Trying to make sense of the Benedict Option
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| Seeking the Benedict Option |
While no one will really know the dimensions, forms, content, limits, or anything else about the Benedict Option until Rod Dreher publishes his book detailing such defining aspects of his invention in the spring of 2017, dedicated fans of his personality and prose nonetheless gather even now in pursuit of their salvation in his words.
UPDATE (as they say): A close friend and very highly placed bishop in one of the world's major orthodox religions who wishes to remain anonymous just emailed me to point out that the image above is not in fact one of devotees of the Benedict Option congregating a year in advance of finding out what it actually is in hopes of snaring a deep spiritual discount prior to its hard launch, but rather a flock of Welsh sheep who had gotten into a patch of cannabis. My apologies for the mistake. Further updates on both groups as they become available.
Sheep high on cannabis or BenOp devotees. Just what is the difference?
ReplyDeleteI believe the sheep must first be high on cannabis before uncritically accepting Dreher's anonymously sourced anecdotes as fact. This is why border collies are employed to bite their heels, a motivation unneeded to suggestively herd BenOp devotees.
DeleteWhile no one will really know the dimensions, forms, content, limits, or anything else about the Benedict Option until Rod Dreher publishes his book detailing such defining aspects of his invention in the spring of 2017
ReplyDeleteWell today the Benedict Option is less strategic withdrawal and more active resistance.
http://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/training-for-resistance-christianity-culture-war-occupation/
How Rod envisions himself leading the fight:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MkTw3_PmKtc
How everyone else sees him:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q7vtWB4owdE
-Anonymous Maximus
Because if Dreher doesn't champion every possible facet of every issue good coin may be left unsnatched from the table, El Cid is now strategically withdrawing his non-withdrawal Benedict Option withdrawal in the form of La Résistance. I think that's the right resis-taunce; I may be wrong.
DeleteAs a Bopper Rod will still strategically withdraw from any possible meaningful or accountable cultural action like politics or other engaged activism, moaning the fatalistic liturgy of Marvin the Robot: "Life...don't talk to me about life...", but he will do so with his eyes squeenched up tightly while straining at stool, thus putting the fiercely resisting lie to any risible notion that the BO is only about monastic retreat from the world.
If the world wishes to find El Cid fiercely resisting the barbarians at the gate, they need look no further than Dreher's Cozy Corner stronghold where the corpses of half-read books are even now being stacked like cord wood.
OTOH, if you're savvy enough to get on board the BO train, you can go from this to
ReplyDelete...my friend Jake Meador, the Evangelical writer and Benedict Optioneer, continues to show why he is one of the most important and visionary Christian voices of his generation
Becoming one of the most important and visionary Christian voices of his generation just six years out of college has got to beat out curating content for an apartment rental company, right? And no grad school debt.
"Benedict Optioneer"
DeleteDoes Rod not hear "Mouseketeer" when he writes that, or does he hear it and think it's cute?
Wendell Berry, Stanley Hauerwas, Alasdair MacIntyre, and James K. A. Smith may all have flicked Dreher the Booger off their pants legs. But there's still young Jake Meador to help Our Working Boy save everyone's precious bodily fluids from Duns Scotus, William of Okham, and "Caitlyn" Jenner.
ReplyDeleteAlso, young Leah Libresco. But she's a girl and, therefore, probably a little bit yucky to Our Working Boy. Not that there's anything wrong with that.
ReplyDeleteFrom Dreher's quotation from our LinkedIned, RentPing social media position-curating guru Meador himself:
ReplyDelete"To be indifferent is, in the sense we are speaking of today, to be confident in the goodness of a certain way of life. It is to be immune to the appeals of popularity and relevance, committed instead to the work we have been given to do. It is to be convinced enough of your vocation that you don’t need to be bothered by many of the things that consume the attention of your peers. It is to say that you are not concerned with finding your next promotion, accumulating life experiences (which you use to build your brand on social media as well as your CV), looking for your next big house, or seeking out the right school to advance your child’s career prospects. It is to be content with the life you have been given and to work in one’s home place for its improvement rather than seeking a better place somewhere else. It is, to borrow a phrase from Berry, to acquire the joy of sales resistance."
Right. Believe it or not, I have nothing personal against our post-pubescent wise one Jake Meador. It's a shining testament to the innate bankruptcy of the Benedict Option, however, that its founder, Dreher, is forced to find the salvation of Christianity in the life experiences of ones like Meador but a decade and change out of puberty - few others making themselves available. But when you're a wannabe cult leader like Dreher on the make, you Pied Pipe your kiddies where you can find them.
I'm sure both Meador and Libresco are intelligent young people who mean well. But they're YOUNG and it's telling that Dreher can't find anybody but fellow bloggers to endorse the Benedict Option and that none of the bloggers he's found is over 30 years old. Meador and Libresco will outgrow Rod Dreher but Rod Dreher will never outgrow himself.
ReplyDeleteRod helpfully links to a post by Alan Jacobs entitled (the lower case styling is Jacobs') "questions for the critics of the Benedict Option", posing the rhetorical question near the end, "So what's the problem...If so, please explain how."
ReplyDeleteI say rhetorical, because, by not accepting comments, Jacobs would apparently prefer not to risk any answers.
Dreher, however, in the post linked from already knows the answers:
"I’d like to know too. There are good faith and bad faith ways to answer Alan’s query. The bad faith way is, “Because if 1, 2, and 3 are true, then I would have to change my way of living more than I am comfortable doing. Therefore, I will not take it seriously.”
But nobody actually says that. The difficulty is trying to figure out when apparently good-faith criticisms are really bad-faith ones in disguise, ones that don’t deserve a response."
1. Clearly bad faith ones, that is, anything anyone says which is really them saying in secret code “Because if 1, 2, and 3 are true, then I would have to change my way of living more than I am comfortable doing. Therefore, I will not take it seriously.”
2. Bad faith ones, all like 1. also, but in disguise.
This is the way the BO defends itself: not allowing criticism and pre-defining it away.
Well, there will be a third kind, much more apparent as Dreher's publication date comes and goes: those (politely, very politely!) not giving any more of a flying eff about Dreher and his BO than they have about his dark wood.
But, because Dreher only wants to make Christianity great again and is my speed bag for conceptual analysis training, I will continue to give one.
Speaking of questions about Rod's BO, revelations that the Obama Administration's State Department "glitch" of 2013 wasn't a glitch at all but rather a deliberate shunting of a legitimate Q & A down the memory hole left me wondering how could I have possibly forgotten this: Noah Millman's Benedict Option questions, mysteriously disappeared by TAC the moment insecure diva Dreher got wind of them.
DeleteBenedict Option-critical Noah Millman questions: down the memory hole, covered by bald-faced TAC and Dreher lies.
Benedict Option-supportive - though literally unanswerable - Alan Jacob questions, well, those supposedly need the answers that only the carefully vetted and curated will be able to provide.
The bottom line is, forget the superfluity of the Benedict Option to Christianity; that's really fairly obvious. The truly odious thing about the whole BO enterprose is the utter personal moral corruption of Rod Dreher that birthed it. No self-respecting worshipper of Ba'al would stand for such shenanigans. Why should any self-respecting Christian?
If Jacobs really can't understand why ordinary, practicing Christians who have always already been doing everything that Dreher recommends would rather not have a big fat "Benedict Option" corporate logo posted onto everything they do by a sex-obsessed, ambiguously-gay internet-gadfly with Asperger's Syndrome who claims to have invented the wheel, then Jacobs needs to give back his PhD.
ReplyDeleteI hear things every Sunday -- if I'm listening, every day -- that, if I took seriously, would mean I would have to change my way of living more than I am comfortable doing.
ReplyDeleteA Bulverism that poisons the well by implying I have to prove the reason I don't think more of the BenOp than I do isn't because Rod is holier than I merely bolsters the objection that, whenever the BenOp starts to take identifiable form, it's indistinguishable from living as though Christianity were true. Every truth of Christianity tells me I should be holier than I am.
Couple Rod Dreher's congenital dishonesty with his naked efforts to monetize Christianity through his Benedict Option book, and I'm afraid those like Meador, Libresco, the Practical Conservative, Jacobs, trying to up-rank their own blogging on the Internet by keywording or otherwise positively associating their blogs with the BO may ultimately find themselves embedded in a Tarbaby instead.
ReplyDeleteOf course, when the BO does - precisely because of its complete superfluity - ultimately give way to the next cyberChristian chatting fad ("beyond Options...Musings!!!"), it will be Dreher and Dreher alone holding the empty sack. So I guess I really can't be too hard on the cynical remora now parasitically attaching themselves to the underside of his jowls hoping for some spillout up-rank greblets; it's really all upside for them. When the BO blush passes, they can wistfully shake their heads at Dreher's consistent inability to write a successful book while they search for the next promising host to feed from.
It appears the Ministry of the Benedict Option (MiniBenOp) has already become as perennially dependent on Catholic-bashing to drive its recruiting and conformity as MiniPax was on Emmanuel Goldstein:
ReplyDelete"I don’t know what Catholic parents in this situation should do.."
Oh, good; then stop right there. Alas, too much to hope for.
"...But this is as good a place as any to make a point I’m going to make more explicitly in my Benedict Option book: parents who are sitting around waiting for the institutional church to get something usefully countercultural and authentically, uncompromisingly Catholic going are wasting valuable time. It’s not going to happen. Do it yourselves. You can’t count on church bureaucrats to do the right thing in cases like this, or even to know what the right thing to do is."
But you can count on Rod. That's why he was born in that manger in St. Francisville. To give Christianity the "countercultural" Internet bubble immersion it's been missing all these years.
Dreher is always at the ready to shame parents on how they should raise their children, while he of course shoulders exactly no responsibility whatsoever for the outcome.
DeleteIOW, you won't get the BO seal of approval unless you bet your children's lives and souls on it.
Director Rod curates the money shot. Commenter Andrew, whose possible existence as an individual not named Rod Dreher is known only to Rod, leaves the thread helpfully paused at a thought-provoking sentiment:
Delete"You know, if your own church is antithetical and actively hostile to you (sic) own faith, perhaps it’s time to cut your losses and seek a better church."
Whoa. Who could possible have seen that coming?
Pik, have we ever seen anything in Dreher's universe that existed as anything other than means to his ends?
DeleteThis comment has been removed by the author.
ReplyDeleteThis is what I emailed Rod's employer:Once again, you have let Mr. Dreher use his blog to spill his Anti-Catholic venom. http://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/principal-priest-dirty-book-writer/
ReplyDeleteI say this because he constantly focuses on one example to make his case that Catholicism is corrupt and no good, unlike his brand of Orthodoxy. Would you like me saying that because you nor any of your enlightened Washingtonian's every spoke about Dennis Hastert's abuse that makes you somehow suspect? Of you would not. I think me and some of my friends will be going on an education campaign to expose the Con-Man you employ.
What do you think?
I'm with you on your email. It depends on his employer, tho -- for all we know, your complaint about Dreher's Catholic bashing would earn Dreher a "Good Job!" pat on the back.
DeleteI once thought about calling the supervisor of a cold-calling stock broker who rudely tried to shame me into going with his hot tip. But then I figured it was just as likely that the boss would give the broker an atta-boy for his aggressiveness.