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Come On, Dreher, Get Happy

She likes the idea of the Benedict Option, but is put off by the fearfulness of its chief spokesman

Here’s a great blog entry by a reader, who is sympathetic to the Benedict Option, but with a strong caveat. Excerpt:

As a single woman, I live largely without a genuine community. My work and church offer activities for me to be involved in, but attending a Christian concert or watching a videotaped women’s Bible study is not actually authentic community. I have caring, encouraging parents and family members, but they live nine hours and more away by car. The idea of fellow believers coming together to work, to eat, perhaps to linger over a deep conversation and a glass of wine and through this community to encourage and renew each other in the faith is one that seems encouraging to me. I imagine it strikes other people in the same way.

I also find the idea of withdrawing, at least partially, from the culture wars attractive. Don’t get me wrong; I believe that we Christians should be involved in our culture. But changing the culture, which usually involves changing the law, or at least preserving it, is often a substitute for the much more difficult process of changing our hearts to be like Christ. We forget that holiness cannot be brought about through legal means, and in any case, we are less to be concerned about their holiness, and more about our own.

OK, so what’s the problem?

My problem is with the tone: fear.

In fact, the posts seem to stoke fear. The post on feminism warns of looming “catastrophe” and threatens that children will “never be able to form stable families” (emphasis mine); the one on transgender school bathrooms compares the schools to a “python slowly squeezing the life out of” students. Notice the panicky quality of these words, the sense of the dramatic and apocalyptic. Not every word is Dreher’s (the post on schools was a letter from one of his readers), but their place on the blog guarantees that those who read about the BenOp, and consider following it, are increasingly being urged to fear what is happening in the culture.

And yet fear is not who we are as Christians.

Read the whole thing.

I really appreciate this critique. In fact, Yuval Levin, in his important new book The Fractured Republic, makes a similar one:

Prophesying total meltdown is not the way to draw people’s attention to this failure to flourish. The problem we face is not the risk of cataclysm, but the acceptance of widespread despair and disorder in the lives of millions of our fellow citizens.

Social conservatives must therefore make a positive case, not just a negative one. Rather than decrying the collapse of moral order, we must draw people’s eyes and hearts to the alternative: to the vast and beautifully “yes” for the sake of which an occasional narrow but insistent “no” is required. We can do this with arguments up to a point, but ultimately, the case for an alternative that might alleviate the loneliness and brokenness evident in our culture requires attractive examples of that alternative in practice, in the form of living communities that provide people with better opportunities to thrive. Especially when we are in no position to enforce or enact our ideals as national norms, social conservatives need to emphasize and prioritize such modeling of alternatives – illustrating the possibility of a more appealing form of modern life by living it.

… But what social conservatives ‘have’ is a vision of the good life and a deep conviction that it would be good for everyone – and therefore ought to be shared and made available as widely as possible. Approaching the larger society defensively is hardly the way to make the truths and advantages of social conservatism apparent to our fellow citizens.

I hear Yuval, and I hear Megan. I thoroughly concede their point, and will do my best to keep it front to mind as I write the Benedict Option book. Let me say a couple of things, though.

1. People who meet me are often surprised by how laid-back and funny I am, versus the guy who writes this blog. And in turn, that surprises me, but by now it shouldn’t. I don’t deliberately hype anything on this blog for clicks. I genuinely am alarmed by the state of the culture, and want to shake up other conservatives, to make them realize what’s going on, and the urgent need to do something about it. But I can compartmentalize. It drives my wife crazy that I can lie in bed at night reading a book about doom and gloom, then turn the light off and go to sleep peacefully. That’s just how I roll.

2. That said, I am a jolly pessimist by nature, and I can’t fake otherwise in the Benedict Option book. So I will have to let happy Ben Oppers speak for the cause. When you meet Ben Oppers like the Tipiloschi, and encounter the joy of living out a traditional Christian life in community, you know in your bones that it can be done. My natural pessimism can’t hold a candle to the fighting ebullience of Marco Sermarini (or a Leah Libresco). So I will extol him and those like him to the moon, because they are the icons of the Benedict Option you want to follow.

Speaking of, I am about to head to the airport for a Benedict Option conference this weekend at Clear Creek Abbey. I’ll get to meet some folks I’ve been in touch with for years, including the great Evangelical Ben Opper Jake Meador, who runs the indispensable Mere Orthodoxy blog.

As I will be traveling most of today, please be patient with my approving comments.

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