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

by Rod Dreher

The main thing that helps a culture survive, Rieff wrote, is “the power of its institutions to bind and loose men in the conduct of their affairs with reasons which sink so deep into the self that they become commonly and implicitly understood.” 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 genius of Saint Benedict is to find the presence of God in everyday life.” People who are anxious, confused, and looking for answers are quick to search for solutions in the pages of books or on the Internet, looking for that “killer app” that will make everything right again. The Rule tells us: No, it’s not like that. 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.

In the Benedict Option, we are not trying to repeal seven hundred years of history, as if that were possible. Nor are we trying to save the West. We are only trying to build a Christian way of life that stands as an island of sanctity and stability amid the high tide of liquid modernity. We are not looking to create heaven on earth; we are simply looking for a way to be strong in faith through a time of great testing. The Rule, with its vision of an ordered life centered around Christ and the practices it prescribes to deepen our conversion, can help us achieve that goal.

No matter how furious and all-consuming partisan political battles are, Christians have to keep clearly before us the fact that conventional American politics cannot fix what is wrong with our society and culture. They are inadequate because in both their left-wing and right-wing forms, they operate from the position that facilitating and expanding human choice is the proper end of our politics. The left and the right just disagree over where to draw the lines. Neither party’s program is fully consistent with Christian truth.

As Pope Benedict XVI has written, “God’s way of loving becomes the measure of human love. This close connection between eros and marriage in the Bible has practically no equivalent in extra-biblical literature.”11 Throughout the Old

“Sex, like any other necessary, precious, and volatile power that is commonly held, is everybody’s business,” says Wendell Berry.15 As with so many other things in contemporary society, we modern Americans see sex as wholly a private matter, one of individual rights. But this is false. The rules, rituals, and traditions of a community pertaining to sexuality, says Berry, intend “to preserve its energy, its beauty, and its pleasure; to preserve and clarify its power to join not just husband and wife to one another but parents to children, families to the community, the community to nature; to ensure, so far as possible, that the inheritors of sexuality, as they come of age, will be worthy of it.” Berry goes on to say that “if the community cannot protect this giving, it can protect nothing—and our time is proving it so.”

British government statistics made public in 2012 revealed that 3.5 million embryos were created in UK laboratories since 1991, when record-keeping began.7 Ninety-three percent never resulted in a pregnancy, and about half were thrown away without even trying. The United States has no reliable records for the sake of comparison, but with a population five times larger than Britain’s, a parallel number would mean 17.5 million unborn human beings were brought into existence in a laboratory, with 16.2 million dying, and 8.8 million thrown into the trash can without an attempt at implantation.

The technocrat decides what he or she wants and, once it is available via technology, rationalizes accepting it. Concealing what technology takes away from us is a feature of the technocratic worldview. We come to think of technological advances as inevitable because they are irresistible. Just as “truth” for the technocrat is what is useful and effective, what is “good” for him is what is possible and desirable. Technological Man regards as progress

that using the Web makes it infinitely easier to find information but much harder to devote the kind of sustained focus it takes to know things.

William James, the founder of psychiatry, wrote, “My experience is what I agree to attend to. Only those items which I notice shape my mind.” Our thoughts really do determine our lives. Tech writer Tim Wu, reflecting on James’s insight, observes that religion has always understood that directing human attention toward what is holy is supremely important. This is why medieval Christendom was filled with prayers, rituals, fasts, and feasts: to keep life, both public and private, ordered around things divine.

you don’t control your own attention, there are plenty of people eager to do it for you. The first step in regaining cognitive control is creating a space of silence in which you can think.

More deeply, pastors and worship leaders who justify incorporating social media into worship should ask themselves: How does this serve the Gospel? If “sharing the Gospel” means simply disseminating information about Jesus, then that makes sense. But we see that becoming a disciple of Christ is about submitting to formation, not absorbing information. In that sense, social media acts like a gale-force wind that prevents the seed of the Gospel from taking root in the soil of one’s soul.

has been taken over by a parasitical form of spirituality called Moralistic Therapeutic Deism, one effect of which is to culture Christians to believe that God blesses whatever makes them happy. In this way, technology becomes a kind of theology. It is a protean theology, because the god to whom it bears witness is the ever-changing Self that is seeking liberation from all limits and unchosen obligations. Every time the church embraces a new fad, especially trends that turn worship into electronic spectacle, it yields more of its soul to this false theology. Before long—and we may be at this point already in some places—the church becomes fully possessed by the spirit of this world. Authentic orthodox Christianity can in no way be reconciled with the Zeitgeist. To the extent the church invites the technological mindset to take up residence within it, the conditions for Christianity will cease to exist.