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

by Rod Dreher

The time was coming, said MacIntyre, when men and women of virtue would understand that continued full participation in mainstream society was not possible for those who wanted to live a life of traditional virtue.

Post-Obergefell, Christians who hold to the biblical teaching about sex and marriage have the same status in culture, and increasingly in law, as racists.

we are going to have to be the church, without compromise, no matter what it costs.

Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI foretells a world in which the church will live in small circles of committed believers who live the faith intensely, and who will have to be somewhat cut off from mainstream society for the sake of holding on to the truth.

The U.S. Supreme Court’s Obergefell decision declaring a constitutional right to same-sex marriage was the Waterloo of religious conservatism. It was the moment that the Sexual Revolution triumphed decisively, and the culture war, as we have known it since the 1960s, came to an end.

The changes that have overtaken the West in modern times have revolutionized everything, even the church, which no longer forms souls but caters to selves. As conservative Anglican theologian Ephraim Radner has said, “There is no safe place in the world or in our churches within which to be a Christian. It is a new epoch.”1

Moralistic Therapeutic Deism (MTD).3 MTD has five basic tenets: A God exists who created and orders the world and watches over human life on earth. God wants people to be good, nice, and fair to each other, as taught in the Bible and by most world religions. The central goal of life is to be happy and to feel good about oneself. God does not need to be particularly involved in one’s life except when he is needed to resolve a problem. Good people go to heaven when they die.

Though superficially Christian, MTD is the natural religion of a culture that worships the Self and material comfort.

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

We are governed by what MacIntyre called emotivism: the idea that all moral choices are nothing more than expressions of what the choosing individual feels is right.

The natural world was to be taken no longer as something to be contemplated as in any way an icon of the divine, but rather as something to be understood and manipulated by the will of humankind for its own sake.

Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.

Rousseau advanced the idea that man is born naturally good but is corrupted by society. From Rousseau came the modern notion that the freer a society is, the more virtuous it is. The people, in expressing the “general will,” are always right.

It pushed religion to the margins of public life, advocating science as the primary source of society’s values and as a guide to social change.

Within Christianity, it replaced the religious model of the human person with a psychological model centered on the Self. And progressives’ political ardor for greater democracy and egalitarianism found expression in church life by eroding the authority of the clergy and Scripture.

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. In the past, a person looked outside himself to learn what he was to do with his life. But in modernity, when we know that religion and all claims to transcendent values are an illusion, we must look into ourselves for the secret to our own well-being. Psychology did not necessarily intend to change a man’s character, as in the old Christian therapies of repentance as a step toward conforming to God’s will, but rather to help that man become comfortable with who he is.

Sociologist Philip Rieff, the great interpreter of Freud, described the shift in Western consciousness like this: “Religious man was born to be saved. Psychological man is born to be pleased.”

In other words, we were creating an “anti-culture,” one that made the foundation for a stable culture impossible.

That is, instead of teaching us what we must deprive ourselves of to be civilized, we have a culture built on a cult of desire, one that tells us we find meaning and purpose in releasing ourselves from the old prohibitions, as we self-directed individuals choose. “Eros must be raised to the level of a religious cult in modern society, not because we really are that obsessed with it, but because the myth of freedom demands it,” says political philosopher Stephen L. Gardner. “It is in carnal desire that the modern individual believes he affirms his ‘individuality.’ The body must be the true ‘subject’ of desire because the individual must be the author of his own desire.”

Here is the end point of modernity: the autonomous, freely choosing individual, finding meaning in no one but himself.

The church, a community that authoritatively teaches and disciples its members, cannot withstand a revolution in which each member becomes, in effect, his own pope.

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.

“To use Pope Benedict’s phrase, which he repeated many times, the Western world today lives as though God does not exist,” he says. “I think that’s true. Fragmentation, fear, disorientation, drifting—those are widely diffused characteristics of our society.”

The genius of Saint Benedict is to find the presence of God in everyday life.”

You can achieve the peace and order you seek only by making a place within your heart and within your daily life for the grace of God to take root. Divine grace is freely given, but God will not force us to receive it. It takes constant effort on our part to get out of God’s way and let His grace heal us and change us. To this end, what we think does not matter as much as what we do—and how faithfully we do it.

A man who wants to get in shape and has read the best bodybuilding books will get nowhere unless he applies that knowledge in eating healthy food and working out daily. That takes sustained willpower. In time, if he’s faithful to the practices necessary to achieve his goal, the man will start to love eating well and exercising so much that he is not pushed toward doing so by willpower but rather drawn to it by love. He will have trained his heart to desire the good.

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. It also implies the realization of natural limits within Creation’s givenness, as opposed to believing that nature is something we can deny or refute, according to our own desires. Finally, it means disciplining one’s life to live a life to glorify God and help others.

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. Christian humility is that important.

“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.”

“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.

“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.”

A Christian who practices asceticism trains himself to say no to his desires and yes to God. That mentality has all but disappeared from the West in modern times. We have become a people oriented around comfort. We expect our religion to be comfortable. Suffering doesn’t make sense to us. And without fasting and other ascetic disciplines, we lose the ability to tell ourselves no to things our hearts desire.

We practice self-denial to strengthen ourselves in the love and service of Christ and His people.

If you are going to put down spiritual roots, taught Benedict, you need to stay in one place long enough for them to go deep.

in a culture like ours, where everyone is always on the move, the Benedictine calling to stay put no matter what can call forth new and important ways of serving God.”

“The hub of postmodern life strategy is not identity building but avoidance of fixation,” he writes.5 In Bauman’s pitiless analysis, to succeed today, you need to be free of all commitments, unbound by the past or the future, living in an everlasting present. The world changes so quickly that the person who is loyal to anything, even to her own identity, takes an enormous risk.

everybody should think deeply about the spiritual and emotional costs of the gyrovague’s liberty that we contemporary Americans take as our birthright. In a sense, what looks like freedom can really be a form of bondage.

To live in real community is to put the good of others ahead of our own desires, when doing so serves truth and righteousness.

“Love can only come from that. Without real contact with other human persons, there is no love. We’ve never seen a Dark Age like this one.”

The laity can benefit from the Rule, he said, if they understand what is radical about Saint Benedict’s life: total abandonment of the self-will for the will of God. The method may require balance in its application, but the goal given to us by the Lord is extraordinary: to be perfect, even as our Father in heaven is perfect.

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.

Writes Levin: The center has not held in American life, so we must instead find our centers for ourselves as communities of like-minded citizens, and then build out the American ethic from there. . . . Those seeking to reach Americans with an unfamiliar moral message must find them where they are, and increasingly, that means traditionalists must make their case not by planting themselves at the center of society, as large institutions, but by dispersing themselves to the peripheries as small outposts. In this sense, focusing on your own near-at-hand community does not involve a withdrawal from contemporary America, but an increased attentiveness to it.1

It’s not whether or not it was worthwhile to have worked on those issues, but rather a growing sense inside of me that there’s a real work of cultural reclamation and renewal, not outside the church but inside the church, that really needs to happen first, before we can think about much longer-term goals.”

In the most basic philosophical sense, though, politics is the process by which we agree on how we are going to live together.

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.”

Nothing is more needful today than the survival of Christian culture, because in recent generations this culture has become dangerously thin. At this moment in the Church’s history in this country (and in the West more generally) it is less urgent to convince the alternative culture in which we live of the truth of Christ than it is for the Church to tell itself its own story and to nurture its own life, the culture of the city of God, the Christian republic. This is not going to happen without a rebirth of moral and spiritual discipline and a resolute effort on the part of Christians to comprehend and to defend the remnants of Christian culture.

Christian cultus, a Latin word meaning “worship.” A culture is the way of life that emerges from the common worship of a people.

Too many of our churches function as secular entertainment centers with religious morals slapped on top, when they should be functioning as the living, breathing Body of Christ.

Our imaginations have been colonized by a mentality that holds older, inherited forms of worship to be impediments to authenticity. On the contrary, we need to be instructed in how to pray and worship to train our minds to think in an authentically Christian way. As Paul exhorted the Romans, we must be transformed by the renewing of our minds, by adopting thought patterns and behaviors that are not actually natural to us. This is not bondage but liberty.

Ralph Wood contends that the church’s task today is “not to create a counter-culture, so much as a new culture based on one so ancient and nearly forgotten that it looks freshly minted.”