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

by Rod Dreher

Descartes was a rationalist but not a moral relativist—indeed, he considered himself a faithful Catholic whose mission in par...

What Descartes did—and what makes him the father of modern philosophy—was to invert the medi...

To the Scholastics, reality was an objective state, and humankind’s role was first to understand the metaphysical nature of reality. Only then could humans begin to explore ...

Descartes, on the other hand, began all inquiry with radical subjectivity, declaring that the first principle of knowledge was t...

Descartes’s philosophy opened the door to the world-changing project dubbed “the Enlightenment” by its cheerleaders, eager to contrast it to the supposedly dark days when revealed...

At its core, the Enlightenment was an attempt by European intellectuals to find a common basis outside religion for determining moral truth. The success of science led moral philosophers to explore how disinterested reason, which was so successful in th...

The philosophers of the Enlightenment sought to use reason alone to establish a new basis for political and social life, on...

They tried to create a secular morality that any reasonable person could understand and affirm, and they b...

They also advocated science and technology as a way to impose man’s rational will upon nature, and they extolled...

For our purposes, the Enlightenment matters because it was the decisive break with the Ch...

God, if He was mentioned at all, was not the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob but the nondesc...

Deism, a rationalistic school of thought that emerged in the Enlightenment, holds that God is a cosmic architect who created the universe but does not interact with it. Deism rejects biblical religion and the supernatural and bases its principles on wh...

Most of the American Founding Fathers were either confessed Deists like Benjamin Franklin (also a Freemason) or strongly influenced by Deism (e.g., Thomas Jefferson). Deism was a powerful int...

John Locke, the English political philosopher whose teaching was a great influence on the American founding, was technically not a Deist—his belief in miracles contradicted the Deists’ watchmaker God—but his ...

Locke believed that the autonomous individual, born as a blank slate, with no innate nature, is the...

The purpose of the government, according to Locke, is not to pursue virtue but rather to establish and guard a social order under which individua...

Government exists to secure the rights of these individuals to life, liberty, and property. The authors of the Declaration of Independence changed this formulation to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness,” a phras...

The U.S. Constitution, a Lockean document, privatizes religion, separat...

For all the good that religious tolerance undoubtedly brought to a young country with a diverse and contentious population of Protestant sectarians and a Catholic minority, it also laid the groundwork for excluding religion from the public square by making it a matter of private, individual choice.

In the American order, the state’s role is simply to act as a referee among individuals and factions. The government has no ultimate conception of the good, and it regards its own role as limited to protecting the rights of individuals.

But from the Christian point of view, Enlightenment liberalism contained the seeds of Christianity’s undoing.

We had no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion. Avarice, ambition, revenge, or gallantry, would break the strongest cords of our Constitution as a whale goes through a net. Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.

Adams understood that liberty under the Constitution could only work if the people were virtuous, restraining their passions and directing them toward the good—as defined, presumably, by Adams’s rationalistic religious belief.

Democracy, Capitalism, Romanticism: The Calamitous Nineteenth Century In the middle of the eighteenth century, new technological breakthroughs began to give man unprecedented power over nature.

This led to an explosion in manufacturing and commerce, which brought revolutionary changes to society. The socially stable way of life based on farming and crafts came to an end. Peasants moved en masse to cities, where they became workers in the new factories. The social hierarchies of the traditional family and village began to dissolve.

The same was true in politics. The American Revolution in 1776 overthrew monarchy and establishe...

The far bloodier French Revolution of 1789 was much more radical, attempting near-totalitarian refashioning of French society in the name of republicanism. Its terror ended in the dictatorship of Napoleon Bonaparte, who restored order, but the violence unleashed by the revolution and its ideals rocked Europe for the rest of the century. It shook monarchies and establ...

Around the same time, artists and intellectuals began to rebel against Enlightenment reason and the effect...

The Romantics, as they were called, found many aspects of the new rationalist, mechanized society distasteful but had no interest in returning to the Christian world. They prized emo...

They advocated an ideal of the heroic, creative individual, one who rejects the strictures of society, one who fol...

For the Romantics, meaning and release from the ugliness of modern society was to be found in art, nature, and culture. Theirs was a primitivist reaction agains...

Though a man of the Enlightenment era, philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778) became...

Rousseau advanced the idea that man is born naturally good but is corrupted by society. From Rousseau came the modern notion that the freer a society is, the more virtuous it is. The people, in expressing the “general will,” are always right. Alexis de Tocqueville, a young French aristocrat traveling...

democracy risked eliminating the virtues that made self-rule possible. Democracies will succeed only if “mediating institutions,” including the churches, thrive.

Writing a generation after Charles Darwin published his Origin of Species in 1859, German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche understood natural selection to mean that there is no divine plan guiding man’s development. It is random, based on the survival of the fittest.

Nietzsche drew on Darwin to formulate a philosophy extolling strength and the individual will.

“God is dead, and we have killed him,” said Nietzsche, stating a blunt truth about th...

The Victorian era in England stretched from 1837 until the turn of the twentieth century and featured a popular Christianity that was muscular, moralistic, and disciplined.

It was notably civic-minded, with a strong emphasis on social reform. This reformist Evangelicalism spread to the United States, sparking the Third Great Awakening, which brought explosive growth in Protestant churches and laid the groundwork for the Social Gospel movement. Rising European immigration brought Catholics pouring into American cities by the hundreds of thousands.

In America, from 1870 through 1930, these elites worked what sociologist Christian Smith terms a “secular revolution.” They harnessed the energy and tumult of industrialization to remake society along broadly “progressive” lines.

Progressives turfed the Protestant religious establishment out of universities and other leading cultural institutions. It pushed religion to the margins of public life, advocating science as the primary source of society’s values and as a guide to social change.

Within Christianity, it replaced the religious model of the human person with a psychological model centered on the Self.

And progressives’ political ardor for greater democracy and egalitarianism found expression in church life by eroding the aut...

The twentieth century arrived amid a wave of optimism about the West’s future. It was a time of hope and faith in progress. The dream came to a catastrophic end in 1914, with the outb...

The Triumph of Eros The mass savagery of World War I, four years of grinding combat that consumed the lives of seventeen million soldiers and civilians, shattered European ideals and de...

The war’s aftermath accelerated the abandonment of traditional sources of cultural authority. Sexual morality loosened. New styles of art and literature arose, making a conscious and definitive b...

Western civilization had been abandoning Christianity for quite some time, but it still had a sense of progress and purpose to unify it and to give its ...

None of that progress—scientific, technological, economic, political, or social—prevented Europe from turni...

This was the period in which the West moved from what sociologist Zygmunt Bauman called “solid modernity”—a period of social change that was still fairly predictable and manageable—to “liquid modernity,” our present condition, in which chang...

Sigmund Freud, the founder of psychoanalysis, found his true genius not as a scientist but as a quasi-religious figure who discerned and proclaimed the Self as a deity to replace the Christian religion. Yet Freud’s immense cultural authority depended on his role as an icon of science.