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

by Rod Dreher

When he left fallen Rome for the wilderness, Benedict had no idea that his founding of his schools for the Lord’s service would over time have such...

Europe in the early Middle Ages was reeling from the calamitous end of the empire, which left in its wake countless local wars as b...

Rome’s fall left behind a staggering degree of material poverty, the result of both the disintegration of Rome’s complex trade network and the loss of ...

In these miserable conditions, the church was often the strongest—and perhaps the on...

monasticism provided much-needed help and hope to the peasantry, and thanks to Benedict, a renewed focus on spiritual life led many men and women to leave the world and devote themselves wholly t...

These monasteries kept faith and learning alive within their walls, evangelized barbarian peoples, and taught them how to pray, to read, to plant crops, and to build things. Over the next few centuries, they prepared the devastated s...

It all grew from the mustard seed of faith planted by a faithful young Italian who wanted nothing more than to seek and to serve God in a community of faith constructed to wi...

In his book After Virtue, philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre likened the present cultural moment to the fall of the Roman Empire in the West.

He argued that the West has abandoned reason and the tradition of the virtues in giving itself over to the relativism that is now flooding our world today.

We are governed by what MacIntyre called emotivism: the idea that all moral choices are nothing more than expressions of what the...

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, and society itself becomes “a collection of strangers, each pursuing his or h...

abandoning objective moral standards; refusing to accept any religiously or culturally binding narrative originating outside oneself, except as chosen; repudiating memory of the past as irrelevant; and distancing oneself from community as well as any unchosen social obligations.

This state of mind approximates the condition known as barbarism.

When we think of barbarians, we imagine wild, rapacious tribesmen rampaging through cities, heedlessly destroying the structures and institutions of civilization, simply because they can. Barbarians are governed only by their will to power, an...

By that standard, despite our wealth and technological sophistication, we in the modern West are living under barbari...

Our scientists, our judges, our princes, our scholars, and our scribes—they are at work demolishing the faith, the family, gen...

MacIntyre concluded After Virtue by looking back to the West after barbarian tribes overthrew the Roman imperial order.

What they set themselves to achieve instead—often not recognizing fully what they were doing—was the construction of new forms of community within which the moral life could be sustained so that both morality and civility might survive the coming ages of barbarism and darkness.

In MacIntyre’s reading, the post-Roman system was too far gone to be saved.

He acted wisely by leaving society and starting a new community whose practices would preserve the faith through the trials ahead. Though not then a Christian, MacIntyre called on traditionalists who still believe in reason and virtue to form communities within which the life of virtue can survive the long Dark Age to come.

The world, said MacIntyre, awaits “another—doubtless very different—St. Benedict.” Christians besieged by the raging floodwaters of modernity await someone like Benedict to build arks capable of carrying them and the living faith ...

who know that if believers don’t come out of Babylon and be separate, sometimes metaphorically, sometimes literally, their faith will not survive for another generation or two in this culture of death.

They recognize an unpopular truth: politics will not save us. Instead of looking to prop up the current order, they have recognized that the kingdom of which they are citizens is not of this world and have decided not to compromise that citizenship.

What these orthodox Christians are doing now are the seeds of what I call the Benedict Option, a strategy that draws on the authority of Scripture and the wisdom of the ancient church to embrac...

Recognizing the toxins of modern secularism, as well as the fragmentation caused by relativism, Benedict Option Christians look to Scripture and to Benedict’s Rule fo...

they recognize that the new order is not a problem to be solved but a rea...

It will be those who learn how to endure with faith and creativity, to deepen their own prayer lives and adopting practices, focusing on families and communities instead of on partisan politics, and building churches, schools, and other institutions within which t...

We cannot give the world what we do not have. If the ancient Hebrews had been assimilated by the culture of Babylon, it would have ceased being a light to the world. So it is with the church.

There is a hidden blessing in this crisis, if we will open our eyes to it. Just as God used chastisement in the Old Testament to call His people back to Himself, so He may be delivering a like judgment onto a church and a people grown cold from selfishness, hedonism, and materialism.

The coming storm may be the means through which God delivers us.

Growing up in south Louisiana, whenever a hurricane was coming, somebody would take out the cast-iron kettle, make a big pot of gumbo, and after battening down the hatches, invite the neighbors over to eat, tell stories, make merry, and ride out the storm together.

Men and women of virtue—the Cajun Navy, church folks, and others—did not wait to be told what to do. They recognized the seriousness of the crisis, and they moved.

we are going to figure out how to make it through the storm and the fog to safe harbor, we have to understand how we got here. Ideas, as we will see, have consequences.

The Roots of the Crisis

One tells the other that in the past year, she has gone to six baby showers for young women in her family and social circles. None of the expectant mothers had husbands.

Some had more than one child out of wedlock. The gray-haired women know what poverty and insecurity are like, and they can’t believe that these young women would bring children into the world without fathers in the home, given how much more likely children in those situations are to be poor.

And where are the fathers, anyway? What is wrong with you...

These women are pro-life Christian conservatives who would never countenance abortion. They would rather see babies born than exterminate...

In the 1940s, when they were born, the out-of-wedlock birth rate among whites was 2 percent. It is now nearly 30 percent (the overall birt...

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.

These beliefs and practices are held to be rooted in and expressive of the sacred order both grounding and transcending existence. They tell and enact the story that holds the community together.

The loss of the Christian religion is why the West has been fragmenting for some time now, a process that is ...

There were five landmark events over seven centuries that rocked Western civilization and strippe...

In the fourteenth century, the loss of belief in the integral connection between God and Creation—or in philosophic terms, transcendent reality and material reality

The collapse of religious unity and religious authority in the Protestant Reformation of the sixteenth century

The eighteenth-century Enlightenment, which displaced the Christian religion with the cult of Reason, privatized religious life, ...

The Industrial Revolution (ca. 1760–1840) and the growth of capitalism in the nineteen...

The Sexual Revolution (19...