Faith in a post-Christian world: The Benedict Option (review)

Rod Dreher. The Benedict Option: A Strategy for Christians in a Post-Christian Nation. Sentinel, 2017. 304pp.

“The changes that have overtaken the West in modern times have revolutionized everything, even the church, which no longer forms souls but caters to selves.”

My favorite books—fiction or nonfiction—are those that help me see a topic from a different perspective. That reveals a point-of-view, solution, or problem I had not heard before. That causes me to ask tough questions about my assumptions or biases.

The Benedict Option, by Rod Dreher, is one such book. His premise is that the West is resolutely post-Christian, and Christianity as lost the battle to be part of that society’s fabric. This alone is enough to engender argument—we are a caring society, we help the less fortunate, we strive for racial, gender, and economic peace. But Dreher would argue that while those virtues are Christian, what drives them must come from Christian theology. What is the basis for those things?

“… in 2005, sociologists Christian Smith and Melinda Lundquist Denton examined the religious and spiritual lives of American teenagers from a wide variety of backgrounds. What they found was that in most cases, teenagers adhered to a mushy pseudoreligion the researchers deemed Moralistic Therapeutic Deism…”

and

“…The problem with MTD, in both its progressive and its conservative versions, is that it’s mostly about improving one’s self-esteem and subjective happiness and getting along well with others.”

It is superficially Christian, which is why (says Dreher) that so many Christians have fallen under its spell. Such studies and research are the basis of the first part of the book, where Dreher makes his argument that that

“American Christians are going to have to come to terms with the brute fact that we live in a culture, one in which our beliefs make increasingly little sense. We speak a language that the world more and more either cannot hear or finds offensive to its ears.”

Dreher makes a good point. A worldview that adopts such an approach cannot solve the problems of society or the individual—precisely because it is subjective. When each person (or interest group) decides what counts as proper behavior, appropriate boundaries of speech and actions, and proper attitudes, community is impossible. Fragmentation and strive is the result. Christianity is the remedy for such radical individualism, creating community out of disparate groups of people to focus on something larger than themselves (and focused on the One who created them, and knows their purpose).

His solution is what he calls the Benedict Option. Drawing on the Rule of Saint Benedict, and the Benedictine communities, he argues that Christians should stop trying to win political battles and focus on building communities that,

The benefice of the Rule is that it is simple and practical. It shows how to live a Christian life—work, family, play, etc.)—rooted in Christian anthropology. That, is, to live in a way that flows from our nature and being as created by God. To follow our “created purpose.”

Dreher’s argument is sound, based not only on studies of attitudes and beliefs of modern people, but also a chapter on the societal changes since the Middle Ages to show how we have arrived at this cultural moment.

He then moves to describe the Rule, and how it works both in monasteries but also how it can work in a church and other Christian organizations. Dreher is no pollyanna—throughout the book, he warns that it is not easy to be such a community, and also that Christian will be called to make sacrifices in the face of societal pressure or outright rejection.

But his solution does not include withdrawing from the world. That is not the church’s calling. Instead, Christian communities and organizations are where we should “live” in order to remain focused, grounded, encouraged, and sound in faith. But our work is “out there.”

Through the rest of the book, Dreher describes how all of this can play out in the lives of ordinary western Christians. The chapter titles give you a good idea: ““A New Kind of Christian Politics,” “A Church for All Seasons,” “The Idea of a Christian Village,” “Education as Christian Formation,” “Preparing for Hard Labor,” “Eros and the New Christian Counterculture,” “Man and the Machine.” (The latter two deal boldly address sexuality and technology in this modern culture.

There is so much here that a short review cannot do it justice. One of the elements that particularly struck me was his description of modern culture as one of “liquid modernity.” This is used by scholars to describe the inability for social institutions to develop and solid because of how quickly conditions change. It describes the problems that occur when nothing is stable: tradition, history textbooks, politics, right and wrong—not even biology.

“If we don’t have internal order, we will be controlled by our human passions and by the powerful outside forces who are in greater control of directing liquid modernity’s deep currents…people today have been tricked by liquid modernity into believing that maximizing individual happiness should be the goal of life.”

His solution is to set out roots deep in the past, in Christian history, teachings, and theology, which gives us an anchor in the constantly shifting seas of liquid modernity.

Dreher’s solutions are, in some areas, radical. So radical that I suspect even a lot of Christians who agree with him cannot or will not follow his ideas. Others may adopt some of them in their individual lives—which, of course, makes his argument about the problems of modern Christianity!

I would love to see churches and groups of Christians discuss these ideas and find ways to implement many of them. At a minimum, Christians should realize that will accept Christianity if it molds itself to liquid modernity and Moralistic Therapeutic Deism. God as a therapist is acceptable, God as our sovereign Lord is not to be tolerated.

I highly recommend this book to anyone who cares about the place of the church and faith in the modern world as a practical matter.

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