His daily blogs are among the most controversial across the deep conservative-progressive divide in US Christianity, veering from petty and vindictive to confessional and touching. Here, another American writer explores the roots of Rod Dreher’s belligerence

Rod Dreher is a senior editor and blogger at The American Conservative, one of the most influential conservative opinion-makers in the US, and a man who has moved conspicuously from Protestant to Catholic to Orthodox Churches. His latest book, Live Not By Lies, takes its title from an essay by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, whose monumental The Gulag Archipelago exposed the labour camp system into which millions disappeared in the Soviet era. Dreher argues that Christians in the US and Europe – whether they recognise it or not – now live under the heel of the “soft totalitarianism” of what he calls “the pink police state”. There are many conservative Catholics in the US who listen more to Dreher, a lay member of an Orthodox church in Louisiana, on matters of belief and practice, than they do to Pope Francis.

Dreher describes himself in his Twitter handle as “Conservative, Orthodox Christian, Southerner, Europhile, Ignatian (Reilly), eclecticist”. That Ignatian reference is to the novel by John Kennedy Toole, A Confederacy of Dunces, in which the central character is one Ignatius J. Reilly. “My aunt and uncle gave me that book back in 1982, as a Christmas present,” Dreher explained, in an interview we conducted in fits and starts by email over three weeks. “I was 15. I remember reading it, and scarcely believing how good it was. I grew up in south Louisiana, but not New Orleans, where the book is set. Still, I love its portrait of the city. The voices of its characters ring very true to me, and, of course, I love poor old Ignatius. He is a man out of time, a philosophy-addled medievalist who is at war with the modern world. He is also a fool. I’m not a morbidly obese misanthropist, well, yet, but I see enough of myself in Ignatius, crusading against modernity while savouring wine cakes and crafting purple prose, that he serves as a warning to me about my worst self.”