Rod Dreher's Blog, page 655

You really should subscribe to Micah Mattix’s daily e-mail digest Prufrock. There’s always something worth reading. Today there are two related pieces. The first is a New Yorker review of Laurus, a new novel about medieval Russia. Excerpt:

A new novel by the Russian medievalist Eugene Vodolazkin, “Laurus,” recreates this fervent landscape and suggests why the era, its holy men, and the forests and fields of Muscovy retain such a grip on the Russian imagination. Vodolazkin’s hero-mystic Arseny is a protagonist extrapolated from the little that is known about the lives and deeds of the famous holy men. Born in 1440, he’s raised by his herbalist grandfather Christofer near the grounds of the Kirillov Monastery, about three hundred miles north of Moscow. He becomes a renowned medicine man, faith healer, and prophet who “pelted demons with stones and conversed with angels.” He makes a pilgrimage to Jerusalem. He takes on new names, depending on how he will next serve God. The people venerate his humble spirituality. In “Laurus,” Vodolazkin aims directly at the heart of the Russian religious experience and perhaps even at that maddeningly elusive concept that is cherished to the point of cliché: the Russian soul.

So much of that soul seems to be wrapped up in Russia’s relationship with the natural world: intimate but wary, occult but practical. Arseny’s initial renown comes from his success as an herbalist and healer as he employs what he learned from his beloved grandfather. For wart removal, the best treatment is a sprinkling of ground cornflower seeds. For burns, apply linen with ground cabbage and egg white. The white root of a plant called hare’s ear cures erectile dysfunction. (“The drawback to this method was that the white root had to be held in the mouth at the crucial moment.”) At least some of Arseny’s remedies are suspect. (Translator Lisa C. Hayden warns, “Please don’t try these at home.”)

The remedies invoke an idea of nature as essentially friendly, or at least potentially helpful. Folk medicine remains popular in Russia to this day. Whether or not it’s effective, it connects an overwhelmingly urbanized population to the scythed fields and profound, spirit-dwelling forests of its antiquity. And Vodolazkin takes his holy fools seriously, offering a view of medieval Christianity that goes well beyond the appropriation of home remedies for religious purposes. Although Arseny cherishes Christofer’s birch-bark pharmaceutical texts, he doesn’t believe the herbs are responsible when the ill recover. (Often, they don’t.) The keys are prayer and faith. He bows to icons on a shelf. Incense burns. A vitalizing current runs from his hands into the core of the patient’s suffering. In “Laurus,” the depiction of faith is presented entirely without irony—a strategy that has become unusual among literary writers, but which is central to Vodolazkin’s effort to excavate what was meaningful from Russia’s distant past.

Read more about this novel here. I have just ordered it. Before I comment further, let me draw your attention to this short Atlantic piece about the revival of paganism in Iceland, which I also found through Prufrock. Excerpt:

Next year, for the first time in a millennium, a pagan temple will welcome Reykjavik’s faithful. The heathen house of worship, vaguely resembling a misshapen meringue, will be aligned with the sun’s path and burrowed into a hill near the city’s airport. There, like the Vikings of old, members of Iceland’s neo-pagan Ásatrú movement will be able to feast on horse meat, swig from goblets of mead, and praise deities such as Thor, the god of thunder, and Freyja, the goddess of love.

At first glance, the scene might appear bizarrely anachronistic. But although Iceland officially adopted Christianity around a.d. 1000, paganism never really disappeared from the Nordic island. The religious traditions of the Norsemen lived on—in mythology and poetry, in popular Icelandic names like Thorstein, in widespread belief in invisible elves and nature spirits. Eygló Svala Arnarsdóttir, an Icelandic journalist and a self-described atheist who has attended Ásatrú ceremonies, told me, “Icelanders have never really been strictly Christian,” noting that when they accepted Christianity, they did so under the condition that they be permitted to quietly practice paganism. “It’s not that people necessarily believe in the old Norse gods or have secret ceremonies in their basement,” she said. Instead, she explained, pagan values are “ingrained into our culture.”

You see in the piece that the neo-pagans have conformed to contemporary liberal mores on gay marriage (an Icelandic journalist concedes that she is “not sure” that their Viking pagan ancestors celebrated diversity). The interesting point to me is that paganism is an embodied religion, and a religion of story, and of mysticism — all things that we Westerners have pushed aside in modernity. Our faith has become cerebral, de-ritualized, disembodied, rationalistic. When the mystical does reassert itself, as in Pentecostalism, it is wild and untamed, like a river bursting its narrow, man-made levees in flood.

One of the things I have grown to love about Orthodoxy is how profoundly embodied and mystical it is. You might say, well, how pagan it is — and this is something it had in common with old-fashioned Catholicism. No, we don’t have herbalists in our tiny mission parish, but we do celebrate the Divine Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom, which is overwhelmingly mystical, and we do live in an imaginative world that’s markedly different from Western Christianity. The New Yorker reviewer Ken Kalfus captures some of this here:

We live in an age in which the pre-modern frequently

Ancient Christianity in the Deep South

comes flush up against the modern and the post-. But Russia and Russian life seem to be especially prone to existing on several planes of time at once. Occasionally, certain Russians cry out that they can see the future. Others dwell in the Byzantine. They may pass you on a Moscow street, robed and bearded. On an autumn walk through the countryside, you may get five bars on your phone while a distant onion dome rises above a stand of birches, a kerchiefed woman on the side of the road sells a kilo of pickles, other women scout for mushrooms in the woods, and in the fields there is a humming swish!, accompanied by the quick gray blur of a long, curving blade on a stick.

I smiled at that, because that’s exactly the experience I have, living in the modern world but worshiping within the timelessness of Russian Orthodoxy. When I returned from my trip to the East Coast, I learned that our parish had obtained a relic, a bone fragment, of St. Geneviève, the patron saint of Paris. She was a fifth-century Gaul, a nun who was a wonderworker. I learned of her when I was in Paris three autumns ago, and went several times to her tomb inside a church atop a hill that bears her name, to venerate her relics, and to ask her prayers. Since then, I have had a private devotion to her, often asking her prayers. When I went to vespers on Saturday night, I stood by her relic, awed to think that a piece of the body of this holy woman of late antiquity, this sister in Christ, was at my right side, and had come to me across the ocean and the sea of time. We Orthodox believe in the communion of saints, which means we hold that every time we gather to worship, all the saints of heaven are mystically present with us (that’s why you see so many icons in our churches). Still, there is something extraordinary about having a piece of the holy woman’s bone present.

This only seems pagan, I think, to modern Christians, who find all of this superstitious, and a relic, so to speak, of our past. I think this is quite wrong. When I was back East last week, I startled myself by talking a lot about Orthodoxy, and the traditional Orthodox spiritual disciplines I have learned from my priest, Father Matthew. I didn’t mean to get on a soapbox for Orthodoxy, but when I had to give examples of the kinds of spiritually formative practices I’m talking about in the Benedict Option … there was Orthodoxy.

It really does work! By “work,” I mean that faithfully going to liturgy, doing the prayers, observing the fasts, and giving yourself over to the tradition truly does de-center yourself from your Self, and re-centers it around God — and it does this because it draws in the imagination and the body in ways that Western Christianity does not. That doesn’t make it true, of course, but I would encourage Catholics and Protestants to study Orthodox worship and learn what they can from it, about how to embody a sense of holiness and otherworldliness. Without that strong sense of God’s reality, and of God “everywhere present and filling all things,” as we pray, I don’t know how people withstand the world. I strongly feel, because I have lived it, that only Orthodoxy purifies my vision and my heart, and opens to me the experience that Dante describes in the Commedia. I could not have understood this outside of Orthodoxy, and I couldn’t have understood it in my first years as an Orthodox Christian. But you absorb the ritual, the colors, the smells, the bells, the bending of the knee and the crossing of the breast, and combined with prayer, confession, and the Eucharist, it all points you — it points all of you — to Him.

I cannot imagine today being anything but Orthodox, because for me, only Orthodoxy gives me the thickness required to stay rooted in historical Christianity, and to resist the disorders of modernity, especially my own disordered heart. When we enter our temple, we don’t find a seat to hear a lecture; we bow before the presence of the Almighty (and bow, and bow, and on certain high holy days, prostrate ourselves fully, head touching floor). This doesn’t symbolize submission to the All-Holy; this is submission to Him, and if we are doing it right, we take that disposition out of the temple with us and into the world.

I say “for me, only Orthodoxy gives me this,” but I really do think it’s true for everybody. It is not something that is easy to explain in print (though if you’d like to know more, my friend Frederica Mathewes-Green’s latest book, Welcome To the Orthodox Church, is a great introduction). You really do have to come and see, not expecting to understand it at first, or even at second. It is not something that you can contain in rationalistic, easily bounded categories. Here’s a short video clip in which Frederica takes you on a tour of her parish, explaining why Orthodox Christians organize their worship space as they do:

My point is that I have a strong sense that if it is going to survive, the Christianity of the future is going to have to be marked by a return to medievalism, in the sense of being strongly sacramental, marked by a sense of enchantment. The Russian Orthodox philosopher Nikolai Berdyaev, nearly a century ago, called for a new medievalism — by which he means a time in which the spiritual life to precedence over the material life. I believe that Orthodoxy will grow in the West once Christians realize more completely the nature of our common predicament in post-Christianity, and if they investigate how Orthodox Christian spirituality and practice stands so powerfully against modernity, not only in what it teaches, but also — and even moreso — in what it does. All those prayers, all that incense, all those praises and prostrations — they are a progressive unveiling, a cleansing of the vision and purification of the heart. It’s hard, but it’s real. But you have to see this for yourself.

Catholic and Protestant readers, is there any sense in which you can be faithful to your own traditions, and still be “medieval” in the sense Berdyaev means? I know it can be done in Catholicism, though that form of Catholicism is thin on the ground here in America, in the modern era. Thoughts?

UPDATE: I want to ask you please not to read this post as proselytizing. I don’t do that here. If you don’t believe the truth claims of the Orthodox Church, then all the beautiful liturgy in the world doesn’t make it appealing. I would like the discussion thread to focus on the role that ritual and bodily practice plays in the experience of religion, and of Christianity in particular.

UPDATE.2: James C. says the American Catholic answer to this is found in Jody Bottum’s 2006 essay about the swallows and Capistrano. It starts like this:

The swallows would swirl through San Juan Capistrano, rising like a mist from the sea every March 19. Or so the legend goes. In fact, the blue-feathered birds sometimes reached California as early as mid-February, and when they arrived at the end of their long trek from Argentina, they would infest the place like happy locusts, plastering their gourd-shaped nests among the crossbeams and crannies, the nooks and corners—anywhere they could get their colonies to stick to the old stucco and adobe of the mission founded by Father Junipero Serra in 1776.

They were cliff swallows, Hirundo pyrrhonota, the woman from the local Audubon Society explained, speaking in the rapid, inflectionless voice of someone reading, for the sixth time that day, from a memo stuck to her desk with yellowing strips of cellophane tape. Lacking the deeply forked tail of the better-known barn swallow, Hirundo rustica, cliff swallows are known by their white forehead, buff rump, and short, squared-off tail feathers. They gather in large flocks, fluttering their wings above their heads in a characteristic motion while gathering mud for their nests. And they haven’t returned to the Mission San Juan Capistrano—darting past the old Serra Chapel and flitting through the ruins of the Great Stone Church—for nearly twenty years.

Not that the mission hasn’t tried to win them back. What’s Capistrano without its swallows? All the mission bells will ring, / The chapel choir will sing, / When the swallows come back to Capistrano, the most popular song of 1939 told the nation, and for years after the swallows disappeared, you could see the groundskeepers out making artificial mud puddles with their green plastic hoses. In the 1990s, someone had the notion of hiring a local potter to fool the birds, and the mission is still dotted with clay nests: ceramic lures that failed to bring the square-tailed nest builders, Hirundo pyrrhonota, back to hear the bells.

There’s a figure in all this—a metaphor, perhaps, or a synecdoche—for the condition of American Catholicism. Its long history, certainly, from the Spanish colonial beginnings on. But, most of all, San Juan Capistrano seems an image for recent decades—because sometime around 1970, the leaders of the Catholic Church in America took a stick and knocked down all the swallows’ nests.

They had their reasons. What was anyone to make of those endless 1950s sodalities and perpetual-adoration societies, the Mary Day processions, the distracting rosaries shouted out during the mumbled Latin Masses? The tangle and confusion of all the discalced, oblated, friar-minored, Salesianed, Benedictined, Cistercianed communities of monks and nuns?

The arcanery of decorations on albs and chasubles, the processions of Holy Water blessings, the grottos with their precarious rows of fire-hazard candles flickering away in little red cups, the colored seams and peculiar buttons that identified monsignors, the wimpled school sisters, the tiny Spanish grandmothers muttering prayers in their black mantillas, the First Communion girls wrapped up in white like prepubescent brides, the mumbled Irish prejudices, the loud Italian festivals, the Holy Door indulgences, the pocket guides to Thomistic philosophy, the Knights of Columbus with their cocked hats and comic-opera swords, the tinny mission bells, the melismatic chapel choirs—none of this was the Church, some of it actually obscured the Church, and the decision to clear out the mess was not unintelligent or uninformed or unintended.

It was merely insane. An entire culture nested in the crossbeams and crannies, the nooks and corners, of the Catholic Church. And it wasn’t until the swallows had been chased away that anyone seemed to realize how much the Church itself needed them, darting around the chapels and flitting through the cathedrals. They provided beauty, and eccentricity, and life. What they did, really, was provide Catholicism to the Catholic Church in America, and none of the multimedia Masses and liturgical extravaganzas in the years since—none of the decoy nests and artificial puddles—has managed to call them home. All the mission bells will ring, / The chapel choir will sing, / When the swallows come back to Capistrano.

Daniel Gordis reflects on the intractability of the Israeli-Palestinian struggle:

We have a young language instructor at Shalem College in Jerusalem, where I work. She’s a religious Muslim who wears a hijab, lives in one of the Arab neighborhoods of Jerusalem and is a graduate student at Hebrew University. She’s fun and warm, and a great teacher — the students like her a lot.

Late last spring, when things here were quiet, some of the students mentioned to the department chair that as much as they’d spoken with her over the past couple of years, they’d never discussed politics. They were curious what someone like her thought about the conflict in this region, especially now that she was teaching at an unabashedly Zionist college, had come to know so many Jewish students and had developed such warm relationships with them. How does someone like her see things here? How did she think we would one day be able to settle this conflict?

“So ask her,” the department chair said. “As long as you speak to her in Arabic (she’s on staff to help our students master the language), you can talk about anything you want.”

They did. They told her that since they’d never discussed the “situation” (as we metaphorically call it here in Israel), they were curious how she thought we might someday resolve it.

“It’s our land,” she responded rather matter-of-factly. Stunned, they weren’t sure that they’d heard her correctly. So they waited. But that was all she had to say. “It’s our land. You’re just here for now.”

What upset those students more than anything was not that a Palestinian might believe that the Jews are simply the latest wave of Crusaders in this region, and that we, like the Crusaders of old, will one day be forced out. We all know that there are many Palestinians who believe that.

What upset them was that she — an educated woman, getting a graduate degree (which would never happen in a Muslim country) at a world class university (only Israel has those — none of Israel’s neighbors has a single highly rated university) and working at a college filled with Jews who admire her, like her and treat her as they would any other colleague — still believes that when it’s all over, the situation will get resolved by our being tossed out of here once again.

Even she, who lives a life filled with opportunities that she would never have in an Arab country, still thinks at the end of the day the Jews are nothing but colonialists. And colonialists, she believes, don’t last here. The British got rid of the Ottomans, the Jews got rid of the British — and one day, she believes, the Arabs will get rid of the Jews.

Read the whole thing.  Gordis writes in sadness, as if having to face the resilience of Palestinian irredentism falsifies a cherished belief. Which, of course, it does: there can never be peace if Arabs believe that Jews have no right under any circumstance to be on the land.

I think there’s a lesson in this for all of us in the West, whatever we think of the Israel vs. Palestine divide. We love to think that the modernity — liberty, equality, capitalism and the material comfort it generates — erodes instincts we find atavistic. Why would you want to carry on a tribal dispute about land when you could live in peace and we could all get rich together, and be happy? The answer, it would appear, is that to the non-Western culture of the Middle East, the greatest poverty is the dishonor of acquiescing in your defeat. We keep missing this about the Middle East.

I have a sense of what this means, because I too come from a shame-honor culture, in the Deep South. It’s not nearly as strong as that of the Middle East, heaven knows, but having experienced it from the inside gives me at least an inkling of how infinitely stronger it must be among Arabs there. To be frank, my father was willing to preside over the breakup of our family system rather than admit error, or to compromise in any way. It was a matter of honor. Last week, I ran into an acquaintance in town, who asked how my mom was doing in the wake of my father’s death. “Your daddy was the kind of man who would do anything in the world for you, but if you crossed him once, that was it,” the man said, making a chopping motion with his hand.

I laughed at that, but it was true, and in the end, it was tragic. In the South, despite our Christian pretensions, many of us know who we are by the grudges we hold. Pushed to the extreme, this ethic is about preferring to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven (Milton). But from another point of view, it’s the ethic of the Christian martyrs, who would rather die than bow down to a false god.

Whether you think the Palestinian language instructor is a slave to self-destructive pride, or is a heroic example of fidelity to ideals uncompromised by material gain, depends on what you think of the end to which she is pledged. Has she sold her soul to irredentism and Jew-hatred? Or is she refusing to sell her soul to the occupiers of her land, no matter how easy they make her life?

What is the soul? Which god does it serve? Those are the real questions, and the answers to them define how the Palestinians deal with their dispossession, and how all of us deal with our own dispossession and exile, which may not be literal, as it is for the Palestinians, but which is real all the same (see How Dante Can Save Your Life for more on this point). My father dealt with his dispossession — seeing his son adopting a way of life somewhat different from his own — by doubling down on grudge-holding, and refusing to compromise, because in his mind, if he compromised, it would amount to accepting his dispossession. But it very nearly succeeded in destroying the very thing he wanted to pass on. See how that works?

(Readers, I’m happy to host a wide-ranging discussion, but I’m not going to publish tiresome polemics about evil Zionists and suchlike. If you don’t have something new to add to the discussion, in the conceptual framework I’ve introduced here, better not to waste your time writing it.)

Funny piece from Matthew Loftus over the weekend, offering a Q&A for people who hate the Benedict Option. Excerpt:

Scene: A small cafe in a coastal urban city. BOB, a boring old believer, and his friend BEN are sipping their coffees as the autumn breeze ruffles the collars protruding from the necks of their sweater vests.



Bob: Thanks for inviting me out here, Ben. So tell me about this “Benedict Option” thing?

Ben: I’m so glad you asked! I’m really excited about it! Well, I’m not excited that it’s come to this. See, we have to start with understanding the cultural forces that have made orthodox Christianity so abhorrent to so many people, including the children of believers. A variety of historical shifts in art, education, and politics have precipitated a loss of cultural power for the Church in the West, so we have to study how our culture rejects orthodox belief for a syncretistic mixture of Christianity and either capitalistic nationalism or pseudoscientific progressivism.

Bob: Oh, you mean, like, missiology?

Ben: Yes, well, as I was saying, we’re at this unique cultural moment in history where orthodox faith is under attack from all sides and we’re barely communicating our faith to the next generation. Whether you’re in a strict fundamentalist and traditional church that drives your kids out the harder you try to control them or you’re in a loosey-goosey evanjellyfish congregation that tries to be more entertaining but only ends up looking less cool than the next flavor of the week, it’s just a disaster. We need a strategic attentiveness—a withdrawal, even—to focus internally on how we preach, teach, and catechize.

Bob: Oh, you mean, like, ecclesiology?

Ben: You’re not letting me finish. Anyway, but we aren’t just heading to the hills and bunkering up!

Et cetera. If I understand his point, he’s saying that the Benedict Option is nothing more than a fussy, entirely unnecessary repackaging of what Christians have always thought about: ecclesiology and missiology. He’s right, to a certain extent; I have tried to be clear that most of this is just basic church-being-church stuff.

There are a couple of important distinctives, though, that I don’t think Loftus, who is an Evangelical, gets. I say this with hesitation, because a guy who lives with his family in the West Baltimore ghetto, where he ministers, and who is preparing to move to Africa to serve as a medical missionary, hardly needs a lesson in Christianity from a flabby-butt bourgeois like me. Nevertheless, here they are — and if he has written about them elsewhere, please someone send them so I can be corrected.

From the satirical Q&A piece, I don’t get the idea that Loftus sees practices as key to formation and discipleship, and certainly not traditional Christian practices. Maybe this is what he means by “ecclesiology.” By “practices,” I don’t mean “actions”; plainly he’s a man who acts boldly and sacrificially for his faith. I’m talking about engaging in the kinds of ritual, repeated practices (like I wrote about the other day) that instantiate a particular Christian vision and memory within a community, and make it possible to pass it on from generation to generation.

Over the weekend I was at an event listening to a couple of Evangelical friends from the same denomination talking about how much things have changed in terms of worship practices within their churches over the years. I didn’t get to hear the end of the conversation, but when I stepped away, one was noting her concern that the main lesson her children are getting from church is that it is supposed to be entertaining. I would put a finer point on that, and say that this model of church makes us think that church is there to meet our needs, not that we are meant to pour ourselves into forms that have been established over a very long time. How can you have continuity with the past, and into the future, without durable forms and practices?

Second, though Loftus snarkily name-checks in passing Alasdair MacIntyre at the end, in fact MacIntyre’s critique is the genesis of the whole Ben Op project. If you ignore him, none of the Ben Op will make sense. How do you do ecclesiology and missiology in a culture in which Christian belief is think, and one that believes in nothing much more than the sovereignty of the Self? I don’t believe Loftus needs metaphysics to serve his neighborhood as he’s doing, but I do believe an indifference to metaphysics will hurt Christians trying to figure out how to hold on in the long term.

Here’s a glimpse of what I mean. The Orthodox theologian David Bentley Hart says that the challenge Christians face after the catastrophe of modernity is more daunting than most of us realize, and will require strong medicine:

For Christians, then, to recover and understand the meaning of the command to have “no other god,” it is necessary first to recognize that the victory of the Church in history was not only incomplete, but indeed set free a force that the old sacral order had at least been able to contain; and it is against this more formless and invincible enemy that we take up the standard of the commandment today.

Moreover, we need to recognize, in the light of this history, that this commandment is a hard discipline: it destroys, it breaks in order to bind; like a cautery, it wounds in order to heal; and now, in order to heal the damage it has in part inflicted, it must be applied again. In practical terms, I suspect that this means that Christians must make an ever more concerted effort to recall and recover the wisdom and centrality of the ascetic tradition. It takes formidable faith and devotion to resist the evils of one’s age, and it is to the history of Christian asceticism—especially, perhaps, the apophthegms of the Desert Fathers—that all Christians, whether married or not, should turn for guidance. To have no god but the God of Christ, after all, means today that we must endure the lenten privations of what is most certainly a dark age, and strive to resist the bland solace, inane charms, brute viciousness, and dazed passivity of post-Christian culture ” all of which are so tempting precisely because they enjoin us to believe in and adore ourselves.

It means also to remain aloof from many of the moral languages of our time, which are—even at their most sentimental, tender, and tolerant—usually as decadent and egoistic as the currently most fashionable vices. It means, in short, self-abnegation, contrarianism, a willingness not only to welcome but to condemn, and a refusal of secularization as fierce as the refusal of our Christian ancestors to burn incense to the genius of the emperor. This is not an especially grim prescription, I should add: Christian asceticism is not, after all, a cruel disfigurement of the will, contaminated by the world-weariness or malice towards creation that one can justly ascribe to many other varieties of religious detachment. It is, rather, the cultivation of the pure heart and pure eye, which allows one to receive the world, and rejoice in it, not as a possession of the will or an occasion for the exercise of power, but as the good gift of God. It is, so to speak, a kind of “Marian” waiting upon the Word of God and its fruitfulness. This is why it has the power to heal us of our modern derangements: because, paradoxical as it may seem to modern temperaments, Christian asceticism is the practice of love, what Maximus the Confessor calls learning to see the logos of each thing within the Logos of God, and it eventuates most properly in the grateful reverence of a Bonaventure or the lyrical ecstasy of a Thomas Traherne.

Hart titled the essay from which that passage comes “Christ and Nothing,” by which he means that for our civilization, having passed through Christianity, the only alternative belief left is Christianity or nihilism. By this he does not mean that people believe in nothing, but rather that anything else they try to believe in won’t really stick. You can contest that, of course, but I riffed on Hart’s title to express my belief that the Christianity of the future is going to have to be “Benedictine” in the sense of being rooted in historical, early-church foundations, order, and ordered ritual prayer, or it’s not going to survive in the wasteland of modernity. Without those roots, forms, and practices, I don’t see how Christianity in the West pulls through — and Moralistic Therapeutic Deism is not Christianity, but a counterfeit facsimile.

UPDATE: Rabbi Meir Soloveitchik makes much the same point in writing about what is missing from Conservative Judaism. He says that if Jews abandon Torah observance, they’re not going to be able to hold on to their Jewish identity over time. Excerpt:

In his groundbreaking 1957 study of Judaism in America, the sociologist Nathan Glazer explained that Judaism is not, and has never been, a faith founded only on creed; it has always been an all-encompassing way of life, its beliefs bound up with its “acts, rituals, habits.” For that very reason, Glazer wrote presciently, “Judaism is even more vulnerable to the unsettling influences of modernity than is Christianity.” Once a Jew finds it more convenient to abandon specific observances of his ancestors, he is left with “no body of doctrine to fall back on . . . . [U]nder these circumstances, an entire way of life disintegrate[s].” Writing many years later, Elliott Abrams built on Glazer’s point by colorfully describing his immigrant grandparents: in America “there was pressure to grab a non-kosher sandwich, to work on the Sabbath, to skip a prayer here and there. And as the ritual pillars began to collapse, they brought down with them the whole structure of faith for many American Jews.”

Sociologically speaking, there is little to argue with in this analysis. But there is a deeper reason why continuity has always been joined together with and dependent on faith and its actualization in practice. Commitment to the obligations of faith is what makes people realize they are part of something larger than themselves: something that they must perpetuate through their children not merely physically but spiritually. “In perpetuation,” writes Leon Kass, “we send forth not just the seed of our bodies, but also the bearer of our hopes, our truths, and those of our tradition.” By contrast, parents with no traditions or with no belief in the truth of their traditions have little or no incentive to ensure that their own way of life will be perpetuated by their children.

Cohen is correct: in the abstract, even a secular Jew can appreciate that father and mother embody, as Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik put it in Family Redeemed, “the greatness of man in toto.” But Rabbi Soloveitchik goes on to note that Abraham becomes the founder of Judaism not through his desire for a biological heir but through his larger determination to transmit his calling to those heirs: “I have chosen him because he will command his children and household after him, that they may preserve the ways of the Lord” (Genesis 18:19). With reverence for religious truth comes, often, a reverence for tradition and a readiness to sacrifice for its transmission.

“It is . . . both necessary and obvious to assert,” Cohen writes in the sentence that I quoted from earlier, “that the fate of the Jews as a people will rest first and foremost on the strength and character of the Jewish family.” In the end, this is only half-true. The fate of the Jews as a people—and Cohen himself hints as much at the very end of his essay—lies in the belief that we as Jews are different: that we are called, chosen, to obey a revelation truer than any other.

If Jews believe this with all their hearts and minds and souls, then the strength and character of their families are ensured. If they do not, then no matter how much they may admire the Jewish theology of the family, their resoluteness in the face of either hatred’s fury or assimilation’s embrace will not last more than a generation or two. To think otherwise is to commit what conservatives caution against: privileging the power of ideas over the lessons of experience.

Privileging the power of ideas over the lessons of experience. That’s a powerful line. A religion is transmitted through its culture — see Wilken’s “Church as Culture” essay — and by people within that culture who are convinced that they are part of something larger that they have the responsibility both to receive and to pass on to the next generation. Religion is not simply something we carry around in our heads, and it’s not something that can be preserved without some ritual forms observed by the community, and to which the community submits.

Ritual and culture is not enough; if it were, you wouldn’t have cradle Orthodox Christians leaving for Evangelicalism because they crave an experience of the living God, and feel that He is hidden beneath the celebration of the ethnos. But we must not make the corresponding modernist error, and assume that the ideas and convictions can take whatever form we choose to impose on them, and survive over time in our families.

One week away from the general election in Louisiana, and a New Orleans freelance journalist drops a daisy cutter on the gubernatorial campaign of Republican US Sen. David Vitter, who leads in the polls. In an interview, a former prostitute who claims she had a three-year relationship with the Congressman — who was caught in a prostitution scandal a few years back, and who admitted to non-specific sins — says that when she told her pro-life lover that he had made her pregnant, Vitter told her to have an abortion. She claims that she refused, and put the child up for adoption.

You can watch the interviews here. The reporter says that Vitter, through his lawyer, repeatedly refused to go on camera to address these allegations. This is how he has conducted his campaign: refusing to talk about his alleged past with prostitutes.

Clancy Dubos, publisher of the New Orleans-based newspaper Gambit, writes:

Now we know why David Vitter avoided so many live TV debates, why he wanted forum questions in advance, why he ducked the media after the two TV debates he did attend — and most of all, why he has never answered questions about the specifics of the “serious sin” to which he allegedly confessed in July 2007.

… This story is going to go viral, and Vitter will either have to answer all questions from the media or watch his campaign for governor implode in the final week. He cannot “manage” this crisis via press releases or prepared statements. The voters of Louisiana deserve a full, complete, open and no-holds-barred “come clean” from Vitter.

Absent that, we can all hit the “reset” button on this governor’s race.

He really is going to have to deal with this. If the election were held today, Vitter would probably beat his two GOP opponents, Scott Angelle and Jay Dardenne, and make it to the runoff with Democrat John Bel Edwards (Louisiana has an open primary system in which absent an outright majority in the first vote, the first two past the post go to a runoff). This bombshell could upend the race, though. Polling shows that Angelle and Dardenne are both far behind Vitter, and running neck and neck — but that 37 percent of voters are undecided.

People in Louisiana can put up with a prostitution scandal. Heck, they returned Vitter to office in 2010, even after this was known. But telling your pregnant lover to get an abortion while presenting yourself as a pro-life family values guy? I don’t know. That’s going to be a hard one to overcome, especially if you’ve spent the entire campaign avoiding venues where somebody might ask you about it.

A lot of Republican votes will be decided in the next week. Vitter, who is now running a commercial featuring his betrayed wife vouching for him, is going to have to talk, or his silence will say it all.

Here’s America magazine’s rush translation of Pope Francis’s speech to the Synod today. Shorter Pope Francis: “Remember, I’m the Pope, and I make the decisions around here.”

The Jesuit Father Jim Martin knows that something is up:

@Pontifex‘s comments today suggest he’ll probably issue an “apostolic exhortation” at the end of the Synod, summing up the deliberations…

— James Martin, SJ (@JamesMartinSJ) October 17, 2015

 

of the Synod, and putting his personal stamp on the decisions and deliberations, as all other popes have done in the past. A prediction…

— James Martin, SJ (@JamesMartinSJ) October 17, 2015

Meaning, as you continue to read Fr. Jim’s thread, that the Pope is going to change the doctrine himself, call it pastoral practice, and expect them all to get in line, because he’s the Pope and they are Catholics. If this happens, then the Trads will have been proven right, and the fix really was in from the beginning. More:

All the Jesuit insiders have abandoned the Synodal pretext and are pre-promoting a papal document. I presume it is already finalized.

— Michael B Dougherty (@michaelbd) October 17, 2015

This IS happening, folks. If you think it won’t touch you, you’re wrong.

— Aaron Gigliotti (@GigliottiAaron) October 17, 2015

A reader wrote in a comment on a different thread, re: anti-gay discrimination laws:

Those of you who think the only ones who need to worry are “small o” Christians who operate businesses related to weddings need to pay attention.

He’s talking about a court ruling last month in a case in which an Oregon bar owner — Chris Penner, who said half his staff was gay or lesbian — lost his business after asking a large transgender group to stop coming around his place. From the story:

The labor bureau’s Civil Rights Division began investigating and found no evidence to support Penner’s contention that the T-Girls disrupted business.

Instead, the bureau found substantial evidence of discrimination and tried to reach a settlement with Penner. When none was reached, Avakian took the case to a hearing.

Penner closed the Twilight Room Annex in April 2014 and laid off five employees after his bank accounts were seized in connection with the $400,000 judgment. The state also imposed $3,000 in civil penalties on Blachana and $2,000 on Penner.

Since Jan. 1, 2008, when the Equality Act took effect, the state labor bureau has received 24 complaints, only a handful of which have advanced to a hearing or remain under investigation. The majority of cases were closed for lack of substantial evidence, withdrawn because of a settlement or taken to state or federal court.

In a 2012 interview with The Oregonian/OregonLive, Penner said he is neither homophobic nor anti-transgender people. He once hosted a weekly queer dance night in the space, and a gay pool team has practiced in the bar. But, he said, other customers complained that the T-Girls left the stall doors open and seats up in the women’s restrooms. Business also had declined since the T-Girls started coming to the bar, he said.

In his appeal, Penner contended that he had not refused to provide service to anyone and that he had a constitutional right to express a desire that the T-Girls stop frequenting his business.

The court rejected the arguments, saying it agreed with Avakian that the voice messages were tantamount to denials of service.

From that 2012 interview, a quote from one of the phone messages the bar owner left:

“People think that A: We’re a tranny bar, or B: We’re a gay bar,” Penner said in the July 2012 message. “We are neither. People are not coming in because they just don’t want to be here on a Friday night now.”

[Complainant Cassandra] Lynn testified at a hearing before an administrative law judge that she could not sleep in the months after Penner’s voicemail. She was irritable at work and considered disbanding the group. Other girls said they stopped going out in public as women. They pulled away from friends, showed up late to work and gained weight.

… “The individuals had found a place at the P Club where they found they could share their lives, their stories. When that is stripped away, that is an indignity that is severe,” [Oregon state Labor Commissioner Brad] Avakian said.

An indignity so severe it prevents people from showing up to work on time? Really? I don’t believe a word of it. I am also skeptical that the state’s investigation found no evidence that the bar’s business went down after this large group of transgenders made it their Friday night gathering place. Most guys would find some other place to drink if their bar, which seems from context like it was something of a sports bar, became known as a transgender hangout, and probably most girls too, because who wants a penis person in the stall next to them in the ladies room?

Nevertheless, the state’s investigation found grounds to support the complainants, and no grounds to support the bar owner — who is now an ex-bar owner, because the lawsuit ruined him. Even if the state’s investigation was fairly done, and the bar owner truly broke the state’s anti-discrimination law in this case, consider that if a large group of men who dress like women decide to colonize your sports bar, and start using the ladies room, you have no grounds on which to ask them to leave. (And before you ask, I think that the owner of a lesbian bar should have the right to ask a large group of fraternity boys who frequented her bar to find somewhere else to drink.)

The reader who pointed me to this story adds:

Again, note. This is not a Christian whose conscience being violated, but a bar owner who complained because of what was being done to his bottom line. He got hit with a discrimination suit, nonetheless.

This is what happens at the state level when the LGBT lobby realizes some of its agenda. The public is obligated, under force of law and threat of punishment to regard any man who throws on a dress as a woman. Furthermore, the State wields an iron fist with a hair trigger, smashing down on any who do not agree, for whatever reason — whether because of Christian conscience or for purely secular, economic reasons.

The man is liable for $400,000 because he left those two ill-advised phone messages. His business is destroyed, and his employees, gay and straight both, are out of work. Good work, LGBT lobby. Good work, State of Oregon.

A reader sends the above image, adding:

My wife is a senior at a public university studying to become an elementary teacher. She attended a transgender workshop to help teachers deal with situations involving transgender elementary students. This was part of the handout that all the workshop students received. It says, “If you do not ‘agree’ with transgendered persons, how will you NOT discriminate?” Note especially the word “agree” in scare quotes, implying that ideological disagreement with transgenderism is really a farce to hide hate.

I think this might help Christians brace themselves for what is coming especially in public schools. This is as blatant as I’ve seen yet.

What about you conservatives in this blog’s readership who did not wear purple on October 15 to participate in “Spirit Day,” GLAAD’s invented holiday to denounce bullying of LGBT youth? I absolutely oppose bullying of all kinds, but had I been in a school or workplace whose leadership encouraged observing Spirit Day, I would not have donned the purple. It’s not because I am indifferent to bullying of LGBT kids — to the contrary, I think schools must take a very strong stand against all kinds of bullying, and probably a more punitive stand than many liberals would advocate. It’s that I would not want to be co-opted by GLAAD, and give the impression that being against bullying means that one is for GLAAD’s agenda.

These things are almost always about virtue signaling, nothing more. Notice in the example that the reader sent, the framing of the transgender issue is about agreement. What on earth would it mean to say that you don’t “agree” with transgenderism? As if something as fathomlessly complex as human sexuality and gender could be boiled down to a yes/no question.

In fact, that is precisely the point: frame it as a matter of agreement, and that way you force the dissenters to identify themselves, so you can weed them out.

If some anti-bullying organization that had nothing to do with LGBT put together a similar show-your-colors campaign, I almost certainly wouldn’t wear their stupid bracelet even though if I agreed with them 100 percent, because I am a contrarian who hates the conformity of virtue signaling.

The Spirit of Vatican II™ is the gift that keeps on giving:

Archbishop Blase Cupich of Chicago — who is participating in the Synod of the Family at Pope Francis’ personal invitation — said at a press scrum in the Vatican press office this afternoon that the conscience is “inviolable” and that he believes divorced and remarried couples could be permitted to receive the sacraments, if they have “come to a decision” to do so “in good conscience” – theological reasoning that he indicated in response to a follow-up question would also apply to gay couples.

During the lengthy press briefing, the archbishop also spoke approvingly of the so-called “Kasper Proposal,” which would permit divorced and remarried Catholics to receive Communion in some cases. Cupich explained that he had distributed Cardinal Walter Kasper’s book, The Gospel of the Family, in which the cardinal had laid out this proposal, to all of the priests in his diocese.

“In Chicago I visit regularly with people who feel marginalized: the elderly, the divorced and remarried, gay and lesbian individuals and also couples. I think that we really need to get to know what their life is like if we’re going to accompany them,” he said.

When asked to give a concrete example of how he would accompany the divorced and remarried in their desire to receive the sacraments, Cupich replied: “If people come to a decision in good conscience then our job is to help them move forward and to respect that. The conscience is inviolable and we have to respect that when they make decisions, and I’ve always done that.”

“Conscience is inviolable,” eh? It’s almost like, “At the heart of liberty is the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life.”

Cupich, recall, was Pope Francis’s first major US appointment, and was personally selected by the Pope to be a Synod father. Audio snippets of the Archbishop’s presser here:

My Southern Baptist pal and co-conspirator Andrew T. Walker bridges the gap between St. Benedict and Abraham Kuyper (1837-1920), the Neo-Calvinist thinker whose thought and work is highly influential among many conservative Protestants today. Walker calls the Benedict Option a “turn to deliberative Christianity.” That’s fair. Then:

Dreher’s proposal has also received a lot of criticism. Critics accuse Dreher of a newfound and rebranded quietism or pietism—a Christianity that shirks social responsibility and instead retreats to the hills. These critics often hail from the transformationalist camp of Christianity, a paradigm that believes that Christianity must always engage with the forefront of culture for the sake of mission or else it will run the risk of disobeying the inherently transformative nature of Christianity. Many look to the 19th century Dutch polymath Abraham Kuyper as the forerunner of Transformationalism or neo-Calvinism. For our purposes, let’s refer to this as the “Kuyper Option.” I’ve even heard this sentiment referred to as “The Wilberforce Option” at the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission on the Gospel and Politics conference in honor of William Wilberforce whose Christian presence in 19th century England helped bring slavery to an end as an institution.

Walker says that the Ben Op and the “Kuyper Op” don’t have to be at odds with each other. He interprets (again, correctly) my Ben Op thinking as saying not that we have to become Anabaptists, withdrawing fully from public life for the sake of the Gospel, but rather that the state of the Church in post-Christianity, and the nature of our secularism, is such that some form of retreat is vital if we are going to nurture properly the inner life of the Church, so it can be the Church in the world.

The Kuyperians, or Transformationalists, are strongly mission-minded, and there is certainly nothing wrong with that, and much right with it. But if they are going to succeed in this time and in this place, they are going to need a great deal more interior building.

More Walker:

I see the primary difference in the two paradigms as between an interior Christianity (Benedict) and an exterior Christianity (Kuyper). Transformationalists insist upon scaling the walls of every sector of culture in order to see Christ’s Lordship ultimately stamped upon it. Here, Kuyper needs Benedict. To scale the walls, it will require a type of people that are formed and self-aware. An interior concern is conscious of who Christians must be in order to exist. An exterior approach is conscious of what Christians do to live faithfully.

Now, there may be serious disagreement between the camps between what each thinks what influence is feasible at the moment. That, I believe, might be the biggest point of conflict. Dreher is pessimistic about opportunities to see change happen and believes that the secularist advance is dominant and unstoppable in the short term. To him, we are irreparably post-Christian in the short-term. The Transformationalists, on the other hand, believe that no momentary hesitation or acknowledged self-retreat is allowable. If there’s an opportunity to influence the culture, it should be taken because Christ’s Lordship over the cosmos requires a witness heralding this lordship over every arena of life and culture. A Kuyper Option understands that Christianity, by definition, is public truth.

A congruence of a Transformationalist Benedict Option may mean, supremely, that our method and expectations change.

And:

But let me say very soberly: There will not be transformation in the headwinds now facing us if there isn’t deep identity and resolve to orthodox Christianity. No longer can parents simply rely on an ambient culture to disciple their kids in the way of the American way of life if the American way of life means subliminal paganism. There’s a realization setting in that the faith of their childhood cannot be passively absorbed. It will require catechesis. I see this happening within my own ranks of conservative Christianity, most of which unabashedly loves culture and wants to benefit it.

Yes, yes, yes. We conservative Christians are by and large not prepared to live in the world as it is now, because we don’t fully appreciate its challenges, and are not doing the contemplative work relative to these changing times. I’m thinking this morning of folks I met on this recent trip back East, who told me about educated, successful people in their own Christian communities who don’t grasp how their uncritical embrace of their lifestyle within the culture of professional advancement and meritocracy undermines the orthodox Christianity they profess, and would like to pass on to their children. Too often they conflate Christianity with the American Way of Life, and don’t see what they’re doing because they believe that personal piety suffices to cover a multitude of disorders. I confess that I am also guilty of this more often than I care to think.

See, this is why we small-o orthodox Christians need each other in this project. We are seeing the same things within the broader Church in America, and within our own churches. And we can bring our particular experiences and insights to bear on building the resistance. I don’t expect that Evangelicals interested in the Benedict Option will become Orthodox, or Catholic, but I do hope that they will be able to find things in the life and practices of the older, more contemplative churches that help root them more firmly in a structure of prayer and living. And I hope that Orthodox and Catholic Christians will be able to benefit from the admirable passion that Evangelicals have for acting in this world for the sake of the Gospel.

Read the whole thing. 

By the way, here’s an amusing and helpful Improbable Guide to the Rule of St. Benedict, a one-sentence summary of each chapter of the Rule. It was devised by Brandon Buerge, with whom one imagines one would like to drink a beer.

Two days after my trip to DC and Charlottesville, and I’m still reflecting on how much it helped me clarify some things on the Benedict Option. I don’t want to get too deeply into detail here, because some of these conversations were private. The gist of it, though, were plenty of stories about how many Christians sense that something is seriously wrong with our culture today and the church’s relationship to it, but how deeply reluctant people are to do anything about it that would require them to be countercultural in ways that discomfit them — that is, conflict with the American Way of Life, as they conceive it. That’s a fault.

But it’s also the case, I heard, that the structure of American life today requires so much from families that it is hard for them to do it even if they want to. This is not their fault, and it’s a real problem, and it has to be faced as we collaborate to figure out what the Benedict Option is, and must be.

On this front, I continue to be grateful for my friend Jake Meador’s attention to the Benedict Option. Jake writes as a young Evangelical family man who lives in Nebraska, and who is deeply aware of the necessity for the Ben Op, and the obstacles to it. In his most recent reflection, Jake takes on the Ben Op’s impracticality. 

He says that the busy-ness of everyday life means that well-intentioned Ben Oppish works

often fail due to a lack of time, energy, or resources (either physical or mental).

This, I suspect, will continue to be one of the chief practical problems facing the Benedict Option: How can we recover a way of life shaped more like that of the historic church while generally not having access to the sorts of cultural and social capital that have historically nurtured and sustained that way of life?

Put another way—many of us lack the spiritual, social, familial, and economic resources that held church communities together in the past. This is where the felt need for BenOp-type communities comes from. And yet it is precisely the lack of those resources that makes acquiring even a proxy for them so incredibly difficult.

And the problem does not exist on a purely practical or logistical level, although the problems there are considerable. There is also an academic problem here as well. The sort of social critique that the BenOp rests on is reliant upon categories and ways of thinking that are not native to most contemporary Americans and thus require some amount of work to understand.

Jake goes on to say that we probably need to think small about the Ben Op before we can think big:

We need a way of talking about smaller, simpler steps that individual Christians and churches can take to address these problems. In the long run, starting rural communes, new churches, new schools, and the like is the way forward. But in the short-term we need smaller ideas in order to build a bridge between where we are today and where we want to be.

Read the whole thing. You know who’s got the right idea? Leah Libresco, who told me at dinner last weekend, “I’m the person who will tell you, ‘I can’t make the first thing you want happen, but here’s the second-best thing, so let’s do it!'” Or something to that effect. What she’s saying is that we can’t let the perfect become the enemy of the good. It’s more important to do something, however insufficient, than to do nothing. As she writes in the post I link to at her name above:

I asked both speakers [Ken Myers and Rod Dreher — RD] what they would recommend that people in the audience do now (either this week, or, if possible, this afternoon) that could be a good first step toward future BenOp projects, but also just good in itself.  (To preclude the temptation that I’m vulnerable to, too, I specified the action shouldn’t be “Read [X]“).  Between the two of them, they came up with:

Invite someone/a group to dinner
Memorize a poem (nourishing through arts)
Adopt a prayer rule (simple is fine, but let it be rooted in some kind of tradition, rather than purely choose-your-own-adventure)

I liked all of these, and 1 and 3 are ones that I do.  They’re nice because they’re the start of a habit, but don’t require an extraordinary effort to begin.

My prayer rule, in case you’re wondering, is Morning and Evening Office, but it’s a little less stable than I’d like at present.  I’ve pegged it to commutes before, but my working schedule doesn’t allow it, so there’s more ad hoc fitting it in (or missing it!) than I’d like.

A prayer rule touches on some of the stability/institutional character of the Benedict Option.  It doesn’t technically involve others, but it could if it’s the kind of thing you can invite others into.  For families, this is a little more straightforward, but people with housemates can see if others are interested, and I’ve asked others to join me for my Evening Prayer practice at the end of alumni debates, on the way home from bars with friends, etc.  Having a regular practice helps keep me on track, and also gives me something to be hospitable with.

Choosing a prayer rule is the kind of challenge that can be derailed by the desire to get it right, and therefore put off beginning.  In general, I think it makes sense to start with something (maybe even this evening, if you have a candidate in mind) and to revise as you go, if needed.  And it’s a good idea to pick something you are pretty sure you can do, even if it means you’re picking something that feels too small (an Anima Christi when you wake up and before bed?)

At a talk the next day, I recommended to the audience that they start fasting regularly, according to some kind of rule. For Orthodox Christians, this means no meat or dairy on most Wednesdays and Fridays. If that’s too much, just do it on Friday. No meat on Friday — how hard is that? It’s not. But it gets you into the habit of denying yourself for the sake of drawing closer to God, and that is the key thing.

One more Ben Op thing before I get off my soapbox for the day. If you have the time, please watch this Robert Louis Wilken lecture on religion and culture today. The talk itself is 33 minutes long, and there’s about another half hour of Q&A. Wilken, as you know, is one of the greatest patristics scholars alive, and he’s also blessed with the gift of being able to talk (and write) like a normal person, not an academic.

The lecture, which was delivered this past summer at a First Things forum, never mentions the Ben Op, but it is filled with wisdom key to its core. Wilken talks about Augustine and Dostoevsky, and quotes the Grand Inquisitor’s line to Jesus:  “The mystery of man’s being is not only in living, but in what one lives for.”

What do we live for? That is, to what end are our loves ordered? Are they ordered at all. Freedom from constraint is very different from freedom for virtue. “Paradoxical as it sounds,” says Wilken, “true freedom is only found in obedience.”

Miracle, mystery, and authority bind us to God, says Wilken, referring, of course, to the Grand Inquisitor fable. But these things are not the same as faith. They are, I would say, icons through which we can see God. If they are substitutes for God, they become idols. This is why the Benedict Option will fail if it is taken as nothing more than a technique to keep the disorders of modernity at bay. 

In the Q&A part, Wilken tells a questioner that the desire to do what we want to do rather than what we should do — that is, to conceive of liberty as license — has always been with humanity, because it’s fun. We’re human; we’re built that way. We desire. Said Wilken, “The modern dilemma is that we have pitched aside the assumptions that restrain that.”

A high school teacher who asked a question said the kids he teaches are good kids, for the most part, but they’re moral relativists. This is the water they swim in. How can he make them see the truth and care about it? he asks.

“Your own life. Your own life! That’s the most powerful thing,” says Wilken. “There’s no way you’re going to argue somebody into it, especially not a 16 year old boy.”

The kind of truth that moves men’s hearts and changes their lives is not propositional, Wilken continues. “The truth is in the talking and the truth is in the doing. It’s not in some concept that you agree to.”

This, I think, is the core of the Benedict Option. It is important that we find a different and countercultural way to think about our life in a post-Christian age. But that only matters if it is a prelude to entering into a different and countercultural way to live.

You need people like me to find ways of talking about these ideas that allow ordinary Christians to make sense of them. And you need people like the indefatigably cheerful Leah Libresco, the Catherine of Siena of the Yes We Can Catholics, to find ways to implement them, and to encourage us not to give up hope.