In 2017, author Rod Dreher wrote The Benedict Option: a Strategy for Christians in a Post-Christian Nation.

I’m not really a fan of Dreher. I find his writing to be whiny, his personality to be grating, and his claim to be a conservative to be dubious. One of my close friends refers to him seamlessly as The Insufferable Rod Dreher. I concur.

That said, I recommend The Benedict Option. I have also heard very good things about his latest offering, Live Not By Lies: a Manual for Christian Dissidents. In fact, Fr. Eckardt wrote about it recently.

When The Benedict Option came out, it was largely misunderstood by a lot of people in the LCMS. Some thought it was a kind of silver-bullet step-by-step program (proof of the LCMS’s tyranny of the bureaucracy). Others rolled their eyes at the idea of Christian community as an attempt to turn us into the Amish or a monastic community. Of course, many of these same moqueurs lived on a seminary campus for three years, immersed in the Bible, confessions, and patristic writings, with lives ordered by the centrality of the worship schedule of the chapel, study, time spent making lifelong bonds of brotherhood with seminarians and their families, and living a countercultural Logocentric and cruciform life, embracing biblical heteronormativity, an exclusively-male clergy, the order of creation in the family, and submission to the Word of God - not to mention putting on a black shirt with a white collar that confesses before the world that we who pursue this life are set apart from the world.

Seminary professors essentially live the Benedict Option, as their very homes, neighborhoods, employment, and day to day life are lived out in a tightly-knit Christian community that extends beyond the three years of campus life that is lived by the students. And this sense of community is a boon to both our professors and their students, which is to say, to our future pastors who are being formed for service.

Dreher came up with the title The Benedict Option based on philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre’s book After Virtue: a Study in Moral Theory, in which the author calls to mind the lifestyle of Christians living in the days of the Roman Empire’s collapse - who essentially safeguarded and restarted civilization around the Rule of St. Benedict and the idea of Christian communities springing up in concentric circles around these Benedictine centers of Christian civilization, learning, worship, and community. In After Virtue, MacIntyre says that we in the present age are awaiting “another—doubtless very different—St. Benedict.”

Dreher explains:

Today, a new post-Christian barbarism reigns. Many believers are blind to it, and their churches are too weak to resist. Politics offers little help in this spiritual crisis. What is needed is the Benedict Option, a strategy that draws on the authority of Scripture and the wisdom of the ancient church. The goal: to embrace exile from the mainstream culture and construct a resilient counterculture.

And so, he suggests that Christians should be more intentional about seeking out the likeminded, especially within the household of faith. He calls upon us to be more hospitable with one another, sharing our lives, withdrawing from the corrupted institutions of the world, and creating our own infrastructures (which is what our Lutheran forbears did by instituting parochial schools that taught the faith instead of undermining it). And contrary to some straw-man responses, Dreher is not suggesting political quietism or sticking our heads in the sand. He is not advocating a complete severance from the world, or a surrender from the idea of being salt and light. So stop typing that comment now, girlfriend. I know you’re out there.

This is hardly radical or new. We Lutherans have a strong heritage of this very thing. But we, alas, as we became more Americanized, we desired to become “like everyone else” - not unlike the Israelites in 1 Sam 8. And as the culture continues to degenerate, as Christians become increasingly marginalized - we would do well to be more proactive in how we live our lives, go about our work, raise our children, and contribute to civilization. We don’t know what the future holds. We may be facing centuries of a new dark age followed by the return of Christ when the Church may dwindle to a handful of people, or there may be a great backlash in our time that restores a sense of virtue to western society and the world.

We just don’t know.

But we do need to live in the here and now, in a world where Biblical Christianity is increasingly identified with hatred, where the idea that the freedom of religion is a preeminent natural right is increasingly seen as a retrograde and dangerous superstition, where the normal family is recast as evil, where deviancy is normalized, where there are now second- and third- generations of people in our country who have no idea who Jesus is, what the Bible is, or what the Church is. The abortion holocaust continues to rage, gender extremists are gaining ground every day, and our history is being rewritten by Neo-Orwellians. All of the major institutions of society, public and private sector alike, are increasingly pressuring conformity to a jackbooted antichristian agenda in the Gramscian juggernaut “march through the institutions “. It is becoming a problem as to how our children should be educated, for whom should they work, how they will find faithful spouses, and how much of the world’s entertainment they should ingest.

One trend that I have seen over the past several weeks is heartening.

I have run into a large number of the laity - mostly young couples - who are making life decisions based on where they can find a faithful congregation. This is not how things were when I was growing up. We went to school, and we got jobs. If the best pay and opportunity for advancement took us out of state, away from family, and even to a place where there were no faithful churches - so be it. We had to “make a living.” Our jobs were the top priority.

Early in my ministry, I had a young parishioner who nailed his dream job in another state. Some time after expressing his uncontainable excitement, he finally got around to asking me what church he should attend. Sadly, there was none anywhere nearby that I could recommend. The state he was moving to was a confessional wasteland. When I reported this to him and to his mother, they were utterly crestfallen. But he was not crestfallen enough to change his plans, not enough to decline the job. It reminded me of the tragic passage of the rich young man in Matt 19:16-22, who, upon being called to follow Jesus, “went away sorrowful, for he had great possessions.”

I too fell for this temptation in my twenties. I took a job with zero consideration about church attendance. In time, God pushed me around like a piece on a chessboard, and somehow, I ended up in the office of the holy ministry in spite of myself. I’m still scratching my head, but gratefully.

By contrast, I am finding more and more people who are deliberately and proactively moving to cities and towns that have solid, liturgical, confessional congregations and pastors. And I have also met people who have turned down lucrative work based on the lack of a church community to join. And in one sense, I think Covid-19 had a small silver lining to it: it has diminished the importance of physical location to one’s employment. Homeschooling has also made it possible for children to be educated anywhere. More and more people are able to work from home or run businesses over the Internet.

I have met numerous Christian people, living in these gray and latter days, who see how important belonging to a faithful Christian community is to them and to their children - who in some cases have not yet even been conceived. And it is not only young couples ordering their lives around the locus of altar, font, and pulpit instead of salary, benefits, and ambition. Retired people, and even the middle aged are now more likely than ever to be willing to pull up the stakes, sell the home, and seek out a likeminded community of brothers and sisters in Christ.

And this is really what the Benedict Option is all about. The days are long over when we could essentially locate anywhere, find a faithful confessional Lutheran church and a parochial school nearby, a church that uses the hymnal and worships according to the liturgy, one with a faithful pastor who handles the Word of God rightly - whether at the altar, in the pulpit, or while giving private pastoral care. And as our society has disintegrated, so too has the unity of our churches. One must now be discerning in deciding at what altar to commune and where one’s children will be born again of water and the Spirit.

And as we have all learned in the aftermath of the coronavirus, even introverts like me need community. After all, the Greek word for Church means “assembly.” And this doesn’t happen by Zoom or by simply calling oneself a Lutheran without having a congregation to be a part of. My hat is off to our faithful laity who have made the kingdom their top priority. This is something that we pastors should encourage and exhort our parishioners to. And for all of the bashing of the Benedict Option, that’s really all that it is.