Where the Benedict Option found its paradigm
Women Now Empowered By Everything A Woman Does*
OBERLIN, OH—According to a study released Monday, women—once empowered primarily via the assertion of reproductive rights or workplace equality with men—are now empowered by virtually everything the typical woman does.
San Diego women empower themselves by eating dinner unaccompanied by men.
"From what she eats for breakfast to the way she cleans her home, today's woman lives in a state of near-constant empowerment," said Barbara Klein, professor of women's studies at Oberlin College and director of the study. "As recently as 15 years ago, a woman could only feel empowered by advancing in a male-dominated work world, asserting her own sexual wants and needs, or pushing for a stronger voice in politics. Today, a woman can empower herself through actions as seemingly inconsequential as driving her children to soccer practice or watching the Oxygen network."
Klein said that clothes-shopping, once considered a mundane act with few sociopolitical implications, is now a bold feminist statement.
And, as we all know, Christians have only two choices:
Either it’s going to be the Benedict Option, or Moralistic Therapeutic Deism, which as we know ultimately results in a loss of the faith.
Fortunately, Rod Dreher's Benedict Option is as brilliant and universally empowering as The Onion's feminism, for it is large, it contains multitudes, and all roads lead to it:
Everybody's got an "option" these days; here's why the term #BenedictOption is the best umbrella for them all: http://t.co/VAYj21hZf1 — Rod Dreher (@roddreher) July 29, 2015
Whatever your option is, even if you're out of options, Rod Dreher's Benedict Option is the one that covers you.
Rod Dreher's Benedict Option knows you're not, bunkie. But it's got you covered, nonetheless.
Like an all-purpose, get-out-of-the-dumps spell, all you have to so is mouth the words "Benedict Option" (technically, as we see above, just "option" alone will do), and you will automatically be fighting the good fight, nurturing that consoling schadenfreude that eventually everyone else will become Caitlin Jenner just before they shoot themselves in the head, after which, if everything in the world isn't already right again, the world will immediately look to you - yes, you - to make it so. Pretty empowering, right?
But I know some of you persist in asking that terribly annoying question: just what is Rod Dreher's Benedict Option?
One person who does know what it is not is Bishop Emeritus Rene Henry Gracida of Corpus Christi, Texas, who informs us in all caps
THE BENEDICT OPTION IS NOT A RETREAT FROM WORLD, IT IS A DISENGAGEMENT FROM THE VALUES AND MORAL OPTIONS OF THE WORLD
But, troll that you are, you probably persist further and ask, well, which values and moral options of the world?
Pornography? Definitely out. Facebook, Twitter? Harder to say. The sort of outrage porn that got Noah Millman's article spiked? Required engagement.
Fortunately, except for the most heinous ones, under the umbrella of Rod Dreher's Benedict Option determining which values and moral options of the world to disengage from is quite elastically up to you - as long as you call whatever you choose to do the Benedict Option.
(As long as you keep talking up Rod's book promotion theme, you don't really think he's going to say you're not doing it right, do you?)
And does it even matter? After all, as Rod himself explains, it's your only alternative to Moralistic Therapeutic Deism. But, because it's also virtually universally inclusive, you should be okay.
Go ahead, under the umbrella of the Benedict Option - the ultimate, universal Christian self-help program - you can even hug yourself, bunkie.
As soon as you buy Rod Dreher's Benedict Option book.
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| A doubtless very different St. Benedict |
*H/T: AOSHQ
"From midnight cheesecake noshers to moms who don't fool around with pain, feminist achievement covers a broad spectrum," said Bradley in her acceptance speech. "It is great to be a female athlete, senator, or physician. But we must not overlook the homemaker who uses a mop equipped with convenient, throwaway towelettes, the college co-ed who chooses to abstain from sex, and the college co-ed who chooses to have a lot of sex. Only by lauding every single thing a woman does, no matter how ordinary, can you truly go, girls."
ReplyDeleteReminds me of this.
...oh, and this.
The paradigm-bursting brilliance of internet marketing - and despite the occasional perch upon this podium here or that confab there, Rod Dreher's Benedict Option has always and only been a golem of internet marketing - has been its ability to finally convert the consumer into his own, self-consuming product.
DeleteFor Christians, this is what the BO ultimately is: the universal, never-ending self-help program none previously recognized they needed until its one-dimensional, Häagen-Dazs-artificial brand name was systematically foisted upon them.
Previously, Christ (the Church) and the Constitution (Caesar) completely mapped the Christian's routes through life. That some may have not fully availed themselves of either is the fault of neither Christ nor Caesar. But it is difficult to market to people that which they already have immediately at hand, and so a new wrinkle was needed.
Enter the Benedict Option. Seizing upon the disaffectations Christians have come to have with their culture by not exercising their long-existing options with respect to both Christ and Caesar, it offers what appears to be a fresh new one: "thickening" (how this may be the same or different from Scientology's "auditing" someone more familiar with either one would have to explain to me) one's relations to Christ and Caesar by exercising one's long-available options with respect to both, but with this new, self-referential, self-consuming twist.
Now those exercises, previously the old-fashioned prayer and politics, will be conducted within the new, conceptual anxiety bubble known as the Benedict Option (whatever that is): the more one exercises the Benedict Option (whatever that is), the more one marinates in one's anxiety about Christ and the modern world, which requires more intermediating Benedict Option (whatever that is), which requires more anxiety marinating...
The Benedict Option is everything from marriage to voting to tweeting about the Benedict Option, but, oh dear, it can't possibly be simultaneously that simple and nothing more than everything that's already available, which is anxiety-making, because what if we're not doing it right, there's so much at stake, and this, the Benedict Option, is the only way, the only way...
Now, in addition to borrowing the consumer's watch, then selling it back to him, the consumer is supplied with an additional service: his own, newly installed OCD to look incessantly at his own watch which he just bought back - and to consult the guru of the Benedict Option daily about how exactly to tell the time.
Jesus and the Church, straight up, no chaser - so First Century. Who wants to tweet about that?
This timely comment from an Eamus Catuli
Delete[Dreher] Maybe Emma Green is onto something in distinguishing between the Benedict Option and what Moore is teaching, but I’m not quite sure. I look forward to meeting him (at last) at the ERLC event, and maybe talking this through. It could be that Moore’s strategy is simply what the Benedict Option looks like from an Evangelical point of view.
Can there be any doubt that "Moore’s strategy is simply what the Benedict Option looks like from an Evangelical point of view"?
[Catuli] So this will be a mightily unproductive conversation (I predict), and the reason goes to a problem at the heart of the BenOp concept to this point: it’s attempting to sweep in everything possible instead of drawing lines and trying to identify what ISN’T a BenOp. All we’ve ever heard described as “not BenOp,” so far, is ordinary, untheorized churchgoing Christianity with no conscious cultural critique attached. But virtually every expression of serious thought about what the religious (not even just Christian) life means, especially if it’s in any way critical of the mainstream American life of the present, is hailed as another model for the BenOp. Moore is somebody who spends his days thinking about this stuff, so whatever he says to RD will also be hailed as great material for the BenOp, as well as really, really helpful and insightful. I know all this before the conversation has even taken place. (And if I’m wrong, I’ll happily say so, but I don’t think that will be needed.)
Nope, Eamus, it won't be needed. It's all connected, you know, even the mop equipped with convenient, throwaway towelettes, just one more time saving aspect of the Benedict Option.
Isn't it kind of a giveaway that "Moore's strategy" (in this example) was conceived without reference to the BenOp? I don't see how something that is not from the same motivation as the BenOp becomes BenOp simply by Dreher running after it and hanging a tag on it.
DeleteBut of course I don't live in the "life of the mind" (or at least I try not to), so I'm sure I don't get it and will be banished as unhelpful.
P.S. Doesn't this part disqualify "Moore's theory" from being BenOp?
As he wrote in his book, “We were never given a mission to promote ‘values’ in the first place, but to speak instead of sin and of righteousness and judgement, of Christ and his kingdom.”
If the BOp is about anything, I thought it was about "preserving Christian culture" (with the emphasis on "culture", i.e. "values"). What Moore's thing seems to be about (through the eyes of that writer) is furthering Christian belief. I don't see a reference to "culture" in the list of "sin and [ ] righteousness and judgement, [ ] Christ and his kingdom."
If I were a wise guy, I'd say Dreher is making the same mistake as he did asserting that Dante is all about relieving stress and Epstein-Barr symptoms, rather than saving your soul.
There are those who will surely find me disgusting ::cough::, but I can't help but see Rod Dreher's BO as an intelligence test, if not a faith test as well, for Christians and, given the Einsteinian gravity well of their Church, Catholics in particular.
DeleteWhat does it say about you, I'd ask, that you even find the BO interesting or attractive to begin with? Does someone seem to be holding your hand and nodding thoughtfully in agreement - at anything you say - when no one else seems to you to be doing so? Is your intelligence, or, far worse, your faith, a function of some sort of moist, vulnerable, unsatisfied existential need?
Could it be that Dreher's BO really has value after all, functioning as some sort of tracer of pathology by lighting up those who would promote or succumb to it?
If I were a wise guy, I'd say Dreher is making the same mistake as he did asserting that Dante is all about relieving stress and Epstein-Barr symptoms, rather than saving your soul.
DeleteThe BO is a solution to the distress suffered by the aesthetic Christian. Imagine if the first Christians had taken the BO as a way of coping with the ugly, icky culture they lived in. Lepers. Meat with flies on it. No internet.
Imagine if the first Christians had taken the BO as a way of coping with the ugly, icky culture they lived in. Lepers. Meat with flies on it. No internet.
DeleteNot to mention lions. And no, I'm not talking about Cecil.
The BO is a solution to the distress suffered by the aesthetic Christian.
DeleteI thought that Crunchy Conservatism had this problem, too. But it goes beyond lepers and bad food. It's *other Christians* that both CC and BO find yucky.
Quite.
DeleteBO = boutique, romantic, retro Medievopunk (Crunchy) Christianity.
As Rod Dreher himself, the Mohammad of the Benedict Option, has said:
This essay explains succinctly why I will always have more in common with my pagan friend Franklin Evans than I do with modernist Christians — even conservative ones.
Good organic food, good wine, hand-carved prayer beads, and tranny voyeur outrage porn - all any BO Christian needs to tide him through until everything else but him mysteriously self-destructs and the few females remaining look longingly to his loins to repopulate the post-apocalyptic landscape.
Post-apocalyptic...okay, so in addition to good wine and hand-carved prayer beads I need to add leather shoulder guards, right? With straps and buckles. Because all the folks in all the post-apocalyptic things I've ever seen seen all wear leather shoulder guards with straps and buckles. Maybe a codpiece, too. Just because.
Here's the psychological architecture behind Rod Dreher's Benedict Option in a nutshell.
Delete"All those ordinary kids out there - they're mean to me. And nasty!
I'm gonna take all my toys and hide in my room. I know, I'll blog and text with my friends who are just like me and feel the same.
Something bad's gonna happen to all those bad kids who were mean to me, you just wait and see! God will make sure of it! Cause he likes me more!
Then, when they're all gone, it'll be safe for us to come out. Then we'll be in charge! Then we'll make the rules! Just you wait and see!
If you don't agree with me, if you don't go along with me, bad things will happen to you! You'll get the Moralistic Therapeutic Deism, which is like cooties but worse, like that flesh-eating bacteria, except it will eat your Church, too!
Just you wait and see!"
Usually this sort of pathology ends with a mass shooting and suicide by cop, but here I'm thinking we're looking at a possible career suicide by publisher.