Trump, Alienation, & the Benedict Option
I haven’t voted in the last two presidential elections because I had no faith that either party would make the country a better place than they found it.
.. “Do you understand the Catholic Church’s position on birth control?” he asked.
“Yes, I…,” I replied, leaning forward. I was about to exposit my own ideas about human sexuality and set them before an older, wiser, and obviously more objective authority. I imagined I was about to learn something.
But the monsignor immediately cut me off. “You already gave me the answer I needed. Don’t tell me about it. I don’t want to know; conscience and all that. It’s just on the list of things I have to ask.”
This experience has often struck me as emblematic of the state of American Catholicism around the turn of the twenty-first century. I was a member of a nervous and awkward Church that wished to know as little about the lives of her members as possible
.. It is hard to muster the wherewithal to maintain faith in the institutions of the imperium, even as we keep participating in them, without much passion or conviction, because nobody has a better idea.
.. The Benedict Option, as I see it, offers us Christians the possibility of living out, in post-Christianity, both an individual and communal telos that leads us beyond ourselves and our passions, and give us the capacity to endure in faith, hope, and love, despite our political and cultural marginalization.
.. The persistence of Trump as a defining political personality is a sign of decadence and a canary in the coal mine. The answer is not to give up in despair, but rather to think, to pray, and to act within the possibilities that present themselves to us.