On the events in Paris, Rod Dreher and the Benedict Option

jean rosenfeld:

November 15th, 2015 at 10:34 am

When events leave us reeling, the mind follows. But, in your spirit:

Similarly, the immigration issue of today (ca. 11M “illegals”) was born of the Central American wars and death squads during the Reagan administration. Refugees from the war in Salvador were the first “dreamers.” (We partially raised one in our home. He is now living in NYC–and achieved citizenship– after finishing college at Middlebury on scholarship, because public universities could not get federal matching loans to support him.)

Since the first World War until the current war, which some, including Pope Francis, are terming a third world war, massive movements of people seeking refuge and suffering the limbo of interminable displacement have characterized our era.
That refugees are swarming Europe almost a century after the fall of the Ottoman Empire should not surprise us. It is part of a larger, more persistent geopolitical phenomenon, in which several European states were complicit.

So, although I fear there are wolves among the sheep, we should take in those who are fleeing the upheaval resulting from our interventions, however well-meaning, in their world. And, in addition, we should also give permanent asylum to the dreamers and “illegals” who are seeking refuge from the ruined states to our south that have never recovered from our government’s proxy war against communism in Central America.

Cheryl Rofer:

November 15th, 2015 at 12:34 pm

I am aware of Rod Dreher only through secondary sources and occasional looks at his posts. I skimmed the one on the Benedict Option and may have missed a lot, but I don’t see a clear vision of what that option is. I also see that Dreher is Orthodox (probably Greek?), which explains my impression early in the piece that he agrees with Vladimir Putin on a lot of things.
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Now, all of that may be quite unfair; as I said, I only skimmed the piece. But there are some dangerous ideas going around, particularly in the Orthodox world, about the sinfulness of modernity and the need to withdraw from it, combined with what looks to me like a serious lack of charity, as in Dreher’s tweet about refugees. We must withdraw from this sinful world and make ourselves perfect. When you combine that with that lack of charity, it’s not too far to jihad in the sense that the perpetrators of Friday’s horrors in Paris probably understood it.
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Or Vladimir Putin, for that matter, although he is combining his Orthodoxy with a nasty nationalism. Which has been the fate of Orthodoxy in Russi like forever.

Grurray:

November 15th, 2015 at 4:14 pm

Dreher is a Greek Orthodox convert. The Benedict Option is an attempt to dress up and update old Evangelical concepts of Biblical and Ecclesiastical Separation, which amounted to self segregating from the greater community to preserve yout particular denominational doctrine.
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I don’t think it’s necessarily true that Orthodox in general are hostile to modernity, although I’m sure many find much under that category that can be criticised. I’ve met and known many, and they mostly embrace modern life, sometimes to extremes.
I do think it’s fair to say that many seem to have a dislike for the West. I’m not sure if it’s rooted in religion or culture or politics, but that hostility could certainly be leveraged into a doctrine of separation. If that is what’s going on then it’s a combination of interesting bedfellows.
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A better option, IMHO, than the Benedict one was put forth by Samuel Goldman, self described secular Jew. He proposes the Jeremiah Option instead
http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/what-would-jeremiah-do/
It may not immediately solve any refugee problem, but it’s more realistic cultural approach.

Daniel F. Bassill:

November 15th, 2015 at 5:12 pm

Hi Charles,

I followed your Twitter feed to this article because of the depth and perspective your articles offer. In this case I wanted to see how you might expand what seems like a two-part problem/discussion (European/capitalist/Christian/historical abuse) vs Middle East/Islam/ISIS/terrorism) into one that might also include what’s happening in Africa and other places around the world also suffering from terrorism, bad government, and Western exploitation).

As I skimmed the comments I saw a link to the “What would Jeremiah do?” article. While it seems to me that the writer was focusing on how refugees might assimilate, or be accepted, into Europe, I think this also might offer meaningful thought for White Christian Americans and Europeans who are becoming minorities in their own countries. Do they resist? Withdraw? Or apply the Jeremiah Option?” This might also apply to Black Americans who are fighting to keep their cultural identity, and perhaps confusing young Blacks who are trying to figure out how they grow up in this world.

Cheryl Rofer:

November 15th, 2015 at 5:14 pm

Thanks for the information, Grurray.
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There are a few fairly loud Greek Orthodox advocates against modernity like Dreher on the intertubes. And they make a big thing about their being Orthodox. I wouldn’t attribute their views to Orthodox believers in general, but when you add in Putin and his clergy, it does look like something of a trend.
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Dreher seems to deny in his article that the Benedict Option is a withdrawal from society, but a lot of what he said certainly sounded that way to me.
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The conflict between withdrawal and engagement will always be with us. I tend to do a little of one and then the other, but I’m not a believer, for whatever that’s worth. I also am fine with modernity – people keep doing the damnedest things, and that’s a source of amusement and amazement. I do have to differ with those who want to kill others or somehow press them into their agenda, though.

T. Greer:

November 15th, 2015 at 9:37 pm

I follow Dreher pretty closely and have watched him debate it with a few others. I have a great amount of sympathy for the project, though sometimes I wonder in Mormons don’t already do the things Dreher describes as Benedictine when asked to get specific.

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The B.O. is an immediate response to the culture wars. Dreher’s position is that conservatives have lost these wars, and that it is a complete waste of time and energy to try and get the rest of the country to follow traditional (read: 1830-1960) moral standards through political means–or indeed, through any means at all. We should accept that the battle is lost and focus instead of preserving our faith(s) and our culture(s) in this new environment. Implicit in this discussion is the assumption that America will soon be as hostile towards the deeply religious as they are towards racists today and that special measure will need to be taken to keep the faith alive in a world where the majority views towards your beliefs and lifestyle range from hate to ridicule.

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I would say that the B.O. is more an orientation than a set of discrete practices. Basically, its the idea that we need to create communities to preserve what is eroding in secular European/N. American culture. What these ‘communities’ mean is up to interpretation. On the one end you have folks who want to go the route of Hasidic Jews, on the other something not too different from Mormonism’s strong community building tied to active civic engagement. They are figuring it out as they go along, and Dreher encourages different models for different folks.

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Dreher has a F.A.Q. up that may be useful:

http://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/benedict-option-faq/

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I think this interview with an anonymous legal scholar gets down to the more nuts-and-bolts of how B.O. people are seeing things play out in the public sphere:

http://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/revisiting-prof-kingsfield-obergefell-religious-liberty/

Grurray:

November 16th, 2015 at 12:12 am

Here is the best explainer on Ecclesiastical Separation that I know of
https://youtu.be/ZBKIyCbppfs

Cheryl Rofer:

November 16th, 2015 at 1:49 am

Thanks for the references. I’m not much interested in what people who want to withdraw from the rest of us want to do right now, but I might be at some future time, and it’s good to know that such things exist.
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I guess I’m grateful that Dreher et al. aren’t arming themselves to rid the world of us heretics, but I feel sad that they feel they need to withdraw. I was fairly involved with Protestantism in the 1960s, and there was an openness there that seems largely to have been lost, except by a few old relics. It’s hard even to develop a conversation about it except among those of us who were there.
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The problem seems to come when a religion specifies a great many things about how one wears one’s hair and beard, what clothes to wear, a schedule for daily behavior, etc. And I guess I’m showing the attitude that Dreher wants to get away from, but it’s hard for me to see how that is essential to religion. I’m not against other people doing it, but where it conflicts with civic life, I’d like to see the decision go for what will benefit the most people. So if someone wants to legislate that I must cover my hair – no.

Charles Cameron:

November 16th, 2015 at 3:31 am

Hi Cheryl:
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I think Dreher is basically making a point that Donald Atwell-Zoll made quite a few decades ago, that if we’re headed into a new dark age, we might do well to have a contemporary equivalent of the monasteries to safeguard what’s worth safeguarding. I’m a bit of a hermit myself, my first mentor was a monk as was my first poet-love, etc, so I’m not temperamentally hostile to the idea.
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Naturally, different people will have different ideas of what that should include, and my own references include Walter Miller’s Canticle for Leibowitz, the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, the secular monasticism of Hesse’s Glass Bead Game, and the Buddhist reading of the Rule of St Benedict found in Benedict’s Dharma.
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What Dreher might make of that assortment, I don’t know.
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As to whether we’re headed into a dark age, an age of enlightenment, or more of what the Jesuit poet Hopkins calls “dapple” I also don’t know — I tend to think we’re in for further dapple, and indeed that dark tends to bring out the light, as light also sharpens the dark.
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But the future, like the past, is above my pay grade!

Cheryl Rofer:

November 16th, 2015 at 3:53 am

Thanks, Charles. Yes, he mentions going into a Dark Age, but I kind of skipped over that in my too-quick reading. And that makes some of the rest make more sense, although others have mentioned various sects that have built their own more-or-less separate worlds, and that interpretation isn’t entirely outside what Dreher is saying. He might think, for example, that I am living in the dark.
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I think that most of history is “dapple.” Part of the reason I didn’t get that business about a Dark Age is that I don’t interpret the Middle Ages that way, or think that even that “Middle Ages” is appropriate for a very dappled thousand years or so. If Dreher is looking at that as a model for a coming “Dark Age,” yes, a lot was lost when Rome collapsed. But a lot was also lost when Rome later collapsed the nascent questioning of its hegemony in the 13th century. Dapple.