The Moorings As Benedict Option

The Promise Of A Good Place In A Troubled Land

Jordan Peterson toasting Helen Orr on her birthday last night

I missed yesterday’s Substack, and you might have legitimately wondered, “Is Rod dead?” You know how diligent I am about this newsletter. Well, not dead, but vividly alive at The Moorings, the compound belonging to James and Helen Orr, just north of Cambridge, on the River Cam. I’ve written about The Moorings in this space before — here and here — and have called Helen, who is a Church of England vicar, “the Abbess of The Moorings”.

Helen Orr, at home in Cambridge

The Moorings is a rambling property that consists of the main house, with a number of cottages in the gardens. James and Helen have built it as a sort of by-the-pants-seat Christian community for Cambridge graduate students who are Christian, and who want to live in a loose community. (But not only Christians: I sat at dinner last night with Michael Hochberg, a highly accomplished Jewish physicist and founder of companies, who rents a room here for when he’s in town; we discovered over coffee this morning that we are both alumni of the Louisiana School for Math, Science, and the Arts.)

Helen had a big birthday party last night here at The Moorings. It was full of fun, smart, interesting people. Jordan and Tammy Peterson were here, as were Jonathan and Marti Pageau. There were a few high-profile Cambridge academics, and a lot of very smart, interesting, and big-hearted graduate students, some of whom live here now, and others of whom have passed through The Moorings (including a man who is on the staff of Vice President J.D. Vance). We had a fine time — there was lots of wine, delicious food, music from an Irish harpist who lives here with her husband, toasts, poetry, and James playing “Happy Birthday” on the bagpipes. Lots of talk, talk, talk, into the wee hours. It was magical. It was right where I wanted to be.

I’m upstairs in the main house now writing this while James is off somewhere with Jordan recording a podcast (he’s launching a podcast in a couple of months; he interviewed me for it yesterday), and Helen is convening a big women’s Bible study in the great room downstairs. You might imagine that The Moorings is some grand English country house, but oh boy, you would be wrong. It’s a modest place, as properties go, but absolutely brimming with life, intellectual and spiritual.

James — see this interview if you don’t know who he is — has become one of the central intellectual figures on Britain’s intellectual Right. He is a philosopher and theologian, and a serious Anglican Christian. He and Jordan became close after James fought a bruising and costly public battle against Cambridge’s attempt to cancel Jordan a few years back. James is a man of great intellect and great courage too. He is conservative but not a Tory. I’m picking up that conservatives who actually want to save the United Kingdom are turning to James for advice and direction.

Prof. James Orr

James’s reputation is skyrocketing. Since I was last at The Moorings, maybe a year ago, the Orrs hosted J.D. Vance and his family; there’s a framed photo downstairs of James, Helen, J.D., and Usha here at The Moorings. Since then, Sen. Vance has gone on to do great things, as you might have heard. When I was with Peter Thiel a few weeks back, we talked about James; Peter is just getting to know him, and said that he is incredibly impressed. Big things ahead for that professor, seems like.

What’s so key, it seems to me, is that on a very small budget, James and Helen have turned The Moorings into a fantastic place of spiritual and intellectual formation. People pass through here for parties, or for a weekend, or even for semesters in graduate school — and it changes them. They meet others here who share their views. Every time I’ve been here, I’ve observed these parties they have, where conservative and Christian intellectuals, journalists, clerics and others meet to have fellowship, trade ideas, and make contacts. This is because of the hospitality of the Orrs. They make things happen.

I stood last night and recited an Auden poem in Helen’s honor: “Atlantis,” one of my favorites. I did so because James and Helen have been very good to me in my own distressing pilgrimage through life these past few years. My son Matt and I took refuge at The Moorings on that first Christmas after the divorce filing. This is a place of nurture, a rest stop on one’s journey to Atlantis (that is, to one’s heavenly home). Here is how the poem ends:

Stagger onward rejoicing;
And even then if, perhaps
Having actually got
To the last col, you collapse
With all Atlantis shining
Below you yet you cannot
Descend, you should still be proud
Even to have been allowed
Just to peep at Atlantis
In a poetic vision:
Give thanks and lie down in peace,
Having seen your salvation.

All the little household gods
Have started crying, but say
Good-bye now, and put to sea.
Farewell, my dear, farewell: may
Hermes, master of the roads,
And the four dwarf Kabiri,
Protect and serve you always;
And may the Ancient of Days
Provide for all you must do
His invisible guidance,
Lifting up, dear, upon you
The light of His countenance.

I ended by asking the Ancient of Days to shine the light of His countenance upon Helen, the abbess of The Moorings. This muddy little property on the Cam is not heaven, but you can just about see it from here — hence my choosing to recite Auden in Helen’s honor.

Helen tells me that she and James are hoping to make The Moorings into something more formal — something that struck me as exactly the kind of thing I envisioned when I wrote The Benedict Option. As you readers well know, I do not call for total withdrawal from the world, but rather for the forming of various kinds of Christian communities within which we can deepen our faith, via study, spiritual discipline, and fellowship, so that when we go out into the world, we can think and act as authentic small-o orthodox Christians.

But this requires money. The Orrs do what they can, but I don’t think it’s insulting to say that they are not wealthy people. They pour everything they make into supporting The Moorings. They have recently completed a chapel, where Helen holds morning prayer for any community members who are interested in joining. The big dinner last night was held in a pavilion they built for just this sort of thing, as well as large seminars.

Helen showed me the sketch of a plan she and James came up with for formalizing the organization of The Moorings as a center of conservative (and conservative Christian) formation and networking — in part depending on the intellectual and cultural resources of Cambridge University. It’s amazing! Good Lord, I thought, yes, this needs to happen! This is a form of the Benedict Option! And it needs to happen in as many places as it can!

I looked at the list of speakers they have hosted here at The Moorings for informal seminars: Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Suella Braverman, Amb. Kelly Clark, John Cleese, Douglas Murray, Jordan Peterson, George Seay, Peter Thiel, J.D.Vance — it’s just amazing to think that the Orrs have managed to pull such people in. Later today, we are going to screen a couple of episodes of the forthcoming (April 1) Live Not By Lies documentary for Jordan Peterson and Jonathan Pageau; James appears in it, and indeed his interview was shot right here at The Moorings.

I can’t emphasize strongly enough how everything that happens at The Moorings has to do with the gifts of James and Helen — especially their gift of hospitality. Helen has invited me to move to The Moorings and help them build it into a Ben Op-style center. But first, they have to get the funding. Certainly I will consider it strongly: I love these people, and am often dazzled by what they are accomplishing here. Honestly, I don’t understand why more people on the Right who have significant financial resources don’t fund things like this. I’m not going to tell you not to give money to political candidates, but what I will say is that if we on the Right want to help nurture and launch a new generation of serious conservative, and Christian, public figures (politicians, scholars, intellectuals, journalists), The Moorings is exactly the sort of thing we should be supporting.

I leave in the morning to go back to Budapest, and I leave with hope and excitement in my heart, despite it all. Great Britain is in a dreadful state right now, as everybody knows. I’ve been telling you that on my recent visits here, I’ve never heard such gloom. And I’m hearing too so many stories of talented and ambitious young people who have either migrated or are planning to get out when they can. They’ve given up.

“We’re staying,” James told me, resolutely. They’re staying, and they’re doing their best to keep the bonfires burning through this present cold and darkness.

Last night, in bed and thinking about all I had heard and seen here, I thought of James and Helen as secular St. Benedicts of their own time: trying to build a community of Christian formation not to escape the world, but to bring truth and faith to the world, for the sake of the world. If it’s God’s will for me to be part of building up The Moorings, well, hallelujah. But please consider, dear readers who have the resources to help, if it’s God’s will for you to do the same.

If this is you, please email me at roddreher — at — substack — dot — com, and I’ll put you in touch with the Orrs.

Ross’s ‘Believe’ Makes The Bestseller List

I thought that Ross Douthat’s new book Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious was to be released next week. I plan to write about it. Apparently I got the date wrong, because it debuted this week on the NYT Bestseller List — a first for Ross! Hooray! I just checked, and it’s the No. 1 religion book on Amazon this morning.

Please read Francis Beckwith’s stellar review in WORLD magazine. He compares this new book to C.S. Lewis’s Mere Christianity, a book that has drawn countless skeptics to the Christian faith over the seven decades since its publication. Excerpt:

Seventy-three years later, another well-known public intellectual, Ross Douthat, has published his own small and accessible book in response to a particular set of reasons for unbelief that find their salience among those who dominate the elite culture of this present age. In Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious (Zondervan, 240 pp.), the New York Times columnist offers a more capacious defense of the reasonableness of religious belief than did Lewis in his original volume. Although a Catholic Christian, Douthat’s project is not to draw converts to Rome or even to Christianity (though he would, of course, welcome them), but to offer an intellectually compelling account of the philosophical, experiential, and historical credentials of the worldview and attitude shared by the world’s leading religious bodies. For Douthat, although certain forms of religion are closer to the fullness of truth (Christianity) than others, he argues that it is better for someone to embrace and practice an imperfect religion than to reject religion in toto. Better to be an observant Muslim or Buddhist than a disciple of nihilism.

Some Christians will bristle at this approach, thinking Douthat is suggesting a kind of sloppy interreligious ecumenism that dilutes the urgency of the gospel message. But that’s not a fair reading of Douthat, who is writing for a particular audience: educated, secular skeptics with virtually no acquaintance with serious faith or sophisticated responses to the pieties of intellectual atheism. To introduce such critics to the Good News, you have to first make a case for why it is reasonable to believe that there is more to the world than matter in motion. You need to offer good reasons to think that a transcendent source of being exists, along with a moral law, immaterial souls, and benevolent and malevolent spirits. Because the universe is far more enchanted than elites in the West have led us to think, Douthat argues it is perfectly normal to believe the restlessness in our hearts (as Augustine would put it) longs for something beyond what the material world alone can satisfy. For this reason, we have an obligation to cultivate that inclination, explore how we can achieve its rightful end, and most certainly not gainsay its reality.

American philosopher William James once said that unless a religious commitment strikes one as a genuine option—an option that is live, unavoidable, and momentous—conventional preaching that promotes what its listeners see as an alien doctrine is likely to fall on deaf ears. Lewis’ target audience in 1952 consisted almost exclusively of readers who, despite their unbelief or nominal religiosity, were born into Christian countries tightly tethered to confessional traditions that were fairly easy to identify. Lewis crafted his apologetic accordingly. The members of Douthat’s target audience are secularists fully ensconced in a globally connected, instantaneously communicating, highly pluralistic, and largely irreligious milieu.

More:

What makes Believe particularly effective is Douthat’s unusual combination of deep intelligence, firm religious conviction, intellectual modesty, and an understanding and conversance with the strongest contemporary arguments for unbelief. Believe is truly a Mere Christianity for the 21st century.

Watch this space next week for my own thoughts about this extraordinary book. I’m so happy for my friend, a faithful Catholic and brilliant columnist who, I hope, is finally getting the book readership he deserves.

Trump’s Purge

You might remember my relating to you here a conversation I had a few days after last November’s election. My interlocutor was a US military officer who had been forced into retirement because he asked for a mild religious accommodation in the face of the Army’s transgender policy. There was no good reason for him not to get it, but he says he was told by his superior that if he persisted, it would destroy his career. He left the military he loved rather than compromise his religious convictions.

That night, the man told me that the only way President Trump could ever really clean out the woke stables of the Pentagon, and purge it of ideological capture, was by firing every general three stars and above. The idea is that all of them would have been promoted because they accepted wokeness and had established themselves as politically reliable.

Well, look: the president has now fired the Biden-appointed head of the Joint Chiefs Of Staff, and others. Notice how The New York Times frames it in the first graf:

President Trump fired the country’s senior military officer as part of an extraordinary Friday night purge at the Pentagon that injected politics into the selection of the nation’s top military leaders.

Incredible. Countless sources in the military have been telling me for years that under the Obama and post-Obama military, the only way to get ahead in your career was to openly and enthusiastically become an advocate for wokeness, DEI, and the rest. That is, to become overtly political! In his first term, President Trump did nothing about it. The man has clearly learned his lesson. More:

Gen. Charles Q. Brown Jr., a four-star fighter pilot known as C.Q. who became only the second African American to hold the chairman’s job, is to be replaced by a little-known retired three-star Air Force general, Dan Caine, who endeared himself to the president when they met in Iraq six years ago.

In all, six Pentagon officials were fired, including Adm. Lisa Franchetti, the first woman to lead the Navy; Gen. James Slife, the vice chief of the Air Force; and the top lawyers for the Army, Navy and Air Force.

The decision to fire General Brown, which Mr. Trump announced in a message on Truth Social, reflects the president’s insistence that the military’s leadership is too mired in diversity issues, has lost sight of its role as a combat force to defend the country and is out of step with his “America First” movement.

Joint Chiefs chairmen traditionally remain in place as administrations change, regardless of the president’s political party. But current White House and Pentagon officials said they wanted to appoint their own top leaders.

In a statement, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth thanked Admiral Franchetti and General Slife “for their service and dedication to our country” and requested nominations for their replacements.

Mr. Hegseth did not say why he was firing the judge advocates general. But in his Senate confirmation hearing last month, he criticized military lawyers for placing needless legal restrictions on soldiers in battle — putting “his or her own priorities in front of the war fighters, their promotions, their medals, in front of having the backs of those making the tough calls on the front lines.”

Mr. Hegseth has previously said General Brown should be fired because of his “woke” focus on diversity, equity and inclusion programs in the military.

“First of all, you’ve got to fire the chairman of the Joint Chiefs,” Mr. Hegseth said in an appearance on the “Shawn Ryan Show” in November. He added that any general involved with D.E.I. efforts should be fired. “Either you’re in for warfighting, and that’s it,” he said. “That’s the only litmus test we care about.”

Thank God. But please do not fail to appreciate the significance of how the Times characterizes Trump’s action: as injecting politics into the military. This is how the ruling class truly understands these things: simply rejecting cultural leftism, and trying to return the military to its non-political role, is … injecting politics.

I was talking with my friend David Brooks at ARC the other day, in the green room. He said he understands why MAGA conservatives are angry over institutional excesses at Washington agencies, but he doesn’t understand at all why they don’t work on reforming the institutions, versus destroying, or nearly destroying, them.

My answer is that these institutions may well have become so ideologically corrupted that they are no longer fit for purpose, and need to be stripped down to the bare essentials (or more) so they can be remade. Like David, I want USAID to keep doing things like funding AIDS treatments in Africa. But the woke managerial liberals have gone so very far in capturing these institutions and distorting their mission that the only sensible thing to do in many cases is to Hulk-smash them, as Trump is doing.

Trump and his team might not be a good Scrutonian conservative’s idea of how conservative political leaders ought to act. But thank God for them. The normie conservatives for whom people like me faithfully voted year in and year out did little or nothing to save these institutions.

You’ll recall the story I told in The Benedict Option about visiting Capitol Hill shortly after Obergefell, and asking some top Christian GOP legislative staffers what the Republicans’ plans were to pass religious liberty protections in the wake of the Supreme Court ruling. The answer: nothing. They had no plans at all. I well remember walking out of that meeting with a chill, realizing that we orthodox Christians are on our own. The Republican Party didn’t give a rat’s ass about us. We embarrassed them in front of their donors.

Along came Donald Trump, and everything changed. Look, I don’t like some things he does. Paula White as his top religious adviser? Please. The IVF executive order? Awful. But come on, everyone: look at the big picture. The conventional Republicans never, ever would have done these massive and necessary things this president is pushing through. They would have accommodated themselves to the woke ideological capture of the US military. A more conventional Republican Defense Secretary than Pete Hegseth would have found every reason not to alienate the generals and admirals.

Not these guys. They won’t be gaslit or intimidated by the Times or anybody else. If you disagree, though, I welcome your arguments in the comments section. I could be wrong about this, of course.

Last night, standing around the Orr’s kitchen talking to Pageau and Peterson, I told them that though I’m a deep pessimist about most things, one big reason to hope is because the future is not fated. Nobody could have predicted the rise of Jordan Peterson. Nobody could have foreseen the emergence of a Jonathan Pageau. And, of course, Donald Trump and J.D. Vance. This is a terrible time to be alive in some ways, but in other ways, it’s exhilarating, and full of promise — if we can rise to the moment. I told the ARC Conference, in my brief remarks, that Viktor Orban says politics are necessary to meet our civilizational crisis, but not sufficient. Politics can create the space within which meaning-giving institutions (families, churches, schools, arts and cultural organizations, etc) can do their work — but if those institutions and the people within them don’t step up and do their part, all the good work of politics will have been in vain.

Here on the damp banks of the River Cam, good men and women are doing their bit for the great cause. They could use some help. Write me if you are interested, and I’ll put you in touch with the Orrs.

I’m sending this newsletter out to the entire list, because I want everyone to know about The Moorings, and the great things happening here. But let me say to non-paid-subscribers: only paid ones can comment. Why not become a paid subscriber? It’s only six dollars per month, and you get a new newsletter every day. When I recorded the podcast with James Orr yesterday, he generously said that far into the future, if historians want to get a sense of the mad times in which we are living, they will need to read the archives of Rod Dreher’s Diary, which lays it out, day by day. Why not join us for the daily feed of news and essays about religion, culture, politics, books, and the lot. We have a very lively comments section — and it needs your contribution to become even livelier.