Today we are faced with a civilizational disaster, Dreher asserted. It is a comfortable collapse, but a collapse nonetheless. Now a new Benedictine rule is needed to teach Christians how to order their lives. We need practice for resilient and faithful Christian communities. No longer can we identify Christianity with the American Empire. We must examine and purge ourselves for a new mission and community, forming new Christians for Christ’s service.

Rod Dreher, conservative writer and commentator, addressed a Faith and Law gathering on Capitol Hill on Oct. 9 regarding his proposal of the “Benedict option,” which is his answer to the failure of Christians to recover Western and American culture following the social revolutions of the 1960s. It attempts to follow the strategy of St. Benedict of Nursia, who developed monasticism in Europe after the collapse of the Roman Empire in the West, and involves a measure of withdrawal by Christians from the world into intentional Christian communities.

Dreher holds that Christians now find themselves in a similar situation. The Judeo-Christian past, he said, is now in a “civilizational struggle.” There is no common authority; hence the culture war. He noted that British moral philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre has said that civilizational dissolution is quite possible. In this situation, “local forms of civility” are needed. There is now a lack of convictions in society, and we are waiting for a “St. Benedict” to appear. Benedict’s rule, Dreher noted, involved instructions to “live and pray fully united to Christ in community.” It involved no plan for the future, but did involve quiet, patient obedience and waiting. It involves moral reformation. It was out of these monastic communities that much of the heart of post-Roman, Christian Europe developed. The monasteries established by the Benedictines become larger communities, in some cases cities. Benedictine communities aimed, however, at seeking their own salvation, not that of the world. This effort ended up civilizing and Christianizing Europe.

Today we are faced with a civilizational disaster, Dreher asserted. It is a comfortable collapse, but a collapse nonetheless. Now a new Benedictine rule is needed to teach Christians how to order their lives. We need practice for resilient and faithful Christian communities. No longer can we identify Christianity with the American Empire. We must examine and purge ourselves for a new mission and community, forming new Christians for Christ’s service. Dreher noted that St. Benedict prescribed prayer and work, but work is not as important as prayer. It is through these new communities, the new Christian “village,” that future Christians will learn who they are and what it means to be Christians. But these new communities need stability, and mass communication and technology undermines community. The world of the mass media also undermines boundaries, and communities must have boundaries. Outsiders must not be allowed to disrupt communal life. Dreher here noted a serious problem with his proposal, that the need for boundaries and security requires religious freedom, which is currently under attack in the West in almost all its aspects, other than the performance of religious ceremonies.

The need for religious freedom may limit what is possible for any new Benedictine communities of the future, but it cannot limit our commitment to Christ or the attitude of faith and hope for the future that sincere conviction necessarily engenders. We must not be fearful but joyful and confident, Dreher said.

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