The world to come out of the Second World War has been characterized by a consensus oriented toward dismantling strong loyalties that, according to liberal and progressivist interpretation, led to totalitarian horrors. This consensus imposed the rule of weak gods, namely: unlimited openness, tireless inclusivity and the cult to diversity.
Under this new orthodoxy, every categorical truth, every strong conviction and every deep fondness have been perceived as intolerance, as an expression of latent authoritarianism.
Russell R. Reno, in The Return of the Strong Gods, contends that obsession over weakness has spawned an atomized and spiritually void society. In view of this he invites us to rebel against “corrosive nihilism,” by searching for the return to that which is in truth worthy of our affection —i.e., the strong gods—: faith in God, tradition, patriotism, and a sense of belonging to family and community.
Russell R. Reno is a towering literary figure of our time in the realm of ideas. He is a theologian, professor and editor of the influential First Things Magazine. Apart from this, he is a a mountaineer and a prolific author of books on the current state of things in society, in the United States and in the Western world at large. Some of his works include Heroism and the Christian Life, Resurrecting the Idea of Christian Society, Genesis, and his very remarkable The Return of the Strong Gods, which is the focus of the present interview.
In the face of resurgent Nietzschean thought and the disruptive power of Silicon Valley’s technocapitalism, how can the party of permanence, in defending an enduring moral order, reaffirm the essential role of the spiritual dimension?
Nietzsche can bewitch today’s readers, because his criticisms of the spiritul mediocrity of modern life are accurate and forceful. But he lacks any alternative. His huffing and puffing about “power” creates the rhetorical illusion of something great and noble. But note well: his doctrines play a central role in postmodern thought, which preaches a dispiriting nihilism—everything is just the naked assertion of the Will to Power. Young people are waking up to the peril of this spiritual vacuum, and some are turning toward Christianity. Our problem, however, is that a great deal of Christian thought has “theologized” multiculturalism and other deracinating ideologies in recent decades. Baby Boomer Christians are often hostile to what I call the “strong god,” the demanding and ennobling objects of shared loves. For exampe, Baby Boomer Catholic priests resist the youth-led revival of the Latin Mass. Truth be told, the churches are ambivalent about playing a role in restoring the spiritual dimensión of Western culture, fearing that doing it might lead to idolatry.
In your work, you emphasize love and obedience as central themes: love as the common affections that anchor us in the world, and obedience, as Russell Kirk described, not as servile but as a commitment to established conventions and a just civil order. Similarly, Roger Scruton’s conservatism was deeply rooted in love, particularly oikophilia and attachment to one’s own home and roots. Do you believe that contemporary conservatism has drifted from these foundational pillars, prioritizing instead a blind trust in issues like the market economy?
The United States has always emphasized freedom. American conservatives took up this theme during the Cold War, not only to oppose Soviet tyranny, but as a criticism of the modern regulatory-welfare state. In my estimation, after the end of the Cold War, American conservatism went too far in this direction. It neglected the solidarity-creating loves—marriage, nation, and God—truthing too much in free markets. But greater wealth does not satisfy the human heart. As Roger Scruton recognized, we want to be from somewhere. People wish to have a home that they can count on, yes, but also a home to which they can contribute, a people and common project that they can serve. Conservatism needs to recover solidarity motifs, which are the foundations for a free society that, paradoxically, are not based in freedom, but rather in obedience to the authority of permanente things, as Kirk puts it.
In the book you contend that the early post-1945 consensus decried someone as moderate as Walter Lippmann for his attempt at appealing to natural law, seeing it as an instance of “authoritarian” backsliding. However, in 1970 Nobel laureate and biochemist Jacques Monod published a book called Chance and Necessity which could be interpreted as the liberal consensus or liberal democracy endowing itself with a sort of “natural law” of its own, as it proposed knowledge as something separate from value judgment. If that were the case, could liberalism be taken as another sort of authoritarianism?
As an “ism,” liberalism can certainly become an ideology that proclaims exclusive right to govern out political imaginations, and not just political, but moral imaginations as well. Sadly, this has happened since the end of the Cold War, when an end-of-history mentality became dominant. The upshot has been a liberal authoritarianism, something we see in Great Britain, where people are arrested for thought crimes. As I’ve written elsewhere, we should cherish our liberal traditions, which in the Anglosphere have deep historical roots—free speech, trial by jury, limited government, rule of law, and so forth. But this is a strand of our heritage, not its sum total. A society that protects human dignity and promotes the common good must have other elements, non-liberal elements, even illiberal ones. For example, patriotism is not a liberal virtue. Solidarity cannot be sustained by liberalism alone.
At one point in the book you refer how the late thinker (or intellectual journalist) Gianni Vattimo made a reading of philosopher Martin Heidegger that fit his own outlook, by, for instance turning Heidegger’s term “Lichtung,” (clearing) into “lightening” to drive home the notion that we should reduce the weight of things that threatens to overburden us with convictions. It seems as though public intellectuals such as Vattimo, Foucault and others have had troubled personal lives to some degree. Are their lives a cautionary tale against living out their philosophies or we should detach life from thought?
I don’t think we need to focus on Vattimo or Foucault’s disordered lives. All of us have reasons to favor a weightless world. If nothing is worth fighting for, nobody will fight. That’s a tempting promise of peace. If nothing is worth sacrificing for, I won’t have to make any sacrifices. That’s a tempting promise as well. If there’s not moral truth, then we can pursue technological innovation without limits. Many are attracted to this prospect. As I try to spell out in Return of the Strong Gods, the postwar, open society consensus took hold for good reasons. But it has become a flesh-eating ideology that we must reject.
A passage of the book reads: Early in the postwar era, Philip Rieff recognized this spiritual self-praise in the ascendancy of a therapeutic mentality. In earlier times, human beings thought that happiness depended upon discerning truth and conforming one’s life to it. Today, we speak of “healthy” beliefs, those which promote psychological well-being and social adjustment.Your compatriots Ezra Pound and general Edwin Walker got to live the experience that Philip Rieff described inside the walls of mental institutions. A Spanish 1954 movie called Asylum by Fernando Fernán Gómez features a protagonist who discovers that (maybe a cliché at this point) the staff and the patients are actually the same people. Has the therapeutic mentality that Philip Rieff denounced in the 1960s not made asylums redundant, but perhaps extensive to the whole of society?
Although he was not mentally ill, Ezra Pound was a strange and eccentric man. American authorities used this fact put him in an asylum, which under the circumstances was a generous act, since the alternative may have been execution or imprisonment. In my experience, those in mental institutions in 2025 are truly mentally ill. It’s a romantic illusion that the staff and the patients are the same. What Philip Rieff exposes is that anti-cultural consequences of a therapeutic culture. Put simply, we have destroyed sacred authorities, thus condemning people to lives in accord with themselves. This leads to a dispiriting suspicion of one’s own mediocrity and live without higher purpose.
You’re a not a vulgar run-of-the-mill “social technologist” like those favored by Karl Popper nor an economist preoccupied with the revenues of big business like Hayek, those of whom you speak about in the book. You’re a poet and a prophet and it can be proven by quoting these beautiful lines of yours: We are made for love. We do not want to rest in our solitary selves or in our “little worlds.” We desire to live shoulder to shoulder with our fellow man in the service of shared loves. So no, we are not safer with never-ending critique, the spontaneous order of the free market, technocratic management of utilities, and the other therapies of weakening. There is this oft-quoted phrase by José Antonio Primo de Rivera that asserts that peoples are only moved by poets. What’s the poetry, in the sense of poiesis, of doing, not simply rhyming words, of the coming day? And yet another question, you speak about how the current human type is in search of a final sale not a final solution. Is the current consumer-citizen of the West not ill-disposed toward poetry, making a mockery of and trivializing it?
On the contrary, I think the current consumer-citizen of the West hungers for poetry. As a I have noted, they suspect their own mediocrity and hunger for something higher, something noble. Don’t get me wrong, voters want prosperity. They’re not spiritual heroes. But they’re human! And as St. Augustine reminds us, to be human is to desire God. Science and technology cannot satisfy that desire, even as they deliver many good of this world. In my estimation, our problem rests in the technocratic mentality of western elites. They are the enemies of poetry.
One last question, please. In the book you define blood, soil, and identity as perverse gods that are encouraged by multiculturalism and the reductive techniques of critique. A recent book by a Spanish author, with a geopolitical bent, that’s becoming increasingly popular, contains two of these three words in its title. Can blood, soil and identity, in your view, never constitute again shared loves that build a healthy civic life? Are they always bound to be confrontational and perilous? It would seem as though, for a full development of both the person and the community there needs to be a semblance of these elements.
Blood, soil, sexual preferences, skin color—these are material realities. A solidarity that ennobles must draw us toward spiritual realities. I understand the metaphorical meaning of “blood.” It refers to a people, a shared culture, a common history and language. But note well: these are spiritual realities that cannot be reduced to DNA. The same holds for “soil.” It’s home, not merely a certain number of hectares or a place on a map. I do not reject these metaphors out of hand. But I do insist that we must always purify our vision of shared loves. As a Christian, I know that I am a pilgrim, a wayfarer in this life, heading to my true and final home in heaven. This does not dim my ardor as a patriotic American who deeply loves my varied and beautiful homeland and the crazy quilt of people with whom I share a precious (priceless!) American citizenship. But faith clarifies “blood” and “soil.” These are finite, temporal gods that must be recognized as preparatory to our devotion to the highest good.
