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

by Rod Dreher

To Freud, religion was nothing more than a man-made mechanism to cope with life and to manage instincts that, if allowed to run free, would make civilization impossible.

Western man had lost God, and with that a sense that there was a higher authority to give life ultimate meaning. But man had to get on with life somehow.

Freud’s answer was to replace religion with psychology. In his therapeutic vision, we should stop the fruitless searching for a nonexistent source of ...

The pursuit of happiness was not a quest for unity with God, or sacrificial dedication to a cause greater than oneself but r...

In the past, a person looked outside himself to learn what he was to do with his life. But in modernity, when we know that religion and all claims to transcendent values are an illusion, we must loo...

Sociologist Philip Rieff, the great interpreter of Freud, described the shift in Western consciousness like this: “Religious man was born to be saved. Psychological man is born to be pleased.”

The 1960s were the decade in which Psychological Man came fully into his own. In that decade, the freedom of the individual to fulfill his own desires became our cultural lodestar, and the rapid falling away of American morality from its Christian ideal began as a result. Despite a conservative backlash in the 1980s, Psychological Man won decisively and now owns the culture—including most churches—as surely as the Ostrogoths, Visigoths, Vandals, and other conquering peoples owned the remains of the Western Roman Empire.

In 1966, at the beginning of this new age, Rieff published a study called The Triumph of the Therapeutic: Uses of Faith After Freud, a book that still stuns with its prescience.

argued that the West, amid unprecedented liberty and prosperity, was going through a profound cultural revolution. It had not become atheist, but it had spiritualized desire and...

Most people understood that Western culture had been slowly moving away from Christianity since the Enlightenment, but Rieff said the process had gon...

In Rieff’s theory of culture, a culture is defined by what it forbids. Each culture has its own “order of therapy”—a system that teaches its members what is permitted within its bounds and gives them sanctioned ways to let off the pressure of living by...

Rather, it must be a “positive asceticism” that links the individual negating his own particular desires to the achievement of a higher, positive, life-affirming goal.

The main thing that helps a culture survive, Rieff wrote, is “the power of its institutions to bind and loose men in the conduct of their affairs with reasons which sink so deep into the self that they become commonly and implicitly understood.”

A culture begins to die, he went on, “when its normative institutions fail to communicate ideals in ways that remain inwardly compelling, first o...

In other words, the Judeo-Christian culture of the West was dying because it no longer deeply believed in Christian sacred order, with its “thou shalt nots,” and it had no way of agreeing on the “thou shalt nots” that every culture must have to restra...

attempting to build a culture on the absence of belief in a higher order that commanded our obedience. In other words, we were creating an “anti-culture,” one that made the foundation for a stable culture impossible.

That is, instead of teaching us what we must deprive ourselves of to be civilized, we have a culture built on a cult of desire, one that tells us we find meaning and purpose in releasing ourselves from the old prohibitions, as we self-directed individuals choose.

“It is in carnal desire that the modern individual believes he affirms his ‘individuality.’ The body must be the true ‘subject’ of desire because the individual must be the author of his own desire.”

newest vanguards of the Sexual Revolution, transgendered people. They refuse to be bound by biology and have behind them an elite movement teaching new generations that gender is whatever the choosing individual wants it to be. The

advent of the birth control pill in the 1960s made it possible for mankind to extend its conquest and subjection of nature to the will to the human body itself. Transgenderism is the logical next step, after which will come the deconstruction of any obstructions, in law or in custom, to freely chosen polygamous arrangements.

Sure, there will be costs to extending the Sexual Revolution. We saw th...

The 1970s, the so-called Me Decade, was when the 1960s came to the rest of America. The divorce rate, rising in the 1960s, mushroomed in the 1970s. Abortions skyrocketed. But there was no going back. The new order found its constitutional confirmation in the Supreme Court’...

Justice Anthony Kennedy, writing for the pro-choice majority, explained (no doubt unintentionally) how the Sexual Revolution depends on a radical, even nihilistic, conception of freedom: At the heart of liberty is the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life. Here is the end point of ...

Of course every age has had its morally lax people, and people who have forsaken ideals and commitments to pursue their heart’s desire.

In fact, every one of us Christians is like that at times; it’s called sin. What’s distinct about the present age, says Taylor, is that “today many people feel called to do this, feel they ought to do this, feel their lives would be somehow wasted or unfulfilled if they didn’t do it.”

What is...

Following your own heart, no matter what society says, or the church, or anybody else. This kind of thinking is devastating to every kind of socia...

The church, a community that authoritatively teaches and disciples its members, cannot withstand a revolution in which each memb...

that are nothing more than a loosely bound assembly of individuals committed to finding their own “truth,” are no longer the church in any meaningful...

In this sense, Christians today may think we stand in opposition to secular culture, but in truth we are as much creatures of...

As Charles Taylor puts it, “The entire ethical stance of moderns supposes and follows on from the death of God (and of course, of the meaningful cosmos).” We may deny that God is dead, but to accept religious individualism and its theological support structure, Moralistic Therapeutic Deism, is to declare t...

Let’s review a timeline of how the West arrived at this blasted heath of atomization, fragmentation, and unbelief.

Fourteenth century: The defeat of metaphysical realism by nominalism in medieval theological debates removed the linchpin linking the transcendent and the material worlds. In nominalism, the meaning of objects and actions in the material world depends entirely on what man assigns it. War and plague brought the medieval system crashing down.

Fifteenth century: The Renaissance dawned with a new, optimistic outlook on human potential and began shifting the West’s vision and social imagination from God to ma...

Sixteenth century: The Reformation broke the religious unity of Europe. In Protestant lands, it birthed an unresolvable crisis in religious authority, which over the ...

Seventeenth century: The Wars of Religion resulted in the further discrediting of religion and the founding of the modern nation-state. The Scientific Revolution struck the final blow to the organic medieval model of the cosmos, replacing it with a vision of the universe as a machine. The mind-body split proclaimed ...

Eighteenth century: The Enlightenment attempted to create a philosophical framework for living in and governing society absent religious reference. Reason would be the polestar of public life, with religion—considered a burden from the Dark Ages—relegated to private life. The French and American revolutions broke with ...

Nineteenth century: The success of the Industrial Revolution pulverized the agrarian way of life, uprooted masses from rural areas, and brought them into the cities. Relations among people came to be defined by money. The Romantic movement rebelled against this alienation in the name of individualism and passion. At...

Twentieth century: The horrors of the two world wars severely damaged faith in the gods of reason and progress and in the God of Christianity. With the growth of technology and mass consumer society, people began to pay more attention to themselves and to fulfilling their individual desires. The Sexual Revolution exalted the desiring individual as the center of the emerging social order, deposing an enfeebled Chri...

The long journey from a medieval world wracked with suffering but pregnant with meaning has delivered us to a place of once unimaginable comfort bu...

The West has lost the golden thread that binds us to God, Creation, and each other. Unless we find it again, there is no hope of halting our dissolution. Indeed, it is unlikely that the West will see this lifeline for a very long time. It is not looking for it and may no longer have the c...

The shadow of the Enlightenment’s failure to replace God with reason has engulfed the West and plunged us into a new Dark Age.

through this except to push forward to the true dawn. We who still hold the golden thread loosely in our hands must seize it more tightly and cling to it for future generations, or it will be torn from our grasp.

Christians know that there is one light that the darkness can neither comprehend nor overcome, and it is that Light to Whom we must return if we are go...

This is the Light, Jesus Christ, who illuminated the monasteries of the Middle Ages and all tho...

The Benedictines had no secret teaching. They had what they still have: the Rule, which shows how to order one’s life to be as receptive as possible to God’s...

You can’t go back to the past, but you can go to Norcia.

And the glimpse of the Christian past a pilgrim gets there is also, I am confident, a glimpse of the Christian future.

Norcia—the modern name of Benedict of Nursia’s birthplace—is a walled town that sits on a broad plateau at the end of a road that winds for thirty-f...

It is easy to imagine how isolated Norcia was in Benedict’s day—and why, to our knowledge, the saint went dow...