The Benedict Option: A Strategy for Christians in a Post-Christian Nation

by Rod Dreher

Christian metaphysical realism—was

Metaphysical realism tells us that the awe we feel in the presence of nature, beauty, or goodness—the feeling that there must be more than what we experience with our senses—is a reasonable intuition.

For example, the yearning for meaning and truth that all humans have, says David Bentley Hart, “is simply a manifestation of the metaphysical structure of all reality.”

This idea implies that objects have no intrinsic meaning, only the meaning assigned to them, and therefore no meaningful existence outside the mind. A

Medieval metaphysicians believed nature pointed to God. Nominalists did not.

modern world possible—but as we will see, it also set the stage for man enthroning himself in the place of God.

For all these reasons, the Model broke apart. Metaphysical realism had been defeated. What emerged was a new individualism, a this-worldliness that would inaugurate the historical period called the Renaissance.

What was being reborn in the Renaissance? The classical spirit of ancient Greece and Rome, which had gone into eclipse following the fifth-century collapse of the Western Roman Empire, and

the subsequent advent of the Christian medieval period.

Renaissance humanism began to consider the world through classical insights and emphasized the study of poetry, rhetoric, and other disciplines we now call the humanities.

Christian humanism was far more individualistic than what came before it, and it sought to Christianize the classical model of the hero, the man of virtue.

Renaissance Rome was a cesspit of vice, and

It took an Augustinian monk named Martin Luther to shatter their illusions—and with it, the religious unity of the West. The Reformation, as we call the revolution he started, was not the first protest movement against Catholic Church corruption, but it was the first to hack at the theological and ecclesiological roots of Roman Catholicism itself.

In 1520, the Vatican excommunicated Luther for refusing to recant his belief that Scripture alone—as distinct from Scripture and the authoritative interpretation of the Roman church—was the source of Christian truth.

Because religion was inseparable from politics and culture, the Reformation, and the Catholic Counter-Reformation, quickly led to a series of savage wars that shredded Europe.

The era overturned the Aristotelian-Christian cosmos—a hierarchical model of reality in which all things exist organically through their relationship to God—in favor of a mechanical universe ordered by laws of nature, with no necessary grounding in the transcendent.

Most leaders of the Scientific Revolution were professing Christians, but the revolution’s grounding lay undeniably in nominalism.

You should accept nothing as truth on the basis of authority, and you should even doubt your senses.

What Descartes did—and what makes him the father of modern philosophy—was to invert the

medieval approach to knowledge.

But from the Christian point of view, Enlightenment liberalism contained the seeds of Christianity’s undoing.

Around the same time, artists and intellectuals began to rebel against Enlightenment reason and the effects of the Industrial Revolution. The Romantics, as they were called, found many aspects of the new rationalist, mechanized society distasteful but had no interest in returning to the Christian world. They prized emotion, individuality, nature, and personal freedom.

Alexis de Tocqueville, a young French aristocrat traveling through America in 1831–32, observed Rousseau’s egalitarian ideals in practice. In Democracy in America, Tocqueville concluded that democracy was the future of Europe, but observed that with its drive for equality, which entailed making standards relative to the majority’s will, democracy risked eliminating the virtues that made self-rule possible. Democracies will succeed only if “mediating institutions,” including the churches, thrive.

None of that progress—scientific, technological, economic, political, or social—prevented Europe from turning itself into a charnel house.

Sigmund Freud, the founder of psychoanalysis,

found his true genius not as a scientist but as a quasi-religious figure who discerned and proclaimed the Self as a deity to replace the Christian religion.

To Freud, religion was nothing more than a man-made mechanism to cope with life and to manage instincts that, if allowed to run free, would make civilization impossible.

Freud’s answer was to replace religion with psychology. In his therapeutic vision, we should stop the fruitless searching for a nonexistent source of meaning and instead seek self-fulfillment. The pursuit of happiness was not a quest for unity with God, or sacrificial dedication to a cause greater than oneself but rather a search to satisfy the Self.

The 1960s were the decade in which Psychological Man came fully into his own. In that decade, the freedom of the individual to fulfill his own desires became our cultural lodestar, and the rapid falling away of American morality from its Christian ideal began as a result. Despite a conservative backlash in the 1980s, Psychological Man won decisively and now owns the culture—including most churches—as surely as the Ostrogoths, Visigoths, Vandals, and other conquering peoples owned the remains of the Western Roman Empire.

A culture begins to die, he went on, “when its normative institutions fail to communicate ideals in ways that remain inwardly compelling, first of all to the cultural elites themselves.”

The new order found its constitutional confirmation in the Supreme Court’s 1992 Planned Parenthood vs. Casey decision reaffirming abortion rights. Justice Anthony Kennedy, writing for the pro-choice majority, explained (no doubt unintentionally) how the Sexual Revolution depends on a radical, even nihilistic, conception of freedom: 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. Here is the end point of modernity: the autonomous, freely choosing individual, finding meaning in no one but himself.

In this sense, Christians today may think we stand in opposition to secular culture, but in truth we are as much creatures of our own time as secular people are. As Charles Taylor puts it, “The entire ethical stance of moderns supposes and follows on from the death of God (and of course, of the meaningful cosmos).” We may deny that God is dead, but to accept religious individualism and its theological support structure, Moralistic Therapeutic Deism, is to declare that God may not be quite dead, but he is in hospice care and confined to the bed.

Fourteenth century: The defeat of metaphysical realism by nominalism in

medieval theological debates removed the linchpin linking the transcendent and the material worlds. In nominalism, the meaning of objects and actions in the material world depends entirely on what man assigns it.

The Sexual Revolution exalted the desiring individual as the center of the emerging social order, deposing an enfeebled Christianity as the Ostrogoths deposed the hapless last emperor of the Western Roman Empire in the fifth century.

The long journey from a medieval world wracked with suffering but pregnant with meaning has delivered us to a place of once unimaginable comfort but emptied of significance and connection.

shadow,” said the writer Ursula K. Le Guin.12 The shadow of the Enlightenment’s failure to replace God with reason has engulfed the West and plunged us into a new Dark Age. There is no way through this except to push forward to the true dawn. We who still hold the golden thread loosely in our hands must seize it more tightly and cling to it for future generations, or it will be torn from our grasp.

This means the discovery of the order, the logos, that God has written into the nature of Creation and seeking to live in harmony with it.

Unlike the secular successors to the nominalists, the Benedictine monk does not believe that things of the world have meaning only if people choose to give them meaning.

people today have been tricked by liquid modernity into believing that maximizing individual happiness should be the goal of life. The gyrovague, the villain

Saint Benedict’s Rule, is the hero of postmodernity.

How do we take Benedictine wisdom out of the monastery and apply it to the challenges of worldly life in the twenty-first century?

The Benedict Option draws on the virtues in the Rule to change the way Christians approach politics, church, family, community, education, our jobs, sexuality, and technology.

And it does so with urgency. When I first told Father Cassian about the Benedict Option, he mulled my words and replied gravely, “Those who don’t do some form of what you’re talking about, they’re not going to make it through what’s coming.”

The answer will not satisfy conservative Christians who understand the church as the Republican Party at prayer, or who go into the voting booth with more conviction than they show at Sunday worship.

As recently as the 1960s, with the notable exception of civil rights, moral and cultural concerns weren’t make-or-break issues in U.S. politics.

What about the Vietnam war, the environment, labor rights, occupational health and safety

Though Donald Trump won the presidency in part with the strong support of Catholics and Evangelicals, the idea that someone as robustly vulgar, fiercely combative, and morally compromised as Trump will be an avatar for the restoration of Christian morality and social unity is beyond delusional. He is not a solution to the problem of America’s cultural decline, but a symptom of it.

anti-Trump blowback will do severe damage to the church’s reputation.

One reason the contemporary church is in so much trouble is that religious conservatives of the last generation mistakenly believed they could focus on politics and the culture would take care of itself.

Conservative Christians can and should continue working with liberals to combat sex trafficking, poverty, AIDS, and the like.