Longing to lead more religious lives—and wary of the wider culture—a growing number of traditional Christians are creating their own small communities
.. “Our goal in moving here was to form our children’s conscience and intellect in a particular way, without society taking that authority from us,”
.. In many ways, Clear Creek resembles the U.S. of a past era. Women wear long skirts and cover their heads during Mass—a practice most Catholics have abandoned since the reforms of Vatican II more than a half-century ago. Young men often ask permission from the fathers of women whom they want to court.
.. “There was just too much promiscuity; it’s permeated the whole society,” said Mr. Schmidgall, 25. “Maybe you teach them one thing at home, but you walk down the street and there’s signs with some provocative image or a woman.”
.. “We’re living in a post-Christian world,” Mr. Dreher said. “There needs to be some conscious separation from the mainstream to be able to hold on to the Christian faith.”
.. Many Christians, however, resist the idea of such stark separation, seeing it as an abandonment of their religious mission. “We have a mandate to spread the gospel,”
.. The families in Clear Creek see themselves as fundamentally different from breakaway religious groups like the Amish. There is no ban on technology or suspicion of outsiders.
.. “We wanted our children to grow up in a community of people that really value family, and value the Catholic faith and tradition,”
.. Life here, Mr. Pudewa said, isn’t “about running away from something. It’s about running to something.” To “inculcate wisdom and virtue in children,” he added, “you surround them with goodness and beauty.”
.. Separated from the wider world, she said, the church pastor became “spiritually abusive.” Women were treated like possessions, and gay people were demonized.
“We didn’t call it the Benedict Option—the phrase we used was ‘doctrine of separation,’ ” said Ms. Field, who left that church while in college. “But it was the same thing. This has been done.”
The Demoralization Of The West
For my parents’ generation, divorce was a stigma and vanishingly rare, at that. But recently I stood outside a Middlesbrough job center interviewing one hundred or so people who were seeking work. Every single one of that hundred came from a broken family. Every one. And of those who now had children themselves, every one was no longer with the partner with whom she’d had the child. And this state of affairs had not made them happy; it had wrecked them. They were all J. D.’s mum now.
Liddle goes on to say that liberalism has a lot to do with this — not just the left-wing liberalism of social permissiveness, but also the right-wing liberalism of market über alles:
Both of these doctrines, left and right, in the end amounted to the same thing: You are your own God now. The old God will not stand in your way, nor, frankly, will the state. You have total freedom to do as you please.
The Neo-Reactionary Ben Op
the truth of the matter is that Conservatism, Inc. not only (perhaps even deliberately) failed to conserve the natural family or religious liberty or the sanctity of human life or pretty much anything else; it did so precisely because it was ideologically aligned with global capital on one side and the cultural commissars of the sexual revolution on the other.
.. The only solution is to eradicate the modernist paradigm, root and branch. Which is why the Benedict Option is our only hope.
.. Anyway, the Ben Op definitely sees in the Enlightenment the seeds of the dissolution of religious belief.
.. The Benedict Option’s prime goal is to build resilient communities of traditional Christian faith that can stand in opposition to the post-Christian progressive ethos, and sustain themselves across generations.
Hauerwas Vs. The Benedict Option
First, community for community’s sake is not a good idea. Sartre is right: hell is other people! Community by itself cannot overwhelm the loneliness of our lives. I think we are a culture that produces extreme loneliness. Loneliness creates a hunger – and hunger is the right word, indicating as it does the physical character of the desire and need to touch another human being.
But such desperate loneliness is very dangerous. Look at NFL football. Suddenly you’re in a stadium with a hundred thousand people and they are jumping up and down. Their bodies are painted red, like the bodies that surround them. They now think their loneliness has been overcome. I used to give a lecture in my basic Christian Ethics class that I called “The Fascism of College Basketball.” You take alienated upper-middle-class kids who are extremely unsure of who they are – and suddenly they are Duke Basketball. I call it Duke Basketball Fascism because fascism has a deep commitment to turning the modern nation-state into a community. But to make the modern state into a kind of community – for the state to become the primary source of identity through loose talk about community – is very dangerous. It is not community for its own sake that we seek. Rather, we should try to be a definite kind of community.