For my Christian friends on FB, what do you think about the “Benedict Option”? Is this the best way for us to operate in America in the coming future? (BTW, I’m not at all interested in ranting about the recent SCOTUS decision. I’m not convinced that it’s terribly productive to do so on social media. I have a few trusted friends that I’ve argued and discussed with, and that’s been far harder work than I imagined, so let’s keep it productive.)
(source: (1) For my Christian friends on FB, what do you… – Philip Irving Mitchell)
Dr. Mitchell–Phil–is prompted to pose this question by these comments from Baylor colleague Thomas Kidd, a Baptist historian:
Still, I am convinced by Dreher’s analysis – and really, I don’t think there’s any other option for traditional Christians but the Benedict path. Christian homes, schools, and churches have always been counter-cultural outposts. De jure and de facto forms of Christian establishments have sometimes blurred that counter-cultural reality, usually to the detriment of Christian integrity. But we Christians are now placed in a deeply oppositional position vis a vis elite American political, business, and entertainment culture. Taking the Benedict Option, in most cases, just equates to Christian discipleship in our cultural moment.
(source: Should Evangelicals Embrace the “Benedict Option”?)
Now, Dr. Kidd and I are analyzing much of this history differently–I think there is a sound rationale for the building of durable cultural institutions with legal protection, including Church and family, where Dr. Kidd appears to think that these realities should exist among persuaded individuals only, with only individual persuasion being protected legally.
Nonetheless, both Dr. Kidd and I are converging on a response that many people are. My comment follows:
I am probably functionally on this path [something like the “Benedict Option”], and Kidd’s reduction of Dreher’s concept is pretty similar. I advocate that we tighten our “internal lines” of communication, sharing, neighborhood-building, so as to provide spiritual and material support to Church and family with or without the cooperation of the regime. In terms of family, that means holding up the intergenerational (extended, co-located) family and its embedding in such a community (co-locating in a parish) as well as its being intact (all children living with both mother and father).
In terms of Church, this means tightening up the teaching and discipline internally, while also working to connect families *as families* and intentionally attach individuals not organically connected to those families to family and household groups.
At the same time, both our families and our parishes need to become ever more adept at showing hospitality and generosity to all comers; the skill comes in doing so without imposing implicit conditions, on the one hand, or pretending our goals and methods are generic rather than specifically Christian, on the other.
Christians in business will have to become more devoted to specifically Christian goals and methods, also, or have their methods dictated to them by a totalitarian regime.
Where I probably do not wholly follow the “Benedict Option” (aside from its worrying lack of definition and its confusion over the nature and role of the monastic Rule) is in the idea of a pre-emptive and/or rhetorical retreat from the political. This just seems like repackaged Quietism which uses “politics is downstream from culture” as a rebuttal, to me.
Christians who make a living in the world, who rear families in the world, who try to build neighborhoods and buttress and institutionalize the True, Good, and Beautiful in civil society, need legal and police protection. They may have to do without it, and we should be preparing each other for that possibility. But they should not do without it in principle, certainly not on the basis of fallible predictions about the future.
There is an undercurrent of fatalism, or at least of historical determinism, about these predictions; it seems essential to me that we not take counsel of despair, but rather commit ourselves to resist while there is hope, as long as there is hope.
There is hope while there are those willing to be martyrs rather than comply, because there is ALWAYS hope beyond this life for those who surrender it to Christ.