Here’s a chapter I wrote for The Future of the Catholic Church in the American Political Order, a collection of essays edited by Kenneth L. Grasso and Thomas F.X. Varacalli.
Benedict Options
James Kalb
1 Introduction
As others have noted, we see around us the growth of a public order dominated by a post-Christian culture hostile to the Church, and an increasingly centralized and omnipresent state animated by a vision of radical human autonomy.
That situation has a variety of causes, institutional, technological, and intellectual. A fundamental intellectual cause, without which the others become hard to understand, is a specific and rather narrow understanding of reason that makes current tendencies seem rationally inevitable and so makes it difficult to oppose them in ways that seem comprehensible to their proponents.
In that current understanding the world is divided into the deterministic world of modern physics, which is considered the real world, and the free but entirely mysterious world of subjectivity. The latter, which current thought cannot account for in spite of its centrality, is the origin of all evaluations and thus of morality and politics.
Our freedom to evaluate the world as we wish and make choices accordingly is thought to make man the world’s lawmaker and so is considered the source of our human dignity. The choices we make inherit that dignity, and since they are all equally choices they are thought to have equal dignity and an equal claim to fulfillment, subject to the consistency, reliability, and efficiency of the system as a whole.
The result is an outlook that combines the modern scientific emphasis on control of the world around us, which is understood mechanistically, with the demand that our control of the world be used to realize the goals each of us chooses, as much and as equally as possible. Technocratic principles are thus viewed as the sole rational basis on which to carry on social life.
In such a setting there is nothing of deep human interest outside the human world. Career success and individual fulfillment—participating in the system and enjoying its fruits—thus become the proper goals of life. Diversity, equality, inclusion, and choice become sacred principles, since otherwise individuals might be limited in their connections and pursuits. Every community, with its particular standards, boundaries, and authorities, must therefore dissolve into every other and into individual choice. Even mainstream religion absorbs this outlook, and adopts inclusion, encounter, accompaniment, and nonjudgmental support as its highest goals. The meaning of America, the West, and (for many people) Christianity thus become their own dissolution.
This social and moral outlook has come to pervade public discussion. It is inculcated by educators, employers, electronic media, government agencies, commercial mass culture, and religious and moral leaders. In many respects, as with the effort to extirpate traditional and even natural distinctions such as sex, it is enforced by law. Opposition is seen as irrational, bigoted, and worthy of suppression rather than reply. And religious and cultural traditions that limit choice are thought oppressive and dangerous.
1.1 Current situation
Since the outlook is so radically man-centered and antitranscendental, it is clearly at odds with Catholicism. Both Catholics and secularists recognize the point, although Catholics who make Catholicism a career often try to blur it. But what is the proper cultural posture of Catholics in such a setting? The question is both deep and acute, so to answer it we need to look at basic principles as well as immediate practicalities.
For generations technology and the technological ideal have been sweeping all before them. Social life is carried on more and more through technologically-calculated arrangements oriented toward economic and utilitarian ends. Work, education, entertainment, and daily practicalities like cooking and the care of the young, sick, aged, and unfortunate are increasingly dealt with through commercial and bureaucratic institutions rather than traditional family, religious, and communal arrangements.
All that is considered liberating as well as efficient, but it means that people become more loosely connected to each other and their traditions. The effect is heightened by the ease of travel, and the all-pervasive electronic communications that weaken our connection to specific concrete settings and constantly bathe us in propaganda and commercial pop culture. Globalism further breaks down local cultural traditions, while mass immigration from everywhere leads to an open-ended increase in religious and demographic diversity throughout the West.
The results are cultural incoherence, radical weakening of specific human ties, and ever more single-minded emphasis on individual autonomy on the one hand and economic efficiency and social management on the other. Such tendencies follow from the ways of thinking described above, which are now considered simply rational.
They are also supported by powerful institutional and economic forces, since they put all social functioning and therefore all power in the hands of commercial and bureaucratic interests. All competing authorities—family, religion, local community, particular culture—are rendered nonfunctional, and the population becomes an aggregate of interchangeable human resources. Liberation thus turns out to be identical to the reign of billionaires and bureaucrats.
1.2 Coming crisis
These tendencies are likely, in spite of the public and private miseries to which they lead, to continue until practical circumstances make that impossible. But how long can people live with them?
Public thought today opposes exclusivity. That opposition is strong enough to override even the most basic concerns. Communities have boundaries, and specific culture exists through particularity, so at least implicitly current public thought considers community and culture as such oppressive and irrational.
Instead, we are to rely on expertise, bureaucracy, and commerce. Instead of family life we are to have fast food, day care, and therapists. The result is the weakening of basic aspects of human life in which people find meaning and purpose. This weakening of culture, human connections, and a sense of cosmic order also disrupts understandings of identity. People rely on these understandings to understand themselves and think about their lives productively, so as their identities become subjective, fragile, and nonfunctional it becomes harder for them to think productively about themselves and their actions.
These tendencies do enormous damage to private life. How can children grow up, for example, when there is no idea of normal adult life? And what can marriage be when there is no settled and realistic idea of what men, women, husbands, wives, and the marital community should be?
Putting private life aside, mutual loyalty and public spirit have no evident basis in the atomized social world now coming into view. And without such things, citizens will have little reason to stand by each other in hard times, or public officials to work for the common good rather than their private interests.
What cannot go on will not go on. A society of increasingly nonfunctional people with few motives to cooperate that transcend private interest is not going to last. Even so, it is impossible to predict when the final crisis will come. Everyday life has enormous momentum, and the collapse of an illusion or bursting of a financial bubble takes longer than those expect who see it for what it is. Also, the current system has shown itself remarkably adaptable, in part because of its enormous wealth. But if it has intrinsic tendencies that really are unsustainable, because it buys immediate power at the expense of overall rationality, the longer the delay the more complete the wreck will be
But what then? Fascism, the irrationalist attempt to impose social unity on some crude basis through simple power and propaganda, is sometimes suggested as a possible outcome. It seems unlikely though that when the time comes non-market and non-bureaucratic connections will be strong and widespread enough to give fascism anything to work with. Instead, we are likely to end up with a neo-Levantine society that carries on life through networks and local communities based on primary human ties—family, tribe—that reconstitute themselves when other ties fail, and perhaps to some extent through criminal mafias, as in the former Soviet Union.
That will mean violence and a radical decline in civilization as people withdraw into insular communities that maintain a certain coherence through refusal to engage others. Already we see signs of such a development in the rise of political correctness, the growing ethnic rancor, and the great difficulty of productive public discussion among people with substantial differences of opinion.
2 What to do?
As Catholics and citizens who care about the well-being of our ecclesiastical and secular communities we need a response that offers more hope. But what?
One possible response is that the future is unforeseeable, and the Gates of Hell will not prevail, so why not take what comes and trust in Providence? So forget about grand strategy, this approach tells us. Even when times seem bad, all things continue to work together for good for those who love God, and every situation is an opportunity to live out the Gospel. Christ transforms culture, and he can transform even a commercial, bureaucratic, and seemingly chaotic postmodern culture like our own. He can turn the indifference and rancor of social atomization into the universal inclusiveness of love. So why not work toward that?
But man is social, and he attaches himself to particulars, so the vision of an absolute secular universalism redeemed by universal love does not seem workable as a political or religious vision. The Church trusts in God but also believes in prudence, and does what she can pastorally to promote favorable settings for growth of the Catholic life among ordinary people with ordinary needs and weaknesses. To the extent the current situation threatens our faith and that of others we should withdraw from it, just as we should avoid occasions of sin and pray, as in the Lord’s Prayer, not to be put to the test.
Our first duty is love of God. From a practical standpoint that requires a focus on worship and our own beliefs and conduct—are we pointing in the right direction?—and thus on the communities in which such things can be developed and sustained. So it is imperative for the Church to maintain herself as a Christian community that is both universal and coherent, and to foster particular communities in which Catholics can carry on Christian lives without constant calls on heroic virtue.
If Catholics go home from Mass and spend the rest of their time awash in pop culture in settings that trivialize religious concerns and insist on perverse conceptions of right and wrong, the strong will no doubt survive. Not all of us are strong, though, and sink-or-swim cannot be the right approach for the Church to take toward her members.
So we need to disentangle ourselves from a society and culture that points us away from God. But what is needed, and how far should we go? “Benedict Option” is a fertile expression that could refer to several ways of dealing with the problem, all worth discussing. Saint Benedict had one version,1. Rod Dreher another,2. and commentators have presented still more. I will try to discuss a range of them, without attending too closely to the particularities of specific thinkers.
2.1 Benedict of Nursia
Benedict himself wanted to break all worldly ties so he could follow Christ and grow closer to God. To that end he went to the mountains to live away from distractions, and eventually established a rule whereby those who wanted to do likewise could live together productively, with each helping the others toward their common goal.
He did not, of course, originate such efforts. In the Bible God repeatedly calls people out of established ways of life to something separate, as when he called Abraham out of Ur and Moses out of Egypt.
Jesus likewise called his disciples to leave home, family, and possessions to follow him. The aspiration to break worldly ties is thus basic to Christianity. Christians are Christian within the Church, the Church aspires to be holy, and the Bible notes a resulting need for separation that is sometimes expressed rather sharply:
Know you not that the friendship of this world is the enemy of God?3
Do not love the world or the things of the world. If anyone loves the world, the love of the Father is not in him.4
Bear not the yoke with unbelievers … Go out from among them, and be ye separate, saith the Lord, and touch not the unclean thing.5
Experience had taught Benedict to take such warnings seriously. Nor did he lack guides. Especially in the East, there had long been solitaries and groups pursuing, in a more or less organized fashion, a secluded life of prayer, abstinence, and penitence. Benedict wanted to follow in their footsteps, and his famous Rule for doing so in community developed previous schemes of monastic life into a system that has proved enduringly useful.
2.2 A newer “Benedict Option”
Such is the “Benedict Option” of Saint Benedict of Nursia. But most current discussion relates to a “Benedict Option” understood in a figurative sense, as a way of life that allows family life, ordinary occupations, and other everyday connections and activities to go forward while holding mainstream secular life at enough of a distance to maintain Christian habits and understandings.
The two are, of course, quite different. But in an age that hates the thought of separation from the social order in the way men once hated the thought of separation from God, there is a family resemblance that justifies speaking of them together. Both have to do with closeness to God and a better way of life in a community that attempts to turn away from the corruptions and distractions of the world.
The Church has always supported some degree of separation. In most respects, the early Christians lived in the same way as other people. They prayed for the emperor, sometimes held positions in the army and government, and accepted Roman authority within the limits of God’s law.
Even so, they carried on a way of life different enough and superior enough to that led by others to conquer the Roman world, and that required some separation. For example, it meant refraining from any semblance of participation in pagan worship. Since many things, such as popular festivals, were associated with pagan worship, that was a broad prohibition. Serious Christians also felt obligated to avoid many of the popular entertainments of the time: the theater, chariot races, and gladiatorial contests.
That was when the mainstream was much less intrusive than today. It was a world of peasants, artisans, small shopkeepers, face-to-face relationships, and education mainly at home or otherwise privately and locally. The Roman games and doings of temple prostitutes were not livestreamed everywhere. And the religious unity of the ancient city had long been lost. So life centered much more on the household and informal local communities, where Catholic understandings could carry weight even when Catholic numbers were few.
Today most practical activities are carried on through large formal institutions committed to anti-Catholic understandings. Large organizations that insist on celebration of every religion, way of life, and purported family form as equivalent to every other dominate education and employment. Electronic media that disintegrate close social connections penetrate everywhere and shape our relations to our fellows.
If we are immersed in those settings, most of us will get swamped and go where the current carries us. For a setting in which people who are not invulnerable heroes of the Faith can live a life closer to their aspirations, we need to break with common ways of doing things and establish what almost amounts to a parallel society, with its own system of education, sources of livelihood, and informal social life.
There is evidently a need for something of the sort. Without tradition and culture life loses form and becomes stupid, brutal, and aimless. But tradition and culture are always particular, tied to particular community, and dependent on boundaries that define and guard them. To carry on a Christian life in an anti-Christian society, Christians must therefore form their own communities with a certain degree of separateness. That is part of what it means, as a practical matter, to say the Church is necessary to what we are as Christians. So the future of the Church seems certain to include a emphasis on some form of the Benedict Option.
3 Background
I have mentioned how both monastic life and some degree of separation for Christians generally go back to the early Church. But such efforts seem to be part of all higher religions. An ideal of life based on a direct relationship to ultimate reality will always sit awkwardly with the actual system of life that grows up in everyday society. Cities are notoriously full of distractions, and we cannot expect Alexandria, Rome, New York, or Ashtabula to be Christian in more than a very faltering way. And modern communications spread the same distractions and corruptions everywhere.
3.1 The call to holiness
Many people despair of making spiritual progress in such settings, so they separate themselves, leaving home, property, and human connections, to focus on the one necessary thing. Others withdraw in a more limited way, holding themselves and their families aloof from aspects of the world around them. The effort has sometimes succeeded and sometimes failed, but overall it has been enormously fruitful, often in unexpected ways.
3.2 How separation develops
Some such strategy simply reflects how almost everyone lives. Our way of life grows out of our understanding of what matters and how the world is, and we naturally try to promote cooperation and reduce misunderstandings and disputes by associating with people who have similar habits, attitudes, and beliefs and so share our way of life.
People with similar interests form clubs. Scholars join together in colleges and universities. A large city is likely to have a Chinese neighborhood and a hipster neighborhood. And the British and American press ran a number of sympathetic pieces a few years ago on the plight of people who found they had neighbors who voted for Brexit6 or Trump.7 Some were thinking of moving elsewhere. How could intelligent and sensitive human beings, they wondered, feel at home in such a setting?
So it is entirely natural for religious groups to set themselves off in some way. That begins without special effort or intention. People find they like some things and do not like others, so they pursue the former and avoid the latter. They do not like the spectacles in the Colosseum or on TV, so they go square dancing instead. They think the schools are bad, and look for something better for their children.
As they do those things they naturally link up with like-minded people who feel the same and make similar choices. If they like anything at all they join a fan club. If they decide it is the key to getting their lives in order they form a support group. The more humanly important the object of their interest, the more such choices come to determine their network of social connections and overall way of life.
As time passes standards and boundaries develop that mark such people off as a separate community. They become aware of themselves as such and develop ways of discussing common concerns and pursuing common interests. Others come to view them as a separate group, and they acquire a certain position in the world, especially in a somewhat fluid society like our own.
All that is simply the natural consequence of people adopting an ideal and way of life. It is the way, for example, that monastic communities developed historically out of collections of individuals who independently decided to abandon worldly ties and pursue a more holy life. How could such things not happen?
Most of us want to avoid conflict and unpleasantness, so the things such people care about, or at least their desire to pursue them, are likely to end up being treated with respect, at least if their numbers are substantial, their lives seem orderly and productive, and they do not interfere too much with their neighbors’ preferences.
After all, why would normally peaceable people oppose them? They express the freedom, community, and autonomy everyone praises today. If people want to celebrate diversity, as they claim, they should celebrate when some go off to follow their bliss in company with others. That should especially be so when the community is always open for other like-minded people to join and for the disaffected to leave.
And from the standpoint of Catholic social teaching, even apart from specifically religious considerations, such communities are a realization of subsidiarity, the principle of making life more participatory by carrying it on as locally as possible.
4 Christian objections
Even so, people today object. In part that is because people do not like their own way of life called into question, but the objections go beyond that. Many Christians are inclined to view leaving the world to find God and save one’s soul as self-centered and even self-contradictory. Did God not make the world, and does he not love it? So if you want to know God and save your soul, why not serve the poor, the cause of peace, or some other aspect of the social good?
But such an outlook is too narrowly utilitarian. It is reminiscent of the modern project of maximizing satisfactions, and perhaps even Judas’s protest against wasting on a religious observance what could be given to the poor. It also ignores the ways in which all lives are intertwined. God sometimes puts aside everyday utility, and acts through remote causes, so why not his worshipers?
4.1 Monasticism
Human life is complex, and we affect each other in a variety of ways. Jesus and the early Christians did not try to reform the Academy, involve themselves in running the synagogues, lobby the emperor for social reform, or engage culturally with the shows at the Theater of Marcellus. Nor did Saint Francis run for the governing board of the local cloth merchants’ guild or try to get a position at the University of Bologna. All those people concentrated on God, lived their lives accordingly, founded brotherhoods, and presented their views and way of life when opportunity offered. By doing so they presented an alternative to the contemporary mainstream that drew people because of what it was. And that changed the world.
Benedict’s project benefited the world immensely even by the most narrowly practical standards. It made monasteries more stable and functional, improving the lives of monks and giving examples of ordered and productive community to a chaotic world. And the monasteries that followed his rule helped civilize all Europe. They preserved classical learning, provided charity and hospitality, developed better agricultural, industrial, and organizational techniques, and provided a nucleus of literate and civilized living in a time of forgetfulness and barbarism. Put it all together, and what man of action ever did more to improve the world than Benedict did, even without specific intention?
And in any case, we are called to love God first and we cannot live other people’s lives for them. The attempt to do so shows a certain lack of respect for them. Each must choose his own way, and if yours solves your problems others will notice and some will find the example useful. So few things can be more helpful to others than showing the reality of a better way of life. It can help even those who do not or cannot follow it, since its existence fills out their understanding of what life can be, and that can change their world in subtle but powerful ways.
Something like monasticism is necessary to Christianity, just as pure science concerned only with truth is necessary to applied science and technology. Its sharpness of focus points it in a particularly striking way toward ultimate realities that should always guide the Church, and that kind of reminder is very helpful to Christians involved in secular life.
The need is especially great when life is either too hard or too soft. When worldly life is brutal and disordered, and the Church is persecuted, she needs a place where she can catch her breath, collect her thoughts, and remember her ultimate goal. And when it is easy and prosperous, so that believers grow worldly and mediocre, and the Church as an institution grows compromised by her connections to worldly powers, she needs to have examples of heroic dedication to her fundamental vision.
Today we in the West have something of both problems. Intellectually, and at the level of informal human relationships, life grows disordered, inhuman, and anti-Christian. But it is physically soft for most people, certainly by historical standards, with endless opportunities for distraction, and powerful forces within the Church support assimilation to secular society.
So there is reason to expect—to the extent such things can be predicted—a revival of monasticism. There is a need for the serenity and focus it can provide, and at some point people will hear that need and answer the call. Some see signs of such a development already, although as with all beginnings there is also skepticism as to its value and how best to proceed.
Such considerations, of course, leave out the benefits to the world of prayer and contemplation. Catholics have traditionally taken such things seriously, and people who do not will not be able to see the full value of Benedict’s way of life.
4.2 Separation generally
There are also objections to a generalized Benedict Option, which is basically the recognition that Christians will inevitably become more separate as the world becomes less Christian.
4.2.1 Escapism?
Why does the idea bother some people so much? To some extent it is a matter of appearances. “Benedict” sounds exotic and antiquarian, while “Option” sounds optional. And Rod Dreher, a best-selling author, is also known for “crunchy conservatism,” which sounds like a post-hippy lifestyle choice for high-flown conservatives who think they are too good for a mass consumer society. Put it all together and it sounds—misleadingly—like a self-indulgent escapist fantasy for bored middle-class people.
There is also a tendency among many Catholics, in line with the antitranscendental trend of modern life, to treat the secular world and its concerns and doings as the real world. That tendency has led, for example, to the widespread false belief8 that Saint John XXIII said he wanted the Second Vatican Council to “open the windows” of the Church and let in fresh air. It also contributed to the situation that led Saint Paul VI to note that the Council had “felt the need … almost to run after [the society in which the Church lives] in its rapid and continuous change.”9
With that attitude, the Great Commission, the obvious threats of current cultural tendencies to the Church and a tolerable social order, and the current emphasis within the Church on social involvement in partnership with other actors lead many people to view any “Benedict Option” as equivalent to refusal to engage the world around us because it is stressful to do so. It seems to them a call for retreat, indifference, and self-involvement.
And finally, it is worth noting that the “Benedict Option” of any sort is not for everyone. Missionaries like Saint Paul do not live it, although the communities they establish may.
4.2.2 Love of neighbor?
But the Benedict Option would not mean complete disengagement from the world. Everyone involved in the discussion recognizes that we are called to love our neighbor. But love means willing our neighbor’s good, not joining in everything he does.
Current tendencies are making it harder and harder for Catholics to participate in general social institutions and practices. How can we be physicians, for example, if physicians are required to participate in abortion? Or participate in electoral politics more than symbolically, if effective participation requires signing on to current views of sex and the sexes?
What we can do in such matters we should do. But it seems likely that Catholics will have to put most of our social efforts into educating the public—otherwise known as evangelization—and providing services directly and often informally.
That would continue political engagement by other means, in a way that carries forward the mission of the Church. The political goal of such activities would be to change the common understanding of the good life and society. To that end we need at least implicitly to offer alternatives to projects like modern social democracy, which aims to serve man by integrating all social life into a system that refers to nothing beyond him, rather than working with such efforts on their own terms.
The most debilitating feature of public discussion today is its extreme narrowness. Only a small range of views are allowed to play a role, and basic human realities are left out of consideration. Otherwise, how could political correctness be possible, or transgenderism rise so quickly to a position of such authority? And how could the Supreme Court find that a desire to injure people is the only possible motivation for supporting the traditional and natural definition of marriage?10
The range of acceptable discussion badly needs expansion and shifting. Catholics will not move that process along by always concentrating on “what brings us together” and showing the dominant powers they can work with us on their own terms. If the only intransigents are progressives, then giving way to them will always be the fast and easy way to social harmony. Why is that a good thing?
The technocratic conception of life that dominates public thought today makes it difficult for people to understand anything about the Catholic view. The healthcare system, for example, is becoming a system for maintaining and managing human resources for the sake of the economic system—that is why death management is growing in importance—and for providing biotechnological consumer goods like babies for people who want them and abortions for people who do not. Economic rationality and consumer choice make that tendency seem unquestionable, and people even dress it up in the language of rights.
Under such circumstances we need consistently to demonstrate the Catholic view in practice, so people can see what it is, and explain it in terms generally accessible. That is the most important thing we can do in public life today. The purpose would not be immediate effectiveness but clarity in season and out of season, which is necessary for ultimate success. Anything else would corrupt our efforts and make it impossible to get our point across.
The ordinary laity would lead publicly with regard to practice, clergy and scholars with regard to explanation and argument. A defense of marriage and family, for example, would first and foremost involve the laity getting their lives in order with the support of a genuinely pastoral clergy, one that also respects in their own lives the principles behind Catholic family doctrine. And Catholic scholars, clergy, and gatherings of bishops would place far more emphasis on ways of communicating unchanging Catholic understandings to the laity and to an uncomprehending world that no longer recognizes natural law.
When we can show a way of life that others have good reason to aspire to, and are truly ready at all times to give every one that asks “a reason for that hope which is in us,”11 we will be far more able to speak effectively to ordinary people, who spend their lives in the same world people have always lived in and are ready to believe that their social betters do not know all the answers. If we can do so that will be the greatest contribution we can make as Catholics to the social world.
5 General objections
However, the most basic objection to the Benedict Option is that the whole proposal goes with the idea that Western life today is fundamentally misdirected: our ideals are degraded, our way of life increasingly nonfunctional, our experts ignorant of the things they most should know. Why should people who basically trust the modern world and believe it is progressing in the right direction approve?
Those who lead public discussion believe that only recently have we begun to break free of the horrors of the past, for example through the current emphasis on equality and human rights—including some very novel ones. That being so, they are naturally appalled by fundamental rejection of current tendencies in the name of traditional religion, especially when that rejection might affect actual social life. They find it misguided, dangerous, and presumptively ill-intentioned.
Many within the Church share such views. The Second Vatican Council called for greater openness to the modern world.12 And many influential clerics see a very large overlap between the demands of the Faith and those of secular political progressivism.
5.1 Exclusion
Much of the worry has to do with exclusivity. The Benedict Option wants strong local community that is somehow set off from the world around it. That means boundaries and exclusions other than those required by the liberal order, which are now considered socially and morally dubious. It also wants to be traditionally Christian, and so respectful of natural law regarding the family. By current standards that makes it sexist, patriarchal, homophobic, and transphobic. (As a community based on commitments and personal connections, it also restricts freedom, so that is another worry.)
Nor would the communities escape accusations of racism. Many have said that the most segregated hour of Christian America is eleven o’clock on Sunday morning. That is a stubborn tendency in even the most liberal denominations, so much so that some mainstream commentators have begun to think it is connected to positive things about congregational life.13 It is doubtful that such reflections will lead to significant rethinking of a principle that is as fundamental to current public thought as inclusiveness, but they are worth pursuing.
In concept cohesive local communities that are fundamental to the day-to-day lives of their members might be held together simply by a common faith that is equally available to all. That principle is what held the earliest Christians described in Acts 2 together in a sort of primitive communism.
Ideally Benedict Option communities would possess a degree of holiness that would make something similar possible. As a practical matter, though, such a situation would not last very long, any more than it did for the early Christians. One point of the Benedict Option is that Christians have many weaknesses. A consequence is that influences other than the common aspiration to sanctity would be needed to hold them together and keep them functional as communities.
Monastic vows impose a discipline that can help overcome human disagreements and contrariness, but they are not for everyone and do not suit family life. And religious cults rely on means that seem inadvisable, such as extreme isolation, thought control, and the mystique of the leader.
But what then? At the very beginning of his Politics,14 Aristotle tells us that human communities naturally arise out of the primordial community of the family, so what works best for most people to form them into communities are family ties and related connections—blood and marital relationships, ties of friendship, common history and culture, and so on.
So the renewed local communities would not be altogether inclusive and multicultural. If successful they may drift toward some degree of what progressives would see as a more or less Christianized tribalism. For an extreme example of what that can mean, consider the Middle East, where there are long-established local religious communities that are fundamental to the day-to-day lives of their members but the tribal aspects of which often seem to dominate the religious ones.
The comparison is not pleasing, but what can be done about it? Utopia is not available, and every possible society has features that can lead to serious problems. That is one reason prudence is necessary in political matters.
A movement toward particularity is now inevitable. The abstract simplicity of basic liberal principles means that liberal society cannot be kept from going to extremes. It always progresses, and its continuing development breaks down the connections and excludes from public life the goods that people live by. But life must go on, man is social and religious, and if the only way he can live in a setting friendly to what he holds dear is to weaken his loyalty toward an ever more hollow public order and turn toward something more particular, he will do so.
If we do not have the Benedict Option we will have gated communities, political fanatics, and ethnic separatism. Instead of a Christian particularity that accepts ultimate loyalty toward something substantive and universal, and so includes a durable basis for outside engagement that keeps separation from collapsing into absolute communal egoism, we will have particularity that rejects such loyalties and sees them as self-betrayal. And that would leave very little hope for a peaceful and humane world.
5.2 Legal issues
A consequence of the foregoing is that there are bound to be legal problems with any sort of Benedict Option. A Catholic hospital would not offer assistance in dying, a Catholic school would not teach the equivalence of all religions, and a gay Somalian atheist would not be as much at home in a setting influenced by traditional Latin-Rite Catholicism as a conservative Irish Catholic who is married with eight children. How could such things be allowed in the new world now coming into view?
So it seems likely that the Church’s chief practical political efforts in the foreseeable future will involve defense of her own freedom against claims that her practices and doctrines have the effect of oppressing other people and even her own members. That defense will have to cover the freedom of Catholics to speak out, live their faith, run their affairs, educate their children, and provide charitable services.
The First Amendment provides some protection for the freedom of the Church, but it cannot be relied on, since the Constitution must be interpreted and the intellectual background against which it is interpreted is changing. More and more, influential thinkers are losing their commitment to special protection for speech and religion. Both can be harmful, and they see nothing special about religion other than what they consider its irrationality.15 So it seems likely that such protections will tend more and more to be interpreted in a minimalist way.
That means we will have to engage in constant political action to prevent straightforward application of principles like inclusiveness that are now considered utterly compelling.16 That will not be easy, and it will be necessary for Catholics to know our convictions and why we hold them, and be ready to stand up and argue for them steadily and articulately in the face of opprobrium. A Church that cares about her faith, her people, and the world would emphasize developing such qualities in her clergy, scholars, and other public figures. And she would take special care to avoid undercutting the efforts of her advocates by blurring the clarity of her doctrine.
6 Challenges
Legal persecution is not of course the only difficulty Benedict Option communities will have to deal with.
6.1 Social
It is hard to make a break with customary ways of doing things. To some extent Benedict Option communities would arise gradually, through abandonment of some connections and practices and emphasis on others, and through the development of new habits among networks and circles of friends. But the contemporary world is intrusive, so people would need conviction and endurance, especially at first. And there is likely to be a need for definite rules. Some communities would remain a bit vague in their outline and demands, and rely solely on the active commitment of their members, but many would eventually feel a need for specific standards to protect and support their way of life. That kind of transition can be bumpy.
Among other things, they would need to find ways to counter the world’s intrusiveness. We assimilate to our environment, and, as Saint Paul notes, “evil communications corrupt good manners.”17 So they would need to limit—for example—their use of electronic media and participation in the virtual worlds they create. The Church accepted the Greek and Roman classics because of what is good in them, but HBO is not Homer, and the Church rejected a great deal of Roman popular culture. Can we imagine what her response would have been to cable TV and the Internet?
And, of course, the communities will have to make their own internal life attractive, in the ways communities have always found to make community life attractive. Once texting and online videos are mostly off the table it should not be difficult for them to find their way to something more engaging. Festivity and friendship spring eternal in the human heart.
6.2 Economic
It is likely to be a struggle finding ways to make a living without offering a pinch of incense to Caesar. Paul could make his living as a tentmaker without hiding his beliefs. Employees of large companies and other institutions are becoming less and less able to do so.
The problem becomes acute because of the scale and ambition of the modern state. The Roman state was tiny by modern standards, and Christians did not pose an immediate practical problem, at least until they became numerous and influential enough to seem a threat to Diocletian’s vision of a glorious restored empire. So in spite of sporadic persecution they were mostly left alone to live as they chose and to influence or persuade others to their way of life.
Our modern Caesars have far more ambition and resources, and they are involved in all aspects of life. Anti-discrimination laws make it impossible to give a business organization of any size a specifically Catholic identity, for example by preferring employees who are committed to Catholic principles, or even to prefer natural law understandings of human relations in providing employee benefits. Indeed, they are forcing large organizations to adopt implicitly anti-Catholic identities. So Catholic business will have to be small and mostly informal, perhaps taking the form of networks of independent contractors. That requirement fits the emphasis on local and community life, but it will have a financial cost.
Possibly Christians will come to concentrate on the trades and become plumbers, electricians, auto mechanics, and so on. The pay is generally good, there is always a demand, and there seems less spiritual slavishness than in white collar occupations. The heresy hunters will still be with us, and may eventually feel called upon to do something about the ability of “extremists” to find refuge in such occupations, but we can only do our best.
We will also need to reduce our wants and restore as much as we can of the practical functions of the home. That will reduce our need for money, and that can be educational as well as liberating. Wealth lets you be stupid, but it takes thought and skill to make a little go a long way.
Functional households will have other benefits as well. Specialization, the industrial system, and the cult of the expert are destroying the competence and self-government of individuals, families, and local communities. Home and family are the school of such things. Homeschooling, now often a necessity, makes the household and local networks far more serious enterprises. So do gardening, do-it-yourself, home-based business, the arts of homemaking, and all the other ways people provide for their needs by engaging directly and practically with the world around them.
6.3 Intellectual
If sink-or-swim is bad for ordinary Catholics, it is a thousand times worse for their children, so we will need schools that are authentically Catholic. We also need more universities, publications, and other cultural institutions that are the same. And we need more intellectual interest on the part of ordinary Catholics. Our current situation has intellectual roots, we need to be able to respond effectively at that level, and we cannot rely exclusively on other people’s thoughts in doing so. A Catholicism that makes cozy with the modern outlook simply cannot do the job.
In recent decades Catholic institutions have tended to assimilate to the world around them. There are Catholic homeschoolers who would like to send their children to the Catholic school across the street but cannot in good conscience because the education on offer is not actually Catholic. That tendency needs to reverse, and it seems likely to do so in the coming years, at least for the institutions that continue to matter.
The reasons are intellectual, cultural, and educational as well as specifically religious. Before the Second Vatican Council many people complained about the narrowness of the Catholic ghetto. The idea seemed to be that the life of the world was going on much more outside the Church than within her, and the Church should throw open her doors and windows and go where the action is.
That strategy failed to improve Catholic intellectual and cultural life, which has gone downhill along with the secular culture. Rejecting natural law, adopting a pragmatic attitude toward truth, and making choice the highest good is not a recipe for true or productive thought. The conversion of Saint Augustine came at a time when the exhaustion of classical culture had made the Church the natural home for intellectual life. If we are right that the Church has a better grip on reality than today’s secular culture, the same seems likely to happen again.
6.4 Spiritual
A Church largely made up of Benedict Option communities will be unable to rely on wealth, power, prestige, or social position. She will thus be rather like the early Church. That will have some benefits, since it will increase the commitment involved in membership and focus attention on the Church’s essential nature. Members will be members because they want what only the Church can provide: God incarnate and eternal life.
But a more devoted Church will require overcoming stubborn ecclesiastical vices. She will, of course, have to reject the world as a standard. But doing so can lead to a tendency to treat ourselves as the standard. Pompous self-will is hard to root out of any organization, and cultishness is hard to avoid in small self-selected ecclesial communities with an outlook radically at odds with the rest of society.
What the Church will need to overcome these faults is what she always needs: sanctity. Sanctity requires the selflessness that sets us free and allows us to see reality, but it cannot be attained without daily self-denial. All this sounds very difficult, a job for saints or at least those who seriously aspire to become such, but that is what is needed now. The Church depends on her saints. As the ark of salvation in a less and less livable world, she will more than compensate for the effort and sacrifice. May many of us be ready to do what the times require.18
7 Outlook
In spite of its triumphalism liberal modernity is neither eternal nor invincible. The attempt to transcend nature, history, and tradition through technology cannot succeed, since those things remain basic to human life. But they are not self-sufficient, any more than the human will and modern natural science are. To accept them as legitimate authorities we need to see them not as brute facts the world has thrust on us but as part of something larger and friendlier to human concerns. In the long run, that means supernatural faith, together with a community that is its bearer. Without that there can be no escape from the black hole of modernity. That is one reason among many that extra ecclesiam nulla salus.
But where is the Church going today? Beyond the mediocrity and corruption there are counter-movements and signs of new life—some evident, and some invisible to people who spend too much time reading weblogs and Twitter. No doubt there are others that are hidden from almost everyone. “The kingdom of God,” we are told, “cometh not with observation.”19 And, as always, the Church remains an oasis of life in a desert.
The Church needs reform at all levels, but she and the faithful will eventually do what they need to maintain the integrity of the Faith in adverse times. Groups as different as the Amish and Mormons have been able to thrive in America while maintaining their distinctiveness, and we too will make our way. What works for us will no doubt evolve through trial and error, with different people finding different solutions. Saint Benedict presents one form of the Christian life, Saint Paul another, the congregations to which Paul ministered yet another, and the groups Rod Dreher describes in his book still more.
However alarming trends may be we should remember that evils conflict with each other, so we are not going to get all of them at once. Future developments and even evils may help us maintain our freedom as Catholics. The demographic diversity that seems almost certain to continue increasing in a globalist age will involve the growing presence throughout the West of people who are not Western liberals20 and also want to live in their own way. And the inefficiency, irrationality, and corruption produced by an ever more incoherent culture is likely to make enforcement of official principles like transgenderism hit-or-miss, and generate a demand for something better among ordinary people.
From a natural standpoint, what works wins, and what cannot keep on will not keep on. So even from that perspective the Church and her vision are likely to prevail over her modern opponents. But insanity can be enormously destructive before it destroys itself, so there are going to be storms and losses on the way. The Barque of Peter needs to prepare for them, and some form of the Benedict Option seems a necessity for keeping her seaworthy.
References
Aristotle. Aristotle’s “Politics”: Second Edition. English. Ed. by Carnes Lord. Second edition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, Mar. 2013. isbn: 978-0-226-92184-6.
Benedict of Nursia. The Rule of St. Benedict. English. Trans. by Anthony C. Meisel and M. L. del Mastro. Garden City, N.Y: Image, Sept. 1975. isbn: 978-0-385-00948-5.
Casa Santa Lidia. Vatican II: “Open the windows” – ? Not exactly… Dec. 2010. url: https://casasantalidia.blogspot.com/2010/12/vatican-ii-open-windows-not-exactly.html (visited on 08/21/2019).
CNA Daily News. “US bishops: Equality Act will hurt more than help”. In: Catholic World Report (Mar. 2019). url: https://www.catholicworldreport.com/2019/03/20/us-bishops-equality-act-will-hurt-more-than-help.
Dreher, Rod. The Benedict Option: A Strategy for Christians in a Post-Christian Nation. English. New York, New York: Sentinel, Mar. 2017. isbn: 978-0-7352-1329-6.
Kruse, Michael. “‘What Do You Do if a Red State Moves to You?’” en. In: POLITICO Magazine (2017). url: http://politi.co/2CL3XEl (visited on 07/30/2019).
Marty, Martin. Taking the Unitarian Universalist Diversity Crisis Seriously | The University of Chicago Divinity School. May 2017. url: https://divinity.uchicago.edu/sightings/taking-unitarian-universalist-diversity-crisis-seriously (visited on 07/30/2019).
Paul VI. Conclusion of the II Vatican Council: Speech at the last public session. Dec. 1965. url: https://w2.vatican.va/content/paul-vi/en/speeches/1965/documents/hf_p-vi_spe_19651207_epilogo-concilio.html (visited on 08/21/2019).
Ratzinger, Joseph Cardinal. Faith and the Future. English. San Francisco: Ignatius Pr, Mar. 2009. isbn: 978-1-58617-219-0.
Second Vatican Council. Vatican Council II Church in the Modern World: Gaudium Et Spes. English. New. Ignatius Press, Oct. 2004. isbn: 978-1-86082-280-3.
Shea, Christopher. “Beyond Belief”. en-US. In: The Chronicle of Higher Education (June 2014). issn: 0009-5982. url: https://www.chronicle.com/article/The-Limits-of-Religious/146971 (visited on 08/06/2019).
Supreme Court. US v. Windsor. June 2013.
Whitney, Karl. “Why Andy Martin, documenter of a changing Sunderland, has left his city”. en-GB. In: The Guardian (Dec. 2016). issn: 0261-3077. url: https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2016/dec/21/sunderland-stranger-home-town-brexit-andy-martin (visited on 07/30/2019).
Zhang, Chenchen. “The curious rise of the ‘white left’ as a Chinese internet insult”. en-GB. In: Hong Kong Free Press HKFP (May 2017). url: https://www.hongkongfp.com/2017/05/20/curious-rise-white-left-chinese-internet-insult/ (visited on 07/30/2019
Benedict of Nursia, The Rule of St. Benedict.↩︎
Dreher, The Benedict Option.↩︎
James 4:4.↩︎
I John 2:15-17.↩︎
II Corinthians 6:14-17.↩︎
Whitney, “Why Andy Martin, documenter of a changing Sunderland, has left his city”.↩︎
Kruse, “‘What Do You Do if a Red State Moves to You?”↩︎
Casa Santa Lidia, Casa Santa Lidia.↩︎
Paul VI, Conclusion of the II Vatican Council: Speech at the last public session.↩︎
Supreme Court, US v. Windsor.↩︎
I Peter 3:15.↩︎
For example, in Gaudium et Spes, Second Vatican Council, Vatican Council II Church in the Modern World.↩︎
Marty, Taking the Unitarian Universalist Diversity Crisis Seriously | The University of Chicago Divinity School.↩︎
Aristotle, Aristotle’s “Politics”.↩︎
Shea, “Beyond Belief”.↩︎
Consider, for example, the currently proposed Equality Act and the U.S. bishops’ response to it. CNA Daily News, “US bishops: Equality Act will hurt more than help”.↩︎
I Cor 15:33.↩︎
This discussion of spiritual issues in the future Church draws on then-Father Joseph Ratzinger’s 1969 address “What Will the Church Look Like in 2000,” printed in Ratzinger, Faith and the Future.↩︎
Luke 17:20.↩︎
Consider, for example, the use of “white left” as a Chinese Internet insult. Zhang, “The curious rise of the ‘white left’ as a Chinese internet insult”.↩︎