The Benedict Option - A Review

Rod Dreher’s 2017 book, The Benedict Option: A Strategy of Christians in a Post-Christian Nation, caused quite a stir when it was published. It was reviewed both favorably and unfavorably. Dreher defended his position at The American Conservative, the magazine website he is the editor of, vocally and often. There were points in the public discussion that it wasn’t clear that everyone who was criticizing the book had read the same thing.

The Benedict Option is an idea borrowed from the monastic order that descended from St. Benedict. Dreher drew the idea that a resurgence of a Benedictine ethos would be beneficial from Alistair McIntyre’s seminal work, After Virtue.

Dreher, formerly a Roman Catholic, who has migrated to the Eastern Orthodox faith, sees a separatist community as the path forward in resisting the corrosive effects of our post-Christian culture.

Strengths

It is clear that Dreher has a good understanding of the problems with Western culture. It isn’t that one thing or another is the big problem. For example, sexual immorality in its various forms as celebrated by our culture, is not the main problem with our world. Or, perhaps more clearly, it is not unique to our culture.

The unique aspect of our culture is how relentlessly intrusive the anti-Christian influences are. Before the digital age keeping your kids from pornography was largely a function of not buying dirty magazines and reasonably screening their time at a friend’s house away from the family. Now pornography is streaming down the same digital pipeline as the cute, if inane, videos about making pretty bracelets or surviving in the wilderness.

Dreher recognizes that even if parents put a filter on their home internet and monitor usage carefully, the vast majority of the parents in the community have given their child their own digital device with unfettered access to whatever the internet might offer. The only way to keep you kids safe (that is, to preserve them in some condition of relative innocence) is to form a contrast community that has agreed upon norms to help protect the group.

Another strength of Dreher’s vision is that, if implemented, it would give Christians the opportunity to practice authentic community in ways that are exceedingly difficult in our dis-integrated modern world. The Benedict Option would require intentional re-integration of life, neighborliness, and humanity. There is something strongly attractive about the move toward a more conscientious observation of the creational order.

Weaknesses

Although the vision Dreher presents are attractive and do seem to answer many of the contemporary, the Benedict Option is not without its difficulties. Many of these were made apparent during the period after the release of the book, when the roiling rage of reviews threatened to swamp the Christian blogosphere. Many of Dreher’s critics seemed to misread his book, exaggerating his claims. However, there are some legitimate points of criticism.

Most significantly, this book makes much less sense read independently than it does when read as a sequel to Dreher’s 2006 book, The Crunchy Con Manifesto. That book gives a better sense of what Dreher’s desired cloister might look like. In fact, looking back at many of the reviews of The Benedict Option, much of the criticism of the book seems to be based on assumptions about the nature of Dreher’s vision for community, which is spelled out much more clearly in his earlier book. Putting the two books together also makes it clearer that Dreher’s book is not merely a reaction to the infamous Obergefell decision, but a rejection of the broader tendencies of modernity.

As a second significant weakness, Dreher’s Benedict Option seems to give little place for evangelistic missions. It seems to point toward bolstering the bastions rather than sending out emissaries for Christ. Dreher clearly does not deny the importance of evangelism, but the theme is largely absent from his work. Taken in combination with his Roman Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy, the failure to discuss this important duty of Christians warrants concern by missions-oriented Protestants.

Conclusion

If you’ve not read The Benedict Option and have formed your opinions about the book from the internet chatter about it, then you’ve likely drawn the wrong conclusions. Dreher posits an idea, which I think deserves a hearing, even if it needs significant modification to be applied. The best thing about Dreher’s Benedict Option is that it offers a positive conception of life as it should be to discuss and strive for. In a world where Christian culture tends to mimic and act as slow-moving revolutionaries, Dreher offers something different.

It may be work quoting a couple of paragraphs of The Benedict Option to give a sense of the work in Dreher’s own words:

The Benedict Option is not a technique for reversing the losses, political and otherwise, that Christians have suffered. It is not a strategy for turning back the clock to an imagined golden age. Still less is it a plan for constructing communities of the pure, cut off from the real world.

To the contrary, the Benedict Option is a call to undertaking the long and patient work of reclaiming the real world from the artifice, alienation, and atomization of modern life. It is a way of seeing the world and of living in the world that undermines modernity’s big lie: that humans are nothing more than ghosts in a machine, and we are free to adjust its settings in any way we like.

There is some wisdom in what Dreher outlines. It is worth considering his plan of action to determine if we can formulate a better one.

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

By Rod Dreher

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The Crunchy Con Manifesto - A Proposal for Actual Conservation of Something

Conservativism is in crisis in the U.S. The term has become altogether too closely aligned with a form of political populism that has little to do with conserving anything of value. For many people on the political left and the political right, conservativism has become largely about listening to angry men in cowboy hats and pretty women in tight t-shirts rail against immigrants, gender revisionists, and “liberals.” Often there is also implicit support for large businesses which are always good for America (especially when they support grifters on the right), except when they lobby for socially progressive policies and for one of the groups that the cowboy hats and tight shirts are angry at. Other than moving society in the United States back to some apparently great condition that is never defined, only reminisced about, there does not seem to be a coherent theme to what passes for conservativism.

In truth, both conservativism and liberalism, as they are used (but rarely defined) in popular discourse are forms of social progressivism. “Liberalism” focuses on achieving atomistic individual freedom to enable people to pursue whatever sexual goals they have and free them from the economic need to do work that aids society. This is often, seemingly paradoxically, pitched as part of the goal of economic collectivism (e.g., socialism) and moral totalitarianism (e.g., attempts to outlaw Christian sexual ethics). On the other hand, “conservativism” tends to be focused progress toward individual freedom to pursue economic goals and social structures that more closely relate to some earlier ideal, which are rarely defined beyond a desire for neighborliness. The progress of conservativism is achieved through lack of government regulation on the economy and fighting against social outgroups that themselves feel as if they are fighting for a place to exist.

Of these two forms of progressivism, I have a decided preference for the “conservative” form. There are obviously destructive elements in contemporary political liberalism that only willful ignorance of economics, history, and basic philosophical anthropology can overlook. However, similarly obvious blind spots exist on the political right, as well. My chief grievance against political “conservativism” as it is often presented is that there is nothing that it is trying to conserve. It is just progress in a different direction toward a goal that is just as undefined as the goals of the left.

As I’ve been exploring this dilemma of political homelessness, in part through the work of Patrick Deneen, though there are others, I discovered a book that Rod Dreher wrote in 2006 that presents a better vision of conservativism, in my opinion. At least, it forms a different starting place for dialogue about what conservativism ought to be aiming at. His book, Crunchy Cons, is a valuable book for those dissatisfied with where the GOP has gone, but completely appalled at the corrosive politics of the DNC, as well.

There are ten articles in Dreher’s “Crunchy-Con Manifesto” that I will quote in their entirety here. (After all, Dreher is the king of block-quoting other articles online, so he can’t mind too much if I take a couple of pages from his book.)

A Crunchy–Con Manifesto

1.       We are conservatives who stand outside the contemporary conservative mainstream. We like it here; the view is better, for we can see things that matter more clearly.

2.       We believe that modern conservativism has become too focused on material conditions, and insufficiently concerned with the character of society. The point of life is not to become a more satisfied shopper.

3.       We affirm the superiority of the free market as an economic organizing principle, but believe the economy must be made to serve humanity’s best interests, not the other way around. Big business deserves as much skepticism as big government.

4.       We believe that culture is more important than politics, and that neither America’s wealth nor our liberties will long survive a culture that no longer lives by what Russell Kirk identified as “The Permanent Things”––those eternal moral norms necessary to civilized life, and which are taught by all the world’s great wisdom traditions.

5.       A conservatism that does not recognize the need for restraint, for limits, and for humility is neither helpful to individuals and society nor, ultimately, conservative. This is particularly true with respect to the natural world.

6.       A good rule of thumb: Small and Local and Old and Particular are to be preferred over Big and Global and New and Abstract.

7.       Appreciation of aesthetic quality––that is, beauty––is not a luxury, but key to the good life.

8.       The cacophony of contemporary popular culture makes it hard to discern the call of truth and wisdom. There is no area in which practicing asceticism is more important.

9.       We share Kirk’s conviction that “the best way to rear up a new generation of friends of the Permanent Things is to beget children, and read to them o’ evenings, and teach them what is worthy of praise: the wise parent is the conservator of ancient truths. . . . The institution most essential to conserve is the family.”

10.   Politics and economics will not save us. If we are to be saved at all, it will be through living faithfully by the Permanent Things, preserving these ancient truths in the choices we make in everyday life. In this sense, to conserve it create anew.

Having sent a salvo against mainstream “conservativism” on the beginning pages of his book, Dreher goes on to journalistically explore people living out particular aspects of this manifesto. They tend to be (but are not exclusively) theologically conservative within their faith tradition, live within a large nuclear family, and community focused. Most significantly, the people Dreher interviews are focused on achieving a positive goal, not simply attempting to escape some negative restriction.

For those seeking an alternative response to contemporary political options, Crunch Cons may be the beginning point for future exploration. This is the book in which Dreher introduces the concept of the Benedict Option (I have not yet read his book), which he explored more fully in the hotly debated volume by that name. Although some of the content is dated, this book remains a good counterpoint for the GOP/DNC binary we seem to be stuck with, and may inspire a positive shift toward a conservative movement seeking to actually conserve something important.

Crunchy Cons: How Birkenstocked Burkeans, gun-loving organic gardeners, evangelical free-range farmers, hip homeschooling mamas, right-wing nature ... America (or at least the Republican Party)

By Rod Dreher

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