Rod Dreher's Blog, page 474

Opioids Are The Opiate Of The People

Kevin Williamson is one hell of a writer, and a hardcore, unsentimental libertarian. Like the (Catholic libertarian) reader who sent in this recent short essay of Williamson’s, I was struck by the tone and content of this Williamson piece in National Review. It begins:

This is the great paradox of our time: In 2017, it has never been easier for us to satisfy our wants, but we seldom have been more dissatisfied. In the United States, in Europe, in Latin America, and even (more quietly) in parts of Asia and in Australia, there is a sense that things are not going quite right, that the old order — not only in politics but also in commercial and religious life — is dead on its feet. People have turned to leaders and movements of very different kinds — Hugo Chávez, Marine Le Pen, Donald Trump, Black Lives Matter, black-mask anarchism — in search of alternatives. In a sense, they are all the same: Those who had felt themselves to be on the outside looking in are now on the outside looking out.

I’m reading Homo Deus by Yuval Noah Harari — a book that is by turns brilliant and shockingly obtuse. Early in the book, Harari — who is a liberal, atheist, scientific materialist — notes that by any material measure, we are living in the best of all possible times. Yet why is it that rich countries today have far higher suicide rates than those not as rich? Harari theorizes that happiness depends not so much on actual conditions, but on expectations of what conditions should be. When conditions do not meet expectations, we can expect political turmoil, or something else — like, for example, the opioid epidemic. [UPDATE: Read Pia Maleney on the effects of downward mobility.] Harari says that the biochemical pursuit of happiness is “an existential threat to the social order.”

We have abandoned a religious outlook that restrains and questions the pursuit of pleasure. Harari doesn’t think this is such a bad thing. Anyway, he writes, no matter what religion says, “for the capitalist juggernaut, happiness is pleasure. Period.” Again, Harari is not criticizing capitalism. In fact, later in the book he praises it for all the advances it has brought to humankind, in terms of increasing pleasure and freedom of action. He says one of the great projects of the 21st century is going to be the use of technology to globalize pleasure. (Tellingly, nowhere in the book’s index is there a mention of Aldous Huxley or Brave New World.)

I hope to write a lot more about the book when I finish it. At this point, I want to point out that even if Harari’s vision is a good thing (it’s not, not in my view), and even if it were feasible, we would still be a very long way from achieving it. And there will be a hell of a lot of suffering ahead for people who have come to believe that happiness can be theirs if only they accumulate wealth and experiences. You can see from reading Harari’s book that economic growth depends to a disquieting degree on people believing that maximizing individual pleasure is the key to happiness, and that acquiring that happiness is possible for them.

Which brings us back to Williamson’s piece. Excerpt:

But the marriage and family that once was a source of security is today a source of insecurity, an unstable and uncertain thing scarcely defended by the law (it is far, far easier to walk away from a marriage than from a student loan) and held in low regard by much of society. Again, this works differently for men than for women: A single mother is still a mother, but a father who lives apart from his children and their mother is not a father in full. If he is not fixed in this world by being a father and a husband, and if he has only ordinary, unexceptional employment, what, exactly, is he? Self-sufficient, perhaps, and that isn’t nothing. But how does he stand in relation to other men, to his neighbors, and to those who came before him and will come after him? His status is vague, and it is precarious.

And there is the paradox within our paradox: The world is wondrous and beautiful and exciting and rich, and many of us have trouble finding our place in it, in part, because it is wondrous and beautiful and exciting and rich, so much so that we have lost touch with certain older realities. One of those realities is that children need fathers. Another is that fathers need children.

But these are what my colleague David French calls the “wounds that public policy will not heal.” Our churches are full of people who would love to talk to you about healing, but many have lost interest in that sort of thing, too. And so they turn to Trump, to Le Pen, to Chavismo (which is what Bernie Sanders is peddling), and, perhaps, to opiate-induced oblivion. Where will they turn when they figure out — and they will figure it out — that there are no answers in these, either? And what will we offer them?

Read the whole thing.

Public policy can only do so much to fix this. What public policy is going to compel a father who has no interest in supporting his children to do so? What public policy is going to force him to be part of their lives? What law is going to force women not have babies without being married to the father? Are there public policies that can muscle troubled couples into staying married when the going gets tough? And what kind of school reform can make up for a child suffering from parents who don’t care about education, and don’t care to make a home life stable enough for their children to learn?

And so on.

About the churches that have lost interest in healing, I am reminded of something my former priest, Father Matthew, told me about this. He said that people often think they want healing, but what they really want is anesthetic so they don’t have to feel the pain of their own condition. There are plenty of churches willing to give patients nothing but anesthetic. A real church, though, will be willing to do the difficult treatment needed to heal the brokenness, not simply mask the pain from it.

We Christians have got to be that kind of church. It is likely to be the case that very many people will not want to come around, because we ask them to commit to something they don’t want to do. We tell them that they will not be able to baptize their pleasures here, but rather they will only find their lives if they are willing to die to themselves. People have never wanted to hear that, and perhaps never more than today, formed by a culture that tells them they can be like gods (the point of the book Homo Deus).

But there is no other way. There just isn’t. It’s the Way of the Cross, not the Way of the Big Electric Blanket. The reference is to a line by Flannery O’Connor, who also said, relevantly, “All human nature vigorously resists grace because grace changes us and the change is painful.”

This kind of grace-filled church will never fill auditoriums, not in this post-Christian consumerist culture. But it will be an ark to those who are willing to lose their lives in order to save them. 

 

Does Germany Still Care About Luther?

Matthias Lohmann and Ryan Hoselton, writing on The Gospel Coalition’s website, lament the fact that Germany, the 1517 birthplace of the Reformation, has turned its back on Protestant Christianity (and Christianity in general). Sure, Germany is holding lots of celebrations of the Reformation this year, but its collective heart isn’t in it, say the writers. Excerpt:

[F]ew in Europe see the relevance of the Protestant Reformers’ theological and spiritual vision for today. Many dismiss their doctrinal and ecclesial agenda as a mask for furthering the political and economic interests of power-hungry royalty (or, unintentionally, of zealous peasants). Others blame the Reformation for leading Europe into divisive wars and struggles with disastrous and abiding social consequences. Most Europeans view the Reformers’ beliefs as intolerant, passé, and petty.

With few exceptions, Europe’s churches more or less agree. To advance ecumenical relationships with Catholics, the EKD will officially commemorate the anniversary as a Christusfest (festival of Christ) rather than celebrate it with the label “Reformation.” There’s little cause for celebration anyway, as most churches have long abandoned—or, at least, significantly revised—the Reformation’s core doctrines: sola Scriptura, sola gratia, sola fide, solus Christus, and soli Deo gloria. While the Roman Catholic church still officially rejects Scripture alone, European Protestant church leaders and university theology faculty now place the authority of human reason, the claims of higher criticism, and individual conscience over Scripture. Grace alone is of little consequence in an age when ministers minimize sin and maximize humanity’s inherent goodness and free will. It appears Erasmus won the debate with Luther over the bondage of the will after all. Faith alone and Christ alone have been replaced by the supposedly humbler positions of “We don’t know” and “Many paths lead to God.” And soli Deo gloria is the forgotten sola, known in Germany today only through the SDG inscribed under Johann Sebastian Bach’s compositions.

Even the bulk of Europe’s evangelicals and free churches (i.e., those without ties to the state) see little use for the theology of the Reformation. The Reformers’ quest for biblical and spiritual depth has been substituted for deep anti-intellectualism and shallow experientialism. Ministers have largely traded the Reformers’ emphasis on the Christ-centered preaching of the Word for theater performances and moralistic guidelines, and the Protestant doctrine of the priesthood of all believers has warped into therapeutic individualism.

“Christusfest”?! Good grief. This is the Reformation we’re talking about, and they’re just watering it all down (in the same way Pope Francis is doing, by the way). This is the kind of ecumenism I do not like: an ecumenism of promoting the lowest common denominator. I have never seen my friendship with Christians from other churches as dependent on either of us giving up our doctrinal truths. In fact, I feel that I am on more solid ground talking to Christians who are true-believing Protestants or true-believing Catholics than with those who don’t seem to take the things that divide us seriously.

Of course there are plenty of Christians in every church who lack charity, and refuse to see the brotherhood in Christ that unites us all, despite our very real and important divisions. I regret that, and want to work against it. That said, even as someone who is naturally more sympathetic theologically to Roman Catholicism than to Reformed Christianity, I can’t help feeling that something important has been lost with “Christusfest”.

Newsweek wrote a piece last year about how Luther’s faith is dying out in Luther’s land. I found this passage arresting:

Here is the paradox: Under East Germany’s Communist dictatorship, where churchgoing was frowned upon, congregations were larger. Indeed, the Protestant church and its pastors and members were arguably the most important factor leading to the fall of the Berlin Wall.

“In [East Germany], the church was a home for those who didn’t support the regime, and everything the church did had public significance,” said Christine Lieberknecht, Thuringia’s prime minister, a Christian Democrat who served as a pastor under the Communists.

As a teenager in the late 1980s, Jana Fenn attended a Christian youth group in Jena, East Germany because, she explained, “You could say things there that you couldn’t say in school, and you learned things there that you didn’t learn in school.”

But one day, Fenn said, her teacher wanted a chat: “She asked, ‘What do you do on Friday evenings?’ I said I went to the Christian youth group. Then she asked who else was there and what we did.” Even though attending the youth group meant Fenn and her friends were exposing themselves to official repercussions, they didn’t let their teachers intimidate them.

But today Fenn no longer belongs to the church. “I go to a service every now and then, but the church doesn’t have a role in my life,” she said. “It doesn’t really stand for anything anymore. I could just as well join Greenpeace.”

Added Pollack: “Catholics criticize their church more vocally than Protestants theirs, but they also feel a very strong connection. Protestants don’t feel such a strong connection. The Protestant church is seen more as an institution that runs daycare centers and provides social services.”

Tolerance and acceptance – who could criticize such benign values? That’s exactly the Lutherans’ problem. “People don’t know what exactly the church represents,” said Pollack. “It’s having a hard time differentiating itself from other organizations within civil society, from trade unions or political parties.”

(For the record, the Catholic Church in Germany is not in much better shape.)

People get that the churches stand for nothing — this is a price paid by churches for trying to hard to assimilate to modernity. It’s true for us too, and this is going to become ever more clear over the next few decades. A church that doesn’t represent much more than being nice and offering social services isn’t going to succeed, and in any case is not really a church.

Notice Lohmann’s and Hoselton’s complaint about Evangelicalism’s “deep anti-intellectualism and shallow experientialism.” This must be what Al Mohler was talking about in the much-discussed podcast interview he did with me some weeks back, when he asked me if I thought Evangelicals have what it takes to do the Benedict Option (= form a strong, resilient, countercultural Christian witness to post-Christian modernity). I told him genuinely that I didn’t not know. He responded that no, Evangelicalism does not have these resources, but if Evangelicals will return to the magisterial Reformers of the early Reformation, they will find everything they need.

I see that Dr. Mohler and other Protestant leaders are going to be speaking at a Reformation conference in Germany later this year, in which participants will be urging a return to Reformation roots. Let me ask you Evangelical, Lutheran, and Calvinist readers: What you think of Dr. Mohler’s claim? Does Evangelicalism have what it takes to do the Benedict Option? Why or why not?

And, what would it mean to return to Reformation roots, either in a Mainline context, or an Evangelical/free church context? I’m asking because I’d love to know. The broad success of The Benedict Option project depends on the answer.

UPDATE: Long, interesting comment from Pastor Brian:

Evangelicalism is tough to define anymore. For that reason I no longer refer to myself as an evangelical, but rather as an orthodox Protestant, or a confessionally Reformed Christian, even though I would fit neatly in the old definition of an evangelical. (For more on this, see Martyn Lloyd-Jones “What is an Evangelical?” and Ian H Murray’s ” The Old Evangelicalism.”)

But evangelicalism, as it is widely constituted today, does not have the chops to survive. It is shallow, experiential and emotional, fad-driven, and quite anti-intellectual. It consciously seeks to mimic the culture and is terrified of seeming “irrelevant,” never dreaming that its actual relevance is only to be found in not seeking cultural relevance as the sumum bonum. It will give away the store to be popular.

There is also a strong undercurrent of eschatological pessimism associated with Dispensational Premillenialism, coupled with a jingoistic Americanism that fundamentally sees America and Christendom as almost synonymous. The cultural decay we see all around us seems, therefore, to be totally unprecedented in human history. Therefore we’re in the End Times. Therefore, there’s no sense in worrying much about the future. The idea that history could go on for another two millennia (or that God could allow global warming to ravage the planet) or the center of world Christianity could shift to Africa or China in that time, and America cease to be “Christian” would almost be seen as heretical unbelief.

Meanwhile younger evangelicals are busy recapitulating the 20th century church’s fatal embrace of theological liberalism. As long as it’s packaged in an emotionally compelling way, their elders can be induced to swallow it as well, as “The Shack” easily demonstrates.

Within the more conservative strains of Reformed and Lutheran Protestantism there are other problematic dynamics. I have many Lutheran friends, but I’ll stick to generalizing about the Reformed. There is a spectrum in the PCA, for instance. The disciples of Tim Keller are almost as ready to give away the store in the name of reaching the culture as the mainstream evangelicals are, and there is a small but significant number of these Young Turks who are busy trying to combine AngloCatholicism and hipster feminism into a small enough package to smuggle into the PCA. On the other extreme are the Confessionalist Conservatives (with whom I mostly identify, tho less and less) many of whom seem to be suffering from Asperger’s Syndrome. Carl Trueman’s denomination is chock full of these. The focus here is on doctrine in an increasingly nuanced form, but it’s not particularly connected to real life most of the time. They tend to build small, unattractive churches full of Christians with advanced degrees in physics or engineering. They love doctrinal controversy, not because they love controversy, but because they love debating ideas. But regular people have no desire to follow the subtle arguments and hate the atmosphere of conflict coupled with a lack of any recognizably pleasing social interaction, so they run away pretty quickly. At my worst, I could easily fall into these pitfalls (indeed, I have) but the Lord is graciously restraining me and reshaping me, and by grace I am better than I was.

How would BenOp look among us? Well, I think it would look something like the Early Church combined with the best of the Puritan movement in England, and the Nadere Reformatie in the Netherlands, with a helping of Bunyan thrown in, all leavened with an 18th century missionary spirit. There would be an emphasis on doctrine and catechesis not for the fun of mastering knowledge, but in the assistance of piety. There would be emphasis on spiritual formation in community, as the early Methodists were noted for, along with the regular practice of the spiritual disciplines.

The most important thing, though, would be to create a warm, positive, life giving atmosphere that clearly said, “We’re very, very different in here, and that’s a very good thing.” Outsiders would be very warmly welcomed, but there should be a sense of leaving one world and entering another when they come among us. Our world should be as different…. as enchanted and charming and True, in its own way, as Narnia was from wartime England for the Pevensie children.

Three Rival Humanisms

I’m very much enjoying reading the new book by historian Yuval Noah Harari, titled Homo Deus: A Brief History Of Tomorrow.  I’m taking notes on it, and find good insights on many pages, but half as many statements and analyses that are way off. I don’t think Harari is the kind of thinker who ever considers that he might be wrong. I’ll be blogging more about the book when I’m done with it, but first, I want to share with you an interesting part of the book I completed last night.

Harari is an atheist, gay, and a man profoundly invested in secular modernity and what you might call the ideology of technology. He has the kind of view of religion that you would expect from someone like that. He actually praises Moralistic Therapeutic Deism (though not by name) as a realistic accommodation by religion to modernity. But he tweaks progressive Christians for telling themselves that their form of Christianity comes from the Bible, when really their prophet is Foucault.

Harari says Nietzsche is right: God is dead, at least in the West, and we have killed him. The body of the 19th century’s deicide victim is finally starting to cool, and we see the world it has left behind. Harari concedes that all the material progress, and progress in liberating the individual will, has come at a steep price. He praises the rise of humanism for creating a Man-centered way of making meaning in a meaningless universe.

Toward the end of his Humanism section, he talks about “schisms” within humanism. He writes:

In fact, humanism shared the fate of every successful religion, such as Christianity and Buddhism. As it spread and evolved, it fragmented into several conflicting sects. All humanist sects believe that human experience is the supreme source of authority and meaning, yet they interpret human experience in different ways.

Harari contends that “humanism split into three main branches:

Orthodox Humanism: The belief that the individual is sovereign, and that “we should give as much freedom as possible to every individual to experience the world, follow his or her inner voice and express his or her inner truth. Whether in politics, economics, or art, individual free will should have far more weight than state interests of religious doctrines.” This orthodox humanism is what we have come to call “liberal humanism,” or just plain “liberalism” (N.B., in this sense, even the right-of-center parties in the West are liberal). The problem is that inevitably the desires of all these individuals will conflict. In the 19th century, liberalism led to nationalism, as people began to think that nations had their own individuality, and should express that without being bound to a transnational empire.
Socialist Humanism: According to Harari, socialist humanism resolves the conflict within liberal humanism by faulting it for focusing too much on the individual, and not enough on the collective. Liberal humanism, on this view, blinds individuals to the needs and wants of others. Socialist humanism focuses more on social forces that prevent human flourishing, and advocates collective action through strong institutions to shape those social forces towards collective liberation.
Evolutionary humanism: This is a very different way of addressing the conflict problem raised by liberal humanism. Evolutionary humanism says that conflict is not always a problem to be solved, but something to cheer, because it pushes evolution forward. “Some humans are simply superior to others, and when human experiences collide, the fittest humans should steamroll everyone else,” Harari writes (though I hasten to say he’s describing this worldview, not necessarily endorsing it). Those humans who excel in various areas are worth more to society than its failures, and ought to be privileged and rewarded, because they are the drivers of progress.

Harari says that Stalin is the prime example of socialist humanism gone berserk, and Hitler is the same for evolutionary humanism. But neither terrible example obviates the insights of their rival humanisms. The historian — stating what I believe is his own view — writes:

Not all evolutionary humanists are racists, and not every belief in humankind’s potential for further evolution necessarily calls for setting up police states and concentration camps.

Auschwitz should serve as a blood-red warning sign rather than as a black curtain that hides entire sections of the human horizon. Evolutionary humanism played an important part in the shaping of modern culture, and is likely to play an even greater role in the shaping of the twenty-first century.

I am sympathetic to the “Christian humanism” of the Renaissance, though given what it opened the door to, I keep one foot in the Middle Ages. Unless something radical and unforeseen happens, Christian humanism is not on the table for the West in the 21st century. The three rival humanisms above are. It ought to be obvious to orthodox Christians how none of these humanisms are fully compatible with the Christian faith, but it ought to be equally obvious that we are going to have to learn to situate ourselves within one or more of them, and bear faithful witness.

To better explain the claims of the rival humanisms, Harari takes the example of four of the sound recordings placed on the Voyager I space probe, to give aliens a sample of what auditory life is like on Planet Earth. The ones Harari considers are:

Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony
Chuck Berry’s “Johnny B. Goode”
A pygmy hunter of the Congo’s tribal initiation song
A wolf howling in the Canadian Rockies

Which one of these recordings is the most valuable, according to the rival humanisms? According to Harari:

The liberal view is that all three human expressions are equally valid.
The socialist view is that “the real value of music depends not on the experiences of the individual listener, but on the impact it has on the experiences of other people and of society as a whole.” Therefore, says Harari, because Beethoven wrote music for rich white Europeans who were about to go plunder the world with colonialism, his music is probably not as important as Chuck Berry’s, which represents the black American experience, including having black America’s music appropriated by white musicians and turned into rock and roll. As for the pygmies, it only serves to uphold a primitive patriarchal order.
The evolutionary view is that the question itself is stupid. There really is a hierarchy of values, and we shouldn’t apologize about it. Harari: “The Taj Mahal is more beautiful than a straw hut, Michelangelo’s David is superior to my five-year-old niece’s latest clay figurine, and Beethoven composed far better music than Church Berry or the Congolese pygmies. There, we’ve said it! According to evolutionary humanists, anyone arguing that all human experiences are equally valuable is either an imbecile or a coward. Such vulgarity and timidity will lead only to the degeneration and extinction of humankind, as human progress is impeded in the name of cultural relativism or social equality.”

Which one do you most agree with? With me, that’s easy: the evolutionary view. But I would not put it in the language of “degeneration and extinction of humankind,” not at all. Because I am grounded in Christian faith and thought, I affirm hierarchy, but also affirm the innate dignity of all men, as bearers of the image of God. The “progress” I seek is not towards humanity becoming Übermenschen, but towards humanity growing in sanctity and love, which is to say, towards greater unity with God.

Similarly, a Christian humanism could embrace in part liberal humanism and socialist humanism (though not evolutionary humanism, which denies the imago Dei and devalues the sanctity of life), while tempering their harsher aspects (e.g., the relativism of liberal humanism, and the way socialist humanitarianism renders individuals as abstractions, and tends to justify injustices against individuals on the basis of class, race, and other classifications.

Anyway, I put all this out there for y’all to think about and talk about.

Munich & Venice Bleg

ESP Professional/Shutterstock

Hey readers, I am emerging from my sedation fog, and am happy to report that the steroid injection onto the bulging discs seems to have worked. No pain there for the first time in a long time. Let’s hope it holds.

I’ve had good luck asking for your travel advice in the past, so let me run something by you. Earlier in this space, I said that I was taking my son Matt with me to Italy for a conference in June. Matt wants to see something in Germany. We decided to go to Munich. It turns out that it’s way more expensive to fly back to the US from Munich. Bottom line: we are flying into and out of Venice. Given the relatively short time period we have, I’m thinking that we should take the train to Munich and spend Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday, then take a one-hour plane ride from Munich to Venice on that Saturday evening. We’ll have that night in Venice, all day Sunday, and fly back to the US on that Monday, late morning.

I’ve already bought the tickets between Europe and the US, so there’s no changing dates or airports. I have no yet bought the one-way from Munich to Venice. Questions for you:

Given that itinerary, what should we see in Munich? Matt wants to see the science museum in Munich, and the BMW Museum. I want to have a close personal encounter with German food, beer, and wine. What else? Where should we stay? Happily we don’t have to slum it like I did when I was his age in Europe, but we aren’t made of money either. Modest sleeping quarters are fine by me, because we will spend very little time in our room anyway. Suggestions?
Given that itinerary, what should we see in Venice? If you only had one evening and an entire Sunday in Venice, what would you see? Where would you stay? No Gritti Palace for us, alas. Where would you eat and drink — places that I really wouldn’t want to miss?

I’ve never been to either place. Advice is very welcome. Thank you.

UPDATE: Matt says he would rather spend Wed-Fri in Munich, then fly to Venice on Saturday morning (there’s a cheap flight available) and have most of the weekend in Venice, for a more balanced trip. Please adjust your suggestions accordingly. Thanks.

Today In All Things Benedict Option

Hello all. I am about to head to the doctor’s office for a medical procedure that’s going to knock me flat for the rest of the day. It involves a needle and a spine (my own). I’ll say no more about it, because I’m stuck on the ceiling like a cartoon cat just thinking about it, and it’s hard to type with one hand.

Here’s a wonderful piece from Christine Emba, writing in The Washington Post, calling on liberals and secularists not to be too quick to dismiss The Benedict Option. Excerpt:

True, some of the book’s descriptions of imminent persecution and a fast-approaching End of the West are overwrought, and it’s written to appeal first and foremost to a conservative, religious audience. But the observations and advice offered in “The Benedict Option” shouldn’t be shrugged off by everyone else. In fact, they ought to be thoughtfully considered by anyone worried about creating and preserving a healthy U.S. society, whether they spend Sundays at brunch or in the pews.

Many of the contentedly progressive would like to think that backing away from the strictures of religion has done our country a world of good. In fact, the opposite may be true. For one thing, there’s the matter of simple social cohesion: Increasing secularization can often lead to less tolerance, not more. As Americans on the right and left untether themselves from the standards of organized religion, they often redraw their allegiances more broadly, rallying around identities of race or nationalism while setting aside tempering ideals such as charity and forgiveness. Think of the alt-right, the small, far-right movement that seeks a whites-only state, suspicious of Christianity because of its acceptance of many groups, or violent protesters on the left, more interested in tearing down their opponents than seeking opportunities for reconciliation. Such attitudes lead to a more partisan politics and more vicious public life.

On an individual level, becoming increasingly unmoored from traditions and norms leads more frequently to negative outcomes than positive ones. Witness the sharply growing numbers of middle-age, working-class Americans — those most likely to have lost their connections to the habits and support systems religious engagement tends to build — dying from what researchers are calling “deaths of despair”: enough of them to lower U.S. life expectancy for the first time in decades.

It’s not necessarily true that Christian communities are flourishing in contrast to the rest of society; in fact, it’s a major conceit of the book that most are not. But in the face of the great unmooring, Dreher advocates that those who are serious about their faith act to embrace a sort of “exile in place” and commit to strengthening their families, churches and schools, forming a vibrant counterculture that will preserve Christianity despite a rising tide of secularism. His strategies for doing so would also benefit society at large.

Here’s a piece based on a long and thoroughly enjoyable interview I did with Bill McCormick of The Jesuit Post. Man, I loved talking to that guy. We could have chatted all afternoon. Excerpts:

Dreher often flirts with a narrative of decline. To be sure, in The Benedict Option Dreher contributes to an ongoing conversation about the cracked foundations of contemporary American society. Many progressives will find this sort of pessimism off-putting, and perhaps uncharitable to Christians trying to engage that culture. Indeed, regular readers of Dreher’s blog will know that he does not always suffer fools lightly. But note that Dreher is here rejecting something that most on the Left find no less troubling: the jingoistic optimism of the Religious Right. When I asked Dreher about this, he responded:

“The wonderful thing about Roman Catholicism is that it doesn’t track one-to-one with American political divisions, and for me that was one of the liberating things about being a Catholic.”

Indeed, if nothing else, arguments like Dreher’s should hearten those who lament the dependence of so many Christians upon the GOP, and it ought to wake up those Republican Christians who still don’t see the problem. As a political scientist myself, this liberation from political parties is certainly of interest to me. When I asked him about it, it was evident that Dreher was, too:

It’s good to step outside your ideological puzzle and realize that the Gospel is much bigger than your political commitments, and sometimes being faithful to the Gospel means standing up to your political allies. I have progressive friends who do that on the issue of life, and I have conservative friends who do that on the issue of the environment or economics. But that’s liberating, frankly. When you don’t feel captive to a political party, when you realize that the Church is not the Republican or Democratic party at prayer, that opens up some really amazing possibilities for your own growth as a neighbor and as a citizen and as a Christian.

Listening to Dreher, I felt a hope that arguments like The Benedict Option could free social and religious conservatives from knee-jerk dependence upon the Republican party. As Dreher indicates, the Option ought to challenge such conservatives to be “faithful to the Gospel” in all its breadth and depth, not just the parts that fit party orthodoxy. This is advice that Dreher admits can be hard for even him to take: “We always need reformation and conversion.”

More:

The struggle to serve God rather than himself, Dreher urges, is a daily one. And so it became more clear to me that the Benedict Option alludes not only to St Benedict’s historical role in shaping European culture, but also to the concrete ways in which the saint cultivated holiness in everyday life.

More subtly, Dreher calls us to scrutinize our own commitments to pluralism and dialogue. As I noted above, Dreher describes the Benedict Option as a “radical choice” between Christ and empire. The moral richness of this “radical choice” first hit me when I asked Dreher about whether the Benedict Option meant retreating not only from the “empire” but from the task finding common ground as well. “That criticism is on point,” he said,

but I am less concerned with finding common ground than I am with being faithful. That doesn’t preclude finding common ground with others outside of my faith tradition, and I look for that. But that is not the thing that I am most concerned about.

This left me speechless. Everyone today talks about the need for finding common ground, for embracing pluralism, for resurrecting civil dialogue. What could be more important?

Simply put, for Dreher, living out one’s faith is more important. And while this doesn’t meant that Dreher is against dialogue – he’s not – he certainly is challenging the priority many give it. He led me to wonder: Am I living out my deepest commitments? Do I live out those commitments even as I interact with others of different beliefs? Ultimately, do I think that God is in charge? Dreher’s readers can give more value to pluralism than he does, as I do, and they might also assign more efficacy to grace within that pluralism, as I do, as well. But we can still be grateful for the questions Dreher raises about pluralism. He may also give us incentive to return to some of the leading theorists of Catholic engagement in pluralism, such as Jacques Maritain and John Courtney Murray, for the insights they offer our times.

Throughout our conversation, Dreher impressed me with his humility: he is not seeking to emulate St. Benedict as the grand savior of Western civilization. Benedict’s goal was a modest, if all-encompassing, one: to serve the Lord in daily life. And where the Dreher of the Crunchy Cons wanted to rescue Western civilization from itself, the Dreher of the Benedict Option has a Benedictine modesty, too:

I was really struck by how St. Benedict did not set out to save Western civilization, to shore up the empire that has fallen. All [the early Benedictines] set out to do was to establish what St. Benedict calls in his Rule a “school for the service of the Lord.” All they wanted to do is learn how we can live faithfully in community in the time and place and with the challenges we have been given. And by doing that work faithfully, seeking nothing but the face of Christ, and ordering everything else to that quest, they ended up spreading throughout Europe, evangelizing European peoples, teaching them how to do practice things like agriculture, things that had been forgotten, and preserving within those monasteries the writings of the Church fathers… Each monastery was like an ark, and, without really knowing what they were doing, they prepared Europe for the rebirth of civilization.

That an ark was Dreher’s guiding image remained with me: while an ark is needed in the fearful times of a deluge, the ark’s presence evokes the hope of safety from the flood. Just so, the Benedict Option is not about fear for Dreher, even though it does arise from fears about American society. Fundamentally, the Benedict Option is about hope: not in America, not in oneself, but in God. When I asked Dreher what he learned from the process of writing the book, he said : “I learned that we don’t have to win the victory in this lifetime, and it can’t be won in this lifetime. All we have to do is to do the very best we can where we are and let God do the rest.”

Read the whole thing.

There are more things I could blog about, but it’s time to go meet my doom. It was nice knowing y’all. By the way, The Benedict Option is still selling well. I really do hope that it starts a bunch of new and important conversations in this country. While it is aimed at my fellow religious conservatives, I hope those outside the bounds of religious conservatism will find some value in the book. As Patrick Gilger, SJ, wrote in his critical-but-appreciative review in America:

Nevertheless, I take Dreher’s book to be doing the church a genuine and needed service. To the extent that his work reminds us that Christianity is a way of living together in the truth—reminds us that today binding is perhaps more necessary than ever—our response ought to be not dissatisfaction but gratitude.

Finding, then, in the Benedict Option a reminder of the grace of having been bound to a spouse, a family or a church, Dreher may become an ally rather than another rival to scapegoat. And Dreher, being reminded that there are more ways than Benedict’s to bind, may too discover that he has allies in unexpected places.

After all, it was none other than the co-founder of the Catholic Worker, that holy fool Frenchman Peter Maurin, who at midcentury wrote:

And we are now

in the age of chaos.

In an age of chaos

people look

for a new order.

Because people are becoming aware

of this lack of order

they would like to be able

to create order

out of chaos.

The time

to create order

out of chaos

is now.

The germ of the present

was in the past

and the germ of the future

is in the present.

The thing to do

is to give up old tricks

and start to play new tricks…

The thing to do right now

is to create a new society

within the shell of the old

with the philosophy of the new.

which is not a new philosophy

but a very old philosophy.

a philosophy so old

that it looks like new.

 

Russian Trads And Western Sympathizers

A couple of weeks ago, Sohrab Ahmari identified me as a Putinist. This came as a shock to me, as I have written critically of the Russian president, of whom I am not an admirer in most, but not all, respects. But that’s just it. Here’s Ahmari:

For the author and American Conservative journalist Rod Dreher, the redemptive promise of Putin is a constant theme. In December, Mr. Dreher wrote of meeting two young Catholics in Italy who viewed Mr. Putin favorably, as a “strong leader who embraces his country’s Christian religious heritage, and seeks to defend it and its teachings, especially against cultural liberals whose views on sex and gender are destroying the traditional family.” Mr. Dreher added: “And you know what? I agreed with them, broadly.” He carved out some of his reservations about the Putinist project but then concluded: “One doesn’t have to believe that Putin is an angel in order to respect some of what he does, and even to be grateful for it.”

No thanks. Even if you, like me, concur in the underlying diagnosis—that the West has become unmoored from its Judeo-Christian foundations, that liberalism has gone too far in eroding traditional authority and moral precepts—the Putin Option is no cure. And it entails hazards that could prove ruinous to the cause of reversing the West’s spiritual fortunes.

A “constant theme”? Really? Ahmari must not read this blog. I stand by what I said in that piece from 2015 that Ahmari quotes. I do respect some of what Putin does, and am grateful for it. That is not the same thing as supporting or otherwise endorsing Putin, whose relationship with the Russian Orthodox Church is only one of the many things about his government that trouble me. But I said what I said back then in part because so many of my fellow Americans are so reflexively anti-Putin, and anti-Russian, that they can’t see why so many Russians like him, and that he is right about some things — some important things, and we religious and social conservatives in the West ought to pay attention. Ahmari’s viewpoint appears to come down to “if you don’t hate Putin without reservation, then you are a Putin apologist.” This is absurd.

What Ahmari doesn’t seem to grasp is that Russia, and Russian Orthodoxy, are more than just the person and government of Vladimir Putin — and that they have something important to offer to Christians in the West struggling to find our footing in the post-Christian order. Writing in The Atlantic, Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins and Brittany Pheiffer Noble explore the growing ties between Russian and Western religious conservatives and traditionalists. Excerpts:

But even as Bannon and various religious leaders seek to pit the values of Christianity against those of Islam, there is also an internal competition to decide who gets to define Christian traditionalism. Two of the main players in this competition, American Christian traditionalists—including conservative Catholics like Bannon as well as evangelicals like Franklin Graham—and Russian Orthodox, are united in their desire to save Christendom from the perceived threat of radical Islam. But buried underneath that superficial agreement is a complex disagreement as to what Christendom even means.

Well, for the record, I do see resurgent Islam within Europe to be a civilizational threat there, but I think those who see Islam as the greatest threat to Christianity today are missing the fact that Western-style individualism, consumerism, and hedonism are far more toxic to Christianity. But let’s continue with this long passage from the Atlantic piece, indicating that this story is a lot more complicated than Ahmari seems to understand:

Yet Bannon suggested that Putin is not really interested in conservatism but in changing Western perceptions of Russia, and for one main purpose: “At the end of the day, I think that Putin and his cronies are really a kleptocracy, that are really an imperialist power that want to expand.” Putin, according to Bannon, must be viewed with a great deal of suspicion. Bannon seems to think that conservative groups in the United States, like those associated with the anti-gay World Congress of Families, are being hoodwinked by Putin on these very grounds.

In addition to his suspicions about Putin himself, Bannon also highlights differences between Judeo-Christian traditionalism and the thinking of Alexander Dugin, who he (hyperbolically) credits as being the intellectual mastermind of the traditionalist movement in Russia. In contrast to mainline American social conservatives, Dugin sees the anti-globalism and anti-Americanism of certain expressions of Islam as having much in common with his own distinctive brand of traditionalism. In fact, Dugin views conservative American evangelicalism as an aberration from historical Christianity, and a cipher for neoliberal capitalism.

In contrast to Bannon’s realpolitik, Sergei Lavrov, the Russian minister of foreign affairs, has called for a greater long-term cooperation with the West—for a “partnership of civilizations” to combat modern geopolitical problems, especially ISIS. In his words, “We believe that universal human solidarity must have a moral basis resting on traditional values which are essentially common for all of the world’s leading religions. I would like to draw your attention to the joint statement made by Patriarch Kirill of Moscow and All Russia and Pope Francis, in which they reiterated their support for the family as a natural center of life for individuals and society.” The same values that motivate Russia’s foreign policy (especially its role in the Middle East) are, to Lavrov, the bedrock of the Christian civilization represented by the Patriarch and the pope.

More:

Meanwhile, the major moral actor in Russia—the Russian Orthodox Church (ROC)—has worked hard to influence “pro-family” legislation in the state. Family values are more than just principles in Russia; they’re also a cornerstone of efforts to repopulate a nation after the collapse of the Soviet Union led to plummeting birthrates and soaring emigration. The government enacted a variety of social plans to counter its demographic freefall, and in 2016 Russia boasted a 1.8 percent fertility rate, higher than all but a few countries in the EU. While the government’s project to grow its population has been framed in vaguely patriotic terms, for conservative groups and the Orthodox Church, low fertility rates are linked with a larger collapse of the nuclear family and, in turn, of society—a symptom of a problem of Western decadence. Russia as a nation has adopted the Orthodox Church’s challenge to Western progressivism, and the message is resonating with American conservatives like Franklin Graham.

Here is where the ROC and ultra-conservative Russians have found allies in the West, and in particular among evangelicals: In a global fight for traditional families, it falls to them to promote heterosexual marriage, childbearing, and adoption as part of an overarching defense of “civilization.” Masha Gessen recently wrote about how the World Council of Families has found an eager audience in the post-Soviet world (namely Russia and the Republic of Georgia), where wealthy conservatives have joined forces to promote the traditional family and to slow or repeal pro-LGBT legislation. The scholar Kristina Stoeckl has charted how the ROC has become involved in issues of religious freedom in the EU. These Russian-led efforts, Stoeckl noted, are not unlike other international groups promoting a clear set of values and trying to enact corresponding legislation; the difference here is that we’re seeing an emergence of Christian traditionalist, rather than progressive, global coalitions.

Yes, exactly. Why shouldn’t Christian traditionalists unite to work on issues of common concern? Since the publication of The Benedict Option a couple of weeks ago, I’ve had e-mails from sympathetic Catholics in various European countries. The conditions they face in their own societies are not precisely the ones American believers face, but they share the general outlook of the book, and are eager to work together when we can — even if, for now, that’s just praying for each other. If we can help each other beyond simply praying for each other, then let’s do it. Traditionalist Christians in the US at times have more in common with fellow traditionalists overseas than we do with our American co-religionists who are satisfied with being the dwindling religious auxiliary of secular, technocratic liberalism, in both its Republican and Democratic versions.

One more excerpt:

Russian conservatives, led by the Orthodox Church, frame their need for moral conservatism and family values as a different type of freedom. Russian moral leaders insist that theirs is a freedom of association, the freedom to adhere to tradition rather than to the “totalitarian freedom” of the capitalist, pluralist West. In the words of Bishop Hilarion Alfeyev, the West offers “freedom from moral principles, from common human values, from responsibility for one’s actions. We see how this freedom is destructive and aggressive. Instead of respect for the feelings of other people, it preaches an all-is-permitted attitude.”

Alfeyev has framed this battle as one to be fought by an alliance of conservative Christians, ones who can no longer count on their liberal co-religionists to stand on the right side of history. Theirs is a battle for the very heart of Western civilization. And when it comes to social values, the ROC now has the state on its side.

Can America say the same? Bannon represents his own brand of conservative Catholicism in the White House, but can American evangelicals count on Donald Trump to represent their concerns or do they need to look beyond the state for institutions of moral traditionalism? And if American evangelicals and conservative Russian Orthodox believers join forces, will they be able to overcome the reality that each of their creeds sees the other as heretical?

I agree with Metropolitan Hilarion, just as I agree with the Polish Catholic philosopher Ryszard Legutko, whose book The Demon In Democracy is a must-read (you can get a sense of his argument by reading the posts I did about him and his book.) That does not mean I endorse the presidency of Vladimir Putin, nor does it mean that I have to, any more than I have to endorse Trump’s presidency to say that he’s right about some things.

As to whether or not rival Christianities can work together to preserve our common heritage, let me offer a piece I wrote in the Wall Street Journal back in 2001, when some Orthodox monks were denouncing Pope John Paul II’s visit to Athens. Excerpt:

It must be said that not all Orthodox feel as the Greeks do. The ecumenical patriarch in Istanbul welcomed the papal visit; and the Syrian Orthodox, who share a relatively close relationship with Syrian Catholics, were much more hospitable. Still, as a Roman Catholic admirer of Orthodoxy, I was saddened by the Greek hostility. To my great relief, a (non-Greek) Orthodox priest friend shared my indignation. “John Paul II is the single person most responsible for the defeat of atheistic communism, and history will be very kind to him,” he said. “Calling for him to be cursed is just embarrassing.” My friend went on to explain, though, that Americans cannot grasp the way the Crusader sack of Constantinople in 1204 shaped the Greek Orthodox soul. True, the Crusaders behaved like barbarians; and no Roman Catholic today would defend them. But eight centuries is a long time to hold a grudge. And it’s not like the Orthodox have clean hands. The sack was preceded in 1182 by a massacre of Western Christians in that city. A cardinal was beheaded, and 4,000 Western Christians were sold into slavery.

Does the pope ask the latter-day Orthodox to apologize? Of course not. Nor does he ask the Russian Orthodox hierarchy to apologize for collaborating with the Soviets to steal Ukrainian Catholic churches six decades ago. Unlike his Orthodox counterparts, this pontiff lives in the real world. He understands that if Christianity is to survive, much less thrive, in the third millennium, believers cannot afford quarrels over past grievances. There are deep theological divisions between East and West, and any ecumenism that pretends otherwise is false. But isn’t working more closely to combat the functional nihilism that accompanies the spread of consumerist values a more pressing concern than fussing over the fate of the Filioque clause? The pope knows that the key question in the era of post modernism and globalization is not what brand of Christianity the world will follow; it is whether the world will follow Christianity at all.

I wrote that as a believing Catholic. Today I am a believing Orthodox Christian. But I stand by it, in the main, though happily, it would not have to be written today. The current leadership of the Russian church is more aware of the historical situation, and more willing to work with friendly and sympathetic elements in the Western churches.

We are in an unprecedented historical and geopolitical situation regarding Christianity. It is time for new ways of thinking. Old enemies may become new allies. We should not fear the conversation. As someone who was a strongly believing Roman Catholic, and who now is a strongly believing Orthodox (in the Russian tradition), I have seen first hand, from the inside, the strengths and the weaknesses of both churches, and what each has to offer the other, and to learn from the other. Pope St. John Paul II famously called on the church to “breathe with her two lungs” — East and West. This need not mean that Orthodox, Catholics, and Protestants give up our doctrinal and ecclesiological claims, or water them down one bit. It does mean that we should work together to rediscover spiritual friendship, and to collaborate on practical concerns, such as strengthening the traditional family, which has been under sustained assault in both the East and the West for a very long time.

I’m reading a really interesting book right now, Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow, by the historian Yuval Noah Hariri. I find myself cheering it and arguing with it on every page (and I’ll be blogging about it when I’m done). I think this formulation from the book is brilliant:

[I]n fact, modernity is a surprisingly simple deal. The entire contract can be summarised in a single phrase: humans agree to give up meaning in exchange for power.

 If we traditional Christians cannot come together to stand against this, we’re doomed.

Let us approach each other with eyes wide open, but please, let us approach each other.

Steve Bannon & Chris Arnade

From Robert Draper’s NYT Magazine story on Trump’s legislative agenda:

Up to this point, Ryan had epitomized to Bannon everything that was wrong with the Republican Party. Discussing the two parties’ shortcomings, Bannon later told me, “What’s that Dostoyevsky line: Happy families are all the same, but unhappy families are unhappy in their own unique ways?” (He meant Tolstoy.) “I think the Democrats are fundamentally afflicted with the inability to discuss and have an adult conversation about economics and jobs, because they’re too consumed by identity politics. And then the Republicans, it’s all this theoretical Cato Institute, Austrian economics, limited government — which just doesn’t have any depth to it. They’re not living in the real world.”

Bannon’s not wrong, you know. More:

As [Bannon] would later tell me: “The working class, and in particular the lower middle class, understands something that’s so obvious — which is that they’ve basically underwritten the rise of China. Their jobs, their raises, their retirement accounts have all fueled the private equity and venture capital that built China. Because China’s really built on investments and exports, right? People are smart enough to know that they’re getting played by both political parties. The two may be different on social issues, but when it comes to fundamental economics, they’re both the same. That’s why the American working class is interested in trade. It’s linked to their lives.”

Along those lines, check out these tweets from today by Chris Arnade, whose Twitter account you really should be following:

 

1. Dems to white working class: “You have structural advantage we will remove, your jobs are obsolete, & your lifestyle icky.” Vote for us!

— Chris Arnade (@Chris_arnade) March 26, 2017

2. When they don’t vote for Democrats. “They are voting against their self-interest. & I have no sympathy for them.”

What can we do???????

— Chris Arnade (@Chris_arnade) March 26, 2017

And then, a tweetstorm:

1. The Democrats are not the party of the working class, but rather the party that “isn’t as awful to workers as the GOP.” pic.twitter.com/qaN72So9ng

— Chris Arnade (@Chris_arnade) March 26, 2017

2. Rather than dismantle huge influence of Wall Street, they have joined GOP & embraced it (& been embraced by it)https://t.co/g37i2wvAoI

— Chris Arnade (@Chris_arnade) March 26, 2017

3. Rather than end the outsourcing of jobs to whatever place is desperate enough to work for crap, they shrug, “Everyone likes cheap iPods.” pic.twitter.com/Fjs9IHGGqn

— Chris Arnade (@Chris_arnade) March 26, 2017

4. Rather than dismantle monopolies that cluster wealth, they weave a neoliberal tale about the goodness of marketshttps://t.co/ul8P9xPtA9

— Chris Arnade (@Chris_arnade) March 26, 2017

5. They got GOP envy, becoming market acolytes who viewed labor as a cost. The result? Inequality ballooned & incomes for most stagnated pic.twitter.com/OaivNiazX3

— Chris Arnade (@Chris_arnade) March 26, 2017

5. They got GOP envy, becoming market acolytes who viewed labor as a cost. The result? Inequality ballooned & incomes for most stagnated pic.twitter.com/OaivNiazX3

— Chris Arnade (@Chris_arnade) March 26, 2017

7. They live in exclusive/segregated hoods in certain cities, or clustered next to elite schools/companies far away from workers & industry pic.twitter.com/ycXtqKOp8Z

— Chris Arnade (@Chris_arnade) March 26, 2017

8. More & more detached from workers — in policy, wealth, & in person — the Democrats went with a “They got no other choice!” strategy. pic.twitter.com/OQAVaIABzQ

— Chris Arnade (@Chris_arnade) March 26, 2017

9. And it kinda worked. They continued getting working class votes because, “Dems aint as far up the ass of shareholders as the GOP!” pic.twitter.com/ytTDi8Hp7J

— Chris Arnade (@Chris_arnade) March 26, 2017

10. Their other pitch? We ain’t racist! Indeed! Their commitment to ending racial/gender imbalances is noble/admirable (& why I vote Dem!) pic.twitter.com/rAGYY87UZd

— Chris Arnade (@Chris_arnade) March 26, 2017

11. Yet they also use it to hide & paper over their economic & cultural elitism. (Look! Working class women & minorities like us!) pic.twitter.com/ECn2rQEAFi

— Chris Arnade (@Chris_arnade) March 26, 2017

12. And to disingenuously paint anyone who doesn’t vote for them, or who questions their views, as racist or dumb. pic.twitter.com/MqLleGJfvQ

— Chris Arnade (@Chris_arnade) March 26, 2017

13. This has all left many workers dangling by thinner & thinner thread, where everything/everyone can be seen as threat to cut the thread pic.twitter.com/BHDDJIb79h

— Chris Arnade (@Chris_arnade) March 26, 2017

14. And when, after decades of dangling & worrying, many working class voters finally turned on the Democrats. pic.twitter.com/1StDgjY2rM

— Chris Arnade (@Chris_arnade) March 26, 2017

15. Did the Democrats blame themselves for selling the workers interest out? Nope. It was the workers’ fault for being dumb. Or racist. pic.twitter.com/zynDSVn6GF

— Chris Arnade (@Chris_arnade) March 26, 2017

16. Or it was the voters’ fault for not understanding their own self interest (a stunningly arrogant notion). So why bother with sympathy pic.twitter.com/3EBkDpYbDZ

— Chris Arnade (@Chris_arnade) March 26, 2017

17. That reaction completes the cycle of detachment. Treat voters like captive fools, and when they finally turn on you, call them fools. pic.twitter.com/YUI9ajgbmZ

— Chris Arnade (@Chris_arnade) March 26, 2017

18. And pre end with thishttps://t.co/faW46gHCJE

— Chris Arnade (@Chris_arnade) March 26, 2017

19. And this https://t.co/1Q8p95AHil

— Chris Arnade (@Chris_arnade) March 26, 2017

20. And really end with this. pic.twitter.com/jkSf5pAfx0

— Chris Arnade (@Chris_arnade) March 26, 2017

Read more and follow @chrisarnade here.

A Republican version of this would not be hard to come up with. I bet Steve Bannon  could come up with a Hurricane Katrina of a tweetstorm laying into the GOP like Chris Arnade lays into his own party here.

A Muslim Reads The Benedict Option

Today I received this lovely letter from reader Kamran Hashim, a Muslim, who gives me permission to share it with you:

I went to Manhattan College in the Bronx, NY.  It is a Catholic college run by the Christian Brothers of the Order of De LaSalle.  All students are required to take three classes on religion during their four years of undergrad studies in order to graduate.  It just so happened that my first religion class was also the first class on my first day as a freshman.  It was taught by Brother Robert Berger (who is still a good friend two decades later).  And he began all his classes (as I came to learn over the years) with a simple prayer – “Let us remember that we are in the presence of God”.  When I look back on my awesome college experience, i am struck by how the most important truth I learned during that time was communicated to me in that prayer in the opening moments of my fist class at the school.

The BenOp, for me, is a way for Christians to actualize this truth…this awareness of God’s active presence in our lives, and to make it inform everything they do…how they worship, how they love, how they work, their mercy, kindness, honesty, how they control anger and other temptations, how they are resilient, etc. It is not about retreating to mountaintops but it is about building communities that can enable individuals to mutually encourage and reinforce this God awareness in their lives.

The BenOp puts God at the center of a christian’s universe again.  God stops being a means to an end like political victories or commercial success, and instead resumes being the End that Christians should strive for.  The BenOp also forces hard choices around how to live in this world.  It is not about disengaging from it but it definitely lays down markers for what’s acceptable and what’s not.  It moves away from thinking of Christian faith as some kind of a la carte menu (something for everyone here), and instead challenges and asks Christians to commit fully to their faith and its demands no matter how they diverge from social and commercial norms.

I also like how the BenOp essentially gives primacy to the spirit and soul over the intellect.  In our culture today, we obscenely fetishize innovation…the ability to use the intellect to solve problems and satisfy needs. We valorize those we think are innovative, disruptive, builders of stuff that is new and different.  The BenOp is a recognition that an innovation focused intellect is just an endless spinning down an unending rabbit hole..that the spirit is more important, and it can be nourished, strengthened, and made beautiful by rediscovering and dedicating oneself to the timeless and essential truths that God has provided us with through the Faith He has revealed to His creation.

The Quran tells us that God does not change the condition of a people for the better till they first change themselves.  The BenOp is about trying to get Christians to do the latter.

I wish you best of luck and success with the book.

Kamran

How is it that my Muslim brother Kamran understands The Benedict Option better than some Christian reviewers?

How is it that I suspect I have more in common with him on the subject of holiness and faithful living than with a lot of Americans who call themselves Christian but who seem to be well assimilated to the secular, consumerist order?

Whatever the answers, I’m so grateful to him for this letter, and for the possibilities it signals of religious collaboration across lines of faith.

The Ben Op’s Ordinary Christian Virtues

Now on sale

I apologize for putting another Ben Op post up today, but there were two more pieces I wanted to draw to your attention, and I don’t want to let the opportunity pass. I’m not going to be blogging much on Monday, because I’m going to have THE DOCTOR PLUNGE A NEEDLE INTO MY NECK AND INJECT STEROIDS INTO THE ANGRY, BULGING DISCS OF MY SPINAL COLUMN a medical procedure related to the automobile mishap I had last December, and I am advised that it will require sedation — the kind that doesn’t come in a cocktail glass. So there’s that.

First, take a look at this excellent précis by Brad Littlejohn: “The Benedict Option In 43 Propositions”.  Here’s his bullet-point summary of one chapter, for example:

Church

Learn the riches of your theological tradition, rediscover your past (102-5)

Liturgical worship (105-13)

Refocuses on God speaking to us, rather than us expressing ourselves
Involvement of the body as well as spirit
A rhythm that disciplines our desires

Recover fasting (114-15)

Recover church discipline (116-17)

Evangelize with goodness and beauty (117-19)

The whole thing is really good, but I must protest that Littlejohn overlooked the chapters advocating white male privilege, disregarding the non-wealthy, and white supremacy. (/snark)

Littlejohn’s full review of the book is here. It’s not entirely favorable, but his criticism is really thoughtful, and I appreciate it.

In the same way, I love Jesuit Father Paddy Gilger’s review in America. He has some serious disagreements with The Benedict Option, but boy, is this piece ever a model of thoughtful critical engagement with the book. It begins:

Whether you come to it from the left or the right, Rod Dreher’s long-awaited The Benedict Option is a book that will not satisfy. Which is exactly why you should read it.

Gilger describes the book’s accounting for our cultural crisis, and its proposal for countering it, and writes:

And it is from this paired diagnosis and prescription that all of the conclusions in this problematic, beautiful, infuriating, necessary book flow.

It ought to come as no surprise that the book fails to satisfy. The Benedict Option is, after all, a rejection the both liberal and conservative political projects; the former because it rejects the values of the left, the latter because it believes the right has already been defeated.

Gilger then lists his main objections to the book. I won’t go into them here, because they are familiar to readers of most previous reviews (I don’t say that dismissively, not at all). I was pleasantly surprised by the good things that such a strong critic of The Benedict Option had to say about it. Look:

This may seem like a long list—and it is. But nothing is gained by settling only for critique. To do so means refusing to learn from the large swaths of what Dreher gets right. Because what Dreher gets right is just as important—perhaps even more important—as where he misses the mark.

The signal gift in Dreher’s work, the one our legitimate dissatisfactions may allow us to too-quickly overlook, is his steady insistence that in order to be Christians today—to bear the name of Christ in truth as well as in title—we must relearn two things: practices and disciplines. That is, Dreher is right in his persistent repetition that, when it comes to the question of how we build Christian persons, how we become Christians in habit as well as in mind, “what we think does not matter as much as what we do—and how faithfully we do it.”

He also praises the Ben Op’s focus on Christian community:

I need a community to sustain me in my effort to practice being a Christian. As do we all. When looked at in this light, the Benedict Option begins to look less like a reactionary withdrawal from pluralist societies than a recommitment to a local politics of subsidiarity.

It is by looking again at our human need for such small communities of practice that Dreher’s admittedly controversial take on individual and communal disciplines comes more clearly into focus. The heart of his argument is that there are times when communal goods must trump individual freedoms. And this is because churches, argues Dreher, fall apart when they become simply another “loosely bound assembly of individuals committed to finding their own ‘truth.’”

And this is fantastic:

The conflict between individual freedom and the common good—between loosing and binding—is what lies at the heart of what is most necessary and most problematic about the Benedict Option. This is because, on the one hand, the trumping of individual freedoms by a common way of life always threatens to turn into autocracy and domination. But, on the other hand, we are all too aware that, in the liquid modernity in which we find ourselves, the trumping of the common good by individual freedom always threatens to destroy community.

This is what accounts for the strange mixture of attraction and repulsion that so many of us—liberal individualists that we are—feel when we read about the Benedict Option. We are attracted to it, and our attraction resonates because of how deeply we want community, how desperately we want to be reassured that the world makes sense and that our lives have a place within it. But the repulsion is there as well, and not only because, like the freedom-addicts we are, we are so hooked on individuality. The repulsion is there because there is a great goodness that we have found in the recognition that each of us is—really, in all actuality—a unique facet of the immortal diamond, the one who shines in ten thousand places, lovely in limbs and lovely in eyes not his.

This is why The Benedict Option fails to satisfy. Not because Dreher has failed, but because he has succeeded in showing us our own failure to hold these two constitutive goods in loving tension. He is right to say that we “have been loosed but we do not know how to bind.” We must relearn how. And if you choose to read Dreher’s book, the exact shape of your dissatisfaction with it will, I venture to guess, correspond to the extent that you have experienced God as a loosing or as a binding force in your own life.

Read the whole thing. I want to thank Father Gilger profoundly for his review. It taught me something about my own book. And it taught me something else too. It is far too easy to allow ourselves to be bound by unrealistically rigid left-right categories. I’m often guilty of this. Because so much of the criticism of this book coming from the left has struck me as unfair, I have slipped into a defensive reflex against jabs coming from the left. When I found out that America, the Jesuit journal, was going to review the book, I … well, I don’t know what I expected, but it was nothing good.

In fact, as you will have seen, it was a critical review, but also a laudatory one in many ways, and in every respect a review that delighted me for its insight and its fairness. It brought to mind a question a Catholic academic asked me at the Ciceronian Society dinner last night. He asked if I thought Pope Francis’s calls on Christians to engage the world fit with the Benedict Option. I told him I was divided on that. I absolutely think we have to engage, but we cannot give the world what we don’t have. My problem with Francis in this regard is that he seems to downplay or disregard orthodoxy, catechesis, and formation. Engagement without orthodoxy and formation in Catholic doctrine and discipline is hard to distinguish from mere social work.

Later, though, I reflected on how much I had liked Francis’s encyclical Laudato si, the pope’s teaching on ecological concern, and how much I found in it that resonated with my own convictions, previously as a Roman Catholic, and presently as an Eastern Orthodox. I reflected that even as I share the deep concern of my Catholic friends about the doctrinal confusion caused by this papacy, I should be careful not to let that overlook those areas of agreement I have with Francis — areas in which the followers of Francis might be allies. As Father Gilger wrote in his review:

Nevertheless, I take Dreher’s book to be doing the church a genuine and needed service. To the extent that his work reminds us that Christianity is a way of living together in the truth—reminds us that today binding is perhaps more necessary than ever—our response ought to be not dissatisfaction but gratitude.

Finding, then, in the Benedict Option a reminder of the grace of having been bound to a spouse, a family or a church, Dreher may become an ally rather than another rival to scapegoat. And Dreher, being reminded that there are more ways than Benedict’s to bind, may too discover that he has allies in unexpected places.

Well said. Thank you, Father Gilger. Please read his entire review all the way to the end, to read the poem from Catholic Worker co-founder Peter Maurin, which tells the truth.

 

The Ben Op: ‘No Non-Rich, Non-Whites Need Apply’? Really?

Michelle D. Milliman/Shutterstock

There are way too many reviews of The Benedict Option for me to respond to, but as Jacob Lupfer’s came in the form of a widely distributed column released on Religion News Service, I feel I have to say something about its mischaracterization (at this point, strange ones) of the book and its message.

It begins:

To hear Rod Dreher tell it, Christians are a moment away from being systematically eliminated from American society.

Oh, come on. This is not what the book says at all. It says that traditionalist Christians face a future of declining political and cultural influence, and increasing marginalization in public life (including existential threats to our institutions), as well as — more importantly — a collapse in belief owing in large part to the inner weakness of the churches. This is so clear from the book, to any intelligent reader (as Lupfer no doubt is), that I wonder if he read the book at all.

More:

Dreher, a thoughtful conservative writer, believes the church must turn inward to form communities, teach their children, and resist a culture co-opted by radical LGBT activists.

That’s truthy, but it’s a meaningful distortion to say that radical LGBT activists are at fault here. As I repeatedly say — and have been saying for the past decade — if gay marriage didn’t exist, we would still need the Benedict Option. Countering the power of Moralistic Therapeutic Deism within American Christian life is one of the pillars of the Ben Op argument, as is clear in the book. That threat to Christianity — which I consider to be the greatest one — has nothing to do with radical LGBT activists. Lupfer’s is a selective reading, if it is a reading at all.

More:

In terms of intellectual and cultural achievement, we are living through something of a golden age for religious conservatives contributing meaningfully to politics and even arts and letters.

Conservative religionists bolster our social fabric with relatively larger families, strong communities, civic engagement, charitable giving and volunteerism. It would be better for everyone if they became less insular — not more so.

I’d love to see evidence of this golden age. I’d love to see evidence of this celebration of conservative religionists and their contributions to American public life. And I’d love to see evidence that the Benedict Option calls for conservative Christians to abandon civic engagement, charitable giving, and volunteerism. You won’t find it in The Benedict Option. In fact, the politics chapter (to name only one part of the book) calls on conservative Christians to become more involved in building up local community. The point of the project — again, as you can plainly read in the book — is not withdrawal into insularity, but for partial withdrawal for the sake of strengthening individuals and church communities, so that they can be more faithfully present within the world, according to their calling. 

I see our situation as like Jeremiah 29: called by God to be faithfully present here in Babylon. But to be faithfully present means being like Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, the three Hebrew captives who served King Nebuchadnezzar as state officials, but who refused to bow down before an idol, and were thrown into the furnace for their impiety towards Babylon’s gods. They miraculously survived (the story is told in the Book of Daniel). The Benedict Option is about forming Christians who have the faith and courage of those three Hebrew men, when put to the test.

More Lupfer:

I’m so committed to keeping conservative believers in our schools, neighborhoods, governments and institutions that I propose making Dreher’s Benedict Option unnecessary.

For starters, I’m willing to grant traditionalists liberty to live in accordance with their beliefs about sexuality. We have laws to protect and promote social equality. There is no need to punish decent people who disagree with sexual equality and libertarianism in good faith.

I also don’t think their colleges necessarily deserve to have their accreditation revoked. Traditionalists should not fear job loss and social ostracism for holding the same beliefs that most Americans held until 15 minutes ago.

In short, I’m willing to grant them their religious views — which are really not novel or radical — in the name of old-fashioned liberal tolerance.

Fantastic! Would that Jacob Lupfer were running public policy, corporate H.R. departments, and in charge of jurisprudence. That’s not happening. I would invite Lupfer to talk to conservative Christian college presidents, deans, and faculty. I would invite him to talk to law professors who study this stuff. I would invite him to talk to ordinary conservative Christians working in mainstream academia or corporate America, and see if they trust that Lupferism is going to carry the day. Fortunately, it appears that we won’t have to worry about Jeff Sessions’s Justice Department going after religious institutions that don’t conform to the new secular religion — but that should scarcely comfort conservative Christians. See if this Republican-led Congress passes religious liberty legislation to shield these dissenting institutions and believers. See if Ivanka’s father signs it.

Seriously, it is good to know that Jacob Lupfer, who is not a man of the Right, is so broad-minded and tolerant. And he is not faking it, either; he has written before about the need for fairness to traditional Christians. But I gotta ask: where are the other Jacob Lupfers? Where are the liberals and centrists who don’t share the beliefs of conservative religionists who are willing to stand up for our right to be “wrong”. We could use those allies, especially on elite college campuses, where gutless administrators allow berserker progressives to run roughshod over dissenters.

Lupfer again:

Dreher thinks liberals who accommodate conservative believers for a season will ultimately be forced to turn the Christians over to government officials to be arrested or worse.

Wait … what?! All I can figure is that this is a reference to my sarcastic line about Rachel Held Evans, in which I said that if the secret police come for the conservative Christians, she would say, “They’re in the basement, officer.” It was a joke making fun of the telling fact that at least some liberal Christians hate conservative Christians and being accepted by the secular mainstream more than they care about religious liberty. There is nothing in The Benedict Option to indicate that I believe a laïcité Gestapo is going to come after conservative Christians and those who shelter them. Lupfer is a sophisticated man. Why on earth would he read what was plainly a sarcastic joke as a serious proclamation of an imminent Robespierran Terror? If he meant to honestly evaluate the book and the proposal, I mean.

I think he gives the game up here:

Perhaps Dreher could become a lay oblate of a Benedictine monastery, periodically retreating to live among the monks and commune with God.

But he doesn’t need to take the rest of upper-middle-class white Christianity with him.

Ah, so this is about race and class spitefulness — as if The Benedict Option were a project of well-to-do white Christians. This is a lazy liberal smear that I’m unfortunately becoming used to. If you read The Benedict Option — as I invite reviewer Jacop Lupfer to do — you will meet people who are not the caricature of Lupfer’s last line. That’s not the Tipi Loschi, the Catholic communal group in Italy, whose membership includes poor and working-class young people who had been in trouble with the law, but who were helped and brought into the community. That’s not the community around St. Jerome, the classical academy in Hyattsville, Maryland, which I feature in the book and which I visited last week (I invite Lupfer to ride the train from DC to Hyattsville and see for himself if these folks are the upper middle class). The folks in that community moved to Hyattsville when it was a decaying inner-ring suburb, bought houses, and contributed to its comeback. From the book:

Living so close to “the imperial city,” as [community leader Chris] Currie calls Washington, means that most of his community members work in the nation’s capital. Their close-knit Catholic neighborhood gives them the nurturing they need to be strong witnesses to the faith in the secular city. “We’re not battening down the hatches, hunkering down, and keeping quiet about our faith,” says Currie. “We don’t do it in a belligerent way, but we are not ashamed of who we are.”

He believes the St. Jerome’s Parish community has been called to be a presence in the greater Washington area. The only way they can resist the pressures of worldliness and secularization is by living near each other and reinforcing their religious identity through life lived in common. Their thick community is a strong model of being in the world but not of it. Striking the balance between being an evangelical presence to the wider community while protecting what makes them distinctly and authentically Christian is difficult—but Currie believes that this is the Gospel’s calling.

“Ultimately I think Christians have to understand that yes, we have to be countercultural, but no, we don’t have to run away from the rest of society,” he says. “We have to be a sign of contradiction to the surrounding society, but at the same time we have to be engaged with that society, while still nurturing our own community so we can fully form our children.”

So much for the “insular” slur. More:

The new St. Jerome Academy made a priority of reaching out to parents and involving them in the life of the school and its classical vision. And the team followed a small-c catholic educational vision, rejecting the idea that classical education was only for highly intentional Catholics.

“This doesn’t mean you accept anybody into the school,” says Currie. “There are some kids who may not be able to profit from a classical education and will disrupt others in their classes. But that number is very small. We’re very diverse and have students from every racial and socioeconomic group. Once parents see the difference it makes in the kids, they’re sold. The way we see it, this education is for people from all walks of life.”

When I visited the school, the kids I saw in the hallway were anything but lily-white. Perhaps its easier for bourgeois critics of The Benedict Option to opine based on their assumptions and prejudices, but it doesn’t have a lot to do with the book or the vision it presents.

Why, exactly, are “upper middle class white people” now a group that it’s acceptable to demonize because of their race and their class? Do their children not have souls and consciences too, souls that need saving and consciences that need forming in a healthy, Christian way? Lupfer’s dissertation is on the role of religious elites in American politics. Surely he understands the importance of elites — even elites — being formed according to authentic Christian teaching, not some fancypants version of the prosperity gospel. If my book were to become a megaseller, and I were to become rich, my children would not need the Benedict Option less; arguably, they would need it more, though for different reasons than the children of the poor and working classes need it.

Besides, the upper middle class can insulate itself largely from the effects of social breakdown. Not so much the poor and working classes, who desperately need the church in their lives. Last night I was at an event here in my town, talking with readers of the book. One man, a Christian college professor, said that in his view, the Benedict Option is especially important for the poor. He talked about how his wife’s previous job was teaching inner-city elementary schoolchildren. The brokenness and need she encountered there was overwhelming. He said that one of his wife’s students worked up the courage one day to ask her what she was wearing on her left hand. “That’s my wedding ring and my engagement ring,” she said.

The little girl had no idea what those things were. None of the kids in the class did. The professor said that Christian communities who take the Benedict Option can and should reach out to the poor, and model for them a life of good Christian order, a life ordered by the love of and obedience to Christ. This is what I observed the Tipi Loschi doing. When I visited, I saw a boy of about 13 working with some of the men on gardening. He was a happy kid who was clearly loved by those dads. I was told that he comes from a badly broken home life, and is poor and fatherless; the men of the community have taken him on as if he were their own, and are making him part of their little Catholic band there in their town. They are showing him what life in Christian community can be like.

Last night, I spoke to another Christian academic, a Catholic grad student who said that he and a number of young orthodox Catholics he knows are prepared to surrender the idea of worldly success for the sake of living in communities where their faith is held in common, and is real. He was one of something like eight siblings raised in New England by a faithful Catholic father who never made more than between $20,000 and $30,000 a year. The student said that they got by, somehow, by being creative and ascetic. You can live decently well if you don’t considered yourself entitled to so many of the things that are part of an American middle class life — that is, if you value other things so much that you are willing to give them up. He has lived that kind of life, and seen its benefits, and wants the same for himself, his young wife, and their family. This is a young man who grew up working class, but faithfully Catholic, and does not aspire to the “American Dream,” but rather to a life of rich Catholic faith and community, even if it means he’s going to have a lot fewer material goods.

“Upper middle class white” my foot. When we lived in Philly, the families in our Christian homeschool co-op included upper middle class whites, yes, but it also included white families and black families that were significantly further down the class scale. So what? We were a community bound by shared Christian faith and commitment to a countercultural form of educating our kids. Again, it’s so much easier for critics to rest in their academic and cultural prejudices than to read the book and see what is right in front of their faces.

But at least Jacob Lupfer did not accuse the Catholic Archbishop of Philadelphia, a Native American, of supporting the Benedict Option conversation because he wants to defend white male privilege. So that’s progress.

I invite you to read the book for yourself and decide what it’s saying, and what it’s not.

UPDATE: A reader writes to tell of a conservative Christian family member who works in a creative field, and who says that if his co-workers knew what he really believed, he would lose his job, and with it, the ability to feed his family. There are details that I obviously can’t share, but I think of this man, and the fear he lives with because of his religious faith, and it makes me angry that so many people — including other Christians — downplay or dismiss the reality of what’s going on.

UPDATE.2: A reader writes:

The reason so many progressive Christians (like Rachel Held Evans) are offended by the Benedict Option is because they object to the marginalization/ moral collapse narrative. What they can’t see, apparently, is how their own doctrine is a symptom of the very moral collapse you’re describing. So of course they can’t see it. It’s like David Foster Wallace’s “This is Water”: they’re swimming in it, and don’t even know it’s there.

UPDATE.3: Janwaar Bibi, who is an atheist, writes on the NC transgender thread:

One of the professional meetings in my research area was supposed to be held in NC but the organizers decided to move the meeting somewhere else to protest NC’s bathroom law. Where has this meeting been moved to? To China, which is famous for its devotion to human rights.

For progressives, boycotting NC is enlightened, boycotting China is racist. The terrifying thing is that my research area is not even in the humanities and social sciences, which have been destroyed by SJWs – it is a hardcore STEM field. Winter is coming.

Nope, nothing to worry about. Only those paranoid Christians bleating again.

UPDATE.4: I forgot to include this link to sociologist George Yancey’s study of progressive Christians, which revealed that they deeply despise conservative Christians. This is why I snarked about Rachel Held Evans (and last year, David Gushee) regarding the secret police.