I don’t have anything to say about this e-mail that came in, but I think there’s a lot of grist for the comment mill in it, and wanted to share it with you:

First off, I just want to thank you for the important work you are doing with the Benedict Option project. I am nineteen years old, and an orthodox Catholic, or at least striving to become more of one every day. As you might imagine, I am more inclined to the “Deneenian” or “radical Catholic” take (obviously more in line with your project) than with the Murrayites (although many days I really wish I could be more convinced by them, especially in an election year, but i digress). In some respects I have come from a very mainstream MTD type Catholic environment, and in others I am a statistical anomaly, so for whatever it is worth, I would like to share some thoughts inspired by this piece and the comments to add to your tapestry of BenOp “data”, for lack of a better word.

My mothers side (particularly she and her sisters) are pretty much the textbook East Coast Irish Catholic family that is quite well off through the fruits of the GI bill with my Granddad, then never left the Democratic party (or at least questioned it) after it took up the baton of 60’s liberation movements, and now lets it dictate their worldview. They are the people who “stood with Margie”, the grade school theology teacher who was fired for being openly in a homosexual relationship. They care more about banning smoking and McDonalds than abortion and pornography. I literally asked my mom over spring break if she dissents from even one aspect of the Democratic party platform, and she could not name a single one. Her answer was that “the GOP just has become so radical” (of course, she didn’t think it was any bit less “radical” before the rise of the tea party). The point is, particularly in post 60’s American Catholicism, politics informs their faith before the faith informs their politics. And this applies to some of the Murrayites also, in my opinion, with their fetishization of markets and the founders.

But what is important to note, as Ross Douthat pointed out in a response to a reader in a recent First Things article, is that my Mom probably believes in God even more strongly than I do on most days, and would come out as part of what Charles Murray called “the religious core” of America under nearly any reasonable national polling criteria. For the family members of my Dad’s side (I will explain shortly), she is their window into all things Catholic, at least until I develop the confidence to publicly stake the claim of orthodoxy (I jest, but only somewhat). She goes to mass every week and is involved in many quite important institutions in the Church’s everyday operation. She and her demographic cohorts are not simply “nominal” Catholics; they genuinely care about what the Church teaches (even if for the time being it is not binding on their consciences) and use the institutional authority that Vatican II bequeathed to them in order to try and usher in a Vatican III. I should also note that this cohort, in my experience, has very few men. My Knights of Columbus chapter doesn’t have squishy Catholics really. Many of the devout men my age are squishy in a different way, but not with respect to obedience to the magisterium. Those men who do reject Church teachings seem simply indifferent, and mostly just stay out of her institutions (CYO sports being the only exception).

My dad’s side is comprehensively secular. They are in academia (my father being the exception) and certainly check off on all the relevant boxes. My dad himself is rather unclear actually about what he believes concerning nearly anything. I suppose it’s just something fathers and sons struggle to talk together about. He has been quite supportive, however, of my mother raising my brothers and I Catholic and sending us to Catholic school, and for that I will be eternally grateful. If he hadn’t done this, as your article suggested, it could have ended pretty poorly for my faith.

I too would have fit into the MTD group mentioned above until not long ago, although more along the lines of indifference than proactive heterodoxy. My becoming a traditional Catholic is a pretty peculiar, statistically improbable one. I once supported SSM, and really didn’t understand how any reasonable person could oppose it. Then I found out who Robert George was about two years ago and realized how false I was and how uncritically my whole generation bought into this particular lie. While I actually reject his “analytical natural law” in favor of the classical version now, the point is that in reading “What Is Marriage”, I felt the thrill of being liberated from ignorance. Once you get your foot in the door, and change your mind on that first controversial issue, the rest of the anti-MTD stuff is pretty easy, be it the falsity of other religious claims, the existence of hell, the immutability of one’s sex, etc.

I apologize for such a long set up, but I personally think its important for us orthodox Christians to understand how we have come to be where we are. I also don’t know if you hear too much from people my age, so perhaps it adds a new perspective. The thing that this leads me to is Catholic high schools, of which I am a recent graduate.

One commenter said he went to Catholic school and learned nothing about the faith. I couldn’t agree more.

I went to your standard archdiocesan high school and the “theology” classes are a complete joke. The problem wasn’t that the teachers dissented from Church teachings, they really didn’t. The problem is that, as someone who has now encountered the tradition and looks forward to exploring its depths for the rest of my life, you would think that their objective is to shield the students from all the intellectual heavyweights throughout Christian history. These forty minutes of theology class per day are their one chance to give the faith a fair hearing which it will not get elsewhere. My “Basic Problems of Philosophy” class in college had me quite riddled for a little about the coherence of any worldview at all, Christian or otherwise. Of course, after more reading and courses, I’ve realized it might as well have been called “Introduction to the Philosophy of David Hume”. The cosmological argument was set up in the most caricatured way possible, and nearly every “problem” was set up as a false dichotomy between rationalists and empiricists. And yet, after 13 years of Catholic education, we never once discussed the relation of faith and philosophy. I really wouldn’t be surprised if I am one of only two kids out of 250 in my class (the other being one who went to the seminary) who know what a “preamble of faith” is.

These are just quick examples of important neglected topics; I could go on. But the point is that we are taught fideism, and so most students will be MTDs, while the more enquiring minds will tend to choose to drink their secularism with no chaser. The English classes don’t help either. By the end of high school, kids don’t know that there have been really bright Christians throughout history, and theology is reduced to “merely poetry”, as Lewis warned against. Obviously, kids can’t read all of, say, Augustine and Milton by the end of high school. But the schools don’t even attempt to show students that such intellects are even out there in the first place. Perhaps one year, every student should just read, say, Mere Christianity and The Abolition of Man. That seems like a manageable task. While for most students, the ideas in books like these will still probably slide off like butter, because the anti-culture is so strong, there may be a couple out there for whom a light switch turns on, and they can embrace a comprehensive Christian worldview.

One other thing I have been wondering, just out of curiosity, is why Evangelicals you have talked with don’t see the Benedict Option as a threat to their tradition. It would seem to me that much the same as the marriage of Aristotelian theology and philosophy with Christianity was the crowning intellectual achievement of Catholicism, the Enlightenment is Protestantism’s gem. While one may object “well this or that Enlightenment guy is bad, but Locke and Smith are good”, he is just making the same argument as the Murrayites. Are Evangelicals not worried that if they embark on a journey that rejects so much of modernity, they are wading through some distinctively Catholic waters, save perhaps Augustine and some of the patristics. On second thought, perhaps I just answered my question somewhat there. But it still seems difficult, if one were a Protestant, to reject the (it would seem to me) chief intellectual accomplishment your tradition has made.