R.R. Reno
National Conservative; Yale PhD in religious studies; Editor of First Things magazine; author of The Return of the Strong Gods (2019)
Who He Is
R.R. Reno is a Catholic intellectual who edits First Things, one of the most important conservative religious journals in America, and is a leading voice of National Conservatism. His 2019 book The Return of the Strong Gods provides the New Right with its most developed emotional and spiritual vocabulary.
The Return of the Strong Gods (2019)
Reno’s central argument: postwar liberalism deliberately weakened the “strong gods” — loyalty, solidarity, love, transcendence, God — in favor of the “gods of weakening” (openness, tolerance, flexibility, pluralism). This was a response to the catastrophes of World War II; the postwar liberal order was designed to prevent the strong passions that fueled fascism and ethnic nationalism.
But the cure has become the disease. “Liberalism hearkens to the gods of weakening… when liberalism becomes dominant, as it has done in the postwar consensus, civil life withers, for liberalism offers no vigorous language of love.” Liberalism “trains us to be loveless and therefore to be something less than human.”
What is needed is a “restoration of love” — and “love is roused by the strong gods, which is why they are returning.”
Field’s assessment: The argument “is based on misunderstandings both of human nature and of liberalism, but Reno is confident.” She describes his framing — the strong gods vs. the gods of weakening — as the New Right’s emotional spine: it provides an affirmative vision (love, solidarity, strength) rather than mere resentment.
Significance in the New Right
Field uses Reno’s “strong gods” concept to describe one of the four pillars of the New Right’s politics: social conservativism understood not as mere rule-following but as the recovery of solidaristic, passionate, traditionalist forms of life.
Reno’s framing also explains why the New Right “does not understand itself in strictly negative terms. It thinks it has a monopoly on things like ‘the good, the true, and the beautiful.’” This is key: the New Right is not merely reactive — it has a positive vision of a “new old-fashioned world.”
2020-21: Equating Left and Right
In the introduction to a 2021 edition of The Return of the Strong Gods, Reno argued that events of 2020 indicated “the strong gods are returning on the left as well.” He proceeded to argue that the rise of “equity” on the left pointed to a wholly new form of leftist radicalism: “Diversity is a feel-good word… ‘Equity’ topples statues.”
Field’s critique: this is the New Right’s characteristic “context collapse” — equating anti-racist activism (a response to ongoing injustice) with authoritarian nationalism (which produced the catastrophes Reno’s book was ostensibly analyzing). The formal similarity (both invoke strong passions, both can be extreme) substitutes for substantive moral analysis.
First Things Magazine
Under Reno’s editorship, First Things has moved from a serious journal of religion and public life (it was founded by the neoconservative Catholic priest Richard John Neuhaus) to a major venue for National Conservative and postliberal ideas. It has published Sohrab Ahmari, Patrick Deneen, and many other New Right thinkers.
Cross-References
- National Conservatism — his intellectual camp
- First Things — the journal he edits
- Postliberalism — overlapping movement
- Christian Nationalism — the more extreme extension of his religious politics
- Yoram Hazony — NatCon colleague
- Furious Minds — Field introduces his “strong gods” framework in Ch. 1 as the emotional spine of the New Right