By DONAL ANTHONY FOLEY
Donal Anthony Foley reviews The Benedict Option: A Strategy for Christians in a Post-Christian Nation by Rod Dreher (Sentinel, 2017); 304 pages; available at amazon.com in hardback, paperback, and Kindle.
The Benedict Option is a book that’s received a lot of praise, and also some criticism. It is composed of ten chapters covering areas such as roots of our present societal crisis, the need for a new kind of Christian politics and culture, and the importance of a truly Christian approach to education.
This book essentially contains Rod Dreher’s views about the future of Christianity in the West. He sees a need for believers to become proactive, but in a countercultural way, by returning to the example and inspiration provided by the life and achievements of St. Benedict of Nursia, who flourished in the sixth century.
Dreher sees the way that the Benedictine monastic order founded by St. Benedict provided communities that were oases of calm and prayer — in a world experiencing great upheaval — as a blueprint for the similar program of renewal for Christianity in the modern world.
That is, just as the Roman Empire in the West came to an end in the face of the Barbarian invasions, so the world is now facing the prospect of a modern societal breakdown under a new “Barbarian” assault, and thus has to look to spiritual, rather than political, solutions to the very serious problems it faces.
So the Benedict option is about new ways of living, given that, in Dreher’s view, “the culture war that began with the Sexual Revolution in the 1960s has now ended in defeat for Christian conservatives.” The solution he puts forward is a return to the roots of our faith, both in thought and in practice.
It could be said that Dreher is overly pessimistic — for example, he says, “There are people alive today who may live to see the effective death of Christianity in our civilization . . . [and] barring a dramatic reversal of current trends, it will all but disappear from Europe and North America.”
But in support of his position he amasses an imposing array of evidence, and particularly regarding demographic trends, which is certainly of very serious concern, as young people, the coming generation, increasingly abandon belief in God and embrace hedonistic materialism.
He argues that rather than trying to combat this “flood” of atheism directly, we should be building an “ark” comprising communities, institutions, and networks of believers, to combat a secular society, which is now engaged in “demolishing our faith, the family, gender, [and] even what it means to be human.”
The book analyses how we have reached our present predicament, tracing the rise of anti-Christian thought through Nominalism in the fourteenth century, the Renaissance, the Reformation, the Enlightenment, the Industrial Revolution, and finally the modern Sexual Revolution, until now we are approaching what he describes as the “end of modernity” — the autonomous, freely choosing individual, who finds meaning in no one but himself.
The book is deliberately aimed at as wide an audience as possible and contains insights from Christians of many denominations, as well as interviews with modern Benedictine monks — all of which gives it a definitely journalistic flavor — but for all that, it is a serious book.
Benedictine monasticism was built on the ideals of order, prayer, work, asceticism, stability, community, and hospitality, all combined in a balanced and sane way. Somehow, Dreher argues, we need to rediscover those ideals so as to bring order out of our current and increasingly disordered world.
Despite the election of President Trump, he thinks traditional politics has little to offer, and that believers should rather be looking to change things on a more local level, and focus on building alternative institutions. But, as he says, this is not about “building a gated community of Christians, but rather about establishing (or reestablishing) common practices and common institutions that can reverse the isolation and fragmentation of modern society.”
In a concrete sense, he advocates practices such as turning off the TV, putting the smartphone away, reading good books, playing games and making music, planting a garden, or even starting a classical Christian school. For the churches as a whole he sees a need for a rediscovering of liturgical worship, greater discipline, and an evangelizing focus on goodness and beauty, if present trends are to be reversed.
Dreher also argues that families need to turn the home into a “domestic monastery” where children can be nurtured in the faith and protected from adverse outside influences. In this respect he sees education and Christian formation as crucial, with a focus on the Bible and the history of Western civilization; he strongly advocates Classical Christian schools or homeschooling — and for college age students a “Christian academic counterculture.”
He also argues that Christians need to rediscover the profound importance of manual labor, not least because the way society is shaping up, they may find themselves excluded from many professional careers, and thus forced to work with their hands.
But this could also well be an opportunity for believers to start their own businesses, and also to choose to buy from fellow Christians. In sum, according to Dreher, in the future, followers of Christ can expect to live in a world where they are poorer and more marginalized.
In particular, the author argues that Christians will have to resist the ongoing sexual revolution which he describes as a “modern re-paganization” of society, and says that there can be no peace between Christianity and this revolution because they are so radically opposed. This resistance will involve believers in not making compromises, while also affirming the basic goodness of sexuality.
Above all, there has to be a realization that parents are the primary sex educators, and that they must assume this role early in order to protect their children from an increasingly pornographic society.
An Achilles Heel
It’s interesting to note that Dreher, who converted to Catholicism from Methodism, has now become a convert to Eastern Orthodoxy, and also that he doesn’t deal with the role of the Blessed Virgin in the book, or mention Fatima. Perhaps for that reason it is somewhat apocalyptic in tone, whereas at Fatima our Lady promised that in the end her Immaculate Heart would triumph and a period of peace would be given to the world.
For Dreher, the greatest danger facing Western Christians comes from the liberal secular order itself, rather than aggressive left-wing politics or radical Islam. In this, he could be said to be echoing what our Lady said at Fatima about Russia spreading its errors throughout the world — which is what has happened as the materialism and atheism of Communism has seeped into Western society.
The lack of a Marian dimension, though, is the Achilles Heel of this book, given the importance of the Virgin Mary’s role in Christian history, and also given Dreher’s Orthodox beliefs.
As St. Louis de Montfort said, Christ’s First Coming, the Incarnation, came through our Lady, and likewise, she is to prepare the way for His Second Coming — but that requires a much greater appreciation of her role and power among Christians generally.
Having said all that, The Benedict Option is certainly a book well worth reading for its valuable insights and strategies for believers who want to do what they can to turn our society away from its present destructive course, and to protect their families from the current moral decline of the West.
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(Donal Anthony Foley is the author of a number of books on Marian Apparitions, and maintains a related website at www.theotokos.org.uk. He has also a written two time-travel/adventure books for young people — details can be found at: http://glaston-chronicles.co.uk/)
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