Ultimately, our faith in methods of ‘intentional
Christian community,’ and our journey in and out of this pre-Dreher Benedict
Option, exhausted our faith and estranged one of our children.
I’d been grinding my own wheat flour for two years by the time I
read Rod Dreher’s “Crunchy Cons” in 2006. A friend had given it to me because
of my, shall we say, “Benedict Option” lifestyle. Winter red wheat berries are
the best for bread baking, while the soft white ones produce a fine, velvety
pastry flour—a tip for those interested in that route.
Life is a tale told through talk, taste, and touch. It is memory
and destiny at once. A Christian might say it is death and resurrection, if you
give your life you keep it. So before we get to Dreher’s new book, “The
Benedict Option,” let me a little of my story.
Watching the President Clinton impeachment trial years ago changed
my life. Sensing a call to do what I could for my country, I let go of my
dreams of a quiet life in academia and went off to law school. I sought out
mentoring by great constitutional law professors so I would eventually
contribute to bringing the judiciary back to constitutional originalism.
By the time I was in my second year in law school, my life was
unravelling. Law school is brutal. It is even more so for those who are married
with families. Our culture can be a meat grinder, and battling it in the front
lines of federal courts is even bloodier. I couldn’t have it all, and I couldn’t
do it all. So I chose my family. This began a trajectory of increasing retreat
and insularity that would lead to me (religiously) grinding my own wheat and
policing my children’s speech for what I deemed to be affirmations of worldly
popular culture.
“The Benedict Option” rightly tells the reader there is no
salvation in politics, our culture has morally collapsed, and Christians have
amalgamated their faith with American popular culture. Dreher believes American
Christians’ only viable choice is what he has dubbed the “Benedict Option.” He
uses the monastic Benedictine spirituality and way of life as a prescriptive
template for all Christians.
This includes such measures as: stable local living in small
intentional Christian communities—“the Christian village”; cutting back on pop
culture consumption; orienting the family towards God; creating sacramentally
vibrant worship; pulling the kids out of public school and educating them
classically either through private school, home school, or co-op; practicing hospitality
and Christian neighborliness; buying from other Christians even if it costs
more; building Christian employment networks; refusing to compromise to satisfy
the whims of the young; fighting pornography—the list goes on. In short: avoid
vice, and take up virtue.
It sounds nice on the surface, but that’s not how it often works
out in practice. This option, no matter what you call it, leads to gospel
amnesia, not to a flourishing Christian culture.
My Family’s Experiment
with a pre-Benedict Option
Soon after I left law school, I had our third baby, and we moved
so my husband would not need to drive 70 miles through Los Angeles traffic to
work. We changed denominations from a nominally conservative but doctrinally
thin Protestantism to a more explicitly Reformed Calvinism. I did what is
natural for a person who wakes up to the fact that she has neglected something
precious—I overcorrected.
While learning about Reformed theology, we were introduced to the
writings of pastors who were putting forth a very similar vision to the one
Dreher offers in his book, though none called it the “Benedict Option” at the
time. Sometimes it was referred to as “communities of like-minded Christians,”
or as one community’s motto had it, “Simple, Separate, and Deliberate.”
Some had ties to neo-agrarianism. Many of the leaders we read had
ties to the classical Christian education movement. Generally it went under
different names depending on the pastor and community. Some even had created
successful “ministries,” companies that sold products aimed primarily at home
schooling parents and celebrating a life outside of twenty-first-century
American culture.
We were in our early thirties. We wanted a faith for us and our
children that could withstand the culture’s battering, intellectual and
otherwise. Ultimately, our faith in such methods, and our journey in and out of
this Benedict Option, exhausted our faith and estranged one of our children. I
do not hold a blanket resistance against Christians building strong robust
churches and communities, but this method is inherently flawed. It weakens
rather than builds.
Benedict Option
Communities Are Intrinsically Weak
We were particularly captivated by two of these Benedict-like
communities, both deliberately founded in smallish cities in rural states with
easy access to land for member families. We listened to recordings of their
pastors and preeminent community members espousing the glories of life together
in their churches and neighborhoods. We were hooked. We were convinced we had to
go this route to survive degenerated American culture and raise godly children.
This was
part of the impetus that drove us to flee Southern California, not to join one
of these seemingly exemplary Benedict-like communities, but to at least be
closer to other sympathizers, to join a community that affirmed the same creed
and stood in solidarity with the brave agrarian vanguard of authentic
Christianity. This was conveniently facilitated by the leaders of these
exemplary communities having founded their own Protestant
denominations, whose member churches could easily be identified online.
So for a
time we found our solidarity and quasi-Benedictine community in this little
corner of Christendom, but didn’t yet realize what a little corner it was.
Church authority was held in high regard, but it gradually became clear that
few could agree on what that meant. Everyone (inspired by genuine Christian
motives, I concede) believed a countercultural lifestyle was of primary
importance. This left matters of church governance to be of secondary importance
at best, and through a series of events, the church and community fell apart.
Ours wasn’t the only Benedict-like community to suffer such a
fate. Several of the exemplary communities we had looked up to unraveled to various
degrees within the same decade. Verbal, ecclesiastical, and sometimes criminal
charges of abuse, whisper campaigns, and blogosphere broadsides weakened the
abilities of these communities not only to be lights to the world, but to serve
their own members and families.
That leads me to my critique. Many of the families who come
together to form these communities believe they are being obedient to God or
purer in faith. But what begins as a good desire turns into a measuring rod.
Families begin comparing themselves to one another and to those outside the
community. Who can be more rigorous, and hence more faithful? Soon these
judgments begin to build a wall that insulates those inside the community from
the world outside. One sees a rise in authoritarian behavior, paranoia, and an
insular mindset. It even distanced families in the community from kin who were
not.
Those
joining must soon be able to show they can check off the righteousness boxes.
Sure, anyone can repent and believe the gospel, but can you live without both
cable and Netflix? Can you homeschool your eight kids, including the
10-year-old special-needs son, without institutional involvement? Can you all
show up twice a week to choir practice?
Can you derive an income for your household without taint from
large immoral corporations or (gasp) government employment? Can you source at
least half your family’s food from your own garden, pasture, and henhouse?
Because the Smiths can. And the Joneses. And the Johnsons. And they are
righteous. Not sure if you are. Welcome to the community.
What begins as a good desire turns into
a measuring rod.
This process
diminishes the gospel, reducing it to a set of propositions one assents to, but
what rises to primary importance is the list of distinctives. Distinctives are
qualities the people of that community hold to be signs of faithfulness and
Christian maturation. For some communities home schooling becomes one of the
most important signs of a family’s obedience to God. In other communities it
was agrarian living, still others it was classical education, or liturgical
church worship. Every community had a slightly different ordering of these
distinctives. But they all had them; they were the “Benedict rule” for that
community.
If you had
asked me back then to name the most important thing in life, I would have
responded with: “Love the Lord your God with all your mind, heart, and
strength.” Everyone would have answered the same way. No one would have said:
“home schooling,” or “four-part harmony singing,” or anything else. But if you
probed further and asked what does loving God mean, people
would have responded with these distinctives. These were envisioned as
necessary derivatives of “Love the Lord your God.”
To be sure, the God of the Bible does give us commands, and does
tell us what loving him should look like. But these secondary and tertiary
components begin quickly to undermine and overwhelm the primacy of what God
actually says. This is my next point: it doesn’t take long for these
communities to begin elevating non-salvific distinctives to a place of primary
importance.
Dreher’s Cautions Are
Not Strong Enough
In “The Benedict Option” Dreher tries to say things like “don’t
make family an idol,” “reach across church boundaries to build relationships,”
“don’t idolize the community,” and so on. But it reads as an “Oh, by the way,
just look out for this.”
I found this perplexing for several reasons: One, if you write a
book suggesting to people that the most viable Christian way forward is to
unite in small communities and live faithful Christian lives, and if you’ve
taken the time to see the ways it’s been done and failed (as I know he has on
his blog), you should take the time to mount an honest counter argument against
your proposal. You should present it to readers, then show how your ideas are
different from those that have been tried and failed or been riddled with
heinous sin.
You should show how your ideas are
different from those that have been tried and failed or been riddled with
heinous sin.
It’s very curious that Dreher doesn’t mention the various Benedict
Option communities that exist or have existed in the recent past and have been
hampered by error, spiritual abuse, physical and sexual abuse, pettiness, and
the like. It’s not that Dreher doesn’t know about these communities. He even
exchanged several public blog post arguments with the pastor of an Idaho
community who harbored a sexual child molester and helped get him married off,
all while using his clerical platform to minimize the crimes and vilify the
abuser’s victims. So why would Dreher not give space in a 244-page book to the
empirical problems of actual intentional Christian communities?
Dreher gives only two mild examples of a Benedict option community
not turning out well, but when read in the greater context of the book, you
walk away thinking they were minimized, and that a general warning is enough to
not fall into the ditch. The two counter points he gives are on page 129, and
page 139 (in the galley copy). On page 129 he tells of a conversation with a
high school senior he calls “an agonized young atheist.” She talks of her
paranoid parents and gives this warning: “I wish you good luck with the
Benedict Option,” she told me. “But please tell parents that if they want their
kids to stay Christian, not to do what mine did. They smothered us and made us
into rebels.”
If you had told me back then that I was
being austere, I would have mocked your superficial, ‘Christian lite’ ideas.
To his credit Dreher does say on that same page, “It sometimes
happens that mothers and fathers think they’re serving God by their austere
discipline but in fact are driving their children away from Him.”
Right, but the fact is that most parents in the midst of such
communities (I include myself in this criticism) do not realize they are being
austere, because in those communities with the parent peer pressure toward producing
“godly children” austere just looks like greater faithfulness. And which parent
in those communities doesn’t want to be more faithful?
If you had told me back then that I was being austere (as my
parents tried to warn me) with my children, I would have mocked your
superficial, “Christian lite” ideas. You would have gotten an earfull, and
three-quarters of Dreher’s 2017 arguments would have been spewing out of my
mouth way back when the Benedict Option wasn’t even a glimmer in anyone’s eyes.
Sure enough, we lost a child to those ideas and way of life.
Quasi-Utopianism In The
Benedict Option
America has a history of such utopian communities, more often than
not separating themselves to be “Christian” in a distinct way from the
surrounding culture. In a way, the Puritans who landed in New England were
taking the “Benedict Option,” although they were anti-Catholic. One can still
say that their goal was to build a community of faithful believers and raise
their children in the faith.
History does not indicate that forming
such family communities—even intentionally Christian ones—results in any kind
of ark of preservation in a turbulent culture.
But we know the tragic end of the Puritans, their faith and
doctrine degenerating into Unitarian universalism fewer than four generations
from landing at Plymouth Rock. History does not indicate that forming such
family communities—even intentionally Christian ones—results in any kind of ark
of preservation in a turbulent culture.
Dreher has
written that he is not suggesting any utopian community or a retreat from the
world. It’s true, he doesn’t outright call for it. This only heightens the
dissonance in the mind of the reader, because his qualifications come amid the
explicitly monastic titular metaphor and his repeated cherry-picked glowing
descriptions of such communities, which are in practice quasi utopian and
retreatist.
Dreher does give some warnings to his readers: “‘If you isolate
yourself, you will become weird,’ Father Marc continued. ‘It is a tricky
balance between allowing freedom and openness on the one hand, and maintaining
a community identity on the other. The idea of community itself should not be
allowed to become an idol.’”
Dreher states: “Communities that are wrapped too tight for fear of
impurity will suffocate their members and strangle the joy out of life
together. Ideology is the enemy of joyful community life, and the most
destructive ideology is the belief that creating utopia is possible.”
Those warnings are good, but what Dreher gives with one hand he
takes away with the other. Later in the book he waxes poetic:
We live liturgically, telling our sacred Story
in worship and song. We fast and we feast. We marry and give our children in
marriage, and though in exile, we work for the peace of the city. We welcome
our newborns and bury our dead. We read the Bible, and we tell our children
about the saints. And we also tell them in the orchard and by the fireside
about Odysseus, Achilles, and Aeneas, of Dante and Don Quixote, and Frodo
and Gandalf, and all the tales that bear what it means to be men and women of
the West.
We work, we pray, we confess our sins, we show
mercy, we welcome the stranger, and we keep the commandments. When we suffer,
especially for Christ’s sake, we give thanks, because that is what Christians
do. Who knows what God, in turn, will do with our faithfulness?
How exactly is this not utopian? For a serious-minded Christian
this sounds like heaven on earth. It certainly sounds wonderful to me.
The problem
is not that Dreher recommends Christians live faithful, sacramental lives.
There are inherent anti-cultural elements to such living, but those elements
are not problematic in the ways these intentional communities of like-minded
Christians are. I am all for, and our family indeed practices, faithful
sacramental behaviors. We think through the decisions we make for our family,
for the education of our children, and for our spiritual maturity. These are
not the issue; but these are not the
Benedict Option. If that is all Dreher
means, then he should not have used a phrase that presupposes certain things.
The reader is left confused because Dreher hints this is all the
“Benedict option” is, living a faithful Christian life. At one point he quotes
a writer, Leah Libresco, saying: “People are like, ‘This Benedict Option thing,
it’s just being Christian, right?’ And I’m like, ‘Yes! You’ve figured out the
koan!’” Libresco told me. ‘But people won’t do it unless you call it something
different. It’s just the church being what the church is supposed to be, but if
you give it a name, that makes people care.’”
One of the fair criticisms Dreher levels against modern Christians
is that they are consumerists who fall for gimmicks and marketing. But it seems
he is perfectly willing to use the method he decries to sell an idea to
Christians. If that’s all this is, then “The Benedict Option” is a ruse.
I understand the longing for what Dreher describes in the Benedict
Option. I still ache for it. There are ways to strengthen the family, to
establish faithful churches, and to build a robust Christian culture. And it is
good that we are having an honest discussion about them. But after our
experience and that of others, I do not believe the Benedict option is it.
Luma Simms
is an associate fellow at The Philos Project. She writes on culture, family,
philosophy, politics, religion, and the life and thought of immigrants. Her
work has appeared at First Things Magazine, Public Discourse, The Federalist,
and elsewhere. Follow her on Twitter: @lumasimms.