The relation between conventional communities of religious belief and the modern state shows no sign of getting any less complicated. On one side, those who hold certain convictions on (predominantly) gender- and sexuality-related questions see themselves as targets of discrimination or worse, locked out of various professions and regarded as deeply suspect if they put themselves forward for public office. See the controversy over Tim Farron’s supposed views on homosexuality or the conservative Catholic affiliations of Ruth Kelly when she held various ministerial posts in Labour governments of the 2000s.
On the other side, there are complaints that it is religious believers who are disproportionately privileged by virtue of being allowed certain kinds of exemption in the workplace. A modern society, it is argued, should not create opt-out areas in respect of settled legal rights and freedoms. It may tolerate diversity of opinion but not non-compliance. If people with certain beliefs are in effect self-excluded from some professions or positions, that is an unavoidable consequence of living in a law-governed society.
This is the backdrop against which Rod Dreher’s already much-discussed book appears (the New York Times columnist David Brooks has called it “the most important religious book of the decade”). Its argument is simple. For conservative religious believers, the battle on the political field has largely been lost; there is no point in wasting energy on forming coalitions to challenge or change legislation. What is needed, instead, is to develop a more densely textured religious life, in which regular patterns of communal prayer and intellectual and spiritual development will keep alive the possibility of inhabiting a nourishing, morally rich tradition. Christians ought to be more like Orthodox Jews or conscientious Muslims: living visibly at an angle to the practices of contemporary society.
This will demand a distancing from the assumptions of capitalism and the all-powerful market, and it will indeed entail the risk that Christians will find themselves de facto excluded from some professions. Dreher – an Eastern Orthodox Christian and a prominent conservative blogger in the United States – is sharply critical of a Christian rhetoric that ignores the evils of public acquisitiveness and selfishness while castigating personal delinquencies. He points to the tradition of monasticism as a model for developing alternative community patterns – hence the reference to Benedict – and invites a close reading of the saint’s precepts for monks as a guide to the practical challenges of living in close quarters with others. What lies in the more distant social or political future is not for us to see; but for now, what we need is a community life that seeks to live and worship with integrity and hopes to attract and persuade by the quality of its mutual care and the fulfilment of its members.
So the focus of Dreher’s case, advanced in this book energetically, though a little repetitively, is that Christian integrity does not depend on winning arguments in political terms. Instead it is by creating a culture – with a consistent ethical and imaginative identity, because it is centred on the love of God and truth for their own sake – that arguments about public morality are won.
The salient political challenge is whether the liberal consensus can live with a diversity of cultures and their convictions. Or does its commitment to public, legal, rights-based provision for its citizens require also the steady reduction of the space available for fundamental disagreement over ethical questions? To take one long-standing debate of neuralgic intensity: does securing legal access to abortion for anyone who requests it entail that no one with moral reservations about it should have any place in public decision-making, even if they are not committed to seeking a change in the law?
Quite a few, if pressed, would say that the answer to that is yes. It makes no sense, they would argue, to have someone holding a public role while questioning the moral legitimacy of acts that are agreed to be legal. If so, Dreher’s strategy is ultimately the only one possible for a traditionalist believer who does not want a revolution or a theocracy. The so-called peace churches of the Mennonite tradition (including the American Amish and the Bruderhof communities) have long since acknowledged that their opposition to war and their commitment to a co-operative lifestyle require the creation of what is, in effect, an alternative cultural environment, distanced from the mainstream. They accept the law, and also that they will not be involved in quite a lot of routine social and professional life. What they ask for is the space needed to secure their freedom to witness to, and to communicate, another perspective.
Dreher’s book thus challenges the liberal state to honour its commitment to liberties of expression and belief. Many who would not share the author’s priorities would agree that if we are serious about social pluralism, there is a strong logic to what he says.
Yet there are aspects of his rhetoric that leave a deep unease. “The LGBT agenda” is a phrase that appears on the third page of the first chapter, and the prominence given to same-sex relations reinforces the common perception that the only ethical issues that interest traditional Christians are those involving sexual matters. In recent interviews, Dreher has been rather less vocally negative about same-sex relations in general than he seems to be in this book, but the phraseology (as in the derogatory use of “transgenderism”), here and elsewhere, sounds a note of angry anxiety and contempt typical of some voices prominent in conservative American religious circles, and somehow jarring with the commendation of Benedictine hospitality and equanimity.
Later in the book he observes in passing that, with the culture wars over sexuality more or less over, the future sites of political debate are race and class – which he seems to think are of less immediate concern to his fellow traditional believers.
Given that the greatest moral dramas of 20th-century America were to do with civil rights and foreign war, Dreher’s perspective here is worrying. He assumes, laudably, that the new Christian communities will have some concern for the marginal and needy but anything like a broader social ideal does not figure largely. Oddly, he does not mention the formidable American activist Dorothy Day or the “Catholic Worker” houses she established in the 1930s – centres caring for the destitute and staffed by people living under a common, very austere rule of life not a million miles away from Dreher’s ideal. But these groups persisted in public advocacy about poverty, racism and war (for all that Day also had uncompromisingly conservative opinions on many of the questions he flags). One would not easily guess from reading Dreher that conscientious religious dissent from the social consensus could fuel this level of public protest.
The lack of specific discussion of groups such as the Catholic Worker movement and the Bruderhof is such that it is hard to envisage just what Dreher’s Benedict-inspired communities might look like – though he strongly commends home-schooling and likes the idea of orthodox believers living in close proximity to one another and to their church. What is left most worryingly vague is how such groups might maintain a level of self-criticism, and how they would handle issues around authority and management of conflict. Benedict has a fair bit to say about this, and Dreher shows he is aware of it and of the problem of alienating a younger generation by excessive exclusivism. However, more information on how actual communities have discovered and handled (or failed to handle) such matters would help.
The Benedict Option is unsettling. It confronts the prevailing consensus about how far the majority is willing to make room for principled dissent and public argument – yet at the same time shows a rather dispiriting lack of confidence in public argument. It puts a solid and appealing case for religious communities to be more serious about the disciplines that sustain prayer, compassion and integrity; but it is also a jeremiad against the decline of a certain sort of American public piety, and the sinister plans of relativists and revisionists.
The book is worth reading because it poses some helpfully tough questions to a socially liberal majority, as well as to believers of a more traditional colour. Yet it also fails to note the irony of advocating what it does in a climate where liberal triumphalism has already been shaken by a very un-Benedictine set of influences, through the resurgence of populist conservatism and protectionism. And neither restating liberal nostrums nor Dreher’s “strategy of hibernation” – to borrow a phrase from Adorno – seems an adequate answer to this.
The Benedict Option: a Strategy for Christians in a Post-Christian Nation
Rod Dreher
Sentinel, 272pp, $25
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