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Frenemies Of The Benedict Option

What to say to conservative Christians who believe our tribe ought to stay on the battlefield and give it all we've got?
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At Aleteia, John Burger wrote a really good piece about the Benedict Option and why it appeals to many Christians these days. He has examples: a Catholic one, an Evangelical one, and an individual one. The piece begins like this:

For the most part, Christians have had a happy — some would even say “privileged” — time of it in America, where Christianity and Christian churches were essentially left alone as they freely exercised their religion within society both privately and, up until recently, in partnership with the government.

Well, that was then, and this is now. The very effective cooperative partnership that existed between the U. S. government and the US Conference of Catholic Bishops to serve victims of human trafficking was ended due to the Obama administration’s insistence that contraception and abortion be included in any assistance provided to victims. Some cities have seen Catholic adoption services come to an end because they cannot conform to anti-discrimination laws that, in legal suit after suit, are adjudicated against religious freedom.

In general, Christians are firmly being told that if they wish to remain in the public square and involved in social services, parades, or business enterprises of any kind, they will have to sacrifice their values and teachings to the shifting morals of the times and resultant regulations, or be ready to give up their business and abandon their missions.

The time of “privilege” appears to be over. Christians face challenges unimaginable even a decade ago, and must discern new ways of being in a nation that has become hostile to expressions of faith lived outside the sanctuaries and beyond the pews.

Read the whole thing, and pay special attention to the real-life examples.

I received in today’s e-mail an extraordinary analysis by a reader who prefers to remain anonymous. In it, he attempts to explain why so many Christians are bound and determined to hate the Benedict Option. I publish it below with the reader’s permission:

I think the story goes something like this: In the first centuries of the Church, Christians were the minority and the outcasts, at times even enemies of the state. Over centuries, and through much toil and blood, we attained toleration. Eventually, that developed into acceptance. Finally, we were ascendant. Christianity became the faith of the Empire. Along with this came positions of power and influence for Christians, who no longer had to fear a conflict between their faith and carrying out the duties of state.

That arrangement more or less persisted for centuries. Obviously, for Orthodox Christians in the East it ended with the fall of the Byzantine Empire and the rise of Islam. In the West, however, the Church remained integrally involved with the state and persisted as a preeminent influence on culture.

Much good has come of this, most especially the influence of Christian anthropology on the arts, philosophy, and political theory. The Church, too, benefited from the need to articulate uniquely Christian understandings of aesthetics, ethics, and political philosophy. The greatest achievements of Western civilization all rest on this foundation laid by Christianity.

However, as has been much discussed, especially by you in connection with the Benedict Option, this longstanding position of power and cultural priority for Christianity has also enabled an, at times, unhealthy laxity within the Church. I’m talking about the propensity of Christians, after they have baptized the culture, to kick up their feet and relax, thinking they have constructed some sort of perpetual motion machine. Once Christianity has formed the culture, this unspoken thinking goes, the culture will perpetuate Christianity. The Church need only see to its rituals, acting as a sort of all-encompassing master of ceremonies for the culture as a whole.

The error in this, or least one prominent one, should be obvious: it ignores the Fall and the reality of sin. No culture will persist in virtue without the constant guidance, admonition, and even judgment of the Church. In the absence of these, the seeds of original sin will again sprout into tares that slowly spread and choke out the wheat of the culture.

This is essentially what has been happening to the West since around the time of the Reformation. And yet it has not been until recently that things have come to a head.

What is different now? Well, the Church has neglected the culture for so long that [the culture] now advocates for beliefs and practices that directly contradict the Christian faith.

This is where the difficulty begins, because Christians have gotten soft. We’ve gotten used to our positions of power and influence. When faced with the choice of keeping their faith or their cultural relevance, an increasing number of Christians have been choosing the latter.

This is not a controversial thing to say about those who have flip-flopped on same-sex marriage in order to avoid being cast a bigot. But I think it also applies to a certain caste of those still fighting in defense of Christian orthodoxy, but who also vehemently oppose the Benedict Option.

Why do they hate the BenOp? Well, if I may be cynical for a moment, it goes like this. These small-o orthodox Christians may not have power under the status quo, but there is at least a theoretical path to attaining it and, in the mean time, a simulacra thereof through participation in the think tanks and organizations aimed at charting that path. I think many peoples’ opposition to the Benedict Option derives from a deep-seated attachment to this framework, to the potential to have power.

Some people are weak enough to actually abandon their principles in order to retain power; these are better, insofar as they won’t abandon their principles. But, even when it has become clear beyond a shadow of a doubt that Christianity no longer has a hold on our culture, that Christians and mainstream society are not even speaking the same moral and metaphysical language, they are unable to take the step back that is necessary to save the culture and themselves.

Why? Because our current arrangement is the only framework they know for attaining power, influence, and relevance. This is what I think drives the more vitriolic and strawmen-laden objections to the Benedict Option. Because the BenOp does require no longer putting your hope in politics, and that likely means no more Georgetown cocktail parties (to use the cliched boogeyman) or invitations to the White House or meetings with Senators or–*gasp*–donations to your non-profit. It may even mean fewer clicks and ‘Likes’.

To put it another way, I think some anti-BenOppers would rather be the kid who doesn’t get invited to the party than live in a world where there’s no party to get invited to. Better to be out of power, but scheming to reclaim it, than to renounce worldly power altogether.

And, really, is this not what got us into this mess in the first place? This is nothing other than worldliness, a focus on reforming our faith to fit the mold of the world rather than the other way around.

Nearly the entirety of Christian spirituality is premised on the belief that, because of the Fall, we are more easily inclined to become attached to the things of this world, to power and material things. Consequently, Christian spiritual discipline is centered on mitigating and restraining such attachment. When that discipline get lax (after, say, a theo-political revolution divides the church by objecting to the bulk of narrative-forming practices that created its identity), guess which direction we inevitably head? And when that process results in a culture that abandons Christian teaching and eventually turns on it, guess which side so-called Christians are going take when forced to choose between prominence and principle?

Thanks for this. When I tell people to “abandon political hope,” I’m not saying “quit voting, agitating, and running for office.” Sure, it’s fine to do those things. But just understand that at best it’s a delaying action. The real work of politics will be at the local level, engaged in antipolitical politics. Just the other day, Justice Clarence Thomas motioned in a Ben Op way in his Hillsdale commencement speech:

At the risk of understating what is necessary to preserve liberty and our form of government, I think more and more that it depends on good citizens discharging their daily duties and daily obligations.

He goes on to say that he’s not going to do the usual commencement address thing, and identify some broad problem and then urge students to rise up and conquer it. You may do more for your country by simply living your own life with integrity.

In The Fractured Republic, his terrific book on US politics to be published next week, Yuval Levin, the leading reform conservative public intellectual of his generation, writes favorably about the Benedict Option as one form of hope for the future:

At their best, these thinkers offer something much more appealing than a refuge for miserable exiles. The point toward a more positive vision of a community-centered social conservatism, one which not only does not reject the larger society, but that ultimately works to repair, unify, and redeem it.

This more aspirational form of the quest for moral community seeks to turn inward from the national state not because some inevitable cataclysm is upon us, but because of precisely the trends we have been tracing. The center has not held in American life, so we must instead find our centers for ourselves as communities of like-minded citizens, and then built out the American ethic from there. A resurgence of orthodoxy in our time will not involve a recovery of the old mainline churches or a reclaiming of the mainstream, but an evolution of the paraphernalia of persuasion and conversion of our traditional religious and moral communities. those seeking to reach Americans with an unfamiliar moral message must find them where they are, and increasingly, that means traditionalists must make their case not by planting themselves at the center of society, as large institutions, but by dispersing themselves to the peripheries as small outposts.

In this sense, focusing on your own near-at-hand community does not involve a withdrawal from contemporary America, but an increased attentiveness to it.

I will leave you with this 2012 speech that Prof. Patrick Deneen gave at a Front Porch Republic conference, about his having left Washington DC, and Georgetown University, for South Bend, Indiana, and a posting at Notre Dame. This part, especially:

As our attention focuses with greater exclusivity upon the concerns of Washington DC, the scale of our vista actually shrinks. Indeed, with our gaze fixed on the bright lights of Washington D.C., we invite its light pollution to dim out the light from the City that ought to matter more – the Eternal City to which we ought rather to aspire. We are more apt to see the lights of that better city from locations less bright, less distracting, less self-important.

We forget that Augustine went to Rome – his biographer Peter Brown tells us, because in Rome he could find the stage where he might pursue his ambitions as a political actor, a teacher of rhetoric. Unlike our current leaders, however, Augustine was quickly disillusioned by what he found there – an assortment of people drawn by common vices in the pursuit of earthly power. He left Rome, and eventually settled in the provinces of his homeland in Africa, in Thagaste, where he was drawn by life in a monastery where, Brown relates, “monks seemed to him to have succeeded in living in permanent communities, where all the relationships were moulded by the dictates of Christian Charity.” It would be from this setting that he would write his great work, The City of God, in which he sought to remind Christians – after the sack of Rome – that even the most important and majestic human societies must die, are destined to die, and will die all the more quickly when they think themselves to be the sole end and purpose of human life.

I have left Washington, but I am still learning to leave Washington. I am trying to learn that what takes place in my city, in my neighborhood, my region, deserves more attention and concern, deserves my energy and devotion and passion, far more than whatever the debate I’m told to care about by my betters who seek to focus my attention on the national and international stage, to distract me from the “slender allurements” of mere “domestic” life. Rather than “win” Washington, I am trying to learn to ignore Washington, to live in and care about where I am. And to remind myself to have a proper vista, not to share in the self-delusion in the eternity of our earthly city – that self-delusion that led our best-and-brightest into the belief that our economy would always grow as long as there was more to borrow, or today that our power will always increase. I am learning to leave Washington in part in preparation for the day when it will no longer be, or be what it is – a day that I think is not as distant as those now living there, a time when we will live in local culture because it will be the only place to live, the only place we should live.

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