Going all Benedict?

I've recently caught up with the rest of the Christian world by reading Rod Dreher's book The Benedict Option.  For those who have not managed it yet, it's an attempt (in an American context, and that's important) to re-think how Christians engage in society, culture, and politics.  The thesis is built on a negative, but I would say accurate, premise: that we lost.  In the US context, Dreher particularly means that Christians lost the culture war; you can expand it to the UK context by noting that we lost without fighting.  However it happened, Christians have lost most of their influence over culture and politics, and now find themselves a minority in a society in which they might formerly have felt at home.

Dreher is not painting the past as some golden age.  He knows there were challenges 'back then' as well.  But we don't have to live then, we have to live now.  What should we do?  His answer is: take the Benedict Option.  Which means what, exactly?

Well, this depends on a perhaps more controversial development of the negative premise.  For Dreher, the culture of the West is so tied up with the Christian religion that the loss of the latter necessarily means the loss of the former; hence we are entering a new Dark Age, a period of history in many ways parallel to the collapse of the Western Roman Empire.  (I hear echoes of Bonhoeffer here, particularly in his Ethics.)  I say this is controversial, because I think certainly in my context there is a lot of wariness about tying Christianity and (Western) culture together in this way. But I find it persuasive, at least from a historical point of view.  Western culture means that particular form of the interaction between the Classical past and the Christian message which took root in the West - and that is what is being lost.

The parallel between the new Dark Age and the old one invites the more positive parallel which Dreher wants to develop: orthodox Christians need to follow the example of Benedict, in developing means of resisting the disintegration of faith and culture.  But what does that look like?  For Benedict it meant the monastery, but Dreher knows that isn't realistic for most of us.  So what then?

Essentially, it seems to me, what Dreher is advocating is just being the church - and he acknowledges that in one sense this is really not rocket science - but being the church more seriously and more intensively than we have become used to.  Creating real, close communities that foster the handing on of the Christian tradition.  Being prepared to opt out of society where it is impossible for us to participate without compromise.  Taking more care in the education of our children (which for him means withdrawing them from public, and most private, schools).  Being much more prepared to be weird.

This is not, by the way, isolationism.  What Dreher calls 'Benedict Option communities' - and he envisages them taking many different forms - will remain fundamentally open and engaged.  But they will do it on terms set by the gospel, and they will do it from a place grounded in a distinctively Christian culture.  Fundamentally, BO communities are seeking to maintain Western culture so that when the experiments in atheistic culture, with its cheery or depressive nihilism, come crashing down, there is something for people to come back to.

I find the vision of this book inspiring, even where the detail doesn't really transfer well into my context.  Christian communities developing ways of maintaining 'thick' Christian culture amidst a disintegrating world.  But are we ready for it?  Dreher recounts how his own Orthodox Church used to insist that anyone who wanted to take the Eucharist on the Sunday must attend Vespers on Saturday night - it's an example of shaping life around church, not just squeezing church in at the margins.  Would we be up for that?  Are we ready to live as if the gospel of Christ really were the most important thing?