational question in New York City, where parents put their child's name on private-school waiting lists as soon as the blessed babe is conceived. We replied that we were strongly considering homeschooling. The woman recoiled.

"Isn't that what right-wing Christians do?" she spluttered.

The conversation went downhill from there, and we found a way to excuse ourselves as gracefully as we could. A few minutes later, walking home, I remarked to Julie that here was a woman whose heart was broken over what her child had become, and that all the money in the world spent at that posh private school couldn't make up for what permissive parenting and a lax educational environment had done to the boy. Here she was longing for the kind of self-disciplined, responsible son that religiously conservative families tend to produce--but she'd die a thousand deaths before actually making the kind of countercultural sacrifices many such families make for the sake of their children's character and future.

We didn't want to be like this sad woman. In fairness, there are conservative families who find themselves in the same despairing position, having thought that having the correct attitudes, the best of intentions, and enough income to pay for private school would be sufficient to raise good kids. We heard all the time--and still do--from fellow conservatives who are not shy about telling us that our kids are going to be socially maladroit freaks if we don't put them in school. "What about socialization?" they ask anxiously, to which we reply, "Well, look at youth culture today; do you really want your kids socialized into that?"

As he got older, Julie started making plans to homeschool little Matthew, and was delighted to discover that there was a small but vibrant homeschooling association in New York City. Unlike homeschooling parents in her native Texas, most of whom do so out of conservative religious conviction, these were primarily secular liberals who had nonetheless concluded that they could do a better job teaching their kids than the schools. In New York, at least, homeschooling was not what right-wing Christians did. Julie was startled to discover that she shared many of the same concerns about primary education with moms whose views on many political issues were diametrically opposed.

Because our faith is at the center of our lives, and because we believe proper Christian worship should honor both truth and beauty, we committed ourselves to an "ethnic" Catholic church in our neighborhood. The people of Our Lady of Lebanon Maronite Church are of Lebanese descent, and speak Arabic in the main. Going there the first few times was an eerie experience, because we naturally associated that language with Islam; it sounded to our untutored American ears like the PLO at prayer.

Yet these people's ancestors were worshipping Jesus Christ when our European ancestors were still praying to trees. Besides, where it really mattered, we all spoke the same language. It was an Eastern-rite parish, where the aesthetically rich, awe-filled fifth-century liturgy was celebrated partly in Aramaic, the language spoken by Jesus, and the priests were decidedly uninterested in the trendiness. We couldn't take the smarmy, white-bread, middle-class American masses at the Roman-rite parishes around us, where the liturgies were washed out and banal, and the moral and theological grandeur of the historical Christian faith was discarded in favor of a piety that demanded no more of you than that you feel good about yourself. This was a form of Catholic Christianity that demanded more from us, and because of that, it was more rewarding. And it seemed so much more solid than Our Lady of What's Happening Now around the corner, where the priests embarrassed themselves trying to be hip and relevant.

The key thing is, we didn't become members of Our Lady of Lebanon parish because it sounded like a neat experiment in religious tourism. We did so beca...