Sostiene che uno stato laico non possa esistere perché un mondo senza una fondazione cristiana collasserebbe. Secondo l'autore bisogna costruire una società alternativa confessionale che possa portare avanti l'umanità e questo sarebbe quello che Benedetto ha fatto a suo tempo. Non sono convinto che questo sia vero, per questo pur essendo il libro scritto bene, devo dare un rating negativo, riservandomi di rileggere il libro e rifletterci ulteriormente. Sulla questione della forma politica, è molto interessante la riflessione di Karl Schmitt in Cattolicesimo e forma politica. ( )

I don't agree with some of his philosophy on religion but overall a good read. ( )

Even if you disagree with the retreat regroup idea, it is a good discusion started ( )

abbruch nach der hälfte, nicht mein denken und nicht mein stil ( )

A call, rooted in the final line of Alasdair MacIntyre's After Virtue looking for a new, and doubtless different St. Benedict, for Christians to...

...strategically create robust community to sustain their faith and hand it on to their children?
...lick their wounds from the culture war, strategically retreat while advocating for religious liberty, until a better day comes?
...save "Western civilization," or the particularly triumphalist view of Western civilization fostered among the Western European and American elites until recent days?
...some mishmash of the above?

In the work Dreher organizes his thoughts to some degree and makes his case for why at this particular point in time Christians need to look to themselves and their household so as to carry on not just the pretense of the faith but also its substance. He discusses how he has come to view the situation, gives a historical overview suggesting how we have reached this point over the past 800 years, introduces Benedict and his Rule, talks about the current monastery in Nursia and what it represents, and then goes through a series of practices which he thinks will help Christians survive the storm: a different political posture, a more robust community, a better conception of church, emphasis on education, economics and hard labor, a counterculture regarding sexuality, and a call for humanity in an age of machines.

Dreher has spoken much about the book and its reception on his blog. On the whole I find his "solutions" to be right, good, and appropriate: perhaps a little less high on liturgy, maybe not nearly as obsessed with sexuality, but yes - if the faith is going to be carried on, it will have to be done deliberately, intentionally, and in resistance to the powers that be...

...but hasn't that always been true?

I find the work perplexing for a few reasons.

(1) What is Dreher really looking for? At the end he wants to make it out as if he's just calling Christians to uphold the faith and keep it going, which sounds well and good but it's certainly not the whole conclusion of the work as a whole. It looks at many points like he wants to preserve a particular type of Christian-dominated civic culture, which has assumed its pretense, as if it really has ever existed. The very invocation of Benedict presumes that a "Dark Age" is coming -- but a "dark age" for whom, and why?

If one's baseline is the Way Things Were in America in 1950, then yes, it's definitely a Dark Age we're coming into - literally and figuratively. If one's primary concerns involve what society says about human sexuality, the same conceit can be granted.

But at many points Dreher would seem to recognize that not all was well in the 1950s, and there are some hints of the recognition that some of the things that have changed since then are for the better, even if they're now making him a bit uncomfortable as cultural dynamics turn against him. In fact, in consideration of the second chapter, one can be forgiven for thinking that Dreher would believe that it has only gone downhill since 1250...and yet Dreher, a big fan of religious liberty and a lot of (philosophically) liberal principles, surely would not agree with that.

There's a lot of incoherence about what is being preserved. I don't think Dreher's being malevolent or hiding anything; there might well be a lot of incoherence. But it is important to know exactly what is trying to be accomplished with this kind of thing. What is being preserved - and, most importantly, should everything which is under consideration actually be preserved? Ecclesiastes 7:10 comes to mind: the good ol'days weren't that good. They were just different.

All of this leads to the major difficulty of (2), a lack of lament and introspection. Dreher spends a lot of time lamenting how things have changed, certainly, but it tends to be from other forces. There's not much of an inward look, asking how this once "Christian nation" has become so "unChristian." I don't think Dreher really believes it's all the fault of political liberals; there are a few passing comments here and there admitting failures of the church and the like. But there's no real grappling with how many people have been alienated from Christianity, or at least its institutional expressions, because of what they saw and heard and how they and others were treated. There's certainly no grappling with Christendom and its attendant compromises, which leads to...

...difficulty (3), which is how thoroughly ensconced Dreher is in "Christendom" and imperial Christianity. He started out as a Methodist, the "Establishment" church of the American frontier if there ever was one, converted to Catholicism, the "Establishment" church of the Latin West, and is now Orthodox, the "Establishment" church of the Greek East. For anyone not associated with "Establishment" churches and their inherent compromises with political power, the Benedict option seems, mostly, just like...well...what Christianity started out as and, as far as we can tell in the New Testament, what it was expected to continue to be until the Lord returns. Only in a world conditioned by establishment churches would it ever be assumed that a person could be inculcated with societal values and generally, or automatically, turn out to be some kind of Christian; and even that could be rightly challenged as preposterous according to NT concerns. A reading of the New Testament makes it clear that its authors would assume that in the absence of strong resistance to the forces of the world a person will become like the world and thus not loyal to Christ.

Dreher has made much of Christian Smith and his understanding of people accepting moralistic therapeutic deism (MTD). I have no quibble with that perspective save that it is not the only perspective, and does not entirely explain the past. It's not like we had untold millions of rigidly doctrinally accurate, Chalcedonian compliant, saintly Christians in America until we all got deluded by the Sexual Revolution. Dreher would have been well served to consider the work of Kruse and others on the nexus of big business and Evangelicals promoting Christianity as the civic religion in the middle of the 20th century, and of Jones on the end of White Christian America to see how many other forces are at play. Recent studies have wondered how much of the decline since the 90s has happened precisely because of the political marriage of Evangelicalism and the Republican party that Dreher implicitly has accepted as a positive development of the 80s through the present: it would have alienated Christians with politically liberal temperaments, and then Dreher wonders why Democrats won't listen to people of faith - because there are too few of us to listen to. But again, this would require the introspection and lament missing in (2).

What if the problem went back far further than 1250 to 325 and the Constantinian compromise? What if it is at that point when the faith became compromised in its willingness to allow the coercive power of the state to advance its purposes? Perhaps, in truth, Christianity is just supposed to be a modified "Benedict option," of people who see themselves as exiles looking for a better homeland, living in subjection to earthly authorities but with a higher loyalty, inculcating the values and community of Jesus into their people in their own generation and those that follow them? If you never depended the state, or the culture, to legitimate you or your views, then most of the fear and apprehension driving this book evaporates.

(4) So why now? A paragraph from p. 79 says it all:

"As recently as the 1960s, with the notable exception of civil rights, moral and cultural concerns weren't make-or-break issues in U.S. politics. Americans voted largely on economics, as they had since the Great Depression. There was sufficient moral consensus in the culturally Christian nation to keep sex and sexuality apolitical. The sexual revolution changed all that."

It requires a certain perspective, one that has over-elevated sexuality as The Great Concern, to lead to a paragraph like that. In reading it you immediately know its author is white.

Could we use some historical imagination? Imagine a cultural commentator in America in 1850. They have seen the collapse of political compromises. They can see slavery remaining and the treatment of indigenous peoples. Would such a commentator not have been in the right to call for a sort of "Benedict option," to get away from a state espousing such white supremacy, oppression of other people, and active in genocide?

And yet the culture at that time was nominally Christian. It just didn't exhibit the character thereof. But, after all, they held to the pretense of Christian moral values about sexuality (even if in practice, well, they didn't).

It's also telling that we get a whole chapter devoted to Benedictines in Nursia, but nothing about the black Christian experience in America. Yes, Dreher says he spoke with many, and would have added it if space permitted - but still. What *is* in it demonstrates priorities. We hear from Benedictines in Nursia who have voluntarily left many aspects of the world, and we do not hear from the people who well know and understand what it looks like when the state doesn't like you and is always stacked against you.

All of it is a telling admission, as if now, now that the pretense of maintaining a Biblical sexual ethic has been dismantled, that now is the time for Christians to reconsider how they exist in this society.

Is society overreacting? Of course it is. That's what societies do. So is the best solution to overreact to the overreaction, and act as if the world is ending, and we're at the precipice of a new Dark Age?

Yes, Christians need to accept that society won't help them or their children remain faithful Christians, and that allowing the world to disciple your children will lead them away from the faith. But that was true in 1975, and 1950, and 1850, and, yes, even in 1250. Christians need deep community with fellow people of God and to instruct according to what God has made known, and even better, embody what that looks like. No argument.

But too much of this work seems to be an apologia for a particular brand of cultural conservatism that may actually need to die the death because it won't come to grips with where it has so spectacularly failed and all it can do is react and respond immaturely and out of proportion to all reason and wisdom. It is a time of reckoning and purging, and that is going to be ugly and distressing for those who maintain commitments to such causes.

Judgment begins at the house of God, as Peter says in 1 Peter 4. The pretense of American civic Christianity is definitely being purged. How much you think it should be missed will direct how much you like this book. ( )