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

by Rod Dreher

Medievals experienced the divine as far more present in their daily lives. As it has been for most people, Christian and otherwise, throughout history, religion was everywhere, and—this is crucial—as a matter not merely of belief but of experience. In the mind of medieval Christendom, the spirit world and the material world penetrated each other. The division between them was thin and porous. Another way to put this is that the medievals experienced everything in the world sacramentally.

sacramentalism had a much broader and deeper meaning in the mind of the Middle Ages. People of those days took all things that existed, even time, as in some sense sacramental. That is, they believed that God was present everywhere and revealed Himself to us through people, places, and things, through which His power flowed.

The power of sacred places and the relics of saints had such potency to the medievals because God wasn’t present in a vague spiritual sense, like a butler watching silently over a manor house. He was there, writes Taylor, “as immediate reality, like stones, rivers, and mountains.”2 The specific sense in which He was present was a mystery—and a source of speculation and contention even back then—but that He was truly present was not disputed. The only reason the material world had any meaning at all was because of its relationship to God. Medieval man held that reality—what was really real—was outside himself and that dwelling in the darkness of the Fall, he could not fully perceive it. But he could relate to it intellectually through faith and reason, and know it through conversion of the heart. The entire universe was woven into God’s own Being, in ways that are difficult for modern people, even believing Christians, to grasp. Christians of the Middle Ages took Paul’s words recorded in Acts—“in Him we live and move and have our being”—and in his letter to the Colossians—“He is before all things and in Him all things hold together”—in a much more literal sense than we do. Medieval man did not see himself as fundamentally separate from the natural order; rather, the alienation he felt was an effect of the Fall, a catastrophe that, as he understood it, made it difficult for humans to see Creation as it really is. His task was to join himself to the love of God and harmonize ...

Our relationship to the world is mediated through God, and our relationship to God is mediated through the world. Humankind dwelled not in a cold, meaningless universe but in a cosmos, in which everything had meaning because it participated in the life of the Creator.

“To know that someone is approaching is not the same as to know that Peter is approaching, even though it is Peter who is approaching.” Through prayer and contemplation, we may build on that intuition and come to know the identity of the One we sense. 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.”

In a letter to soldiers in 1798, John Adams, a Founding Father and practicing Unitarian, remarked: We had no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion. Avarice, ambition, revenge, or gallantry, would break the strongest cords of our Constitution as a whale goes through a net. Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.

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. The West has lost the golden thread that binds us to God, Creation, and each other. Unless we find it again, there is no hope of halting our dissolution. Indeed, it is unlikely that the West will see this lifeline for a very long time. It is not looking for it and may no longer have the capability of seeing it. We have been loosed, but we do not know how to bind.

Christians know that there is one light that the darkness can neither comprehend nor overcome, and it is that Light to Whom we must return if we are going to make it through this time of trial. This is the Light, Jesus Christ, who illuminated the monasteries of the Middle Ages and all those who gathered around them. The Benedictines had no secret teaching. They had what they still have: the Rule, which shows how to order one’s life to be as receptive as possible to God’s grace, both individually and in community.

Legend has it that in an argument with a cardinal, Napoleon pointed out that he had the power to destroy the church. “Your majesty,” the cardinal replied, “we, the clergy, have done our best to destroy the church for the last eighteen hundred years. We have not succeeded, and neither will you.”

Though the monks here have rejected the world, “there’s not just a no; there’s a yes too,” Father Cassian says. “It’s both that we reject what is not life-giving, and that we build something new. And we spend a lot of time in the rebuilding, and people see that too, which is why people flock to the monastery. We have so much involvement with guests and pilgrims that it’s exhausting. But that is what we do. We are rebuilding. That’s the yes that people have to hear about.”

Far from being a way of life for the strong and disciplined, Benedict’s Rule was for the ordinary and weak, to help them grow stronger in faith.

As a result of their orientation toward Christ, the monks recognize that He is the Creator, the One in Whom all things consist, and that man is not the measure of all things. 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. The monk holds that meaning exists objectively, within the natural world created by God, and is there to be discovered by the person who has detached themselves from their own passions and who seeks to see as God sees.

“The monk is deeply aware of the fact that in himself and in others, that order has been disturbed, has been disrupted by the Fall, by original sin, and by the personal sin of each person,” Father Basil said. “The monk enters the monastery knowing that finding that order doesn’t come easily. You have to fight for it, to work for it, and you have to be patient to achieve it. But it’s worth it, because that order gives us peace.”

That radiance is a fruit of deep and constant prayer. The Apostle Paul told the church in Thessalonica to “pray without ceasing” (1 Thessalonians 5:17). Benedictines consider their entire lives to be an attempt to fulfill this command. Strictly speaking, prayer is communication, either privately or in community, with God. More broadly, prayer is maintaining an unfailing awareness of the divine presence and doing all things with Him in mind. In the Benedictine life, regular prayer is at the center of the community’s existence.

“if one can accept that God’s will is made manifest in everything one does all day long, then one’s whole day becomes a prayer.”

Though they are contemplatives, monks must not complain about manual labor, directs Benedict. “For then they are truly monastics when they live by the labor of their hands, as did our Fathers and the Apostles.”

The work must serve not ourselves but God and God alone. In a chapter instructing monastic craftsmen, Benedict says that if they come to be proud of their work, the abbot must find something else for them to do.

Benedictines view their work as an expression of love and stewardship of the community and as a way of reordering the natural world in harmony with God’s will. Remember that for the monk, everything is a gift from God and is meant to be treated as sacred. Every human thought and act is to be centered on and directed to God and to be united in Him and to Him. And we men and women are participants in God’s unfolding Creation, by ordering the world according to His will. Seen this way, labor takes on a new dimension. For the Christian, work has sacramental value. “Creation gives praise to God. We give praise to God through Creation, through the material world, and into our areas of work,” explained Father Martin Bernhard, thirty-two. “Any time we take something neutral, something material, and we make something out of it for the sake of giving glory to God, it becomes sacramental, it becomes a channel of grace.”

“By means of the work in the kitchen, I’m establishing order. I’m exercising my God-given governance of the creative world,” he said. “From a human perspective, work is so important because it helps us exercise that God-commanded dominance over the earth. And from a practical point of view, it provides for ourselves and others. It’s important for us to know that through our work, we are making an important contribution to the community.”

“Ultimately, work serves as an expression of charity, of love, and that is what all work really should be,” Father Basil explained. “This is a lesson we have to work all our lives to learn. Work is not something I do in order to get something. Doing it is good for me, it’s constitutive of my happiness, because in it and through it I show love for others. “We are called to love,” he added. “Work is a concerted way of showing our love for others. In that sense, it can become very transformative—and very prayerful too.” “Too often it’s seen as a burden, and it doesn’t have to be. If we approach work as a burden, something’s wrong in here,” he said, pointing to his heart. “The problem needs to be fixed primarily here, in the heart.”

“We are often further away from God than we realize,” he said. “Asceticism serves as a healthy reminder of how things are. It’s not a punishment for being so far away.”

those who think stability is meant to hold you back, and to stifle personal and spiritual growth, are missing the hidden value in the commitment to stability. It anchors you and gives you the freedom that comes from not being subject to the wind, the waves, and the currents of daily life. It creates the ordered conditions in which the soul’s internal pilgrimage toward holiness becomes possible.

Life in Christian community, whether in monastic or ordinary congregations, is about building the kind of fellowship that every one of us needs to complete our individual pilgrimage.

the church exists as a brotherhood established by Christ, even if it doesn’t feel like it in a given moment. The martyred Lutheran pastor taught that struggles within the community are a gift of God’s grace, because they force its members to reckon with the reality of their kinship, despite their brokenness. A community that cannot face its faults and love each other through to healing is not truly Christian.

The spiritual work they are called to do requires silence and separation. Our work does not require the same structures. As lay Christians living in the world, our calling is to seek holiness in more ordinary social conditions.

“Saint Benedict says that Christ is present in the brothers, and Christ is present in our guests. Every day I would think, ‘Christ is coming. I’m going to make this as pleasant for them as I can, because it showed them that we cared,’” he said. “That’s a good outreach to people: to respect them, to recognize their dignity, to show them that you can see Christ in them and want to bring them into your life.”

“It is kind of a warning: if you want to be welcome in heaven, you had better welcome people as Christ himself now, even if you don’t like it, even if you suffer because of those people,” he said. “If your life is to seek Christ, this is it. You will find redemption in serving these guests, because Christ is coming in them.”

Hospitality must be dispensed according to prudence, so that visitors are not allowed to do things that disrupt the monastery’s way of life. For example, at table, silence is kept by visitors and monks alike. As Brother Augustine put it, “If we let visitors upset the rhythm of our life too much, then we can’t really welcome anyone.”

“The best defense is offense. You defend by attacking,” Brother Ignatius said. “Let’s attack by expanding God’s kingdom—first in our hearts, then in our own families, and then in the world. Yes, you have to have borders, but our duty is not to let the borders stay there. We have to push outward, infinitely.”

Benedict did not want to create wishy-washy monks. “He wants people to be saints. Saints are not usually very balanced people,” said Father Benedict, laughing. “He was creating a radical life: total detachment and emphasis on conversion. It’s giving everything to God, all the time.”

By methodically and practically ordering our bodies, souls, and minds to a harmonious life centered on the Christ who is everywhere present and filling all things, the Benedictine way offers a spirituality accessible to anyone. For the Christian who follows the way of Saint Benedict, everyday life becomes an unceasing prayer, both an offering to God and a gift from Him, one that transforms us bit by bit into the likeness of His son.

The Benedictine example is a sign of hope but also a warning: no matter what a Christian’s circumstances, he cannot live faithfully if God is only a part of his life, bracketed away from the rest. In the end, either Christ is at the center of our lives, or the Self and all its idolatries are. There is no middle ground.

The way of Saint Benedict is not an escape from the real world but a way to see that world and dwell in it as it truly is. Benedictine spirituality teaches us to bear with the world in love and to transform it as the Holy Spirit transforms us.

the church is not merely politically conservative white people at prayer.

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. If a democratic nation loses religion, he wrote, then it falls prey to inordinate individualism, materialism, and democratic despotism and inevitably “prepares its citizens for servitude.” Therefore, said Tocqueville, “one must maintain Christianity within the new democracies at all cost.”

Here’s how to get started with the antipolitical politics of the Benedict Option. Secede culturally from the mainstream. 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. The point is not that we should stop voting or being active in conventional politics. The point, rather, is that this is no longer enough.

We faithful orthodox Christians didn’t ask for internal exile from a country we thought was our own, but that’s where we find ourselves. We are a minority now, so let’s be a creative one, offering warm, living, light-filled alternatives to a world growing cold, dead, and dark. We will be increasingly without influence, but let’s be guided by monastic wisdom and welcome this humbly as an opportunity sent by God for our purification and sanctification. Losing political power might just be the thing that saves the church’s soul. Ceasing to believe that the fate of the American Empire is in our hands frees us to put them to work for the Kingdom of God in our own little shires.

Benedictine spirituality is good at creating a Christian culture because it is all about developing and sustaining the Christian cultus, a Latin word meaning “worship.” A culture is the way of life that emerges from the common worship of a people. What we hold most sacred determines the form and content of our culture, which emerges organically from the process of making a faith tangible.

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. Without a substantial Christian culture, it’s no wonder that our children are forgetting what it means to be Christian, and no surprise that we are not bringing in new converts.

When Christians ignore the story of how our fathers and mothers in the faith prayed, lived, and worshiped, we deny the life-giving power of our own roots and cut ourselves off from the wisdom of those whose minds were renewed. As a result, at best, the work of God in our lives is slower and shallower than it might otherwise be. At worst, we lose our children.

There is a connection between neglecting to take liturgy seriously, or giving up liturgy altogether, and abandoning Christian orthodoxy. If we are to maintain these truths over time, we must maintain our liturgy.

Liturgy is like a medium of communication in the McLuhanesque sense. The effect of liturgy is both in the information it conveys and in the way it conveys it. Imagine that you are at a Catholic mass in a dreary 1970s-era suburban church that looks like a converted Pizza Hut. The next Sunday you are at a high Catholic mass in New York City, at St. Patrick’s Cathedral. The Scripture reading is the same in both places, and Jesus is just as present in the Eucharist at Our Lady of Pizza Hut as at St. Patrick’s. Chances are, though, that you had to work harder to conjure a sense of the true holiness of the mass in the suburban church than in the cathedral—though theologically speaking, the “information” conveyed in Word and Sacrament in both places was the same. This is the difference liturgy can make.

Christian liturgies, on the other hand, should lead us to desire communion with God. The basis for our liturgies is the one who unites the medium and the message of the Gospel: Jesus Christ. As scholar Robert Inchausti pithily puts it, McLuhan’s famous slogan is “just another way of saying ‘the Word become flesh.’”5 Our liturgies of worship, diverse as they may be, are oriented toward praising and partaking of Him.

in the Christian tradition, liturgy is primarily, though not exclusively, about what God has to say to us. Liturgy reveals something of the divine, transcendent order, and when we submit to it, it draws us into closer harmony with that order.

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. As we have seen, the Benedictines order their lives around belief that matter matters, and that what we do with our bodies and the material world has concrete spiritual consequences.

Liturgy restores the stability we’ve lost by cementing the story of the gospel in our bodies. As MacIntyre has said, if we want to know what to do, we must first determine the story to which we belong. Christian worship, done properly, provides us with regular reminders that we belong to Christ and to the story He is unfolding. It also teaches us, though, that we are not free to improvise the story but are bound to write our own chapters according to what has been revealed to us in the Book, and in continuity with what our fathers and mothers of the faith have written before us.

If you want to build faith capable of maintaining stability and continuity, you need to regularly attend a church that celebrates a fixed liturgy. That’s how individuals come to be “shaped by the Christian story.” “Liturgical rhythm is a kind of music by which the truth of the gospel is inculcated over time,” writes Chan in his book Liturgical Theology.7 He adds that the liturgy is a “journey toward an intended end” and constitutes “the living out of our baptismal faith in the body.”

Liturgies do more than pass on information about God. They form our imaginations and our hearts. Nothing is more effective at doing so in a way faithful to Scripture than ancient forms of Christian worship, says Aniol. 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. “The issue is not whether people will be formed by liturgy, but which liturgies will form them,” says Aniol.

As Wendell Berry puts it, denying bodily desire for the sake of spiritual growth is “a refusal to allow the body to serve what is unworthy of it.”

Fortunately, when churches are properly ordered toward Christ through liturgy, with life maintained through asceticism and discipline, the result is a beauty in sharp contrast to the world. As times get uglier, the church will become brighter and brighter, drawing people to its light. As this happens, we Christians should not be afraid to consider beauty and goodness our best evangelistic tools.