Crunchy Con-versation.

From a long interview from Godspy with Crunchy Cons author Rod Dreher:

"The first thing is to realize that this is a sensibility, not an ideology. I still shop at Wal-Mart when I need to, and I don't feel guilty about it. I don't want people to think—oh, I've got to run out now and get a Prius, and junk the mini-van.

The first important first step, I would say, is turn off the TV. You can consider it fasting. My family spent an entire Lent not watching TV at all, and pretty soon, if you do that, you realize how great it feels to have a house where people talk to each other, or spend their time reading or listening to good music. A good idea is to stop and think about how your family's media diet, including time on the computer—as my wife Julie constantly reminds me—cuts into family time, and make the necessary changes.

The next thing I'd do is work on the family's diet. Organic food can be expensive, but you'd be surprised how much you can save, to spend on quality food, by cutting down on all the processed food most people have around the house. I can't afford to eat organic vegetables from the supermarket, but Julie and I feel pretty strongly about not eating meat that's raised on factory farms. So what a lot of people can do is check into the local farm situation. We live in downtown Dallas, but we get our meat from Christian farmers who live out in the countryside, who raise their livestock without antibiotics, ranging freely, because they believe that's what God would have them do. We love their food, and we love the fact that our dollars are supporting these large, home-schooling Christian farm families. So those are two small things that people can do, and you'll find others once you start....

I think one thing Julie became very aware of was how our economy is so geared to making our kids a target market. There's a science to all this, with companies trying to communicate their brands to kids when they're pre-conscious. You don't want to be a paranoid crank about it, but it's happening all the time. What we try to do with our kids is teach them the tools they need to spot when they're being
manipulated. If parents don't see their role to be actively countercultural—not passively countercultural—then they're going to lose. We see people losing all the time, good conservative people who don't see how the messages of mass consumer marketing work against their values..."

Here's the whole thing.