#benop

There never will be another Medieval subject. All of us in the Anglophone world see with liberal eyes and hear with liberal ears, and to some degree think with liberal minds: Indeed, the lament that we’re no longer Medieval is a comically typical liberal refrain (think of the Romantics, with their Gothic revivalism, or the pre-Raphaelites, with their knights in shining armor). The will to be Medieval subjects again is the desire to return to an age of faith, but this is not an option.

This will demand a distancing from the assumptions of capitalism and the all-powerful market, and it will indeed entail the risk that Christians will find themselves de facto excluded from some professions. Dreher – an Eastern Orthodox Christian and a prominent conservative blogger in the United States – is sharply critical of a Christian rhetoric that ignores the evils of public acquisitiveness and selfishness while castigating personal delinquencies. He points to the tradition of monasticism as a model for developing alternative community patterns – hence the reference to Benedict – and invites a close reading of the saint’s precepts for monks as a guide to the practical challenges of living in close quarters with others. What lies in the more distant social or political future is not for us to see; but for now, what we need is a community life that seeks to live and worship with integrity and hopes to attract and persuade by the quality of its mutual care and the fulfilment of its members.

There is something very postmodern about the proposal. It is indeed suited to virtual times in which negative relationships with communities can be defined by unfollowing and unfriending and positive associations signaled with “likes.” A Benedict Option assumes one can unfollow the mainstream, unfriend those that threaten family life, and “like” those who hold similar views.  It seems the proposal is much better suited to a Facebook page than a cultural blueprint for communities of believers.

If they honored the Bible more highly, they would appreciate that the Word of God will endure demythologizing, that the Word cannot be threatened by anything whatever given humanity to discover and know through any science or discipline of the world…. More than that, if the fundamentalists actually took the Bible seriously, they would inevitably love the world more readily, instead of fearing the world, because the Word of God is free and active in this world and Christians can only comprehend the Word out of their involvement in this world, as the Bible so redundantly testifies.

In a recent book about the speed of change in today’s technological society, the authors write that students who go to college to major in the field that offers the most jobs when they enter are often the very ones who lose out. By the time they graduate, the market has been glutted, and the real opportunities are elsewhere. Better, they say, to pick something few are doing and to get in on it in its early stages. When it comes to the real needs of the world, isn’t that exactly where our students are?

The long journey from a medieval world wracked with suffering but pregnant with meaning has delivered us to a place of once unimaginable comfort but emptied of significance and connection. The West has lost the golden threat that binds us to God, Creation, and each other.  Unless we find it again, there is no hope of halting our dissolution.

But here’s the thing: Thoughtful Christians have been critiquing this sort of individualism and the systems and structures that support it for decades. None of what Esolen, Reno, Dreher, and Chaput is saying is new. They are simply observing the same problems in a later stage of development and their warnings have been adjusted accordingly. But the problems they are seeing are quite old and the church has been talking about them for many years.

Basically, a progressive BenOp will look the same way Jesus' BenOp looked to the Pharisees: A community that embraces the unclean, privileges empathy over piety, isn't overly pious, and is the friend of sinners.