How are Christians to live in a culture becoming more and more hostile to Christian faith and morals? Rod Dreher, an important contemporary thinker and writer, talks with John Stonestreet of "Breakpoint" and offers "a realistic look at what being the church means in a post-Christian culture." Here's the audio: (It's about 28 minutes.)
LISTEN NOW | DOWNLOAD
Here's an article summation from Breakpoint:
The culture of our nation is moving further and further away from biblical morality. And it sometimes feels as though we're powerless to do anything about it. But during this week's broadcast, John Stonestreet welcomes blogger, author, and columnist Rod Dreher, who explains what he's dubbed "the Benedict Option," a developing plan for Christians to weather the cultural storm ahead.
The speed at which the sexual revolution has rewritten right and wrong in America is breathtaking. But we've by no means seen the end of our culture's decline. And commentators like Rod Dreher, an author and columnist at “The American Conservative,” say things will likely get worse before they get better. For several years now, Dreher has been sounding that alarm. He thinks what we're witnessing isn't a mere moral slip, but a fundamental and long-term shift away from Christian “cosmology,” or ultimate meaning. In response, he's proposed what he calls “the Benedict Option,” “a kind of deliberate, strategic retreat so that we can tend our own gardens...and cultivate the deep roots that our kids and their kids, and their kids’ kids will need to hold on to the faith through the dark times ahead.”
Until this year, many Christians still spoke and acted as though halting the momentum of the gay rights movement and reversing the tide in our culture was possible. But what happened in Indiana after the passage of that state's Religious Freedom Restoration Act shattered those illusions. The national backlash and subsequent surrender by Indiana governor Mike Pence made it painfully clear that religious liberty is no longer a priority for most Americans.
“I think for many, many Christians—even those who were hopeful that we could turn this thing around,” says Dreher, “what happened in Indiana with the Religious Freedom Restoration Act was a complete shock.”
He characterizes the response to Indiana's RFRA as “an apocalypse,” not in reference to the end of the world, but as a description for an “unveiling,” or a “revelation.” What it revealed was just how dramatically our national understanding of right and wrong has shifted.
“We Christians are not fighting for traditional marriage anymore,” Dreher says. “That battle was lost a long time ago. We are fighting for the right simply to practice our religion without being punished by the state and by the culture. And it's a fight we're losing, quite frankly.”
In his groundbreaking article, “Sex After Christianity,” Dreher explained such responses as the aftershocks of our culture's “cosmological shift.” The American “overculture,” he says, has abandoned the Christian worldview and adopted a new set of assumptions about how the world is ordered. And in that new worldview, there's no room for objective meaning to sex, marriage, or even family. Indeed, anyone who suggests there is, or that members of the same sex can never constitute a marriage, will be summarily run out of town on a rail.
Well-meaning, loving, and winsome Christians are now treated like members of the KKK. Pointing to the case of Gordon College, which was recently threatened with losing accreditation for holding traditional Christian sexual morality, Dreher says it's only a matter of time before more Christian institutions face the choice between their convictions and their existence. Writing in “USA Today” recently, Homeschool Legal Defense co-founder, Micahel Farris agreed.
In another recent article entitled “The Failure of Winsomeness,” Dreher concludes that being nice will no longer win us any points. Of course, we should continue to love our neighbors—gay, straight, liberal or conservative—and answer them with gentleness—but not because we expect to gain a toehold with them by doing so. The sexual revolution has progressed far more quickly than most Christian realize. And being nice just won't cut it. If we don't act now to carve out a legal and social space where we can practice our faith unmolested, our window of opportunity may disappear, says Dreher.
“We are facing the very real prospect of religious institutions including schools and charities losing their tax exempt status because they believe what the president of the United States professed to believe three years ago. I mean, it's madness, it's moving so quickly.”
That's where “the Benedict Option” comes in.
A phrase borrowed from moral philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre's classic work “After Virtue,” Dreher describes the Benedict Option as “the way...to prepare a culture of resistance for the church to live in these post-Christian, indeed, these anti-Christian times.”
It takes its name from Benedict of Nursia, a Christian saint who, during the collapse of the Roman Empire, founded independent communities of believers who preserved virtue, literacy, and civilization through the Dark Ages. These communities, of course, became what we know today as monasteries, and Benedict became the namesake of the most famous monastic order.
Dreher isn't proposing we don habits and cloister ourselves in monasteries. But he is proposing that we recognize our civilization’s decline, disentangle Christian identity from secular culture, and prepare the Church to preserve that identity for future generations.
“The time is going to come when we Christians will have to separate from the mainstream—not head for the hills, let me underscore that—not head for the hills, but live in some sort of separate community so we can be the church. Not so we can keep ourselves pure but so that we can remind ourselves of who we are and be a light to the world, called to fidelity to Christ.”
To that end, and at the behest of friends and colleges, Dreher has begun work on a book outlining the Benedict Option and its specifics. Home education, intentional catechesis, redoubled support for Christian legal defense organizations, and careful restriction of secular media consumption are just some of his proposals. All are aimed at helping Christians maintain “a sense of ourselves as a separate people whose commitments are higher than being a good citizen or being accepted by everybody,” and preparing the Church to stand “confident in its own story...”
“If we don't do this,” he warns, “we're not going to make it.”
Of course, Benedict Option is about more than safeguarding the Christian way of life. Indeed, its very name hints at Dreher's endgame: the preservation and eventual re-establishment of Christian civilization.
As John Stonestreet points out, “secularism just doesn't work to bring life, and fullness, and stability, and joy and love.” Many are already finding themselves burned out by relativism and the sexual revolution, and are thirsty for something more. Millions of others, embittered by the legacies of divorce, hookups, homosexuality, and infanticide will follow, meaning Christians must prepare now to give them the Living Water they'll need.
“We Christians have to be here to give a clear, firm, loving answer to these people who've become refugees of the sexual revolution,” says Dreher.
As our culture continues to decline, staking out who we are and Whose we are will become more important than ever. Like the believers witnessing Rome's collapse and the collapse of their hopes for a global Christian civilization, we in the 21st century should be ready for a long haul through the "dark ages." Because whatever comes, the heart of the Benedict Option is what St. Augustine wrote in the 5th century, distinguishing the permanence of the City of God from the transience of the city of man:
“The earthly [city] has made for herself, according to her heart's desire, false gods out of any sources at all, even out of human beings, that she might adore them with sacrifices. The heavenly one, on the other hand, living like a wayfarer in this world, makes no false gods for herself. On the contrary, she herself is made by the true God that she may be herself a true sacrifice to Him...So it falls out that in this world, in evil days like these, the Church walks onward like a wayfarer stricken by the world's hostility, but comforted by the mercy of God.”