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

by Rod Dreher

A community that cannot face its faults and love each other

through to healing is not trul...

And it teaches the individual monk more about himself. “When a man first comes to the monastery,

the first thing he notices is everybody else’s quirks—that is, what’s wrong with everybody else,” said Father Martin. “But the longer you’re here, the more you begin to think: what’s wrong with me? You go deeper into yourself to learn your own strengths and weaknesses. And that leads you to acceptance of others.”

The Rule commands that all those who present themselves as pilgrims and visitors to the monastery “be received like Christ, for He is going to say, because He will say, ‘I was a stranger, and you took me in’” (Matt. 25:35). If you are invited to dine with the monks in the refectory, they greet you the first time with a hand-washing ceremony prescribed in the Rule.

Balance, then—or put another way, prudence, mercy, and good judgment—is key to governing the life of a Christian community.

As recently as the 1960s, with the notable exception of civil rights,

moral and cultural concerns weren’t make-or-break issues in U.S. politics. Americans voted largely on economics, as they had since the Great Depression. There was sufficient moral consensus in the culturally Christian nation to keep sex and sexuality apolitical.

Thomas Byrne Edsall in the Atlantic, “they now pit voters who believe in a fixed and universal morality against those who see moral issues, especially sexual ones, as elastic and subject to personal choice.”

That was 2003. Today the culture war as we knew it is over. The so-called values voters—social and religious conservatives—have been defeated and are being swept to the political margins.

Donald Trump won the presidency in part with the strong support of Catholics and Evangelicals, the idea that someone as robustly vulgar, fiercely combative, and morally compromised as Trump will be an avatar for the restoration of Christian morality and social unity is beyond delusional. He is not a solution to the problem of America’s cultural decline, but a symptom of it.

In 2016, the Republican nominee ran as a nationalist opponent of trade deals while the Democratic candidate, a globalist to the fingertips, was Wall Street’s favorite.

Welcome to the politics of post-Christian America.

Besides, fair or not, conservative Christianity will be associated with Trump for the next few years, and no doubt beyond. If conservative church leaders aren’t extraordinarily careful in how they manage their public relationship to the Trump administration, anti-Trump blowback will do severe damage to the church’s reputation.

Trump’s election solves some problems for the church, but given the man’s character, it creates others. Political power is not a moral disinfectant.

There is also the danger of Christians falling back into complacency. No administration in Washington, no matter how ostensibly pro-Christian, is capable of stopping cultural trends toward desacralization and fragmentation that have been building for centuries. To expect any different is to make a false idol of politics.

One reason the contemporary

church is in so much trouble is that religious conservatives of the last generation mistakenly believed they could focus on politics and the culture would take care of itself. For the past thirty years or so, many of us believed that we could turn back the tide of aggressive 1960s liberalism by voting for conservative Republicans. White Evangelicals and Catholic “Reagan Democrats” came together to support GOP candidates who v...

No, it will not. Politics is no substitute for personal holiness. The best that orthodox Christians today can hope for from politics is that it can open a space for the church to do the work of charity, culture building, and conversion.

Yuval Levin, editor of National Affairs magazine and a fellow of Washington’s Ethics and Public Policy Center, contends that religious conservatives would be better off “building thriving subcultures” than seeking positions of power. Why? Because in an age of increasing and unstoppable fragmentation, the common culture doesn’t matter as much as it used to. 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

religious liberty.

Religious liberty is critically important to the Benedict Option. Without a robust and successful defense of First Amendment protections,

Lance Kinzer

grew up very much with the idea church was a place you go for teaching and fellowship, but you’re really there for a kind of pep talk before you go out there and live your real life the rest of the week,” he says.

Given the post-Christian turn in American culture, that is no longer enough. Kinzer has plunged more deeply into the life of his congregation, teaching a class on Augustine’s City of God and organizing a new prayer meeting for men and women. The former legislator sees this as vital work to prepare his own congregation for the new reality—one that American Christians still don’t grasp.

Evangelicals who always believed that there was some sort of silent majority with them, is to come to terms with the fact that this is just not true,” he says. “This is difficult, this is disorienting. Internalizing the fact that that is...

We do not have the luxury of continuing to fight the last war.

True. As important as religious liberty is, though, Christians cannot forget that religious liberty is not an end in itself but a means to the end of living as Christians in full.

The church’s mission on earth is not political success but fidelity.

Part of the change we have to make is accepting that in the years to come, faithful Christians may have to choose between being a good American and being a good Christian. In a nation where “God and country” are so entwined, the idea that one’s citizenship might be at radical odds with one’s faith is a new one.

Alexis de Tocqueville was convinced that democracy could not survive the loss of Christian faith. Self-government required shared convictions about moral truths. Christian faith drew men outside themselves and taught them that laws must be firmly rooted in a moral order revealed and guaranteed by God.

In other words, civilization doesn’t exist to make it possible for individuals to do whatever they want to do. To believe that is an anthropological error. A civilization in which no one felt an obligation to the past, to the future, to each other, or to anything higher than self-gratification is one that is dangerously fragile. In the waning decades of the Western Roman Empire, Augustine described society as preoccupied with pleasure-seeking, selfishness, and living for the moment. Because it prescribes government

Those who “live within a lie,” says Havel, collaborate with the system and compromise their full humanity.

Every act that contradicts the official ideology is a denial of the system. What if the greengrocer stops putting the sign up in his window? What if he refuses to go along to get along? “His revolt is an attempt to live within the truth”—and it’s going to cost him plenty.

“A better system will not automatically ensure a better life,” Havel goes on. “In fact the opposite is true: only by creating a better life can a better system be developed” (emphasis mine).

“parallel polis”—a separate but porous society existing

parallel polis is not about building a gated community for Christians but rather about establishing (or reestablishing) common practices and common institutions that can reverse the isolation and fragmentation of contemporary society. (In this we hear Brother Ignatius of Norcia’s call to have “borders”—formal lines behind which we live to nurture our faith and culture—but to “push outwards, infinitely.”)

If we hope for our faith to change the world one day, we have to start locally. Benedict Option communities should be small, because “beyond a certain point, human ties like personal trust and personal responsibility cannot work.” And they should “naturally rise from below,” which is to say, they should be organic and not handed down by central planners. These communities start with the individual heart and spread from there to the family, the church community, the neighborhood, and onward.

The totalitarian government had taken that away from them. Benda’s attempt to repoliticize the people consisted of activating their desire simply to be together, to be social in whatever way they found pleasing.

“They surrendered themselves to the idea that these things were worth doing in and of themselves, not because they might have definite, measurable consequences,” Taylor says. “Havel, Benda, and the other dissidents made it clear that once you start down the path of consequentialism, you will always find a reason not to do anything. You have to want to do something because it’s worth doing, not because you think it will make the Communist Party fall in four years.”

In some sense, Christians’ new minority status may help us keep our focus where it ought to be. As Southern Baptist leader Russell Moore says in his book Onward, by losing its cultural respectability, the church is freer to be radically faithful. “We will engage the culture less like the chaplains of some idyllic Mayberry and more like the apostles in the book of Acts,” writes Moore.

Christians often talk about “reaching the culture” without realizing that, having no distinct Christian culture of their own, they have been co-opted by the secular culture they wish to evangelize.

If today’s churches are to survive the new Dark Age, they must stop “being normal.”

Tradition not only guides them in how to obey God’s Word and

be open to the Holy Spirit’s leading, but it frees them from the burden of having to make things up as they go along.

When Christians ignore the story of how our fathers and mothers in the faith prayed, lived, and worshiped, we deny the life-giving power of our own roots and cut ourselves off from the wisdom of those whose minds were renewed. As a result, at best, the work of God in our lives is slower and shallower than it might otherwise be. At worst, we lose our children.

In her church and religious school, she was fed nothing but the thin gruel of contemporary Christianity, with its shallow theology and upbeat sloganeering.

There is a connection between neglecting to take liturgy seriously, or giving up liturgy altogether, and abandoning Christian orthodoxy. If we are to maintain these truths over time, we must maintain our liturgy.

“The medium is the message.”