David Goldman Book Review: The Benedict Option, by Rod Dreher
https://pjmedia.com/spengler/
You Can’t Go Home Again (But You Can Hide Out)
The Benedict Option: A Strategy for Christians in a Post-Christian Nation, by Rod Dreher. Sentinel Press. 262 pages with index. $25.00
There is something inherently odd about the Benedict Option, the view that Christians should retreat from the world into small and tightly-knit communities where they may live a Christian life with a minimum of disturbance from the evil side of modernity. Christianity by its nature has a universal mission. It speaks to the evil of our age that devout Christians want to encyst themselves against the secular world.
Rod Dreher, a prominent conservative writer, describes his Benedict Option as follows:
We live liturgically, telling our sacred Story in worship and song. We fast and we feast. We marry and give our children in marriage, and though in exile, we work for the peace of the city. We welcome our newborns and bury our dead. We read the Bible, and we tell our children about the saints. And we also tell them in the orchard and by the fireside about Odysseus, Achilles and Aeneas, of Dante and Don Quixote, and Frodo and Gandalf, and all the tales that bear what it means to be men and women of the West.
Dreher’s book has both the charm and merit of a participant’s account of the practicalities of withdrawing from the world. The first half of the book tries to account for the decline of Western civilization, an issue to which I will return later; the strongest chapters come later, recounting the experience of the religious who have tried to separate themselves from secular society, and exhorting the reader to embrace work, risk, and faith. Christians should be prudent, that is, not seek needless career martyrdom in pursuit of principles where victory is impossible; they should save themselves for family and community. Where believers are driven out of certain professions by the new secular inquisition, Dreher says, they should instead be entrepreneurial. Christians should rediscover the trades, where the religious can make a living without signing on to secular ideology. They should buy from other Christians and help Christians find employment.
These examples and exhortations will be of great help to religious people who find it impossible to protect their children from the plagues of pornography and commercialism that erode the content of contemporary life. Dreher proposes sensible, well-considered measures to achieve family and community independence from mainstream society rather than radical demonstration.
Jews have no business telling Christians how to conduct their lives, but there is something in the Jewish experience that resonates with the idea of withdrawal from the mainstream of society. When I speak to Christian groups the question I hear most often is: “How do the Jews keep their children in the fold?” The answer, of course, is that most of us don’t. As the joke goes, the difference between Donald Trump and a liberal Jew is that Trump has Jewish grandchildren.
But Orthodox Jews succeed in keeping their children, to a greater extent, at least, than any other identifiable religious group in the United States. The survey data suggest that about two of three children born to observant families become observant adults. They do this by maintaining their own institutions and, where that is not practical, their own well-defined enclaves in such institutions as major universities. Observant Jews mainly attend Jewish day schools (I do not personally know any Orthodox home schoolers). They marry young, usually in their early twenties. Orthodox Judaism has one major university, New York’s Yeshiva University, but Orthodox students tend to cluster in other universities where they can find a daily minyan (prayer quorum), kosher food, and above all prospective Jewish mates.
If Hitler had not invaded Poland, the religious Jews of Poland no doubt would still be in their shtetls living a quietest life of intense observance and sacred study. The robustness of that culture still amazes; it has been recreated in several neighborhoods of Brooklyn, the Five Towns of Long Island, Lakewood New Jersey, and other enclaves. Some 400,000 Jews read the entirely of the 100-volume Talmud in a seven year cycle of one folio page per day.
Cultivating religious institutions and informal networks that sustain faith , fellowship and family is the only viable strategy for religious survival. That is extremely hard to do and entails many dangers. Pope Benedict XVI argued throughout his career that the Catholic Church must shrink to a core of believes who are willing to assume the yoke of faith. As he wrote in his 1996 interview book The Salt of the Earth, “We might have to part with the notion of a popular Church. It is possible that we are on the verge of a new era in the history of the Church, under circumstances very different from those we have faced in the past, when Christianity will resemble the mustard seed [Matthew 13:31-32], that is, will continue only in the form of small and seemingly insignificant groups, which yet will oppose evil with all their strength and bring Good into this world.” I do not know why Benedict abdicated, but the plain fact is that he was replaced by a pope who compared the Church to a giant triage tent on a battlefield, taking in all the wounded of the world. The Big Church concept prevailed against what might be called a Benedictine approach, if not quite the Benedict Option envisioned by Alasdair MacIntyre.
As a practical matter, home schooling isn’t a good option for most parents, not only because they may not be qualified to teach, but because children learn more from each other than they do from their teachers. Dreher cites Jewish education and the diligence of students at Yeshiva University, but he does not mention how expensive it is to live the simple life outside the orbit of the secular world.
Comments are closed.
