Church: Where Are The Men?
by Rod Dreher, The American Conservative:
I had breakfast in Budapest this morning with an American academic on vacation with his family. We talked about the turmoil in the world; like me, he is a Christian. He has been working in the Baltic countries for the past few years, and said that those places are beginning to re-paganize. About the Christian churches in the West, he said that it feels to him like we are at the point of the downfall of the Kingdom of Judah, just before the Jews were taken to Babylon in captivity. He said that in those days, many false prophets appeared, telling the Jews what they wanted to hear: that God was going to give them victory. Jeremiah, though, came and said that no, because they had forgotten God, He was going to allow them to be taken into captivity, but if they were faithful, He would restore them after a time.
I told the professor that this is how I explain The Benedict Option to people: as advice for a church that is in the process of being taken into captivity, to help them remain faithful during this time of oppression. “We Christians are going to have to live somewhere between Jeremiah 29 and the first chapters of Daniel,” I told him, “where Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego served the king, but never forgot who they were, such that they were even willing to lay down their lives for God.”
The man and I talked for a bit about how unwilling so many pastors and church leaders are to confront the realities of these times. He told me that conservative Protestants like him — young Gen Xers and Millennials — were raised on Voter Guides, and have a reflexive hostility to the over-politicization of church life. That’s good to a certain point, he said, but they take it too far, and try to avoid anything controversial.
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