As the legal and social climate in the United States becomes more adverse, where not altogether hostile, toward traditional religious values and beliefs, the question of how Christians should respond becomes an urgent one.
The conservative Catholic writer Rod Dreher, for example, has been writing about what he calls the “Benedict option,” which is the idea that those who want to live according traditional morality ought to separate themselves, to some degree, from mainstream society in order to live in “intentional communities.” (The Benedict in question isn’t the recently retired pope, by the way, but, rather, St. Benedict, the sixth-century founder of the Benedictine monastic order that did so much to preserve much of Western civilization through the so-called “Dark Ages.)
On the other hand, some Southern Baptist leaders have recently been raising the prospect of Christians being obliged to sacrifice their careers and even going to jail as prisoners of conscience:
I have to admit that this notion has crossed my mind, too, as something newly and shockingly conceivable.
The balance between being in the world while not being of the world is and has always been a difficult one to maintain, and sometimes the formula for doing so needs to be reexamined. We may be entering into such a time.
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