Rod Dreher's Blog, page 478

Withdrawal For The Sake Of Renewal

Excerpt from my NRO interview with my old friend and former boss Kathryn Jean Lopez:

LOPEZ: Is the Benedict Option really withdrawal, or is it renewal?

DREHER: It’s both. It is withdrawal for the sake of renewal. My book is heavily influenced by a 2004 essay in First Things written by the early-church historian Robert Louis Wilken. He said we in the West were losing our cultural memory of Christianity. Because of this, he said, there is nothing more important for Christians today than the church telling itself its own story, and nurturing its inner life. His point is not that we shouldn’t evangelize, but that we are forgetting what Christianity means. We cannot give the world what we do not have. Therefore, we have to withdraw in meaningful ways for the sake of contemplation and formation — this, so we can truly bring the light of Christ to the world. When I started writing the book, I asked my friend Michael Hanby, a philosopher at Catholic University of America, for his advice. He said, “Ask yourself: ‘What would Karol Wojtyla do?’” I didn’t understand what he was getting at. He said that when the Nazis invaded Poland, they sought to crush the Polish nation by erasing its memory of what it meant to be Polish, and what it meant to be Catholic. The future Pope St. John Paul II and his circle realized that the most important form of resistance they could offer was to keep that cultural memory alive. They wrote and performed plays about the faith, and about patriotism. They did this under fear of death. If the Gestapo had found them, they would have imprisoned them all, and maybe killed them. But culture was that important to the survival of the nation, and those Poles risked everything to keep the story alive. We don’t face anything that severe, obviously, but as Wilken says, we are losing our cultural memory all the same. The hopeful thing is that the future is not fated. There are things we can do, in our own families, parishes, and schools.

LOPEZ: Can every Christian really be called to be St. Benedict?

DREHER: No, but every Christian is called to be a saint. God had a special historical mission for Benedict of Nursia. I believe God has a mission for each of us, and the standard of holiness is for all of us. As the French Catholic novelist Leon Bloy once wrote, the only true tragedy in life is not to have become a saint. Few of us are called to be monks or nuns, but all of us are called to holiness. St. Benedict and his followers can help us meet that standard in our own vocations. Benedictine spirituality is not for spiritual superheroes. It is very practical, very much geared to everyday life. He is a saint for our time and place, just as he was for the sixth century. I hope that my book helps all Christians — Catholic, Protestant, and Orthodox alike — find their way through the darkness, to Christ.

Here’s something neat: As you know, I’m an Eastern Orthodox Christian. The publisher of The Benedict Option, Sentinel, told me a while ago that they planned to publish the book on March 14. I thanked them for this, and asked them how they knew. “Know what?” they said. “That March 14 is St. Benedict’s feast day on the Orthodox calendar,” I said. They had no idea! It was just a coincidence. Well, I don’t believe in coincidences. I like to think that the saint himself — who is my patron saint, by the way — is praying for this book’s success.

Read the whole thing.

Thanks everybody for your good wishes on today, the launch day for The Benedict Option. Whether you expect to like the book or not, the claims it makes and the arguments it puts forth are crucial to 21st century Christianity in the West. I hope you’ll read it for yourself and make your own decision.

On Not Understanding The Benedict Option

Great, great blog post by Andy Crouch:

1. Social hostility and legal restrictions will undermine the viability of many Christian institutions, and significantly limit individual Christians’ participation in many professions and aspects of public life, in the United States within a generation or so.

Portion of The Benedict Option devoted to this claim: 20%

Portion of journalistic coverage of the book devoted to this claim: 90%

Portion of social media buzz (pro and con) devoted to this claim: 98%

Likelihood of this claim being true: 50%

How much this should cause acute distress for those who believe that Jesus is Lord: 5%

2. Due to a lack of meaningful discipleship and accommodation to various features of secularized modernity and consumer culture, the collapse of Christian belief and practice is likely among members of the dominant culture (and many minority cultures) in the United States within a generation or so.

Portion of The Benedict Option devoted to this claim: 80%

Portion of journalistic coverage devoted to this claim: 10%

Portion of social media buzz (pro and con) devoted to this claim: 2%

Likelihood of this claim being true: 90%

How much this should cause acute distress for those who believe that Jesus is Lord: 100%

Karen Swallow Prior also notes how a lot of people simply don’t grasp the basic claims of The Benedict Option. Excerpts:

The Benedict Option’s vision is not to make nuns and monks of modern Christians. Nor does it propose a bunker (whether literal or figurative) from which to establish merely an updated version of the fundamentalist separatism of yore. Nor is the turn to Benedict a quixotic attempt to recapture a romanticized past.

To the contrary, The Benedict Option calls Christians wherever they live and work to “form a vibrant counterculture” by cultivating practices and communities that reflect the understanding that Christians, who are not citizens of this world, need not “prop up the current order” (18). While the monastery that birthed the Benedict Rule was literal, the monastery invoked in The Benedict Option is metaphorical. It is not a place, but a way.

Dreher explains:

We are only trying to build a Christian way of life that stands as an island of sanctity and stability amid the high tide of liquid modernity. We are not looking to create heaven on earth; we are simply looking for a way to be strong in faith through a time of great testing. (54)

In this part, Karen says something that no review I’ve yet seen says about the book:

The heart of The Benedict Option is the third chapter of the book. Here, after describing the order of St. Benedict and his Rule, Dreher draws from the Rule to identify and adapt principles that we in the church should apply within our modern context:

Order: recognizing and establishing inner order that is in harmony with the natural limits and ultimate reality created by God
Prayer: making communication with God through prayer and scripture the basis of daily life
Work: recognizing that work is not separated from the spiritual life and must glorify God
Asceticism: resisting the materialism, consumerism and hedonism that drive modern culture and inhibit the spiritual life
Stability: putting down deep roots where we live, work and worship
Community: prioritizing fellowship with others over individual interests and freedoms
Hospitality: being as open to the world as is possible without compromising orthodox faith
Balance: practicing the prudence necessary to balance not only right and wrong, but competing goods

The beauty of these principles is that they can be adopted by nearly any Christian individual or community, regardless of denomination, ethnicity, socio-economic status or location. Some, certainly, speak more to those in positions of privilege or power. But it is perhaps the most oppressed among us who demonstrate the transforming power inner order has within the harshest of conditions. These principles not only bring internal order, but knit communities together, as well as create new bonds among those who share them. The rest of the book’s chapters detail how these principles can be applied to various spheres: politics, churches, local communities, educational institutions, workplaces, families and technology.

Read her entire piece. 

As KSP and Andy Crouch say, this is a book that is primarily about shoring up the Christian faith in a time of great testing — and the test will come not so much from persecution of some sort, but from a falling-away from within. Whether you think you will agree with The Benedict Option or not, you need to read it and deal with its actual arguments. There’s a reason why David Brooks, who did not like the book, calls it “the most important religious book of the decade.”

Read it and decide for yourself.

David Brooks On The Benedict Option

Good morning. I was in a car driving from New York City to DC, through snow, slush, and ice. I was supposed to be in Manhattan last night and today, but with the blizzard coming, they ended up hiring a car to drive me to Washington to make doubleplus sure I didn’t miss my Trinity Forum event here on Wednesday night (you can still register here). Got here at 4 am and crashed.[/caption]

Let me draw your attention to a nice piece that my friend David Brooks did on The Benedict Option on today. He calls the book “already the most discussed and most important religious book of the decade.” That’s good. But he did not like the book, which is not a big surprise. [UPDATE: Actually David *did* like the book, as he emphasized to me in a subsequent e-mail. I regret the error of misinterpretation. — RD] I’d like to address his arguments below.

Rod says it’s futile to keep fighting the culture war, because it’s over. Instead believers should follow the model of the sixth-century monk St. Benedict, who set up separate religious communities as the Roman empire collapsed around them.

The heroes of Rod’s book are almost all monks. Christians should withdraw inward to deepen, purify and preserve their faith, he says. They should secede from mainstream culture, pull their children from public school, put down roots in separate communities.

Maybe if I shared Rod’s views on L.G.B.T. issues, I would see the level of threat and darkness he does. But I don’t see it. Over the course of history, American culture has tolerated slavery, sexual brutalism and the genocide of the Native Americans, and now we’re supposed to see 2017 as the year the Dark Ages descended?

But that’s not what my book says! The “Dark Age” is an allusion to the remarks of both Alasdair MacIntyre and Pope Benedict XVI, who likened our own time to the fall of the Roman Empire in the West. Neither one of them was talking about same-sex marriage. They were talking about the spiritual acedia and social fragmentation overtaking the West. Same-sex marriage is a part of the whole, but is by no means the whole. I thought I was pretty clear about that in The Benedict Option. For Christians, as I attempted to say in the book, the potential for persecution is real, but the far greater threat now is the loss of the faith — and that is not something outsiders are doing to us, but that we are doing to ourselves. 

If the church were in better shape, I would still find the loss of traditional marriage and the dissolution of the family (think Charles Murray’s work, and others) to be important. But the weakness of the church at the present moment, which is amply documented in The Benedict Option, is the book’s central concern. Given that weakness, we remain especially vulnerable to various forces in this post-Christian — and at times anti-Christian — culture.

More Brooks:

Rod is pre-emptively surrendering when in fact some practical accommodation is entirely possible. Most Americans are not hellbent on destroying religious institutions. If anything they are spiritually hungry and open to religious conversation. It should be possible to find a workable accommodation between L.G.B.T. rights and religious liberty, especially since Orthodox Jews and Christians aren’t trying to impose their views on others, merely preserve a space for their witness to a transcendent reality.

Well, yes, in the best of all possible worlds, that would be so. But that’s not the world we live in. ACLU lawyers, gay activists, and others have shown no interest in giving religious institutions that don’t kowtow to the new sexual orthodoxy any breathing room. I have no doubt that there are gays and liberals who would be willing to do this, but they aren’t the ones driving this train: the sore winners are. I don’t think Brooks fully grasps the situation these dissenting Christian institutions face. Just yesterday, for example, a Christian college professor named Heather Peterson wrote that she and her colleagues discuss not if they are going to lose their accreditation over LGBT, but when. These conversations are happening all over Christian academia — and that’s just one area. Christians having these conversations know that they cannot depend on LGBT activists, their allies, and the courts to suddenly develop respect for pluralism, and leave them alone. “Most Americans” aren’t “hellbent on destroying religious institutions,” it is true. But it’s simply naive to believe that the ones who are aren’t the determinative factor in our future.

If Andrew Sullivan were running the show here, I wouldn’t worry so much. He’s not, though.

Anyway, let me repeat: the thrust of the book is not about persecution, but about the loss of Christianity. It’s not a book about how to resist Robespierre as much as it is a book about how to keep your kids and your church from turning into Rachel Held Evans, which would be a precursor to losing the faith entirely.

More Brooks:

My big problem with Rod is that he answers secular purism with religious purism. By retreating to neat homogeneous monocultures, most separatists will end up doing what all self-segregationists do, fostering narrowness, prejudice and moral arrogance. They will close off the dynamic creativity of a living faith.

There is a beautiful cohesion to the monastic vocation. But most people are dragged willy-nilly into life — with all its contradictions and complexities. Many who experience faith experience it most vividly within the web of their rival loves — different communities, jobs, dilemmas. They have faith in their faith. It gives them a way of being within the realities of a messy and impure world.

Well, yeah, I expect most of the readers of The Benedict Option will not be heading for the hills, but will instead continue to live, as I do, in the messy world. We are not all called to be monks or nuns. But the research data are crystal-clear: the Christian faith is declining in a couple of measures. For one, among the Millennials — that is to say, in the next generation — the collapse in religious belief is at a level never before measured in the US. As David Voas and Mark Chaves have shown, are now on the same downward slope first traveled by Europe.

For another, as Christian Smith and his colleagues have amply documented, the content of American Christian belief has degraded sharply from any kind of historical Christian orthodoxy, such that those younger adults who profess Christianity in fact hold to a belief system that is only superficially related to the religion of the Bible, as it has been historically understood. These folks may “have faith in their faith,” but that’s not the same thing as having faith in the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, who is also the God of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.

Having faith in faith is the stance of a Moralistic Therapeutic Deist. To be a serious Christian (or Jew, Muslim, etc.) requires more. Much more.

Brooks again:

The right response to the moment is not the Benedict Option, it is Orthodox Pluralism. It is to surrender to some orthodoxy that will overthrow the superficial obsessions of the self and put one’s life in contact with a transcendent ideal. But it is also to reject the notion that that ideal can be easily translated into a pure, homogenized path. It is, on the contrary, to throw oneself more deeply into friendship with complexity, with different believers and atheists, liberals and conservatives, the dissimilar and unalike.

I’m afraid I don’t understand this point. I think he’s saying that we need to have faith in faith. I don’t agree. I believe we need to have faith in Jesus Christ. Moralistic Therapeutic Deists believe that they are “in contact with a transcendent ideal” too, but that weak sauce approach to faith — whatever its form (Christian, Jewish, Muslim, etc.) — is not going to withstand the corrosive qualities of modernity. It is not withstanding it.

To be a serious Christian in a post-Christian culture requires one to know what a serious Christian is, and what a serious Christian is not — and then to act accordingly. The Modern Orthodox Jewish friends I have are not hived away into enclaves where they can commune with their simple lives. They live lives of order so that they can be fully, authentically Jewish when they go out into the complex world. I want the same for Christians. I don’t believe that pluralism demands that we water down our beliefs for the sake of comity. True pluralism finds a way for us to coexist even though we have incompatible belief systems.

But if we cannot agree, then so much the worse for pluralism. God doesn’t ask us to be good pluralists. He commands us to be holy. Loving one’s neighbor in a post-Christian nation will require developing pluralistic, tolerant instincts, but in the end, believers have to be faithful to what they have been given, no matter what it costs them. The Benedict Option says, “It’s going to cost you, and cost you a lot. You had better get ready for it.”

The Benedict Option also says, “Even if you don’t personally pay a price for your orthodox Christian faith, you could lose your faith all the same if you don’t develop the practices to embody it and hold on to it in a culture that finds what you believe to be offensive and wrong.”

Finally:

Rod and I have different views on L.G.B.T. issues. But I think we genuinely respect each other and honor each other’s lives. To me that means the real enemy is not the sexual revolution. It is a form of purism that can’t tolerate difference because it can’t humbly accept the mystery of truth.

Of course we respect and honor each other. Nothing in this response to David’s column should be read as anything other than respectful disagreement, offered in a spirit of gratitude for his column about my book. But I will close by saying that I don’t grasp David’s point here. In it, I hear an echo of Justice Anthony Kennedy’s famous remarks in the Casey decision:

At the heart of liberty is the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life.

That belief is the enemy of true religion. I don’t believe that living in truth requires ordering your life according to a twenty-point program, or anything like that. But it does require believing that there is a transcendent truth with which we must harmonize our lives, then adopting practices that embody submission to that truth. I believe that this transcendent truth, this logos, is a person, Jesus Christ. That particular idea has particular consequences. The Benedict Option is about how to respond as a believer in Jesus Christ amid a culture that once professed belief in him, but no longer does.

In the end, I suppose that people who believe that the Ben Op is too harsh and separatist have to make a case for why a gentler, more winsome, sweet-mystery-of-life approach to living out Christianity is going to do a better job of preserving the faith than a more robust, demanding approach will. Because the faith is declining, both in numbers and in content. This is undeniable.

UPDATE: Reader Edward Hamilton:

I’m a scientist, and persuaded by evidence-based and empirical arguments. Advocates of an abstract preference for optimism (Brooks here, as with James K.A. Smith earlier) need to contend with the complication that the genuinely pluralistic future of their hopes has already been tested under the most favorable possible conditions, and has failed.

The academic world has a centuries-old philosophical pre-commitment to the idea of free inquiry. It has a deep awareness of the way in which ideas have changed over time, due to its constant engagement with intellectual history. It constantly cycles through a community of new members (new students, and new faculty) in a way that should resist calcification into a rigid orthodoxy. Finally, these constantly changing communities are assembled out of of highly intelligent people who profess to dislike dogmatism.

As a whole, would you say academic world looks like the kind of mutually-respectful demilitarized zone that Brooks sees as a plausible alternative to the gloomier Benedict-Option-necessitating future? If not, why would you expect the broader world (with its stark red-blue geographic divides, ascendent fake-news media, and meme-driven electronic social networks) to turn out any better result?

You can play the same thought experiment with religious communities specifically. The most fertile garden for a Brooks-like pluralistic future for religion would presumably arise in a Christian tradition that emphasizes shared worship practice (liturgy, hymnody) over doctrine, has a long history of preferring reason over dogma, and is dominated by a well-educated membership that can engage its own confessional history critically. That describes the 50s-era Protestant mainline almost perfectly, I’d say.

Would you say that prestigious mainline churches like the Episcopal Church USA have turned into model communities for how liberals and conservatives can coexist indefinitely with irenicism and polite disagreement? If not, then when would you expect better results from faiths and denominations that have demanded of their members and enforced consensus on praxis and doctrinal purity rather than a broader ethos of Brooks-like reasonableness?

Or to borrow an ancient metaphor: If they do these things in the green tree, what shall be done in the dry?

UPDATE.2: Actually David *did* like the book, as he emphasized to me in a subsequent e-mail. I regret the error of misinterpretation.

More Ben Op Reviews

Again, I apologize to readers who find all this Benedict Option stuff wearying. This is publication week — book is in stores Tuesday March 14 — so you’re going to have to endure it. I’m going to post clips from a few of the latest reviews. I am traveling this week for the book, so don’t assume that my not engaging deeply with these critiques is a sign that I’m ignoring them. I just want to throw them out there for you readers interested in the Ben Op to consider.

Collin Hansen at The Gospel Coalition offers a generally positive, though somewhat critical, review from an Evangelical perspective. Excerpts:

Probably most confusion over Rod Dreher’s much-discussed The Benedict Option could be resolved with a careful read of the book’s subhead: “A Strategy for Christians in a Post-Christian Culture.” Not “the” strategy, but “a” strategy.

Do you need to adopt Dreher’s Orthodox convictions about the formative effects of liturgical worship? Not necessarily, though you’ll want to consider whether worshiping in a church that looks like a mall with music that sounds like Top 40 radio helps you develop counter-cultural spiritual instincts.

Do you need to homeschool your children or start a classical school, because “it is time for all Christians to pull their children out of the public school system,” as Dreher contends? Not necessarily, but you might be inspired as you learn about the schools profiled by Dreher, senior editor and prolific blogger at The American Conservative.

No, you don’t need to agree with all the details of Dreher’s strategy, dubbed the Benedict Option in honor of Benedict of Nursia (AD 480–547), the founder of Western monasticism. But you’ll remain confused if you don’t agree that some strategy is necessary for sustainable Christian mission in an increasingly post-Christian culture.

For all the details, Dreher’s message is simple: to be for the world we need to sometimes be away from the world. How can we testify to Jesus if we lose our faith in him amid cultural pressures? “We cannot give the world what we do not have,” Dreher writes. Or, to borrow from Jesus in his Sermon on the Mount, “You are the salt of the earth, but if salt has lost its taste, how shall its saltiness be restored? It is no longer good for anything except to be thrown out and trampled under people’s feet” (Matt. 5:13).

More:

My main fear with Dreher’s book is that the people who need it most won’t read it. How do you convince Americans that replacing fast food and cable news with fasting and hard labor will be good for their souls?

Overwhelming evangelical support for Trump suggests not many conservative Christians would agree with Dreher that “losing political power might just be the thing that saves the church’s soul.” Rather, they seem to believe the American Empire needs our partisan politics in service of God’s kingdom. I’m afraid that evangelicals will continue to obsess over national politics instead of pursuing creative and communal local strategies for spiritual health and mission. Follow the example of crisis pregnancy centers, Dreher counsels:

Here’s how to get started with the antipolitical politics of the Benedict Option. Secede culturally from the maintream. Turn off the television. Put the smartphones away. Read books. Play games. Make music. Feast with your neighbors. It is not enough to avoid what is bad; you must also embrace what is good. Start a church, or a group within your church. Open a classical Christian school, or join and strengthen one that exists. Plant a garden, and participate in a local farmer’s market. Teach kids how to play music, and start a band. Join the volunteer fire department.

Dreher would sell a lot more books if he proposed partisan politics as “the” strategy for Christians in a post-Christian era. But at least for Christians disabused by such failed promises, Dreher’s little way leads the right way.

Read the whole thing. Hansen thinks I missed the boat on a few matters.

Meanwhile, John Ehrett at Conciliar Post also offers a positive-but-mixed review. Excerpts:

The Benedict Option does so much so well that it’s hard to know where exactly to begin. In dissecting some of its more controversial elements further on in this review, I don’t want that recognition to be lost: this is an extraordinarily well-written book that says plenty of valuable things. It is because this book will be influential that I want to engage with it thoughtfully.

And:

The Benedict Option reflects an amazingly detailed, affirmative vision for rebuilding Christian civil society. Dreher gets admirably specific, stressing at length the value of prayer, fasting, and family investment in the life of the local church. In the course of sketching such a vision, he also devotes extensive space to profiling Christian schools that couple rigorous academics with solid theological instruction. This discussion is one of the book’s best elements: I entirely agree with Dreher that the classical approach can be an effective counterweight to the pressures of modernity. In his words, “[c]lassical Christian education is the new counterculture.” He’s probably right. (173) As someone whose own primary, secondary, and tertiary education was heavily steeped in the classical tradition, I can personally attest to its enduring value. In making this point, Dreher critiques the incredible impoverishment of a life devoted solely to credentialing (building a child’s life around getting into the right college, and then the right job), and I can’t agree with him more. (166) My family never imposed such pressures on me, and for that I’m exceedingly grateful.

Nice. But here’s some criticism:

I question Dreher’s attempt to commingle this intellectual problem with his critique of modernity per se; it seems like a stretch to assume that most residents of past Christian cultures were fully versed in doctrine. There is a powerful tendency in some conservative quarters to dabble in a kind of retro-utopianism, which romanticizes the pre-modern past as an era of simplicity, faith, and community before the intellectual depredations of the Reformation and the Enlightenment. This tendency is dangerous. Let’s consider some negative features of the pre-modern past: routinely fatal childbirths; sky-high infant mortality rates; venal religious authorities more interested in serving secular power than serving God; widespread sales of indulgences to commoners who had no way of knowing whether they were deceived; widespread deaths from readily treatable illnesses; dispossession of property due to the lack of a developed “rule of law”; and so forth. I could go on (I haven’t even mentioned the usual evils—slavery, ubiquitous violence towards women, rape as a weapon of war, burning of religious dissidents—commonly cited in progressive accounts of history).

But I don’t assume that, and I regret it if I did not make that clear in the book. I do not believe that the past was a Golden Age — but neither do I believe the progressive/Whig view that we live in the best of all possible times. The Benedict Option does not argue that the Middle Ages was a relative utopia, or that ordinary believers were walking around with the Summa between their ears. What the premodern past, for all its problems, had was a belief in transcendent truth — specifically, a belief in the authority of the Bible and the Christian faith. This did not make the people perfect, but it did give them a framework to understand who they were and what they were to do. We have lost that in modernity, and have found nothing to replace it.

(Plus, it’s a fallacy to say that if you value indoor plumbing and modern dentistry, you must therefore deplore the Middle Ages, which did not have them.)

Here’s a good point from Ehrett:

Institutional decay is not limited to Christian churches: the phenomenon is widespread, and not even progressive juggernauts are immune. Journalism, for example, has been facing a professional crisis amid rising political polarization for the last decade, and university educations have been reduced to the level of consumer products. Dreher is rightly concerned about institutional delegitimization, but I think he assumes secular progressive institutions are comparatively stronger than they are.

In short, it seems that today’s American cultural landscape can’t really be reduced to Dreher’s dyadic view of “Christians and secularists.” Ours is instead a triadic age, where traditional Christians will increasingly find themselves out of sync with culturally progressive neoliberals and dissident right-wing populists. That’s an angle I wish The Benedict Option had probed more deeply.

That’s fair. In retrospect, I spent all of 2016 writing a book that looked like it would debut under a Clinton presidency. There was a mad scramble to rewrite when Donald Trump upended everyone’s expectations. I don’t at all believe that the Trump victory obviates the need for the Benedict Option. Rather, it complicates the narrative significantly, in a way that Ehrett (and Hansen) identify. I wish I had had time in the book’s production to probe this more deeply.

Also, from Ehrett:

And just as a side note, I tend to think that attributing American cultural decline exclusively to sexual license (including Internet pornography) is myopic. As the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission’s Samuel James has noted, excessive video gaming often goes hand-in-hand with the sustained porn use Dreher notes (and one might even go further, connecting this kind of “psychosocial anesthetization” with the unfolding epidemic of drug abuse). There’s a real and distinctive malaise there, with a narrative that runs deeper than just “sex and technology are dangerous”: Charles Murray captured this well in Coming Apart, and I wish Dreher had dug a little deeper into the connectedness of these phenomena.

I don’t believe The Benedict Option does this, quite frankly. I talk openly in the book about how individualism and consumerism have helped bring us to this point. I do focus particularly on the Sexual Revolution, but explain in detail why it is so significant — indeed, the culmination of modernism. I wish I had quoted Augusto Del Noce in the book. That is my greatest regret about the book. From the TAC review of an English translation of his Crisis of Modernity (which was translated by this blog’s frequent commenter, Carlo Lancellotti):

Del Noce’s other early scholarship focused on the roots of fascist thought and its relationship to other ideologies. He methodically revealed the revolutionary spirit behind fascism and described its relationship to violence. Fascism, he argued, really grows out of communist ideology, and is one of several stages in the long process of Western secularization.

This—combined with the permissiveness, eroticism, and what Del Noce calls the “libertine philosophy” of the sexual revolution—has brought the West to ruin. “The question of eroticism is first of all metaphysical,” he argues. And it arises in the context of a de-sacralized West, “which today has manifested itself as never before.”

Tracing the origins of eroticism, Del Noce says the ideas of sexual freedom had already been fully formulated between 1920 and 1930, beginning with the anti-rationalist Surrealist writers and then further developed by Wilhelm Reich (1897-1957). Reich died in an American prison, “almost completely forgotten,” Del Noce notes, “after having been condemned by the still moral United States.” But the “various beat and hippie movements then rediscovered him.”

Del Noce thus sees the countercultural revolution of the 1960s as the apotheosis of various long-dormant revolutionary strains. He elaborates: “The French ‘May Revolution’ was marked precisely by the hybridization of Marxian themes with Freudian themes and themes inspired by de Sade.” But he also faults the global entertainment industry and the arts, as well as the media and other powerful elites, for having participated in an aggressive “campaign of de-Christianization through eroticism.”

For the revolution against the transcendent to triumph, explains Lancellotti, “every meta-empirical order of truth” had to be abolished. Recreational sex replaced the truth of conjugal love. And the ideas of procreative sex and indissoluble monogamous marriage were destroyed since they presupposed, Del Noce says, “the idea of an objective order of unchangeable and permanent truths.”

Del Noce was clearly a highly astute observer of societal trends. But as Lancellotti points out, he also sought to understand “philosophical history”—which he insisted had to be understood given how profoundly affected the West had been by the philosophies of earlier centuries. Atheism, empiricism, historicism, materialism, rationalism, scientism, etc. had all led to the “elimination of the supernatural” and a “rejection of meta-historical truths.”

At the same time, Del Noce was a staunch critic of the modern West’s affluence, commercialism, and opulence. The loss of belief in the transcendent, he said, had produced a rootless society in which there was nothing to support beliefs in anything other than science and technology, entertainment and the erotic. And behind everything, as Del Noce demonstrated, is nihilism—and the rejection of the Incarnation itself. Thus, the crisis of modernity is really a crisis of spirituality.

There’s a lot more criticism in Ehrett’s excellent review, but I’m running out of time as I write this waiting for a flight. I hope you’ll read the whole thing. One more quote, and I’ll be done:

And building on Alan Jacobs’ charge above, I might suggest that “hard” Benedict Option proponents themselves should be wary of motivated reasoning. Proclaiming “all is lost, we must retreat” is, in a way, its own form of easy cultural surrender; “taking the Benedict Option” risks embracing a form of the comfortable and the familiar rather than going boldly forward in the prophetic tradition of the Church.

That’s not to say that you shouldn’t read—and read carefully—The Benedict Option. At a time when public conservative discourse seems to have devolved into either warmed-over Reaganism or veiled white nationalism, Dreher’s proposal is genuinely new, controversial, and revolutionary. The questions The Benedict Option raises are questions that all American Christians should be weighing, whether they realize it or not. And purely as a matter of aesthetics, this book is an excellent and highly compelling read.

Those seeking to articulate a traditional Christian witness in the face of today’s social and political unrest will face future challenges on not one, but two fronts: secular progressivism and populist identitarianism (consider the backlash Russell Moore faced from his own denomination upon boldly engaging issues of racial and religious discrimination). Confronting those challenges will exact a personal price.

To this, let me quote Collin Hansen: “For all the details, Dreher’s message is simple: to be for the world we need to sometimes be away from the world. How can we testify to Jesus if we lose our faith in him amid cultural pressures?”

Finally, here is an excerpt from a piece by the Evangelical writer Heather Walker Peterson:

For my own setting, my ears are deaf to accusations that Dreher is fearmongering regarding the loss of job and educational opportunities for conservative Christians. I work at an evangelical postsecondary institution, and among such universities we are currently planning for not if we lose our accreditation or our students become ineligible for state and federal loans but when in respect to our institutional stances on traditional sexual ethics.

When recent alums have talked to me about career aspirations as faculty in conservative Christian universities, I have praised their desires but told them that they may need to consider one of the parallel structures that Dreher writes about: Christian study centers near major public universities. Perhaps more shocking, a friend of mine is reconsidering his option to send his graduating high schooler to a prestigious evangelical institution because he’s concerned his child will have less job opportunities with that institution’s name on her resume.

Like many evangelical reviewers, my initial reaction to the idea of the Benedict Option, a “strategic withdrawal,” was that it smacked of the separatist, fundamentalist cultural ghettoization of my childhood, a bunker mentality. In the cultural wars, we lobbed critiques at contemporary thought with no regards for its grains of veracity or the individuals behind the ideas. We labeled social justice as “liberal” and focused on Bible studies instead. It seemed that truth, disregarding our limited interpretations of it, was more important than love.

Can the Benedict Option be different? How do proponents, as a church, community, or other organization, not relive the sins of the fundamentalist movement that began in the 1920s?

That’s a great question. I’ve been told by some Evangelical friends that the reason so many Evangelicals have an instinctive aversion to the Benedict Option concept is because they are either ex-fundamentalists or only one generation removed from fundamentalism. Superficially, the Benedict Option sounds like fundamentalism — therefore, they want to stay away from it.

But as Peterson indicates, just because we don’t want to relive the fundamentalist experience, that doesn’t make the challenges post-Christian America puts to the church go away. Working out how to do the Benedict Option without becoming bunkered-and-hunkered fundamentalists (even of the Catholic/Orthodox variety) is going to require us small-o orthodox Christians to be creative minorities. 

The Benedict Option is out in stores tomorrow, or you can order it here. I don’t expect you will agree with everything in it, but I hope it inspires critical thinking within the church at this watershed moment in Western life.

The Ben Op And The Christian Bubble

Skye Watts/Shutterstock

A Protestant reader writes, concerning Christian resistance to the idea of the Benedict Option:

I think there’s something to the idea that maybe American church leaders don’t want to face the fact that what they have been doing is in vain. I would say they’ve had it backward: a top down, rather than bottom up notion of Church, spiritual formation, and ministry. Of course Christians transform the culture, ideally you create it (Rembrandt, Bach?). Modern Protestants either don’t want to or genuinely don’t see they’re the minority now, and the faith is incompatible with mainstream US culture. That would require a lot of work and change.

I grew up in a very healthy Evangelical, non-denominational church in [Southern state]. We WERE the dominant culture, and the practice of faith was personal and real, but I’ve since lived in DC, New York, and now the liberal enclave of Austin. I think the idea that the country and culture has raced past them and is coming for them is a little hard to fathom, while it’s blindly obvious to me. I sometimes have to step back and acknowledge that I’ve just seen a lot they haven’t. Most of my friends have stayed there in [my home state], in what’s been a really economically vibrant area, done really well financially, and are repeating the prosperity and culture their parents enjoyed, and are continuing to have influence on school boards, city council, PTA, etc., but that’s not been the case in most parts of the country, and it would be very hard to repeat.

I’m many ways they think they’re still the dominant culture, but even here in conservative Texas, the administrators are against you, in Fort Worth of all places. I don’t know what it will take to wake them, we’ve seen the activists go after the cake-bakers and flower-arrangers. I don’t think we’re far from people going after conservative pastors and Catholic priests; it’s not enough to be able to get married, “YOU have to marry me, or there’s not equality.”

This is true, I think. So many of us Christians haven’t really come to grips with what has happened. PRRI is a research organization that studies religion, culture, and politics. They are officially non-partisan, but pretty clearly lean left. They just released a poll on where Americans stand on a number of controversial issues related to the Sexual Revolution, including religious liberty — and the numbers are catastrophic for orthodox Christians.  Even if you allow for the possibility that PRRI’s numbers are skewed toward conclusions that favor progressives, there’s no way to make this look good.

Notice this one:

There is considerable partisan disagreement over when sex can be considered morally acceptable. Seven in ten (70%) Republicans say sex can only be considered morally acceptable when it takes place between a married heterosexual couple, but only four in ten independents (42%) and Democrats (39%) say the same. A majority of Democrats (58%) and independents (55%) disagree.

By a wide margin, white evangelical Protestants are most likely to say sex is only morally permissible when it occurs within the confines of marriage between a man and a woman. More than eight in ten (83%) white evangelical Protestants agree sex is only moral when it is between a married heterosexual couple, as do more than six in ten (63%) nonwhite Protestants. Just under half of Catholics (46%), four in ten (40%) white mainline Protestants and fewer than one in four (23%) religiously unaffiliated Americans agree.

Unsurprisingly, young adults express a much less restrictive view about the morality of sex. While nearly two-thirds (64%) of seniors agree sex is only moral when it is between a married man and woman, only three in ten (30%) young adults say the same. Nearly seven in ten (69%) young adults disagree that sex is only morally acceptable when it takes place within a heterosexual marriage.

These particular data don’t have anything directly to do with the political conclusions regarding the other issues, but they do explain where those positions come from: the Sexual Revolution has overthrown the Christian view of sex and marriage. Strictly speaking, there is no reason why this can be true but American society also support broad religious liberty protections. But in reality, it’s not going to happen, because discrimination based on sexual desire and sexual categories doesn’t make intuitive sense to people who don’t perceive a meaningful conflict.

Beyond the law, this is going to have a massive effect on church life over the next few decades. Churches are going to be pressured from within to abandon Christian orthodoxy on sexual matters. Those that do are going to alienate the orthodox within their congregations. Those that do not are going to alienate the growing majority.

A church should always take a stand on the truth, not on what’s popular, but good luck finding today a church that has cast aside orthodoxy on sexual teaching and continued to grow. There is something about the pelvic issues that, once compromised on, make church seem less vital. Did the de facto liberalization on sexuality of European churches keep anyone in the pews? No.

On the other hand, the trends among younger Americans make it clear that churches that do stand by orthodoxy are going to see declining numbers as well. Twenty years from now, a small-town church whose pastor declines to perform a same-sex wedding may well find himself with a congregational mutiny on his hands.

Why does sex matter so much in Christianity? Why can’t we just modify our views to suit the times? How should Christians prepare for this present and growing reality? Answering that question is why I wrote The Benedict Option, which will be in bookstores tomorrow. I hope it finds an audience among Christians in the more conservative parts of the country, like the Southern state from which the reader comes. There is no place to escape the Sexual Revolution, and no way for churches to avoid having to deal with its theological, moral, and political consequences.

 

 

Finding A Church That’s Going To Make It

The Rev. Gavin Ashenden is the Church of England priest who was forced to resigned as Chaplain to the Queen after he protested against the reading of the Koran at an Epiphany service. That passage from the Koran explicitly denied the divinity of Christ — which the Feast of the Epiphany marks. In this interview, Fr. Ashenden pulls no punches about the future of the Church of England. Excerpts:

Jules: Monsignor Carlo Liberati, Archbishop Emeritus of Pompeii, said last week: ‘In 10 years we will all be Muslims because of our stupidity…per nostra stupidità.’ Do you agree with him?

Gavin: Yes. The whole of North Africa and the Middle East was Christian once. All the indications are that Muslims are more committed and less willing to compromise than Christians. When that combines with terrorism, which undoes secularists who want a comfortable and easy life, cowardice and compromise will open the way to Islamic domination. Michel Houellebecq’s new novel Submission charts how he sees it happening in France in about ten years’ time. It’s a terrifying vision, and astonishingly, quite politically possible; some would say—likely. I want my children to have the opportunity to worship Jesus, avoid female circumcision and sharia beatings.

Jules: How should ordinary Christians who seek to be faithful to the gospel of Christ respond to liberal clergy who preach and practice heresy?

Gavin: Leave their Church and look for one that has kept as much of the historic, apostolic and biblical values as possible.

Jules: Have you had any support from bishops in the Church of England following your resignation as Queen’s Chaplain?

Gavin: I have had hundreds, perhaps thousands of emails in the last week from Christians across the world pledging their support and their prayers. But not a single one from a serving C of E bishop!

Jules: How do you see your future in the Church of England and the future of the Church of England?

Gavin: It isn’t a matter of how I see it. Demographically and financially it is dying. Spiritually it appears to be on its last legs too. I’m not sure I see much point in a church that just wants to be accepted as a sort of not too irritating chaplain to a secular and hedonistic culture, which is what it seems to be becoming. I want to remain a faithful Anglican, but increasingly it looks like that is only possible outside the C of E. It has opted for a kind of spiritualised socialism and feminism in opposition to the Gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ. You get new life when you repent. But there is no sign that it is ready to take that path.

Read the whole thing.  At the recent C of E Synod, gay-rights proponents and traditionalists joined forces to prevent the center from pretending that the issue of sex and sexuality is one on which good Anglicans can disagree. Both sides strongly disagree with each other, of course, but both agree that the issue is too important for there to be a muddy via media. Ashenden explains why from his side here.  The progressive, pro-gay Baptist David Gushee was right when he wrote a couple of years ago:

It turns out that you are either for full and unequivocal social and legal equality for LGBT people, or you are against it, and your answer will at some point be revealed. This is true both for individuals and for institutions.

Neutrality is not an option. Neither is polite half-acceptance. Nor is avoiding the subject. Hide as you might, the issue will come and find you.

It will.

Let Father Ashenden’s words from the interview be a lesson to all small-o orthodox Christians: there is no point to a church that just wants to be accepted as chaplain to a secular and hedonistic culture. If you want to stay engaged with mainstream culture as a Christian, then you are going to have to be part of a church community that is far more into countercultural discipleship than many are today. If you want to train spiritually for the Dark Age upon us, you had better find another church or another parish. It really is that important. That parish had better be one where you can find a significant number of people, even though they may be a minority within the parish, who are dedicated to living out a holistic, committed, countercultural Christian life. As I write in The Benedict Option, using the culture war metaphor:

“America has lived a long time off its thin Christian veneer, partly necessitated by the Cold War,” [Notre Dame sociologist Christian] Smith told me in an interview. “That is all finally being stripped away by the combination of mass consumer capitalism and liberal individualism.”

The data from Smith and other researchers make clear what so many of us are desperate to deny: the flood is rising to the rafters in the American church. Every single congregation in America must ask itself if it has compromised so much with the world that it has been compromised in its faithfulness. Is the Christianity we have been living out in our families, congregations, and communities a means of deeper conversion, or does it function as a vaccination against taking faith with the seriousness the Gospel demands?

Nobody but the most deluded of the old-school Religious Right believes that this cultural revolution can be turned back. The wave cannot be stopped, only ridden. With a few exceptions, conservative Christian political activists are as ineffective as White Russian exiles, drinking tea from samovars in their Paris drawing rooms, plotting the restoration of the monarchy. One wishes them well but knows deep down that they are not the future.

Americans cannot stand to contemplate defeat or to accept limits of any kind. But American Christians are going to have to come to terms with the brute fact that we live in a culture, one in which our beliefs make increasingly little sense. We speak a language that the world more and more either cannot hear or finds offensive to its ears.

Could it be that the best way to fight the flood is to . . . stop fighting the flood? That is, to quit piling up sandbags and to build an ark in which to shelter until the water recedes and we can put our feet on dry land again? Rather than wasting energy and resources fighting unwinnable political battles, we should instead work on building communities, institutions, and networks of resistance that can outwit, outlast, and eventually overcome the occupation.

The Benedict Option will be published tomorrow, Tuesday March 14 — the Feast of St. Benedict on the Orthodox New Calendar.

Russell Moore’s Job On The Line

The Washington Post reports today:

Concern is mounting among evangelicals that Russell Moore, president of the Southern Baptist Convention’s policy arm, could lose his job following months of backlash over his critiques of President Trump and religious leaders who publicly supported the Republican candidate. Any such move could be explosive for the nation’s largest Protestant denomination, which has been divided over politics, theology and, perhaps most starkly, race.

More than 100 of the denomination’s 46,000 churches have threatened to cut off financial support for the SBC’s umbrella fund, according to Frank Page, president of the executive committee. The committee is studying whether the churches are acting out of displeasure with Moore because it has received more threats to funding over him than over any other “personality issue” in recent memory, said Page, who will meet with Moore today.

Moore, who heads the SBC’s Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission and has been relatively quiet since the election, declined to comment for this article. Page declined to discuss the plan for Monday’s meeting, but he indicated that he would not rule out the possibility that he could ask Moore to resign. He said he hopes Moore and his opposition will agree to pursue efforts toward reconciliation.

This is both not surprising and stunning. It’s not surprising, because the old-guard conservatives in the SBC have had it out for Moore over his criticism of Donald Trump and Evangelical support for him. After the Trump victory, Moore’s job status has been up in the air. Judging from the Post story, it could all be coming to a head today in the meeting with Frank Page.

What’s stunning about this is the blow Moore’s firing, if it comes to that, will be to Southern Baptist credibility and witness. I’ve made no secret of my admiration for Russell Moore, whom I also consider a personal friend (I have not talked to him since reading the Post story). He’s a theological and social conservative in a new mold, and whether or not I agree with him on specific policy positions, I believe he is a model for Christian conservative public engagement. If the Southern Baptist Convention removes him from the presidency of the ERLC, it will signal a dramatic win for the old-guard Religious Right within the nation’s largest Protestant denomination. It will also spark the biggest war within the Southern Baptist Convention since the 1990s fight between conservatives and liberals.

I hope and pray that it doesn’t come to that. This is a good time to read Moore’s 2016 Erasmus Lecture, titled, “Can The Religious Right Be Saved?”. Here’s how it begins:

I am an heir of Bible Belt America, but also a survivor of Bible Belt America. I was reared in an ecosystem of Evangelical Christianity, informed by a large Catholic segment of my family and a Catholic majority in my community. I memorized Bible verses through “sword drill” competitions, a kind of Evangelical spelling bee in which children compete to see who can find, say, Habakkuk 3:3 the fastest. The songs that floated through my mind as I went to sleep at night were hymns and praise choruses and Bible verses set to music. Nonetheless, from the ages of fifteen through nineteen, I experienced a deep spiritual crisis that was grounded, at least partially, in, of all things, politics.

The cultural Christianity around me seemed increasingly artificial and cynical and even violent. I saw some Christians who preached against profanity use jarring racial epithets. I saw a cultural Christianity that preached hellfire and brimstone about sexual immorality and cultural decadence. And yet, in the church where the major tither was having an affair everyone in the community knew about, there he was, in our neighbor congregation’s “special music” time, singing “If It Wasn’t for That Lighthouse, Where Would This Ship Be?” I saw a cultural Christianity with preachers who often gained audiences, locally in church meetings or globally on television, by saying crazy and buffoonish things, simply to stir up the base and to gain attention from the world, whether that was claiming to know why God sent hurricanes and terrorist attacks or claiming that American founders, one of whom possibly impregnated his own human slaves and literally cut the New Testament apart, were orthodox, Evangelical Christians who, like us, stood up for traditional family values.

I saw a cultural Christianity cut off from the deep theology of the Bible and enamored with books and audio and sermon series tying current events to Bible prophecy—supermarket scanners as the mark of the Beast, Gog and Magog as the Soviet Union or, later, Saddam Hussein or al-Qaeda or the Islamic State as direct fulfillments of Bible prophecy. When these prophecies were not fulfilled, these teachers never retreated in shame. They waited to claim a new word from God and sold more products, whether books or emergency preparation kits for the Y2K global shutdown and the resulting dark age the Bible clearly told us would happen.

And then there were the voter guides. A religious right activist group from Washington placed them in our church’s vestibule, outlining the Christian position on issues. Even as a teenager, I could recognize that the issues just happened to be the same as the talking points of the Republican National Committee. With many of these issues, there did seem to be a clear Christian position—on the abortion of unborn children, for instance, and on the need to stabilize families. But why was there a “Christian” position on congressional term limits, a balanced budget amendment, and the line item veto? Why was there no word on racial justice and unity for those of us in the historical shadow of Jim Crow?

I was left with the increasingly cynical feeling—an existential threat to my entire sense of myself and the world—that Christianity was just a means to an end. My faith was being used as a way to shore up Southern honor culture, mobilize voters for political allies, and market products to a gullible audience. I was ready to escape—and I did. But I didn’t flee the way so many have, through the back door of the Church into secularism. I found a wardrobe in a spare room that delivered me from the Bible Belt back to where I started, to the Lion of the tribe of Judah.

I had read The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe and its sequels as a child, and found something solid there. As the other Inklings knew, the Narnia series wasn’t great literature or a carefully constructed myth such as Middle Earth was. My experience was similar to that of science fiction writer Neil Gaiman: “The weird thing about the Narnia books for me was that mostly they seemed true,” as if they “were reports from a real place.” So when, in the middle of my spiritual crisis, I saw the name C. S. Lewis on the spine of a book called Mere Christianity, I was willing to give him a chance—and he saved my life. Mere Christianity is not the City of God or the Summa Theologica or the Institutes of the Christian Religion. It didn’t need to be. All I needed was for this drinking, smoking, probably dancing and card-playing man on another continent to tell me the truth, to point me to a broad, bustling Church that took serious questions seriously and could be traced all the way back to an empty hole in the ground in the Middle East.

Most faiths that persist are tested and questioned and tempted along the way. But for me, the question was whether I was a beloved son or a cosmic orphan. It seems to me that my spiritual crisis is similar to a larger one that threatens to engulf religious conservatism in America. The religious right—whether we trace it to the school prayer skirmishes of the 1960s or the segregation academy controversies of the 1970s or the response to Roe v. Wade and the sexual revolution—was always a multifaceted coalition. After all, Jerry Falwell adopted Paul Weyrich’s language of a “moral majority” because the movement encompassed not just born-again Protestants but also many traditional Roman Catholics and Latter-day Saints and Orthodox Jews. But while the movement was in many ways informed by sources such as John Paul II’s theology of the body and Richard John Neuhaus’s The Naked Public Square, the entrepreneurial energy almost always came from Evangelical Protestantism. For that and other reasons, American Evangelicalism is enmeshed with the religious right psychologically, institutionally, and in terms of reputation in ways the Catholic bishops, the Mormon apostles, and Orthodox rabbis just aren’t.

The fate of religious conservatism is important, though, and not merely for its own sake. Ross Douthat is quite right that America—left and right—needs a strong religious conservative movement. The religious right, at its best, modeled the kind of civic engagement and civil society that James Madison and Alexander Hamilton wanted for this country. At its best, the religious right reminded all of us that there are realities more important than political or economic success; that we are a nation under God, one that can be weighed in the balance and found wanting. At its best, the religious right kept the focus on a vulnerable minority that easily becomes invisible to those with power: unborn children. Douthat is correct that without some form of religious right, the space left behind can all too easily be filled by European-style ethno-nationalism or Nietzschean social Darwinism. The religious right must, in some form, be saved. But how and in what form? That question, of course, brings us to the 2016 presidential election.

We know how that turned out. And we now see that that result could have serious consequences for Russell Moore. Read the entire lecture, and you will be able to understand the battle lines within the Southern Baptist Convention — if Moore is fired, that is. There are a lot of younger Southern Baptists who are not willing to return to the Republican Party at Prayer mode of public engagement. I hope the SBC leadership pulls back. This conflict, and its resolution, will have a serious impact beyond the SBC. It will determine the future of Christian conservatism in America.

The Benedict Option: The New Christian Paradigm

Good morning. Today I am traveling to New York to begin a week of media interviews and public presentations about The Benedict Option, which is to be released on Tuesday. Tonight I’ll be on Tucker Carlson’s Fox show, talking about Benedict — tune in!

I want to draw your attention to an excellent, insightful review of the book, by Damon Linker. Damon is a longtime friend, and a sometime critic of my work. I figured his commentary on The Benedict Option would be, well, critical, because Damon is on the left. But I also figured that Damon’s review would be like Russell Arben Fox’s: an intelligent critique from the left, one that grapples with the book in good faith. I was not disappointed.

Damon says that The Benedict Option

may be the most important statement of its kind since Richard John Neuhaus’ The Naked Public Square, the 1984 book that Dreher’s implicitly seeks to supplant. Like Neuhaus, Dreher provides devout Christians with a gripping metaphor that both describes the present moment and sets out a course of action in response to it.

As Damon points out, Father Neuhaus’s book was written in a time when it was possible for religious and social conservatives to imagine that the United States was a religious and morally conservative country which was ruled (misruled) by a secular elite that sought to push believers out of the public square. RJN called for Christian political engagement to remoralize the public square.

That project has failed, leaving religious conservatives to figure out what to do in a post-Christian nation in which people who hold their (our) beliefs are a minority? Linker:

Dreher’s The Benedict Option is very much an expression of this bleak outlook — and it goes far beyond the United States. In his opening pages, Dreher informs his readers that “the light of Christianity is flickering out all over the West.” “There are people alive today,” he writes, “who may live to see the effective death of Christianity within our civilization. … This may not be the end of the world, but it is the end of a world, and only the willfully blind would deny it.”

Nothing in the surprise election of President Trump, who was strongly supported by the remnants of the religious right, changes this doleful situation. In Dreher’s view, Trump’s victory “has at best given us a bit more time to prepare for the inevitable.” That’s because “secular nihilism has won the day.” And its triumph isn’t a product of a liberal elite imposing it on the country so much as it is a consequence of the fact that “the American people, either actively or passively, approve.”

That’s where “the Benedict Option” comes in. Having lost the culture and the country, devout Christians need to realize that looking to ordinary politics to reverse secularizing trends is futile. Instead, Christian conservatives need to practice “a new kind of Christian politics” — or an “antipolitical politics” — that follows the example of the religious order that St. Benedict of Nursia founded in the 6th century to preserve and foster Christian civilization as the Roman Empire decayed and crumbled around it.

This means, specifically, that Christians need to turn inward, steeling themselves against the pernicious moral influences swirling around them by adopting a “rule for living” that turns their faith into the orienting focal point of their lives. Roughly half of Dreher’s book offers practical suggestions for how to live out this vision of deep piety amidst the ruins of Christian civilization: Attempt to live in proximity to like-minded Christians; pull children out of aggressively secular public schools; recover liturgical worship; tighten church discipline; devote family time to studying scripture; place strict limits on digital technology in the home; and so on. Only when a comprehensive form of Christian living has been recovered and instantiated in concrete communities will believers be equipped to begin the daunting task of attempting to win back the wider culture from the forces of secular nihilism.

That’s a good summary. Damon goes on to discern an important divide between my vision and the one of the late Father Neuhaus:

Their disagreement has to do with whether the loss of power was contingent and reversible (Neuhaus) or inevitable and, at least for the foreseeable future, permanent (Dreher).

Damon goes on to say that it’s an illusion to think that Christianity in past ages was as doctrinally and morally well-informed and orthodox as I portray it. He’s right about that, I think. The main difference is that however far any given society in Christendom has been from the ideal — and every one has — there was a shared understanding that there was an ideal outside of ourselves to which we must aspire. As Father Neuhaus once put it (if memory serves): We don’t judge the Bible; the Bible judges us.

Damon says that in practice, all Christians have been Moralistic Therapeutic Deists, more or less, in all times and places. “Except in one respect: sexual morality.” He writes:

A Moralistic Therapeutic Deist will tend not to have strong opinions about sex, beyond affirming the importance of consent. Intercourse outside of marriage, masturbation, the use of contraception, homosexuality (including same-sex marriage), transgenderism — none of it will register as raising significant moral or theological issues and problems. That wasn’t true in the 19th-century U.S., in 17th-century Prussia, or in 11th-century France. In all of those times and places, news of what growing numbers of people (including people who define themselves as Christians) think of as sexually acceptable behavior would have been received as inexplicable, and an abomination.

This is what makes our time decisively different from past eras in the history of the Christian West: We live on the far side of the sexual revolution. Neuhaus thought that revolution could be at least partially reversed through concerted democratic action. Dreher has no such hopes and so advises withdrawal and self-protection.

If traditional sexual morality is an absolutely necessary component in an authentic Christian life, then America may well be the post-Christian nation Dreher insists it is, with devout Christians reduced to the status of exiles within it and facing the prospect of outright persecution in the workplace and elsewhere.

He goes on to say:

Dreher’s concerns about persecution may be somewhat exaggerated, but they aren’t delusional. Now that same-sex marriage has been declared a constitutional right, the full weight of anti-discrimination law is poised to bear down on those whose faith precludes them from accepting the licitness of such arrangements.

This is one of the things I appreciate most about Damon’s review: the acknowledgement from someone on the Left that something important really is happening to dissenters. So many who celebrate the new order as a more perfect form of justice — and Damon is one of those people — are bound and determined to insist that orthodox Christians aren’t losing anything significant (and if they are, they deserve it: this is what I call the Law of Merited Impossibility). Damon Linker is not one of those whose peace of mind requires this denial, and I’m grateful for that. Some critics of the Benedict Option, and of conservative Christians in general, love to accuse us of being “obsessed” with homosexuality. But see, because of anti-discrimination law, we cannot help but pay attention to it, because it is precisely on the LGBT rights question that our rights are being taken away, or stand to be taken away.

The question of homosexuality, and the Sexual Revolution more broadly, is at the center of the grand struggle between orthodox Christianity and the forces — many of them within the church — that are trying to defeat it. I explain this more fully in the sex chapter of The Benedict Option. Excerpt:

Wendell Berry has written, “Sexual love is the heart of community life. Sexual love is the force that in our bodily life connects us most intimately to the Creation, to the fertility of the world, to farming and the care of animals. It brings us into the dance that holds the community together and joins it to its place.”

This is more important to the survival of Christianity than most of us understand. When people decide that historically normative Christianity is wrong about sex, they typically don’t find a church that endorses their liberal views. They quit going to church altogether.

This raises a critically important question: Is sex the linchpin of Christian cultural order? Is it really the case that to cast off Christian teaching on sex and sexuality is to remove the factor that gives—or gave—Christianity its power as a social force?

Though he might not have put it quite that way, the eminent sociologist Philip Rieff would probably have said yes. Rieff’s landmark 1966 book The Triumph of the Therapeutic analyzes what he calls the “deconversion” of the West from Christianity. Nearly everyone recognizes that this process has been under way since the Enlightenment, but Rieff showed that it had reached a more advanced stage than most people—least of all Christians—recognized.

Rieff, writing in the 1960s, identified the Sexual Revolution—though he did not use that term—as a leading indicator of Christianity’s demise. In classical Christian culture, he wrote, “the rejection of sexual individualism” was “very near the center of the symbolic that has not held.” He meant that renouncing the sexual autonomy and sensuality of pagan culture and redirecting the erotic instinct was intrinsic to Christian culture. Without Christianity, the West was reverting to its former state.

It is nearly impossible for contemporary Americans to grasp why sex was a central concern of early Christianity. Sarah Ruden, the Yale-trained classics translator, explains the culture into which Christianity appeared in her 2010 book Paul Among the People. Ruden contends that it’s profoundly ignorant to think of the Apostle Paul as a dour proto-Puritan descending upon happy-go-lucky pagan hippies, ordering them to stop having fun.

In fact, Paul’s teachings on sexual purity and marriage were adopted as liberating in the pornographic, sexually exploitive Greco-Roman culture of the time—exploitive especially of slaves and women, whose value to pagan males lay chiefly in their ability to produce children and provide sexual pleasure. Christianity, as articulated by Paul, worked a cultural revolution, restraining and channeling male eros, elevating the status of both women and of the human body, and infusing marriage—and marital sexuality—with love.

Christian marriage, Ruden writes, was “as different from anything before or since as the command to turn the other cheek.” Chastity—the rightly ordered use of the gift of sexuality—was the greatest distinction setting Christians of the early church apart from the pagan world.

The point is not that Christianity was only, or primarily, about redefining and revaluing sexuality, but that within a Christian anthropology sex takes on a new and different meaning, one that mandated a radical change of behavior and cultural norms. In Christianity, what a person does with their sexuality cannot be separated from what a person is. In a sense, moderns believe the same thing, but from a perspective entirely different from the early church’s.

In speaking of how men and women of the early Christian era saw their bodies, historian Peter Brown says

the body was embedded in a cosmic matrix in ways that made its perception of itself profoundly unlike our own. Ultimately, sex was not the expression of inner needs, lodged in the isolated body. Instead, it was seen as the pulsing, through the body, of the same energies as kept the stars alive. Whether this pulse of energy came from benevolent gods or from malevolent demons (as many radical Christians believed) sex could never be seen as a thing for the isolated human body alone.

Early Christianity’s sexual teaching does not only come from the words of Christ and the Apostle Paul; more broadly, it emerges from the Bible’s anthropology. The human being bears the image of God, however tarnished by sin, and is the pinnacle of an order created and imbued with meaning by God.

In that order, man has a purpose. He is meant for something, to achieve certain ends. When Paul warned the Christians of Corinth that having sex with a prostitute meant that they were joining Jesus Christ to that prostitute, he was not speaking metaphorically. Because we belong to Christ as a unity of body, mind, and soul, how we use the body and the mind sexually is a very big deal.

Anything we do that falls short of perfect harmony with the will of God is sin. Sin is not merely rule breaking but failing to live in accord with the structure of reality itself.

For a more profound meditation on how the Sexual Revolution overturns Christian ontology and anthropology, I strongly urge you to read Michael Hanby’s essay about “the civic project of American Christianity.” It informally declares the end of the Neuhaus project. In the present reality, Hanby writes, maintaining an authentically Christian vision:

will require disciplined reflection, and this labor is daunting enough. Yet it will also require a countercultural way of life, a deep faith in the goodness of God and in the intelligibility of creation, and real hope in the transcendent vantage, beyond our immanent success or failure, opened up by the Resurrection. It will take a great deal of courage and not a little imagination to risk failure, powerlessness, and cultural and political irrelevance—to be, in Pope Francis’s words, a less “worldly” Church—for the sake of the truth.

This is the Benedict Option. And though Damon Linker thinks that these events mark progress, he also sees the tragedy here for orthodox Christians. Linker:

Christianity in all of its manifold forms and expressions isn’t about to disappear, but comprehensive Christianity — a holistic vision of God and humanity, sexuality and sin, marriage and procreation — has been dethroned. Those of us who see a necessary moral advance in this revolution should be capable of acknowledging that it also entails a significant loss.

Read the entire piece. I don’t want to put words in Damon’s mouth, but I read his essay as saying that if orthodox Christians are alarmed by what’s happening, then they really do have something to be alarmed about. Christianity as it has been understood for most of its history is over, at least in the West.

But that does not mean orthodox Christians can surrender! It means that we have to fight as the resistance in different ways. One of the things we have to resist are voices within the church trying to deny the gravity of the current situation. If you are an orthodox Christian who is not alarmed, then you are not paying attention.

And you probably haven’t been paying attention for a while, to be honest. I’m really grateful to Jake Meador for making this point: there is nothing new about cultural alarmism in our time.  Jake writes:

Virtually nothing that any of these guys [Chaput, Esolen, Dreher, all of whom Smith slams] are saying is new and, given how long it has been said and how accurate previous generations have been in their predictions, it’s difficult to dismiss this talk as alarmism

I have read all four of the books in question, if we include Rusty Reno’s Resurrecting the Idea of a Christian Society, which we should. In the cases of Esolen, Reno, and Dreher particularly, I have followed their work for a number of years. This is the basic idea behind all four books: “We are living in the last days of western liberalism, a way of understanding the world that treats all human beings as detached individuals free to define themselves in whatever ways they see fit and in whatever ways capital can enable and facilitate. As the system fails, its great shortcomings are becoming ever more apparent. As a result of this, the actions society must take to prop up the system are becoming more extreme and the dangers to the church and to civil society more generally are growing accordingly.”

But here’s the thing: Thoughtful Christians have been critiquing this sort of individualism and the systems and structures that support it for decades. None of what Esolen, Reno, Dreher, and Chaput is saying is new. They are simply observing the same problems in a later stage of development and their warnings have been adjusted accordingly. But the problems they are seeing are quite old and the church has been talking about them for many years.

Read the whole thing. He quotes from T.S. Eliot, Christopher Dawson, J. Gresham Machen, Pope John Paul II, C.S. Lewis, Stanley Hauerwas, and others.

Jake is also correct in saying that Tony Esolen and I invite charges of alarmism with the harsh rhetoric we use. I say without apology: my rhetoric is alarming — because I believe there is much to be alarmed about, and the church is not taking it seriously.

Napp Nazworth, commenting on progressive Episcopalian Rachel Held Evans’s trite dismissal of the Benedict Option, tweeted:

If I understand right, Ben. Op. is to protect church from people like RHE. Amazing she missed that. https://t.co/AfjzCaHEGj via @amconmag

— Napp Nazworth (@NappNazworth) March 9, 2017

He understands perfectly. With the notable exception of the chapter on work, The Benedict Option is primarily about the church’s desperate need to strengthen itself from within. Moralistic Therapeutic Deism is a much greater threat to the church right now than the state. It’s not even close. When and if the state does become a much greater threat — and I believe it’s a matter of when, not if — then our failure to have become a lot more serious about our faith is going to doom us. But hear me: even if things stayed exactly as they are right now with regard to the law, Christianity would still be in existential trouble in the West, for the reasons I write about in the book. And if there were no such thing as same-sex marriage, the argument for the Ben Op would scarcely change.

The extent to which the church goes the Rachel Held Evans assimilationist route, it will not survive. That message is far more central to The Benedict Option than the idea that we will suffer persecution of any sort (though we will). Anybody who reads the book will see this. I hope you will be one of its readers. I don’t expect everybody to agree with everything in it. But I hope that those who do read it and take it seriously will bring their creative minds and voices to the project of building what MacIntyre called “new forms of community within which the moral life could be sustained so that both morality and civility might survive the coming ages of barbarism and darkness.”

Don’t forget: the early Benedictines evangelized too, but unlike so many of us contemporary Christians, they did so from a strong spiritual and communal base. They knew who they were, and Whose they were, and were able to sound a certain trumpet in an uncertain world. So must we be.

 

 

Protestant ‘Low-Grade Civil War’

What would John Calvin do? (Marzolino/Shutterstock)

A reader commenting on the “Long Island ménage” thread posted a fascinating (to me) comment:

Rod, if you want to understand why some Protestants love you and some Protestants hate you, this quote [from me — RD] explains why:

“The point to take away from this story is that a society that has no strong concept of the Good other than granting individuals within it maximum liberty to live as they prefer to is not a society that has within in it the capacity to govern itself, or to endure. A religion that is only about formless ‘love’ is a religion that worships emotion, and that ends up making an idol of the Self.”

The Protestant church has basically been in a state of low-grade civil war since the Enlightenment. On one side, there are those who think that, with a few modifications, it can be made consistent with Christianity. In fact, they take pride in Protestantism’s role in starting the Enlightenment, while having certain regrets around how it has developed. Pietists (eg Bismarck, progressive evangelicals), neo-Calvinists (eg Abraham Kuyper and Calvin College), and mainline Presbyterians fall into this category. On the other side are Anabaptistic separatists and confessional Calvinists (including Netherlands Reformed Congregations / Gereformeerde Gemeenten and Covenanters). During the American Revolution, the Old Lights and New Lights went to literal war with each other.

However, most evangelicals are in a fog in the middle. This isn’t sustainable, and which way they twist will have huge repercussions. For example, most evangelicals believe that America is the best ever, because it’s founded on the idea of freedom. Yet, they also believe that America is the best ever, because it’s a Christian country. When this mental incongruence becomes untenable, where do they turn?

I think we’re starting to see the answer, with the rise of both the emergent church and Christian Reconstructionist movements. The former embraces Americanism, with progressive politics, consumeristic worship, and watered-down theology and practice. The latter endorses a revisionist history wherein America started Christian but later went bad, while also embracing homeschooling, “biblical patriarchy”, huge families, premillennialist alarmism, and the like.

This growing divide is what writers like James KA Smith are utterly scared of. They’re too conservative for progressive “evangelicalism”, but too cool and respectable for Christian Reconstructionism. Your reporting accelerates this divide, which will destroy their careers and their already-imploding middle-way churches like the CRC. As someone who is also in the middle, I share their fears. I don’t think it excuses his unfair article, but it helps explain it.

This is fascinating to me, as an outsider. I would love to know what Protestant readers who are more familiar with the dynamics this reader identifies have to say about it.

 

Same Republican Song, 752nd Verse

Peggy Noonan says that Republicans on Capitol Hill do not get it. Do. Not. Get. It. Excerpt:

We are in the midst of the kind of crises that can do nations in. It is pleasant to chirp, as Speaker Paul Ryan does, of “choice” and “competition” and an end to “paternalistic” thinking on health care. Is it responsive to the moment? Or does it sound like old lyrics from an old hymnal?

I close with Tucker Carlson’s Wednesday night Fox News interview with Mr. Ryan. It cut to the political heart of the matter.

Mr. Carlson questioned the new bill’s elimination of a tax on wealthy investors. “Looking at the last election, was the message of that election really, ‘We need to help investors?’ I mean, the Dow is over 20,000. Are they really the group that needs the help?”

Mr. Ryan answered that the tax had been imposed by ObamaCare. “The trillion-dollar tax cut that this bill represents—that is part of the trillion-dollar tax increase that was in ObamaCare to finance ObamaCare.” It deserves repeal: “It’s bad for economic growth.”

Mr. Carlson: “But the overview here is that all the wealth, basically, in the last 10 years, has stuck to the top end. That’s one of the reasons we’ve had all the political turmoil, as you know. And so, kind of a hard sell to say ‘Yeah, we’re gonna repeal ObamaCare, but we’re gonna send more money to the people who’ve already gotten the richest over the last 10 years.’ I mean, that’s what this does, no? I’m not a leftist, it’s just—that’s true.”

“I’m not that concerned about it,” Mr. Ryan replied. Republicans promised to repeal ObamaCare, and they are.

Maybe he should be concerned.

Read the whole thing. If you want to see this particular part of the exchange between Carlson and Speaker Ryan, fast-forward to the 5:30 mark.

When you have the most famous hymnodist of the Reagan Era telling you that it’s time to change the tune, for heaven’s sake, you would have to be an idiot not to listen.