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.
More Benedict Option Dark Side: Mennonite experience
It seems the Ben Op is based on a faulty premise, that there is a connection between the events of late antiquity and today. I disagree, I believe that the destruction of western thought after WWI was permanent, irreversible, and total. China is the future, a godless, atheist, kleptocratic state that encourages “an orgy of consumption and a dearth of idea”. This is what many American think democracy means, the ability to but stuff at Walmart. The West is dead. You may chose to live in a Ben Op community, but you are simply avoiding, or at best postponing, the inevitable.
.. How to avoid being a cult? I suggest three things. First, the community must avoid all intrusion into the private life. No dress codes, no discipline, no holier than thou kind of rules. The church may suggest that people do things, but avoid making it into a contest. Since this is a voluntary organization, it must have a certain amount of freedom.
Second, there must be outside authority, a bishop, a pope, who is not related, by blood or marriage to the powerful people. Too many things revolve around families, especially when fertility is high. One generation and 40 kids later, things get ugly. The authority must not be easy to corrupt.
Third, there must be a transparent system in allegations of abuse. People in these communities often try to keep everything a secret, and without a clear process, abuse cases (sexual, embezzlement, adultery) can drag on, damaging people who weren’t initially involved.
Frankly I have a very low opinion of human organizations, and therefore find the idealism behind the Ben Op the most ridiculous thing. No matter how good the idea seems, it will, as always, turn into a rank pit of incest and corruption. It is the nature of things.
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.