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

by Rod Dreher

we should stop the fruitless searching for a nonexistent source of meaning and instead seek self-fulfillment.

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.”9 The 1960s were the decade in which Psychological Man came fully into his own. In that decade, the freedom of the individual to fulfill his own desires became our cultural lodestar, and the rapid falling away...

1980s, Psychological Man won decisively and now owns the culture—including most churches—as surely as the Ostrogoths, Visigoths, Vandals, and other conquering peoples ...

In 1966, at the beginning of this new age, Rieff published a study called The Triumph of the Therapeut...

It had not become atheist, but it had spiritualized desire and embraced a secular “gospel of self-fulfillment.”

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.”

What made our condition so revolutionary, he said, was that for the first time in history, the West was attempting to build a culture on the absence of belief

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

“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.”10

The advent of the birth control pill in the 1960s made it possible for mankind to extend its conquest and subjection of nature to the will to the human body itself. Transgenderism is the logical next step, after which will come the deconstruction of any obstructions, in law or in custom, to freely chosen polygamous arrangements.

The 1970s, the so-called Me Decade, was when the 1960s came to the rest of America. The divorce rate, rising in the 1960s, mushroomed in the 1970s. Abortions skyrocketed. But there was no going back. The new order found its constitutional confirmation in the Supreme Court’s 1992 Planned Parenthood vs. Casey decision reaffirming abortion rights. Justice Anthony Kennedy, writing for the pro-choice majority, explained (no doubt unintentionally) how the Sexual Revolution depends on a radical, even nihilistic, conception of freedom:

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

Everyone has a right to develop their own form of life, grounded on their own sense of what is really important or of value. People are called upon to be true to themselves and to seek their

own self-fulfilment. What this consists of, each must, in the last instance, determine for him- or herself. No one else can or should try to dictate its content.11

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. Churches—Protestant, Catholic, and Orthodox—that are nothing more than a loosely bound assembly of individuals committed to finding their own “truth,” are no longer the church in any meaningful sense, because there is no shared belief.

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.”

That spark shone forth in a world when, in the words of the English lay Benedictine Esther de Waal, “life was an urgent struggle to make sense of what was happening.”

We are rebuilding. That’s the yes that people have to hear about.” Rebuilding what? I asked. “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.”

And this monk was telling me that he and his brothers in the monastery saw themselves as working on the restoration of Christian belief and Christian culture. How very Benedictine. I leaned in to hear more.

That is common to all monastic living, but Benedict’s Rule adds three distinct vows: obedience, stability (fidelity to the same monastic community until death), and conversion of life, which means dedicating oneself to the lifelong work of deepening repentance. The Rule also includes

directions for dividing each day into periods of prayer, work, and reading of Scripture and other sacred texts. The saint taught his followers how to live apart from the world, but also how to treat pilgrims and strangers who come to the monastery.

“nothing harsh and burdensome” but only to be strict enough to strengthen the hearts of the brothers “to run the way of God’s commandments with unspeakable sweetness and love.” He instructed his abbots to govern as strong but compassionate fathers, and not to burden the brothers under his authority with things they are not strong enough to handle.

Despite the very specific instructions found in the Rule, it’s not a checklist for legalism. “The purpose of the Rule is to free you. That’s a paradox that people don’t grasp readily,”

The genius of

Saint Benedict is to find the presence

of God in everyda...

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.

If a defining characteristic of the modern world is disorder, then the most fundamental act of resistance is to establish order. If we don’t have internal order, we will be controlled by our human passions and by the powerful outside forces who are in greater control of directing liquid modernity’s deep currents.

Rather, it is what theologian Romano Guardini called man’s efforts to “regain his right relation to the truth of things, to the demands of his own deepest self, and finally to God.”

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.

Benedictine monks have a lot of time with God. Seven times each day they gather around the altar in the basilica to chant the appointed prayers for the Divine Office,

lectio divina,

The idea is not to study the Bible as a scholar would but rather to encounter it as God speaking directly to the individual. In this sense, a monk immersing himself in Scripture, as directed by the Rule, is carrying out a form of prayer.

After I was spiritually healed, my priest explained his reasoning for directing me to give myself over to that simple meditative prayer: “I had to get you out of your head.”

He meant that I was captive to an intellectual tendency to try to think my way out of my troubles—a strategy that always ended in failure for me. What I really needed to do was to quiet my mind and still my heart to open it to God’s grace. He was right.

Besides, as Father Benedict put it, asceticism can be a wake-up call for the spiritually slothful. “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.”

Along those lines, a tree that is repeatedly uprooted and transplanted will be hard pressed to produce healthy fruit. So it is with people and their spiritual lives. Rootlessness is not a new problem. In the first chapter of the Rule, Saint Benedict denounced the kind of monk he called a “gyrovague.”

The Rule requires monks to take a vow of “stability”—meaning that barring unusual circumstances, including being sent out as a missionary, the monk will remain for the rest of his life in the monastery where he took his vows.

“It’s the life of Mary, not Martha: to stay put at the foot of Christ no matter what they say you’re not doing.”

Zygmunt Bauman says that liquid modernity compels us to refuse stability because it’s a fool’s game. “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.

The gyrovague, the villain of Saint Benedict’s Rule, is the hero of postmodernity.

The church is not always a sign of contradiction to this modern lack of community. In the first decade of my life as an adult Christian, I left church as soon as services were over. Getting involved with the people there was not interesting. Just Jesus and me was all I wanted and all I needed, or so I thought. You might say that I wasn’t interested in joining their pilgrimage, that I preferred to be a tourist at church—and was too spiritually immature to understand how harmful this was.

That consumerist approach to the community of believers reproduces the fragmentation that is shattering Christianity in the contemporary world.

Community life, not a dreamy ideal, said Bonhoeffer, but an often difficult initiation into the “divine reality” that is the church. That is, 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.