Rod Dreher's Blog, page 658

Benedict And Nothing

Funny piece from Matthew Loftus over the weekend, offering a Q&A for people who hate the Benedict Option. Excerpt:

Scene: A small cafe in a coastal urban city. BOB, a boring old believer, and his friend BEN are sipping their coffees as the autumn breeze ruffles the collars protruding from the necks of their sweater vests.



Bob: Thanks for inviting me out here, Ben. So tell me about this “Benedict Option” thing?

Ben: I’m so glad you asked! I’m really excited about it! Well, I’m not excited that it’s come to this. See, we have to start with understanding the cultural forces that have made orthodox Christianity so abhorrent to so many people, including the children of believers. A variety of historical shifts in art, education, and politics have precipitated a loss of cultural power for the Church in the West, so we have to study how our culture rejects orthodox belief for a syncretistic mixture of Christianity and either capitalistic nationalism or pseudoscientific progressivism.

Bob: Oh, you mean, like, missiology?

Ben: Yes, well, as I was saying, we’re at this unique cultural moment in history where orthodox faith is under attack from all sides and we’re barely communicating our faith to the next generation. Whether you’re in a strict fundamentalist and traditional church that drives your kids out the harder you try to control them or you’re in a loosey-goosey evanjellyfish congregation that tries to be more entertaining but only ends up looking less cool than the next flavor of the week, it’s just a disaster. We need a strategic attentiveness—a withdrawal, even—to focus internally on how we preach, teach, and catechize.

Bob: Oh, you mean, like, ecclesiology?

Ben: You’re not letting me finish. Anyway, but we aren’t just heading to the hills and bunkering up!

Et cetera. If I understand his point, he’s saying that the Benedict Option is nothing more than a fussy, entirely unnecessary repackaging of what Christians have always thought about: ecclesiology and missiology. He’s right, to a certain extent; I have tried to be clear that most of this is just basic church-being-church stuff.

There are a couple of important distinctives, though, that I don’t think Loftus, who is an Evangelical, gets. I say this with hesitation, because a guy who lives with his family in the West Baltimore ghetto, where he ministers, and who is preparing to move to Africa to serve as a medical missionary, hardly needs a lesson in Christianity from a flabby-butt bourgeois like me. Nevertheless, here they are — and if he has written about them elsewhere, please someone send them so I can be corrected.

From the satirical Q&A piece, I don’t get the idea that Loftus sees practices as key to formation and discipleship, and certainly not traditional Christian practices. Maybe this is what he means by “ecclesiology.” By “practices,” I don’t mean “actions”; plainly he’s a man who acts boldly and sacrificially for his faith. I’m talking about engaging in the kinds of ritual, repeated practices (like I wrote about the other day) that instantiate a particular Christian vision and memory within a community, and make it possible to pass it on from generation to generation.

Over the weekend I was at an event listening to a couple of Evangelical friends from the same denomination talking about how much things have changed in terms of worship practices within their churches over the years. I didn’t get to hear the end of the conversation, but when I stepped away, one was noting her concern that the main lesson her children are getting from church is that it is supposed to be entertaining. I would put a finer point on that, and say that this model of church makes us think that church is there to meet our needs, not that we are meant to pour ourselves into forms that have been established over a very long time. How can you have continuity with the past, and into the future, without durable forms and practices?

Second, though Loftus snarkily name-checks in passing Alasdair MacIntyre at the end, in fact MacIntyre’s critique is the genesis of the whole Ben Op project. If you ignore him, none of the Ben Op will make sense. How do you do ecclesiology and missiology in a culture in which Christian belief is think, and one that believes in nothing much more than the sovereignty of the Self? I don’t believe Loftus needs metaphysics to serve his neighborhood as he’s doing, but I do believe an indifference to metaphysics will hurt Christians trying to figure out how to hold on in the long term.

Here’s a glimpse of what I mean. The Orthodox theologian David Bentley Hart says that the challenge Christians face after the catastrophe of modernity is more daunting than most of us realize, and will require strong medicine:

For Christians, then, to recover and understand the meaning of the command to have “no other god,” it is necessary first to recognize that the victory of the Church in history was not only incomplete, but indeed set free a force that the old sacral order had at least been able to contain; and it is against this more formless and invincible enemy that we take up the standard of the commandment today.

Moreover, we need to recognize, in the light of this history, that this commandment is a hard discipline: it destroys, it breaks in order to bind; like a cautery, it wounds in order to heal; and now, in order to heal the damage it has in part inflicted, it must be applied again. In practical terms, I suspect that this means that Christians must make an ever more concerted effort to recall and recover the wisdom and centrality of the ascetic tradition. It takes formidable faith and devotion to resist the evils of one’s age, and it is to the history of Christian asceticism—especially, perhaps, the apophthegms of the Desert Fathers—that all Christians, whether married or not, should turn for guidance. To have no god but the God of Christ, after all, means today that we must endure the lenten privations of what is most certainly a dark age, and strive to resist the bland solace, inane charms, brute viciousness, and dazed passivity of post-Christian culture ” all of which are so tempting precisely because they enjoin us to believe in and adore ourselves.

It means also to remain aloof from many of the moral languages of our time, which are—even at their most sentimental, tender, and tolerant—usually as decadent and egoistic as the currently most fashionable vices. It means, in short, self-abnegation, contrarianism, a willingness not only to welcome but to condemn, and a refusal of secularization as fierce as the refusal of our Christian ancestors to burn incense to the genius of the emperor. This is not an especially grim prescription, I should add: Christian asceticism is not, after all, a cruel disfigurement of the will, contaminated by the world-weariness or malice towards creation that one can justly ascribe to many other varieties of religious detachment. It is, rather, the cultivation of the pure heart and pure eye, which allows one to receive the world, and rejoice in it, not as a possession of the will or an occasion for the exercise of power, but as the good gift of God. It is, so to speak, a kind of “Marian” waiting upon the Word of God and its fruitfulness. This is why it has the power to heal us of our modern derangements: because, paradoxical as it may seem to modern temperaments, Christian asceticism is the practice of love, what Maximus the Confessor calls learning to see the logos of each thing within the Logos of God, and it eventuates most properly in the grateful reverence of a Bonaventure or the lyrical ecstasy of a Thomas Traherne.

Hart titled the essay from which that passage comes “Christ and Nothing,” by which he means that for our civilization, having passed through Christianity, the only alternative belief left is Christianity or nihilism. By this he does not mean that people believe in nothing, but rather that anything else they try to believe in won’t really stick. You can contest that, of course, but I riffed on Hart’s title to express my belief that the Christianity of the future is going to have to be “Benedictine” in the sense of being rooted in historical, early-church foundations, order, and ordered ritual prayer, or it’s not going to survive in the wasteland of modernity. Without those roots, forms, and practices, I don’t see how Christianity in the West pulls through — and Moralistic Therapeutic Deism is not Christianity, but a counterfeit facsimile.

UPDATE: Rabbi Meir Soloveitchik makes much the same point in writing about what is missing from Conservative Judaism. He says that if Jews abandon Torah observance, they’re not going to be able to hold on to their Jewish identity over time. Excerpt:

In his groundbreaking 1957 study of Judaism in America, the sociologist Nathan Glazer explained that Judaism is not, and has never been, a faith founded only on creed; it has always been an all-encompassing way of life, its beliefs bound up with its “acts, rituals, habits.” For that very reason, Glazer wrote presciently, “Judaism is even more vulnerable to the unsettling influences of modernity than is Christianity.” Once a Jew finds it more convenient to abandon specific observances of his ancestors, he is left with “no body of doctrine to fall back on . . . . [U]nder these circumstances, an entire way of life disintegrate[s].” Writing many years later, Elliott Abrams built on Glazer’s point by colorfully describing his immigrant grandparents: in America “there was pressure to grab a non-kosher sandwich, to work on the Sabbath, to skip a prayer here and there. And as the ritual pillars began to collapse, they brought down with them the whole structure of faith for many American Jews.”

Sociologically speaking, there is little to argue with in this analysis. But there is a deeper reason why continuity has always been joined together with and dependent on faith and its actualization in practice. Commitment to the obligations of faith is what makes people realize they are part of something larger than themselves: something that they must perpetuate through their children not merely physically but spiritually. “In perpetuation,” writes Leon Kass, “we send forth not just the seed of our bodies, but also the bearer of our hopes, our truths, and those of our tradition.” By contrast, parents with no traditions or with no belief in the truth of their traditions have little or no incentive to ensure that their own way of life will be perpetuated by their children.

Cohen is correct: in the abstract, even a secular Jew can appreciate that father and mother embody, as Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik put it in Family Redeemed, “the greatness of man in toto.” But Rabbi Soloveitchik goes on to note that Abraham becomes the founder of Judaism not through his desire for a biological heir but through his larger determination to transmit his calling to those heirs: “I have chosen him because he will command his children and household after him, that they may preserve the ways of the Lord” (Genesis 18:19). With reverence for religious truth comes, often, a reverence for tradition and a readiness to sacrifice for its transmission.

“It is . . . both necessary and obvious to assert,” Cohen writes in the sentence that I quoted from earlier, “that the fate of the Jews as a people will rest first and foremost on the strength and character of the Jewish family.” In the end, this is only half-true. The fate of the Jews as a people—and Cohen himself hints as much at the very end of his essay—lies in the belief that we as Jews are different: that we are called, chosen, to obey a revelation truer than any other.

If Jews believe this with all their hearts and minds and souls, then the strength and character of their families are ensured. If they do not, then no matter how much they may admire the Jewish theology of the family, their resoluteness in the face of either hatred’s fury or assimilation’s embrace will not last more than a generation or two. To think otherwise is to commit what conservatives caution against: privileging the power of ideas over the lessons of experience.

Privileging the power of ideas over the lessons of experience. That’s a powerful line. A religion is transmitted through its culture — see Wilken’s “Church as Culture” essay — and by people within that culture who are convinced that they are part of something larger that they have the responsibility both to receive and to pass on to the next generation. Religion is not simply something we carry around in our heads, and it’s not something that can be preserved without some ritual forms observed by the community, and to which the community submits.

Ritual and culture is not enough; if it were, you wouldn’t have cradle Orthodox Christians leaving for Evangelicalism because they crave an experience of the living God, and feel that He is hidden beneath the celebration of the ethnos. But we must not make the corresponding modernist error, and assume that the ideas and convictions can take whatever form we choose to impose on them, and survive over time in our families.

Ex-Prostitute Accuses Vitter

One week away from the general election in Louisiana, and a New Orleans freelance journalist drops a daisy cutter on the gubernatorial campaign of Republican US Sen. David Vitter, who leads in the polls. In an interview, a former prostitute who claims she had a three-year relationship with the Congressman — who was caught in a prostitution scandal a few years back, and who admitted to non-specific sins — says that when she told her pro-life lover that he had made her pregnant, Vitter told her to have an abortion. She claims that she refused, and put the child up for adoption.

You can watch the interviews here. The reporter says that Vitter, through his lawyer, repeatedly refused to go on camera to address these allegations. This is how he has conducted his campaign: refusing to talk about his alleged past with prostitutes.

Clancy Dubos, publisher of the New Orleans-based newspaper Gambit, writes:

Now we know why David Vitter avoided so many live TV debates, why he wanted forum questions in advance, why he ducked the media after the two TV debates he did attend — and most of all, why he has never answered questions about the specifics of the “serious sin” to which he allegedly confessed in July 2007.

… This story is going to go viral, and Vitter will either have to answer all questions from the media or watch his campaign for governor implode in the final week. He cannot “manage” this crisis via press releases or prepared statements. The voters of Louisiana deserve a full, complete, open and no-holds-barred “come clean” from Vitter.

Absent that, we can all hit the “reset” button on this governor’s race.

He really is going to have to deal with this. If the election were held today, Vitter would probably beat his two GOP opponents, Scott Angelle and Jay Dardenne, and make it to the runoff with Democrat John Bel Edwards (Louisiana has an open primary system in which absent an outright majority in the first vote, the first two past the post go to a runoff). This bombshell could upend the race, though. Polling shows that Angelle and Dardenne are both far behind Vitter, and running neck and neck — but that 37 percent of voters are undecided.

People in Louisiana can put up with a prostitution scandal. Heck, they returned Vitter to office in 2010, even after this was known. But telling your pregnant lover to get an abortion while presenting yourself as a pro-life family values guy? I don’t know. That’s going to be a hard one to overcome, especially if you’ve spent the entire campaign avoiding venues where somebody might ask you about it.

A lot of Republican votes will be decided in the next week. Vitter, who is now running a commercial featuring his betrayed wife vouching for him, is going to have to talk, or his silence will say it all.

Francis Clears the Decks

Here’s America magazine’s rush translation of Pope Francis’s speech to the Synod today. Shorter Pope Francis: “Remember, I’m the Pope, and I make the decisions around here.”

The Jesuit Father Jim Martin knows that something is up:

@Pontifex‘s comments today suggest he’ll probably issue an “apostolic exhortation” at the end of the Synod, summing up the deliberations…

— James Martin, SJ (@JamesMartinSJ) October 17, 2015

 

of the Synod, and putting his personal stamp on the decisions and deliberations, as all other popes have done in the past. A prediction…

— James Martin, SJ (@JamesMartinSJ) October 17, 2015

Meaning, as you continue to read Fr. Jim’s thread, that the Pope is going to change the doctrine himself, call it pastoral practice, and expect them all to get in line, because he’s the Pope and they are Catholics. If this happens, then the Trads will have been proven right, and the fix really was in from the beginning. More:

All the Jesuit insiders have abandoned the Synodal pretext and are pre-promoting a papal document. I presume it is already finalized.

— Michael B Dougherty (@michaelbd) October 17, 2015

 

This IS happening, folks. If you think it won’t touch you, you’re wrong.

— Aaron Gigliotti (@GigliottiAaron) October 17, 2015

Transgenders Take Down Bar

A reader wrote in a comment on a different thread, re: anti-gay discrimination laws:

Those of you who think the only ones who need to worry are “small o” Christians who operate businesses related to weddings need to pay attention.

He’s talking about a court ruling last month in a case in which an Oregon bar owner — Chris Penner, who said half his staff was gay or lesbian — lost his business after asking a large transgender group to stop coming around his place. From the story:

The labor bureau’s Civil Rights Division began investigating and found no evidence to support Penner’s contention that the T-Girls disrupted business.

Instead, the bureau found substantial evidence of discrimination and tried to reach a settlement with Penner. When none was reached, Avakian took the case to a hearing.

Penner closed the Twilight Room Annex in April 2014 and laid off five employees after his bank accounts were seized in connection with the $400,000 judgment. The state also imposed $3,000 in civil penalties on Blachana and $2,000 on Penner.

Since Jan. 1, 2008, when the Equality Act took effect, the state labor bureau has received 24 complaints, only a handful of which have advanced to a hearing or remain under investigation. The majority of cases were closed for lack of substantial evidence, withdrawn because of a settlement or taken to state or federal court.

In a 2012 interview with The Oregonian/OregonLive, Penner said he is neither homophobic nor anti-transgender people. He once hosted a weekly queer dance night in the space, and a gay pool team has practiced in the bar. But, he said, other customers complained that the T-Girls left the stall doors open and seats up in the women’s restrooms. Business also had declined since the T-Girls started coming to the bar, he said.

In his appeal, Penner contended that he had not refused to provide service to anyone and that he had a constitutional right to express a desire that the T-Girls stop frequenting his business.

The court rejected the arguments, saying it agreed with Avakian that the voice messages were tantamount to denials of service.

From that 2012 interview, a quote from one of the phone messages the bar owner left:

“People think that A: We’re a tranny bar, or B: We’re a gay bar,” Penner said in the July 2012 message. “We are neither. People are not coming in because they just don’t want to be here on a Friday night now.”

[Complainant Cassandra] Lynn testified at a hearing before an administrative law judge that she could not sleep in the months after Penner’s voicemail. She was irritable at work and considered disbanding the group. Other girls said they stopped going out in public as women. They pulled away from friends, showed up late to work and gained weight.

… “The individuals had found a place at the P Club where they found they could share their lives, their stories. When that is stripped away, that is an indignity that is severe,” [Oregon state Labor Commissioner Brad] Avakian said.

An indignity so severe it prevents people from showing up to work on time? Really? I don’t believe a word of it. I am also skeptical that the state’s investigation found no evidence that the bar’s business went down after this large group of transgenders made it their Friday night gathering place. Most guys would find some other place to drink if their bar, which seems from context like it was something of a sports bar, became known as a transgender hangout, and probably most girls too, because who wants a penis person in the stall next to them in the ladies room?

Nevertheless, the state’s investigation found grounds to support the complainants, and no grounds to support the bar owner — who is now an ex-bar owner, because the lawsuit ruined him. Even if the state’s investigation was fairly done, and the bar owner truly broke the state’s anti-discrimination law in this case, consider that if a large group of men who dress like women decide to colonize your sports bar, and start using the ladies room, you have no grounds on which to ask them to leave. (And before you ask, I think that the owner of a lesbian bar should have the right to ask a large group of fraternity boys who frequented her bar to find somewhere else to drink.)

The reader who pointed me to this story adds:

Again, note. This is not a Christian whose conscience being violated, but a bar owner who complained because of what was being done to his bottom line. He got hit with a discrimination suit, nonetheless.

This is what happens at the state level when the LGBT lobby realizes some of its agenda. The public is obligated, under force of law and threat of punishment to regard any man who throws on a dress as a woman. Furthermore, the State wields an iron fist with a hair trigger, smashing down on any who do not agree, for whatever reason — whether because of Christian conscience or for purely secular, economic reasons.

The man is liable for $400,000 because he left those two ill-advised phone messages. His business is destroyed, and his employees, gay and straight both, are out of work. Good work, LGBT lobby. Good work, State of Oregon.

Do You Agree, Or Are You a Bad Person?

A reader sends the above image, adding:

My wife is a senior at a public university studying to become an elementary teacher. She attended a transgender workshop to help teachers deal with situations involving transgender elementary students. This was part of the handout that all the workshop students received. It says, “If you do not ‘agree’ with transgendered persons, how will you NOT discriminate?” Note especially the word “agree” in scare quotes, implying that ideological disagreement with transgenderism is really a farce to hide hate.

I think this might help Christians brace themselves for what is coming especially in public schools. This is as blatant as I’ve seen yet.

What about you conservatives in this blog’s readership who did not wear purple on October 15 to participate in “Spirit Day,” GLAAD’s invented holiday to denounce bullying of LGBT youth? I absolutely oppose bullying of all kinds, but had I been in a school or workplace whose leadership encouraged observing Spirit Day, I would not have donned the purple. It’s not because I am indifferent to bullying of LGBT kids — to the contrary, I think schools must take a very strong stand against all kinds of bullying, and probably a more punitive stand than many liberals would advocate. It’s that I would not want to be co-opted by GLAAD, and give the impression that being against bullying means that one is for GLAAD’s agenda.

These things are almost always about virtue signaling, nothing more. Notice in the example that the reader sent, the framing of the transgender issue is about agreement. What on earth would it mean to say that you don’t “agree” with transgenderism? As if something as fathomlessly complex as human sexuality and gender could be boiled down to a yes/no question.

In fact, that is precisely the point: frame it as a matter of agreement, and that way you force the dissenters to identify themselves, so you can weed them out.

If some anti-bullying organization that had nothing to do with LGBT put together a similar show-your-colors campaign, I almost certainly wouldn’t wear their stupid bracelet even though if I agreed with them 100 percent, because I am a contrarian who hates the conformity of virtue signaling.

Cupich Drops a Bomb

The Spirit of Vatican II™ is the gift that keeps on giving:

Archbishop Blase Cupich of Chicago — who is participating in the Synod of the Family at Pope Francis’ personal invitation — said at a press scrum in the Vatican press office this afternoon that the conscience is “inviolable” and that he believes divorced and remarried couples could be permitted to receive the sacraments, if they have “come to a decision” to do so “in good conscience” – theological reasoning that he indicated in response to a follow-up question would also apply to gay couples.

During the lengthy press briefing, the archbishop also spoke approvingly of the so-called “Kasper Proposal,” which would permit divorced and remarried Catholics to receive Communion in some cases. Cupich explained that he had distributed Cardinal Walter Kasper’s book, The Gospel of the Family, in which the cardinal had laid out this proposal, to all of the priests in his diocese.

“In Chicago I visit regularly with people who feel marginalized: the elderly, the divorced and remarried, gay and lesbian individuals and also couples. I think that we really need to get to know what their life is like if we’re going to accompany them,” he said.

When asked to give a concrete example of how he would accompany the divorced and remarried in their desire to receive the sacraments, Cupich replied: “If people come to a decision in good conscience then our job is to help them move forward and to respect that. The conscience is inviolable and we have to respect that when they make decisions, and I’ve always done that.”

“Conscience is inviolable,” eh? It’s almost like, “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.”

Cupich, recall, was Pope Francis’s first major US appointment, and was personally selected by the Pope to be a Synod father. Audio snippets of the Archbishop’s presser here:

When Kuyper Meets Benedict

My Southern Baptist pal and co-conspirator Andrew T. Walker bridges the gap between St. Benedict and Abraham Kuyper (1837-1920), the Neo-Calvinist thinker whose thought and work is highly influential among many conservative Protestants today. Walker calls the Benedict Option a “turn to deliberative Christianity.” That’s fair. Then:

Dreher’s proposal has also received a lot of criticism. Critics accuse Dreher of a newfound and rebranded quietism or pietism—a Christianity that shirks social responsibility and instead retreats to the hills. These critics often hail from the transformationalist camp of Christianity, a paradigm that believes that Christianity must always engage with the forefront of culture for the sake of mission or else it will run the risk of disobeying the inherently transformative nature of Christianity. Many look to the 19th century Dutch polymath Abraham Kuyper as the forerunner of Transformationalism or neo-Calvinism. For our purposes, let’s refer to this as the “Kuyper Option.” I’ve even heard this sentiment referred to as “The Wilberforce Option” at the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission on the Gospel and Politics conference in honor of William Wilberforce whose Christian presence in 19th century England helped bring slavery to an end as an institution.

Walker says that the Ben Op and the “Kuyper Op” don’t have to be at odds with each other. He interprets (again, correctly) my Ben Op thinking as saying not that we have to become Anabaptists, withdrawing fully from public life for the sake of the Gospel, but rather that the state of the Church in post-Christianity, and the nature of our secularism, is such that some form of retreat is vital if we are going to nurture properly the inner life of the Church, so it can be the Church in the world.

The Kuyperians, or Transformationalists, are strongly mission-minded, and there is certainly nothing wrong with that, and much right with it. But if they are going to succeed in this time and in this place, they are going to need a great deal more interior building.

More Walker:

I see the primary difference in the two paradigms as between an interior Christianity (Benedict) and an exterior Christianity (Kuyper). Transformationalists insist upon scaling the walls of every sector of culture in order to see Christ’s Lordship ultimately stamped upon it. Here, Kuyper needs Benedict. To scale the walls, it will require a type of people that are formed and self-aware. An interior concern is conscious of who Christians must be in order to exist. An exterior approach is conscious of what Christians do to live faithfully.

Now, there may be serious disagreement between the camps between what each thinks what influence is feasible at the moment. That, I believe, might be the biggest point of conflict. Dreher is pessimistic about opportunities to see change happen and believes that the secularist advance is dominant and unstoppable in the short term. To him, we are irreparably post-Christian in the short-term. The Transformationalists, on the other hand, believe that no momentary hesitation or acknowledged self-retreat is allowable. If there’s an opportunity to influence the culture, it should be taken because Christ’s Lordship over the cosmos requires a witness heralding this lordship over every arena of life and culture. A Kuyper Option understands that Christianity, by definition, is public truth.

A congruence of a Transformationalist Benedict Option may mean, supremely, that our method and expectations change.

And:

But let me say very soberly: There will not be transformation in the headwinds now facing us if there isn’t deep identity and resolve to orthodox Christianity. No longer can parents simply rely on an ambient culture to disciple their kids in the way of the American way of life if the American way of life means subliminal paganism. There’s a realization setting in that the faith of their childhood cannot be passively absorbed. It will require catechesis. I see this happening within my own ranks of conservative Christianity, most of which unabashedly loves culture and wants to benefit it.

Yes, yes, yes. We conservative Christians are by and large not prepared to live in the world as it is now, because we don’t fully appreciate its challenges, and are not doing the contemplative work relative to these changing times. I’m thinking this morning of folks I met on this recent trip back East, who told me about educated, successful people in their own Christian communities who don’t grasp how their uncritical embrace of their lifestyle within the culture of professional advancement and meritocracy undermines the orthodox Christianity they profess, and would like to pass on to their children. Too often they conflate Christianity with the American Way of Life, and don’t see what they’re doing because they believe that personal piety suffices to cover a multitude of disorders. I confess that I am also guilty of this more often than I care to think.

See, this is why we small-o orthodox Christians need each other in this project. We are seeing the same things within the broader Church in America, and within our own churches. And we can bring our particular experiences and insights to bear on building the resistance. I don’t expect that Evangelicals interested in the Benedict Option will become Orthodox, or Catholic, but I do hope that they will be able to find things in the life and practices of the older, more contemplative churches that help root them more firmly in a structure of prayer and living. And I hope that Orthodox and Catholic Christians will be able to benefit from the admirable passion that Evangelicals have for acting in this world for the sake of the Gospel.

Read the whole thing. 

By the way, here’s an amusing and helpful Improbable Guide to the Rule of St. Benedict, a one-sentence summary of each chapter of the Rule. It was devised by Brandon Buerge, with whom one imagines one would like to drink a beer.

 

The Impractical Ben Op

Two days after my trip to DC and Charlottesville, and I’m still reflecting on how much it helped me clarify some things on the Benedict Option. I don’t want to get too deeply into detail here, because some of these conversations were private. The gist of it, though, were plenty of stories about how many Christians sense that something is seriously wrong with our culture today and the church’s relationship to it, but how deeply reluctant people are to do anything about it that would require them to be countercultural in ways that discomfit them — that is, conflict with the American Way of Life, as they conceive it. That’s a fault.

But it’s also the case, I heard, that the structure of American life today requires so much from families that it is hard for them to do it even if they want to. This is not their fault, and it’s a real problem, and it has to be faced as we collaborate to figure out what the Benedict Option is, and must be.

On this front, I continue to be grateful for my friend Jake Meador’s attention to the Benedict Option. Jake writes as a young Evangelical family man who lives in Nebraska, and who is deeply aware of the necessity for the Ben Op, and the obstacles to it. In his most recent reflection, Jake takes on the Ben Op’s impracticality. 

He says that the busy-ness of everyday life means that well-intentioned Ben Oppish works

often fail due to a lack of time, energy, or resources (either physical or mental).

This, I suspect, will continue to be one of the chief practical problems facing the Benedict Option: How can we recover a way of life shaped more like that of the historic church while generally not having access to the sorts of cultural and social capital that have historically nurtured and sustained that way of life?

Put another way—many of us lack the spiritual, social, familial, and economic resources that held church communities together in the past. This is where the felt need for BenOp-type communities comes from. And yet it is precisely the lack of those resources that makes acquiring even a proxy for them so incredibly difficult.

And the problem does not exist on a purely practical or logistical level, although the problems there are considerable. There is also an academic problem here as well. The sort of social critique that the BenOp rests on is reliant upon categories and ways of thinking that are not native to most contemporary Americans and thus require some amount of work to understand.

Jake goes on to say that we probably need to think small about the Ben Op before we can think big:

We need a way of talking about smaller, simpler steps that individual Christians and churches can take to address these problems. In the long run, starting rural communes, new churches, new schools, and the like is the way forward. But in the short-term we need smaller ideas in order to build a bridge between where we are today and where we want to be.

Read the whole thing. You know who’s got the right idea? Leah Libresco, who told me at dinner last weekend, “I’m the person who will tell you, ‘I can’t make the first thing you want happen, but here’s the second-best thing, so let’s do it!'” Or something to that effect. What she’s saying is that we can’t let the perfect become the enemy of the good. It’s more important to do something, however insufficient, than to do nothing. As she writes in the post I link to at her name above:

I asked both speakers [Ken Myers and Rod Dreher — RD] what they would recommend that people in the audience do now (either this week, or, if possible, this afternoon) that could be a good first step toward future BenOp projects, but also just good in itself.  (To preclude the temptation that I’m vulnerable to, too, I specified the action shouldn’t be “Read [X]“).  Between the two of them, they came up with:

Invite someone/a group to dinner
Memorize a poem (nourishing through arts)
Adopt a prayer rule (simple is fine, but let it be rooted in some kind of tradition, rather than purely choose-your-own-adventure)

I liked all of these, and 1 and 3 are ones that I do.  They’re nice because they’re the start of a habit, but don’t require an extraordinary effort to begin.

My prayer rule, in case you’re wondering, is Morning and Evening Office, but it’s a little less stable than I’d like at present.  I’ve pegged it to commutes before, but my working schedule doesn’t allow it, so there’s more ad hoc fitting it in (or missing it!) than I’d like.

A prayer rule touches on some of the stability/institutional character of the Benedict Option.  It doesn’t technically involve others, but it could if it’s the kind of thing you can invite others into.  For families, this is a little more straightforward, but people with housemates can see if others are interested, and I’ve asked others to join me for my Evening Prayer practice at the end of alumni debates, on the way home from bars with friends, etc.  Having a regular practice helps keep me on track, and also gives me something to be hospitable with.

Choosing a prayer rule is the kind of challenge that can be derailed by the desire to get it right, and therefore put off beginning.  In general, I think it makes sense to start with something (maybe even this evening, if you have a candidate in mind) and to revise as you go, if needed.  And it’s a good idea to pick something you are pretty sure you can do, even if it means you’re picking something that feels too small (an Anima Christi when you wake up and before bed?)

At a talk the next day, I recommended to the audience that they start fasting regularly, according to some kind of rule. For Orthodox Christians, this means no meat or dairy on most Wednesdays and Fridays. If that’s too much, just do it on Friday. No meat on Friday — how hard is that? It’s not. But it gets you into the habit of denying yourself for the sake of drawing closer to God, and that is the key thing.

One more Ben Op thing before I get off my soapbox for the day. If you have the time, please watch this Robert Louis Wilken lecture on religion and culture today. The talk itself is 33 minutes long, and there’s about another half hour of Q&A. Wilken, as you know, is one of the greatest patristics scholars alive, and he’s also blessed with the gift of being able to talk (and write) like a normal person, not an academic.

The lecture, which was delivered this past summer at a First Things forum, never mentions the Ben Op, but it is filled with wisdom key to its core. Wilken talks about Augustine and Dostoevsky, and quotes the Grand Inquisitor’s line to Jesus:  “The mystery of man’s being is not only in living, but in what one lives for.”

 

What do we live for? That is, to what end are our loves ordered? Are they ordered at all. Freedom from constraint is very different from freedom for virtue. “Paradoxical as it sounds,” says Wilken, “true freedom is only found in obedience.”

Miracle, mystery, and authority bind us to God, says Wilken, referring, of course, to the Grand Inquisitor fable. But these things are not the same as faith. They are, I would say, icons through which we can see God. If they are substitutes for God, they become idols. This is why the Benedict Option will fail if it is taken as nothing more than a technique to keep the disorders of modernity at bay. 

In the Q&A part, Wilken tells a questioner that the desire to do what we want to do rather than what we should do — that is, to conceive of liberty as license — has always been with humanity, because it’s fun. We’re human; we’re built that way. We desire. Said Wilken, “The modern dilemma is that we have pitched aside the assumptions that restrain that.”

A high school teacher who asked a question said the kids he teaches are good kids, for the most part, but they’re moral relativists. This is the water they swim in. How can he make them see the truth and care about it? he asks.

“Your own life. Your own life! That’s the most powerful thing,” says Wilken. “There’s no way you’re going to argue somebody into it, especially not a 16 year old boy.”

 

The kind of truth that moves men’s hearts and changes their lives is not propositional, Wilken continues. “The truth is in the talking and the truth is in the doing. It’s not in some concept that you agree to.”

This, I think, is the core of the Benedict Option. It is important that we find a different and countercultural way to think about our life in a post-Christian age. But that only matters if it is a prelude to entering into a different and countercultural way to live.

You need people like me to find ways of talking about these ideas that allow ordinary Christians to make sense of them. And you need people like the indefatigably cheerful Leah Libresco, the Catherine of Siena of the Yes We Can Catholics, to find ways to implement them, and to encourage us not to give up hope.

Muscle, Memory & the Death of St. Stan’s

A Catholic reader, reflecting on my post about memory, society, and the Benedict Option, sent in this story, which I publish with his permission. It’s amazing, just amazing:

Because I think it’s related to the BenOp in some remote way, and because it has to do with memory, and because my sister and I were just talking about it and feeling sad/mad, let me tell you about St. Stanislaus, in the heart of Fell’s Point in Baltimore.

My sister moved there in about 1993. I got there in 1996. Fell’s Point was already well on its way to gentrifying, but it still had a really interesting mix of old Polish ladies, aging frat boys, hippies, dock workers, etc. St. Stan’s still had a Catholic grade school, as did another Catholic church a few blocks up, so there were still families there, obviously, all living in aging row homes in walking distance of the water, tourist traps and about a bajillion bars, some of which opened at 6 am for people coming off third shift. I loved it there.

At any rate, St. Stan’s was a focal point of the weirdness. It was a beautiful old Polish church with some very devout old ladies. It was also major part of the local culture. The enormous and raucous Fell’s Point Festival saw every drunk in town along with thousands of tourists stumbling around the place, including the parking lot of St. Stan’s, which ran its own beer garden. They had a huge Coors Light sign hanging across the buildings. They regularly had polka masses, which instead of the church were held in the basement, in folding chairs. The reasoning was that the old ladies could not walk up the stairs top the main chapel. But I seem to recall that they had to walk down into the basement and back up out of it. Maybe there was an elevator, but we never saw it. I like to think there wasn’t one. At any rate, one week I was there with my sister and her future husband. He and I sat in our chairs in the back row. I kicked something under my seat. It was a handle of Crown Royal.

For some reason they did their communion line backwards. They started with the people in the back, who ran into the people coming after them as they tried to get back to their seats. It was like a ballet. They made it work, but we screwed it up and botched the line entirely. We were at a stand still until an old nun put both her hands directly in the middle of my back and shoved me back into a seat without saying a word. It was awesome.

At any rate, St. Stan’s closed in 2000, just a few months before I left town. As such, I kind of feel like I was there for the end of the “real” Fell’s Point. I know that’s how every gentrifier feels, but honestly, something changed. They were planning to use the space for ridiculously expensive townhomes. Who needs a school when the place is for young, rich college grads who have no kids? And the dock workers and drunks can live somewhere else, as that was PRIME real estate.

At any rate, all these years later, out of curiosity, I tried to find out what became of the church. Turns out the local parishioners wanted it to become a museum of Polish history. The Franciscan order that owned it had other ideas, which included $800,000 townhomes. The Franciscans won, but they never did put in the $800,000 townhomes. They did save the church, though. So what did it become? It is actually worse than I thought:

http://www.sanctuarybody.com/our-studio

It’s  GYM. Holy balls, it’s a GYM! I’d rather it was… anything but a gym! Townhomes would have been better. Worse, it’s a gym that tries to build on the building’s history by talking about itself as a SPIRITUAL gym. So yeah. Memory. In the service of…http://blog.thenewcenturyschool.com/2013/05/24/sanctuary-bodyworks-an-exercise-haven/

Gag. Gag!

I know that’s not fair. Good health is great. But I remember that Crown Royal and the Coors Light beer garden and the angry nun, who was stronger than any gym rat I have ever met and I think… this is progress?

Now listen. I am not a heritage absolutist. If I wanted it to be something else I should have bought it. But gadzooks.

And yeah. I guess the world is a different place and 120 years after the thing was built, it’s not like that neighborhood had any kids in it that would benefit from the school because…

But wait a minute…

What happened to the school? Seeing that there aren’t really kids down there and there’s no need for a school, I guess it was time to make room for…

THE SCHOOL!

That’s right. Directly next to the church, where the school was, you can now find… a school. It’s called “The New Century School.” It’s for ages two through fifth grade. It’s doing so well that they are adding a middle school one grade at a time.

http://www.thenewcenturyschool.com/

Got that? It’s a special school. Where you learn to become fluent in Chinese and Spanish.

So. Not enough Catholic kids in the area to support a private school. But a school for people who for some reason need to know Chinese and Spanish? Can’t build ’em fast enough.

Yeah, well… who can afford tuition at St. Stan’s?

Dunno. But the tuition at The New Century School is about $12,000 per year. I don’t have the data in front of me, but I bet that St. Stan’s tuition was maybe half that, and the church paid the difference. And that they couldn’t support it anymore so they closed it. But it turns out that there are lots of people in Baltimore who are interested in a private education, and are willing to pay $12,000 a year. They just want the focus to be on foreign languages.

And of course, you and I know that the Catholic church has no access to or interest in language instruction because…

Wait a minute. What I meant to say is that the Catholic church OWNS the discussion about access to and interest in language instruction. And that if any institution in the whole world could lay claim to teaching foreign languages to young people, it’d be the Catholic church. But instead of running that school, they walked away and let someone else run it and charge the full boat tuition they needed.

That’s not a criticism. Just an observation. And clearly, the world is a different place and downtown Baltimore probably doesn’t need a gargantuan cathedral and a school every three blocks like they once did. And maybe upper middle class strivers would be less willing to pay tuition at a language school if the tuition also got them some religious instruction as part of the deal, although I think that the presence of Catholic schools in the wealthy exurbs argues otherwise.

Balls. Either way, I feel compelled to go drink beer in their parking lot, just on principle. And to find that old nun, take her into the gym and have her crush everyone in a bench pressing contest. I am hoping the Crown Royal is still in the basement. I’l be needing it.

All of which is to say, memory is a really interesting concept. But it’s one that can be commodified just like anything else. Look at it Rod. LOOK AT IT! One of the links above actually uses a header that says, “He sells sanctuary” in discussing the owner of the gym. I appreciate the reference to the great song by The Cult (The Cult!), but still. And this. Just… this:

“If a former cathedral strikes you as being an incongruous site for a gym (the one divine, the other traditionally considered fully secular), think again. Owner Brandon Hallock’s choice of the former church to open his “bodyworks” was quite deliberate. Consider the name he gave it: Sanctuary—it’s not just a playful take on the building’s origins. Mr. Hallock says he wanted to create a “more therapeutic, spa-like, relaxing atmosphere—a retreat from urban living.” He even kept as is or repurposed architectural elements from the church to maintain the peaceful ambience this hallowed place continues to impart. Though no longer a place of religious worship, and re-created to focus on the physical body, it is nevertheless inherently spiritual.”

More. Therapeutic. Just thought I’d point that out for you.

Again, St. Stan’s couldn’t fill the seats. Couldn’t pay the bills. It basically had to close, and at least someone managed to find something to do with it. From a very personal standpoint, however, that transformation made that a less interesting place. And a lesser place. For me. I know. It made it a better place for people who can afford $800,000 townhomes and want their kids to be tri-lingual in Chinese, Spanish and English and can afford $12,000 per year. So they get that place.

Meh. I have my own memories. Angry nuns, Crown Royal, Coors Light and polka masses in the basement. That’s what I find therapeutic. I don’t know the details, so I can’t say that the gym guy or the parishoners or the bishop or the Franciscans did anything wrong here. Reality is reality and neighborhoods change. The church is building schools in other areas, so maybe it’s a win, writ large.

But I would not join that gym, Rod. I wouldn’t!

The reader adds in a follow-up e-mail:

Just in case you didn’t read the whole link, Rod, I decided I might ruin your day by pointing this out:

“The architects who transformed the space skillfully combined new industrial brick and steel with the existing graceful arches and faded though still ornate painted designs. Images of saints, their facial features somewhat rubbed away by time, hover on ceilings and walls as if sanctioning your fitness efforts.”

Yes. As if! Because they certainly would! Yes, my son, THIS is why I gave myself to martyrdom: So you can impress with rock-hard abs and toned buttocks. YES, my daughter, one more rep so you can justify wearing that halter top to Preakness this year!

Yes, Rod. Here they are dismantling the pipe organ. Look at the faded Saints.

You and I have enough theology to know that these saints are SCREAMING for solid pecs and perky breasts and therapeutically enhanced upper arms. DO they seem dismayed in these photos? I suspect it has to do with their disappointment in the overall level of TONE they see in the world.

Yes, Rod. With their facial features somewhat rubbed away by time, it’s as if these saints sanction our fitness efforts. Hovering, as they are, on the walls and ceilings.

I have nothing to add to this. It’s perfect. I would point out that on its website, Sanctuary Bodyworks sells itself as, get this: “Your Body, Our Temple.”

Could their possibly be a more powerful symbol of what we have lost as Christianity has faded from our collective life? What was once a place to worship God and perfect one’s soul is now a place for worship of Self and perfection of one’s body.

We deserve what we get.

What Francis Does vs. What He Says

Nice, huh?:

Pope Francis today asked for forgiveness for scandals that have taken place in the Church, the Vatican and also in the city of Rome.

Before beginning his catechesis at his weekly general audience, in which he underlined the need to remain loyal to the promises we give to our children, the Holy Father said:

“In the name of the Church, I would like to ask you for forgiveness for the scandals that have happened in these recent times, whether in Rome or in the Vatican, for which I ask forgiveness.”

 

Speaking much, much louder than Pope Francis’s words is his granting of the prominent place of Belgian Cardinal Godfried Danneels in the Synod on the Family now underway in Rome.

There is no charitable way to read this. In 2010, a secret recording of a meeting Danneels had with Bishop Roger Vangheluwe and the bishop’s 42-year-old nephew, whom he had molested throughout virtually his entire childhood, was made public. The man told the cardinal that he needed help. Excerpts from a Reuters story of the time:

What do you really want?” asks Danneels, cutting the victim off by saying he already knows the story and doesn’t need to hear it again. When the man says “I give you the responsibility, I can’t decide … you should do what you think should be done, because I don’t know how this whole system works.”

“Do you want this to be made public?” the cardinal asks. “I leave that to you,” the victim responds. Then Danneels begins his effort to convince him to keep the lid on the problem: “The bishop will step down next year, so actually it would be better for you to wait.”

“No, I can’t agree that he takes his leave in glory, I can’t do that,” the victim replies.

The transcript is too long for me to translate all of it here and the only English version I’ve seen is too rough to be recommended. In any case, the exchange only gets worse. At one point, Danneels ducks and weaves trying to fend off the victim’s pleas to inform the Church hierarchy about Vangheluwe’s misdeeds. He says he has no authority over the bishop, only the pope does. When the victim suggests Danneels arrange a meeting with the pope, the cardinal gives the flip reply: “The pope isn’t that easy to reach.” A little later, he says: “I don’t think you’d do yourself or him a favor by shouting this from the rooftops.”

At another point, Danneels suggests the victim admit his guilt and ask for forgiveness. “Who do I have to ask forgiveness from?” the surprised man asks. When the cardinal remarks that going public would put the bishop in a quandary, the victim replies: “I’ve been living my whole life in a quandary … I was brought up Catholic. I see the institution is wavering, I read the newspapers and so I think I have a duty to do this. How can I get my children to believe something that has such a background? I can’t. That’s just always shoving it onto the next generation. And everything stays the same. That’s not what the Church is for.”

When Danneels suggests the victim may be trying to blackmail the Church, the man pleads with him to take up this case, saying there has to be someone in the Church who can handle it because he cannot bring himself to expose his uncle on his own. “We were forced to get married by him, our children were baptised by him, how can I explain this to them?” he asked. “Yesterday I said to my oldest son, look, this is what happened to me. They must know what has happened.”

The exchange goes on with Danneels repeatedly arguing he has no power to do anything and that the whole story would come out if Vangheluwe were forced to resign. That’s when the victim asked: “Why do you feel so sorry for him and not for me? … You’re always trying to defend him. I thought I was going to get some support, but I have to sit here and defend myself against things I can’t do anything about.”

There’s more, but you get the drift. I apologize for the long quote, but it’s important to read the details here, to get a sense of how morally repulsive the Belgian cardinal’s actions are. This is the kind of man Pope Francis chose as a Synod on the Family father. 

There are other reasons why the wicked Danneels, who the retired archbishop of Mechelen-Brussels, has no business at a Synod on the Family (read about them here). But his behavior in the Vangheluwe case is the most outrageous. Pope Francis can apologize all he wants to the victims, but his favoring of Danneels, who by his own account helped engineer Francis’s accession to the papal throne via his “mafia club,” speaks louder, and more definitively.

This Danneels scandal was widely reported at the time. There is no way that Francis didn’t know about it before he appointed this elderly cretin to the Synod. If this Pope really understood what the abuse scandal has done to victims and their families, and to the credibility of the Roman Catholic Church and its leadership, the thought of appointing Danneels to the Synod on the Family — the Family! — would have been unthinkable.

It is always, always, always more important to watch what popes and bishops do about sex abuse rather than to listen to what they say. Talk is cheap grace.