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

by Rod Dreher

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, and inaugurated the age of democracy The Industrial Revolution (ca. 1760–1840) and the growth of capitalism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries The Sexual Revolution (1960–present)

“metaphysical realism.” From this principle comes what Charles

The world and everything in it is part of a harmonious whole ordered by God and filled with meaning—and all things are signs pointing to God. Society is grounded in that higher reality. The world is charged with spiritual force.

These three pillars had to crumble before the modern world could arise from the rubble, Taylor says.

nominalism.

began with Copernicus (1473–1543), who showed that the earth was not the fixed center of Creation, and ended with Newton (1642–1727), whose breakthrough discoveries laid the foundation for modern physics. The era overturned the Aristotelian-Christian

John Adams, a Founding Father and practicing Unitarian, remarked: 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.7

Zygmunt Bauman called “solid modernity”—a

Sigmund Freud,

Freud vs Jung Materialism vs. spiritualism

we must look into ourselves for the secret to our own well-being.

2/3rds of humans are extroverts. They do not excel at looking inward.

“Religious man was born to be saved. Psychological man is born to be pleased.”9

“positive asceticism”

How can we create a Christianity that feels this void?

We are not the ones who give things meaning. God gives things meaning.”

Submitting to rules one doesn’t understand is difficult, but it’s a good way to counteract the carnal desire for personal independence. There may not be spiritual merit in choosing to eat two dishes instead of three at a meal, but the humility that comes with agreeing to submit to another’s decision that one do so is transformative.

the Lord responded that Mary had chosen the better path. Why? Because as Jesus said when he rebuked Satan, “Man shall not live by bread alone, but on every word that proceeds out of the mouth of God” (Matthew 4:4). It is important to do things for the Lord, but it is more important to know him with your heart and your mind. And that is why contemplation takes priority.

that everyone he knew who lost his faith began by ceasing to pray. If we are to live rightly ordered Christian lives, then prayer must be the basis of everything we do.

Lance Kinzer

2016 book Conserving America?: Essays on Present Discontents, Patrick J. Deneen,

You have to want to do something because it’s worth doing, not because you think it will make the Communist Party fall in four years.”

S. Lewis called “the abolition of man.”

If there is no real participation in the eternal—that is, if we do not regard matter, and even time itself, as rooted firmly in God’s being—then the life of the church can scarcely withstand the torrents of liquid modernity.

Richard Rhor-like theme?

Evangelical ecclesiology is inadequate to the task of meeting postmodernity’s challenges, he has

As crucial as cultural survival is, Hanby warns that Christians cannot content themselves with merely keeping their heads above water within liquid modernity. We have to search passionately for the truth, reflect rigorously on reality, and in so doing, come to terms with what it means to live as authentic Christians in the disenchanted world created by modernity. Education is the most important means for accomplishing this.

one based on the premise that there is a God-given, unified structure to reality and that it is discoverable.

Be specific here? Where is it discoverable? That is, what can we as God believers stand on that it least allows us to hold their own against scientific materialism?

In traditional Christianity, the ultimate goal of the soul is to love and serve God with all one’s heart, soul, and mind, to achieve unity with Him in eternity. To prepare for eternal life, we must join ourselves to Christ and strive to live in harmony with the divine will.

Define explore this essay topic

Today our education system fills students’ heads with facts, with no higher aspiration than success in worldly endeavor.

Is not this the intended purpose for a public, secular Educational system?

But mastery of facts and their application is not the same thing as education, any more than an advanced degree in systematic theology makes one a saint.

How would the “Christian” school, or for the education system just previously described, do this differently?

Whether or not their accomplishments are morally worthy is a secondary question,

If a Christian way of living isn’t integrated with students’ intellectual and spiritual lives, they’ll be at risk of falling away through no fault of their own.

What exactly would be the “Christian way? Is this worthy of an essay exploration?

Ideas have consequences—and so does their lack.

Specific examples?

It is not enough to present students with facts about Western civilization—the civilization that is the father and mother of every citizen of the West, whether their ancestors immigrated from Africa or Asia, and even if, like me, their Christian confession is Byzantine.

This seems like a heavy lift. How would Dreher Propose he do this with the new social justice warriors? My hunch is they would not be very receptive, even a reasonable towards this idea.

Germany’s strict laws mandating shop closing times.

what their faith entails,

Just like the Renaissance and Enlightenment required pushed us to new interpretations of the Bible as it relates to how our physical universe operates (earth is not the center of the universe, the earth was not created in 6 days, etc.), isn’t it time to to re-evaluate it in light of our knowledge of humankind?

To sign the oath, they believe, would be the modern equivalent of burning a pinch of incense before a statue of Caesar.

Why have church leaders allowed this false-dichotomy to be defined? Can’t we all agree that gay/LGBT people, are 'people?' Were not they create by God, in God's image?

One Christian professor on a secular university’s science faculty declined to answer a question I had about the biology of homosexuality,

religious liberty lawyer,

Are any of these published?

David Gushee, a well-known Evangelical ethicist who holds an aggressively progressive

Jews entered banking, for example, because usury was considered sinful by medieval Christianity and was kept off-limits to Christians.

This is a good example of how Christianity has changed in the past, and can do so now, if we want to. I’m pretty sure, Jews, as a people who do not exactly except the credentials of Jesus, would be considered sinful. Why not refuse to bake them a cake, or watch their Hollywood products. Usury used to be consider a sin that brought discrimination of Jews. But now, usury and the Jews are considered almost as allies of Christianity.

Signing a statement affirming one has seen a training video is not the same thing as signing a statement affirming homosexuality. Christians must exercise wisdom in these cases. Life is full of compromises, and not every one turns a believer into Judas.

EXACTLY!!!

This raises critical questions: Is sex the linchpin of Christian cultural order? Is it really the case that to cast off Christian teaching on sex and sexuality is to remove the

He seems to be asking the questions backwards.

they were joining Jesus Christ to that prostitute, he was not speaking metaphorically. Because we belong to Christ as a unity of body, mind, and soul, how we use the body and the mind sexually is a very

The same saying could be used as we Christians persecute gay people. It is Jesus that persecute them, and thus the kick back towards Christianity.

metaphysical reality of male and female.

What? So is God metaphysically male or female?

Future historians will wonder how the sexual desires of only three to four percent of the population became the fulcrum on which an entire worldview was dislodged and overturned.

shatter the authority of the Bible. Rightly

Is this what really shattered the authority of the Bible? Hasn’t this been a long line of lines in the sand to which our church fathers signed us up for, but which gave us no way to reasonably do so? Lack of leadership and vision in our leaders?

“The death of a culture begins when its normative institutions fail to communicate ideals in ways that remain inwardly compelling,”

teaching overboard in an attempt to keep the boat afloat on rough seas is not the answer.

What is the proof for this claim?

If the real challenge of the Sexual Revolution is cosmological,

old boundaries,”

Some expansion here would have been nice. Is he referring to, only, male and female, and their traditional union?

If Christianity is a true story, then the story the world tells about sexual freedom is a grand deception.

Why? This is good of example, in my opinion, of the type of things that traditional Christianity claims, which seem to claim some authority, and of course some accompanying restrictive orthodoxy, but are pulled from the Bible without proof nor are we given a solid, logical explanation of why.

attack the fake in the name of the real.

We Christians, as a religious sect, based solely on our faith in a metaphysical worldview, would be wise to hold our attacks on our opposers who operate fully in the materialistic world. One could make the case that that is the primary reason we find ourselves in the position we are currently in.