The cultural mandate, not the Benedict option
by Andrew Sandlin, Centre for Cultural Leadership.
Rod Dreher’s The Benedict Option: A Strategy for Christians in a Post-Christian Nation (an excerpt of which appeared in Christianity Today), has launched the latest Facebook-Twitter-blog-web battle among culturally oriented Christians. The Benedict Option (Dreher abbreviates it: Ben Op) is a “strategic withdrawal” according to which many conservative Christians, aggressive culture warriors since the 70s, now retreat into tight-knit communities to bolster their faith during our time of nearly unprecedented cultural hostility. Dreher argues that this culture is presently so influential and pervasive in its anti-Christianity that to refuse to withdraw from it relegates our children and grandchildren to “assimilation.” Our cultural foes are so vast and influential, that we just can’t expect to hold out against them. We’ve lost the culture wars, and we’d better adopt and act on a strategy to spend our earthly sojourn as the cultural losers we’ve become…
…There can be no doubt that the Ben Op is attractive to culture-war-weary Christians as well as to the community-entrenched faithful who long for a life lived with the likeminded and like-acting. But the Ben Op is wrong, and it will not work, and even if it could, it shouldn’t.
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