Rod Dreher's Blog, page 657

Tonight at dinner in Charlottesville (The Local; try the goat cheese cheesecake), one of my hosts, Bill Wilder, executive director of the Center for Christian Study at the University of Virginia, asked me what the top two things I learned on my trip to DC and Charlottesville were.

I told him this:

1. How hopeless it is for Christians to expect that Congressional Republicans will do anything effective to defend religious liberty, in particular the liberty of our institutions, including schools and non-profits. The Left has no incentive to compromise, the Democrats don’t care about religious liberty anymore, and the Republicans are sick of the whole issue, as well as scared of being called bigots. Plus, big business has chosen sides. We really are on our own now, and had better start digging in, building networks and, as one influential Washington pastor told me, “tarring the ark.”

2. What an amazing lesson in the Benedict Option there is here on UVA’s campus, including the Center for Christian Study, a terrific place, and the houses where Christian students live in various forms of intentional community.

About these houses. Here’s a link to Chancellot, a house for Christian men who are students at the university. From their vision page:

CORE VALUES

This is a cross-class community, for two reasons:

Discipleship — we learn by sharing stories, experiences, and wisdom with each other.

Continuity — only a third of the residents graduate in any given year, which helps preserve the community’s core values over time.

This is a missional community. This means:

It doesn’t exist for its own sake; it exists to be a light and a blessing to our neighbors, to offer an alternative vision of what male community can look like in college and to invite others to experience that.

It is not an exclusive or elite clique; it’s a tight but welcoming community. We seek closeness with each other in order to enhance our relationships with those outside the community, not crowd them out. We build tight community for the purpose of inviting others to experience the fellowship we have with each other and with the Father and his Son, Jesus Christ (1 John 1:3).

Our doors remain open whenever possible.

This is an intentional community. This means:

We hold each other to a high standard of behavior and spiritual discipline as leaders and role models in the Christian community. We strive to be “above reproach” (1 Tim 3), to be “united in mind and thought” (1 Cor 1:10), and to “live such good lives among the Gentiles that, though they accuse you of doing wrong, they may see your good deeds and glorify God” (1 Pet 2:12).

Residents are committed followers of Christ seeking to grow in spiritual maturity, and have committed to involvement in one of the chapters of InterVarsity Christian Fellowship at UVA. All are willing to submit to the core values and vision of the house.

Proximity can facilitate community, but it won’t accomplish it for you. We make an effort to step out and spend time with people we wouldn’t otherwise be in community with.

The UVA community has a number of these houses for men and women. I spent a good portion of Monday meeting with Christian students who live in these houses, asking them about their experience of community there. I learned a lot. One student said, of his time in the community, “I would find people there who would tell me stories that helped me to know who I am, and to make sense of the world.”

(“Saints cannot exist without a community, as they require, like all of us, nurturance by a people who, while often unfaithful, preserve the habits necessary to learn the story of God.” — Stanley Hauerwas)

I didn’t take extensive notes today; it was more important for me to ask questions, then listen to the answers. I was startled, and delighted, by how serious these young men and women were, and how much they visibly loved their life in common in their houses. They all seemed so thoughtful and happy. Each house is governed differently. Some require signing a covenant; others are less intentional. All are about building Christian community. Some I talked to were so marked by their years at UVA living and serving in community that they decided to stay on in Charlottesville after graduation, finding jobs and deepening their friendship.

We talked about the challenges and the possibilities of replicating the college Christian communal living experience in Washington, or other big cities where graduates of UVA’s Christian houses might go after graduation. Why not?

These houses are so obviously a good and necessary idea that you can’t imagine why they don’t exist at other universities. Maybe they do. I’ve never heard of them before today, but as you can tell, I am impressed. And I like how the Center for Christian Study is a hive of activity. They made the best room in the house, the one with the greatest view of the gentle valley, the library. And they have thousands of volumes there, and plenty of rooms for students to gather. It is a place of light and happiness. The whole community seems very L’Abri somehow. Standing at the podium tonight addressing the audience, I found myself saying, without meaning to flatter anybody, that I would strongly consider sending my kids to UVA, not only because of the quality of the education, but as much or moreso from the formation they would receive in the Christian community here, especially by living in one of those houses.

At the Center this morning, I spoke to a gentle older professor, Ken Elzinga, who teaches economics. He was open, kind, and modest, and he invited me to stay in his and his wife’s lake house if I wanted to work on the Ben Op book there. I was so grateful. Later, folks told me that Prof. Elzinga is a legend at UVA. He has taught here for over 50 years, and his influence is in inverse proportion to his modesty. That is, he’s a giant, but you’d never know it to talk to him. “It’s probably true that we wouldn’t have any of this Christian community here if not for Ken Elzinga,” someone said.

“He’s like your own St. Benedict,” said I.

There is no question that when I begin writing the Ben Op book formally, I will return to UVA and spend more time studying the Christian houses, and their connection to the Center. This is very much a form of the Benedict Option, one that I could see other universities, both secular and Christian, creating. Why can’t churches close to college campuses create residential housing like this for Christian students who want to live in intentional community, and be formed and discipled within them?

The Benedict Option is alive and well at UVA, and I’m betting that more than a few graduates of these houses go on to innovate in Christian community-building in the post-college world.

Exciting stuff! I thought Leah Libresco had all the ideas and all the energy in her generation, but as hard as it is to believe, it’s not so. One of the young men involved in a Christian house stayed around to talk, and said that this Benedict Option book is going to be big. He said Christians are ready for it. I hope so. This trip has given me the ideas and the impetus I need to finish the proposal this week. I’m ready to go. The time is right, and there are people all over this country doing great things in their churches and elsewhere. (I spent an hour or so with Pastor Greg Thompson and the ministry team at Trinity Presbyterian; it was all off the record, just for informational purposes, but the things they were telling me about were innovative and exciting and based on Benedict’s Rule. Calvinists getting in touch with their inner Benedict — who knew?

So, after a morning event at the Covenant School with Ken Myers, I’ll be off to Starhill again, arriving on Nora’s ninth birthday. Home is always and everywhere my favorite journey, but the next journey I make to UVA to write about the Christian houses of this college will be a bona fide pleasure. Thank you, Charlottesville friends, for making this such a great visit.

(Note to Bill and Fitz: Why don’t we host KenFest (a.k.a. “Mars-Hill-a-palooza”) at the CSC?)

This is big:

A group of cardinals – including some of the most powerful figures in the Catholic Church – have written to Pope Francis telling him that his Synod on the Family, now meeting in Rome, has gone badly off the rails and could cause the church to collapse.

Their leaked letter, written as the synod started, presumably explains why a few days ago the Pope suddenly warned against ‘conspiracy’ and reminded the cardinals that he, and only he, will decide the outcome of the synod.

This is the gravest crisis he has faced, worse than anything that happened to Benedict XVI, and he knows it.

Here is the text of the alleged letter. But now, this update from the Spectator‘s Damian Thompson:

Update: As I write this (3.20pm Monday) various cardinals have said they didn’t sign the letter, some of them waiting several hours before distancing themselves from it. Now Erdö says he didn’t sign it. It’s extremely hard to get at the truth. ‘Not signing’ can mean a number of things, ranging from an outright false claim that a cardinal supported the letter to panicky backtracking by cardinals who did assent to it but are grasping at the technicality that they didn’t personally append their signature. But the damage to the synod is done.

Crux reports:

The Vatican spokesman, the Rev. Federico Lombardi, declined to comment at Monday’s press briefing, saying that since it was a letter supposedly for Pope Francis, “it’s up to him to choose what to say about it.”

But he did say that two of the reported signatories had denied signing the letter. And then, as the briefing was underway, a third issued a similar denial. Later, a fourth also denied involvement to Crux.

The cardinals who said they didn’t sign the letter are Péter Erdõ, archbishop of Esztergom-Budapest, Hungary, and relator general of the synod; Mauro Piacenza of Genoa, Penitentiary Major at the Vatican; Angelo Scola, archbishop of Milan, and André Armand Vingt-Trois, archbishop of Paris.

More from Crux:

A source told Crux, however, that the letter does exist, but that Pell’s involvement was overstated.

The source, a senior participant in the synod who asked for anonymity because he is not authorized to speak on the matter, said the content of the letter as described by Magister also was incorrect, as was the list of signatories.

He did confirm, however, that there is a letter addressed to the pope from a number of cardinals, but declined to elaborate on its contents.

What is happening? Are they losing their nerve? Did some conservative do this to sabotage the Synod? What is going on?

Who is governing the Church?

There is no civil war in Rome. Doctrine isn’t being debated, only its pastoral applications. American troops will never reach Baghdad.

— Ross Douthat (@DouthatNYT) October 12, 2015

This is evil, and this is brilliant. China has introduced a system allowing people to manage their credit rating. But there’s a catch — lots of them:

In the West, our credit score is simple. It’s our ability to pay. It’s measured from our assets, our income, and if we have bought on credit in the past and managed it well. That’s it. In China, the situation is… more nuanced. It’s not just that you have bought things, it’s also what you buy that contribute to your credit score, in either direction. If you’re buying things that the regime appreciates, like dishwashers and baby supplies, your credit score increases. If you’re buying videogames, your score takes a negative hit.

In theory, Sesame Credit (and its benefits) is optional. So far. For the time being. But China has already announced that it, or something very like it, will become mandatory from 2020. It has also announced that while there are benefits today for obedient people, it intends to add various sanctions for people who don’t behave, like limited Internet connectivity. Such people will also be barred from serving in certain high-status and influential positions, like government official, reporter, CEO, statistician, and similar.

Things that will make your score deteriorate include posting political opinions without prior permission, talking about or describing a different history than the official one, or even publishing accurate up-to-date news from the Shanghai stock market collapse (which was and is embarrassing to the Chinese regime).

But the kicker is that if any of your friends do this — publish opinions without prior permission, or report accurate but embarrassing news — your score will also deteriorate. And this will have a direct impact on your quality of life.

This is pretty close to a perfect totalitarian system. If you don’t conform to the state’s ideology, people will have to shun you or they will be economically ruined. The state doesn’t have to do anything; every member of the community becomes a secret policeman by default.

Could you imagine such a system coming to the US? If so, how?

Hey, look who Mr. Bigtime Needs A Haircut had lunch with on Saturday in Georgetown: the mighty Ken Myers, of the Mars Hill Audio Journal. This selfie taken after our talk onstage at the university. We had dinner again tonight, this time in Charlottesville, Va., closer to his home. I have decided to commit my mighty powers to conjuring up MarsHillapalooza, a festival of all things Ken Myers. We will gather in Charlottesville, and it will feature talks by Journal greats like Alan Jacobs, Ralph C. Wood, James K.A. Smith, and many others. It’ll be like a Walker Percy Weekend of the upper South. We will find the funding for this thing and make it happen!

I am in C’ville tonight, and am about to go to sleep, so no time for a long entry. Quick notes from meetings and conservatives on the DC-C’ville trip so far:

1. Religious conservatives aren’t going to get any help from Republicans. Not on religious liberty, or anything else. The Left in Congress is in no mood to compromise, because they’re on a roll. There’s no stomach on the Right in Congress to fight, because business doesn’t want anything to do with it, and because if members say one thing wrong, they’ll be crucified as bigots in the media, and on social media. We’re on our own. Best thing to do, I’m learning, is vote Republican in hopes that better policies will be made from the executive branch, and better judges will be nominated. That’s about it.

2. A law professor told me that the kinds of things that go out on legal listservs he reads gives you an idea of what’s going to be mainstream 20 years from now. “Some of it is so horrifying I don’t feel right talking about it,” he said. Oh come on, I said, what? “Legalizing bestiality,” he said.

3. In a discussion of the problem of authority and the Benedict Option, a young DC lawyer told me about her bad experience with it. She was raised in a severely restrictive homeschool community that followed the teachings of Bill Gothard and Vision Forum. Really far-out-there groups and ways of thinking. Both were later disgraced by sex scandals. After a related blow-up at Patrick Henry college, her faith was shattered. She got it back together, and is a lot wiser today. She said one of the most important things I heard all weekend:

“Whenever you go looking for strong, clear, unbending authority, you’re going to find Bill Gothard.”

4. Some intriguing Ben Op stuff going on at Trinity Presbyterian in C’ville. Will learn more tomorrow.

Forgive me for posting so much about the Ben Op. I’m really excited about today’s (Sat Oct 10) meeting at Georgetown, not least because at long last I’ll meet Leah Libresco, the Catholic convert and devotee of the Dominican House of Studies, who thrills me with posts like this. Excerpt:

When Rod Dreher profiled model Benedict Optioners, he wasn’t focused on the monks in the monastery, but the people who had deliberately settled in the shadow of the monastery, so that they could lean on the brothers while engaging with the world.  I find myself living in a similar situation as a Washington D.C. resident, living within the orbit of the Dominican House of Studies — only a short metro ride away from my home and my office.

My parish hosts two Dominican brothers, who assist at Mass and run an Adult Sunday School, where they give excellent weekly talks on matters of faith.  They’re so integrated in to the parish that, when our RCIA director was choosing sponsors for my class of converts, she had a Dominican step in to be my godfather.  Once a month, I go to the “Christopolis” lecture, where a Dominican father introduces a speaker (not infrequently a Dominican) to speak on the underpinnings of our religion and how to live them out.  When I had a free afternoon, I stopped by the House of Studies to join the friars and their guests for Evening Prayer (and used to do it a lot more often, when I had a job with “summer hours”).  A Dominican friar has stopped by the monthly debates I host, chatted with my friends, and helped us consider the question “R: Send Your Kids to Public School” (which touched on Benedict Option themes).  And, just a couple months ago, I saw a lot of my friends when we all gathered at the priory for theDominicans’ Vigil of All Saints.

Living supported by the Dominicans does more for me than cultivating piety on my own or even being involved in my church.  The brothers (and the sisters studying at their school) offer infusions both of knowledge and of joy for us.  They open up the faith so we can study in in greater detail, not just in order to amass more knowledge, but so that we can delight in beauty.  They also clear out space for us to experience this delight.  And they serve as a Schelling Point where we can find people we can share philia bonds with (“You, too? I thought I was the only one!”).  I even went so far as to recommend to one Catholic friend (currently in law school) that he might want to prioritize finding a summer job in DC, so he could have the experience of being in such a rich and lively Catholic community, so he could decide if he wanted to prioritize living here, or someplace like it, when he did longer-term career planning.

Yes! Read the whole thing. 

Man oh man, I think about how different my life would have been in DC, back in the early 1990s, if I had had what Leah and those like her have with the Dominicans. Such joy, in community and orthodoxy.

(If you’re reading this on Saturday morning, please come see us and meet Leah at Gaston Hall @ Georgetown, 37th and O, NW, Washington. Event starts at 10 am — and you’ll get to hear and meet Ken Myers, which, I’m telling you, will change you life.)

(Did you see Part I of the dialogue between New Monastic leader Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove and Your Working Boy? Read it, then you’ll be ready for Part II, here:)

Rod Dreher: Well, hang on. I don’t agree that the most important commitment of any religious movement must be to not further fracture the Church. It’s not that I think division is a good thing, but rather that I think unity that is not based on shared belief is superficial and unsustainable. You indicate that the members of Rutba House worship at local congregations. Do you mind saying which ones? Are there serious theological divisions among the congregations represented in the Rutba House community, and if so, how do you resolve them?

Along these lines, I don’t believe that it is dangerous to retreat with “those who share our bias about the world”; in fact, that is largely (but not entirely) the point of the Benedict Option, in my view. One man’s “bias about the world” is another man’s creed. I would see a red flag in a community that insisted that everyone agree in lock-step on every single issue. But it’s clear to me that there must be a substantial and fundamental unity among a community’s members about what constitutes truth, and what our authority for discovering that truth is. For example, it strikes me as a recipe for fragmentation and disaster if you put small-o orthodox Catholics in the same community with committed progressive Catholics; it is hard to get them to agree on a lot of things, not because one side is better than the other, but because in practice, they lack agreement on a common authority. You are right back to MacIntyre’s square one. I know this from my years as a Catholic, engaging in debates both friendly and unfriendly with progressive Catholics, most of whom, in my experience, did not believe that the Church’s Magisterium (teaching authority) was binding on their individual consciences.

About “other-ing,” I don’t like the term, especially used in context of the Ben Op. It strikes me as politically loaded. True, all Christians have to be very careful about drawing lines between us and others, lest we fall prey to the temptation to see them as less than human. That said, to be a member of any community is to draw lines around that community, so that we can know what it means to be part of it. The sociologist Philip Rieff said that a culture is defined by its “remissions” — that is, it’s “thou shalt nots”. That’s a simple but useful definition, I think. Every community has them. What are Rutba House’s thou shalt nots? Where do you draw the line and tell someone, in charity, “Sorry, brother, but you can’t live among us if you hold that belief”? If a sincere fundamentalist Christian presented himself at Rutba House’s door and asked to join the community, could you afford to let him in? Maybe you could; I don’t know how your community is constituted. But I’m betting there would come a point at which you all asked him to leave, not because you are nasty people or because he is a nasty person, but because the gap between his beliefs and the community’s is simply too great to overcome, and the lack of fundamental unity is impairing the community’s ability to function.

As you know, the Christian response to LGBT folks is a point of sharp division among contemporary Christians. I know where you Red Letter Christians stand; small-o orthodox Christians (including us big-o Orthodox Christians) stand with the older belief — which we do not feel we have the liberty to reject. If your community is fundamentally committed to LGBT equality, you can’t afford to have one of us in your community — and vice versa. There are other baseline issues too, but I think you and I can agree that the moral and theological status of LGBT is the most heated one in our time and place. Churches are dividing over it, and for good reasons on both sides of the controversy. It is not a minor issue, not at all. Though division is not to be sought or celebrated, it is inevitable in our fragmented world, don’t you think? We ought to own that. If we consider our communities — New Monastic or something less intensive than that — to be in some way “schools for the Lord’s service,” we have to have a basic agreement on the ends to which we are headed. To return again to the sharpest source of division in the contemporary church, what does serving the Lord require of us in terms of governing our sexual lives? Can there be morally licit sexual activity between unmarried people? Between people of the same sex? How can we know the right answer? These are not issues on which a community can simply agree to disagree, it seems to me.

Wilson-Hartgrove: Let me tell you a story. Some years ago, a man named Roy was living at Rutba House who’d come home to the neighborhood from prison—mid 40s, African-American, gregarious. He had a lot of experience in sales… most of it illegal. But he was a changed man. He’d met Jesus and turned over a new leaf. A life of praying and eating regularly with other people helped him stay focused, he said. So he stayed.

Like Benedict says, community life is mostly praying and eating. And meeting. Roy came to meetings and participated. He was intrigued by our process of building consensus.

I’ll never forget the evening I brought a request from Tim to come live with us. Tim wanted to come from San Francisco to live here for a couple years while he studied at the seminary in town. He wanted everyone to know that he hadn’t been in school for over a decade, so the transition might be hard for him. And he wanted us to know that he was gay.

Well, Roy was kind of like you: he said you have to draw the line somewhere, and given his experience, this was it. “I done dealt with homosexuals in prison,” he said. “I ain’t living with a gay man.” This is what we call “blocking consensus.” It felt like an impasse.

But Roy agreed to talk to Tim, then agreed to try life in community with him, “as long as we’re not living in the same house.” They prayed together and ate together. Eventually, they learned that they both liked pool, so they played an occasional game together. I don’t know that Roy ever “changed his mind” about homosexuality, but I do know that when Tim moved back to San Francisco, Roy was the first person from our community to go visit him. They’re still good friends today.

The main reason I believe in the Benedict Option is that I know from experience that it creates conditions in which we can gain a new perspective on the language and categories of our age. Sure, the church must always remain committed to both truth and unity. You know the line attributed to Augustine: “In essentials unity, in non-essentials liberty…” The rub, of course, is that we have to figure out what’s essential—and do it, as all things, “in love.”

And this is precisely where I think much of American Christianity has become captive to the spirit of our age. For two millennia the Church has blessed the marriage of man and woman (as well as man and Jesus or woman and Jesus—let’s not forget the monastics!). For a few decades, the Church has had members asking it to bless the marriage of man and man or woman and woman. I completely understand that a fragmented Church would have differences of opinion on how to respond to this change. But who told Christians in America (liberal or conservative) that who the government allows to marry is an essential of our faith?

This is where I’m grateful to have mentors in the black church tradition (and where I think you’ve misunderstood the assumed “Red Letter” position on gay marriage). When a Constitutional Amendment against gay marriage was proposed here in North Carolina, Rev. William Barber—a mentor with whom I’ve written a book on moral witness—came out against it. But he was very clear that his opposition was neither an affirmation nor a condemnation of the morality of gay marriage, but rather a moral defense of equal protection under the law. He looked back to the NAACP’s position on marriage between black and white people in the 1960’s. For liberal Christians at the time, it was morally wrong to bar people from marriage based on race. For conservative Christians, it was morally wrong to mix races which, as they said over and again, God had separated. Rev. Barber pointed out that the NAACP had never declared a position on the morality of interracial marriage. That was not the purview of a public moral witness. What they had said clearly—and he insisted that this applied to gay marriage as well—was that whether citizens in this country can enjoy the legal benefits of marriage in public life is a matter of equal protection under the law. The moral obligation of a Christian public witness is not to legislate one community’s understanding of marriage but to ensure, to the best of our fallible ability, equal protection under the law.

This is where I worry that a Benedict Option, uncritically applied, could further exacerbate the Church’s captivity to a left vs. right, conservative vs. liberal framework. You asked what congregations members of Rutba House have joined. Most of us are at two, which are both in walking distance of our houses. One is the classically liberal white Baptist church in town—welcoming and affirming. The other is a traditional, conservative black Baptist church in Walltown—neither affirming nor very welcoming of homosexuals, to tell the truth. I’m a minister at the latter, so the fears that are stirred up among conservatives on this issue are familiar to me. But I have watched how the Republican party has tried to manipulate our people, using “moral” values to win votes while immorally suppressing the minority vote here in North Carolina. If a Benedict Option is to lead us toward the gospel way in our time, I think it has find a way to resist precisely those divisive powers.

Rod Dreher: I’m with you on the question of depoliticizing Christianity. I am a cultural conservative but a registered Independent. I tend to vote Republican for national offices, but if I thought the Democrats had a place for people like me — socially conservative, but economically moderate to liberal — I would be much more likely to vote for them. I do not understand why the Democrats are so resolutely pro-choice, calling the extermination of the lives of unborn children “freedom.” I don’t believe either political party is blameless, from a Christian point of view. In any case, I don’t like the idea of the church being a political party at prayer. I was surprised back in 2010 to learn from reading Bob Putnam and David Campbell’s book “American Grace” that research finds religiously liberal churches are even more politicized than religiously conservative ones. It’s unhealthy for the church either way.

That said, I see no necessary conflict between being charitable towards a gay man, and holding to Biblical teaching about the meaning of sexuality. I don’t want to be part of a church that tells gays to stay out, or tells me that I cannot be friends with gays. On the other hand, I do not want to be in a church that compromises on truth for the sake of unity, which would in that case come at too high a price. I think one reason I feel so strongly about this is because it was my own disordered love — my refusal to sacrifice my sexual liberty — that kept me away from Christianity for years as a young adult. I wanted to be a Christian, but I didn’t want to obey the teaching about keeping sexual expression inside marriage. I briefly attended a church that didn’t care what I did with my sex life, but I knew that was dishonest. Eventually I yielded, and I’m grateful for the unfashionable witness of the Catholic Church on this point. The four years of chastity between my conversion and my marriage were a desert, but I thank God for them, because the ascetic practice rightly ordered my heart.

Anyway, I don’t see how the gay question can be resolved to the satisfaction of both sides within the church, because it doesn’t strictly have to do with homosexuality, but with the meaning of human sexuality and the human person. You and I don’t need to go deeply into this here, but I do think — and I bet you do as well — that this is not one of those issues on which we can agree to disagree within the bounds of a community. Sexuality is so foundational to Christian anthropology. A Christian community that affirms homosexuality is going to seek different ends in some respects than a Christian community that does not. The division is based on something real, and consequential. Could you be part of a church or an intentional community in which the group was committed to living out the traditional Christian teachings on sexuality (hetero and homo)? Or would that strike you as compromising on a fundamental matter of justice? For us on the traditionalist side, it is a matter of justice too, “justice” being the right ordering of things. Noncelibate gay partnerships and gay marriage doesn’t make sense within our Christian conception of order, and I’m guessing that for your Christian conception of order, denying gays the moral right to partner and the legal right to marry is irrational and unjust.

We get right back to MacIntyre again, don’t we?

Wilson-Hartgrove: Nicholas Wolterstorff taught me that there’s a basic difference between understanding justice as the “right ordering of things” (i.e. “justice from above”) and understanding justice as a systemic effort to listen to the oppressed (i.e. “justice from below). His Reformed colleagues in South Africa justified apartheid as “the right ordering of things.” They forced him to reimagine justice biblically as God hearing the cry of Israel in Egypt.

I like Cornel West’s way of putting it: “justice is what love looks like in public.” I’m glad you wouldn’t be part of a church that tells you you can’t befriend a gay man. But when I listen to my gay friends—when I try to love them not just as friends, but as fellow neighbors in society—I find myself saying, “Of course you should be able to speak with your kids’ teacher at school. Of course you should be the one talking to the doctor at the hospital when your partner is in a car accident.”

I have enough friends who think they are conservative to know that this is not what they’re thinking about when they say Kim Davis is right to conscientiously object to signing marriage certificates for gay folks. People who think themselves conservative think about tradition and the normative function of law. If we change the “traditional” definition of marriage, it will change our culture, they say. And they are right.

But if we’re honest, we know very little about how Christianity will be affected by a culture that recognizes the legal right of homo and heterosexual people to enjoy the benefits of marriage. Your question about how a biblical anthropology helps us to imagine what our bodies are for is precisely the question I wish Christians were talking about, whether we imagine ourselves conservative or liberal.

But that’s not the conversation we’re having—neither in public nor in many of our churches. What I’m trying to say is that our cultural captivity isn’t to the “liberals” who’ve gone and messed up traditional marriage but to an ideology that says liberals and conservatives could never be Christian together. You said you thought I would agree that this is not one of those issues where we can agree to disagree. But, as I was saying earlier, I live in community—daily shared prayers, meals, meetings, and money, etc.—with people who have radically different views on this—and are all Christian. Indeed, I think this is one of the most important ways a new monasticism can bear witness to the gospel.

Whatever its form, if the Ben Op doesn’t help us imagine something new, then it will inevitably become a fortress of the left or the right. I’m not interested in new monastics as “special forces” to perpetuate the culture wars.

Rod Dreher: I don’t agree with your thinking on justice, but we are both running out of time, so I’ll pass on that. I do agree with you on the need to imagine and live out a Christianity that is not captive to the culture war. Our problem is not so much with liberals (= Democrats and their fellow travelers) as it is with liberalism as an individualist mode of thought and politics that emerged from the Enlightenment. Conservatives — that is to say, Republicans and their fellow travelers — are as captive to liberalism, in this sense, as are their political opponents. That said, religious conservatives like me may not be interested in the culture wars, but the culture wars are definitely interested in us. I am certain that both the state and corporate interests will do what they can to make life harder for traditional Christians, both individually and with our institutions, who dissent from the new consensus on homosexuality. Sex is not the whole of the Gospel, of course, but fidelity to Scripture on sexual purity is precisely the area on which the world will push hardest against us. The Benedict Option must do many things, but one thing I hope it will do is teach us traditionalists how to endure without losing our faith or our peace, and without returning hatred for hatred. My hope is that our Christian brothers and sisters on your side of the divide recognize our right to be wrong, and stand by us when things get hard.

(Cross-posted at Red Letter Christians.)

So, it was a busy day in Washington, talking about the Benedict Option, and

Our Leader (Mpls55408/Shutterstock)

launching my long-shot bid to be Speaker of the House as a Traficant Whig. Somebody has to represent the Marsupial-Haired-American community on the Hill, yes?

I spoke to the Faith & Law group today, and realized a couple of things after the talk. For one, I met a man whose writing I deeply admire, and with whom I had corresponded over the years, but had never met. (I won’t embarrass him by naming him.) He said he agrees with much of what I say regarding the Benedict Option, but thinks I’m too gloomy and defensive about it. He believes that there is a more positive vision to be articulated here, a vision that’s about a turning-inward towards community as more than an escape, but an actual embrace of liberty. His words reminded me once again that I have a bad habit of coming across as more apocalyptic than I am. Sort of.

I mean, I really do think things are going to get increasingly more difficult for us traditionalist types, both in terms of law and culture, and I find that, to paraphrase Flannery O’Connor, for people who are deaf, you have to shout. That said, anybody who has spent 10 minutes around me knows that I am very far from calling for the Amos Starkadder Option. As a native of south Louisiana, when the hurricane is coming, my instinctive response is to get out the gumbo pot, make a roux, ice down some beer, and invite everybody over to eat. I need to find some way to bring some of that joie de vivre to this dire topic, because I really do feel it.

Second — and I can’t learn this often enough — I really need to articulate better this whole withdrawal thing. People keep hearing me say, “Head for the hills!”, though I don’t believe that. The road to the Benedict Option goes through the Christian philosopher James K.A. Smith, so let me quote from him on the topic. This is from my own notebook. I think this is from his Desiring the Kingdom. Here, Jamie explains what he means by the term “liturgy,” and by “cultural liturgy”:

Liturgies, then, are a certain species of practice. More specifically, I want to distinguish liturgies as ‘rituals of ultimate concern': rituals that are formative for identity, that inculcate particular visions of the good life, and do so in a way that means to trump other ritual formations. Admittedly this might include rituals not associated with traditional religions (e.g., rituals of Nazi fascism or other rituals of totalizing nationalism); indeed, expanding our conception of what counts as ‘worship’ is precisely the point. Our thickest practices — which are not necessarily linked to institutional religion — have  liturgical function insofar as they are  a certain species of ritual practice that aim to do nothing less than shape our identity by shaping our desire for what we envision as the Kingdom — the ideal of human flourishing.

Liturgies are the most loaded form of human practice because they are after nothing less than our hearts. They want to determine what we love ultimately. By ‘ultimately,’ I mean what we love ‘above all,’ that to which we pledge allegiance, that to which we are devoted in a way that overrules other concerns and interests. Our ultimate love is what defines us, what makes us the kind of people we are. In short, it is what we worship. Another way of putting this, in terms we’ve used before, is to say that liturgies are ritual practices that function as pedagogies of ultimate desire.

The Benedict Option may be understood as deepening our commitment to Christian “liturgies,” as Jamie uses the word: not only the formal practice of religion, but the practices of everyday life, in family and community, to orient ourselves more thoroughly to God and His service. Jamie contends that we have to stop paying so much attention to what we say and think, and more to what we do, because practices are the way these cultural liturgies sink down into our marrow. The Benedict Option is the liturgization of our lives — and that requires a withdrawal from the liturgies we now inhabit.

But what does that withdrawal mean? Does it require us to move to the countryside? I don’t think it does. Jamie’s sequel, Imagining the Kingdom, sheds more light on the subject. In it, he writes of conversion (or, if you prefer, discipleship) as not simply about processing information, but about formation. True conversion is not simply an intellectual assent to theological propositions, but the instantiation of those propositions into our lives, such that we emerge over time with new habits, desires, and virtues.

The imagination shapes our identity and governs our orientation to the world. “Education is also about formation (‘aiming’) of our love and desire,” he writes, and “such formation happens through embodied, communal rituals we call liturgies — including a range of ‘secular’ liturgies that are pedagogies of desire.”

More, on the limits of merely adjusting your worldview:

A worldview approach would assume that the proper response to a disordered mindless eating is mindful eating, as if simply getting the right perspective on eating is sufficient. … We have a tendency … to overestimate the importance of thinking.

… The driving center of human action and behavior is a nexus of loves, longings, and habits that hums along under the hood without needing to be thought about.

More:

A way of life becomes habitual for us such that we pursue that way of life — we act in that way of life — without thinking about it, because we’ve absorbed the habitus that is oriented to a corresponding vision of “the good life.” Indeed, because this becomes sedimented into my background, I can’t even see the world otherwise; this way of seeing it just seems “obvious,” and I don’t even feel the call to be otherwise. I fail to resist temptation, not because I’ve made a bad decision, but because I’ve failed to recognize that I’m being malformed by a constellation of cultural “disciplines” that are disciplining me otherwise.

The Benedict Option requires us to embrace what Jamie calls “intentionally decentering practices” — that is, practices that release us from centering around the Self, as all the secular liturgies of our time do, and re-center us around God.

Here’s the key: if we are going to serve God as we are called to do, we have to be decentered from our Selves. And that requires entering into the life of the community that teaches us, through its practices, to do that. Here’s the heart of it:

We worship for mission; we gather for sending; we center ourselves in the practices of the body of Christ for the sake of the world; we are reformed in the cathedral to undertake an image-bearing commission to reform the city.

It’s like what Marco the Lombard tells the pilgrim Dante in Purgatorio: If you want to reform the world, start by re-forming your own heart.

One more thing from Jamie. He says that if we Christians are going to be in the world but not of it, we have to practice a form of withdrawal. Jamie, writing out of the Reformed tradition, cites Calvin:

So while Calvin does not advocate a retreat from “the world” to the desert, he still emphasizes the set-apart-ness of the Christian life. As Boulton so well summarizes it, “For Calvin, Christian life does involved being set apart, not via a geographical, social retreat to a monastic campus, but rather via a moral, existential brand of practical withdrawal from “the world” and “the depravity of disposition.” That is, Calvin envisions a reformed way of life robustly engaged in ordinary affairs that is nevertheless unconformed to the prevailing patterns and protocols, in effect a dispositional deflection from the world while remaining ensconced within it.

I get that. That’s what I believe the Benedict Option calls for. Yet we will need time in the desert, metaphorically speaking, for contemplation, so we can be recharged and re-centered for our action in the world. If, however, being in the world in a particular way proves to be a separation from God, then we have to physically withdraw. It will be very easy to lie to ourselves about this. Jamie:

It is not enough to convince our intellects; our imaginations need to be caught by — and caught up into — the Story of God’s restorative, reconciling grace for all of creation. It won’t be enough for us to be convinced; we need to be moved. Otherwise we’ll just be reading Wendell Berry in Costco; we’ll be convinced but not transformed.

Hey folks, come out on Saturday October 10 to Gaston Hall at Georgetown University (37th and O St., NW) to talk with Ken Myers and me and a bunch of your nascent Ben Oppers about the Benedict Option. 10 am till 12:30.

Peter Leithart praises the new translation of Augusto Del Noce’s essays, which were translated by this blog’s own commenter, Carlo Lancellotti. Excerpts:

In a few carefully argued pages in his recently translated The Crisis of Modernity, the Italian Catholic philosopher Augusto del Noce explains the “ascendance of eroticism.” Del Noce died in 1989, but his account could have been written yesterday. He illumines why Fifty Shades of Grey strikes a cultural chord, why same-sex marriage became the cutting edge of radical politics, and why virtually no Democrat dares to oppose abortion rights. It’s a little tour de force of philosophical and political analysis.

The sexual revolution, del Noce argues, was a radical change in Western metaphysics and views of human nature. Wilhelm Reich’s manifesto, The Sexual Revolution, began from the unargued assumption that there is no “order of ends, no meta-empirical authority of values.” In a world without purposes, “all that is left is vital energy, which can be identified with sexuality.”

This worldview is partly a product of a deliberate war against Christianity, especially Catholicism, but Del Noce sees it as the fruit of the elevation of science into a metaphysics. Modern science eliminates Aristotelian-Thomist teleology and deals only with efficient causes and natural forces. Sexuality becomes nothing more than a play of drives, without purpose or ultimate value. “The sexual revolution is . . . the point of arrival of ‘scientism.’” Any limit on our drives is an assault on our dignity. Sexual inhibitions are unnatural, every prohibition a threat to human freedom.

This is why the Sexual Revolution was really a cosmological one.  More Del Noce, via Leithart:

The sexual revolution transforms the past into “what has to be surpassed,” what Reich calls “the dead trying to suffocate the living.” The past is “what must be negated to find psychological balance.” We are not free unless we are free to couple and decouple at will, without faithfulness or future. As del Noce puts it, “the domain of free sexuality is the pure present.”

Isn’t that what it means to be a fully modern Westerner: to live in the pure present, with nothing but possibility laid out before us, and only our desires to carry us forward?

View from the guest bedroom at my DC area hosts Joe and Melanie Hartman. They went to the trouble to research my tastes and to lay in a bottle of this hard to find French aged plum brandy. I was flabbergasted when I saw it. What a special gift! This is one of the most thoughtful welcomes anyone has ever given me. If this is how the DC trip starts…

Met a number of Christians in Washington, DC, today, and talked about the Benedict Option with most of them. Overheard today by me in one of those conversations:

“So many of the families in our church just want their kids to be happy and successful.”

Well, doesn’t every parent? Yes. But that’s not the point here. In context, the speaker meant that this is their telos, that they want nothing more for their kids than that they be happy and successful, and that the mothers and fathers are not prepared to hear anything contrary to this gospel of worldly success.

Hate to say it, but that attitude is going to be the death of Christianity in those families, in the younger generation. We are going to have to prepare a church that is capable of suffering, and suffering without losing its joy. This is an unpopular message, but it happens to be the truth. As Flannery O’Connor put it:

What people don’t realize is how much religion costs. They think faith is a big electric blanket, when of course it is the cross.

Hey, please consider coming out to Georgetown on Saturday morning to the Benedict Option event with Ken Myers and me. It will be a great opportunity to meet Christians (and others?) who can read the signs of the times, and who want to build communities of joyful resilience. Here’s the Facebook page, and details from it:

How should Christians meet the challenge of living faithfully in a post-Christian America? Inspired by the cultural diagnosis of Alasdair MacIntyre, Pope Benedict XVI, and other contemporary critics of modernity, Rod Dreher contends that the most important work orthodox believers can do is to construct local forms of community within which traditional Christianity can thrive in what he sees as a new Dark Age. The sixth-century Rule of St. Benedict and the monastic spirituality that emerged from it can inspire Christians today to be a countercultural, creative minority.

Please join us on Saturday morning, October 10 at Gaston Hall on the campus of Georgetown University for what promises to be a fascinating discussion of what Dreher, inspired by the cultural diagnosis of philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre, has termed the “Benedict Option.”

When: Saturday, October 10, 2015, 10:00 a.m. – 12:30 p.m.

Where: Gaston Hall, Georgetown University 3700 O St. NW

Go to the Facebook page and let us know if you’re coming. Not strictly required, but it would be nice of you. I predict that after you hear Ken Myers speak, you will subscribe to his Mars Hill Audio Journal, which, if you ask me, is the aural companion to the Benedict Option. In my experience, there are two kinds of Christian intellectuals: Journal subscribers, and those who have not yet heard the Journal.

By the way, Father Raphael Barberg has started a Facebook discussion group about the Benedict Option.