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

by Rod Dreher

Professing orthodox biblical Christianity on sexual matters was now thought to be evidence of intolerable bigotry. Conservative Christians had been routed. We were living in a new country.

And then two months later the U.S. Supreme Court declared a constitutional right to same-sex marriage.

No sooner was the right to gay marriage achieved than activists and their political allies, the Democratic Party, began pushing for transgender rights.

Post-Obergefell, Christians who hold to the biblical teaching about sex and marriage have the same status in culture, and increasingly in law, as racists.

The culture war that began with the Sexual Revolution in the 1960s has now ended in defeat f...

The cultural left—which is to say, increasingly the American mainstream—has no intention of living in postwar peace. It is pressing forward with a harsh, relentless occupation, one that is aided by the clueless...

Don’t be fooled: the upset presidential victory of Donald Trump has at best given us a bit more time ...

have written The Benedict Option to wake up the church and to encourage it to act to strengthen itself, while there is still time. If we want to survive, we have to return to the ro...

We are going to have to learn habits of the heart forgotten by believers in the West. We are going to have to change our lives, and o...

In short, we are going to have to be the church, without compromise, no...

This book does not offer a political agenda. Nor is it a spiritual how-to manual, nor a stand...

True, it offers a critique of modern culture from a traditional Christian point of view, but more importantly, it tells the stories of conservative Christians who are pioneering creative ways to live out the fait...

If the salt is not to lose its savor, we have to act. The hour is late. This is not a drill.

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.

Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI foretells a world in which the church will live in small circles of committed believers who live the faith intensely, and who will have to be somewhat cut off from mainstream society for the sake of holding on to the truth.

Read this book, learn from the people you meet in it, and be inspired by the testimony ...

In the first part of this book, I will define the challenge of post-Christian America as I see it.

I will explore the philosophical and theological roots of our society’s fragmentation, and I will explain how the Christian virtues embodied in the sixth-century Rule of Saint Benedict, a monastic guidebook that played a powerful role in preserving Christian culture throughout the so-called Dark Ages, can help all believers today.

In the second part, I will discuss how the way of Christian living prescribed by the Rule can be adapted to the lives of modern conservative Chr...

To avoid political confusion, I use the word “orthodox”—small “o”—to refer to theologically traditional Protestants, Catholic...

The Rule offers insights in how to approach politics, faith, family, communit...

Finally, I will consider the critical importance of believers thinking and acting radically in the face of the two most powerful phenomena directing contemporary life and pulverizing the church’s foundations: sex and technology.

In the end, I hope you will agree with me that Christians are now in a time of decision.

Jesus Christ promised that the gates of Hell would not prevail against His church, but He did not promise that Hell would not prevail against His church in the West.

I invite you, the reader, to keep in mind as you make your way through these pages that maybe, just maybe, the new and quite different Benedict that God is calling to revive and strengthen His church is . . . you.

The newspaper said heavy rains were headed to south Louisiana that weekend in August 2016, but it was nothing unusual for us.

By the time the rain stopped, the deluge had dropped over thirty inches of water on the greater Baton Rouge area. Places that no one ever imagined would see high water disappeared beneath the muddy torrent as rivers and creeks hemorrhaged and burst their banks.

People fled their houses and made it to high ground with minutes to spare. Some had not even that much time and were lucky to clamber with their families onto their roofs, where rescuers found them.

I spent the Sunday of the flood at a makeshift shelter in Baton Rouge. My son Lucas and I helped unload the rescued from National Guard helicopters, and we joined scores of other volunteers in feeding and helping the ...

Men, women, families, the elderly, the well-off, the very poor, white, black, Asian, Latino—it was a real “here comes everybody” moment. And nearl...

These confused and homeless evacuees could be forgiven their lack of preparation. Few had thought to buy flood insurance, but why would they?

The Great Flood was a thousand-year weather event, and nobody in recorded history had ever seen this land underwater. The last time something like this happened in Louisiana, Western civilization had not yet reached American shores.

We Christians in the West are facing our own thousand-year flood—or if you believe Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI, a fifteen-hundred-year flood: in 2012, the then-pontiff said that the spiritual crisis overtaking the West is the most serious sinc...

The light of Christianity is flickering out all over the West. There are people alive today who may live to see the effective death of...

but barring a dramatic reversal of current trends, it will all but disappear entirely fro...

This may not be the end of the world, but it is the end of a world, and only the willfully blind would deny it. For a long time we have downplayed or ignored the signs. Now t...

The breakdown of the natural family, the loss of traditional moral values, and the fragmenting of communities—we were troubled by these developments but believed they were reversible and didn’t reflect anything fundamentally wrong with our approach to faith.

Our religious leaders told us that strengthening the levees of law and politics would keep the flood of secularism at bay.

by continuing to do what Christians have been doing for decades—especially ...

Today we can see that we’ve lost on every front and that the swift and relentless currents of secularism have ...

Hostile secular nihilism has won the day in our nation’s government, and the culture has turned powerfully ...

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

The advance of gay civil rights, along with a reversal of religious liberties for believers who do not accept the LGBT agenda, had been s...

The U.S. Supreme Court’s Obergefell decision declaring a constitutional right to same-sex marriage was the Wat...

It was the moment that the Sexual Revolution triumphed decisively, and the culture war, as we have known it s...

In the wake of Obergefell, Christian beliefs about the sexual complementarity of marriage are considered to be abominable prejudice—and in a growing number of cases,...

Not only have we lost the public square, but the supposed high ground of our churches...

Well, so what if those around us don’t share our morality? We can still retain our faith and teaching within the walls of our churches, we may think, but that’s placing unwarranted conf...

The changes that have overtaken the West in modern times have revolutionized everything, even the church, which no longer...

As conservative Anglican theologian Ephraim Radner has said, “There is no safe place in the world or in our churches within which t...