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

by Rod Dreher

Donald Trump tore up the political rule book in every way.

In a nation where “God and country” are so entwined, the idea that one’s citizenship might be at radical odds with one’s faith is a new one.

Alexis de Tocqueville was convinced that democracy could not survive the loss of Christian faith. Self-government required shared convictions about moral truths. Christian faith drew men outside themselves and taught them that laws must be firmly rooted in a moral order revealed and guaranteed by God.

In his 2016 book Conserving America?: Essays on Present Discontents, Patrick J. Deneen, a Notre Dame political theorist, argues that Enlightenment liberalism, from which both U.S. parties are descended, is built on the premise that humans are by nature “free and independent,” and that the purpose of government is to liberate the autonomous individual.

This is contrary to what both Scripture and experience teach us about human nature. The purpose of civilization, in Deneen’s words, “has been to sustain and support familial, social and cultural structures and practices that perpetuate and deepen personal and intergenerational forms of obligation and gratitude, of duty and indebtedness.” In other words, civilization doesn’t exist to make it possible for individuals to do whatever they want to do. To believe that is an anthropological error. A civilization in which no one felt an obligation to the past, to the future, to each other, or to anything higher than self-gratification is one that is dangerously fragile. In the waning decades of the Western Roman Empire, Augustine described society as preoccupied with pleasure-seeking, selfishness, and living for the moment.

Hence the need, not for the second coming of Ronald Reagan or for a would-be political savior, but for a new—and quite different—Saint Benedict.

trust and personal responsibility cannot work.” And they should “naturally rise from below,” which is to say, they should be organic and not handed down by central planners.

By contrast, the politics of the Benedict Option assume that the disorder in American public life derives from disorder within the American soul. Benedict Option politics start with the proposition that the most important political work of our time is the restoration of inner order, harmonizing with the will of God—the same telos as life in the monastic community. Everything else follows naturally from that.

advantage. “They surrendered themselves to the idea that these things were worth doing in and of themselves, not because they might have definite, measurable consequences,”

what C. S. Lewis called “the abolition of man.”

The point, rather, is that this is no longer enough.

But it can’t be repeated often enough: believers must avoid the usual trap of thinking that

politics can solve cultural and religious problems.

only cultural change and religious con...

The deep cultural forces that have been separating the West from God for centuries will...

Losing political power might just be the thing that saves the church’s soul.

The best witness Christians can offer to post-Christian America is simply to be the church, as fiercely and creatively a minority as we can manage.

the wisdom of past ages, treating worship as a consumer activity,

Christians often talk about “reaching the culture” without realizing that, having no distinct Christian culture of their own, they have been co-opted by the secular culture they wish to evangelize.

By rediscovering the past, recovering liturgical worship and asceticism, centering our lives on the church community, and tightening church discipline, we will, by God’s grace, again become the peculiar people we should

always have been.

The media critic Marshall McLuhan could be said to have been writing about liturgies when he said, “The medium is the message.” What he meant was that the concrete form in which information is delivered is itself a message, because it shapes our ability to receive the message.

FaceTime, with our friends in the Netherlands. McLuhan coined the term global village in 1964 to refer to the technology-enabled worldwide sharing of culture.

Liturgy is like a medium of communication in the McLuhanesque sense.

All worship is in some sense liturgical, but liturgies that are sacramental both reflect Christ’s presence in the divine order and embody it in a concrete form accessible to worshipers. Liturgy is not magic, of course, but if it is intended and received sacramentally, it awakens the sense that worshipers are communing with the eternal, transcendent realm through the ritual and its elements. The liturgy feeds the sacramental imagination, reweaving the connection between body and spirit.

The contemporary Reformed theologian Hans Boersma identifies the loss of sacramentality as the key reason why the modern church is falling apart. If there is no real participation in the eternal—that is, if we do not regard matter, and even time itself, as rooted firmly in God’s being—then the life of the church can scarcely withstand the torrents of liquid modernity.

As MacIntyre has said, if we want to know what to do, we must first determine the story to which we belong.

More to the point, it helped reinforce the truth that Orthodox Christianity is a way of life, and embracing it means we do things that set us apart from the crowd.

What many Protestants reject as “vain repetition” in liturgical forms of worship is actually the quality of liturgy that makes it so effective at discipleship.

In a society that values comfort and well-being over anything else, there may be no more essential Christian formative practice than regular fasting.

Gays, lesbians, and their allies are not wrong to question why conservative Christians are quick to condemn their sin but overlook rampant divorce and sexual sin among straights in our own congregations.

The first Christians gained converts not because their arguments were better than those of the pagans but because people saw in them and their communities something good and beautiful—and they wanted it. This led them to the Truth.

Wurmbrand wrote that there are two kinds of Christians: “those who sincerely believe in God and those who, just as sincerely, believe that they believe.

A church that looks and talks and sounds just like the world has no reason to exist. A church that does not emphasize asceticism and discipleship is as pointless as a football coaching staff that doesn’t care if its players show up for practice.

religion is like a language: you can learn it only in community, starting with the community of the family. When both the family and the community become fragmented and fail, the transmission of religion to the next generation becomes far more difficult. All it takes is the failure of a single generation to hand down a tradition for that tradition to disappear from the life of a family and, in turn, of a community. Eberstadt is one of a long line of religious thinkers to recognize that when concrete embodiments of the relationship to God crumble, it becomes very hard to hold on to Him in the abstract.1

For decades conservative Christians have behaved as if the primary threats to the integrity of

families and communities could be effectively addressed...

That means maintaining regular times of family prayer. That means regular readings of Scripture and stories from the lives of the saints—Christian

A culture of obedience is the mark of a healthy monastery and a healthy family, but members of both communities must see that those given authority over them also subject themselves to a higher authority.

True, adults should not be expected to keep their movie and TV watching to the level of children, but neither should they feel free to watch whatever they like.

They have to know that it’s fine to be a nonconformist.

as opposed to a means to the end of unity with God, the family risks becoming tyrannical.

American Christians have a bad habit of treating church like a consumer experience.

It’s as simple as starting a book group—but one with the purpose of catechesis, discipleship, and intentional community building. It’s a social event, true, but it has to have a strong focus on something more serious than socializing. The Hall of Men prays when it meets, then discusses a text from the church’s Great Tradition.

Ideology is the enemy of joyful community life, and the most destructive ideology is the belief that creating utopia is possible.

Solzhenitsyn said that the line between good and evil runs down the center of every human heart.

He and his community friends were raised in what Marco disdainfully calls “this bourgeois church, this church of comfort, this church where people didn’t want to take any risks to live radically for the Lord Jesus.”

She started doing this after becoming convinced that her circle needed more Christian cultural liturgies in their daily lives.

“I used to do things with my Christian friends, and we knew we were all Christian, but the fact that we were Christians never came up,” she says. “There’s something weird when none of the communal parts of your life are overtly Christian.

Echoing Sermarini, Libresco says that this strategy is not a new thing at all; it only seems so because we have forgotten how to act like a community instead of a random collection of individuals. “People are like, ‘This Benedict Option thing, it’s just being Christian, right?’ And I’m like, ‘Yes! You’ve figured out the koan!’” Libresco told me.