Rod Dreher's Blog, page 471

Assad Hates ISIS. So Does The US. Let’s Overthrow Him!

Palm Sunday for Christians in Egypt:

Suicide bombers attacked two Coptic churches in Egypt on Palm Sunday, killing at least 40 worshipers and police officers stationed outside, in the deadliest day of violence against Christians in the country in decades.

The Islamic State group claimed responsibility for both attacks in a statement via its Aamaq news agency, having recently signaled its intention to escalate a campaign of violence against Egyptian Christians.

The first explosion occurred about 9:30 at St. George’s Church in the Nile Delta city of Tanta, 50 miles north of Cairo, during a Palm Sunday Mass. Security officials and a witness said that a suicide bomber had barged past security measures and detonated his explosives in the front pews, near the altar.

At least 27 people were killed and 71 others injured, officials said.

Hours later, a second explosion occurred at the gates of St. Mark’s Cathedral in the coastal city of Alexandria. That blast killed 13 people and wounded 21 others, the Health Ministry said.

The patriarch of the Egyptian Coptic Church, Pope Tawadros II, who is to meet with Pope Francis on his visit to Egypt on April 28 and 29, was in the church at the time but was not injured, the Interior Ministry said.

Palm Sunday inside the head of official Washington:

U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley said Saturday that regime change in Syria is one of the United States’ priorities, adding that Syrian President Bashar Assad “is not the leader” Syria needs.

In an interview on CNN’s “State of the Union,” Haley said ousting Assad is a priority for the U.S., as well as defeating the Islamic State and shrinking Iranian influence.

“This is a complicated situation. There are no easy answers and a political solution is going to have to happen,” Haley said. “There’s not any sort of option where political solution is going to happen with Assad at the head of the regime, if you look at his actions if you look at the situation, it’s going to be hard to see a government that’s peaceful and stable with Assad.”

When asked by host Jake Tapper whether it’s the position of the Trump administration that Assad cannot remain in power, Haley indicated that regime change is possible.

“Regime change is something that we think is going to happen because all of the parties are going to see that Assad is not the leader that needs to be taking place for Syria,” Haley said.

So, having bombed the only meaningful anti-ISIS power center in Syria, we are going to work now towards obliterating it. Because we’re fighting ISIS. Or something. The United States never learns. Fourteen years of screwing up the Middle East with our bad judgment, and we’re going to double down on it, under the leadership of a president who campaigned in part on reversing America’s interventionist approach to the Middle East.

Whatever else might be said of the wicked Bashar al-Assad, he does not set off bombs inside Syrian churches.

Regime change in Syria. My God. We learn nothing. Everyone who voted for Trump hoping that he would have a more sensible foreign policy has now been sold out.

 

Goodbye, Evangelicalism

Elijah, one of our readers, said the other day on the blog that he had recently decided to leave Evangelicalism. Knowing him from his posts to be a stalwart Protestant Christian (and a good writer), I asked him if he would explain why, offering to publish whatever he wrote. Here it is:

Back in November we stopped going to church. My wife was on a horseback riding trip for a week with friends, and returned home on a Saturday afternoon; when Sunday morning rolled around we were just too tired to get out of bed. We didn’t go the following week, or at Thanksgiving, or the next week. We didn’t attend the Christmas service, either. Several friends in our Evangelical church said they missed us, and I thanked them for their concern.

The pastor of the church, possibly my closest friend, asked if everything was okay with us, and I gave him some tepid reply. How do you tell a good friend that you basically aren’t finding anything meaningful about worship at his church? Mind, we didn’t make a conscious decision to stop going. And we were simultaneously guilty and relieved.

One morning I told my wife “St. Mary Anne’s has a healing service on Wednesday morning. I’m going to check it out.” As it happened, the next two Wednesdays went pear-shaped and we both ended up going on Ash Wednesday. The appearance of the church, the vestments, the liturgy, and the hymns were all so familiar, so comforting (I grew up Lutheran, the LCA, the precursor to the ELCA). Father John placed ashes on my forehead and I walked back to my pew feeling joyful, of all things. I’ve attended services there several times and at a local Anglican church. Both are conservative churches regardless of denomination.

I don’t know if we’ll join either of those churches, but we did make up our minds about one thing: we’re leaving the Evangelical church.

We’ve been there for twelve years, and that church helped our family rediscover and rekindle our faith. They helped us grow as Christians and gave us a lot of opportunities to serve. It is and has been the best church family one could hope for: genuinely supportive, caring, and committed to its brothers and sisters in the faith. Grace Bible Chapel takes the Bible seriously (obviously) and is not at all anti-intellectual. Truth be told, I never wanted to go to church with a bunch of Bible-thumpers, disliked the praise band, and couldn’t believe that any church only celebrated Communion once a month (they also never take offering – there are boxes by the doors). But I found friends and true community – with a few popped-vein-in-the-forehead fundie types – among people who had read Josephus, were doctors and professional people, and were unashamed of the role of their faith in daily life. Those are not small things. There were strong educational opportunities from small children to adults, with several adult Sunday school classes per quarter (I taught several on Apologetics, Colossians, and Worldview).

But Campaign 2016 had a lot to do with things coming apart for me in Evangelicalism. Because of my work as a teacher/principal and youth group leader, I am friends with a broad swath of Christians considerably younger than me. I was amazed at the disparate Christian writers, speakers, and bloggers that were liked, shared, and affirmed (and also mocked) on various social media sites by Christians of my acquaintance. Many of these “influencers” have little or no theological education, they haven’t done any Biblical scholarship, but they have wide audiences because they are perceived as authentic or “write from the heart”. This applies equally to progressive and conservative influencers, I hasten to add. Some of them are very well-expressed, but many of the ideas they share are simply at odds with a Christian worldview. When I asked a few friends about some of the more egregious statements of these influencers that they “liked”, many said “Well, I don’t agree with that opinion. I just take what I need and leave the rest behind.” Several said to me they feel the same way about sermons in church that they don’t agree with: just leave that bit behind. (Ironically, one of the “I take what I need” guys regularly complains about “church hoppers”.)

And what dawned on me was that a great many of these people who had been raised on Scripture, prayer, and Sunday School lacked any kind of cohesive Christian worldview. They knew dozens, maybe hundreds, of Bible verses but could not connect them to larger themes or ideas. The problem is that when ideas about sex or greed or whatever are not grounded in a larger framework, it’s easy to simply discard them. “We don’t practice animal sacrifice as Leviticus tells us, so why should I take what it has to say about sex seriously?” So the minute that a younger Christian faces cultural pressure because of their beliefs, the inclination is to ask “How important is this particular belief?” rather than “Is my entire framework for living going to collapse if I change?” And what I saw was that despite all the Bible study and whatnot, the culture won almost every time.

Even in youth groups, certain kids were held up as role models of what good Christian kids look like, even though the entire county knew those same kids were hammering down beers illegally on Friday night, bragging about stealing, and even discussing sexual adventures on social media. Yet come Sunday they are “walking right with the Lord”. And there seemed to be an invisible but very real pressure among families to present as the Mr. & Mrs. Perfect Christian Family, as if problems don’t exist in truly Christian households.

How is that Biblical? How is it Christian? How do you ‘do’ community with people who declare that they are sinners saved by grace but try to appear as if they have no sin?

Around this same time, The Benedict Option discussion was really heating up on your blog, and what struck me was not just the need for community, or even a community of like-minded believers, but a community of like-minded believers united in practice. My Evangelical church does almost nothing together except sing. We don’t say any common prayers, or creeds; we don’t confess or repent together; even our Communion ritual is centered around “what Jesus did on the Cross for us”. We don’t do any community events, or really even sponsor any organizations – educational, charitable, whatever – in our area, but leave it to the individual congregants to do that.

In a nutshell, we’re a very atomized, even alienated group. We’re supposed to be united in belief, and that’s great, but it doesn’t do much to create lasting bonds between a church and its people. I never agreed, for example, with the Rapture and Tribulation theology of the church, nor did I ever see Communion as simply a memorial meal. Recently a friend posted a bit of a cri du coeur on Facebook about her son, and I texted her, asking if there was anything I could do. There was, and I did it, but I was the only person in the entire church of 800 people who offered to do anything other than pray. The Evangelical emphasis on right belief is in many respects admirable, but it is also stifling: what if I end up helping someone who isn’t an exact theological copy of me? The horror!

(Aside: a few years ago there was a woman in my church who considered anyone who was not a precise theological copy of herself to be less than Christian. She hated Rick Warren, for example, not for his Hawaiian shirts but because he had once invited an eminent Roman Catholic philosopher to speak in his church. I told her Peter Kreeft made Biblical Christianity clearer to me than any Protestant. I was dead to her after that.)

And I think this problem may be unique to Evangelical Christianity: the obsessive focus on ourselves masked with talk about “our Christian walk”. Thomas Merton once commented on this tendency of certain Protestants to be so concerned with the state of their individual faith, they in essence made their faith a work, the very thing they fear in Catholicism. (Bringing up Thomas Merton didn’t win me any friends, either.)

I brought up some of my concerns to my pastor, along with some concrete suggestions of what we might do, and volunteered to do whatever I could to make something happen. Our conversation was very friendly, but he was having none of it. He simply would not believe that young people were drifting off, the political rancor, the unbiblical and un-Christian discussions, that un-orthodox opinions were real, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary (I had printed off actual examples). And he considers any practice that is even remotely traditional to be nothing more than the dead hand of the past.

“But some of these practices have been sustaining believers for 2,000 years – shouldn’t we at least consider how we connect current generations to a legacy of Christianity?” I said.

“That’s not the direction we’re moving in,” he replied.

I offered to teach a Sunday School class on The Benedict Option – he heard me out politely, but I could tell from the get-go that the answer was no. Not just because you are Orthodox, formerly Catholic, though that wouldn’t have surprised me; no, the BenOp requires us to look to the past for (at minimum) inspiration, and that’s very uncomfortable for a congregation who is betting everything on contemporary forms.

“Do we really need that?” he asked. Well, we’ve lost 18 legacy members of the church recently, basically the next generation of church leaders, who have all decamped to a newer, slicker church where nobody over the age of 40 is allowed in “public-facing ministry”. How long is that going to last? What happens when they turn 40?

Another group has decamped to an Evangelical church down the road that is advertising a “Swagtacular Easta” and they’re not joking – there’s even a video [really, there is: go to the Facebook page and watch “Rayvon’s Swagtacular Easta” — RD] – do you think our young people don’t see through this kind of crap?

“Well, we would never do that.”

Probably not, but what ARE we doing to ground the faith of our people in a faith that has lasted for millennia? How do we expect people to take the holiest day of the year seriously when we are promoting it with an offensive (even to my tin ears) video that plays on cultural and perhaps even racial stereotypes? (My goodness I sound positively woke.)

“We don’t need rituals.” I’m not so sure about that; I ran a school for kids with learning differences – Asperger’s, ADHD, dyslexia, etc. – and I can tell you people learn differently. That’s not a controversial idea. Sometimes ritual is precisely what we need to help people keep anchored and grounded in an ever-changing world. “Taste and see that the Lord is good” says the psalmist, so why is our church designed to appeal solely to the ears? Besides, we already have rituals: it’s called what we’ve been doing every week for the past 40 years!

What about adding in a hymn or two now and then? I might as well have suggested we roast a puppy for lunch. Why not? “Nobody likes them except the older folks.” Again, my brief and not-at-all comprehensive survey suggests that it’s the 40-60 crowd that likes contemporary praise music; the young people don’t like an awful lot of it because they think it’s “cheesy”, “manipulative”, and “trying too hard”. Said one person: “We know church music is supposed to be different, so why are they trying so hard to sound like pop music?”

I would have liked to suggest we stand united behind a cause or ministry important to the local community as a last ditch, but the church has recently come out with a new vision statement that I think precludes it. The church’s vision is for “the congregation to leave the fingerprints of God on as many people as possible”…so that ultimately the church will find 50 new families to minister to. Can you imagine? And it took two years to come up with that. So our message to the congregation is this: in a world of turmoil and uncertainty, go out and give your time, money, and labor to good causes in the hopes that you can bring forth new butts in the seats. We’re a big rich church – why are we so bloody timid?

I tried once more: our church wants to form disciples. We even changed the name of our small groups from Life Groups to Disciple Groups, and yet our whole church service is focused on the conversion moment, the proverbial altar call. Why not try something new? No, no, and no.

In the end I could not convince him that our church, let alone the Christian culture at large, is facing any kind of problem. And I neither want nor expect the church to change for me, but I do think it’s foolish not to look around and take stock of where the church is and where the culture is headed and think about what we might do better or differently. Some people think the answer is more preaching, especially expository preaching, but if your church is full of people who think “I’ll take what I need and leave the rest behind”, what’s the point?

But leaving your church family is a hard thing. Unlike some who’ve made their exit from Evangelical churches, I harbor nothing but love for mine. They’re good people and good Christians, and I don’t resent them one little bit. We’ve had some disagreements over the years, and they effectively turned off one of my kids to The Church, but I don’t bear them any ill will over it. People make mistakes.

Perhaps my pastor is right and all of my concerns are off-base. Time will tell, I suppose. But for the last six weeks I’ve been attending a liturgical church twice a week and for now, it’s where I will stay.

You’ve mentioned several times how it’s not enough to turn from what’s wrong, you’ve got to turn towards something good. It’s nice to be in a church full of people who believe that they are “sinners saved by grace” but still feel the need to corporately get on their knees and confess their sins then repent together every time they gather. It feels good to pray together as a body – not have someone pray over us, but say the words together. Part of the reason I’ve been going twice weekly to church is that I realized how much I missed and need the Eucharist – how the power of that sacrament has been missing in my life.

Yes, sacrament: there is much more going on than just a memorial meal to celebrate what Christ did 2,000 years ago. As if Christ isn’t alive and active in our lives right now! As if we can’t share in the power and joy of His Resurrection!

I ask you to pray for me and my family in this time of transition.

Thoughts?

UPDATE: Mike S writes:

Elijah seems very particular about what is proper in a church. I wish him well in his church search. But, if I were Elijah I might ask myself whether in 2027 I might be writing a lengthy essay like this about the deficiencies of the Orthodox, Catholic, or Lutheran church that I joined in 2017. Sometimes the issue is our own impatience or critical tendency. I know that’s true in my case.

This is a good point. A dear friend — an Evangelical in the Anglican tradition — wrote to say how angry he was at me for posting Elijah’s reflection. He thinks it grossly unfair to Evangelicalism, this piece, which seems to the reader to dismiss an entire tradition because of the flaws of one congregation. I don’t apologize for publishing it, because though I don’t know Elijah personally, I know from his long participation on this blog that he is, or has been, a committed Evangelical Christian. I also know that he has no interest in becoming Roman Catholic or Orthodox. As one of you commenters said, Elijah’s story brings to mind exactly what the Southern Baptist theologian Dr. Al Mohler said to me on his podcast, in which he stated his view that Evangelicalism will only have what it takes to get through this current crisis if it returns in a serious way to its Reformational roots.

I’m interested to know from Evangelicals — former ones, current ones, those in transition like Elijah — what that means.

I would also like to invite testimonials from former Catholics and Orthodox who left their churches and traditions for what you might consider Benedict Option reasons. I’m thinking of a Coptic Christian man I once knew who didn’t formally leave the Coptic Church, but who was taking his children to an Evangelical congregation as well, because in his suburban American Coptic parish, all anybody (including the priests) talked about was Egyptian politics. He wanted them to know Jesus.

I’m thinking also about a friend in New Orleans who was raised Catholic, but who says he encountered Jesus for the first time in Evangelicalism. He is well aware of all the flaws in his current congregation, but he says that the sermons are deep and challenging, and the people there, despite their flaws, are serious about following Christ in a countercultural way.

I’ve seen enough bad things — and enough plain old mediocre things — within both Catholicism and Orthodoxy to have developed a strong internal reaction against triumphalism. True, a bad experience with Father Falafel or Sister Stretchpants does not obviate an entire tradition, any more than Pastor Rayvon the Swagtacular negates all of Evangelicalism. But great movements in culture happen because of individual stories like Elijah’s.

I believe all churches are in need of reform today. I believe in a return to tradition. If you ask me, I would say that I wish everyone would become Orthodox. But back on this planet, I think we would all be better off if Catholics would be more faithful Catholics, if Orthodox would be more faithful Orthodox, and if Evangelicals would be more faithful Evangelicals — which, if Dr. Mohler is right, means a renewal and recovery of the Reformation.

In re-reading Elijah’s testimony, I see a man who did not throw up his hands and leave his church in a huff. He tried hard to work constructively. And he doesn’t leave with bitterness in his heart. But he left, because he no longer believed that he could be formed as a disciple within that particular congregation — and he knows how high the stakes are.

I invite similarly thoughtful and challenging testimonials from readers who have found within Evangelicalism what they did not find in Orthodoxy or Catholicism. I’m not trying to use this space to convert people, and I don’t want y’all arguing back and forth (as distinct from disagreeing in a civil way). I’m genuinely curious about the phenomenon of being Christian in America today, and what it looks like in your own congregation and tradition. What happens when you hit a brick wall? How do you know when it’s time to leave, or to rededicated oneself to hanging on? How do you decide whether or not the problem is just yourself or your congregation, and when the problem is the tradition itself?

For the sake of clarity, let me say this: I don’t believe that ANY tradition has all the answers for how to be fully and faithfully Christian in post-Christian America. I genuinely believe that we all need each other: Evangelicals, Mainline Protestants, Catholics, and Orthodox. That’s not kum-ba-yah, COEXIST sloganeering from me. I’ve spent enough time among believers in all three broad traditions of Christianity to see strengths and weaknesses among all.

I think the rest of the church in America can learn from the Orthodox how to pray and worship more reverently and meaningfully. And it can re-learn ascetic disciplines.

I think that Evangelicals in America can learn from the Catholics how to think more deeply as Christians, and that Orthodox Christians in America can learn from Catholics how to be more small-c catholic in thinking about the Church.

And I think Catholics and Orthodox can learn from Evangelicals how to love the Bible more, how to be more zealous, and how to be more engaged with church fellowship.

These are just a few things. The point is, we all need each other. I firmly believe that. I believe that a lot more strongly now that I’ve written the Benedict Option book than I did going in.

UPDATE.2: Really good words from Mark C.:

As somebody who was brought up in evangelicalism and became Anglican en route to Catholicism, I of course sympathize with your correspondent and can identify with much of what he experienced. But the Benedict Option will not succeed in North America if it is simply about the individual conversion of evangelical Protestants to more liturgical / traditional forms of faith from LCMS Lutheranism to Orthodoxy. It must be a renewal movement within evangelicalism that encourages evangelicals to embrace liturgy, discipline, deeper prayer life, and a more serious approach to the education / formation of youth.

If everybody has to leave their evangelical homes in order to find that, then at best this will result in a blip of earnest, devout converts to Catholicism and Orthodoxy at every Easter vigil (which is not to be shrugged at). And those who are sitting in the pews jiving to the praise band and haven’t thought about these issues will be left in complacency as their children absorb MTD theology or lose their faith altogether. They need pastors and elders Christian brethren who can challenge them to “duc in altum” – put out into the deep. What is needed is a renewal of evangelicalism from within, an equivalent of an evangelical Oxford Movement, or otherwise the most dynamic sector of American Christianity (which is the most dynamic part of Christianity in the developed world) will slowly drift into apostasy or irrelevancy that traditional Catholic, Orthodox or confessional Protestant “creative minorities” are unlikely to be able to replace.

UPDATE.3: CatherineNY, who is a practicing Catholic, writes:

I can think of several friends who left Catholicism for evangelical churches. In one case, the friend found out that her husband and his brothers had been abused by a priest, and not believed by their parents. The husband had issues, and left her alone with a brain-damaged child. She found concrete help and companionship in a megachurch that she had never found in a Catholic parish. Another woman I know started going to her husband’s evangelical church. When the husband committed suicide with a gun, the pastor of the evangelical church came to her house and actually helped clean up the scene. I’m not sure what led the third friend to make the move from Catholicism to evangelicalism, but the first two stories are evidence of something I have observed — Catholic parishes don’t do some things very well. I can’t imagine any of the priests I have known showing up to help clean up a suicide scene. Christian care of this sort can start to make some “vapid” worship services look just fine.

Taxpayer-Supported Agitprop As Anti-Fascist Talisman

Trump proposes to cut out the National Endowment for the Arts. Personally, I think that’s a bad idea, but boy, could there be a drearier and more predictable left-wing defense of federal arts funding than this one in the NYT by sociologist and visual artist Eve Ewing? Excerpts:

But as Hitler understood, artists play a distinctive role in challenging authoritarianism. Art creates pathways for subversion, for political understanding and solidarity among coalition builders. Art teaches us that lives other than our own have value. Like the proverbial court jester who can openly mock the king in his own court, artists who occupy marginalized social positions can use their art to challenge structures of power in ways that would otherwise be dangerous or impossible.

Hitler! Naturally. More:

In its last round of grants, the NEA gave $10,000 to a music festival in Oregon to commission a dance performance by people in wheelchairs and dance classes for people who use mobility devices. A cultural center in California received $10,000 to host workshops led by Muslim artists, including a hip-hop artist, a comedian and filmmakers. A chorus in Minnesota was granted $10,000 to create a concert highlighting the experiences of LGBTQ youth, to be performed in St. Paul public schools. Each of these grants supports the voices of the very people the current presidential administration has mocked, dismissed and outright harmed. Young people, queer people, immigrants, and minorities have long used art as a means of dismantling the institutions that would silence us first and kill us later, and the NEA is one of the few wide-reaching institutions that support that work.

The federal government is giving arts grants for things like that? Wait, tell me again why you want to cut the NEA out, Mr. President? There was a great New Yorker cartoon years ago showing an artist painting a portrait of a businessman, with the words “FUC YOU” written on the bottom. All it lacked was the K. The artist turned to the businessman with his hand out, and asked for a donation to help him finish the painting.

Why should the government subsidize radicals who want to destroy the institutions of the society that supports them? Dismantle the institutions on your own damn dime, Eve Ewing.

One more excerpt:

We need the arts because they make us full human beings. But we also need the arts as a protective factor against authoritarianism. In saving the arts, we save ourselves from a society where creative production is permissible only insofar as it serves the instruments of power. When the canary in the coal mine goes silent, we should be very afraid — not only because its song was so beautiful, but also because it was the only sign that we still had a chance to see daylight again.

Oh please, enough with the melodrama. You want to know the truth? Nobody really cares. Maybe they should care — I think they should care, but not for the same reasons that Eve Ewing does — but they don’t. Walker Percy nailed in in Lost In The Cosmos:

The writer-artist makes sure that he is in the world and that he is real by taking on the world, usually by political action and, more often than not, revolutionary. Even if one is imprisoned by the state — especially if one is imprisoned — one can be certain of being human. Ghosts can’t be imprisoned. This strategem is more available to European writers, who are taken more seriously than American writers. The secret envy of American writers: Alexander Solzhenitsyn. Despite their most violent attacks on the state and the establishment, nobody pays much attention to American writers, least of all the state. To have taken on the state and defeated it, like Solzhenitsyn, is beyond the wildest dreams of the American writer. Because the state doesn’t care. This indifference leads to ever more frantic attempts to attract attention, like an ignored child, even to the point of depicting President Johnson and Lady Bird plotting the assassination of Kennedy in Barbara Garson’s MacBird!, or President Nixon having sex with Ethel Rosenberg and being buggered by Uncle Same in Times Square in Robert Coover’s The Public Burning.

Still, no one pays attention.

A paradigm of this generally failed reentry option: a lonely “radical” American writer standing outside the White House gate, screaming obscenities about this fascist state, dictatorship, exploitation of minorities, suppression of freedom of speech, and so on and on — al the while being ignored by President, police, and passersby.

There are worse things than the Gulag.

Is there anything quite so precious and pathetic as an artist in a liberal democracy screaming “Hitler! HITLERRRRRRRR!” because somebody threatens to take her federal grant money away?

If supporters of public funding of the arts cannot make a more compelling argument for it other than that left-wing radicals ought to be kept on the government teat so they can continue to tell the public FUC YOU, so Hitler won’t win, then why should people care?

Nota bene, I do think that there is a federal role for arts funding, but that it should be confined to supporting traditional arts institutions, and arts education. If a genderqueer theosophist with an MFA wants to chant the Urantia Book at a bowl of clabbered milk to stand against the patriarchy, fine by me — just find some other sucker to pay for it.

Trump The Phony

TAC’s Robert Merry — whose 2005 foreign policy book The Sands Of Empire you really must read — let’s the White House have it over its Syria warmaking. Excerpts:

It may be too early to tell for sure, but Donald Trump is looking more and more like a phony. He’s also looking like a weakling. And a political ingrate. All this is coming into stark relief with accelerating events involving Syria. The United States launched dozens of missiles against Syrian military installations to retaliate for the chemical attack on rebel-held territory. Thus did Trump demonstrate that, to the extent that his foreign policy differs from that of his predecessor, it is more aggressive and adventuresome than Obama’s. That’s the opposite of how he campaigned.

More:

We are now reading that the conventional thinkers and the establishment denizens of the Trump administration are decimating the administration people who were with him during his campaign, when he devastated the conventional thinkers and establishment denizens who now are taking over his administration. In domestic policy, perhaps the stakes aren’t so high; the biggest loser is likely to be Trump himself. But in foreign policy the stakes are immense, and the loser could be the entire country.

How does one account for these signs that Trump’s governance is going to be significantly at variance with his campaign advocacy? It’s difficult to resist the suspicion that some of it has to do with a lack of conviction. He’s winging it—and has been since he descended that famous Trump Tower escalator in June 2015. And yet he talked as if he were a man of ironclad conviction, someone whose words presage his actions. In politics, when words and actions don’t mesh, we call that phoniness.

Read the whole thing. It’s the best commentary I’ve yet read anywhere on the president’s shocking action against Syria.

Trump really is a phony, isn’t he? He gave President Obama hell for contemplating attacking Syria over the 2013 chemical weapons assault by the Assad regime. Look at all these past Trump tweets against US involvement in the Syrian war.  Assuming this latest gas attack was Assad’s, he did nothing this time that he didn’t do before. So why has Trump now committed an act of war on a sovereign nation, risking a much greater conflict with Russia?

So much for our non-interventionist new president. Yep, he’s winging it. It took Trump less than three months in office to break one of his core campaign promises: that he would not involve the United States in these unnecessary regional wars, especially not in Syria.

Presidents can change their minds. Presidents learn things in office that they did not know as campaigners. But Trump flipped so quickly on Syria, with no new information that would have impelled such a drastic shift. So, who’s he going to sell out next? The Chrsitian Vladimirs and Estragons waiting for him to issue that expected religious liberty Executive Order?

 

Queering Episcopal High: The Fallout

Per Bengtsson/Shutterstock

Two days ago, I reprinted an e-mail that had gone out to students and others about a week of gay rights education and pep rallies at Episcopal High School of Baton Rouge. Apparently this caused a stir. The head of school subsequently sent this out to parents this afternoon:

Dear Parents of Upper School Students,

After several years of noting the National Day of Silence (“NDOS”) on campus without controversy in the Upper School, this year’s observation has been far from controversy free.  This letter contains my explanation of the circumstances.  This letter also contains my apology for the misunderstanding surrounding NDOS events, creating concerns and questions that could have been avoided, with more thought and clarity.  I hope the conclusion to this letter is reassuring to you.

The Circumstances

Several years ago, I instituted the observance on Episcopal’s campus of the National Day of Silence (NDOS) to allow Upper School students, faculty and staff to use their silence for the non-class portions of one day to express their concerns over the discrimination and danger  in the world experienced by members of the LGBTQ community.  The NDOS was defined clearly as a voluntary activity. Generally, the observance was led by interested students and supervised by the Dean of Students.

Until this year, NDOS observance had been limited to a single day.  This year, an expansion of the observance was approved to include an opportunity for discussion about the academic aspects of discrimination for those interested in Dr. Kuhn’s analysis.  And, a student wanted to speak in Chapel about what it has meant to stand in alliance with the LGBTQ community as an ally (the term for a supportive straight person).

The main communication of the schedule of events this year consisted of a message written by one of the student leaders in this area, which was forwarded by the Dean of Students to all Upper School students and All Faculty, and Staff at Episcopal. The description of the approved event involving the academic analysis of discrimination by Dr. Kuhn was misleading.  Most of the comments I have received have focused on that description, noting that it looked to some as a vehicle for encouraging adoption of an LGBTQ lifestyle.  We are not and will not do that.  I can assure you with my personal word that neither Dr. Kuhn nor I had any intention whatsoever of adding any sort of “sex education” or exploration of human sexuality to the National Day of Silence.  Her offering was to give an academic reflection on the topic of discrimination in general.

It has been pointed out, too, that this year is different in the cumulative attention paid on campus to LGBTQ issues in the Upper School.  As I have reflected on this observation, I think it is true.  We have had, this year, very active leadership from a significant number of students concerned about LGBTQ issues. The vast majority of these students are not from within the LGBTQ community, but are “allies.”  Noting the high suicide rate among LGBTQ students today in America, many Upper School faculty members have clearly labeled their classrooms as “safe,” meaning that insulting language, harassment and bullying will not be tolerated.  Such labeling is a recommended practice to head off unsafe practices and suicides. I am in favor of designating safe classrooms. Just a few weeks ago, a few Honors Thesis presentations touched on topics related to the robust LGBTQ discrimination now fully reported across the country. I have been asked things like “Why so much?” and “Why ‘in the face’ of students so much?”  For me, looking back, those are fair questions.  While the debate could continue on whether the efforts were too much in a cumulative sense, I know that each of the actions—nearly all of which were student driven— were taken with the purest intent of making our campus a safer place for all students.

My Apology and Undertakings

I apologize for creating a situation that caused anxiety, concern, and questioning in some Episcopal families.  I apologize, more specifically, for our faults in communicating, in general, and our lack of communication to parents about this issue.

Additionally, going forward I will pay close attention to the professionalism and proportionality in our community of our messages.  I am convinced that a significant portion of the controversies raised this year were avoided in prior years (and can be avoided in the future) by tying activities more closely to our internal situations, without ignoring what is going on in the world around us.

Conclusion

We came through the Flood of 2016 by telling each other the truth about the flood damage, by communicating openly about each step of the recovery, and with faith in each other.  That’s how this year started.  I am working now to get back on those tracks that produced so much good for this community by admitting, telling the truth (as I see it), by communicating openly, and with faith in the Episcopal community of 2017.

Some of you have probably recalled while reading this the letter I sent to the community after the elections in November.  In that letter I assured you that Episcopal’s Mission & Ministry and the teachings of Jesus and the Episcopal Church will be the foundational places where we look to set our course.  We are not—and will not become—a school defined by the “liberal-conservative” debate raging in the country these days, just as we do not change our stripes after one party goes out of power and another comes in.  I represent to you that Episcopal is filled with dedicated professionals who, while not agreeing on a lot of things, are all together on being dedicated to putting first and foremost the education and development of students entrusted to us. That dedication is written large on the 16-17 school year in so, so many ways.

The Episcopal School of Baton Rouge is a diverse community, located in a diverse city found in an even more diverse country and, as we learn more every day, an ever increasingly diverse (and more connected) world. Living effective and rewarding lives for almost all of us requires adjusting to this diversity.  We must learn to communicate amid the diversity, to build a community devoid of hate, irrationality or dismissive labeling. I will be working hard to ensure the year that started with this community coming together to recover from the flood of 2016 ends unified and well, with momentum.

Sincerely,

Hugh M. McIntosh

Head of School

Well. A few questions:

Prior to certain faculty members at this prep school declaring their classrooms “safe,” did students (gay or otherwise) really have to worry about insulting language, harassment, and bullying being tolerated in classrooms there? If so, why did it take a special designation like this to stop the insults, harassment, and bullying? Is it the policy of Episcopal High teachers who do not formally advertise their classrooms as “safe” to tolerate these things? Really? Or is this a rationalization for something that would have been harder to implement had the administration been straightforward about it?
“Such labeling is a recommended practice to head off unsafe practices and suicides.” This is Grade A backside covering administrative-therapeutic cant.
It is striking to learn from this missive that the school had been keeping this pro-gay campaigning more or less out of the sight of parents — parents who spend $16,000 per year to send their kids to a Christian school.
I’m trying to translate this:

“Additionally, going forward I will pay close attention to the professionalism and proportionality in our community of our messages.  I am convinced that a significant portion of the controversies raised this year were avoided in prior years (and can be avoided in the future) by tying activities more closely to our internal situations, without ignoring what is going on in the world around us.”

I think it means, “In the future, we’re going to be a lot craftier more low-key about pushing this stuff.” But I’m not sure.

Interesting to observe how this kind of thing happens: the school administration allows the students to take gay activism and run with it, but keeps the parents largely in the dark about this part of their children’s education and formation. If you’re going to embrace LGBT activism and make it a normal part of the school experience, then there is no reason to hide it from parents or downplay it.

By the way, Episcopal High students who keep trying to comment on this blog: you will stand a better chance of having your comments approved if you don’t resort to profanity and personal insults. One would like to think that you are being taught better than that.

The Practical Benedict Option

A reader writes:

I notice in the comments that you’ve been getting a lot of flak over what the Ben Op is supposed to look like specifically, or what the people who won’t wear the rings in Australia are supposed to do, exactly.  It seems like you’re frustrated that people aren’t just thinking for themselves and realizing on their own what “be an actual Christian” looks like.  I get that.  It is super frustrating.

But I think, to be honest, that you may be expecting a bit too much out of the average “wants to be serious” Christian individual/family. As a pastor, in my experience, and that of many clergy friends, the laity that we love and shepherd are…how do I say this politely?  Wildly incompetent.

It was only after a year of co-authoring a daily family devotional for my confirmation kids and families, and sending it home each week, to no avail, that I realized the level of help and hand-holding I needed to provide.  No, sadly, it isn’t obvious.  Yes, I needed to actually write out the following.

Here the reader provides a guide to a very basic family devotional. It reads like it was written to help small children in deepest jungle mission territory know how pray at home. But this pastor lives in Red America.

More:

It’s utterly ridiculous.  Some days I am so frustrated I can barely manage.  How do you people not know how to do this????? But then I remember that these are the same families whose children enrolled in the public school and who cannot read the Gospel of Mark aloud in any meaningfully proficient manner, and I try to have compassion on the poor, lost sheep.

So here’s my thought: I know that the book itself is meant to be a conceptual overview of the need for the BenOp, and not 40 Days To Becoming a Ben Op Christian.  But I think that people are going to need that kind of help.  We can’t all up and move to Clear Creek, nor do you expect us to.  But I’m wondering about some kind of website, perhaps, where we can find one another, build (virtual or IRL) communities, get answers, seek resources, etc.

How great would it be if someone could ask the question, “I need to find a different church.  We are currently Evangelical but open to Anglicanism and Lutheranism.  We live in Podunk, Flyover State.  Can anyone recommend a parish?”  or “I’m ready to get rid of TV in the house, but my kids are pitching a fit and the Comcast sales rep offered me a really good deal to keep cable…how do I talk to the kids and stay firm in my resolve when I’m on the phone?”  or “I need help budgeting in to order afford shopping somewhere besides Walmart” or “who in the Minneapolis area would be willing to meet for dinner once a month to talk BenOp living?” and pastors who know people in the area, and a dad who already did it and a mom who’s a former Comcast employee and a rockstar budgeter and 6 other people from Minneapolis chime in?  I think a lot of us would have questions, and a lot of us would be willing to offer what we can to help others – but we need a way to connect with one another, first.

I know you’ve mentioned you’re working on getting a website out.  Is something like this part of it?

I slightly edited this letter to protect the pastor’s identity, but this is a good letter — and one that motivates me. I’m getting this question a lot. I own a URL for a website, and want to develop one like this to help connect Christians all over the world who are interested in the Benedict Option. I need to get started building that site. If you have any recommendations for web developers I might hire, please write to me privately at rod — at — amconmag — dot — com. You would not believe the volume of mail I’m getting today, so I can’t answer everyone. Please don’t assume that I didn’t get the email if I don’t respond to it.

Today my agent sold publication rights for France to a French Catholic publisher. It means a lot to me that The Benedict Option is going to be in French. I hope I have the opportunity to go to France for the launch, and to make a pilgrimage to the tomb of St. Geneviève, to thank her for her prayers. This Benedict Option thing is not only for Americans. We all need to be making these contacts, building these networks, both nationally and internationally, while we can.

UPDATE: Tell me what features you would like to see on this site. Again, it’s not going to be a site to sell something, but a site that will be a practical guide.

One Poor Battered Gargoyle

Am stuck in airport on the way back from Colorado. Massive flight delays today. I want to take a moment, though, to note an interesting conversation I had in Boulder.

On the bus north from the Denver Airport, I sat next to a clean-cut young white guy, maybe in his early 30s, who was well dressed, in a business casual way. Turns out he was a trained shaman transitioning to a real estate career. “Six months ago, I had hair down to my waist,” he said. It turned out that his Indian spiritual master told him to leave the reservation and return to the world, and take up a normal career. “That is your path,” he quoted the old man saying.

Turns out this guy had spent many years in South America, studying in various shamanic traditions. He knows a lot about ethnobotany. I could have talked to him all day. The conversation was deeply fascinating. At one point I lad my cards on the table, and told him I was an Orthodox Christian, and though I very much disagree with his metaphysical and spiritual take on the world, I do agree with him about the profound mystery of our existence. I tell you, this neopagan was in some ways talking like an Athonite monk.

“You cannot put God, or reality, in a box,” he said. “You just can’t. So many people figure if you can’t prove it, or can’t conceive of it, it doesn’t exist. I don’t even argue with those people. It’s fine with me if they think this way. I know that’s not true, because I have experienced so many things.”

And he told me about some of those things. Here’s the part that stays with me, two days later: he said that most people in the Western world simply do not believe that matter can be charged with spirit. He talked about some of the things he had experienced living in shamanic communities overseas that proved otherwise. He knew very little about Christianity, because he grew up mostly overseas, and seemed surprised when I talked to him about what Orthodox Christianity teaches, and about classical (pre-modern) Christian metaphysics. It’s not the same thing as shamanism, not by a long stretch. But strangely enough, a traditional Christian would have more in common with this shamanistic wayfarer who looks like a real estate salesman than he would with most modern Westerners.

It puts me in mind of this C.S. Lewis quote:

The christening of Europe seemed to all our ancestors—whether as themselves Christians they welcomed it, or like Gibbon deplored it as humanistic unbelievers—a unique, irresistible, irreversible event. But we’ve seen the opposite process. Of course, the unchristening of Europe in our time is not quite complete. Neither was her christening in the Dark Ages. But roughly speaking we may say, that while as all history was for our ancestors divided into two periods, the pre-Christian and the Christian, for us it falls into three, the pre-Christian, the Christian, and what may reasonably be called the post-Christian.

This surely must make a momentous difference. I’m not here considering either the christening or the un-christening at all from a theological point of view. I’m thinking of them simply as cultural changes. And when I do that, it seems to me that the un-christening is an even more radical change than the christening. Christians and pagans had much more in common with each other than either has with the post-Christian. The gap between those who worshipped different gods is not so wide as that between those who worship and those who don’t.…

I find it a bit hard to have patience with all those Jeremiahs in press or pulpit who warn us that we are relapsing into paganism. What lurks behind such prophecies, if they are anything but careless language, is the false idea that the historical process allows simple reversal, that Europe can come out of Christianity by the same doors she went in, and find herself back where she was. That isn’t the sort of thing that happens. A post-Christian man is not a pagan. You might as well think that a married woman recovers her virginity by divorce. The post-Christian is cut off from the Christian past and therefore doubly from the pagan past.…

What that young man and I have in common is the conviction that the material world is not all there is. That living is an encounter with mystery. That most people, for whatever reason, cultivate deadness to that mystery, and to grace. Why? I didn’t ask him for his opinion, but my sense is that it frightens them.

I wish I had thought to share with the shaman on the bus this quote from Russell Kirk, which speaks for me:

I did not love cold harmony and perfect regularity of organization; what I sought was variety, mystery, tradition, the venerable, the awful. I despised sophisters and calculators; I was groping for faith, honor, and prescriptive loyalties. I would have given any number of neo-classical pediments for one poor battered gargoyle.

Big 7th Circuit Gay Rights Ruling

A federal court made a potentially huge ruling this week:

In an 8-3 ruling, the US Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit on Tuesday concluded that federal civil rights law — specifically, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 — protects workers from discrimination based on sexual orientation. So, the court decided, it’s not legal in the US for an employer to discriminate against gay workers — making it the first federal appeals court to conclude that gay people are protected under existing civil rights law.

The argument: Federal civil rights laws prohibit sex discrimination, and this, based on the Seventh Circuit Court’s interpretation of the law, encompasses sexual orientation. “It would require considerable calisthenics to remove the ‘sex’ from ‘sexual orientation.’ The effort to do so has led to confusing and contradictory results,” Chief Judge Diane Wood concluded in the majority opinion.

David French analyzes the decision, and concludes that the federal panel just made up law for the sake of social justice:

There is instead an entire class of federal judges who, when faced with contentious culture-war cases, simply ask, “what can I do for social justice today?” They disrupt the constitutional system, and they don’t even (Judge Posner aside) pay us the courtesy of basic honesty about their intentions and methods. The case will probably proceed to the Supreme Court. There’s a circuit split (in other words, different federal courts of appeal have reached different outcomes), and the ultimate fate of the law is almost certainly in Justice Kennedy’s hands. He has proven that he can understand and apply the original meaning of the law, and he’s also proven — particularly regarding LGBT issues — that he will do whatever he wants to advance a cause he so plainly likes. We can’t know what he’ll do, and thus we can’t know if he’ll hold that the statute means what it so plainly says. That’s not constitutional government; it’s judicial supremacy, and it’s creating a grave and ongoing challenge to the rule of law itself.

In her dissent, Justice Diane Sykes highlighted what a dangerous step this ruling is:

Our role is to… [interpret] the statutory language as a reasonable person would have understood it at the time of enactment. When we assume the power to alter the original public meaning of a statute through the process of interpretation, we assume a power that is not ours. The Constitution assigns the power to make and amend statutory law to the elected representatives of the people. However welcome today’s decision might be as a policy matter, it comes at a great cost to representative self-government.

In other words, the court took it upon itself to say that the law means things the drafters could not have meant. Rather than wait on Congress to change the law, the court changed the meaning of language itself. It is shocking. What democracy!

It is unclear what specific impacts this ruling, if nationalized by SCOTUS, would have on religious liberty within religious institutions. But it cannot be good. The cultural meaning is that this is one more step — a big step — on the road to rendering traditional Christians no better in the public’s imagination than racial segregationists. Get ready.

Trump Flip-Flops On Non-Intervention

Hello everyone, I’m sorry I’ve been away from the keys most of the day. I’ve been in Boulder, a beautiful city filled with good restaurants and nice people — and high altitude, and a bone-dry climate. My advice to you, if you want to avoid dizziness ‘n stuff: hydrate, hydrate, hydrate!

So, back in the room after giving a talk at CU tonight — thanks for coming, friends — I see that the US is thinking about entering the Syrian war.  Excerpt:

President Trump warned on Wednesday that he would not tolerate the “heinous” chemical weapons attack in Syria, opening the door to a greater American role in protecting the population in a vicious civil war that he has always said the United States should avoid.

The president declined to offer any details about potential action. But he said his horror at the images of “innocent children, innocent babies” choked by poison gas in a rebel-held area of Syria had caused him to reassess his approach. Only days after the White House declared it would be “silly” to persist in trying to oust President Bashar al-Assad of Syria, Mr. Trump said, “My attitude toward Syria and Assad has changed very much.”

“It crossed a lot of lines for me,” the president declared at a news conference in the Rose Garden, referring to the “red line” that his predecessor, President Barack Obama, had drawn before a 2013 poison-gas attack by Mr. Assad’s forces. Mr. Obama’s failure to strike Syria after that, Mr. Trump claimed, sowed the conditions for this new assault. The estimated death toll was reported to have exceeded 100.

More:

Nothing, it seems, affects Mr. Trump’s judgments as much as what he sees on television. On Wednesday, he said the images of death inside Syria affected him, presumably in ways they did not under similar circumstances four years ago. “I will tell you that attack on children had a big, big impact on me,” he said. “That was a horrible, horrible thing.”

Anybody with a heart has to understand this feeling. But it is extremely dangerous to go to war because of what we have seen on television. Few if any Americans arguing for US restraint in Syria does so because they are indifferent to the horrific suffering of the Syrian people. They argue for it because a) it is next to impossible to know which of the bad-guy factions (there are no good guys) we should support, and b) because we have demonstrated at massive cost in human life, money, materiel, and regional stability the folly of going to war based on our strong emotions.

My colleague Daniel Larison wrote earlier today:

Pretending that “action” in Syria isn’t war is an attempt to demand that the government initiate hostilities against another state without owning up to the implications of what that means. Even if the purpose of the action were simply punitive and intended to make their government “pay a price,” the U.S. will not be in control of how the other parties to the conflict respond to that action. That risks sparking a wider conflagration that could prove very costly for us and the entire region, and doing it just for the sake of punishing the Syrian government is not a good enough reason to take such a huge gamble.

We also know that once so-called “limited” interventions begin they often do not stay “limited.” The war on ISIS began initially as a defensive response to a threat inside Iraq, but has since expanded into Syria and beyond. Once the U.S. makes the mistake of attacking the Syrian government, the clamor to “finish the job” will grow louder. And there are always unintended consequences in war, some of which none of us will have expected at the beginning, so it is possible that there are even greater dangers from taking such action that we don’t yet appreciate.

Why have we not learned this with regard to the Middle East?! It’s enough to make one despair. This is exactly what some of us less inclined to intervening militarily overseas feared about Trump: that his non-interventionist instincts were not grounded in anything, and could not be trusted. Today’s statement by Trump validates that concern. Remember what he pledged in the week after his election?:

President-elect Donald Trump laid out a U.S. military policy on Tuesday that would avoid interventions in foreign conflicts and instead focus heavily on defeating the Islamic State militancy.

In the latest stop on a “thank you” tour of states critical to his Nov. 8 election win, Trump introduced his choice for defense secretary, General James Mattis, to a large crowd in this city near the Fort Bragg military base, which has deployed soldiers to 90 countries around the world.

“We will stop racing to topple foreign regimes that we know nothing about, that we shouldn’t be involved with,” Trump said. “Instead, our focus must be on defeating terrorism and destroying ISIS, and we will.”

Trump’s rhetoric was similar to what he said during the election campaign when he railed against the war in Iraq.

In Fayetteville, he vowed a strong rebuilding of the U.S. military, which he suggested has been stretched too thin. Instead of investing in wars, he said, he would spend money to build up America’s aging roads, bridges and airports.

I don’t know to what extent this sentiment came from Stephen Bannon. To be perfectly clear, Bannon, as a political adviser, had no business sitting on the NSC. That said, I wonder if he was the only non-interventionist voice in the Trump inner circle. I don’t know that he counted himself a non-interventionist, per se, but read these remarks Bannon made to a Vatican conference in 2014. They don’t have much to do with foreign policy, but his saying that we have to focus more tightly on the long-term battle with radical Islam — it’s reasonable to conclude from that that Bannon would be hostile to the idea of US military intervention to punish the anti-ISIS Assad government. This, because it undermines the fight against radical Islam, which Bannon pretty clearly sees as a long-term, civilizational struggle.

Again, this is purely speculation on my part, and I welcome any insights readers may have into this situation. I was encouraged to see this today from Sen. Rand Paul:

This remains true today as it was in 2013. Both parts. https://t.co/sRQkcZ0oDI

— Senator Rand Paul (@RandPaul) April 6, 2017

Does Donald Trump have anybody around him now in the White House making this argument? Remember when Assad’s use of chemical weapons spurred President Obama to try to talk the nation and Congress into an act of war against Syria? This happened:

So when the president stepped into the sunny Rose Garden that Saturday morning, he announced that he had made two decisions: first, that the U.S. should act against Syria, and second, that he would seek explicit authorization from Congress to do so. With that, the administration set out on a different campaign than the military one we had been preparing for: to convince the American people that intervening in Syria was in the country’s interest.

What transpired over the next month was one of the most controversial and revealing episodes in eight years of Obama’s foreign policy. Despite the administration’s strong advocacy and support from a small minority of hawkish politicians, Congress and the American people proved strongly opposed to the use of force.

Do Congress and the American people remember this? Are they prepared to be consistent now that the president is a Republican named Trump? This news from last week out of the Administration is deeply troubling:

Even as the U.S. military takes on a greater role in the warfare in Iraq and Syria, the Trump administration has stopped disclosing significant information about the size and nature of the U.S. commitment, including the number of U.S. troops deployed in either country.

How are the American people supposed to be aware of the Administration’s troop buildup? Who benefits? Do you trust this Commander-in-Chief to make wise decisions about when, how, and whether to go to war?

This is war we’re talking about, you know. We had no business going in there in 2003, and we cannot seem to learn our lesson.

Agency & The Benedict Option

At The Federalist, Cheryl Magness defends The Benedict Option:

The concern that Christians who embrace the Benedict Option are retreating into a cultish, anti-social lifestyle is perhaps the most common criticism of Dreher’s book. But Dreher has repeatedly denied that the book calls for Christians to withdraw from modern life to live in snobby little separatist communes.

Instead, Dreher encourages Christians to engage the culture, but to do so on their own terms, not on the culture’s. This is what I think a lot of people are missing about the Benedict Option. In focusing on the first part of the name, which evokes an image of monastic life, they are overlooking the importance of the second part of Dreher’s vision: “Option.” “Option” means “choice”—and it is the Christian’s commitment to choosing his path, rather than allowing it to be chosen for him by the world, that is at the heart of Dreher’s argument.

Yes, and to put a fine point on it, I get the idea of a choice, an “option,” from MacIntyre’s final paragraph of After Virtue, in which he posits the division between those in the collapsing Roman Empire who chose to continue trying to “shore up the imperium” with those who decided that to preserve what they most valued under those conditions, they had to live counterculturally. The idea is that we are not helpless, that we do have a choice — and if we have a choice, we also have a responsibility to choose well.

It’s interesting to me how some readers of the book say that the book’s ask is too hard, or at least harder on some than others, therefore we can safely ignore the whole thing. I think that’s a strategy of evasion. OK, so you can’t afford to pull your kids out of public school, or can’t homeschool, or send your kids to a solid Christian school? Fine — but what are you going to do about it? If your kids are in a less than ideal school setting, that only means that you are going to have to compensate at some point for what they are not getting. Maybe Ben Op-oriented parents whose kids go to a certain public school can get together, decide what their kids need supplementing with, and organize to do that. Maybe their kids go to a church youth group, in which case perhaps the parents can get more involved there to make sure the youth group is giving serious formation and discipleship to the kids, given that they’re not getting it in school. Creative minorities, y’all.

I never tire of telling the story of the Catholic priest who shut up me and a Catholic friend circa 2000, when we were complaining endlessly about all the things the local parishes, and the archdiocese, were not doing to form the laity and their children. The priest said yes, we were absolutely right to identify these problems and to lament the lack of institutional concern or assistance. But we were absolutely wrong, he said, to wash our hands of responsibility for ourselves, our friends, and our kids. As intelligent, capable, and well-formed laity, there was a lot we could do for ourselves without waiting passively for permission from the institutional church.

He was right. In the same spirit, if our kids in public school (or wherever) are not getting all that we believe they need, it’s much better to work to do something for them instead of lament what they don’t have, and to say, “Welp, guess we’re out of luck on this Benedict Option thing.”

For example, if it’s true that it’s much harder for single parents, or families where both people work, to do the Benedict Option, well, what can we who have more resources do to help make it more possible for those families? And if we cannot afford to homeschool or to do the educational aspects of the Ben Op for whatever reason, okay, then let’s work hard on the things that we can do. The perfect must not be the enemy of the good.

Back to Cheryl Magness:

The Benedict Option is an abstraction. Everything about it is going to depend on the concrete ways in which people apply it, and those ways are going to vary from one person to the next. One family’s negative experience with something like the Benedict Option does not mean the underlying principles are all bad, just that it’s possible to not execute them well.

As Joy Pullmann observed, the Benedict Option is “summed up by a New Yorker named Leah Libresco Sargeant on page 142: “[P]eople won’t do it unless you call it something different. It’s just the church being what the church is supposed to be, but if you give it a name, that makes people care.”

For some, Dreher’s acknowledgment that he has merely given a name to something that is not new is a weakness, or as Simms describes it, a “gimmick.” For me, it is a revelation, a way of talking about what my husband and I have been doing for more than 20 years without realizing it. To be able to give our way of life a name so we can talk about it with others who are doing the same thing and to build one another up in our efforts is hardly a gimmick: it is a gift. (Dreher gave a similar gift when he wrote “Crunchy Cons.”)

I recently read “Hillbilly Elegy,” by J. D. Vance. It was a profoundly affecting experience, as my husband and I could relate to a staggering number of things in the book. It was also sad. Vance unflinchingly and honestly catalogs both the circumstances and personal behaviors that can make it difficult to impossible for people to chart a different path from the one in which they have been brought up. Yet the only way out is to wrest what control one can: to take responsibility for one’s actions and to make choices instead of letting others make those choices for you.

That is what the Benedict Option is all about: choosing. Do you send your children to public school because that’s what people do, or do you consider alternatives? Do you take the culture as it comes, or do you discriminate, saying no to music, books, movies, fashion, and other societal trends that conflict with your values? Do you let every latest piece of technology into your family’s hands simply because it’s available, or do you draw some boundaries?

Do you resign yourself to compromising your beliefs in performing your job because that’s just what one has to do these days, or do you refuse and accept the consequences? Do you make church a priority and seek out one that is serious about confessing Christ, or do you look for one that is comfortable and easy to fit it in around the edges? Do you actually read the Bible and pray as a family, or do you just call yourself a Christian and hope this and the occasional prayer born of urgency is good enough to get you into heaven some day?

Read the whole thing; it’s really good.

In interviews recently, I’ve been pointing out that so many conservative Christian parents think they’ve got everything well in hand because they send their kids to a Christian school (or homeschool them), go to church on Sunday, maybe send their kids to the youth group, and they hold the correct conservative Christian opinions. Meanwhile, they’re handing their young kids smartphones, thereby undoing everything they (the parents) think they’re accomplishing. The most common complaint? My kids will be weird if they don’t have smartphones.

This is how we surrender agency, folks. This is not on Hollywood, or the media, or the public schools, or liberals, any other outsider we might wish to blame. This is on us Christians.