Rod Dreher has been championing an idea he calls The Benedict Option – as he describes it, “a limited, strategic withdrawal of Christians from the mainstream of American popular culture, for the sake of shoring up our understanding of what the church is, and what we must do to be the church”
Alan Jacobs spins things in a slightly different direction:
So I wonder if a better way to think about the Benedict Option is not as a strategic withdrawal from anything in particular but a strategic attentiveness to the institutions and forms of life within which Christians can flourish.
It’s some interesting reading, even if Dreher can be rather dour. But I really like what Jake Meador has to say about it today over at Mere Orthodoxy.
…perhaps the issue isn’t that the culture has moved away from the faith, but that the faith’s adherents have moved away from it along with the culture–and as the culture we’ve attached ourselves to becomes progressively more antagonistic to orthodoxy we are simply becoming aware of the distance that has opened between the faithful and traditional orthodoxy. We’ve been riding along with the culture even when we shouldn’t have and we’re just now beginning to realize where that ride has taken us.
While there will always be some who feel called to a more significant strategic withdrawal from the culture, Meador’s analysis seems close to the mark. Maybe withdrawing from the culture isn’t something special for this time and era so much as it is a call out from a culture to which we’re far too drawn in. Certainly worth some reading and thought.
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RT @cjhubbs: The Benedict Option (i.e. Christian Cultural Withdrawal): http://t.co/jsBrH0jBt6
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idk the church is already out of touch enough. Becoming more insular doesn’t seem to be the right answer. Also, for Benedictines withdrawing was to live a life of commitment and service to Christ. They were and are very involved in their local communities and cultures.
If I were to use different terminology, I might say that the American evangelical church has become far too much of the world but not in it, and needs to reverse that status.
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Interesting. This is what I thought the emergent church was trying to do, but ended up not doing. I’ve always felt the that church should hold a polity higher than the world we live in, but it would involve pastors and leadership that actually leads to this effect. Sadly, it seems that it is just the opposite.
However polarizing it should be done in a gentle way that is compelling rather than reactionary. The gospel in its very nature is counterculture and when explained fully and rationally it makes clear sense.
As y’all read this commentary, do you see the authors referring to “the church” or individual Christians? (or both)
Matt, I think Dreher is talking about groups of individual like-minded Christians who would more or less join up into communities of some sort.