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

by Rod Dreher

Don’t be fooled by the large number of churches you see today. Unprecedented numbers of young adult Americans say they have no religious affiliation at all.

According to the Pew Research Center, one in three 18-to-29-year-olds have put religion aside, if they ever picked it up in the first place.2 If the demographic trends continue, our churches will soon be empty.

Even more troubling, many of the churches that do stay open will have been hollowed out by a sneaky kind of secularism to the point where the “Christianity...

What they found was that in most cases, teenagers adhered to a mushy pseudoreligion the researchers deemed Moralistic Therapeutic Deism (MTD).

A God exists who created and orders the world and watches over human life on earth. God wants people to be good, nice, and fair to each other, as taught in the Bible and by most world religions. The central goal of life is to be happy and to feel good about oneself. God does not need to be particularly involved in one’s life except when he is needed to resolve a problem. Good people go to heaven when they die.

This creed, they found, is especially prominent among Catholic and Mainline Protestant teenagers.

and replacing it with a pseudo-Christianity that is “only tenuously connected to the actual historical Christian tradition.”

MTD is not entirely wrong. After all, God does exist, and He does want us to be good. The problem with MTD, in both its progressive and its conservative versions, is that it’s mostly about improving one’s self-esteem and subjective happiness and getting along well with others.

It has little to do with the Christianity of Scripture and tradition, which teaches repentance, self-sacrificial love, and purity of heart, and commends sufferin...

Though superficially Christian, MTD is the natural religion of a culture that worships the...

As bleak as Christian Smith’s 2005 findings were, his follow-up research, a third installment of which was publ...

only 40 percent of young Christians sampled said that their personal moral beliefs were grounded in the Bible or ...

It’s unlikely that the beliefs of even these faithful are biblically coherent. Many of these “Christians” are actually committed moral individualists who neither know...

An astonishing 61 percent of the emerging adults had no moral problem at all with mat...

An added 30 percent expressed some qualms but figured it was not worth worrying about. In this view, say Smith and his team, “all that society is, apparently, is a collectio...

These are not bad people. Rather, they are young adults who have been terribly failed by family, church, and the other institutions that formed—or rather, failed to ...

To a remarkable degree, teenagers have adopted the religious attitudes of their parents. We have been an MTD nation for some time now.

“That is all finally being stripped away by the combination of mass consumer capitalism and liberal individualism.”

the flood is rising to the rafters in the American church. Every single congregation in America must ask itself if it has compromised so much with the world that it has been compromised in its faithfulness.

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.

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.

That is, to quit piling up sandbags and to build an ark in which to shelter until the water recedes and we can put our feet on dry land again?

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.

In the first centuries of Christianity, the early church survived and grew under Roman persecution and later after the collapse of the empire in the West. We latter-day Christians must learn from their exam...

One day near the turn of the sixth century, a young Roman named Benedict said good-bye to his hometown, Nursia, a rugged village pocketed away in central Italy’s Sibylline mountain range.

The son of Nursia’s governor, Benedict was on his way to Rome, the place where promising young men seeking a place in the world went to complete their education.

Nearly seventy years before Benedict was born, the Visigoths had sacked the Eternal City. The collapse of the city of Rome was a staggering blow to the morale of citizens across the once-mighty empire.

Yet Christians throughout the empire mourned because Rome’s suffering forced them to confront a terrible fact: that the foundations of the world they and their ancestors had known were crumbling before their eyes.

“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.”

So great was the shock that Jerome’s contemporary, Saint Augustine, wrote his classic City of God, which explained the catastrophe in terms of God’s mysterious will and refocused the minds ...

The city of Rome did not disappear, but by the time young Benedict arrived, Rome was a pathetic shadow of its former self. Once the world’s largest city, with a population estimated at one million souls at the height of its power in the second...

In 476, barbarians deposed the last Roman emperor of the West. By the turn of the sixth century, Rome’s population had scattered, leaving only one hund...

The overthrow of the Western empire did not mean anarchy. To the contrary, in Italy, things went on much...

Theodoric, the Visigoth king who ruled Italy in Benedict’s time from his capital in Ravenna, was a heretical Christian (an Arian) but made a pilgrimage to Rome in ...

The king assured the Romans of his favor for them and his protection. In fact, the best he could do ...

We know few particulars of social life in barbarian-ruled Rome, but history shows that a general loosening of morals follows the shatt...

Think of the decadence of Paris and Berlin after World War I, or of Russia in the decade after t...

Pope Saint Gregory the Great never knew Benedict, but he wrote the saint’s biography based on interviews he conducted ...

was so shocked and disgusted by the vice and corruption in the city that he turned his back on the life of privilege that awaited him ther...

He moved to the nearby forest and later to a cave forty miles to the east. There Benedict lived a life of prayer and contemp...

This was normal in the first centuries of the church, and it continues in some places even today. In the third century, men (and even a few women) retreated to the Egyptian desert, renouncing all bodily comfort to se...

They took to an extreme the scriptural injunction to die to self to live in Christ, obeying the Lord’s command to the rich young ruler to sell his poss...

During Benedict’s three years in the cave, a monk named Romanus, from a nearby monastery, brought him food. By the time Benedict emerged from the cave, he had a reputation for sanctity and was invited by a monastic community to be their abbot.

Eventually Benedict founded twelve monasteries of his own in the region. His twin sister, Scholastica, followed in his footsteps, beginning her own community of nuns.

To guide the monks and nuns in living simple, orderly lives consecrated to Christ, Benedict wrote a slim book, now kn...

For the early monastics, a “rule” was simply a guide to living in...

The one Benedict wrote is a more relaxed form of a very strict earlier one f...

In his Rule, Benedict described the monastery as a “school for the Lord’s service.” In that sense, his Ru...

Modern readers who turn to it looking for mystical teaching of fathomless spiritual depth will be disappointed. Benedict’s spirituality is wholly practical—and he origina...