Many of the families who come together to form these communities believe they are being obedient to God or purer in faith. But what begins as a good desire turns into a measuring rod. Families begin comparing themselves to one another and to those outside the community. Who can be more rigorous, and hence more faithful? Soon these judgments begin to build a wall that insulates those inside the community from the world outside. One sees a rise in authoritarian behavior, paranoia, and an insular mindset. It even distanced families in the community from kin who were not.

I’d been grinding my own wheat flour for two years by the time I read Rod Dreher’s “Crunchy Cons” in 2006. A friend had given it to me because of my, shall we say, “Benedict Option” lifestyle. Winter red wheat berries are the best for bread baking, while the soft white ones produce a fine, velvety pastry flour—a tip for those interested in that route.

Life is a tale told through talk, taste, and touch. It is memory and destiny at once. A Christian might say it is death and resurrection, if you give your life you keep it. So before we get to Dreher’s new book, “The Benedict Option,” let me a little of my story.

Watching the President Clinton impeachment trial years ago changed my life. Sensing a call to do what I could for my country, I let go of my dreams of a quiet life in academia and went off to law school. I sought out mentoring by great constitutional law professors so I would eventually contribute to bringing the judiciary back to constitutional originalism.

By the time I was in my second year in law school, my life was unravelling. Law school is brutal. It is even more so for those who are married with families. Our culture can be a meat grinder, and battling it in the front lines of federal courts is even bloodier. I couldn’t have it all, and I couldn’t do it all. So I chose my family. This began a trajectory of increasing retreat and insularity that would lead to me (religiously) grinding my own wheat and policing my children’s speech for what I deemed to be affirmations of worldly popular culture.

“The Benedict Option” rightly tells the reader there is no salvation in politics, our culture has morally collapsed, and Christians have amalgamated their faith with American popular culture. Dreher believes American Christians’ only viable choice is what he has dubbed the “Benedict Option.” He uses the monastic Benedictine spirituality and way of life as a prescriptive template for all Christians.

This includes such measures as: stable local living in small intentional Christian communities—“the Christian village”; cutting back on pop culture consumption; orienting the family towards God; creating sacramentally vibrant worship; pulling the kids out of public school and educating them classically either through private school, home school, or co-op; practicing hospitality and Christian neighborliness; buying from other Christians even if it costs more; building Christian employment networks; refusing to compromise to satisfy the whims of the young; fighting pornography—the list goes on. In short: avoid vice, and take up virtue.

It sounds nice on the surface, but that’s not how it often works out in practice. This option, no matter what you call it, leads to gospel amnesia, not to a flourishing Christian culture.

My Family’s Experiment with a pre-Benedict Option

Soon after I left law school, I had our third baby, and we moved so my husband would not need to drive 70 miles through Los Angeles traffic to work. We changed denominations from a nominally conservative but doctrinally thin Protestantism to a more explicitly Reformed Calvinism. I did what is natural for a person who wakes up to the fact that she has neglected something precious—I overcorrected.

While learning about Reformed theology, we were introduced to the writings of pastors who were putting forth a very similar vision to the one Dreher offers in his book, though none called it the “Benedict Option” at the time. Sometimes it was referred to as “communities of like-minded Christians,” or as one community’s motto had it, “Simple, Separate, and Deliberate.”

Some had ties to neo-agrarianism. Many of the leaders we read had ties to the classical Christian education movement. Generally it went under different names depending on the pastor and community. Some even had created successful “ministries,” companies that sold products aimed primarily at home schooling parents and celebrating a life outside of twenty-first-century American culture.

We were in our early thirties. We wanted a faith for us and our children that could withstand the culture’s battering, intellectual and otherwise. Ultimately, our faith in such methods, and our journey in and out of this Benedict Option, exhausted our faith and estranged one of our children. I do not hold a blanket resistance against Christians building strong robust churches and communities, but this method is inherently flawed. It weakens rather than builds.

Benedict Option Communities Are Intrinsically Weak

We were particularly captivated by two of these Benedict-like communities, both deliberately founded in smallish cities in rural states with easy access to land for member families. We listened to recordings of their pastors and preeminent community members espousing the glories of life together in their churches and neighborhoods. We were hooked. We were convinced we had to go this route to survive degenerated American culture and raise godly children.

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