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Facing Reality

Rod Dreher
The American Conservative

A fundamental mistake people make in interpreting The Benedict Option is to think that I am counseling escapism. That’s not true. It’s rather that I believe that orthodox Catholics and other conservative Christians should understand very clearly that at best we are fighting a rear-guard action . . . .  We live in a post-Christian society, one in which a far more serious conflict than we’ve seen so far between Church and State is inevitable. To think that we’re going to win these conflicts because we can’t afford to lose them is the worst kind of magical thinking.

That doesn’t mean we can’t afford to fight.
It means that we can’t expect to win. A few years back, I spoke to a Christian lawyer who works on religious liberty cases. He told me that what most Christians in that pre-Obergefell time didn’t realize is that on the legal front, “We’re out of bullets.” If I remember the conversation correctly, his general point was that our side lacked a realistic sense of how difficult the legal environment has become for us.

I don’t know what’s going to follow liberal democracy, or what should follow liberal democracy. I care most about the health of Christianity, which can endure any number of regimes, as it has throughout history. I believe that orthodox Christians who genuinely believed that they are called by God to work in politics, in law, and in the military, should, in general, answer that call. But they have to ask themselves: who, and what, are they protecting with their service? That is, absent the discipleship and formation the Benedict Option calls for, what kind of church will we have?

Christians who have assimilated into the post-Christian, secular liberal order need no protection. They need conversion. This is a point that I cannot seem to get across to many Christian critics of the Benedict Option: that acquiring and exercising worldly power is an empty quest if the people have lost faith and virtue. Think about it: Even if an Angel of the Lord delivered from heaven the perfect scheme of government, and anointed a Philosopher-King to administer it, what good from a Christian point of view would that do if the people had apostatized?