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

by Rod Dreher

We tell ourselves that these developments have been imposed by a liberal elite, because we find the truth intolerable: The American people, either actively or passively, approve.

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.

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

Surveying the moral beliefs of 18-to-23-year-olds, Smith and his colleagues found that only 40 percent of young Christians sampled said that their personal moral beliefs were grounded in the Bible or some other religious sensibility.

Nobody but the most deluded of the old-school Religious Right believes that this cultural revolution can be turned back. The wave cannot be stopped, only ridden. With a few exceptions, conservative Christian political activists are as ineffective as White Russian exiles, drinking tea from samovars in their Paris drawing rooms, plotting the restoration of the monarchy. One wishes them well but knows deep down that they are not the future.

But 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.

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.

“My voice sticks in my throat; and, as I dictate, sobs choke my utterance,” wrote Saint Jerome in its aftermath. “The city which had taken the whole world was itself taken.”

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. MacIntyre said that a society that governed itself according to emotivist principles would look a lot like the modern West, in which the liberation of the individual’s will is thought to be the greatest good. A 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. To live “after virtue,” then, is to dwell in a society that not 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,

This is not just about our own survival. If 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 word religion comes from the Latin word religare, meaning “to bind.” From a sociological point of view, religion is a coherent system of beliefs and practices through which the community of believers know who they are and what they are to do.

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

The Sexual Revolution (1960–present) This outline of Western cultural history since the High Middle Ages admittedly leaves out a great deal. And it is biased toward an intellectual understanding of historical causation. In truth, material consequences often give birth to ideas. The discovery of the New World and the invention of the printing press, both in the fifteenth century, and the invention of the birth control pill and the Internet in the twentieth, made it possible for people to imagine things they never had before and thus to think new thoughts.

In his final book The Discarded Image, C. S. Lewis, who was a professional medievalist, explained that Plato believed that two things could relate to each other only through a third thing. In what Lewis called the medieval “Model,” everything that existed was related to every other thing that existed, through their shared relationship to God.

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. Says Lewis, “Every particular fact and story became more interesting and more pleasurable if, by being properly fitted in, it carried one’s mind back to the Model as a whole.”3

The core teachings of Scholasticism include the principle that all things exist and have a God-given essential nature independent of human thought. This position is called “metaphysical realism.”

The world and everything in it is part of a harmonious whole ordered by God and filled with meaning—and all things are signs pointing to God. Society is grounded in that higher reality. The world is charged with spiritual force.

The theologian who did the most to topple the mighty oak of the medieval model—that is, Christian metaphysical realism—was a Franciscan from the British Isles, William of Ockham (1285–1347). The ax he and his theological allies created to do the job was a big idea that came to be called nominalism.

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.”

As C. S. Lewis put it, “We are all, very properly, familiar with the idea that in every age the human mind is deeply influenced by the accepted Model of the universe. But there is a two-way traffic; the Model is also influenced by the prevailing temper of mind.”

What emerged was a new individualism, a this-worldliness that would inaugurate the historical period called the Renaissance. The defeat of metaphysical realism inaugurated a new and dynamic phase of Western history—one that would culminate in a religious revolution.

It contains within it the secular progressive belief that the religiously focused medieval period was a time of intellectual and artistic sterility—a ludicrous judgment but an influential one.

Nevertheless, the Renaissance does mark a distinct change in European culture, which shifted its focus from the glory of God to the glory of man. “We can become what we will,” said Pico della Mirandola (1463–94),

While the late medieval period concentrated on the rediscovery of Greek philosophical texts, Italian scholars of the fourteenth century led the way in reviving ancient literature and history. “Man is the

measure of all things,” said the ancient Greek philosopher Protagoras, in a line that also described the spirit of the new age dawning upon Europe.

Renaissance humanism began to consider the world through classical insights and emphasized the study of poetry, rhetoric, and other disciplines we now call the humanities. Though humanist culture was not as narrowly focused on the faith as its medieval predecessor, it was by no means anti-Christian. The Renaissance brought into Western Christianity a greater c...

Medieval Christianity focused on the fall of man, but the more humanistic Christianity of the Renaissance centered on man’s potential. Christian humanism was far more individualistic than what came before it, and it sought to Chr...

The danger was that Christian humanists would become too enamored of human potential and man’s capacity for self-creation and lose sight of his chronic inclination toward sin. This was a temptation to which the Italian humanists were particularly susceptible.

Christianity. In 1517, Luther proclaimed his “Ninety-Five Theses” questioning the sale of indulgences, a feature of the Catholic penitential system that allowed the living to buy relief for relatives believed to be suffering punishment in Purgatory.

1520, the Vatican excommunicated Luther for refusing to recant his belief that Scripture alone—as distinct from Scripture and the authoritative interpretation of the Roman church—was the source of Christian truth. Thus was the Protestant Reformation born.

Even as the Wars of Religion raged, science made rapid advances. The Scientific Revolution was a roughly two-hundred-year period of staggering advances in science and mathematics that began with Copernicus (1473–1543), who showed that the earth was not the fixed center of Creation, and ended with Newton (1642–1727), whose breakthrough discoveries laid the foundation for modern physics. The era overturned the Aristotelian-Christian cosmos—a hierarchical model of reality in which all things exist organically through their relationship to God—in favor of a mechanical universe ordered by laws of nature, with no necessary grounding in the transcendent.

Sir Francis Bacon, an important late Renaissance philosopher and founder of the scientific method, famously said that scientific discovery ought to be applied “for the relief of man’s estate”—that is, to improve the lives of humans by reducing their pain, suffering, and poverty. This was a turning point in the history of ideas.

Descartes taught that the best method was to begin by accepting as true only clear ideas that were beyond doubt. You should accept nothing as truth on the basis of authority, and you should even doubt your senses. Only those things of which you can be certain are true. And the first principle of all under this method is, “I think, therefore I am.”

Descartes was a rationalist but not a moral relativist—indeed, he considered himself a faithful Catholic whose mission in part was to reconcile science to faith.

God, if He was mentioned at all, was not the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob but the nondescript divinity of the Deists.

Deism, a rationalistic school of thought that emerged in the Enlightenment, holds that God is a cosmic architect who created the universe but does not interact with it.

Deism rejects biblical religion and the supernatural and bases its principles on what can be known about God—the “Sup...

Locke believed that the autonomous individual, born as a blank slate, with no innate nature, is the fundamental unit of society. The purpose of the government, according to Locke, is not to pursue virtue but rather to establish and guard a social order under which individuals can exercise their will within reason. Government exists to secure the rights of these individuals to life, liberty, and property. The authors of the Declaration of Independence changed this formulation to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness,” a phrase every American schoolchild learns in his civic catechism.

In the American order, the state’s role is simply to act as a referee among individuals and factions. The government has no ultimate conception of the good, and it regards its own role as limited to protecting the rights of individuals.

When a society is thoroughly Christian, this is an ingenious way to keep the peace and allow for general flourishing. But from the Christian point of view, Enlightenment liberalism contained the seeds of Christianity’s undoing.

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...

They prized emotion, individuality, nature, and personal freedom.

Enlightenment era, philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778) became the father of Romanticism. 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.

Alexis de Tocqueville, a young French aristocrat traveling through America in 1831–32, observed Rousseau’s egalitarian ideals in practice. In Democracy in America, Tocqueville concluded that democracy was the future of Europe, but observed that with its drive for equality, which entailed making standards relative to the majority’s will, democracy risked eliminating the virtues that made self-rule possible. Democracies will succeed only if “mediating institutions,” including the churches, thrive.

Friedrich Nietzsche understood natural selection to mean that there is no divine plan guiding man’s development. It is random, based on the survival of the fittest. Nietzsche drew on Darwin to formulate a philosophy extolling strength and the individual will.

The important changes, though, took place among the cultural elites, who continued to shed any semblance of traditional Christianity. In America, from 1870 through 1930, these elites worked what sociologist Christian Smith terms a “secular revolution.”

The mass savagery of World War I,

four years of grinding combat that consumed the lives of seventeen million soldiers and civilians, shattered European ideals and dealt a mortal blow to what remained of Christendom.

This was the period in which the West moved from what sociologist Zygmunt Bauman called “solid modernity”—a period of social change that was still fairly predictable and manageable—to “liquid modernity,” our present condition, in which change is so rapid that no social institutions have time to solidify.

Sigmund Freud, the founder of psychoanalysis, found his true genius not as a scientist but as a quasi-religious figure who discerned and proclaimed the Self as a deity to replace the Christian religion.