Should the Church Retreat?
Revisiting The Benedict Option
Should the church retreat?
When the surrounding culture turns hostile to Christian life and values, and this shift in the surrounding culture is perceived as a threat to Christian life, Christians come out swinging. Christendom culture has disintegrated. Christians respond most often in two ways: a.) retreat, or b) culture wars.
The idea of “culture as a threat” is often dismissed by the “all culture is good” crowd. But I implore that crowd especially to take the “culture is a threat” fear seriously. It is what drives the MAGA culture wars Christians. But we shouldn’t dismiss the fear in our hastiness to dismiss MAGA as quickly as possible. The fear is real. Culture is a force that shapes “selves,” experience, desire, and human meaning. And if you take sin and evil seriously, as evident in the cultures surrounding us (in such things as misogyny, abuse, racism, etc etc), there’s no way the “all culture is good” approach can meet the challenges of our day. But this is a subject for another post and another day.
The Anabaptist approach to culture is often accused of responding to the fear with the retreat option. For many Anabaptists, the community of the church is the social space, where Jesus is recognized as Lord, where we live our lives out in His Kingdom, becoming His disciples, living in and engaging the world in nonviolent love. The church is a “contrast community” in the words of Hauerwas. But this too can turn into a “bunker” mentality. The church can become an enclave. And this can be perceived as a retreat from culture as opposed to an engagement into it. It can be used as an ecclesiology for fundamentalism.
Seven years ago, Rod Dreher put forth a version of this retreat motif, which he called the Benedict Option. It was a substantive proposal. It received massive attention among academics, pastors and the Christian reading public. Back then, I wrote a critique of it over at Christianity Today. Dreher’s Benedict Option was an attempt to “preserve” Christian culture, while refusing (or giving up on) governmental power to enforce Christian convictions on the rest of the culture (culture wars option). It was a very well thought out deeply historical version of the “retreat” option.
Dreher has had more than his share of oddities and culture studies missteps since he wrote The Benedict Option. But at a time when the culture wars option has taken center stage for Christians seeking to preserve a Christian culture (ala Christian Nationalism, Project 2025), perhaps it’s time to revisit Dreher’s proposal for the Benedict option?.
So what follows is my basic argument from back then. Examining Dreher’s gospel (soteriology), eschatology, and ecclesiology, I saw inadequacies. Which led to me proposing what I called the St Patrick Option. I think the St. Patrick option is a more compelling option today, than it was seven years ago. Read further and tell me if you agree?
Dreher’s Gospel?
For many reading Dreher’s book, there is no good news in The Benedict Option. Christians have lost the culture war in North America. The ways Christians in America have tried to change the culture have backfired. Indeed, even the church has been compromised. And so, for Dreher, Christians are in a heap of trouble in the West.
To some therefore, it might appear that Dreher’s Benedict Option has no gospel. But this is an overstatement. I think Dreher’s good news to Christians goes something like this: If we are faithful, we will survive this mess!
In the first chapter of The Benedict Option, Dreher gives an impressive summary of the intellectual history that has brought us to this point in North America. It relies on many of the authors I read in graduate school way back when including Hauerwas, Milbank, David Bentley Hart, Charles Taylor, Zygmunt Bauman, Phillip Rieff, Christian Smith and of course Alasdair MacIntyre (FYI I read many many other authors in grad school than these white men. These are just the authors Dreher draws from). Dreher nicely popularizes these thinkers to show us the historical factors that led us to this point in American culture.
This all leads to Dreher’s conclusion. Set up by these various historical factors, it’s now too late for Christians to try to fix the culture through the means so many Christians have been trying. We’re being overwhelmed. It’s time for Christians to withdraw. For Dreher this is the big news (if not the good news).
Dreher then goes on to argue that if we will withdraw, become faithful and get our act together, we can survive and flourish, calling the rest of the culture to see the way of Christ at work in our lives. It’s worth noting that Dreher is not telling us to withdraw for withdrawal’s sake. NO, the goal here is step back, survive, flourish as Christian communities, and then impact the culture with our witness. If there’s a gospel in The Benedict Option, this is it.
But is that a true gospel? Gospel is, by its nature, an announcement of something unforeseen, something God has done to overcome the world, something we didn’t expect or know before hearing the good news of what God has done in Christ to inaugurate a new world. Dreher’s message seems to be about preserving something old.
Dreher’s gospel doesn’t seem like a proclamation of God doing something dynamic and world-changing through Jesus Christ. Rather it’s Dreher calling on the church to withdraw from the culture to rebuild an older, in his view Classic, insulated culture, or as he puts it, “the restoration of Christian belief and culture” (p.50).
That means that Dreher already has an ideal version of culture in his views. His discussion about that seems unusually focused on sexuality and the nuclear family. And, while I agree that we should examine the American church’s self-expressivist and romanticist views of marriage, it’s as if Dreher is locked into some 1950’s version of gender roles and nuclear family. (Why does he use gender-excluding pronouns throughout the book?).
The worry for me here is that Dreher’s perception of the gospel says: “We have it figured out, this is what it looks like, come join us.” It’s a posture of preservation from a Christendom standpoint that seeks to preserve what it once had in the heyday of its power. It’s like golden age logic, and to me, that’s no gospel at all.
Dreher’s Eschatology?
Dreher’s book also has a second problem: It’s devoid of an eschatology. One might take a look at Dreher’s negative assessment of culture and think Dreher is practicing (what used to be called) dispensationalism (James K. A. Smith made similar observations in this piece back seven years ago).
Traditionally, dispensationalists have said that Jesus postponed the kingdom to the future. The world is heading to an Armageddon destruction, and we live in ‘the church age’ where we seek to pull as many people out from the coming doom of God’s judgement, after which the kingdom will come. Therefore let us retreat and hold serve while we wait out this mess.
Dreher’s association of The Benedict Option with Noah’s Ark and the Great Flood sounds strangely like dispensationalist end times teaching where the church becomes, according to Dwight L. Moody, a life boat and the world a wrecked vessel, and we are called to save as many as we can.
But even dispensationalism would say that God is in control and taking the world somewhere. Dreher doesn’t seem to have that? His book seems devoid of an eschatology. As a result, for Dreher, the task of the church seems to be to preserve for preserving sake. There seems to be no sense that Christians should cooperate and participate in what God is doing in the world in and through His people to usher in the Kingdom that God is bringing in Christ.
This eschatological void cannot help but shape a church to be defensive. It focuses the church on maintaining in the face of threats. It undermines the very witness we had hoped to accomplish in the first place with this strategy.
Looking to St. Patrick
And so with no gospel and a devoid eschatology we are left with a church incapable of mission. It all leads me to propose another option. Yes, I know. In response to Dreher’s Benedict Option, back seven years ago, there was Jamie Smith’s Augustinian Option, Mike Bird’s Zacchaeus Option, a Bonhoeffer Option —Heck, we even had the Fitch Option! But for the times we’re facing today I again prefer the option offered by St. Patrick of Ireland.
Whereas Benedict withdrew from a declining (yet established) Roman Christianity in Italy, St Patrick moved into Ireland, where there were no signs left of Roman Christianity. As opposed to retreating from a church losing its power, Patrick went humbly, giving up power, to be a missionary to pagans who had previously enslaved him
From Patrick’s communities, missionaries were sent (like Columba to Iona, Aidan to Lindisfarne, Ninian, Cuthbert) all over Europe. Again and again, these Irish missionaries took groups of twelve disciples to form communities of presence to all the dark places of Europe. They became present to people in the world. They believed the gospel, that God had made Jesus the Lord of the world, that He still works in the world by the Spirit.
Whereas Benedict became known for preserving Latin Scriptures (and other texts), these Celtic communities were known for translating their prayerbooks from Latin into the vernacular of the people. They famously illustrated these prayer books with the art and images of their various contexts. The presence of God infused their daily lives in the world. And through the Irish, some have said, all of Europe was saved. (The most popular of these works include Thomas Cahill, and George Hunter).
So I applaud The Benedict Option for teaching us the value of community and faithfulness, but, for this time, I suggest that the Benedict Option is in need of a Patrick Option. No doubt the role of the Irish in Christian history has been overplayed, but nonetheless, the example of St. Patrick shows what faithfulness and mission look like together in the forming of communities in Christ. For these times we need more than withdrawal, we need the faithful presence of the Irish. (For a more substantive treatment of this option for the church today see my Faithful Presence - link here).
What say you? Versus the ‘retreat option’, the ‘culture wars option’ and even the “all culture is good option”, can St Patrick offer an option from the cultural situation we (Christians) find ourselves in?
I love that someone has written about the Fitch Option.
One thing I’ve been coming back to is how much fretting there is about “the church” - namely in the US or the West, and what do we do with the sense of loss. For years, I was immersed in this conversation. But these days, when simply living, pastoring, in my community and on God’s mission - I have come to realize how uninterested the conversation is.
I wonder if we it is because we are a tiny church, and we have zero expectations for cultural power. Maybe it’s because I came to Christ at an immigrant church, where being a cultural minority was all we ever knew (even though we still somehow bought into the Christian right’s political narrative of some yonder year — which we were never even in America for!). Maybe it’s because we live in a place that’s been not only post-Christian, but pluralistic as long as I’ve been alive.
In any case, for that reason, I’m definitely more drawn to the St Patrick option than the preservationist mode of Dreher. I don’t know it well enough, but it sounds like there is no assumption of cultural power, but acts on the belief in the true power of the mustard seed looking power of God.
Part of me is skeptical though, was St Patrick really without cultural power? Seems like he has the backing of the power Western Church. But maybe I wrong!
Dreher’s option stems from the historian’s narrative that Benedictine communities were the means to save and then restore civilization. It follows the Enlightenment dominance of thinking that Greco-Roman civilization was the high point with Feudal Europe as a backwards middle time, and the Enlightenment recovering what had been lost. What that narrative misses (in addition to your turn to Patrick) is that the establishment of Benedictine monasteries was a top-down act of Pope Gregory. While I deeply value the Rule of Benedict, its ubiquity and impact was indebted to the legislation of Imperial style church leadership. It was the norm because the religious powers said so. Dreher clearly fetishizes that kind of authority and the civilization thesis (rather than “culture” as you are talking about).
I appreciate your turn to Patrick, not so much for the ways Celtic is used in spirituality circles as a kind of Christianity untouched by Imperialism, but because he signifies the Irish tradition of being sent. The greatest renunciation of the Irish monk is to leave the homeland for the sake of Christ. There is a letting go of familiarity (and even dominance) in Irish monasticism that I think we can find empowering in intercultural ministry.