Is ‘Commitment Pluralism’ the Answer?
The point is, conservative Christians are right to be fearful and anxious about this stuff, because it’s going to cost them their institutions, their livelihoods, and even their jobs. There is going to be very little tolerance and no respect for them in the fast-emerging order. Pulling in the tribal walls is plain common sense when the tribe is under attack.
Similarly, when working-class people are losing their jobs and their financial security because of de-industrialization and the kind of policies promoted by liberals (= classical liberals, Republicans and Democrats alike), why shouldn’t they “distrust the outsiders” who are attacking their sense of stability? Being mistrustful of the people who will do you and your tribe harm if they have their way is not a character flaw.
.. My point is simply that people’s anxieties these days are often (but not always!) justified by the facts on the ground.
.. I have proposed the Ben Op mostly because fundamental forces stand to eliminate orthodox Christianity. These forces include radical individualism, globalism, hedonism, materialism, skepticism, and … well, the forces that created the modern world, and in so doing brought us many wonderful things. The forces of liberalism, which have the effect of depriving us of our past for the sake of freeing us to make our own future. But we are at a time in which that liberalism, and the radical autonomy upon which it is premised, appears unsustainable.
.. In the same way that courses in economics claiming merely to describe human beings as utility-maximizing individual actors in fact influence students to act more selfishly, so liberalism teaches a people to hedge commitments and adopt flexible relationships and bonds. Not only are all political and economic relationships fungible and subject to constant redefinition, but so are allrelationships—to place, to neighborhood, to nation, to family, and to religion. Liberalism tends to encourage loose connections.
.. Liberal philosophy rejected this requirement of human self-limitation. It first displaced the idea of a natural order to which humanity is subject and thereafter the very notion of human nature itself
.. The Civil Rights marchers didn’t find the strength to face down Bull Connor, and to return hatred with love, from the pseudo-Christianity we call MTD. I want to be strong enough to stand up for what is right, and to stand against my own temptations to give in to fear and hatred — and I know I am not strong enough to do it on my own. As I see it, churches and Christian communities that practice the Benedict Option will do so to remember their (our) own stories, and to strengthen each other through the present and coming trials, which will wipe out all the MTD churches — but also be there to welcome those escaping the maelstrom and the plague. Because that’s what Christians do.