I am re reading Rod Dreher’s The Benedict Option: A Strategy for Christians in a Post Christian Nation. It is a much needed wake up call to Christians in the West to remember our treasures in Christ, to stop relying on the wider culture for our spiritual formation, and to structure ourselves in community ordered by the Holy Spirit according to God’s Word. The second chapter in which he surveys the roots and development of the crisis in Western civilization, the ninth chapter on recovering and reliving right Christian teaching and practice of sexuality in a positive redirection of eros towards the Creator, the tenth chapter analyzing technological epistemology, ontology and metaphysics, and the final chapter in which he revisits the Benedictine monastery in Benedict’s home town after devastating earth quakes are worth more than the price of the book. This is an important work and disciples of Jesus in the West and in places influenced by the West will do well to prayerfully digest this material in community.
(April 2023 I don’t know what to make of recent reports on Dreher in Hungary other than to be extremely cautious about condemnation, character assassination and gossip. I will continue to call him brother because He professes faith in Jesus Christ. Jesus knows what’s up with brother Rod’s politics, marriage and blogging, I don’t need to be able to sort it all out. I have shared this manuscript with him because it is somewhat critical of his work and I don’t want to ‘talk behind his back’).
Brother Rod’s intriguing premise is that the West: North America & the former Latin speaking parts of the Roman Empire are headed into a new dark age when the agreed upon standards of public virtue have eroded and civilization is overtaken by barbarism. He argues that orthodox Bible believing Christians in Roman, Orthodox, Protestant (including Pentecostal) movements are finding ourselves unable to fully participate in the culture and politics around us without seriously compromising our obedience and loyalty to the Lord Jesus Christ.
Thus, brother Rod proposes a strategy of retreat into ordered communities of faith that selectively and partially engage the surrounding local, Western, and global cultures. He uses Benedict’s experience after the sack of Rome as a paradigm for the establishment of such communities. Much of his book follows examples of contemporary communities that are in some way following this Benedict option of partial withdrawal into ordered community and selective engagement with the wider world.
One of the purposes of this proposed partial withdrawal is the preservation of Western civilization in the face of rising Barbarism. Though, to be fair, the primary purpose, as made explicit by brother Rod’s use of Matthew 6:33 is to seek Jesus and His rule and the living out of His righteousness.
Since my first reading of Dreher’s Benedict Option I’ve been reading several works by Mark Sayers including A Non-Anxious Presence & Strange Days. Mark speaks of a Gray Zone in which one set of world system paradigms has passed but the new world order has yet to clearly emerge. This resonates with brother Rod’s identification of the growing dark age.
My own take is similar. (My own take is hardly original. It is of course a synthesis of all kinds of things that, forgive me, I have trouble citing with academic rigour though I have come under the influence of Walter Wink (Naming the Powers, Unmasking the Powers, Engaging the Powers), Michael S. Heiser (The Unseen Realm), John Nugent (Endangered Gospel), Frank Viola (Insurgence), Zeb Bradford Long & Douglas McMurry(Collapse of the Brass Heaven, The Dunamis Project and others), John Howard Yoder (the Politics of Jesus, John Nugent on John Howard Yoder: the Politics of Yahweh).
We are in a time of massive upheaval when the pillars of our ‘Western’ institutions are under constant assault from within and without. The world order that was negotiated with the defeat of Japanese and German fascism is straining at the seams and wheezing. Will it rally or will it sputter out? NATO, the United Nations, The World bank, the International Monetary Fund, The World Trade Organization, western social democracy are strained and showing worn threads in the fabric of world order. The planet is heating up through the release of greenhouse gases in our three century addiction to burning fossil fuels. Mass shootings plague North America. The family is in chaos. We are infested with pornography and sexual immorality. We are so hateful and inhospitable to human life that we undermine the very fabric of marriage even as we socially and financially pressure women to abort unborn babies in the name of individual autonomy and fiscal prudence. In Canada we have even embraced euthanasia as a legitimate medical practice.
We don’t even know whether or not male or female is a thing or whether it is appropriate to assign pronouns in public schools. It’s like a free for all for ‘new’ ideologies jockeying for market share in the zeitgeist (spirit of the age). The principalities and powers are stirred up, divided against each other, and they don’t know who or what to submit to in an orderly fashion as each tries to grab a piece of something for itself. Things feel very fragile, turbulent, and volatile.
“There’ll be the breaking of the ancient western code, your private life will suddenly explode…” thus prophesied the late Leonard Cohen in the 90’s and we are seeing it spilling out all over the place in horrible untidiness and chaos punctuated by mass shootings.
In my own journey I was raised to be a benign, somewhat Victorian, ‘white’ civilizer: some sort of ‘benevolent’ propagator of Anglo-Northern Eurocentric civilization. I was groomed to be a professor or a teacher or perhaps a police officer or military officer or member of parliament or maybe some combination of these things. I was raised to do my duty to love and honour My God, my Queen (err hi Charles, King), my country and my fellow man (err human) to keep the law of the wolf cub pack and to do a good turn for somebody everyday!
That ethic of civilization in which I was raised was accustomed to Constantinian alliances among the powers of the state, wider civilization, the ‘respectable’ institutional churches, and the Christian faith. This is what Dreher’s historiography would indicate emerged largely through the conservation efforts of monasteries that served as a sort of Ark to convey the seeds of classical Christian civilization through the dark chaos of the fall of Rome in order to emerge into a new season of relative stability in feudal Europe. From there they continued to sprout onwards into the renaissance and reformation and around the world through the colonizing quest for Imperial wealth and power.
While I certainly appreciate much of Western culture I am not as cheerful a booster of civilization as Rod appears to me to be in chapter 2 of his Benedict Option. It seems to me that the seeds of the dark age initiated by the ‘Barbarian’ sack of Rome were long formed and hidden within the very fabric of classical Christian civilization. Political stability and an absence of armed conflict are a great thing that I wholly enjoy and approve. However, they are not necessarily a godly marvel and they are not necessary for the Church to withstand the gates of Hell.
In chapter 3 brother Rod weaves a narrative of the degeneration of the sacred from the spiritual wealth and physical poverty of the Medieval to the astonishing material prosperity that many enjoy in the West today. This astronomical weath and technological ability occurs even as our Western cultures gasp on fumes in their ability to discern the presence of Jesus, let alone contemplate Him together or lovingly obey Him together in family and community. Rod brilliantly articulates the loss of connection to the Creator, to community and to family in the metaphysical, ontological, epistemological, scientific and ethical developments within Western civilization.
Western cultures have all but drown in what Rod calls liquid modernity. We have become so atomized, narcissistic, consumerist, materialist and solipsistic that we have little if nothing remaining to bind us together in coherent communities or families. We are so spiritually bereft of any healthy sense of what it is to be human in relation to Creator and Creation that we are ripe for anarchy or some emerging tyranny. Thus, while brother Rod does not detail the nature of civilization itself in relation to rebellious unseen principalities and powers in the spirit realm, he is aware and articulate of the sinful decay contained within human cultural projects.
Nevertheless, while the preservation and cultivation of civilization may well, in God’s providence, be a bi product of Christian community, I believe that brother Rod unintentionally approaches the conflation of the project of conserving Western civilization with that of seeking seeking first of the Kingdom of God and living out Christ’s righteousness in family and community.
Doubtlessly brother Rod would agree with me that preservation of culture is one of the things that can be added unto us as we seek first Jesus. Perhaps my concern is a misunderstanding or perhaps it is an insight. The Lord will have to sort us out.
This apparent critique of mine may have to do with capital O Orthodoxy and the realism of the practice of icons versus the nominalism inherent in Reformed Protestantism. I do not wish to over-criticize but for the sake of balance and submission to Jesus I do wave this yellow flag around the possibility of unintentional conflation of our cultural projects and the Kingdom of God. The Kingdom of God will always have a cultural vehicle in a particular context but however important that medium is to the holistic shaping of our body soul and spirit in communal liturgy, that medium is not the same as the entirety of the message.
All civilization is ambivalent. The first cultural innovators that established the city (Genesis 4:17) and technology were Cain and his descendants (Genesis 4:20-22) seeking to settle and secure themselves in the Land of Wandering independently of our Creator.
Our ‘creative’ cultural developments are an outworking of what it is to be the terrestrial celestial beings made in God’s image to cultivate the earth as a pleasure Garden according to the Lord’s purposes.(Genesis 1:27 & Genesis 2). However, as a consequence of disobeying God and following the serpent, humanity’s very nature was radically corrupted.
As a species we died. Our spiritual death affected the whole of terrestrial creation as indicated by the Lord’s speech in Genesis 3 where our Creator notes that the very ground is cursed by our sin turning meaningful work into fretful toil and raising up thistles and thorn bushes. We were shaped from the earth as earthlings to tend the earth and when we died spiritually it had profound consequences for the whole earth and all creation in the terrestrial sphere.
This has left our cultural projects deeply wounded. They are something like the mythical undead, having a form of life and power but containing an inescapable deep rotten unwholesome corruption.
When our cultural projects become closely associated with Christian imagery, language, and religion then we enter into a danger zone that my Kiplingesque-Baden-Powell-Sam-Steel-Victorian-good-scout-loyal-militia-officer-larval-professor training has real difficulty detecting.
In every civilization the principalities and powers clothe themselves in religious lore. It’s part of the ‘soft’ social power game that diplomatically compliments the ‘hard’ power games involving the threat and use of armed conflict. Behind the scenes of chiefs and emperors and queens and governors and parliaments there are fallen celestial beings (Ephesians 2:2, 6:10-18, John 14:30,) These celestial beings have, like humanity and the whole earth, come under the insurgent reign of the serpent in the garden. (Here I’m following Michael S. Heiser most directly and explicitly but there’s a host of others on this Biblical bandwith. Instead of me providing you with footnotes you can do worse than read Unseen Realms: Recovering the Supernatural Worldview of the Bible. The Unseen Realm: Recovering the Supernatural Worldview of the Bible – Kindle edition by Heiser, Michael S.. Religion & Spirituality Kindle eBooks @ Amazon.com. )
In majority Buddhist societies the authorities dress themselves in Buddhist lore. Where Confucius is honoured the powers use Confucian philosophy. Where Marx is lionized as a cultural hero the powers deck themselves out with atheistic communist religious rhetoric in which the insistence on no god is worshipped in the place of God.
This is the same with any other world or regional religion or system of thought. In societies where the historical power has rested with those who express Christian religious sensibilities the principalities and powers dress themselves in fabric woven from Christian sensibilities. A big piece of this present dark age, or gray zone, is that the powers in the West are rapidly shedding themselves of any pretext of a Christian civilization or to the classical public virtues of their Greco-Roman roots.
Without participating in evil or deception God uses this vainglorious costume-play of the powers. The Creator is sovereign and the Creator plays multidimensional chess within history from an eternal perspective that contains history itself. (I steal the image of three dimensional chess shamelessly from Frank Viola, and adapt it multifariously.) God uses the unseen principalities’ proclivities for soft power much like He used the Roman Roads.
Rome intended its roads to project hard power military logistics for colonization. However, the Creator used them to carry the message of the real emperor of the Cosmos, Jesus Christ, wherever His people were scattered throughout the Roman world and beyond.
Therefore, although God’s eternal purpose will not be thwarted, as we sinful humans follow our cultural projects we tend to confuse the insurgent power of this world in the place of this world’s true and only King, Jesus. This trend is especially so if those cultural projects are by our initiative conducted in ‘the name of Christ’.
The principalities and powers take the name of Christ for their own purposes. While God uses the principalities and powers giving them the authority of the sword for the restraint of evil doers, and while their abuse of their freedom as celestial beings made in God’s image cannot defeat the eternal purpose of the Creator, the conflation of Christ and Caesar inescapably leads to blasphemy.
This blasphemy is deep in Western Culture and has expressed itself horrifically in things like indigenous erasure, the myth of ‘blackness’ and ‘whiteness’, the trans Atlantic slave trade, and the continuing legacy of colonization that slants the global financial playing field in favour of wealthy elites centred on the old Imperial powers at the expense of the governments and people of former colonies and current dependant territories in the global south. Much of the anti-Christian ferment of ‘liquid modernity’ is driven by an outrage at social and generational damage caused by this blasphemy that took the Lord’s name for vain-glorious imperial, plutocratic projects and socio-political domination. Ironically the ‘barbarous responses’ to the imperial injustice of ‘Christendom’ cannot see or identify their own blasphemies or their own propensity to inflict unjust violence in the name of restitution, reparation or raw revenge.
In his desire to preserve Western Culture as part of seeking first the Kingdom of God it does not seem to me that brother Rod addresses this dynamic of the blaspheming principalities and powers adequately. He does not examine the ambivalence of the legacy of Constantine’s adoption of orthodox Christianity as the religious genius of empire and how that is at odds with the Kingdom of God manifest in Jesus Christ. Thus I detect in Dreher’s work a doubtlessly unintentional over identification of the Kingdom of God with Western Civilization.
While I find brother Rod’s presentation of the Benedict Option useful in identifying our urgent need for intentional ordered community in Christ so that together we may withstand the assaults of an ungodly world on our life in Christ, this lack of explicit awareness of how the serpent has invaded the very nature of civilization is a major oversight.
This particularly plays out in his chapter on education. It’s easy to criticize. Perhaps I’m too influenced by nominalism and Protestantism in my critique of brother Rod’s enthusiasm to embody a rule of community life in Christ by a renaissance of a classical western education in the Great Books tradition. I hear his points on embodiment and the external rule and visceral sense of the liturgy and how that carries over into spiritual, intellectual, cultural and social formation in Christ within schools.
We can no more live without culture than a fish can live without water. God designed us that way. And God Himself encounters us that way in Jesus who entered the physical and social world through the womb of a faithful young Jew. There is no such thing as a generic non-ethnic human, not even the human who is God.
Culture is intrinsic to our nature and all culture is particular and historical. All culture is ethnic. Brother Rod and I are Anglo North American Westerners in a European tradition within which we have been formed and within which we have come to faith in Jesus Christ. So of course, our cultural expression, our religion, our community rule within which to encounter and grow in Jesus together is going to be rooted in European history, rooted in the Greco-Roman-Hebrew-Christian classics. But I’m not as comfortable, enthusiastic, or unquestioning of this as brother Rod appears to be. It’s not that I despise my western identity. I enjoy it. In many ways I am it and I come by it as honestly as any sinner can come by their own ethnicity.
However it is not unambiguous and I am concerned that we not conflate centring our lives together in Christ with centring our lives together in Greco-Roman-Hebrew culture. I am not out to barbarously destroy the European culture of which I am an heir and a participant and even in some ways an appreciative connoisseur. However, in seeking an iconography of embodied encultured commonality it is very easy for me to subtly miss the mark of Christ and focus on a cultural project initiated by an apparently Godly enthusiasm that isn’t truly Godly because it only partially pays attention to the rule of Christ. It’s like what King Saul had done when the prophet Samuel challenged him about the bleating of sheep. (1 Samuel 15) He had only partially paid attention to what the Lord had instructed in order to find excuses to do what he wanted to do to please himself and his troops.
Saul is a particularly stark and blatant example. (It’s also a fraught passage in that we might be tempted to believe Saul was kind and merciful and the Lord was harsh and genocidal. But this is a whole can of worms beyond the scope of this paper. Good reads on this include Paul Coppin: Is God a moral monster and chapters in Michael S. Heiser’s The Unseen Realm (including 23 ‘Giant Problems’, 24 the place of the serpent and 25 ‘Holy War’.)
Perhaps we would be more subtle than Saul in our half-hearted half-listening. Nevertheless we must guard against our proclivities to get carried away in our own preferences and launch ourselves into our own cultural religious projects in the Lord’s name. We can engage in an apparently godly project that, like the principalities and powers, takes the name of Christ upon its lips and proceeds with its own will to build its own thing based on half digested second hand religious lore. It half hears from the King of the Cosmos and then rushes out of Christ’s throne room to accomplish things independently applying a veneer of Jesus for its own purposes, all the while refusing to remain prostrate before the presence of Christ throughout the whole of life.
I am critical but it’s not that I want to destroy Western Civilization in an angry rampage over its failures. That is barbarism. It’s just that given the radical depravity resulting from our spiritual death as a species I cannot whole-heartedly embrace any human driven cultural project.
Some of my caution may flow from an idiosyncratic imbalance on my part rooted in challenges with maintaining a sense of meaning & motivation arising from anxiety and depression based mental illness. Some of the caution is temperament, bias, and vocational on my part. I am not an archivist, philosopher, artist, architect, historian or an archaeologist whose God given curiosities and talents lead them to preserve physical, intellectual and social cultural artifacts as part of their discipleship in Christ. I believe these cultural endeavours and others, including civic participation to better the wider community and the nation, can be godly worthwhile occupations in submission to Jesus within communities of faith. There is something about embodying and celebrating the image of God in all of humanity in these projects.
But we must beware the ambiguity and the particular blasphemes that emerge when powers dress themselves in Biblical imagery. If we are unaware of such things, our spiritual enemy, the flesh and the world can blind side us in our confusion over the things of God and the things of the principalities and powers. Thank God that Jesus is sovereign and none of this is a surprise to Him so trusting in Him we can selectively engage and partially withdraw from the things of this world as we seek Him together in ordered community.
As a bi product of this seeking of our King and His rule He will preserve what he intends to preserve of our Western and other cultures. Additionally Christ will reveal evil for what it is, whether that evil takes the form of willfully ignorant barbarism that eschews civic virtue or an ‘evil empire’ that supplants civic virtue with something perverse, like Nazi ethics, or whether it takes the shape of a civic virtue that has a form of Biblical Godliness but denies the power and rule of our only King and Head Jesus Christ even as it occasionally takes His name and His scriptures upon its lips, its constitutional documents, traditions, institutions and monuments.
To be fair, at some level, brother Rod does indeed understand and articulate the sinfulness of human culture, even our beloved classical Greco-Roman-Hebrew-Christian-Western culture. If he did not he could not write: “…if work – or family, community, school, politics, or any other good thing – becomes and end it itself, it turns into an idol. It will eventually become a prison, a desert, even a graveyard of the spirit. These things serve the truth and human flourishing only if they are icons through which the light of Christ shines forth, making them a means by which the kingdom flourishes.”(Dreher chap 9 Eros and the New Christian Counter culture)
My ex-Roman-Catholic-Reformed-Protestant-challenged-by-Anabaptist-&-Wesleyan-Protestant self is very suspicious of the distinction between an idol and an icon. However, in analyzing my own nominalism I can see, if only dimly, what brother Rod’s capital O Orthodox application of iconography is trying to say.
Despite our undead radical depravity in Culture, and in all things, Jesus can and does shine through them and in them and with them as we offer, share, and receive them sacramentally, holistically in Him with Him and to Him.
I suppose I can summarize my concerns as follows: in our desire to receive and offer the best of Western Culture iconographically we must be careful that we don’t subtly replace Christocentricity with Eurocentricity. We also must be very careful in analyzing how we westerners and Christians of other cultures, or other power dynamics within broader Western cultural movements, may struggle with submitting multifaceted heritages to the Holy Spirit to be true life giving icons rather than distracting deceiving idols. We socially constructed ‘white’ western culture enthusiasts need to learn from other cultures, and other experiences of our culture, without unduly imposing our own ways upon them through our comfort with our own ethnicity and our discomfort and unintentionally bigoted proclivity to misunderstand theirs.
Post script:
One fascinating example of non-Western cultures interacting with Western culture and other, Eastern influences such as Confucian philosophy is the life of the Church in Korea and in the Korean emigrant diaspora. I am so very ignorant but I am vaguely aware that their struggles for genuine cultural iconography rather than idolatry both overlap our Western ones and look radically foreign to our sensibilities. I am even less aware of the struggles of communities of various Chinese ethnicities.
A second is the struggle of believers of indigenous heritage in the North American contexts to find genuine iconography of Christ in the application of their ancestral wisdom in the face of the abuse of the name of Christ as a blunt tool of land grabbing genocidal imperialism on the part of the Western cultures that came to dominate the continents labelled ‘the Americas’ after an Italian cartographer.
A third is Latin American experience. I am near totally ignorant of this.
A fourth is Caribbean experience. How to be Christocentric and critically approach European heritage and its blasphemes and blessings while honouring Indigenous, African and Asian ancestral ways in genuine cultural iconography without replacing ‘white’ western Eurocentric blasphemy with a reconstructed Afrocentric or ‘black power’ blasphemy.
I have little wisdom on these four and more fronts. I simply a budding awareness that our Western ethnic quest for a genuine Christocentric rule of Christ in and through a locally expressed iconography of culture isn’t the only ethnic or Christian game in and around North America, let alone globally.
Leave a Reply