Benedict Option Marketing Problems
Let's get a few things out of the way at the outset. Despite Rod Dreher's wish to evoke and insinuate any or all of these, his so-called Benedict Option was never practiced by Benedict of Nursia, nor did Alasdair MacIntyre ever recommend a "Benedict Option" in After Virtue. As Pauli has already said most succinctly of Dreher's calculatingly manufactured phrase, "It's not Benedictine and it's not an option."
What is it I'm addressing here, then?
Although Rod wants to draw on several threads in Christian tradition in compounding a marketing brand about which to then write and sell a book, resonant as Benedict of Nursia, Pope Emeritus Benedict, or MacIntyre's invocation of the name Benedict might be within those traditional Christian circles searching for a silver bullet to save themselves from what troubles them about the age we live in, outside such limited circles the phrase "The Benedict Option" itself immediately becomes as intuitively opaque a name for a brand as Snapple. Unless you already know what it refers to, you haven't a clue what it refers to.
Let's not forget, as its creator himself has explained on more than one occasion "The Benedict Option" is not a collection of examples Dreher is struggling to give a name to but just the opposite, a phrase he continues to struggle to explain and provide uniquely meaningful representative examples of.
As a matter of fact, enter "Benedict" into Google, and the first thing that pops up is the face of this guy:
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| Wrong Benedict |
Rod Dreher chose the phrase "The Benedict Option" for his book-to-be marketing project for several reasons, first, as mentioned, for the evocative value of "Benedict" among traditional Christians, his hoped for core readership. His now moribund sock puppet side project "The Benedict Post" pursued the same strategy.
Second, branding it as a capitalized "Option" gives it powerful dynamism, particularly with respect to any group currently feeling helpless. Benedict + Option, opaque as that compound still is, now becomes a murky clarion call to action, somewhere between a pre-planned "Take the children and go to your sister's!" and the hopelessly unpredictable results of firing off a six shooter in the night in the midst of a herd of cattle.
Hopefully, though, with this dynamic "Option" now an equal ingredient in the marketing phrase someone, somewhere will now want to do something Rod can write about.
But the problem of the opacity of the phrase stubbornly remains, dynamism or not. Here is "The Benedict Option", now placed within a field of phrases which similarly do not contain their meaning within themselves:
The Network Effect
Beneful
The Benedict Option
The Spearmint Rhino
The China Syndrome
Heaven's Gate
The Holcroft Covenant
The Apocalypse Watch
I really have no doubt that Dreher chose "The Benedict Option" to evoke the same dynamic thrill intended to be invoked by this list. Perhaps he had visions of Shawnee Smith or someone else headlining a made-for-TV anti-cultural Christian thriller, but in his zeal to unilaterally attempt to generate publicity buzz for a not-yet-existent Christian movement in order to then someday write a book about it, he unfortunately managed to couple an intuitively opaque branding vehicle with a concept he could never hope to trademark or otherwise protect.
Why is this a problem? We'll see in further detail below.
First, Dreher could have formed an organization incorporating "The Benedict Option" as part of its legally protected identity and then pushed franchises. Unfortunately that option would be obviously even more self-serving than his current efforts and, needless to say, far harder to sell by appeals to "the disaster of the Enlightenment and modernity itself."
But even if he had given his inchoate phrase-concept such a definitive rooting, legally protected brands can still find themselves either unexpectedly on the wrong side of history like this once happy and promising product
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| "Why take diet pills when you can enjoy Ayds?" |
So. Even though Rod is burning his candle at both ends trying to recruit other Christians under an umbrella label they, but most often he and he alone, regardless of their interest or consent, refer to as "The Benedict Option", he can't legally protect his only-a-concept - now containing and implicating their lives as well - in any way whatsoever. Such as, for example, from ending up in the Urban Dictionary alongside "truffle butter" (not safe for decent people to look up; you have been warned). Just take my word for it, it's not a French delicacy.
Or from having someone else subsequently appropriate Dreher's coolly hip "Benedict Option" phrase for their own ends and actually trademark it as their exclusive legal property after the fact of his having unilaterally subsumed every other Christian he can manage to rub up against under it, like this hypothetical future entrepreneur of a chain of decidedly non-Benedictine establishments decided to do.
His focus at least seems to be heterosexual:
The next one's need not be.
Yes, there's Wikipedia disambiguation, but do you really want your non-immediate friends and relatives even wondering why on Earth you and your family are somehow mixed up with that chain of gay bathhouses you heard about on the news named "The Benedict Option"?
So let me summarize the problems surrounding Dreher's attempt to create a marketing brand called "The Benedict Option" in order that he can further his career as a writer by writing a book about it:
- Outside of those already practicing what they need to be doing and who already know what the words refer to, "The Benedict Option" is an inscrutably opaque phrase, meaning nothing - or anything - to the broader population at large.
- The only-a-concept "Benedict Option" and the phrase referring to it as Dreher wishes to employ it cannot be patented or trademarked or otherwise legally protected from any sort of abuse; but
- Anyone else can, after Dreher has already published that your wife is a "Benedict Option Mama" and your kids are "Ben Op" kids, subsequently appropriate the phrases "The Benedict Option" and "Ben Op" to his own, including conceivably quite nasty, ends while legally protecting his exclusive use of them - for example, suing you for illegaly using them - to whatever those ends happen to be.
Here's the bottom line as I see it. Do you feel a need to replenish, recharge, reassert your Christianity? If so, why would you want to consign yourself and your family to this sort of "Benedict Option" branding trap? What could you possibly hope to gain by assuming Dreher's manufactured mantle of faux-authenticity?
Instead, here are a number of already proven and well-established hallmarks under the aegis of which to assemble your efforts:
Jesus Christ, Our Lord and Saviour
The Catholic Church
The Presbyterian Church
The Methodist Church
The Episcopal Church
The Baptist Church
The Orthodox Church
You get the idea. And there are many, many others, all intuitively transparent, completely unambiguous, and every one immune to reappropriation to commercial ends you may not have considered, the worst of which I have already effortlessly imagined for you above.
We are called to be salt and light to the world. One of the assumptions underpinning that divine commission is having a grasp above that of a six-year-old of how that doggone real world works in the age in which one is commissioned. I have serious doubts that Rod Dreher has a clue, but that at worst need only be a problem for him and his family, not you and yours.
Please, fellow Christians, just think before you allow someone else to label you and your family to suit his own commercial ends above all others. Your children may end up thanking you most of all.
The Spearmint Rhino is the name of a "gentleman's club" in Dallas. Not sure if the reference was intentional. :)
ReplyDeleteAnd, regarding the substance of the post, I couldn't agree more.
Yes, of course the reference was intentional. The thing is, without knowing anything about what's behind either phrase, if one lays The Spearmint Rhino alongside The Benedict Option it's impossible to tell which is strip club and which is religious movement.
DeleteInstead, here are a number of already proven and well-established hallmarks under the aegis of which to assemble your efforts:
ReplyDeleteNot if you're Rod Dreher. According to him all the existing Christian communities suffer from a fever, and the only cure is more BenOp cowbell.
Jesus Christ, Our Lord and Saviour
That guy is a little too nice for Rod...hard to love you neighbor and make a living in the snark business at the same time
The Catholic Church
Haven't you heard, it's on the edge of collapse and led by a homo-loving, liberation theology teaching, Anti-Pope.
The Presbyterian Church
Stinks of the Enlightenment
The Methodist Church
Pa & Ruthie's "church", I think not
The Episcopal Church
You're really going to go there...you know they're all led by gay bishops who would rather sell their old buildings to Islamofascists than "real" Christians
The Baptist Church
No liturgy, no admission to Rod's playground
The Orthodox Church
Okay, maybe the Russians, but the Greeks are just cultural Catholics with Baklava.
The point of Rod Dreher's Benedict Option isn't to defend Christianity against the rages of modernism, it's to remake Christianity in Rod's graven image.
-A practitioner of Moralistic Therapeutic Anonymity
The point of Rod Dreher's Benedict Option isn't to defend Christianity against the rages of modernism, it's to remake Christianity in Rod's graven image.
DeleteAbsolutely on point. Rod's writing has never been anything but his mean girl revenge on a world which has done nothing but fail him and cruelly bully him in the process. The Catholics in particular are serving as Rod's speed bag in this particular round; all his relevant family are already dead.
Sometimes I feel a bit guilty for enjoying the Dreher-roasting here so much, but this post presents an astute analysis of substantial problems with the BO. The mild snark in this one could be edited out (not that I'm saying it should) and the impact of the argument remains. But this is just the kind of analysis that Rod bans from his comment threads.
ReplyDeleteSnark and roasting are Dreher's modus operandi. I feel, at worst, I may be honoring too much in serving him similarly.
DeleteTo understand why I, at least, keep trying to highlight and with respect to which I keep wondering about the motives of those more than happy to nod along with Dreher's activities, maybe a little thought experiment would be illuminating.
ReplyDeleteLet's imagine an alternate universe inhabited by a genuine religiously interested journalist named Dod Rreher. Dod's discovered that there are other Christians like him, unsettled at the nature and encroachment of popular culture into areas previously informed by Christian belief, and so he sets out to see if he can find out more about both the problems themselves and any solutions to them Christians may be creating.
He investigates Group One and discovers they are doing this, that, and the other. And then he hears about and investigates Group Two and discovers they are experiencing slightly different problems and responding to them with that there, this other, and another thing. And so on, and so on, until he ultimately builds up a multi-dimensional conceptual model of both the problems-solutions matrix and the spectrum range of solutions Christians are bringing to bear on it.
To explain his discoveries for his readers, he doesn't reduce things to the sorts of opaque catch-phrases liberals are so fond of like "diversity", he repeatedly articulates both the concept of the encroachment problem and his subjects responses to it using real world rooted examples such that, like a rhetorical CAT scan, he successively describes the situation matrix from one perspective, then another, then another, each time adding an additional layer of immediately real world-rooted multi-dimensional understanding to the situation as a whole. Finally, his publisher slaps whatever catchy title phrase on the finished product he thinks might sell it best to its intended market.
Back in our universe, however, our counterpart to real journalist Dod Rreher, Rod Dreher, is doing precisely the opposite, almost certainly because - what's the explanation I'm thinking of? Oh, yes - he's out and out really just f*cking faking it from the get go. It's really hard to see his approach as anything else.
He found a catch-phrase fragment from MacIntyre he's managed to attach and build a visible profile around in his current journalistic beat of choice, the bloggy-and-academically religious, and like an industrious oyster, he's been busy trying to construct around it a pearl of great price by siphoning in whatever can't escape his hoovering tube.
Unlike Dod's, Rod's project is driven first and foremost by his catch-phrase fame, and, unlike Dod, Rod has no prayer of understanding the conceptual worlds of social, political, and religious phenomena he really must plumb and comprehend to give his catch-phrase any meaning and even less in doing so. It's all an intellectual Potemkin village designed only to generate a book contract. Book contract in hand? Everything after that devolves to remain someone else's problem.
Right now, Rod's prospects still don't seem all that great. He seems testy when not manically giddy, and he's begun to turn on and snap at even his most slavishly loyal commenters, like that Siarlys Jenkins, who comments on every post and travels to hear him speak.
But at some point I would not be surprised if someone with real Christian effort invested in a real Christian enterprise with a real legal identity punched back at Dreher's unilateral, blustering attempts to hijack them into his catch-phrase quicksand of the sorts name value and other good will liabilities I pointed out above. Just depends on how irresistible the force and how immovable the victim target, but it could conceivably get ugly. Being labeled by the cheesy "Ben Op" could conceivably be regarded in some circles as legally actionable defamation rather than as an honor.
Lol...like Ace Rimmer vs Arnold Rimmer. (Obscure Red Dwarf reference; sorry.)
DeleteYour thought experiment inspired another one for me: Imagine that Rod gets a publisher, but that publisher absolutely refuses, for whatever reasons, to use Rod's catch phrase in the title. Or maybe refuses to use it in the text. Whatever Rod's written in that book, the publisher will buy it but only if the whole thing is revised to call Rod's dream something other than "the Benedict Option." Hmmm.
ReplyDeleteI suppose it's unlikely, since it's the "BO" branding buzz that probably gets the publisher interested in the first place and he wouldn't want to lose that thread, but you never know. Thought experiment.
Here is flamboyantly trans-communions-Christian Rod Dreher lecturing cradle Catholic commenter Uncle Billy on contraception.
ReplyDeleteUncle Billy says:
October 14, 2015 at 7:29 pm
...
The hierarchy has been wrong before and it is wrong now with contraception. In the 17th century the Vatican was focused on astronomy and they were wrong, wrong, wrong. In the 20th and early 21st century they seem focused on gynecology. Celibate, elderly men obsessed with marital relations. They are wrong now too. You might say, OK, then just leave. No. As a cradle Catholic who has studied Church History and has one of my degrees from a Jesuit University, I am not being run out of my Church by fanatic Trads with weird ideas about marital relations. We are not shutting up and we are not leaving. Get used to it.
[NFR: If you don’t accept Catholic ecclesiology, why are you a Catholic? You are a de facto Protestant. You are your own pope. No getting around it. — RD]
Those who have followed Dreher since before the Scandal remember him explaining his existence of his Catholic at the time family of three children, spacing never explained, as having been shown to him in a dream as a nest with three eggs. Shortly after the birth of his third child, soon enough thereafter that his wife consulted their new Orthodox priest on fasting while nursing her, Dreher left the Catholic Church for Orthodoxy. He concealed this change in the communions governing his family planning until exposed by EQE's own Jonathan Carpenter. Thereafter, he penned a lugubriously weeping and gnashing epic of 5,000 words explaining he had switched because of the Scandal. He has not added to his family since. A few years later he admitted he never understood nor agreed with the Church's stand on contraception and some time after that added that Catholic family planning could be hard on marital relations. Pauli and others here have links on any or all of these events.
It's really all in the theatricality of the Elmer Gantry hustle, isn't it? That, and a control of discussion of the narrative which would make Pravda weep. Many people are easily intimidated by the thought of making a rude scene if they question a charlatan too closely, especially one in mid-expression of high dudgeon as Dreher is here, and especially one who lives almost exclusively on the Internet, where one's public life is easily as carefully choreographed as any revelations from one's private life. And, of course, the Rod Drehers of the world always have their admirers, fellow travelers and especially understudies.
That BS is the stuff that makes me really angry with Dreher. All of this "compassion for me, but not for thee" stuff. I can even see why it gets to the gays who read there. I'm with the church on sexuality but putting myself in their shoes, if some guy was carrying on self-righteously at me like that and then whining about how being celibate for 3 years was like having cancer so he needs special kudos for waiting until marriage, I'd want to backhand him too.
DeleteSo Rod is allowed to *defect* over this issue, but if Billy has doubts based on his informed opinion as a lifelong Catholic, Billy is the guy with the big attitude problem? Gimme a break Rod.
Caille, Rod has been so widely documented as being an out and out prevaricator in so many different areas of his that believing either that his celibacy was his choice or that he was even celibate at all when opportunity knocked is simply a leap of faith one elects.
DeleteBut that's how the passive-aggressive intimidator operates, daring and forcing others to be so viciously rude as to not believe without question whatever he chooses to say.
There's a good reason Dreher's demographic is systematically shifting ever more to the young and idealistic and inexperienced.
of his life
DeleteWho are the foot soldiers in Rod Dreher's Benedict Option army? Impressionable young people. One he touts frequently is Leah Libresco, now close to four full years out of Yale, who went to hear him when he drew a crowd of 200 at the day-long BOFest at Georgetown:
ReplyDeleteSo perhaps Dreher's BO, if it in fact grows legs at all, will become Christianity's own De-Occupy Movement of the next number of months.
I'll cut young Leah some slack, as she was able to (nicely) cut through the crap of the BO and ask the obvious question of "So what should we actually do?". And she got these:
Delete1) invite a group to dinner;
2) memorize a poem;
3) adopt a prayer rule.
All three are good and well, but is that all? I thought this was about Saving Civilization. But when it comes down to something concrete, we get a couple of things that people already do and a third thing that is one of those "hmm, yeah I guess that would be a nice thing to do once in awhile".
There is indeed no There there.
I'm torn between two responses, so, naturally, I'll offer both of them.
DeleteFirst, in honor of Leah's list, a BO photo gallery: a picture of a man walking a dog, a picture of a woman buttering toast, a picture of a child tying their shoes...
Second, in honor of Leah's list, tempered by Dreher's admonition that the BO should instill things that are hard,
1) Invite a group to dinner: The International Brotherhood of Teamsters - all of them. That'll task your menu selection skills.
2) Memorize a poem: The Iliad.
3) Adopt a prayer rule...uh, a little help here, please?
..uh, a little help here, please?
DeleteStylite.
It's not much of a strategic withdrawal from modernity if you don't have to give up air-conditioning, the internet, or the Rolling Stones. It's also not much of a dark age if you can make your living telling people they're living in a dark age.
ReplyDeleteAn exchange on the Twitter and a recent post by Mr. Dreher on the American Conservative reminded me of this post. In his Struggle of Memory Against Forgetting he commented at length and with extensive quotations on how crucial it is to his Benedict Option that communities and individuals have a memory of the habits and histories of their faiths. Someone on the Twitter asked him in response to a tweet of the essay what he thought of Orthodox Old Believers, and he replied, "I don't know enough about them to have an informed opinion" (https://twitter.com/EnemyOfTheCrown/status/654714489724469248). So much for the importance of memory. The conflict of the Old Believers is a major part of Russian Orthodox history, and yet the gentleman who wishes readers to follow him into his journey to escape historical-ritual amnesia has insufficient knowledge to comment on it. At least he was candid about that much on the Twitter.
ReplyDeleteIn that same essay Mr. Dreher writes, "The beginning pianist knows how to read music, but he cannot really play the piano if is conscious that he’s reading the notes. He becomes a pianist when he can play fluidly, without thinking about it. He has become habituated to music." Forgive me, but he is describing himself. I recall an episode some months back where he boasted on his blog of a wonderful experience he had with prayer, and he described a means of prayer that is expressly disapproved of in Orthodoxy. Soon enough some readers commented on it, he consulted his priest, and he admitted that what he had said was a marvelous form of Orthodox prayer was in fact not Orthodox at all. As I've noted on the other occasions that I have commented here, it troubles me deeply as a lifelong Orthodox Christian that this fellow is taking the lead. He has no idea what he is doing.
"I don't know enough about them to have an informed opinion"
DeleteQuick, someone send him a copy of "The Idiot's Guide to the Old Believers" for him to read on his next two and a half hour flight. By the time he lands, he'll be an expert and be able to scold his commenters with his new found knowledge
-A practitioner of Moralistic Therapeutic Anonymity
As an Orthodox christian I find Rod's blogging deeply disturbing. He really dispalys a chronic lack of basic knowledge about the faith. How can a member of a ROCOR parish not know a goodf deal about the old believers. It beggars the imagination. I strongly suspect that Rod was barely given instructions in teh faith before his conversion. The extreme moralizing and judgmentalism aside, he seems to lack any understanding of what the Orthodox faith teaches about many aspects of the faith such as sin, redemption, the narture of divine judgment etc ... HHe chronically confuses and conflates sinwith d immorality. He really writes like a protestant fundamentalist rather than an Orthodocx christian and as a prominent public "intellectual" I fear he will give the public a very distorted view of Orthodoxy.
Deletechronically confuses and conflates sin with immorality. He really writes like a protestant fundamentalist rather than an Orthodox Christian
DeleteRod's holding out for someone to form the "First Calvinist Liturgical Apostolic Successional Mystical Church of Christ."
The Five Points of which will be: TULS&B
Total Depravity
Unconditional Election
Limited Atonement
Smells &
Bells
-A practitioner of Moralistic Therapeutic Anonymity
Rod is the poster child for bad Orthodox catechesis. I find it impossible to imagine how a spiritually mature Orthodox Christian can write some of the unOrthodox nonsense which regularly appears on his blog. In his endless commentary about "immorality" and the decline of civilization, Rod betrays a deep ignorance of basic Orthodox theology. Orthodox Christianity really is not about "morality" as much as it is about communion with God. From our perspective, anything which interferes with one's ability to grow spiritually constitutes sin. Therefore, within the Orthodox tradition, even the pursuit of virtue can be sinful. This was the great error of the scribes and Pharisees.. Reading Rod, I would have to conclud that this is the case for him as well. Of course, as an Orthodox bishop said, moral outrage about other person's sins is actually a form of public confession, Because of this, I wonder about Rod's actual sexual orientation.
DeleteThere is something very deeply deceptive about Rods, blogging. He engages in regular intellectual "sleight-of-hand" in which he appears to be saying one thing while in fact stating something quite different. I strongly suspect that his blogging on the Benedict option is an attempt to control his readership for ideas because he simply lacks the critical thinking skills, imagination, and intellectual background to write about this topic with any degree of depth or intelligence. In reading his blogging, I have the very distinct impression that I am being used by him to further a book deal.
As a social scientist myself I have to say that its puzzling that Rod would be reading a 30 year old, out of date, anthropologist's book on social amnesia to generate some ideas about the BenOp. One would think that of Rod were serious about creatng something with some intellectual depth he would have gone immediately to the ;large social science literature on ontentional communitoes and develop ideas first instead of using his blogging as a sounding board from which he can extrract the ideas which he himself is unable to generate..
People joke about Rod Dreher being gay, but his biography and his writings consistently reveal something distinctly different. For Rod Dreher, child sexual molestation is immediately resonant and very, very personal, and for him human sexuality itself has become a radioactive element.
DeleteRod has dutifully made three babies with a woman, but outside that his quest, weaving among young female "sluts" and every sexual perversion he can dig up to write about, has been for the Christian purification of his marrow-deep sexual radiation burns. One can almost imagine him in the dead of night with wet eyes, grasping his knees and rocking, reprising a MacBeth, "Out, damned spot!", trying to scrub away something he never can.
No telling what went on in those sacred groves deep back in the bayous of Rod's Southern Gothic childhood, but it's made him the man he is today, and there's a purulent sexual river running right down the middle of it.
Keith - although my first instinct is usually to despise armchair psychology, I think one can't take Rod's "torture" at the hands of his classmates into account enough to explain the person he has become.
DeleteHere is an adolescent on the cusp of manhood (based on the fact that it probably took place before he left for boarding school yet after he was old enough to go on beach trip with only a few chaperones so I'm guessing the summer between 10th and 11th grade), in a rural southern culture that values stoic manhood, screaming, crying, and flailing on the floor. And why? Because he was terrified to have his genitalia exposed to the opposite sex, an activity (if I remember correctly) that was the unspoken purpose behind activities that involved both genders at that age, if you know what I mean ;)
He feels he was singled out because he wasn't "one of the popular kids" and the adults failed to rescue him, and sided with the others, for the same reason. I suspect he was singled out because he was an immature, insufferable prick. You know the kid who listened to the Velvet Underground, but had to let everybody know that he did because the popular music of the day was written for the unintellectual masses. Furthermore I suspect he was ignored by the adults, not because they sided with the popular kids, but that they were embarrassed for him and didn't know how to react to a 15-16 year old young man who still cried and threw a tantrum when he was teased. They probably were just hope in he'd "grow a pair" on his own.
Put it all together and you get an intellectually, emotionally, and sexually stunted man-child with a bully pulpit. Someone who grooms and dresses himself to call attention to himself and show how different he is from the rest of us. Someone who converts to a small, somewhat esoteric in the popular cultural view, faith not out of a deep convection for, and understanding of, that faith, but as a place to run away from the Catholicism that's bullying him. Someone who is lightening quick to pick on college kids in some article he reads on the Internet in his dust free den in Louisiana, removed from interaction with society unless he can control the terms of that interaction digitally. Someone who publicly wears his Christianity on his sleeve as sign of his martyrdom, yet makes part of his living by writing cruel, snarky comments about people he doesn't know the first thing about, people who his faith teaches him to "love as he loves himself", and then when his peanut gallery has the audacity to question him, and call him out for going too far, he relies that hose criticizing him have no sense of humor.
Perhaps had he stood up for himself on that trip, or even just had the presence to use humor to defuse the situation, he'd despise himself a little less and be able to love his neighbor a little more.
-A practitioner of Moralistic Therapeutic Anonymity
MTA, I can't disagree with any of what you say. Rod daily provides ample testimony to layers upon layers of pathology silted up in his past, in particular a powerful sense of betrayal by higher authorities in combination with a terrifying host of possibilities beyond basic urination implicit in packing a Li'l Rod.
DeleteI believe Rod would have ultimately been happiest born as some sort of simple tube worm creature forever traveling through food in a straight line and mindlessly discharging his hermaphroditic gametes into the tides once a year under a warm full moon.
I can't get over how obvious it is that he continues to care so very deeply about what "the popular kids" think of him even as he supposedly pursues this program of disassociation from their mainstream society. That's why he gets hung up on the pettiest level of the "culture wars" constantly. He can't bear the thought that if he goes with the church and opposes the trans trend, someone might call him a naughty name and think he's uncool. He can't bear the thought of *actually* being an outsider and being comfortable with that status. Which is why the BO is such a joke. It's like he's trying to start a competing cool kids club, not that he's actually stepping away and prioritizing something else and being confident about being different.
DeleteMaybe I'm not articulating it well, but it's another sign of adolescent arrested development.
In particular because the comments here have fallen in the thread that began with my comment, I will say that it's more than a bit unseemly to be speculating about Mr. Dreher's juvenile sexual experiences. He provides much in his public life that is worthy of rebuke. Examining these kinds of private and inevitably to us imaginary causes is in poor taste.
DeleteVirgil, even though I am hardly a standard bearer for good taste, I probably wouldn't do it had not Dreher made it his career signature to talk about others' sexuality in the particularly juvenile and gossiping way he does and, in addition, more specifically, to make such a personal fetish of child sexual molestation as I have described.
DeleteWe are not wondering here about the juvenile sexual roots of Dreher's accomplished pottery making or violin playing, we are wondering about the juvenile sexual roots of Dreher's arrested juvenile fixation in adulthood with peculiar forms of sexuality to the exclusion of others consistently in the forefront of his writing about others. While some may well find it in poor taste, it is hardly unnatural by analogy to wonder with respect to a man constantly shouting "Boobies!" about his lifetime experiences with breasts. Dreher, however, counts on such hesitations to preempt and quell criticisms of his output. That's how a passive-aggressive operates.
How does speculation you can't prove help you to criticize the substance of his work or indeed criticize any speculation he himself might make that is specious? If a man behaves irrationally, I don't need to know what was done to him in puberty in order to describe and criticize the irrational behavior. Mr. Dreher may rely on a great many things that make others hesitant to criticize him, but if he relies on hesitance to talk about his childhood sexuality, then he's an even bigger fool than I take him for, because critiques like this are so baseless and nasty that they only make the critics look bad. When I say it is in poor taste, I don't mean like a poorly coordinated color scheme in your living room or even like using coarse language: I mean like insulting a man's mother or gossiping about female friends he has other than his wife. It makes the person engaging in such "criticism" look a good deal worse than it does the insulted mother, female friends, or the man they have in common.
DeleteHow does speculation you can't prove help you to criticize the substance of his work or indeed criticize any speculation he himself might make that is specious?
DeleteWell, it doesn't, Counselor, but Dreher was not being tried here.
It does, however,lend the possibility that there may be substantial, possibly even empathetic reasons beyond his control for why a lifetime predatory asshole like Dreher who has consistently reached out to try to harm real people (Google "slut wedding dress") consistently behaves like a predatory asshole; when one finds an abuser, one immediately explores the possibility there may have been prior abuse in his own life which prompted and shaped it. Plus, I just enjoy doing it.
More useful, of course, would be a directly published top-level critique of Dreher's cluelessness about religion itself of the sort you raised here, for example, by you on your own blog, under your credentials as both attorney and lifelong Orthodox, something the search engines would be sure to pick up. I understand, though, that such non-speculative critiques too often themselves tend to miscarry for fear of transgressing the same standards of niceness you raise here.
I noticed appended to your distinction about taste several straw man arguments concerning critiques about Dreher's mother and wife not raised here. For whom were those intended?
Regardless, I apologize for tracking any mud you didn't want into your excellent comment.
My comments about insulting a man's mother or speculating on female friends other than his wife were not references to Rod Dreher or anything said about him: they were merely examples of the level and form of insult I meant by the phrase poor taste (in contrast to the other things I mentioned: bad decorating or coarse language). I try to remain mindful of responding too many times and in increasingly fine detail as a discussion continues on another person's blog, especially as such things tend towards speaking repetitively, and so I think, other than having clarified that "poor taste" matter and thanking you for your kind words (which I do take to be genuine, so thank you, Keith), I'll let myself be assured that I said what I had to say and let any readers judge for themselves between our remarks.
DeleteYou should comment more often, Virgil. My talents lie only in pointing out to the well-meaning family that their beloved baby boy is really a day stripper breaking their Sunday bread with them in the nude, while you are able to explain to them why the mole they shouldn't be seeing anyway is actually melanoma.
DeleteFor what it's worth, I often find Keith's speculations about Rod's private life prurient, and sometimes creepy.
DeleteThat said, given the way Rod doesn't have ideas so much as emotions, engaging with what he writes almost inescapably involves some level of armchair psychology.
I prefer responding to Dreher's substance. But in Keith's defense, a large portion of the man's substance is oversharing. Responding to that stuff, however, is always a trap to some degree, and people not familiar with his methods find us distasteful for our exposés.
DeleteI strained a friendship years ago because I warned a friend to stay away from a very manipulative, coquettish woman. He said I was being harsh, judgmental, "not very nice", etc. Later he learned the hard way that I was not the mean one. The burned hand teaches best.
I still think it's good not to give into the temptation to follow the mystifying light of his confessional swamp gas. "Stay on target," is the Star Wars slogan to follow when he throws out revelatory countermeasures.
Although not yet the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal, and although he has not yet actually healed the great Schism, Rod Dreher has, remarkably, both bridged it and managed to get himself nationally recognized as a spokesman for both Orthodoxy and Catholicism (and he's working diligently on Evangelical Protestantism, to boot), overwhelmingly by intimidating - the verb "to make timid" - his might-be critics on all sides into worrying that, unless they're prepared to submit footnoted, peer-reviewed papers against his passive-aggressive insinuations, payloads-within-wrappers, and ever-updateable top-of-the-head discharges, they will forever be regarded as horrible people and no one will ever pick them for their dodge ball team again.
DeleteThat, and the sheer, relentless volume of his doing so, is why Dreher's winning and continues to bitch-slap the Catholic Church and anything else he chooses to with impunity. The "New York Times best-selling" "conservative" author, whose best-selling status and conservatism is simply assumed, acceded to, and never even questioned.
To EQE's great credit, it's one of the few, if not the only, sites on the Web that actively criticizes this charlatan's fraudulent hustle, while an embarrassing number of other Christian sites demurely study how they, too, might get a little SERP juice bumpity-bump from passively through-putting his stuff.
Sometimes one's fate at the hands of others can be uncomfortably hard-earned.
… Rod Dreher has, remarkably, both bridged it and managed to get himself nationally recognized as a spokesman for both Orthodoxy and Catholicism (and he's working diligently on Evangelical Protestantism, to boot), …
DeleteForgive the return to this a few days after it was left, but, catching up at the end of the week now, this comment struck me. Mr. Dreher's growing association with Evangelical Protestants (including meeting in person with them and being favorably mentioned by them on the Twitter) is a phenomenon that conceals an issue that should be of concern to any Orthodox. Namely, no small number of Evangelical Protestants think that most Orthodox (as well as Catholics) are going to hell.
Perhaps the younger generation have lightened up a bit not, but surely not entirely. While, for instance, Russell Moore seems an affable enough fellow, the young Owen Strachan of the Council on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood recently wrote in his blog that the thousand years between the Nicene Creed and the Protestant Reformation were primarily characterized by the rise of semipelagianism. Perhaps too the older generation have taken more to keeping their harsher views to themselves, but not very long ago at all Dr. Albert Mohler said, charitably, that he thinks possible thousands of Catholics are saved. Do the math. (And forgive me if I mentioned that anecdote in any earlier comments: I tell it often enough.)
I could continue with names and remarks, but we get the picture. Mr. Dreher is getting into bed with a number of folk who quietly or not so quietly believe that Orthodox and Catholics are idolaters, Mariolaters, and any other kind of -olaters you'd like to name. I was once confronted in a conversation with an Evangelical professor on the Twitter by a third person who derided the Orthodox Church to me (inserting himself into our conversation). The professor, who made a huge stink about how some far right bloggers had misrepresented her views and for spent many days tacitly begging her followers for support and retweeting every defense of her, did not say one word to this fellow who insulted Orthodoxy to the both of us. For my own part, I told the fellow to go pound sand, and I wondered whether Professor So-and-So had remained silent due do her own views of Orthodoxy.
Virgil, I am glad you returned to the thread, because you make a very important point IMHO.
DeleteOf course Rod is just using evangelicals the way he uses compliant Catholics. But, as you say, what does this say about the seriousness of his own religious commitment? I'm a pretty ecumenical person, but I would draw the line at making common cause with Jack Chick or Maria Monk. Sometimes those who are not with us are against us.
Should read: Sometimes those who are not with us really *are* against us.
DeleteI think both of you may be missing the obvious.
DeleteRod is building an entirely new Christian communion known as Ben Oppers, formal, not particular faith-substantial, a self-identified as select group of individuals self-segregated from their individual faith paths by their self-determination that they are personally endowed with the internal means to be better Christians than the average bear Christian.
Because Ben Oppers will necessarily hold mutually contradictory faith views, any particular such faith tradition cannot define them; there cannot be any faith catechism defining Ben Oppers, and so any Christian, perhaps any deist at all, can become one. If they did, if there were, only Orthodox could be Ben Oppers (even as much as Rod might want it), but not Catholics, or only Baptists, but not Orthodox, etc. But one can't build a book-buying readership on the basis of such parochial exclusion, can one.
Therefore, Ben Oppers necessarily become ecumenical (or, perhaps, "MTD") formally rather than substantially: all generically whatever Christiany - so long as they announce fealty to the BO - but, excitingly for restless young people, that new, improved Christianyness which thoughtful housewives across America have been demanding for their laundry shelves for far too long now.
Let me flip this around: how, on what basis, could Rod possibly read anyone out of the BO?
DeleteSatanist? Okay.
Barring that, though, who who might wish to exhort that they, too, are a Ben Opper - based on any criterion they wish to name - is Rod in a position to claim, "No, X is not and cannot be a Ben Opper."
Me, for instance, based on...I'll make something up later.
In connection (and agreement) with all this: OK, refresh my memory here, please, y'all. Didn't Rod once post about something called "distance healing"? This was several years ago. IIRC he was being distance-healed over the phone with the help of some spiritual guru or master or what have you. (NOT a priest, either Catholic or Orthodox; more an Eastern Religions kinda spiritual master.)
ReplyDeleteI remember thinking at the time, "That sounds New Agey. I thought this guy was Orthodox, supposedly."
I guess he makes it up as he goes along. So do a lot of people, of course, including many ill-informed Catholics. But then, those other people usually don't get on their high horses and hector everyone else about The One True Right Way to Be Christian.
As I mentioned earlier, before being hired by the Templeton Foundation as an editor Dreher had already managed to score a Templeton-Cambridge Fellowship ($15K cash, musty pile-o'-books allowance, vacation in Cambridge, England) for which largess he was required to produce a paper. His sketchy accounts at the time puts it squarely in your New-Agey East-meets-West-in-a-fusiony-motel room wheelhouse, with or without distance healing.
DeleteLike I said, Dreher never published it directly himself, but I wonder if there's not a catalog somewhere of all those T-C papers.
One-size-fits-one Dreherian-specific Orthodoxy would indeed solve a lot of problems for someone so Orientally inclined, pseudo-intellectual as much as reproductive.
I looked up "Distant Healing" (apparently its correct name). It is connected with Reiki, which is some seriously scary stuff. When someone tried to do Reiki at our parish, we had the building re-blessed. Reiki masters also charge for their services: Aa an ex-New Ager (now Catholic deacon) once said to me, "With New Agers it is always finally about money."
DeleteAnyway, this stuff is neither Catholic nor Orthodox. Practitioners of both faiths may be attracted to it, alas. But then they should not presume to be spokesmen for orthodox Christianity, let alone experts re same.
I realized that Dreher has raved about Distant Healing in the past, but I'm more interested in what he raves about continuously, e.g., Benedict Option and how awful the Catholic Church is.
DeleteOh, agree 100%! I was just chiming in with the Orthodox folks on this thread who point out that Dreher's Orthodoxy doesn't sound very Orthodox. I was merely confirming their insights, from my outsider perspective and vague, inchoate memories.
DeleteAny recommendations for sound Orthodox bloggers?
ReplyDeleteI like Fr. Ted Bobosh (https://frted.wordpress.com/), and Fr. Alexis Trader has written some thoughtful essays (http://ancientchristianwisdom.com/). Demetri Salapatas, who is studying in England, collects some edifying quotations on Orthodoxy as well as offering his own remarks, photographs, and other philosophical, cultural, and religious material (http://londinoupolis.blogspot.com/). The Web site Pemptousia (http://pemptousia.com/) publishes a variety of new and reprinted essays: some are excellent, others not so much. Their recent series "Theology of Gender," for instance, was mostly on the excellent side.
DeleteJust to name four that easily come to mind. Of course one takes one's chances trying to find a true or sound representation of anything on the Internet.
Y'all, some folks are invoking Dreher in the service of hyperventilating re the Synod over at Midwest Conservative. Responses appreciated. Linkie later.
ReplyDelete