Around the year 500 AD, a young Italian man known only as Benedict was sent to Rome by his wealthy parents to complete his education.  He was so disgusted by the city’s decadence that he fled south to the forest near Subiaco in central Italy to live as a hermit and to pray.

Benedict gained a reputation for holiness and gathered other monks around him.  He personally founded a dozen monastic communities. He wrote his famous book, Rule of Saint Benedict, which became the guidebook for scores of monasteries that spread across Western Europe in the tumultuous centuries following the fall of Rome (a period from the 6th through 14th centuries often referred to as the Dark Ages).

Benedict’s monks built lives of peace, order, and learning.  The monasteries were incubators of Christian and classical culture, and outposts of evangelization in the barbarian kingdoms.  Benedictines taught the peasants who gathered around their monasteries the Christian faith, as well as practical skills, like farming.  Benedictine monasteries emerged as islands of sanity and serenity, and became the bases from which European civilization gradually re-emerged.

Does Benedict’s historical example provide American Christians a model for surviving the coming Dark Ages as the country moves rapidly into a post-Christian era?

The “Benedict Option” (a term coined by Dreher) refers to Christians in the contemporary West who believe that the continuation of Christianity requires the formation of thicker, faith-based communities to resist the intense secularization of the decaying American empire.

Nothing is more needful today than the survival of Christian culture, because in recent generations this culture has become dangerously thin.  At this moment in the Church’s history, it is less urgent to convince the culture of the truth of Christ than it is for the Church to tell itself its own story and to nurture its own life.  This is not going to happen without a rebirth of moral and spiritual discipline and a resolute effort on the part of Christians to comprehend and to defend the remnants of Christian culture.

What I propose is that we Christians should soberly – but with a sense of urgency – discuss, build, and embed ourselves in these communities now, because the power of secular popular culture is dissolving Christianity.  Christians, especially in the United States, have been able to live for a long time as if the mainstream culture reinforced what we believe to be true.  This hasn’t actually been true for a very long time, but now, nobody can possibly believe that.  The Benedict Option is a call for cultural resistance through building endurance and resilience within ourselves, our families, and our communities.  It is about discipleship, which is itself an indirect form of evangelism.

What matters at this stage is the construction of intentional, local communities within which civility and the intellectual and moral life can be sustained through the new Dark Ages, which are already upon us.  And if Christianity was able to survive the horrors of the last Dark Ages, we are not entirely without grounds for hope.  This time however the barbarians are not waiting beyond the frontiers; they have already been governing us for quite some time.  And it is our lack of consciousness of this that constitutes part of our predicament.

Christians need to wake up and face reality.  There will be no “take back our country” moment, because we have lost, and lost decisively.  We are rapidly de-Christianizing. True, we have a long way to go before we get to European rates of secularization and religious indifference, but the trajectory is the same.  Rather than change the world, the world is changing the churches.  The power of popular culture is overwhelming.  Most Christians do not challenge modernity’s assumptions, and are therefore highly susceptible to being colonized by it.  That, in fact, is what has happened to most churches, and most individual believers.

Although the Order of Saint Benedict was Catholic, the Benedict Option is not a Catholic or neo-Amish endeavor – it is above all a Christian one.  It is also not monastic, but it does require some sort of meaningful withdrawal.  Whatever forms the Benedict Option takes, we have to understand that it’s going to be diverse, depending on local needs, and particular religious traditions.  How Catholics live it out won’t look exactly like how Southern Baptists live it out.  How urban Christians live it out won’t look exactly like how rural Christians live it out.  The ultimate goal, though, is to develop healthy communities that are islands of stability, sanity, and goodness in a fast-moving and chaotic culture that works against all of those things.

In the end, it’s not really an option.  It’s a necessity.

REFERENCES

Dreher, Rod. (2013, December 12). Benedict Option. The American Conservative. Retrieved from http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/benedict-option

Dreher, Rod. (2015, December 7). Shocking Numbers for Benedict Option. The American Conservative. Retrieved from http://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/shocking-numbers-benedict-option-poll-37-percent

Dreher, Rod. (2015, December 29). The Dark Side of the Benedict Option. The American Conservative. Retrieved from http://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/the-dark-side-of-the-benedict-option

Dreher, Rod. (2016, March 29). Not the Benedict Option. The American Conservative. Retrieved from http://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/not-the-benedict-option

Dreher, Rod. (2015, July 8). Critics of the Benedict Option. The American Conservative. Retrieved from http://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/critics-of-the-benedict-option

Dreher, Rod. (2015, October 6). Benedict Option FAQ. The American Conservative. Retrieved from http://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/benedict-option-faq