Against the Return of the Strong Gods
My Manifesto of Defiance Against a Wicked Book by R. R. Reno
This book fills me with profound sorrow. It is the record of how a man who drank the same civic and intellectual mother's milk as me, who ought to have been a brother, betrayed his heritage and became a stranger and an enemy.
My first, most instinctive and visceral response as I listened to this book, which I mention only because it is psychologically interesting, was not sorrow, but anger and fear. R. R. Reno is like an arsonist shouting angry slogans against everything that I believe in as he charges towards my house with a blowtorch to burn it down. The book is a declaration of war against a civic creed that I hold sacred, and that is the foundation of my national identity. Upon hearing that being attacked, I wanted to kill the author before he kills me.
But I checked this feeling by remembering that Christ taught us to love our enemies, to turn the other cheek when struck, and to judge not, that we be not judged. And so, slowly, laboriously and with difficulty, I struggled against and quelled my anger against Reno, and against millions of my unworthy countrymen who seem to agree with him, and to which mentality this book provides a clue. In my mind’s eye, as part of my labor of forgiveness, it turned out to be necessary for me to watch the arsonists burn down my house and leave me forever homeless in this world, unresisting, quelling my vengeful anger, which I could only do because Christ was at my side, counseling me not to be angry, and to remember that He, too, had nowhere to lay His head. And so I still loved the arsonists, and prayed for them, and did not hate, and I had learned a little about placing my treasures in heaven and not trusting in princes and the sons of men. The feeling that the labor of forgiveness left behind is sorrow that people who ought, by birthright, to have been a certain great and noble thing, namely Americans, had sold their birthright and became something less than Americans and even less than men. That vocation that they have forsaken is, on balance, perhaps the greatest and noblest class that has ever been seen in all of human history. How great America is! Or at least, how great it was, for its greatness is being attacked and may be destroyed by America-First populism. But for now, there’s still hope that America will triumph over its populist enemies. The word “American” is, of course, very nearly a synonym for the word “liberal,” in the broad sense that includes libertarians and classical liberals as well as social-democratic left-liberals. But it's a muscular and patriotic liberalism that has defended democracies and defeated and overthrown tyrants again and again, and presided over the most beneficent world order mankind has ever seen. Reno denigrates and repudiates all this noble legacy and wants it to end. And with him, seemingly, millions of other Americans-by-birth have betrayed the civic creed that gives America its identity and returned to, in Reno's phrase, the “strong gods” of base submission to strongman leaders, communal solidarity based on hatred and exclusion, falsification of history to flatter one's people and one's leaders, and idolatry of the nation and the state, and become un-American.
Of course, ostensibly that's not what Reno means by the phrase “strong gods.”
But this is an insincere book. He's trying to pull the wool over the eyes of some foolish intellectuals, or helping some bad-hearted intellectuals to fool themselves, while dog-whistling to the forces of darkness.
I knew it going in. From the title, and a few rumors I'd heard about the author, I knew this book was the work of an enemy. I started listening to it in order to know my enemy. Not a day goes by that I don't worry for a few moments about dying at the hands of a Proud Boys firing squad, after the neofascist MAGA movement takes over America, as retaliation for some new crime that will be created, such as telling the truth about the results of the 2020 election. I read this book to see how intellectuals sell out and become anti-patriots, enemies of liberty, friends and fellow travelers of the new fascism.
And nothing about The Return of the Strong Gods changed my mind. It's a wicked book, but it's also a fascinating, profound, thought-provoking intellectual history, with a diagnosis of our times that is full of important truths, eloquently stated, but twisted to evil ends. R. R. Reno is a bad man, but he might have been a semi-good man in a better world, and 90% of this is the book that that semi-good man would have written. I learned and will remember much of value from this accursed testament of a traitor. The exaggerated negativism towards everything that lovers of liberty hold sacred, and the declarations of fealty to populism, and the favorable mentions of “strong gods,” seem like an afterthought that has been pressed down onto preexisting material as an awkwardly imposed thesis. One almost feels like the book is an intellectual trying to twist his life-work, which had considerable merit, into a job application to work for a tyrant.
The book is, above all, a reaction against the post-World War II reaction against totalitarianism, against Popper and Hayek and Milton Friedman and Derrida and many others who shaped the contemporary Western mind. I have my disagreements with them, too. But the intellectual edifice they built has supported liberty. If Reno wanted to be understood as still wanting to safeguard liberty in spite of rejecting the post-World War II liberal reaction against totalitarianism which has so long and triumphantly carried the torch of the defense of liberty, he would have an uphill battle to prove that he has an equally strong alternative basis in principles and practices for the defensive liberty. He makes no attempt. He doesn't really pretend to be on the side of liberty in any way, and his chief purpose in writing is to attack the intellectual bodyguards of liberty, while aligning himself with “populism” and defending the new demagogues in the only way they can be defended: by whataboutism, the rhetoric of deflecting all criticism by slandering the free society and its natural leaders with accusations that mirror whatever is said against the demagogues.
Reno has, as I say, many truths to teach, but the truth that he misses is as great and obvious as the sky. He misses completely that personal liberty is a prerequisite for personal integrity, that to live in truth, one must be free, which is why honest men must insist upon freedom above all else.
The title is, in truth, both blasphemous and fascistic. Who are the “strong gods” referenced in the title? No one living in our times could hear the phrase “return of the strong gods” without thinking of certain dark, powerful figures who loom over our dangerous times, hating freedom and truth and threatening to destroy civilization, and thinking also, and relatedly, of the strong, godlike figures who bestrode the world in an earlier time of darkness, and who now seem to have returned. Then there were Hitler and Mussolini and Stalin; now there are Vladimir Putin, Victor Orban, and the depraved MAGA chieftain whose name my patriotic scruples forbid me to utter, as the people of Gondor in Lord of the Rings would not utter the name of their great enemy Sauron. That is the obvious meaning of the title, and these tyrants and tyrants-in-waiting, whom Reno means to flatter, will certainly love to be called “strong gods” if Reno ever has the good fortune (by his lights) to get enough of their attention to look at the cover of his book. The fig leaf of plausible deniability that Reno provides for himself is that the “strong gods” ostensibly don't mean strongman leaders, but… well, what? It's very far from clear. Certainly no lucid, deliberate, cogent unpacking of and justification for the phrase Is ever offered. Still, Reno persistently pretends that the “strong gods" mean certain principles, such as solidarity and transcendence and justice, which are enduringly important to people. He contrasts these with the “weak gods” like openness and diversity that, by his account, have been elevated at the expense of the strong gods in the post-world War II era as a reaction against totalitarianism.
It's a weird metaphor. Gods are persons. So are Putin, Orban, and the American Sauron. Solidarity and transcendence are not. And Christians believe in only one God (albeit in three persons but never mind that for now). Any reference to “gods,” plural, suggests a return to paganism with all its horrors and lies. Why, then, doesn't Reno drop this clumsy and disturbing metaphor and title the book The Return of Solidarity and Transcendence? Because then the book would do nothing to flatter the new tyrants, or grab the attention of corrupt readers who are sick and tired of being good, and in whom the old, atavistic yearning for blind subjection and communal violence is stirring again.
Moreover, the title would be far less plausible. Our times are seeing the return of “strong gods” in the sense of neo-fascist strongman rulers whose followers abase themselves to participate in obscene personality cults, sealed together by a kind of blasphemous sacrament of heightening and obsessing over and inventing grievances and then blaming them on scapegoated minorities. Those “strong gods” are indeed returning, and so the title Return of the Strong Gods has an immediate and obvious relevance. By contrast, if the book were titled The Return of Solidarity and Transcendence, it would immediately appear implausibly optimistic and out of touch. We are not seeing any return of solidarity and transcendence in these dark, populism-haunted times. The strong gods of this age are thoroughly worldly and cynical, and the only kind of solidarity they work for is obeisance to themselves, so as long as freedom and integrity still live, they will continue only to be divisive. And yet it probably is true that a misguided yearning for solidarity and transcendence is part of the impulse that corrupts men into supporting them. People want togetherness, so they welcome a leader who is intolerant of disagreement and criticism, and cannot accept that he lost an election. People want to worship, so they exalt wicked earthly rulers and lose themselves in submission to them. I'm grateful to Reno for helping me understand that better.
After chapters and chapters of grievance and grumbling against the post-World War II liberal order, Reno does clumsily tried to make a positive case for something or other at the end. He wants us to turn away from the “weak gods” of the open society to things that we love, and that give us a feeling of home. He wants to stir up a conversation about “who we are.” But he has just spent most of the book rejecting who we are and denying what we love. Like Reno, I believe in love. I believe in community. I believe in tradition. I believe in truth. I believe in God. I believe in having higher loyalties. And Reno is my enemy because he is the enemy of my community, my tradition, my loyalties, what I know to be true, and what is commanded by my God. Freedom is my fatherland. The open society that he derides is my home, the only home in which I can ever feel at home, because I have the moral maturity to understand that a just society cannot be founded on force, fear, and exclusion. I feel love for and solidarity with liberals of every nation. But I will never submit to any kind of solidarity with enemies of liberty such as R. R. Reno and the MAGA cult. “Better dead than red,” as the old saying had it, or in Patrick Henry's formulation, “Give me liberty or give me death.” The open society and the ideal of freedom is not weak. For its sake alone, the greatest nation in history built the greatest military power the human race has ever seen and defended it steadfastly through the Age in all history when the human race was most prosperous and numerous and thriving. And we true patriots, the liberals in the broadest sense, some of us at least, will never falter or sell out even if we lose an election or two. If MAGA wins the 2024 election and wants to establish national solidarity under their new Fuehrer, they had better send a Proud Boys firing squad gun me down, because I will never submit. I am for freedom in the Constitution and the America that I have always known as long as I draw breath.
If they do it, if the Proud Boys shoot me dead for being loyal to freedom, will R. R. Reno disapprove? That's the question that haunted me as I listened to Return of the Strong Gods.
Long ago, Caiaphas said “it is expedient that one man should die for the people.” For the people. That has always been one side of populism, in Chesterton’s words “the soul of the hive, a heathen thing.”
Does Reno have any conscience left? What is he prepared to do for the sake of his “strong gods?” I don't think anything in the book gave me reassurance that he has any scruples. There are, of course, moments when he drops phrases that could be charitably interpreted as indicating some sympathy for human rights. But he has strayed far from the creed of liberty and seems eager to stray still further. He’s busy selling out, and one gets the sense that any residual scruples are either decoys, or else liberal habits of mind that he hasn't gotten around to selling out yet. Of course, he has a tricky problem, because he wants to stir up loyalties of some sort, and Americans have nothing but freedom to be loyal to. That has been the purpose of the nation from the beginning. And so he can't help occasionally dropping phrases reminiscent of liberty as focal points for the solidarity that he wants to use against the open society and liberty. But would he ever reach a breaking point and turn against the “strong gods” of populism, and turn in defense of liberty and human rights? I suspect so, but he doesn’t admit it in Return of the Strong Gods.
All in all, my attitude to Reno and MAGA may be best captured by words written long ago by G.K. Chesterton in The Everlasting Man, about the psychology of war:
Whatever starts wars, the thing that sustains wars is something in the soul; that is something akin to religion. It is what men feel about life and about death. A man near to death is dealing directly with an absolute; it is nonsense to say he is concerned only with relative and remote complications that death in any case will end. If he is sustained by certain loyalties, they must be loyalties as simple as death. They are generally two ideas, which are only two sides of one idea. The first is the love of something said to be threatened, if it be only vaguely known as home; the second is dislike and defiance of some strange thing that threatens it. The first is far more philosophical than it sounds, though we need not discuss it here. A man does not want his national home destroyed or even changed, because he cannot even remember all the good things that go with it; just as he does not want his house burnt down, because he can hardly count all the things he would miss. Therefore he fights for what sounds like a hazy abstraction, but is really a house. But the negative side of it is quite as noble as well as quite as strong. Men fight hardest when they feel that the foe is at once an old enemy and an eternal stranger, that his atmosphere is alien and antagonistic; as the French feel about the Prussian or the Eastern Christians about the Turk. If we say it is a difference of religion, people will drift into dreary bickerings about sects and dogmas. We will pity them and say it is a difference about death and daylight; a difference that does really come like a dark shadow between our eyes and the day. Men can think of this difference even at the point of death; for it is a difference about the meaning of life.
Men are moved in these things by something far higher and holier than policy: by hatred. When men hung on in the darkest days of the Great War, suffering either in their bodies or in their souls for those they loved, they were long past caring about details of diplomatic objects as motives for their refusal to surrender. Of myself and those I knew best I can answer for the vision that made surrender impossible. It was the vision of the German Emperor’s face as he rode into Paris. This is not the sentiment which some of my idealistic friends describe as Love. I am quite content to call it hatred; the hatred of hell and all its works, and to agree that as they do not believe in hell they need not believe in hatred. But in the face of this prevalent prejudice, this long introduction has been unfortunately necessary, to ensure an understanding of what is meant by a religious war. There is a religious war when two worlds meet; that is, when two visions of the world meet; or in more modern language, when two moral atmospheres meet. What is the one man’s breath is the other man’s poison; and it is vain to talk of giving a pestilence a place in the sun.
Just so, in Reno and MAGA, I meet the foe who is at once an old enemy and an eternal stranger; what is their breath is my poison. Its old name is fascism, or tyranny. It is the rule of force, fear and lies, the disdain of all the scruples and restraints of justice, the contemptuous destruction of protocols and procedures and rule of law and establishments and norms and traditions and habits of respect and deference and tolerance, the self-glorification and rampant denigration of others, the spirit of mockery and insult, the nihilistic impulses. I for one will never cease in mental fight for the soul of the Republic until this spirit is dead and buried in shame forever.
I think I can say what sort of reader could put Return of the Strong Gods to the best use. If a playwright or screenwriter had the ambition to tell the story of the crucifixion of Christ from the perspective of His enemies, of the chief priests and the Jewish mob and Pontius Pilate and Herod in the Roman soldiers, and to portray their cause as sympathetically as possible, he would do well to read Return of the Strong Gods. The book is full of the cynical agnosticism of Pontius Pilate, asking “What is truth?” as an excuse for not defending the innocent. It is full of attachment to community and tradition that has been desiccated of mercy and justice and tainted with ethnic pride and cynical realpolitik. Reno mentions a few times that he is a Catholic and would like to see a revival of religious faith, but it is clear that he only means a lazy-minded and ritualistic faith that can numb the critical faculties and conscience so as to make men more pliable to tyrants. He's clearly unwilling to hold his worldview biblically accountable, and the last thing he wants is to meet the living God who commands men to welcome the stranger, and to submit to His obedience. The book is full of the spirit of Pilate and Caiaphas, of wholesome things twisted, of rhetoric and sophistry obfuscating selfishness and cowardice that are ready to turn to cruelty at any moment. In the end, all the talk of transcendence and solidarity comes to nothing more than the cynical takeaway that we have no king but Caesar.
May God save me, and the republic, from R. R. Reno, and save him from himself, bringing him to repentance.