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The Benedict Option: A Strategy for Christians in a Post-Christian Nation Kindle Edition

by Rod Dreher (Author) Format: Kindle Edition

2,004 ratings

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A NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER

"Already the most discussed and most important religious book of the decade." —David Brooks

In this controversial bestseller, Rod Dreher calls on American Christians to prepare for the coming Dark Age by embracing an ancient Christian way of life.

From the inside, American churches have been hollowed out by the departure of young people and by an insipid pseudo–Christianity. From the outside, they are beset by challenges to religious liberty in a rapidly secularizing culture. Keeping Hillary Clinton out of the White House may have bought a brief reprieve from the state’s assault, but it will not stop the West’s slide into decadence and dissolution.

Rod Dreher argues that the way forward is actually the way back—all the way to St. Benedict of Nursia. This sixth-century monk, horrified by the moral chaos following Rome’s fall, retreated to the forest and created a new way of life for Christians. He built enduring communities based on principles of order, hospitality, stability, and prayer. His spiritual centers of hope were strongholds of light throughout the Dark Ages, and saved not just Christianity but Western civilization.

Today, a new form of barbarism reigns. Many believers are blind to it, and their churches are too weak to resist. Politics offers little help in this spiritual crisis. What is needed is the Benedict Option, a strategy that draws on the authority of Scripture and the wisdom of the ancient church. The goal: to embrace exile from mainstream culture and construct a resilient counterculture.

The Benedict Option is both manifesto and rallying cry for Christians who, if they are not to be conquered, must learn how to fight on culture war battlefields like none the West has seen for fifteen hundred years. It's for all mere Christians—Protestant, Catholic, Orthodox—who can read the signs of the times. Neither false optimism nor fatalistic despair will do. Only faith, hope, and love, embodied in a renewed church, can sustain believers in the dark age that has overtaken us. These are the days for building strong arks for the long journey across a sea of night.

Editorial Reviews

Review

“The Trump era…has not made The Benedict Option…less timely, but more so….Conservative Christians active in politics have no choice but to do the best they can from that unsteady, wavering position. But only a robust counterculture, a healthy sense of their own freakishness and, yes, a few St. Benedicts will save them if they fall.”
—Ross Douthat, The New York Times

"The Benedict Option is already the most discussed and most important religious book of the decade."
—David Brooks, The New York Times

"I'm more missionary than monastery, but I think every Christian should read this book. Rod Dreher is brilliant, prophetic, and wise. Even if you don't agree with everything in this book, there are warnings here to heed, and habits here to practice.”
—Russell Moore, president, The Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention

“A terrific book: provocative in its content, shrewd in its insights, vivid and engaging in its style. The strength of The Benedict Option is not just its analysis of our culture’s developing problems but its outline of practical ways Christians can survive and thrive in a dramatically different America. This is an invaluable tool for understanding our times and acting as faithful believers.”
—Charles J. Chaput, O.F.M. Cap., Archbishop of Philadelphia

"This is the kind of book I am going to use to get the thoughtful people in my congregation reading and discussing. It is going to be helpful to the very people who have to live on the front line."
—Carl R. Trueman, Westminster [PA] Theological Seminary; writer for First Things

“An insightful and optimistic plan of action for Christians who are starting to realize just how hostile American culture is to their faith.”
—Mollie Ziegler Hemingway, senior editor, The Federalist

“Deeply convicting and motivating. This book will be a grounding force for the Church in the decades ahead.”
—Gabe Lyons, author of Good Faith; president of Q Ideas

About the Author

ROD DREHER is a senior editor at The American Conservative and the author of Crunchy Cons, How Dante Can Save Your Life, and The Little Way of Ruthie Leming.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

CHAPTER 1

The Great Flood

No one saw the Great Flood coming.

The newspaper said heavy rains were headed to south Louisiana that weekend in August 2016, but it was nothing unusual for us. Louisiana is a wet place, especially in summer. The weatherman said we could expect three to six inches over a five-day period.    By the time the rain stopped, the deluge had dropped over thirty inches of water on the greater Baton Rouge area. Places that no one ever imagined would see high water disappeared beneath the muddy torrent as rivers and creeks hemorrhaged and burst their banks. People fled their houses and made it to high ground with minutes to spare. Some had not even that much time and were lucky to clamber with their families onto their roofs, where rescuers found them.    I spent the Sunday of the flood at a makeshift shelter in Baton Rouge. My son Lucas and I helped unload the rescued from National Guard helicopters, and we joined scores of other volunteers in feeding and helping the thousands of refugees flowing in from the surrounding area. Men, women, families, the elderly, the well-off, the very poor, white, black, Asian, Latino—it was a real “here comes everybody” moment. And nearly every one of them looked shell-shocked.    Serving jambalaya to hungry and dazed evacuees, one heard the same story over and over: We have lost everything. We never expected this. It has never flooded where we live. We were not prepared.    These confused and homeless evacuees could be forgiven their lack of preparation. Few had thought to buy flood insurance, but why would they? The Great Flood was a thousand-year weather event, and nobody in recorded history had ever seen this land underwater. The last time something like this happened in Louisiana, Western civilization had not yet reached American shores.    We Christians in the West are facing our own thousand-year flood—or if you believe Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI, a fifteen--hundred-year flood: in 2012, the then-pontiff said that the spiritual crisis overtaking the West is the most serious since the fall of the Roman Empire near the end of the fifth century. The light of Christianity is flickering out all over the West. There are people alive today who may live to see the effective death of Christianity within our civilization. By God’s mercy, the faith may continue to flourish in the Global South and China, but barring a dramatic reversal of current trends, it will all but disappear entirely from Europe and North America. This may not be the end of the world, but it is the end of a world, and only the willfully blind would deny it. For a long time we have downplayed or ignored the signs. Now the floodwaters are upon us—and we are not ready.    The storm clouds have been gathering for decades, but most of us believers have operated under the illusion that they would blow over. The breakdown of the natural family, the loss of traditional moral values, and the fragmenting of communities—we were troubled by these developments but believed they were reversible and didn’t reflect anything fundamentally wrong with our approach to faith. Our religious leaders told us that strengthening the levees of law and politics would keep the flood of secularism at bay. The sense one had was: There’s nothing here that can’t be fixed by continuing to do what Christians have been doing for decades—especially voting for Republicans.    Today we can see that we’ve lost on every front and that the swift and relentless currents of secularism have overwhelmed our flimsy barriers. Hostile secular nihilism has won the day in our nation’s government, and the culture has turned powerfully against traditional Christians. We tell ourselves that these developments have been imposed by a liberal elite, because we find the truth intolerable: The American people, either actively or passively, approve.    The advance of gay civil rights, along with a reversal of religious liberties for believers who do not accept the LGBT agenda, had been slowly but steadily happening for years. The U.S. Supreme Court’s Obergefell decision declaring a constitutional right to same-sex marriage was the Waterloo of religious conservatism. It was the moment that the Sexual Revolution triumphed decisively, and the culture war, as we have known it since the 1960s, came to an end. In the wake of Obergefell, Christian beliefs about the sexual complementarity of marriage are considered to be abominable prejudice—and in a growing number of cases, punishable. The public square has been lost.    Not only have we lost the public square, but the supposed high ground of our churches is no safe place either. Well, so what if those around us don’t share our morality? We can still retain our faith and teaching within the walls of our churches, we may think, but that’s placing unwarranted confidence in the health of our religious institutions. The changes that have overtaken the West in modern times have revolutionized everything, even the church, which no longer forms souls but caters to selves. As conservative Anglican theologian Ephraim Radner has said, “There is no safe place in the world or in our churches within which to be a Christian. It is a new epoch.”1    Don’t be fooled by the large number of churches you see today. Unprecedented numbers of young adult Americans say they have no religious affiliation at all. According to the Pew Research Center, one in three 18-to-29-year-olds have put religion aside, if they ever picked it up in the first place.2 If the demographic trends continue, our churches will soon be empty.    Even more troubling, many of the churches that do stay open will have been hollowed out by a sneaky kind of secularism to the point where the “Christianity” taught there is devoid of power and life. It has already happened in most of them. In 2005, sociologists Christian Smith and Melinda Lundquist Denton examined the religious and spiritual lives of American teenagers from a wide variety of backgrounds. What they found was that in most cases, teenagers adhered to a mushy pseudoreligion the researchers deemed Moralistic Therapeutic Deism (MTD).3    MTD has five basic tenets:    A God exists who created and orders the world and watches over human life on earth.

God wants people to be good, nice, and fair to each other, as taught in the Bible and by most world religions.

The central goal of life is to be happy and to feel good about oneself.

God does not need to be particularly involved in one’s life except when he is needed to resolve a problem.

Good people go to heaven when they die.

This creed, they found, is especially prominent among Catholic and Mainline Protestant teenagers. Evangelical teenagers fared measurably better but were still far from historic biblical orthodoxy. Smith and Denton claimed that MTD is colonizing existing Christian churches, destroying biblical Christianity from within, and replacing it with a pseudo-Christianity that is “only tenuously connected to the actual historical Christian tradition.”    MTD is not entirely wrong. After all, God does exist, and He does want us to be good. The problem with MTD, in both its progressive and its conservative versions, is that it’s mostly about improving one’s self-esteem and subjective happiness and getting along well with others. It has little to do with the Christianity of Scripture and tradition, which teaches repentance, self-sacrificial love, and purity of heart, and commends suffering—the Way of the Cross—as the pathway to God. Though superficially Christian, MTD is the natural religion of a culture that worships the Self and material comfort.    As bleak as Christian Smith’s 2005 findings were, his follow-up research, a third installment of which was published in 2011, was even grimmer. Surveying the moral beliefs of 18-to-23-year-olds, Smith and his colleagues found that only 40 percent of young Christians sampled said that their personal moral beliefs were grounded in the Bible or some other religious sensibility.4 It’s unlikely that the beliefs of even these faithful are biblically coherent. Many of these “Christians” are actually committed moral individualists who neither know nor practice a coherent Bible-based morality.    An astonishing 61 percent of the emerging adults had no moral problem at all with materialism and consumerism. An added 30 percent expressed some qualms but figured it was not worth worrying about. In this view, say Smith and his team, “all that society is, apparently, is a collection of autonomous individuals out to enjoy life.”    These are not bad people. Rather, they are young adults who have been terribly failed by family, church, and the other institutions that formed—or rather, failed to form—their consciences and their imaginations.    MTD is the de facto religion not simply of American teenagers but also of American adults. To a remarkable degree, teenagers have -adopted the religious attitudes of their parents. We have been an MTD nation for some time now.    “America has lived a long time off its thin Christian veneer, partly necessitated by the Cold War,” Smith told me in an interview. “That is all finally being stripped away by the combination of mass consumer capitalism and liberal individualism.”    The data from Smith and other researchers make clear what so many of us are desperate to deny: the flood is rising to the rafters in the American church. Every single congregation in America must ask itself if it has compromised so much with the world that it has been compromised in its faithfulness. Is the Christianity we have been living out in our families, congregations, and communities a means of deeper conversion, or does it function as a vaccination against taking faith with the seriousness the Gospel demands?    Nobody but the most deluded of the old-school Religious Right believes that this cultural revolution can be turned back. The wave cannot be stopped, only ridden. With a few exceptions, conservative Christian political activists are as ineffective as White Russian exiles, drinking tea from samovars in their Paris drawing rooms, plotting the restoration of the monarchy. One wishes them well but knows deep down that they are not the future.    Americans cannot stand to contemplate defeat or to accept limits of any kind. But American Christians are going to have to come to terms with the brute fact that we live in a culture, one in which our beliefs make increasingly little sense. We speak a language that the world more and more either cannot hear or finds offensive to its ears.    Could it be that the best way to fight the flood is to . . . stop fighting the flood? That is, to quit piling up sandbags and to build an ark in which to shelter until the water recedes and we can put our feet on dry land again? Rather than wasting energy and resources fighting unwinnable political battles, we should instead work on building communities, institutions, and networks of resistance that can outwit, outlast, and eventually overcome the occupation.    Fear not! We have been in a place like this before. In the first centuries of Christianity, the early church survived and grew under Roman persecution and later after the collapse of the empire in the West. We latter-day Christians must learn from their example—and particularly from the example of Saint Benedict.

One day near the turn of the sixth century, a young Roman named Benedict said good-bye to his hometown, Nursia, a rugged village pocketed away in central Italy’s Sibylline mountain range. The son of Nursia’s governor, Benedict was on his way to Rome, the place where promising young men seeking a place in the world went to complete their education.

This was no longer the Rome of imperial glory, the memory of which remained after Constantine’s conversion made the empire officially Christian. Nearly seventy years before Benedict was born, the Visigoths had sacked the Eternal City. The collapse of the city of Rome was a staggering blow to the morale of citizens across the once-mighty empire.    By that time, the empire was governed in the West from Rome, which had long been in decline, and in the East from Constantinople, which thrived. Yet Christians throughout the empire mourned because Rome’s suffering forced them to confront a terrible fact: that the foundations of the world they and their ancestors had known were crumbling before their eyes.    “My voice sticks in my throat; and, as I dictate, sobs choke my utterance,” wrote Saint Jerome in its aftermath. “The city which had taken the whole world was itself taken.” So great was the shock that Jerome’s contemporary, Saint Augustine, wrote his classic City of God, which explained the catastrophe in terms of God’s mysterious will and refocused the minds of Christians on the imperishable heavenly kingdom.    The city of Rome did not disappear, but by the time young Benedict arrived, Rome was a pathetic shadow of its former self. Once the world’s largest city, with a population estimated at one million souls at the height of its power in the second century, its population plummeted in the decades after the sack. In 476, barbarians deposed the last Roman emperor of the West. By the turn of the sixth century, Rome’s population had scattered, leaving only one hundred thousand souls to pick over the ruins.    The overthrow of the Western empire did not mean anarchy. To the contrary, in Italy, things went on much as they had gone for decades. Theodoric, the Visigoth king who ruled Italy in Benedict’s time from his capital in Ravenna, was a heretical Christian (an Arian) but made a pilgrimage to Rome in the year 500 to pay his respects to the Pope. The king assured the Romans of his favor for them and his protection. In fact, the best he could do was to manage Rome’s decline.    We know few particulars of social life in barbarian-ruled Rome, but history shows that a general loosening of morals follows the shattering of a long-standing social order. Think of the decadence of Paris and Berlin after World War I, or of Russia in the decade after the end of the Soviet empire. Pope Saint Gregory the Great never knew Benedict, but he wrote the saint’s biography based on interviews he conducted with four of Benedict’s disciples. Gregory writes that young Benedict was so shocked and disgusted by the vice and corruption in the city that he turned his back on the life of privilege that awaited him there, as the son of a government official. He moved to the nearby forest and later to a cave forty miles to the east. There Benedict lived a life of prayer and contemplation as a hermit for three years.    This was normal in the first centuries of the church, and it continues in some places even today. In the third century, men (and even a few women) retreated to the Egyptian desert, renouncing all bodily comfort to seek God in a solitary life of silence, prayer, and fasting. They took to an extreme the scriptural injunction to die to self to live in Christ, obeying the Lord’s command to the rich young ruler to sell his possessions, give to the poor, and follow Him. Saint Anthony of Egypt (ca. 251–--356) is believed to have been the first hermit. His followers founded communal Christian monasticism, but the figure of the hermit remained a part of monastic life and practice.

Product details

ASIN ‏ : ‎ B01KUCY7XI
Publisher ‏ : ‎ Sentinel (March 14, 2017)
Publication date ‏ : ‎ March 14, 2017
Language ‏ : ‎ English
File size ‏ : ‎ 1.7 MB
Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Screen Reader ‏ : ‎ Supported
Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Print length ‏ : ‎ 269 pages

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Customers consider this book a must-read for believers, praising its well-written, easy-to-read style and thought-provoking content. They appreciate its practical call to a deeper Christian life, with one customer noting how it frames the discussion for serious orthodox Christians. The book receives positive feedback for its historical material, with one review highlighting its lucid compact history of events, and customers find it timely.

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155 customers mention "Readability"136 positive19 negative

Customers find the book highly readable, describing it as one of the best they've read this year and a must-read for all believers.

"I An incredible book, but one many Christians won’t be willing to accept...." Read more

"...The Benedict Option is one of the best books I have read in several years – provocative, shrewd, and engaging...." Read more

"...find it to be a waste of my time, but this book was well worth reading all the way through. Two aspects of the book that made it quite enriching: 1...." Read more

"...This volume is a readable resource, and stuffed full with stories, anecdotes, ideas and strategies...." Read more

139 customers mention "Insight"122 positive17 negative

Customers find the book thought-provoking and informative, with many useful insights that inspire them.

"...some very hard decisions that need to be made as well as outlining some very good ideas about what direction our Christian culture needs to go in...." Read more

"...The American Conservative magazine, Dreher writes and researches prolifically on religion, economics, community, faith, and politics...." Read more

"...assesment of Christian community today and useful in directing how to move forward. Any issues I could find?..." Read more

"...The Benedict Option” that I found helpful are the strategies for reassessing our place in history and how to establish ourselves for the future come..." Read more

78 customers mention "Faith"65 positive13 negative

Customers appreciate the book's approach to faith, describing it as a practical call to a deeper Christian life that frames the discussion for serious orthodox Christians and preserves the true faith in Jesus Christ.

"...do with the Christianity of scripture that teaches repentance, self-sacrificial love, purity of heart, and commends suffering - the Way of the Cross..." Read more

"...In other words, I found it to be a trustworthy assesment of Christian community today and useful in directing how to move forward. Any issues..." Read more

"...faith means in the everyday in a new way, READ THIS BOOK, slowly and carefully, read every word, underline, highlight, think about, pray about, and..." Read more

"...: Classical Christian education, business networking, commitment to the marital covenant, breaking the addictive hold of materialism and technology..." Read more

27 customers mention "Writing quality"27 positive0 negative

Customers praise the book's writing quality, noting it is well-written and easy to read, with one customer highlighting the author's deep love for God.

"...What this very well written book does is present Christians with some very hard decisions that need to be made as well as outlining some very good..." Read more

"...It’s written with understanding and love. And it’s written with keen insight into what is tearing the culture apart and the forces behind it." Read more

"...However, I am giving it 5 stars for quality. It is well written, expresses carefully considered ideas, and expresses a deep burden on the part of..." Read more

"I absolutely loved this book. Dreher's writing is clear and relevant, breaking down complex theological topics that are easily digested...." Read more

14 customers mention "Thought provoking"14 positive0 negative

Customers find the book thought-provoking and well-informed, with one customer noting how it lays out Western civilization in great detail.

"...It is so much more original, well researched, and interesting than most of the feel good, MTP drivel being published by many Christian authors...." Read more

"...is one of the best books I have read in several years – provocative, shrewd, and engaging...." Read more

"...He spells out the plan, monastic in its design. And it's radical. It's demanding...." Read more

"...I think this is a very thoughtful and interesting book with a great idea - stepping away from the putrified aspects of American and global culture...." Read more

13 customers mention "Historical context"10 positive3 negative

Customers appreciate the historical context of the book, with several noting its interesting historical material. One customer describes it as a lucid compact history of events, while another highlights its accurate portrayals of turning points in history.

"...The book then finishes with contemporary stories and advice to make the entire package worth reading, considering and absorbing...." Read more

"...Accurate portrayals of turning point in history that left devout Christians looking for answers. Some of which the author provides comfort...." Read more

"...I absolutely love how each story always pertains to something that is happening in my life. I highly recommend this book for everyone! A must read!" Read more

"...It is dangerously naive, authoritarian, Luddite and anti-American...." Read more

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Customers appreciate the book's timeliness, with one noting how it provides historical context.

"...what your faith means in the everyday in a new way, READ THIS BOOK, slowly and carefully, read every word, underline, highlight, think about, pray..." Read more

"Wow. This book is powerful, timely, and critical for learning how to live as a Christian in a post-Christian, and increasingly, anti-..." Read more

"A timely book giving the back story to how we find ourselves where we are today, followed by some ancient advice from similar times...." Read more

"Very timely indeed. An must read for people who consider themselves leaders and true believers in the living God of Israel." Read more

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Dreher's Book is Thoughtful, Challenging, and Original! Worth putting at the Top of your Reading List! Superb!
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I An incredible book, but one many Christians won’t be willing to accept. Dreher claims that Christianity in the West is on the verge of collapse and I can’t say that I disagree. You see, even in the heart of some of the Bible Belt, where I live, it is completely normal to go to football games, basketball games, and baseball games, and be exposed to some pretty vulgar music (as in songs like ‘Big Poppa’ blaring over the speakers before the game, halftime, in between innings, etc) to make the experience more ‘entertaining’ (it also interrupts your conversations so you ‘might as well’ go grab some concessions). Why would I mention this first in my review? Because sadly, the fans sitting in the stands are usually chock full of Christians with their children, many of whom think it is all in good fun and are singing right along with it. We have come to think of this as normal things for a Christian to do since we have all given up the ‘cultural war’ and we have all willingly exposed our children (or know they are exposed to it at school and at friends’ homes) consistently to a diseased culture. Sadly, there are any number of Christian men coaching or in the stands who may be pastors or deacons in their church who do nothing but shrug their shoulders and sigh - if it even bothers them at all.

The problem for most Christians is that they don’t have a clue what is necessary to get themselves out of the aimless, lost, and perverted culture of the world and into a community of people who value and honor the things of Christ. One of the things that Dreher makes clear is that, for our kids’ faith and for the future of Christian community, Christian children need to be pulled out of public schools and either home-schooled or Christian Schooled (Dreher’s children go to a half day Classical Christian school which, to me, is absolutely ideal) with a Classical Education which uses a medieval structure called the Trivium. Dreher stresses that there is no middle ground here. However, most of us, as Christians, don’t want to hear this at all. We want to continue to plod along while our children adopt secular perspectives about life and modern sexual mores. So many of us as parents keep on swearing that if ‘this or that’ were to happen at our child’s school, that we would then pull them out. The problem is that most of us don’t really mean it. When something happens at our child’s school that is truly awful or when policy changes are put in place that reflect some extreme concessions to the liberal agenda, we just shrug and continue to insist that everything will be okay.

At the heart of Dreher’s book is his call for Christians to adopt a ‘monastic way of thinking’ about the Christian home and the Christian community. According to Dreher, the Christian life needs to be full of rituals, prayers, fasts, and feasts. One key theme is the need for our daily lives to have a ‘sense of the Divine Order’. I agree with this wholeheartedly. As western Christians, we think very shallowly about our time. We basically work way too much so we can have lots of money to be consumers, eat as quickly as possible (and with as little preparation time as possible), then we entertain ourselves as much as possible with sports and media, then we go to church on Sunday morning and think that everything is fine as long as we, at least believe that we are living just a little bit ‘cleaner’ than the rest of the world. Dreher calls it “Moralistic Therapeutic Deism”. MTP is defined by the belief that there is a Creator God who watches over us, that He wants us all to be good, nice, and fair to each other, that our purpose is to be happy and feel good about ourselves, that God is only needed when we go through difficulties, and that people go to Heaven when they die. Regardless of the fact that many churches will deny teaching MTP, the sad reality is that most Christian children and adults have somehow adopted this mindset. I don’t know how a society’s government can dictate what children are taught day in and day out for most of their youth, while also taking a good chunk of a parent’s daily responsibilities ‘away from them’ and produce a culture that Christians can expect to remain dedicated to a healthy perspective of family and faith. Dreher makes it clear that creating a healthy Christian culture has to be a very intentional act. You can’t just live your life as you wish and spread some Christianity over it from time to time. What Dreher suggests, on the other hand, is for Christians to adopt a much more disciplined concept of time. It isn’t just that he thinks Christians should be spending less (if not, none) time watching TV, playing video games, or on their phones, but that they should be filling that time in a much more intentional, consistent, and thoughtful way with the Christian's’ faith in Christ at the center of it all.

One thing that I would add to this conversation is that the Christian church’s adoption of ‘income tithing’ as the method by which it supports its ministry, in my personal view, a big contributor to the shallow, unhealthy Western mindset about church. The majority of Biblical references to the faithful giving ten percent of their income to the church are based on newer translations that have consistently changed references about giving based on ‘possessions’ or ‘prosperity’ to giving based on income (based on a fiat currency). I’m here to tell you that these two concepts are by no means identical. For a person to accumulate possessions and wealth (to be truly prosperous) requires some very capable Christian stewardship. For a person to garner a high wage requires absolutely no Christian stewardship. All it requires is a strong addiction to consumerism and a devotion to being a workaholic. For income-tithe collecting churches, they are more than happy to see women working and embracing a career (thus bringing in another tithable income) than staying home to homeschool or even help with a half-day Classical Christian School that is working towards the integration of faith, education, and community.

The Sequitur Classical Academy in Baton Rouge and the Saint Constantine School in Houston are given as examples of these kinds of schools by Dreher. The bottom line is that for Christians to maintain a proper perspective on sexuality (which is a sacred act which should potentially be able to fulfill the purpose of procreation AND pleasure equally), Christian women must be prepared to have more than 1 or 2 children that can easily be stuck in a school system enabling them to get themselves back in the workforce and back to their careers. Instead, mothers must be ready to see the rearing of children as a valid vocation. Churches that zealously collect income tithes cannot possibly be well served by women fulfilling this vocation. The two are simply at cross-purposes. On the other hand, possession-tithing, (to be clear - this is not one of Dreher’s ideas) which is based on the Fair Market Value of all someone’s possessions subtracted from the remaining principal owed on those possessions, then divided by 12 or 52 (depending on how frequently the tithe is paid), is a much better reflection of someone’s prosperity (and stewardship of their finances, family, and faith) than a person’s income. Even if Christians adopt the increasingly popular stance that tithing is simply not required of New Testament Christians, it may still be a healthier perspective on giving for the church than a strict adherence to the materialistic and consumeristic centered income tithe.

Let me finish by getting back getting back to my conclusion of Dreher’s ‘Benedict Option’. This book deserves a higher rating than it has at the time that I am writing this review. It is so much more original, well researched, and interesting than most of the feel good, MTP drivel being published by many Christian authors. At least a few of the people who gave this book a one or two star rating must have not bothered to read the book’s subtitle because they claimed that they thought this book would be about something else entirely. One has to doubt the sincerity and validity of such ratings. What this very well written book does is present Christians with some very hard decisions that need to be made as well as outlining some very good ideas about what direction our Christian culture needs to go in. It is a book that eloquently says many of the things that I have been thinking for the last decade about the crisis that Christianity is facing. Dreher, who is not too fond of Trump, is probably right in claiming that Trump may (emphasis on the conditional here) give Christians a brief respite in a nation that is becoming increasingly hostile to their ability to practice their religion and maintain their beliefs in the business world. Christians could very soon find themselves in a nation whose government and businesses are ready to put their plans to eradicate the Christian faith into high gear. A time is likely soon coming where more and more Christians will be forced to choose between their faith and their employment or even their lives. For those that want to come down on the side of Christianity, you absolutely, positively need to read this book.

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Michael A. Herbert
The Benedict Option: A Critique of Modern Western Secular Culture From A Traditional Christian Point of View
Reviewed in the United States on June 6, 2017
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Dreher, Rod : The Benedict Option: A Strategy For Christians In A Post-Christian Nation. New York, New York. Sentinel, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-73-521329-6 (hardcover)

This book is a critique of modern Western secular culture from a traditional Christian point of view. The author, Rod Dreher, has mastered his material over the course of the last decade, previously writing several books on society, politics, and religion. As a senior editor at The American Conservative magazine, Dreher writes and researches prolifically on religion, economics, community, faith, and politics.

The Benedict Option is one of the best books I have read in several years – provocative, shrewd, and engaging. I commend every lay person and minister to read it, contemplate it, and discuss with their congregation, as he is asking Christians to change the way we live in modern America. It has challenged and even changed some of my assumptions with respect to gay and lesbian marriage from a traditional Christian point of view. More importantly, it has renewed a thirst for a classical liberal Christian education based on the Great Books series – Greek philosophy, Judeo-Christian teachings, and Roman law - that is the foundation of Western Christian civilization. He explains how early fourth through sixth century Christian leaders ( Benedict of Nursia and Augustine of Hippo) created communities of faith - in the Latin sense of the word religion, as in “ to bind” - as the Roman social, political, and economic order crumbled.

Dreher defines the challenge of post-Christian America, exploring the philosophical and theological roots of social fragmentation. The Sexual Revolution accelerated the unmooring of mainstream society, and the Obergefell decision in 2015 put a nail in the coffin of traditional society. He identifies severe threats to Christian faith as lying within the church walls, as the broad social acceptance of the advance of sexual freedom and the recalibration of thought regarding gender and sexuality (pp. 2-3, 9, 179-186). More importantly, he says we have overlooked the rampant divorce rate in our own congregations as the harbinger of social collapse, as the early Christian teaching of one man/one woman mandated a radical change of cultural norm of Roman decline (p 198-199). He identifies religious liberty, often caught up in LBGT matters as one of the two great cultural challenges facing orthodox Christianity (pp. 80 – 84). The malformation of Christians is based on a 2005 sociological study by Christian Smith and Melinda Denton (pp 10-11) that they call Moralistic Therapeutic Deism (MTD), the basis of most Christian teachings in American churches today – the idea that God exists, people should be nice to each other, and you go to Heaven if you are good. While not entirely wrong, it is based on improving one’s self esteem, happiness, and getting along with others. It has little to do with the Christianity of scripture that teaches repentance, self-sacrificial love, purity of heart, and commends suffering - the Way of the Cross – as the pathway to God.
Next, Dreher discusses the ideal of classical Christian living could serve as a guidebook that may help believer’s today as similar upheavals occur in the 21st century. Education is the key to Christian formation (p. 122, 175) for both individuals and the group, and C Dreher details how traditional Catholic, Protestant, and Orthodox Christians approach politics, faith, family, community, education, and work. He outlines communities as geographically diverse as Benedictine monks and lay people in San Bendetto del Tronto, Italy, plus Catholics in Hyattsville, Maryland plus diverse Protestant communities in the United States. It is not a call for Christians to abandon our engagement with the world nor call on Christians to abandon involvement in daily affairs. Rather, it calls for Christians to re-prioritize their concerns in the communities in which they live. We are supposed to be saving the Church, not the nation. For too long, too many conservative Christians have acted as if the most important thing we can do for the country is to vote Republicans (p.90, 99) at the national level into office.

Finally, while you may not agree on everything in the book, Dreher certainly lays out the challenges and provides analysis of the weakening foundations of our culture and an outline of practical ways for Christians – Orthodox, Catholic, and Protestant – to survive and thrive in an American secular culture. In short, Christians in local communities are going to have to be the church and wake up to the fact that American secular culture – worshipping the Self and Materialism – finds Christian beliefs and theology offensive and make little sense. The key is take these practices out of the monastery (p.77), and build the church as both Ark as the refuge and Wellspring as sharing the water of God’s grace (p. 238) within our communities.

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justanother
Useful book to any Christians thinking about how to live well in the current context of this age.
Reviewed in the United States on June 15, 2023
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Rarely do I read these types of books. Typically, I get about a quarter of the way and find it to be a waste of my time, but this book was well worth reading all the way through. Two aspects of the book that made it quite enriching: 1. its ability to show how an anchored vision of Christian living looks (or should look) in the present fluid age of modernity and post modernity. 2. its helpful examples and possible steps that can be made to be more in line with said anchored vision. The book was insightlful without pretense and sensible in a way that is is hard to dispute. In other words, I found it to be a trustworthy assesment of Christian community today and useful in directing how to move forward.
Any issues I could find? I suppose I am not fond the use of the wording, "God's image bearers" as a little bit of academic slight of hand imo (small matter of nuance) and I cringed at the random statement on the bourgeoisie (scapegoat). The Kulaks would agree with my resistence to such a term as it was used. Otherwise, maybe there were certain sections that I could've skipped entirely, but they will likely be useful to other readers. Really my complaints are hardly worth mentioning. It was an enjoyable and useful book to read.

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Elisabet
Motivador y necesario
Reviewed in Spain on October 23, 2017
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Un libro necesario, motivador y valiente para reflexionar sobre la autenticidad de lo que creemos y vivimos. Lo recomendaría a toda persona cristiana que desee crecer en la fe, en especial a catequistas, formadores y responsables de grupos parroquiales y movimientos.

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Stephanie Zee Fehler
a thoughtful look at what society is like right there
Reviewed in Canada on May 14, 2018
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a thoughtful look at what society is like right there, and what choices i could make now and in the future, to be able to live a life, and raise my children according to my conscience and in accordance with the Bible...

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Jobo International GmbH
most timely Christian publication
Reviewed in Germany on May 29, 2018
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Ein tolles Buch von einem Autor, der einen prophetisch klaren Blick für unsere Zeit hat und uns Christen zum Kern des Evangeliums führt.
Sehr empfehlenswert.

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Marco F.
The Benedict Option
Reviewed in Italy on August 24, 2017
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Libro interessantissimo, visto con la lente di un cristiano americano, che riesce a esaminare la secolarizzazione del mondo occidentale e a suggerire ai cristiani interessanti consigli per continuare o, meglio, riprendere a testimoniare la propria fede proprio prendendo spunto dalla Regola di San Benedetto. L'autore ha trascorso parecchio tempo con i frati di Norcia e ne ha tratto fondamentali insegnamenti, non mi ha sorpreso la giovane età di molti dei monaci intervistati, perché proprio quella generazione sa meglio recuperare il senso e l'attualità di valori oggi in gran parte dimenticati come il silenzio, la preghiera ed il lavoro per gli altri uniti al recupero della migliore dottrina.

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Eve
wonderful and uplifting
Reviewed in Australia on May 8, 2023
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Filled me with inspiration - a great read to ponder on your own Benedictine way ❤️ especially like the examples of communities, and the focus on returning to the basics - prayer, fasting, almsgiving….in community.

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5.0 out of 5 stars Dreher's Book is Thoughtful, Challenging, and Original! Worth putting at the Top of your Reading List! Superb!

5.0 out of 5 stars The Benedict Option: A Critique of Modern Western Secular Culture From A Traditional Christian Point of View

4.0 out of 5 stars Useful book to any Christians thinking about how to live well in the current context of this age.

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5.0 out of 5 stars Motivador y necesario

5.0 out of 5 stars a thoughtful look at what society is like right there

5.0 out of 5 stars most timely Christian publication

5.0 out of 5 stars The Benedict Option

5.0 out of 5 stars wonderful and uplifting

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Dreher's Book is Thoughtful, Challenging, and Original! Worth putting at the Top of your Reading List! Superb!

The Benedict Option: A Critique of Modern Western Secular Culture From A Traditional Christian Point of View

Useful book to any Christians thinking about how to live well in the current context of this age.

Motivador y necesario

a thoughtful look at what society is like right there

most timely Christian publication

The Benedict Option

wonderful and uplifting