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

by Rod Dreher

have written The Benedict Option to wake up the church and to encourage it to act to strengthen itself, while there is still time.

more importantly, it tells the stories of conservative Christians who are pioneering creative ways to live out the

joyfully and counterculturally in these darkening days. My hope is that you will be inspired by them and collaborate with like-minded Christians in your local area to construct responses to the real-world challenges faced by the church. If the

Alasdair MacIntyre said that we await “a new—doubtless

very different—St. Benedict.” The philosopher meant an inspired, creative leader who will pioneer a way to live the tradition in community, so that it can survive through a time of great testing.

the demographic trends continue, our churches will soon be empty. Even more troubling, many of the churches that do stay open will have been hollowed

by a sneaky kind of secularism to the point where the “Christianity” taught there is devoid of power and life. It has already happened in most of them. In 2005, sociologists

teenagers adhered to a mushy pseudoreligion

researchers deemed 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.

MTD is not entirely wrong. After all, God does exist, and He does want us to be good. The problem with MTD, in both its progressive and its conservative versions, is that it’s mostly about improving one’s self-esteem and subjective happiness and getting along well with others. It has little to do with the Christianity of Scripture and tradition,

which teaches repentance, self-sacrificial love, and purity of heart, and commends suffering—the Way of the Cross—as the pathway to God.

“all that society is, apparently, is a collection of autonomous individuals out to enjoy life.”

young adults who have been terribly failed by family, church, and the other institutions that formed—or rather, failed to form—their consciences and their imaginations.

Every single congregation in America must ask itself if it has compromised so much with the world that it has been compromised in its faithfulness. Is the Christianity we have been living out in our families, congregations, and communities a means of deeper conversion, or does it function as a vaccination against taking faith with the seriousness the Gospel demands?

Rather than wasting energy and resources fighting unwinnable political battles, we should instead work on building communities, institutions, and networks of resistance that can outwit, outlast, and eventually overcome the occupation.

Saint Gregory the Great never knew Benedict, but he wrote the saint’s biography based on interviews he conducted with four of Benedict’s disciples. Gregory writes that young Benedict was so shocked and disgusted by the vice and corruption in the city that he turned his back on the life of privilege that awaited him there, as the son of a government official. He moved to the nearby forest and later to a cave forty miles to the east. There Benedict lived a life of prayer and contemplation

guide the monks and nuns in living simple, orderly lives consecrated to Christ, Benedict wrote a slim book, now known as the Rule of Saint Benedict.

For the early monastics, a “rule” was simply a guide to living in Christian community.

his Rule is simply a training manual. Modern readers who turn to it looking for mystical

Rome’s fall left behind a staggering degree of material poverty, the result of both the disintegration of Rome’s complex trade network and the loss of intellectual and technical sophistication.

These monasteries kept faith and learning alive within their walls, evangelized barbarian peoples, and taught them how to pray, to read, to plant crops, and to build things. Over the next few centuries, they prepared the devastated societies of post-Roman Europe for the rebirth of civilization.

Benedict’s example gives us hope today, because it reveals what a small cohort of believers who respond creatively to the challenges of their own time and place can accomplish by channeling the grace that flows through them from their radical openness to God, and embodying that grace in a distinct way of life.

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.

virtuous society, by contrast, is one that shares belief in objective

moral goods and the practices necessary for human beings to embody those goods in community.

“after virtue,” then, is to dwell in a so...

only can no longer agree on what constitutes virtuous belief and conduct but also doubts that virtue exists. In a post-virtue society, individuals hold maximal freedom of thought and action, and society itself becomes “a collection of strangers, ...

This state of mind approximates the condition known as barbarism. When we think of barbarians, we imagine wild, rapacious tribesmen rampaging through cities, heedlessly destroying the structures and institutions of civilization, simply because they can. Barbarians are governed only by their will to power, and neither know nor care a thing about what they are annihilating. By that standard, despite our wealth and technological sophistication, we in the modern West are living under barbarism, though we do not recognize it. Our scientists, our judges, our princes, our scholars, and our scribes—they are at work demolishing the faith, the family, gender, even what it means to be human. Our barbarians have exchanged the animal pelts and

spears of the past for designer suits and smartphones. MacIntyre concluded After Virtue by looking back to the West after barbarian tribes overthrew the Roman imperial order. He wrote, A crucial turning point in that earlier history occurred when men and women of good will turned aside from the task of shoring up the Roman imperium and ceased to identify the continuation of civility and moral community with the maintenance of that imperium. What they set themselves to achieve instead—often not recognizing fully what they were doing—was the construction of new forms of community within which the moral life could be sustained so that both morality and civility might survive the coming ages of barbarism and darkness.5

recognize an unpopular truth: politics will not save us. Instead of looking to prop up the current order, they have recognized that the kingdom of which they are citizens is not of this world and have decided not to compromise that citizenship.

we are going to be for the world as Christ meant for us to be, we are going to have to spend more time away from the world, in deep prayer and substantial spiritual training—just as Jesus retreated to the desert to pray before ministering to the people. We cannot give the world what

we do not have.

The coming storm may be the means through which God delivers us.

Growing up in south Louisiana, whenever a hurricane was coming, somebody would take out the cast-iron kettle, make a big pot of gumbo, and after battening down the hatches,

invite the neighbors over to eat, tell stories, make merry, and ride out the storm together. This spirit ruled the response to the Great Flood of 2016. Even as the waters rose, little platoons all over south Louisiana rushed out to rescue the trapped, shelter the homeless, feed the hungry (with mountains of jambalaya, mostly), and comfort the broken and broken-hearted.

was not a response ordered from on high. It emerged spontaneously, out of the love local people had for their neighbor, and the sense of responsibility they had to care for those left poor and naked by the flood. Men and women of virtue—the Cajun Navy, church folks, and others—did not wait to be ...

The grave spiritual and cultural crisis that has overtaken us did not come from nowhere. Though its pa...

fifty years, the crisis has been gestating for many centuries. If we are going to figure out how to make it through the storm and the fog to safe harbor, we have to understand how we g...

Those women aren’t imagining things. Their whole world really is unraveling. Political scientist Charles Murray documented it in his aptly titled 2012 book Coming Apart: The State of White America 1960–2010. Murray focused his study on the white

working class, but the social and cultural trends that have undone them are not confined to whites alone. Nor were the 1960s the beginning of our unraveling, though they were a turning point. We are living with the consequences of ideas accepted many generations ago, and as a result of those decisions, we are losing our religion—a far greater crisis than merely losing the habit of churchgoing.

The loss of the Christian religion is why the West has been fragmenting for some time now, a process that is accelerating. How did it

happen? There were five landmark events over seven centuries that rocked Western civilization and stripped it of its ancestral faith:

the loss of belief in the integral connection between God and Creation—or

collapse of religious unity and religious authority in the Protestant Reformation of the sixteenth century

eighteenth-century Enlightenment, which displaced the Christian religion with the cult of Reason, privatized religious life, and inaugurated the age of democracy

Industrial Revolution (ca. 1760–1840) and the growth of capitalism in the n...

The Sexual Re...

religion was everywhere, and—this is crucial—as a matter not merely of belief but of experience.

they believed that God was present everywhere and revealed Himself to us through people, places, and things, through which His power flowed.

Christians of the Middle Ages took Paul’s words