I wrote this essay/review after reading The Benedict Option by Rod Dreher in 2017. This tireless exponent of Christian Nationalism is suddenly worried about liberty in America. Or maybe his bank account. It was the worst book I read that year.
When you want to say the nation is going to Hell, you first need a villain. Then you need to say how that villain is going to ruin everyone’s lives. The central theme of The Benedict Option is Dreher predicting the end of Christian culture in America through gay rights and the gay agenda. Dreher is sure that Christian hegemony in America is over. The only option is to withdraw from life in corrupt America into intentional communities of those committed to real goodness.
The first question I have is, ‘Why will the gay agenda ruin our nation after it flourished with a long history of slavery, Jim Crow and betrayal of Native Americans?’ Is a nation really blessed by slavery and genocide and cursed by gay marriage?
America perpetrated the worst slavery in the history of the world on Africans. They were kidnapped and brought here in chains to be slaves until death for generation after generation. America had slavery with no hope of buying oneself out or getting free. The center of that slavery was the New Orleans slave market.
Dreher grew up in Louisiana and returned there to withdraw from life in big cities. He is in a state and a region with a horrible history of slavery, followed by 100 years of apartheid called Jim Crow. What could be worse than men who would buy and sell human beings, fight a war to keep their slaves, and then oppress their victims openly for a century after losing the war?
Every confederate battle flag represents unrepentant racism, slavery and murder. And yet, Dreher says, it is gay rights that will kill Christian faith in a way that Pride, Murder, Rape and Greed could not. Dreher says at the end of the book historians will wonder how a 3% minority killed a great nation like ours.
If America can perpetuate slavery longer than every civilized nation, break uncountable treaties, slaughter Native-Americans, allow Jim Crow laws in the south for a century, and then put a racist sexual predator in the White House with the support of 81% of "Christian" America, can the Gay agenda really trump everything else we have done? Dreher has his enemy.
Dreher begins the book saying he was led to the idea of withdrawal from culture by thinking of his son’s future from the moment he was born. The book has many instances of Dreher and other Christian parents making what he calls sacrifices for their children. Dreher writes as if parenting were the central Christian ministry. As a father of six, I would say parenting is one of the central delights and urges and vanities of the Human Condition. Can any parent really say that spending their time and money toward the success of their children is a sacrifice? Does working toward the success of my own children make me the equal of Mother Teresa caring for the poorest outcasts in a Calcutta gutter? No, it doesn’t. My bright, successful, funny children are a delight, they are not a ministry. And they in no way set me apart from the world.
I heard many idiots in focus groups and on the news say one proof that Trump was obviously a good guy because he is a good father whose children love him. Saddam Hussein loved Uday and Qusay. The worst Roman emperors were the beloved, spoiled children of previous emperors. Trump is, by his own words, a racist who is willing to grab other people’s children by the pussy. Parenting does not excuse pandering.
Dreher should know well that nothing ties a person to the world like having children. No actual Benedictine has kids. The withdrawal from the world with kids that Dreher posits is not a new monastic movement, but a gated community with spiritual decorations on the iron fence.
Compared to, say, Coptic Christians in Cairo and other believers facing danger and death, the Benedict Option like a military video game, allowing the out-of-shape, pale player to pretend he is a combat soldier while in the comfort of mom’s basement away from the blood and bullets of battle.
I would have called it the book the Benedict Fiction.
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