A Strategic Withdrawal Without a Strategy
A review of Rod Dreher’s The Benedict Option
The Benedict Option, a book and religious movement of sorts by journalist Rod Dreher, posits that Christians have lost the culture war, and the only hope for the preservation of Christian moral life is for the faithful to fall back from politics and the secular public square, and instead turn inward.
Dreher presents The Benedict Option as a method of spiritual survival during the incipient "dark age" of secularism and decadence that is enveloping Western societies.
No-fault divorce, feminism, the pill, abortion-on-demand, and more recently, gay marriage and LGBT-ism are now ascendant. The traditional family structure, and with it, the dichotomy of male and female, are dissolving. It is easy to conclude, then, that the ethos of the 1960s Sexual Revolution has finally triumphed and the Christian moral order is passing into irrelevancy.
In such an environment, Dreher proposes that faithful Christians must withdraw from the wider culture and choose to become purer, more orthodox, and more networked by living intentionally in community with one another. In such communities, Christians avoid the poison of modern secular culture. Christians, to keep their faith, must be consciously counter-cultural: in the world, but not of it.
Dreher is sometimes unclear on his specific proposals, but here’s an example he cites - Bruderhof, an undeniably Amish-flavored series of communes located in the United States and around the world. These communities pre-date Dreher’s book but exemplify the idea. If Dreher is correct, that such Benedict Option communities are the only hope for Christian survival, it is easy to predict that most Christians would sooner take their chances with secularism and decadence. Dreher is quick to caution that geographic isolation is not necessary, or even desirable in all cases. Most of his examples are either classics-oriented schools or different types of fraternal organizations, such as the “Tipi Loschi”.
He models his movement on, or at least draws inspiration from, the monastic religious order established by St. Benedict in the 6th Century A.D. as the Roman Empire was collapsing. In that spirit, Dreher calls for a radical withdrawal from politics and the broader struggle over social issues being waged by religious conservatives - the "culture wars".
For Dreher, the culture wars are over and Christians have lost. The public square in America is effectively secular and openly hostile to Christians and their worldview. Political activism, to Dreher, is worse than useless because it subtracts from the real work of building communities that can preserve Christian moral life amid moral decline.
Political retrenchment is a prerequisite to authentic Christian renewal. Modernity and anti-Christian secularism have swept over the culture like a "great flood", and the only hope for survival of authentic Christian communities is to build an "ark". His ark, which will keep Christians aloft through the deluge, is living in closely-knit intentional communities of fellow Christians. As he states:
"Could it be that the best way to fight the flood is to . . . stop fighting the flood? 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." (12)
In Dreher's view, Christian attempts to re-evangelize the culture through political activism are doomed to failure:
"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. With a few exceptions, conservative Christian political activists are as ineffective as White Russian exiles, drinking tea from samovars in their Paris drawing rooms, plotting the restoration of the monarchy. One wishes them well but knows deep down that they are not the future." (12).
According to Dreher, this should not be thought of as a retreat. A "call to head for the hills and hunker down in some kind of separatist commune — is not at all what The Benedict Option calls for," he has written at The American Conservative magazine. Of course, he cites many such communes as “Ben Op” examples, so it’s a little difficult to pin him down clearly on what he is proposing, beyond Christian schools and regular fellowships organizations one might find at any local parish.
At a talk at the Union League in NYC he affirms that Christians must make a "strategic withdrawal from the world for the sake of serving the world as authentic Christians." So, it’s a withdrawal, but just not all the way into the hills. Just fall back to the foothills.
Whether The Benedict Option is a "strategic withdrawal" or an "ark", it argues that political passivity is the price of authentically Christian moral life, a view of politics which is gaining ground among Christian thinkers. Recently, James Kalb echoed a similar sentiment writing in the Catholic World Report:
Under such circumstances Catholics concerned with public life need to take stock and find what they can still do productively. In local affairs, and on a few specific issues like abortion, something directly practical may still sometimes be achieved. But the same is not true of broad issues of public policy, because people in public life don’t understand or care about the Catholic vision of such things. . . .
For the foreseeable future, then, general policy initiatives on the part of the Church will have to be less practical than symbolic. Their basic purpose will be to supplement the evangelical goal of changing minds on basic issues, so the important point will be integrity rather than practical politics. Concrete political initiatives will mostly have to do with practical issues of special concern to the Church and to Catholics—most prominently, maintaining the freedom of the Church, and of Catholics to live their faith.
Dreher promises to “overcome the occupation”, but provides little clarity on how that victory will be achieved. How does a focus on integrity and political disengagement ultimately retake the public square, assuming Christians are not obliged to give up that territory indefinitely, adrift in self-imposed exile? Unless there is a convincing theory of how that can be achieved through the practices its prescribes, The Benedict Option is not a strategic withdrawal; it’s just a withdrawal. Dreher argues as follows:
The Benedict Option is about discipleship, which is itself an indirect form of evangelism. Pagans converted to the early Church not simply because of the words the first Christians spoke, but because of the witness of the kinds of lives they lived. It has to be that way with us too . . . The Benedict Option is about forming communities that teach us and help us to live in such a way that our entire lives are witnesses to the transforming power of the Gospel.
Perhaps the wider culture will be inspired from afar by the joyful Christian witness of these communities, but that feels more like wishful thinking than a strategy. The martyrs of the Church endured decapitation, burning, and all forms of execution because they converted people with a fearless zeal, not simply passive example.
Furthermore, from the perspective of a Catholic, the Benedict Option makes little sense. The heart of Catholicism is the Mass, and therefore the center of a Catholic community must be the parish. The parish would naturally be a Catholic’s network, where there is a school, fraternal organizations, fellowship, charitable endeavors, etc. If he finds it unsatisfying, he can find another parish, or, even better, work to strengthen that community. If Christians cannot retake and hold the institutions they already have, they will never build the new ones Dreher is convinced they need, much less defend them. Saying, as Dreher does, that many churches do not do their jobs in instilling the faith so we must reinvent the wheel and call it the Benedict Option is itself a form of rootlessness, the very disease the Benedict Option is supposed to cure.
But the greatest pitfall of the Benedict Option is ceding the Christian voice in public life. This would only confirm to every Christian that their values are matters of private belief, as opposed to imperatives for a just society. It offers them an excuse to sit out the struggle for the soul of the country, while dressing up their indifference with the aesthetic of Benedictine spirituality.
To that end, if Christians are going to channel the energy of any prior era of Christian witness, I'm not sure medieval monks speak particularly to our time. Our crisis is a lack of nerve, not a lack of guys chanting and making jelly.
The Crusader Option
As Dreher would acknowledge, belief follows practice. The less politically engaged Christians become and the less activist their outlook, the less Christians will believe and expect their vision of the public good to shape society. Christians cannot be indifferent to politics because there is no political order that is truly neutral. Christians can either work to pass laws informed by Christian morality, or suffer under the will of those who would upend it.
