Aaron Renn devotes much of his consistently excellent Masculinist newsletter to a discussion of Live Not By Lies. You can subscribe to The Masculinist here; it’s a sophisticated discussion of manhood, culture, and Christianity. In the new one, Issue 47, Renn writes, in part:

Dreher is frequently accused, with some fairness, of being excessively gloomy. As with all of us, I don’t think we can understand why he is the way he is without putting it in the context of his life experience. I haven’t done a detailed biographical investigation of him, but the things I’ve heard Dreher say about his own life are characterized by various degrees of trauma and loss. He was bullied in school and was not able to overcome his assailants, nor did the authorities come to his aid. He moved back to his hometown from the big city but his family was not necessarily glad to see him. He gave his all to expose Catholic abuse scandals but was unable to bring about justice. That experience nearly shattered his Christian faith, and did cause him to leave the Catholic Church and go into Eastern Orthodoxy.

If these were our experiences, we’d probably be gloomy too.

More:

People who can see terrible truths are quite often like this, wounded and alienated from institutions. My own newsletter is a product of this very thing. A three-year period of frankly bizarre occurrences did me enormous harm and caused me to question everything I thought I knew.

That’s fair, and more than fair: it’s really insightful. Renn made me reflect on the sources of my own pessimism. Might have taken two years of therapy to get to where Renn got with those grafs.

I would only add to Renn’s catalog of my own path my disgust with the Republican Party and movement conservatism during the second George W. Bush administration, when I came to terms with the Iraq War, and how we got there. As I’ve said here many times, I had to reckon with my own intellectual complicity with that project. I lost faith in the party and the movement, and came to doubt my own judgment.

You want to know why I freak out over the Christian conservatives telling themselves and the world that God spoke to them and said that Trump is going to be president after January 20, and calling them to rally to Trump’s side? I’ve never been the sort of person who says “God told me” this or that, but on the Iraq War, I was the kind of man who was morally certain that I was right, and that all those who disagreed with me were either cowards or fools. [UPDATE: This, I should clarify, is why I lost faith in my own judgment back then. It wasn’t taking the wrong side in the war, like you feel when you’ve backed the wrong political candidate, or picked the wrong horse. It was the deep certainty I had that the cause was so just that it was not possible for anyone to disagree in good faith.]

Mostly, though, Iraq deeply damaged my faith in governing elites, and in the GOP, which I thought was the realistic party, the hard-headed, unsentimental party. So, by the way, did the 2008 financial crash. Both Republicans and Democrats, across both the Clinton and G.W. Bush administrations, gave the financial industry what it wanted, and created the conditions for the crash. I don’t trust these people. Still don’t.

About the Catholic Church, I will just say that I saw that leadership elites will make the weak, the vulnerable, and the trusting suffer to protect their own interests. It’s true of any leadership elite, but I had not expected that in the Church. I learned otherwise. It was a confirmation of what I learned as a bullied kid in high school: most of the time, people in authority, and with the responsibility to protect those who can’t defend themselves, will not stand up to bullies.

The situation in my Louisiana family I’ve written about extensively. Let’s just say here that I learned after a costly move, involving my wife and kids, that things were not what I had been raised to believe, and that the idea I had of family was something of a sham. I had not seen any of that coming, and could not have predicted it. It broke me physically and otherwise, in ways from which I’m still not fully recovered.

In fewer than 20 years, I lost my faith in my church, my country (as an agent of righteousness in the world), my political party, and my family — and in some ways, myself. You’d be gloomy too.

What I’m struggling to come to terms with is the knowledge that life is worth living, and life is ultimately good, despite these all too human failures. I find it very hard to trust. I hadn’t quite thought about all this in cumulative context until reading Renn’s newsletter. Funny how things that are totally obvious to a stranger can elude one.

Renn goes on:

While Dreher is right to be gloomy in my view, he comes across as someone invested in a future of defeat. He explicitly says he has hope, yet a mood of defeatism pervades his work, something I’m far from the first person to notice. He’s more likely to write about someone who suffered and survived, or someone who’s living a healthy, quiet existence somewhere, than of stories of victorious conflict or justice triumphant. I think accounts for much of the pushback he receives. This sadly provides an excuse for people to dismiss him as “alarmist” or whatever and ignore the substance of his work, which is frequently quite penetrating.

This is where perhaps different life experiences might have produced a different outcome. Imagine if, for example, he had been able to get people to go on the record about Cardinal McCarrick, leading to his removal and justice triumphing. How might he feel differently about the world today with some big wins like that under his belt?

These too are fair comments. Every couple of weeks, somebody will write me a letter telling me that something I wrote brought them to religious faith, or led them to convert to Orthodoxy, or meant a lot to them in some big, life-changing way. Man, those things make such a difference. It makes me feel that it’s worthwhile. I should also confess that I have a hard time accepting success; I only think about the things I failed to do. I just checked on the sales numbers for Live Not By Lies, and they’re pretty good. Selling 66 percent more than The Benedict Option at this same period, despite not being able to go out and give talks to support it, and not having much mainstream media attention to it. Still, I find it hard not to think about what I might have done better with the book or my promotion of it. That’s just my personality. I can’t tell how much of it is modesty, how much of it is the vice of ingratitude, and how much of it is plain old neurosis.

Overall, though, I have learned from experience not to expect much from the people and institutions you are supposed to trust. You invest a lot of yourself and your hopes in them, and they break your damn heart. This is called wisdom, and it comes from understanding the meaning of tragedy (such as: my dad and my sister, who both believed that Family Was Everything, but who shared such a strong idea of what family should be that they laid the groundwork for the dissolution of the family after their passing.) When I go on and on about the Christians of the Communist world who endured without losing their faith or having their spirits broken, and trying to draw lessons from it, I’m not just searching because it interests me professionally, you understand.

Miracles might happen. God can do anything He wants. None of the people I talked to in the former Soviet Union and the Soviet bloc expected to live to see the end of Communism. They did what they did because it was the right thing to do, and because they know that somehow, God, and His goodness, would triumph. I believe that. I really do. But in some times more than other times, faith is the evidence of things unseen.

To be precise for a moment, the reason I am so gloomy about our prospects as traditional, conservative Christians in the short term is because I have done my homework, and I know where all the trends are taking us. We have the liberty to change our direction, but the only way we will do so is if we wake up, and — to use an old-fashioned word — repent. If we keep living this way, our fate is probably sealed by the choices we made, and failed to make, today.

When I think about the big failures I’ve been part of — everything but the childhood bullying thing — they all come down to a combination of factors: people believing too much in their own goodness, and denying the possibility of failure, including failure of judgment; refusal to turn back when warned, in part because it was too scary to let go of a comforting narrative, or at least a familiar one;. and finally, trusting that everything was bound to turn out for the best if we just stayed the course.

One work of art that I take as explaining life to me is Auden’s “As I Walked Out One Evening.” It’s about idealism, disappointment, disorder, and redemption. This passage especially:

‘O look, look in the mirror,
   O look in your distress:
Life remains a blessing
   Although you cannot bless.

‘O stand, stand at the window
   As the tears scald and start;
You shall love your crooked neighbour
   With your crooked heart.’

I’m living out these lines right now. I’m writing these lines in everything I do.

If I didn’t have hope, though, I wouldn’t write at all. The story I told of my late sister’s life and what I learned from it, The Little Way of Ruthie Leming (only $1.99 on Kindle) is a book about hope, but also tragedy. I had not realized until my sister, a small-town school teacher, died, and I started hearing stories from people about what a difference she made in their lives, how much great good could come from a quiet life, a hidden life. That story also proved tragic for me, in the end — I mean, beyond her untimely death — but that doesn’t negate all the good she did, and that she lived. Few stories involving the human heart are simple. When I published that book seven years ago, I received a number of letters and comments from people about how it inspired them to move back home to raise their kids around their families. I will never know this side of heaven how much good was accomplished through that book. I trust that some was, though. That brings me hope.

I imagine that Benedict of Nursia was thought of as a crank and an alarmist when he left the city of Rome as a young man, and went to live in a cave in a steep valley in the countryside north of Rome. Who does that? And when he came out and started monastic communities, people must have thought he was leading men (and women) to throw their lives away. Still, he persisted. He never lived to see the fruits of his labors. It’s fair to say that the movement Benedict started played a key role in saving western European civilization, and leading an unknowably large people to the faith.

You have to take the long view, I believe. There was no reason for anybody to be optimistic in Rome around the year 500. Everything was falling apart. Benedict was no optimist. He was a man of faith, and that meant a man of hope.

This is why I’m so gloomy when I talk about the situation with our culture and our politics, but so cheerful and lively when people meet me. I like people, and I like to talk to them, and hear their stories. I take their company as an opportunity for an epiphany that might show me the world more clearly, and might help me see truth, beauty, and/or goodness. It has happened so many times before. As Russell Kirk said, “The world remains sunlit, despite its vices.”

Americans seem to have trouble separating optimism from hope, I think. Maybe it’s because we lack a tragic sense of life — that is, we deny that suffering is the human condition, and that all wisdom begins with suffering. That we cannot separate joy from suffering. That we must know that everything we build will one day turn to dust.

Or maybe I have just become some sort of Slav. Anyway, Tolkien’s lines resonate deeply within my heart:

Actually I am a Christian, and indeed a Roman Catholic, so that I do not expect ‘history’ to be anything but a ‘long defeat’— though it contains (and in legend may contain more clearly and movingly) some samples or glimpses of final victory.

Say, I’m going to be driving all day tomorrow to central Texas for a private event. I won’t be able to approve comments until late in the evening. Please be patient, I’ll get to it.