The Benedict Option After listening to an hour long lecture by Rod Dreher my question is: Can anyone really take him seriously?
How is it possible for anyone to take The Benedict Option seriously? Not that there isn't an appeal to the Christian past to be made. There is, and it is a strong appeal. Anyone who is a Christian should take pride in the Christian heritage of the West -and elsewhere. But that is part of the problem, there is an elsewhere -formerly Christian Iraq, Christian Egypt, Christian Turkiye, Christian Sudan, Christian Tunisia, not to mention such out-of-the-way places as Christian Socotra. And that is just the geographical and historical elsewhere. There is also an educational elsewhere, only now -and very selectively- being rediscovered, like the Jewish heritage of Christian faith. Which, though, is quite odd inasmuch as the Jewish heritage part of the story has it that today's rabbinical Judaism has always been normative, which it was not, certainly not as late as, say, the 250 AD or 300 AD era, when popular Judaism in the Mediterranean world was likely to feature some synthesis with the high culture of the Greeks and Romans, hence synagogue art that sometimes featured more-or-less secular versions of various Greco-Roman deities, motifs, and concepts. Not tucked away off to the side, as it were, but central in synagogue art. There was something similar amongst Christians where, in Egypt, for instance, the Isisist motif of the sacred madonna and child, served to define our Christmas theme of Mary and the infant Jesus as we know it -it spread from Egypt to the rest of the Christian world. In Turkiye (what is now Turkiye) Artemis veneration, aka Goddess veneration more generally, served as the impetus for icon art and Mariology at large, hence the doctrine of Theotokos, "Mother of God," which, while foreign to Protestant thought, is central to Catholic and Greek Orthodox thought. This is unimportant? Like hell. Exactly why does anyone suppose Dan Brown's novel, The Da Vinci Code, resonated so strongly in popular culture? The book may have been a huge flop among Evangelicals but for most other populations in America there was a ready-made audience that propelled the book to best-seller status for months and months and onto the silver screen in a Tom Hanks movie. The buzz is gone now but the effects of all of that, a real stir that lasted at least 5 years, are very much still with us. The larger point, though, is the nature of modern culture in America. There is no option in it for the Benedict Option. Cloistered Christianity is unsustainable except on the margins, it has limited appeal, and it has basically become impossible for 80% or 90% of the young because it is unthinkable in the world they know. To be sure, Evangelicals are, in effect, cloistering themselves, as they retreat from the public arena after suffering one loss after another, decade by decade, but does anyone think that home-schooling is the answer to the massive failures of public education? It may be a needed lifeboat but that is as far as it goes. Indeed, where are there Christian answers to the most vexing questions of our time? An appeal to tradition sui generis, viz The Benedict Option or Protestant equivalents, simply can't hack it. Why? Because we are in the process of creating a wholly new kind of tradition in which modern technology is very much part of the mix, and modern ways of looking at things, modern in the sense of science and religion neutral standards of truth. Hence the Left wins most of the cultural battles because Christians are clueless about what it takes to win. To be sure, the Left has major weaknesses, the war is anything but over, but the point is that Christian responses have been half-hearted when looked at in a cold sober way. I mean, the young are not buying what Christians are "selling." Not in a marginal sense, but across the board. As everyone who reads this understands, I am hardly arguing for some sort of capitulation to Hollywood, Wall Street, or Silicon Valley, to name a few. I am arguing close to the exact opposite. However, what is also being argued is that Christianity needs to be rethought for the 21st century based on a radically new kind of education needed not only to gain fresh credibility with the young but to re-educate everyone else in the process. And that is a long way -a very long way- from Medieval monasticism or, for that matter, 19th century or even 1950s style Protestant Christian commonplaces. To accomplish this objective requires something different than business as usual, more of the same but more fervently, more of the same but expressed in a more hip fashion, more of the same but more informal. The next religious reformation needs to be an educational reformation. Billy -------------------------------------------- Religion News Service A closer look at ‘The Benedict Option’ yields suggestions worth considering By _Jacob Lupfer_ (http://religionnews.com/author/jacob-lupfer/) | March 31, 2017 (RNS) Last week I wrote about the imperative to _keep the culture war’s losers engaged in public life_ (http://religionnews.com/2017/03/24/keep-religious-conservatives-involved-in-american-life/) . The issue has renewed salience because Rod Dreher wrote a best-selling book about how traditionalist Christians should respond to their loss of cultural influence. I used Dreher’s book as a jumping-off point for my argument that government, media, business and the arts should be hospitable to the untold millions who will continue to hold traditional beliefs about sex and God. And while Dreher _appreciated my broad-minded tolerance_ (http://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/benedict-option-upper-middle-class-whites-lupfe r/) , he challenged me to actually read his book, _“The Benedict Option.” _ (http://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/547188/the-benedict-option-by-rod-dreher/9780735213296/) Happily, I did. Dreher simply argues for cultivating a worldview, spiritual practices and habits of mind drawn from historic Christianity rather than from atomized, relativist and religiously individualist post-modern values. “If Christians today do not stand firm on the rock of sacred order as revealed in our holy tradition, we will have nothing to stand on at all,” he warns. Dreher takes readers on a brief tour of Western intellectual history from the smoldering ruins of the Roman Empire to the cultural rot of our own time. Predictably, things keep getting worse, and in his telling we stand on the precipice of a very dark age. Biblical, revealed religion is just not going to withstand the scientific, philosophical and ethical attacks against it. Post-Christian ways of thinking took root so many centuries ago that by now, even most church people in the West accept them without even realizing it. The unfortunate result of decayed religion in a secular age is Moralistic Therapeutic Deism (MTD), a term coined by sociologists but which proves the fiercest enemy in Dreher’s analysis. Indeed, readers who expect Dreher to lay the blame with same-sex marriage or gender-neutral bathrooms will be disappointed. He is more distraught about how MTD has replaced religion in our society, even infecting most churches. “Though superficially Christian,” Dreher writes, “MTD is the natural religion of a culture that worships the self and material comfort.” Those who think Dreher will defend right-wing politics and conspicuous consumption will also be surprised. He takes aim, perhaps more timidly than some would like, at conservative Christians’ uncritical enthusiasm for capitalism. In telling the stories of communities that are living out forms of the Benedict Option, Dreher invites readers to think about whether and how they might incorporate some of these principles into their own lives. The book ends with a stinging critique of the soul-numbing effects of our technology and devices. Here, Dreher channels _C.S. Lewis’ critique of scientism_ (https://www.amazon.com/Restitution-Man-Lewis-Against-Scientism/dp/080284491X) in a way that is accessible and compelling. I came to “The Benedict Option” as a writer engaged in debates about religion in public life. But I could not help reading the book as a man approaching middle age with three young children. While I spend little time worrying about whether Rod Dreher’s prognosis for American civilization is too dark, I actually worry a great deal about my children’s future and what my wife and I should be doing to prepare them for it. In vivid ways, my entire intellectual and religious life has been forged in the increasingly irreconcilable conflict between the Christian past and what Dreher sees as an anti-Christian future. My formation in mainline Protestantism approximated Moralistic Therapeutic Deism more than I would like to admit. And though I feel mostly at home in modern culture, my emphatic opinion that Christianity has self-evidently been more of a boon than a bane to civilization puts me at odds with many secular progressives. Dostoyevsky said, “The second half of a man’s life is made up of nothing but the habits he has acquired during the first half.” “The Benedict Option ” got me thinking critically about how I might inculcate better habits in my children. Dreher has plenty of critics, and many of them have thoughtful objections to his analysis. He generally _overlooks nonwhite Christian voices_ (https://www.raanetwork.org/10847-2/) , and his defensiveness and dismissiveness toward concerns about his racial blinders are unbecoming. I still find Dreher’s assessment of the present situation in “The Benedict Option” too gloomy. But his analysis is provocative and his suggestions merit serious consideration, regardless of how dismal things actually are. He makes a fairly strong, if unfashionable, case for medieval ways of thinking that are arguably at least as enlightened as our own. I am not sure whether the Christian past holds the keys to human flourishing in our time. But Dreher gives me reasonable doubt that the future we are embracing will be much better. -- -- Centroids: The Center of the Radical Centrist Community <[email protected]> Google Group: http://groups.google.com/group/RadicalCentrism Radical Centrism website and blog: http://RadicalCentrism.org --- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Centroids: The Center of the Radical Centrist Community" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
