City of Rod

A Benedictine retreat from political life cannot be the answer for today’s Christians.

in that respect Rod Dreher’s The Benedict Option is not exactly wrong. Yet it’s not exactly right, either. But as I hope to demonstrate, some level of wrongness does not preclude value or insight, which is, incidentally, where I disagree most with Dreher, whose response to the wrongness threaded into liberalism is essentially to abandon modernity altogether.

.. For Dreher, a writer at The American Conservative, the Christian West began to lose its way in the fourteenth century, when the English Franciscan friar William of Ockham pioneered the theory of nominalism, which held there is no inherent order or purpose encoded into the material world. This was a radical departure from the philosophy of theologians like Augustine and Aquinas, who believed God’s intention for the material world is inscribed into nature itself, and can be discerned with human powers of reason.

.. They simply knew that all of creation pointed to God.

.. The Renaissance centered man over God; the Protestant Reformation shattered religious unity in Europe; the Wars of Religion ravaged the continent just as the Scientific Revolution was displacing moribund Medieval views of the cosmos.

.. only goal is to attain some kind of self-realization through a lot of vaguely therapeutic-sounding practices and activities.

.. One can chase what one believes to be the good life, but one cannot place moral claims on others. This is the “catch,” as it were, of liberalism: “Liberalism,” political theorist Judith Shklar wrote, “has only one overriding aim: to secure the political conditions that are necessary for the exercise of personal freedom.” Or, as Catholic philosopher Jacques Maritain had it: “Obey none but yourself.”

.. It’s no accident that the earliest liberals had a special contempt for Catholics, who are especially inclined to protest the reduction of the faith to a private sentiment.

.. The absence of robust religious instruction in public life, Dreher contends, has led us to a world wherein sin and vice run rampant among abundance and pleasure.

.. Moralistic Therapeutic Deism (MTD), a foggy set of feel-good notions about the divine and the good life coined by sociologists Christian Smith and Melinda Lundquist Denton in 2005, has, in Dreher’s estimation, mostly supplanted Christianity in America. MTD’s rough tenets are:

  1. A God exists who created and orders the world and watches over human life on earth.
  2. God wants people to be good, nice, and fair to each other, as taught in the Bible and by most world religions.
  3. The central goal of life is to be happy and to feel good about oneself.
  4. God does not need to be particularly involved in one’s life except when he is needed to resolve a problem.
  5. Good people go to heaven when they die.

.. Deism became fashionable during the Enlightenment precisely because it is deeply hospitable to liberalism; because it is only a private belief about the divine, it imposes no pesky ethical requirements on its adherents.

.. the Benedict Option is also a set of best practices, and Dreher’s Option is his own rule.

.. the Rule of Rod are rather more prosaic: form communities oriented to the worship of God; eschew sloth and take up manual labor; homeschool or school privately in the classics and Bible; support unmarried Christians in their chastity and oppose, on all fronts, pornography, fornication, and other forms of excess and vice. No Evangelical living in my hometown of Arlington, Texas would find any of these directives remotely surprising or particularly new.

.. The part that would shock them, however, is Dreher’s decree that they should become essentially apolitical. Dreher is convinced that Christians in America are “a powerless, despised minority,” and that traditional politics cannot serve them.

.. “When we are truly ordered toward God,” he reminds us, “we won’t have to worry about immediate results.”

.. His daily posts exhorting political change on The American Conservative, one assumes, must be after something other than immediate results, though it’s hard to imagine what.

.. withdrawing from conventional politics is difficult to parse with Christ’s command that we love our neighbors.

.. Withdrawal may have been a permissible option when citizens had little to no say in the laws of their governments, but we do, and a pretense of powerlessness registers as a flimsy excuse not to exercise it.

.. Is society uniquely anti-Christian now, in this moment more than others? Are we uniquely liberal, or is liberalism, actually, in some sense imperiled? As we watch the elevation to the Supreme Court of Neil Gorsuch, a longtime fighter for religious liberty and the rights of the faithful, is it really possible to argue that Christians are politically powerless?

.. the establishment of small, local communities of virtuous Christians still leaves open pressing questions of justice and right. “If two fishing crews are in conflict, they should both submit to the authority of the judge. Otherwise, justice would belong to the more ruthless and stronger fishing crew,”

.. And it is the duty of Christians qua Christians to oppose the erosion of liberalism into wanton, inhumane technocracy, even when it means setting out into risky waters.