In his new book, Return of the Strong Gods, First Things editor R.R. Reno sets out the case for his and the magazine’s populist turn. Western elites, he argues, overreacted to the nationalist horrors of World War II, and threw out salutary commitments to nation, family, and religion in an understandable desire to deter revival of the forces that led to that devastating conflict.
The main problem with Reno’s argument is that it lacks the very particularity for which he criticizes liberalism. In an age that, he argues, begs for the power of the particular, he treats the “strong god” of religion in terms more appropriate to the vapid religiosity of the 1950s than to the needs of the present.
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