The outrage from big business (even Walmart!), the media, and the culture at large over Indiana’s Religious Freedom bill has many Christians thinking that America is a lost cause. The dominant culture is so fixated on gay marriage and sexual permissiveness that it will not tolerate dissenters. Even religious liberty, in the court of public opinion and likely legal opinion, will have to give way, and conservative believers will increasingly be demonized and punished.
Whether we are actually at that point or not, a number of thinkers–mostly of the Roman Catholic and Orthodox persuasion–are raising the possibility of what they call The Benedict Option.
After Rome fell to moral chaos and then to the barbarians, St. Benedict formed distinct Christian communities where believers could practice their faith separated from the world. Similarly, mainstream American culture may become so hostile to Christianity, so the reasoning goes, that Christians must form alternative communities, carrying on an alternative culture, until, as with Benedict, the barbarians are converted.
Rick Strickert posted some powerful quotations on this subject on Lutheran Forum, which I give after the jump. And then I want to pose a question: Can there be a Lutheran version of the Benedict Option, and, if so, how would it be different from the Roman Catholic and Fundamentalist versions?
From Rick Strickert, Luther Quest Discussion Group:
The various excerpts below come from Roman Catholic laymen, so they are not necessarily in theological agreement with Lutherans. But if Roman Catholics are writing these things about what is now going on in our country, what, if anything different, should Lutherans be writing?!?
In his March 30, 2015 Sardonic Ex Curia blog, “The Sunset of the West,” a Roman Catholic professor and lawyer wrote:
quote:In recent days, with the passage of the Indiana RFRA, an act mirroring that enshrined in statute or court decision in more than half the states of these United States and in the federal government, and the ensuing uproar created by those ignoring the text of the act and judging it based on feelings alone, I think we have finally reached a point where the veneer of claims about “tolerance” can be dispensed with, and social conservatives must, must, cease deluding themselves about any return to a situation of neutrality in the law.
Having now wiped away the final semblances of “equal protection under the law,” and transformed all social jurisprudence into a variation on the passage from the Supreme Court case Casey v. Planned Parenthood (which states “At the heart of liberty is the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life”), the State turns its head towards ensuring that nothing – no person, intermediary institution, law, regulation, or smaller government – interferes with what philosopher John Haldane calls “hedonistic consequentialism,” or the idea that “ethics is about promoting or respecting the good of persons, where that good is understood as consisting in the satisfaction of considered preferences.”
In other words, the State is now at war with portions of its citizenry, at the command of an elite, educated, mob. This mob sees every limitation as an insult, every hesitation the result of bigotry, every pause as insufficient commitment to the cause. It has overcome resistance to contraception, abortion, gay marriage (and soon, plural marriage), pornography, adultery, norms against suicide and “assisted” suicide, and other activities through a moral crusade from which it has stolen the Christian language of rights, used recently to great effect in ending slavery, and stripping that language of any purpose beyond itself, of any boundary save consent, and any responsibility save obtaining that consent.
We are at war. It is a war we did not wish, but it is thrust upon us. And the sooner we realize it, the sooner we can raise the barricades.
In his March 31, 2015, column, “Indiana & the Benedict Option,” Rod Dreher refers to the above article and then states:
quote:I remind you of where the concept of the Benedict Option comes from. Philosopher Alasdair Macintyre, writing in 1981 [After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory (3rd Ed., University of Notre Dame Press, Notre Dame, Indiana 2007, 1st Ed. 1981, p. 263)] :
“It is always dangerous to draw too precise parallels between one historical period and another; and among the most misleading of such parallels are those which have been drawn between our own age in Europe and North America and the epoch in which the Roman Empire declined into the Dark Ages. None the less certain parallels there are. A crucial turning point in that earlier history occurred when men and women of good will turned aside from the task of shoring up the Roman imperium and ceased to identify the continuation of civility and moral community with the maintenance of that imperium. What they set themselves to achieve instead—often not recognising fully what they were doing—was the construction of new forms of community within which the moral life could be sustained so that both morality and civility might survive the coming ages of barbarism and darkness. If my account of our moral condition is correct [one characterized by moral incoherence and unsettlable moral disputes in the modern world], we ought to conclude that for some time now we too have reached that turning point. What matters at this stage is the construction of local forms of community within which civility and the intellectual and moral life can be sustained through the new dark ages which are already upon us. And if the tradition of the virtues 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. We are waiting not for a Godot, but for another—doubtless very different—St. Benedict.”
Dreher quotes from a number of others including LCMS pastor Hans Fiene at The Federalist on “Selma envy.” Dreher closes:
quote:“It is time to write the Benedict Option book, so orthodox Christians and other religious dissenters will have a framework for thinking about how to live in post-Christian America. I am putting together a proposal now.”
Finally, in his April 3, 2015, article, “The Post-Indiana Future for Christians,” Rod Dreher writes:
quote:I spent a long time on the phone last night with a law professor at one of the country’s elite law schools. This professor is a practicing Christian, deeply closeted in the workplace; he is convinced that if his colleagues in academia knew of his faith, they would make it very hard for him…. I assure you that from where he sits, and teaches, and from his CV, he is telling the truth.
I will call him Prof. Kingsfield, after the law professor in The Paper Chase.
What prompted his reaching out to me? “I’m very worried,” he said, of events of the last week. “The constituency for religious liberty just isn’t there anymore.”
“Alasdair Macintyre is right,” he said. “It’s like a nuclear bomb went off, but in slow motion.” What he meant by this is that our culture has lost the ability to reason together, because too many of us want and believe radically incompatible things.
Kingsfield said that the core of the controversy, both legally and culturally, is the Supreme Court’s majority opinion in Planned Parenthood vs. Casey (1992), specifically the (in)famous line, authored by Justice Kennedy, that at the core of liberty is “the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life.” As many have pointed out — and as Macintyre well understood — this “sweet mystery of life” principle (as Justice Scalia scornfully characterized it) kicks the supporting struts out from under the rule of law, and makes it impossible to resolve rival moral visions except by imposition of power.
“Memories Pizza teaches us all a lesson. What is the line between prudently closing our mouths and closeting ourselves, and compromising our faith? Christians have to start thinking about that seriously.”
“We have to fall back to defensive lines and figure out where those lines are. It’s not going to be persecution like the older Romans, or even communist Russia,” he added. “But what’s coming is going cause a lot of people to fall away from the faith, and we are going to have to be careful about how we define and clarify what Christianity is.”
“If I were a priest or pastor, I don’t know what I would advise people about what to say and what not to say in public about their faith,” Kingsfield said.
And on the cultural front? Cultural pressure is going to radically reduce orthodox Christian numbers in the years go come. The meaning of what it means to be a faithful Christian is going to come under intense fire, Kingsfield said, not only from outside the churches, but from within. There will be serious stigma attached to standing up for orthodox teaching on homosexuality.
Bottom line: the Benedict Option is our the only path forward for us. Indiana shows that. “Write that book,” he said.
If you have more time, read the original articles.
The Benedictine option that preserved Western civilization and the Christian faith through the Dark Ages gave us monasticism. A Protestant version would be the fundamentalist separatism of the early 20th century.
Lutheran theology has problems with both of those. The doctrine of the Two Kingdoms gives much more room for secular culture than those other theologies, teaching that God is at work in a hidden way in secular authorities and in the ordinary vocations of economic and cultural life.
Then again, Lutheranism teaches that God rules the Kingdom of the Left by means of the moral law, reason, and earthly authorities. A society that rejects those would arguably not be within the pale of God’s Kingdom of the Left, though perhaps that rule would still manifest itself in other ways.
But, still, we need to think through this. Do we need to be cultivating a Benedict Option?
Arguably, some of this is already happening, with things like homeschooling and Christian detachment from mainstream entertainment and media. Followers of Wendell Berry and the localist movement are also doing something similar.
What would a Lutheran Benedictine option look like, and how would it be different from that of Roman Catholicism and Protestant Fundamentalism?
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