Rod Dreher's Blog, page 653

Predictably, there are people who look at Word of Life Church, that lunatic fringe cult in New York state (you know, the ones who allegedly beat a teenager to death), and say, “Ah ha! There’s your Benedict Option!” That kind of silly remark says more about the person who makes it than it does about the Benedict Option, in the same way that people who look at the most extreme manifestations of gay culture, or black culture, or (fill in the blank) culture, and call it exemplary of the whole.

Still, there is a Ben Op point to be made about the Word of Lifers. Take a look at this in-depth report in The New York Times, about how the church turned into a cult. Excerpts:

People of all stripes once showed up at the living room Bible study that became Word of Life, many of them disaffected members of other churches drawn by the group’s stripped-down style of worship. It was the late 1980s, and Ms. Irwin’s father, Jerry Irwin, was the founder and soft-spoken pastor.

“They wanted what the Bible says; they didn’t want all this other religious tradition,” said Janet Sylvester, who joined her two brothers in the group in the early 1990s after having a child as a single woman. “It was back to the basics.”

Boom. Big red flag. Declaring oneself liberated from all religious tradition, going “back to the basics,” is a bad sign. Churches and groups should be embedded within a long and established tradition, if only to set boundaries and to be accountable. After 2,000 years of Christianity, anybody who says that they are going “back to the basics” should not be trusted, in my view. Is it really the case that after all this time, someone is going to emerge who discovers that everybody since the early Church has been wrong, and now, at last, the true reform is upon us?

More:

When Mr. Irwin returned to Word of Life in the mid-1990s, it was as a prophet who claimed to be able to see and hear inside people’s homes, former members said. One of his visions was to move his family into the sprawling third floor of the schoolhouse. Over time he drove Mr. Wright from power.

“The freedom that you felt was slowly going away, and the fear was slowly increasing,” Ms. Sylvester said. “And the fear wasn’t necessarily a fear of him; it was a fear because he represented God in your eyes. So your fear was toward God.”

Fear and paranoia are often danger signs. To be clear, there really are scary things in the world, and fear can be a sign of sanity and health. That said, when leaders begin to talk like that, and your primary experience of church, and of God, is fearful, that’s an indication that you should hit the road.

More:

Gates went up outside the schoolhouse, and other ministers were no longer welcome. Members began letting phone calls go to voice mail, feeling the need to get Mr. Irwin’s approval before taking a call. Parishioners were often barred from taking communion because he said they were in too much sin. One member said Mr. Irwin used racial slurs during sermons, though others did not recall that.

Members’ lives slowly became less their own, the former members said, as the building around them transformed into a sort of altar to the Irwin family’s whims. The third floor, where Mr. Irwin’s family took up residence in the late 1990s, became “pretty much a mansion,” Mr. Ames recalled. One room held a trampoline, and another a small basketball court. The bathroom had a whirlpool bath. It was so big the Irwins bicycled through the hallways.

Cult of personality. Classic.

The entire NYT report is here.

As Ken Myers pointed out at our recent Ben Op event in Georgetown, we are simply going to have to develop a tolerance for risking this kind of disaster if we are going to risk something good and healthy developing. How much sense would it make to look at the various sex abuse scandals arising out of churches and conclude that all churches inevitably become nests of abuse? How much sense would it make to say that because some marriages become abusive, the institution of marriage is bound to be a dark trap? At some point, you have to move forward on trust — but that does not mean blind, unquestioning faith in and loyalty to the leadership.

Umm, ahh, this:

The odds that Donald Trump wins the Republican presidential nomination are going up.

Eighty-one percent of Republican insiders say the likelihood that Trump becomes their party’s nominee is more today than it was a month ago, and 79 percent of Democrats said the same. That’s according to the POLITICO Caucus, our weekly bipartisan survey of top strategists, operatives and activists in the early-voting states of Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina and Nevada.

“I can’t even describe the lunacy of him as our nominee. But reason has not applied to date in this race, and my hopes are fleeting that it will ever surface,” lamented an Iowa Republican, who like all participants was granted anonymity in order to speak freely.

“Predictions of his demise keep not coming true,” added a New Hampshire Republican.

Asserted a South Carolina Republican, “Donald Trump being the GOP nominee is now within the realm of possibility.”

Meanwhile:

Jeb Bush, once a front-runner for the Republican presidential nomination, is implementing an across-the-board pay cut for his struggling campaign as he attempts to regain traction just 100 days before the party’s first nominating contest.

The campaign is removing some senior staff from the payroll, parting ways with some consultants, and downsizing its Miami headquarters to save more than $1 million per month and cut payroll by 40 percent this week, according to Bush campaign officials who requested anonymity to speak about internal changes. Senior leadership positions remain unchanged.

The campaign is also cutting back 45 percent of its budget, except for dollars earmarked for TV advertising and spending for voter contacts, such as phone calls and mailers.

National Review‘s Lawrence Brinton looks at the state of GOP candidate fundraising, and draws some conclusions:

To win the GOP primary and, more important, the general election, a candidate must be able to play to both grassroots supporters and the major donors. Since the dawn of the era of Internet campaigns, beginning in the 2000 election, no candidate in either party who was not, at this point in the election cycle, in the top two in grassroots fundraising has won the nomination, nor has any candidate outside the top three in major-donor funding. Candidates who cannot win the support of major donors ultimately lack the qualities to be competitive in a general election. Influential votes and voices matter, and not just for their money. This is why candidates such as Bernie Sanders are extremely unlikely to be president, no matter how much money they raise.

Conversely, candidates whom big donors love but who do not excite the base can sometimes be lifted by the establishment to the nomination but have no hope in the general election. This why candidates such as Rudy Giuliani, despite his enormous major-donor fundraising totals, went absolutely nowhere in the GOP primaries. Ultimately, it is candidates who — e.g., Obama and George W. Bush — excite the grassroots and do well with major donors who win. Ultimately, it is candidates who excite the grassroots and do well with major donors who win.

Brinton concludes that Jeb Bush, unloved by the grassroots, cannot be the nominee. Aside from Trump, know who is best positioned, from a fundraising POV, to win the GOP nomination?

Ted Cruz. Brinton digs deep here, and explains his reasoning.

So, conservative voters may face a 2016 presidential contest between Trump and Clinton, or Cruz and Clinton. In such a showdown, incredibly, the liberal Democrat would arguably be less of an ideologue than either Republican.

Evangelical writer Thomas Kidd says there is no way he, as a Christian, could support a Trump candidacy, even if it meant a Clinton presidency. I know where he’s coming from. It will be hard for some conservative Christians to conceive of voting for Ted Cruz, who is a somewhat more respectable demagogue, but a demagogue indeed (‘memba this?). Neither Trump nor Cruz is electable. It’s looking like the only GOP candidate who might have the power to stop them is Marco Rubio, of all people. If he can’t do it, Republican Party bigs may have to hold their noses and back Cruz as the only way of stopping Trump.

It wasn’t long ago that Republicans were excited about the 2016 race, looking out over all the strong candidates in the field. That was before the Summer of Trump.

John Haldane reflects on the mortal decline of the Church of Scotland, and compares it to the woes of the Roman Catholic Church at its current Synod.  The reflection was prompted by this mail-out from the Kirk, asking people to participate in its campaign to define its work of the next decade. It’s social-gospeller boilerplate; at no place does it mention God, or Jesus Christ. On the declining Kirk’s main webpage, they have a special link touting its current Properties for Sale. Anyway, Haldane writes that the decline will continue in the Roman Catholic Church too — but that there’s a difference:

In general, then, inefficient and unseemly—but, as they say, “here’s the thing.” For all that messiness [at the Synod], the upshot will be reaffirmation of existing teachings on sex and marriage. No printer or publisher should invest in the possibility of a reprinting of the Catechism of the Catholic Church, though they might hope for some small short-term commissions for pastoral letters in Washington and Munich. The absence of ‘progressive movement’ will lead to a fairly speedy decline in the ‘popularity’ of Pope Francis and a resumption of the attacks on the Catholic Church as the last bastion of resistance to making ‘a fairer, more equal and more just world’.

There will be further lay and clerical dissent, defection and lapsation, closing of parishes for lack of priests, insolvency of dioceses, closures of Catholic agencies, including schools, apostasy among colleges and universities, and so on. In that sense its decline could look like that of the Church of Scotland. The difference, however, is that it will be because ‘having tested everything it is holding fast to what is good'; and it will still be there in two generations when the turn will come.

Amen. This is one of the missions of all the churches: Benedict Option yourselves, doing what is necessary to be faithful when the turn comes. The generation living through this rolling catastrophe will be looking for light, shelter, and sanity — and, dare I say it, holiness.

UPDATE: Uh-oh. From a report on Pope Francis’s homily today. The Pope said:

“Times are changing and we Christians must change continually. We must change whilst remaining fixed to our faith in Jesus Christ, fixed to the truth of the Gospel but we must adapt our attitude continuously according to the signs of the times. We are free. We are free thanks to the gift of freedom given to us by Jesus Christ. But our job is to look at what is happening within us, discern our feelings, our thoughts and what is happening around us and discern the signs of the times – through silence, reflection and prayer.”

This one ain’t over till the Argentinian sings.

Writing in New York magazine, Rebecca Traister gives voice to the cutting-edge complaint of campus feminists: consensual sex is not enough; it had better be good, and bridge the “orgasm gap” — or else. Read on:

It may feel as though contemporary feminists are always talking about the power imbalances related to sex, thanks to the recently robust and radical campus campaigns against rape and sexual assault. But contemporary feminism’s shortcomings may lie in not its over­radicalization but rather its under­radicalization. Because, outside of sexual assault, there is little critique of sex. Young feminists have adopted an exuberant, raunchy, confident, righteously unapologetic, slut-walking ideology that sees sex — as long as it’s consensual — as an expression of feminist liberation. The result is a neatly halved sexual universe, in which there is either assault or there is sex positivity. Which means a vast expanse of bad sex — joyless, exploitative encounters that reflect a persistently sexist culture and can be hard to acknowledge without sounding prudish — has gone largely uninterrogated, leaving some young women wondering why they feel so fu**ed by fu**ing.

More:

In this line of thinking, sex after yes, sex without violence or coercion, is good. Sex is feminist. And empowered women are supposed to enjoy the hell out of it. In fact, Alexandra Brodsky, a Yale law student and founder of anti-rape organization Know Your IX, tells me that she has heard from women who feel that “not having a super-exciting, super-positive sex life is in some ways a political failure.”

Except that young women don’t always enjoy sex — and not because of any innately feminine psychological or physical condition. The hetero (and non-hetero, but, let’s face it, mostly hetero) sex on offer to young women is not of very high quality, for reasons having to do with youthful ineptitude and tenderness of hearts, sure, but also the fact that the game remains rigged.

Watch as young feminists discover that the world is round:

It’s rigged in ways that go well beyond consent. Students I spoke to talked about “male sexual entitlement,” the expectation that male sexual needs take priority, with men presumed to take sex and women presumed to give it to them. They spoke of how men set the terms, host the parties, provide the alcohol, exert the influence. Male attention and approval remain the validating metric of female worth, and women are still (perhaps increasingly) expected to look and f**k like porn stars — plucked, smooth, their pleasure performed persuasively. Meanwhile, male climax remains the accepted finish of hetero encounters; a woman’s orgasm is still the elusive, optional bonus round. Then there are the double standards that continue to redound negatively to women: A woman in pursuit is loose or hard up; a man in pursuit is healthy and horny. A woman who says no is a prude or a cock tease; a man who says no is rejecting the woman in question. And now these sexual judgments cut in two directions: Young women feel that they are being judged either for having too much sex, or for not having enough, or enough good, sex. Finally, young people often have very drunk sex, which in theory means subpar sex for both parties, but which in practice is often worse (like, physically worse) for women.

The editor of the website Feministing, Maya Dusenbery, reveals her tragic secret:

And it’s not as if that culture disappears upon graduation. Dusenbery, who is now 29, speaks of her “great feminist shame”: After a decade of sexual activity, she very often still doesn’t get off. “In one way that feels so superficial, but then, if I believe sexual pleasure is important, that’s terrible! Come on, Maya! Communicate!” She winds up feeling bad for not having done the work of telling her partners how to make her feel good. “What I want is not for me to have that burden. I want one of my male partners, who are wonderful men who care about me, to have just once been like, ‘No, this is unacceptable to me. I’m not going to continue to have sex with you when you’re not getting off!’ And I can’t imagine that happening.”

Read the whole thing.

Saints preserve me from either of my boys or my daughter participating in this degraded rutting culture. What is missing here is — wait for it — love. And commitment. And the mutual respect that comes from a culture where sex is an expression of committed love. What you have instead is young men who behave like barbarians, young women who adopt their barbaric ethic, and then are surprised when they are left feeling cold and used … and who, just you watch, are going to start figuring out ways to construe unfulfilling sex as somehow a violation of their rights.

There is a better way, a saner way, a more humane way, a way out of the dark wood mapped out by Rebecca Traister: the Love and Fidelity Network offers it.

On the Spiritual Friendship blog (for and by gay Christians who are living chastely), Christopher Benson highlights an important insight by theologian and ethicist Oliver O’Donovan, regarding homosexuality and the church. Excerpt:

Let us imagine a gay person who has “heard” the message of the gospel but is yet unaware of any bearing it may have for his homosexual sensibility. Must there not be some following up of the good news, something to relate what has been heard to this aspect of his self-understanding? It is helpful to keep the analogy with teachers, magistrates, and financiers in our mind. Suppose a Christian teacher who has found in the gospel no implications for how literature is to be read and taught; or a Christian politician who has found no special questions raised by the gospel about policies for military defense; or a financier to whom it has not yet occurred that large sums of money should not be handled in the way a butcher handles carcasses. A pastoral question arises. In the light of the gospel, neither literature nor government nor money are mere neutral technicalities. They are dangerous powers in human life, foci upon which idolatry, envy, and hatred easily concentrate. Those who deal with them need to know what it is they handle. The teacher, politician, and banker who have not yet woken up to the battle raging in heavenly places around the stuff of their daily lives, have still to face the challenge of the gospel. It is any different with the powers of sexual sensibility?

Of course, this pastoral train of thought does not entitle us to demand that the gay Christian (or the teacher, politician, and banker) should repent without further ado. Theirs is a position of moral peril but also a position of moral opportunity. In preaching the gospel to a specific vocation, we must aim to assist in discernment. Discernment means tracing the lines of the spiritual battle to be fought; it means awareness of the peculiar temptations of the situation; but it also means identifying the possibilities of service in a specific vocation. The Christian facing the perils and possibilities of a special position must be equipped, as a first step, with the moral wisdom of those who have taken that path before, the rules that have been distilled from their experience. A soldier needs to learn about “just war,” a financier about “just price,” and so on. Again, can it be any different in the realm of sexual sensibility? Discernment is not acquired in a vacuum; it is learned by listening to the tradition of the Christian community reflecting upon Scripture. In this exercise, of course, we cannot rule out the possibility that we may reach a “revisionist” conclusion. No element formed by tradition can claim absolute allegiance. But the right to revise traditions is not everybody’s right; it has to be won by learning their moral truths as deeply as they can be learned. Those who have difficult vocations to explore need the tradition to help the exploration. The tradition may not have the final word, but it is certain they will never find the final word if they have failed to profit from the words the tradition offers. And if it should really be the case that they are summoned to witness on some terra incognita of “new” experience, it will be all the more important that their new discernments should have been reached on the basis of a deep appropriation of old ones, searching for and exploiting the analogies they offer. No one who has not learned to be traditional can dare to innovate.

If this gay Christian, then, directed to traditional rules of sexual conduct as bearers of help, complains that the good news is difficult to hear because his position is treated as compromised from the outset, he has misunderstood something. There is only one position compromised from the outset, and that is the position that is “revisionist” from the outset, determined by the assumption that the church’s past reflections on the gospel have nothing helpful to offer. Certainly no one who sets out from that starting point will end up in catholic communion, for catholic communion presupposes a catholic mind.

The whole excerpt is here. 

O’Donovan is writing in specific about homosexuality, but what he’s really talking about is something that afflicts all of us who profess Christianity: the separation of church and life. If you are a Christian and there is an area of your life that you have not submitted to the tradition, then you are not who you think you are. All of life is a struggle to surrender to God; those who do it must successfully we call saints.

If you are a husband or a wife, then you must be so as a Christian — that is, not as a husband or a wife who happens also to be a Christian, but as a Christian husband, a Christian wife, in a Christian marriage. If you are a writer, you must be a Christian writer, even if you never write a thing about religion; the experience of living with the mind of Christ must inform everything you write. If you are an electrician, you must be a Christian electrician. No, there is not a Christian way to wire a building, but you must do the work you are called to do in the awareness that you are doing it in sight of God, and as His servant, and as part of a Christian community to which you must be accountable.

That community extends both backward and forward in time. This is what we call the Great Tradition. You are responsible for receiving it, and for handing it on. As O’Donovan says, it is not the case that you are always and everywhere bound to slavishly re-enact it in your own life, but you must first absorb it and contend with it seriously before contemplating modifying it. The condition of being modern is to begin with the assumption that the Tradition has no prior claim on us.

The radical insufficiency of this stance is easy for us traditional, orthodox Christians to see when it comes to gays. But we struggle to see it when it applies to teachers, politicians, bankers, and … ourselves, in our own vocations. Actually, I wonder how much we struggle at all. We think that we are teachers, politicians, bankers, and so on who happen to be Christian, as if one only incidentally had anything to do with the other. Similarly, we often think of being Christian as having little or nothing in particular to do with what being a Christian meant to Christians in the past, and what that has to do with us. We are free agents, and don’t perceive anything wrong with that.

It is a form of nominalism, this separation between church and life.

I spent a very rewarding hour on the phone this morning with Robert Louis Wilken, the patristics scholar, talking about the Benedict Option. One of the things he said:

The Christian church must become much more conscious that it is a unique kind of community. When people talk about Christianity today, it’s in the sense that it’s an opinion that certain people hold. Christianity is not an opinion. There may be beliefs and teachings, but first and foremost, it’s a community. Christianity came into the world as an ordered community, not as a message. Look at the New Testament and see how much attention there is to how the community is formed, how it is ordered.

To that end, I’m telling you, watch the Catholic convert Leah Libresco; she has a special practical genius for this kind of thing, I’m convinced. In First Things today, she has an essay up called, “How To Strengthen Catholic Community.” She begins by saying that the talk at the Synod on the Family is about inclusion of gays and lesbians and remarried divorced people in the communion rite, but Leah says this misses something important about community:

In many parishes, it’s easy to attend church anonymously, without speaking to anyone else except for a quick “Have a nice day, Father” and without any contact with fellow parishioners beyond a quick handshake at the sign of peace. A “Hi” from a greeter at the door can be nice, but it doesn’t really give people a sense of being known in the “Jesus looked at him and loved him” sense. Communion is asked to do all the work of inclusion.

Instead of trying to drop barriers to the Eucharistic feast, it’s worth thinking about what to do to address the community famine. There isn’t any single fix to help all people who are, at present, prohibited from participating in communion, be known and loved, but here are a few small suggestions.

Among them:

Parishes can make it easier to ask for any form of help (and for people besides the priest to provide it!) When I had a group of Christian friends over to discuss ways of providing Benedict Option-like support for each other, one part of our evening was spent just naming things people wished others would do for them. “I’d like to spend more, well, any, time around children.” “I wish I had someone who would go to adoration with me after work.” “I want to get to sing with other people.”

There wasn’t an obvious way for most of us to express these wishes at our parishes. In America, priests are stretched painfully thin, so it didn’t make much sense for us to just ask our parish priests to solve these problems for us. But there must be some ways to make it easier to ask things of each other, whether by parishes forming online groups as this Italian street did, or by having a physical bulletin board, or anything else that makes it easier to make the kind of small asks that become strong ties.

Read the whole thing. It’s great. One thing I love about the essay is that it energizes Catholics to get up and do these things for themselves. One of the great regrets I have from my time as a Catholic is that I spent lots of time (as did my friends) griping about the failures of the Church. We didn’t often think about what responsibility we had, as part of the Church, to remedy that. One of the things we complained about was clericalism, but we were guilty of it too.

Here’s an idea: start websites or blogs in particular locales that function as a kind of bulletin board for Catholic (or general Christian) meet-ups for prayer, singing, meals, and so forth. Anything else that makes it easier to make the kind of small asks that become strong ties. I met Leah in DC a couple of weeks ago, and sat next to her at dinner. The amazing thing about her is her restless energy. She wants to absorb the big ideas, then go out and do something about them. Me, I’m willing to theorize until the wee hours of the morning, but Leah is ready to act. The thing is, we need both the contemplative and the active modes within the Church. As we figure out what the Benedict Option is and what it means for Christians in post-Christian America, I’ll be watching and learning from Leah Libresco: she’s all over it.

This is a thing. A thing that once existed, on our planet.

It was found inside a vinyl copy of the Bee Gees Greatest Hits, purchased by my son Matthew, who is a vinylhead, and who has the most eclectic musical tastes of anyone I know. He listens to Kraftwerk, then he’ll put on Marty Robbins. That’s how he rolls. I am pretty sure he likes the Bee Gees unironically. I don’t know how anyone who also likes REM and the Clash can like the Bee Gees, but he’s catholic that way.

Anyway, take a look at that flyer above. Contemplate it. Here is a close-up of the cover of one of the most exciting books ever printed. About three toothsome falsetto-barking dogs:

I was 10 years old when the Saturday Night Fever soundtrack was released. It’s a wonder my phonograph needle didn’t dig through the vinyl, so many times did I play those records. In 1979, the same year this book was published, the Bee Gees released a simpering song called “Too Much Heaven.”  

That lasted for about three weeks. Obviously, I needed lots of deprogramming.

(I spent three hours on this post this morning, but hit the wrong series of buttons as I was preparing to publish it, and lost the entire thing. It must have been about 5,000 words long. I was too frustrated to try to recreate it this morning, but let me try again. It will probably be a lot shorter this time. Maybe it’s a good thing for my readers when I lose a post like that. I do tend to go on long when I get wound up about something.)

Some personal good news for me: I finally, finally, finished the great rewrite of my Benedict Option book proposal (working title: The Benedict Option: Resistance, Resilience, and Resurrection in a Post-Christian Age) and got it off to my agent. We’ll see what happens. It comes at a time when the BenOp idea really seems to be taking off. I see that John Stonestreet and my friends at the Colson Center are hosting a Ben Op-themed panel at the upcoming meeting of the Evangelical Theological Society. It’s called “Benedict, Babylon, and Kuyper,” which is probably the first time in history those three nouns have been linked. This BenOp moment is producing some interesting theological mash-ups and creative thinking.

Another Evangelical friend, Jake Meador, continues to enlighten me with his regular writing about the Ben Op at Mere Orthodoxy. His latest is a gloss on the use of nouns to describe various options. His essay proposes four Ben Op points in response to Evangelical critics who criticize the Ben Op for being all about disengagement. I agree with all of these points, by the way:

1. The BenOp is not primarily a strategy for the church’s interaction with popular culture. So there may not actually be any necessarily conflict between the BenOp and something like the city-church model so popular in the PCA right now.

2. Doubling down on engagement when your previous attempts at engagement have failed will also fail unless you understand why those attempts failed.

3. We probably shouldn’t make assumptions about how healthy our churches are.

4. You cannot give what you do not have.

Unlike in this morning’s lost post, I won’t take the time to comment extensively on Jake’s exegesis, but I do want to say this. He writes on the second point (engagement) that the way some Evangelicals think about sending their kids to public schools is a case worth considering. Some believe that they should send their kids to public schools so that they can be “salt and light” to the braoder community. Jake writes:

Unfortunately, the issue between the church and the public schools was never the headline-grabbing issues connected to the classic talking points—teaching evolution, sex ed classes, prayer in schools, etc. The issue is in the curriculum broadly speaking and with, to borrow from James KA Smith, the sort of catechesis that Christian children will undergo in public schools that will shape them toward a sort of market-focused individualism. If we engage more in this arena without understanding that issue, then we may have more positive relationships with some people (and that is a good thing), but the net cultural effect is likely to be minimal.

This, as an aside, is also why the sort of anti-public school thinking that has often gone on in evangelicalism has often failed to produce a robust alternative to our public education. We have often withdrawn from these schools out of purely defensive concerns with minimal understanding of the good which we hope to obtain through a more properly Christian education. And so what we often end up with is our own version of the same sort of materialism that reigns in the public schools.

I would say yes about the general “catechesis” in the public schools, with more of a focus on the catechesis and formation that goes on outside the classroom than within (this is also true of private schools). I think it is unrealistic to expect a child who is in formation herself to be able to carry the weight of the Christian ethos as she tries to swim upstream of a popular culture that is increasingly hostile to Christian moral values.

Further, Jake is absolutely right to say that Christians who think setting up a school and calling it “Christian” (or “Catholic”) takes care of the problem are deluding themselves. I talk to Evangelical and Catholic school teachers and administrators all the time who say that parents are one of the chief obstacles to the Christian formation of their children that the schools are trying to carry out. Parents want to outsource that formation to the school, but don’t actually want to co-operate in the mission of forming a Christian conscience in their children. When Christianity comes in conflict with achieving middle-class success, the parents don’t want Christianity interfering with the plans they have for their children’s lives. What it sounds to me like from these conversations is that many parents are fooling themselves: they don’t actually care about their kids being Christian, but rather want their children to go to school with kids they assume will be “nicer” and more middle class.

Elsewhere at Mere Orthodoxy, Matthew Loftus responds to my answer to his jokey criticism of the Ben Op. I appreciate what he’s written, and it seems that we don’t really disagree all that much. Here is one point where we don’t see eye to eye:

Where I lose interest is when the dire circumstances of our time overshadow our appreciation for church history or the methods and means by which formation is already happening all around us. Where I start to point and laugh is when anyone supposes that any particular method that is too grandiose for missiology and ecclesiology is going to save us.

I don’t think I understand his point. The Ben Op, as I conceive it, is not a method; it’s an antagonistic stance towards modernity from which Christians can work out responses that are faithful to their own particular traditions (Evangelical, Catholic, Orthodox). Of course it will involve ecclesiology and missiology. It seems clear that Matthew Loftus, who is a missionary, has thought about this a lot more than I have; it’s why I keep saying that as I undertake this book project, I will be interviewing people like him to find out what they’re doing, and how the rest of us can learn from it. (Tonight I’m interviewing the great patristics historian Robert Louis Wilken, asking him what we have to learn from the early church that can help us respond in our own circumstances). The “Benedict Option” rubric is just a conceptual framework built around MacIntyre’s critique of modernity, and meant to emphasize how radical our situation as Christians in this culture is. I said yesterday in The Great Oprahstasy that the postmodern take on religion offered by the Christian historian Diana Butler Bass is a greater threat to orthodox Christianity than the New Atheists, because it baptizes anything and everything. It’s what sociologist Robert Bellah called “Sheilaism”: a DIY faith in which the Self is the authoritative arbiter of all religious truth. It comes from a woman named Sheila Larson, interviewed by Bellah and his co-author in their influential book Habits of the Heart. Sheila said:

“I believe in God. I’m not a religious fanatic. I can’t remember the last time I went to church. My faith has carried me a long way. It’s Sheilaism. Just my own little voice…It’s just try to love yourself and be gentle with yourself. You know, I guess, take care of each other. I think He would want us to take care of each other.”

I’d say that most people I know are Sheilaists. They may be Christian Sheilaists, but Sheilaists they are. I find this a greater challenge to Christian orthodoxy than honest atheism, because it’s parasitic on Christianity. Because he’s engaged in the grit and grimness of the impoverished inner city, Loftus no doubt sees every day suffering people who would be lucky to have Sheilaism as their biggest problem, so it makes my fretting over it seem like a First World Problem. But a real problem it is, and the souls lost because of it are no less precious to God than the souls of those men, women, and children who live in very different circumstances.

(I don’t really hear Loftus saying this, but when people dismiss these kinds of concerns on the grounds that the lives of Christians elsewhere in the world are so much harder, it sounds to me like someone telling the person who lives on the south side of Chicago, surrounded by drugs, violence, and despair, to cheer up, because nationwide, the indicators of crime and social dysfunction are going down.)

Anyway, it seems to me that Loftus’s main criticism of the Ben Op is that it is trying to claim some new insight into something that Christians have always recognized as a perennial problem: missiology and ecclesiology. I concede, obviously, that Christians have been thinking about the problems of church and mission since the very beginning. My point with the Ben Op concept is to highlight for ordinary Christians in the pews how very late in the day it is, how serious our situation is, and how much our own modernity — that is, the things we contemporary Christians take for granted because we have been formed by modernity — has to do with getting us to this dangerous point. Pope Benedict XVI once said:

As we know, in vast areas of the earth faith risks being extinguished, like a flame that is no longer fed. We are facing a profound crisis of faith, a loss of the religious sense that constitutes the greatest challenge to the Church today. The renewal of faith must therefore take priority in the commitment of the entire Church in our time.

 

Benedict XVI elsewhere compared our times to the fall of the Western Roman Empire, saying that Christians in the West have not faced a moment like the present one since those days. Joseph Ratzinger is not a hysteric. Attention must be paid. This is the spirit in which the Benedict Option is conceived. Any solution to the problem that is based on modernist assumptions is bound, I think, to fail.

Over at the Living Church’s blog, historian Hannah Matis takes exception to the idea that the Benedict Option, or the life of the early Benedictines, was about strict separation from society:

In the long history of the effort to live according to the Rule of St. Benedict, signing out of society is not a noticeably prominent theme. Rather, the reverse is true: monastic foundations required patronage, either by royalty or the aristocracy, and rendered goods, services, and, in some cases, soldiers and arms, back to the king and to his aristocracy, praying for the well-being of the realm and for their patrons in life and death. Monasteries made excellent prisons, when required. Until the twelfth century, the elite of Benedictine monasteries were child oblates rather than adult converts, placed by their parent and socialized in that community from a very young age; the Venerable Bede, for example, entered Wearmouth-Jarrow at the age of eight or nine. Foundations for women, on the other hand, frequently acted like Catholic convent schools in the nineteenth century, taking in and educating aristocratic girls who could be withdrawn from the community suddenly if a good marriage alliance presented itself. In fact, so deeply did Benedictine monasteries become enmeshed in their local communities that they were not really an “order,” strictly speaking. Instead, each house developed within its own regional context and, to some extent, became a locus of memory and community identity.

She goes on to say that the Benedictine Rule succeeded because it was embraced and promoted by Pope St. Gregory the Great, who was Benedict’s biographer. Matis writes:

Gregory recognized the very real potential for active witness in people of committed discipline, and he famously argued not so much for a separation of the active and contemplative lives, but a balance of the two in which the energy derived from contemplation was directed outward and downward into pastoral care. …  Monasticism is a counterculture, and the proper function of a counterculture, like a political third party, is sometimes not so much its own long-term survival but the re-direction of a larger unit. Historically, the movements that thrived didn’t so much break the tie between a monastic community and its broader culture as let that tie stretch and, like a lever, exert the greatest possible torque at the greatest possible distance. The key lies in the precise amount of distance: if the connection was lost altogether, the community nearly always failed for lack of members; too close, however, and the community merged into society at large.

And:

For those who worry that withdrawal of any kind from the broader culture will mean the loss of the younger generation, remember St. Antony. If we are clear what we are for, whatever that may be and in whatever range of permutations possible, that is a far better tool for evangelization than being pulled in twelve directions at once. I am just barely millennial myself, according to some calculations, and one of the main differences between the older generation and younger millennials in the church is the desperate longing on the part of millennials, in an overwhelming and despairing wider world, to be part of some sort of smaller, functioning community.

Read the whole thing; it’s a wonderful post. And it’s a reminder to me of the problem of carrying out this project of defining the Ben Op in public, in real time, on this blog. In the best of all possible worlds, you would not have heard any of this until I wrote the book. But in that world, I never would have thrown this idea out there, people wouldn’t be talking about it, and I never would have heard of Jake Meador, Matthew Loftus, or Hannah Matis, and been able to learn from their perspectives.

So, after all that, why did I title this post “Religion in the Great Exhaustion”? It comes from the title of an essay in The American Interest by the political theorist Josh Mitchell. I found it via David Brooks’s last column:

Writing in The American Interest, Joshua Mitchell of Georgetown argues that we are heading toward an “Age of Exhaustion.” Losing confidence in the post-Cold War vision, people will be content to play with their private gadgets and will lose interest in greater striving.

I only have space to add here that the primary problem is mental and spiritual. Some leader has to be able to digest the lessons of the last 15 years and offer a revised charismatic and persuasive sense of America’s historic mission. This mission, both nationalist and universal, would be less individualistic than the gospel of the 1990s, and more realistic about depravity and the way barbarism can spread. It would offer a goal more profound than material comfort.

Here’s a link to the “Great Exhaustion” essay.  I had extensively quoted it in this morning’s post, but can’t do it now because I’ve used up my three-article quota from the magazine this month. You’ll have to read it yourself. As I recall, Mitchell says that Liberal Triumphalism (by which he means the belief that classical liberalism, which entails faith in democracy, free markets, and human rights, is destined to be the ultimate model for global development) has failed, but the anti-Liberal solutions in identity politics proposed by progressives are no persuasive solution. Instead, Mitchell says, we are overtaken by the Great Exhaustion, defined by a loss of faith in anything bigger than our private concerns, and a retreat into private life.

This is a bad thing, says Mitchell, and I agree with him to a point. The United States and the world would have been a lot better off if we had not gone crusading to bring liberal democracy to the Middle East, and instead minded our own business. Only a fool would be eager to redouble that effort to reclaim a sense of national mission. But it is also true that we seem to have lost a sense of public purpose, of a sense that there is a sacred order with which we should strive to harmonize, and which ought to give purpose and meaning to our lives. In a piece last year in First Things about the Middle East, Mitchell indicates his frustration with the way liberal democracy (modernity) has run smack into pre-modernity there:

Alexis de Tocqueville long ago wrote that the democratic age is upon us. By this he meant that the “links” to family and tribe that held us fast in the aristocratic age were breaking apart before our eyes. The political consequence of this social de-linkage, however, was not necessarily benign democratic governance. Indeed, he worried that attempts would be made to refortify the old links, to reaffirm roles at the moment when delinked persons were emerging. What we today often identify as “Islamic Fundamentalism” is just such an attempt to re-fortify the old links, to re-enchant the world. Herein lays the dilemma of the Middle East. Caught in the matrix of the political and social arrangements of the twentieth century that defy credulity, drawn and at the same time repulsed by the fugitive freedom they see on Western shores but only dimly understand, nascent citizens more than occasionally dream of returning to an enchanted world for which an imagined Islam provides a ready guide.

Under these wildly unstable conditions, U.S. foreign policy-makers should take the long view. Democratic governance will not arrive soon in the Middle East. If it does at all, it will emerge only when families and tribes become much less important than they now are. Citizens and entrepreneurs?the building blocks of democratic governance and of market commerce?do not spring up spontaneously out of societies where families and tribes still retain their hold on the imagination. The slow process by which that changes, moreover, cannot easily be accelerated by U.S. foreign policy. In the meantime, in the interludes of peace, diplomatic and cultural outreach and, above all, higher education initiatives intended to help the younger generation understand and thrive in the disenchanted world it will inherit offer perhaps the most constructive ways to engage the region.

Mitchell, plainly, is a modernist who believes in liberal democracy as an ideal. His “Great Exhaustion” piece is built on the same insight he brings to the one I quote. I wonder, though, what he thinks of right-wing anti-Liberalism. The life that pre-modernity prescribes for Arab Muslims is not working for them, and perhaps the “disenchanted” world would be better by comparison. Obviously many of them feel that way, because they are leaving their own countries for the disenchanted lands of the unbelievers.

That said, the Great Exhaustion comes from the disenchantments of modernity. Modern religion — Moralistic Therapeutic Deism, the Great Oprahstasy — is only an analgesic, not a solution. Carle C. Zimmerman, the Harvard historian and sociologist, was not a religious man, but in his book Family and Civilization, which examining the history of the decline and fall of ancient Greece and Rome, and looking at medieval and modern European history, Zimmerman found that the presence of 11 factors preceded the dissolution of those civilizations — factors relating to the atomization and fragmentation of what he calls the “domestic family” (one man + one woman, exclusively). Those factors include widespread divorce, the loss of a sense that the domestic family is normative, and the general acceptance of sexual diversity (called “perversity” by Zimmerman, but he wrote in 1947).

In Zimmerman’s view, the family is the basis for civilization, and “familism” — an ideology that in general puts the family’s needs above the needs of the individual — is necessary for a healthy, stable society. A society that has lost familism will follow customs and impose public policies that work against the domestic family, thereby eating its seed corn. Fertility declines, and with it, the civilization’s ability to thrive.

So says Zimmerman. If he’s right … this is us. In fact, Zimmerman, back in the ’40s, believed it was us. He did not recommend religion as a solution to the decline, no doubt because he was not a religious man. He hoped that science and education would give us the answer. Plainly that’s not going to happen.

Traditional Christians today find ourselves embedded in what the (agnostic) sociologist Philip Rieff calls an “anti-culture” — so called because the things that make any culture possible — shared moral absolutes that bound individuals to the commons — have dissipated. As he wrote in The Triumph of the Therapeutic, “Western culture is changing already into a symbol system unprecedented in its plasticity and absorptive capacity. Nothing much can oppose it really, and it welcomes all contradiction, for, in a sense, it stands for nothing.” Rieff invented the term “deathworks” to describe works of art, literature, and culture that catechize us to believe that there is no such thing as sacred order, no absolute “thou shalt nots”.

Rieff, again, was not a religious believer, but far better than many people who profess faith did Rieff understand the price of non-belief — and of Moralistic Therapeutic Deism. From an interview with The Guardian not long before he died:

Rieff has always been the most cross-grained of American neo-Freudians – one who believes the psychoanalytic “therapeutic culture”, far from “curing” ills, has brought our world to its third, and terminal stage, staring barbarism in the face.

Rieff, it should be explained, sees the world as having developed through three successive cultures, or what he calls “ideal types”. “The first, historically, is the pagan, or pre-Christian world,” he says. “The second the Christian culture and all its varieties. And finally the present Kulturkampf, which is the third culture.”

Are we, then, in a state of barbarism? “No, we’re not. But we’re near it because we treat the past with considerable contempt. Or nostalgia. One is as bad as the other.”

Is there any way back, or around the barriers that confront us? “I don’t know whether what I’ve called the second culture can survive as a form that is respected and practised.”

And is the third culture the end of the road? Rieff is not to be drawn into prophecy. “I don’t know. It remains to be seen.” He says it with the air of a man who only knows that he won’t himself be around to see what the future holds.

What, then, is it about the third culture that is so ominous?

“It’s characterised by a certain vacuity and diffidence. The institutions which were defenders of the second world, or second culture – I think cultures are world creations – have not offered the kind of defence or support that would have been more powerful than therapeutic forces. So Christianity becomes, therapeutically, ‘Jesus is good for you.’ I find this simply pathetic.”

“A certain vacuity and indifference” — the Great Exhaustion. But we are not entirely indifferent. No. Look at what happened last week in Chicago:

The battle for equal access for transgender students is pitting Illinois’ largest high school district against federal authorities.

At issue is locker room access for a transgender high school student in Palatine-based Township High School District 211. The student, who identifies as female, is asking that she receive full access to the girls’ locker room.

Citing privacy concerns, the district has denied the request and instead offered a separate room where the student can change.

“At some point, we have to balance the privacy rights of 12,000 students with other particular, individual needs of another group of students,” said District 211 Superintendent Daniel Cates. “We believe this infringes on the privacy of all the students that we serve.”

An official with the American Civil Liberties Union, which is representing the student in a complaint filed with the U.S. Department of Education, called the district’s stance “blatant discrimination, no matter how the district tries to couch it.”

“We’re talking about somebody who is being denied fair and equal treatment as compared to the other students, only because she is transgender,” said John Knight, director of the LGBT and HIV Project at ACLU of Illinois.

Federal officials responded to the complaint, which was filed about a year and a half ago with the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights, by saying the school is in violation of the Title IX gender equality law, according to the ACLU and district officials. A representative of the civil rights office could not be reached Monday.

So, the entire might of the Empire federal government is being brought to bear on a school district that wants to prevent a teenage boy who thinks he’s a girl from using the girls locker room at a high school. It is a small thing, surely, but a telling one, as Zimmerman foresaw. When Christians see this kind of thing, they intuit what Alasdair MacIntyre meant when he said:

A crucial turning point in that earlier history occurred when men and women of good will turned aside from the task of shoring up the Roman imperium and ceased to identify the continuation of civility and moral community with the maintenance of that imperium. What they set themselves to achieve instead—often not recognising fully what they were doing—was the construction of new forms of community within which the moral life could be sustained so that both morality and civility might survive the coming ages of barbarism and darkness. … What matters at this stage is the construction of local forms of community within which civility and the intellectual and moral life can be sustained through the new dark ages which are already upon us. And if the tradition of the virtues was able to survive the horrors of the last dark ages, we are not entirely without grounds for hope.

The Empire is greatly exhausted, spiritually and otherwise, and signs of its thrashing in its fatigue are everywhere. Hence the Benedict Option. It doesn’t come from nowhere. Full-on modernity devours itself, as we are finding out. To the extent we contemporary Christians understand ourselves in a modernist framework, we will be complicit in our own dissolution.

I always imagined that one of the compensations for having serious pain would be taking hydrocodone. Wrong! It only makes me sleepy and muddle-headed; Sam Quinones will not have cause to worry about me. I just woke up from a four-hour hydro nap. The great consolation is that today’s mail came, and the kids put my delivery on my table next to my meds. A good book — now that brings real relife!

Karen Swallow Prior, whose glasses are cooler than mine, if you can believe it (see for yourself!), has a lovely reflection up today on The Gospel Coalition website, talking about what Protestants can learn from going on the journey with Dante through The Divine Comedy. Excerpts:

What might medieval Catholic poet Dante Alighieri teach Protestants today? A lot, actually.

Dante’s masterpiece, The Divine Comedy, has been rightly called “one of the essential books of mankind.” Hundreds of extant early manuscripts and printed editions attest to the popularity of the work in its own age. Its treatment by the word’s great artists, musicians, and writers over the past 700 centuries proves its continued lure. It has been translated into English countless times and featured regularly on lists of the world’s best books and best poetry. Earlier this year—the 750th anniversary of Dante’s birth—Rod Dreher published a marvelous book How Dante Can Save Your Life [review], meditating on the power of the poem to change his life.

While The Divine Comedy most clearly reflects the Catholic faith of the poet and his medieval world, it hints at some principles the Reformation would bring to bear on the church two centuries later.

“A marvelous book!” — Karen Swallow Prior. Thanks, ma’am. More:

After descending all the way to the center of the earth where hell is housed, Dante proceeds out of it simply by stepping forward. He emerges on the island of Mount Purgatory and begins an ascent that will eventually take him to heaven. While purgatory is clearly rooted in Roman Catholic doctrine, Dante depicts it as the kind of purgation of sins that slightly resembles the Protestant understanding of sanctification. In Purgatorio, the pilgrim encounters repentant sinners in the process of shedding their defects of character and shortcomings so as to achieve a purified state befitting heaven. The circles of hell are paralleled by seven terraces leading upward. Sins are arranged in the reverse order of hell, with the graver sins of the will encountered first followed by those of the flesh: pride, envy, wrath, sloth, avarice, gluttony, lust.

Virgil, Dante’s guide, explains that all actions stem from either natural or spiritual love. Perversion of love leads to the sins from which one must be cleansed. Here, he echoes Augustine on sin as disordered love, a theme recently revived by Tim Keller. Upon reaching the last level of purgatory, Virgil declares: “Your will is free.” The greatest revelation of Dante’s journey comes when he realizes that all shortcomings are shortcomings of love.

Read the whole thing. You don’t have to be a Catholic to gain so much practical spiritual wisdom from reading Dante. I wrote my book for ordinary people, Catholic and non-Catholic, Christians but also those who don’t necessarily affirm the faith, to describe how the penitential journey into the Self, on the winding path to God, is a pilgrimage we all can and must take. That was the thing that really struck me about the Commedia: how acute was Dante’s spiritual and psychological insight, and how accessible and relevant it was (see here, for example). This Italian Catholic poet of the High Middle Ages just might know you and all the strategies you use to hide from God better than you know yourself and your own self-deceptive ways. That was true for me.

That is one of Karen Swallow Prior’s points in her essay: that by writing his poem in the vernacular language (versus Latin, the scholar’s language), Dante brought his divine message directly to the people, because he wanted to reach ordinary people.

If you are a Protestant who has read either the Commedia or How Dante Can Save Your Life, I would love to hear from you about what you learned.