Ah! So the Benedict Option is...Oh...
...I tell everybody I can that yes, the Benedict Option is simply the church doing what it ought to have been doing all along, but hasn’t been,...
Oh. Well...
Still, who better to instruct the church - which church? why, any church - how to do what it ought to have been doing all along, but hasn’t been than lifelong religious buffet nibbler Rod Dreher?
But to find out how to fix your broken church and maybe even remove that stubborn hard water residue you're going to have to wait until next year when the cure is finally bottled and for sale.
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| The essential additive without which your church cannot function properly |
If you give your $20 which can only be spent once to a person in need who is not Rod Dreher, you obviously risk cultivating in that person a dependency on handouts over personal industry.
On the other hand, if you give your $20 which can only be spent once to a person in need who is Rod Dreher, you obviously risk cultivating in that person a dependency on handouts over personal industry, for example the industry of having made any effort at all over the prior ten years to think about, midwife, shape, create, critique, test, re-examine, and in any other conceivable way produce anything remotely resembling substantial content to back the hollow marketing phrase "Benedict Option" prior to having finally landed a book contract and being forced to dash out the needed filler for it over the space of a few months.
Still, if God can create the earth in seven days, why can't the next best thing for your church, Rod Dreher, invent the Benedict Option out of whole cloth in just seven months to meet a contract deadline?
Boy, tough call on that $20, I know.
Hey...here's an idea. Maybe just give it directly to your church.They've been invested in this whole Christian thing quite a bit longer and view it through a lens somewhat larger than merely hustling a book contract.
UPDATE (as they say): I'm tacking this on here because it's not enough to fill a post of its own, but mainly because it's the essential question implicit in this post itself.
Why is the Benedict Option for sale?
Why is, according to its inventor, Rod Dreher, the only remaining hope for orthodox Christianity being peddled as just another market commodity, like a Hula Hoop, a pack of condoms, or a six pack of light beer?
Because it is for sale. According to Rod, he put the finishing touches on the only definitive prescription to save orthodox Christianity last night.
But it's not as if Rod and his family would starve if this one salvic treatise were simply given to the faithful like Christ's sermons themselves. Rod gets paid round the clock for his writing.
So if the Benedict Option is the only real hope for millions of Christians, why is it being strategically priced and peddled the way Martin Skreli hustled Daraprim?
But if its just another Dreher book meant to keep its author in wine and oysters, how important can it really be?
They've been invested in this whole Christian thing quite a bit longer and view it through a lens somewhat larger than merely hustling a book contract.
ReplyDeleteOh...I think our Louisiana bloodhound has caught a whiff of something more lucrative than the traditionally "straight to remainder" Rod Dreher book deal.
Conferences. Conferences in Maui. Lawyers conferences (follow the money and you'll eventually find lawyers). Keynote speaker fees. Drivers. Expense accounts. Maybe even enough money to put a cement pond in to amuse the family back home whilst he's in Hawaii.
Doesn't matter if you're well respected as long as you're well paid for you shrill shilling. Witness the birth of the Russell Moore Option.
-Anonymous Maximus
Nothing says Christian counter-cultural like Maui. It gives the folks back in Bug Tussle something to live vicariously through.
DeleteI guess "the Benedict Option is simply the church doing what it ought to have been doing all along" so long as you leave out the part about "Go, therefore, and make disciples of all nations".
ReplyDeletePik, Pik, Pik...just like the Benedict Option is both optional and non-optional, it's also a both/and proposition, not an either/or proposition.
DeleteIts architecture is being compiled by having a dozen six-year-olds sit in a fun circle and make a list of the things they know the names of:
"Church!"
"Yeah - and chickens!"
"What about cars?"
"Yeah, cars...cool cars, too."
"And babies"
"Teachers"
"And Maui!"
"What's Maui?"
Rod checks in:
ReplyDelete"Please forgive me for no posting this morning. I pulled an all-nighter, and very nearly finished the final chapter of the Benedict Option book."
I want to cough-up my hard earned cash for a book on a topic as important as how to save orthodoxy in the Post-Christian West penned by an alleged professional writer and conservative thought leader who puts as much time and effort into his masterwork as an undergrad writing a paper for Sociology 101 - said no one ever.
The comment on the previous post which, oddly, didn't receive an NFR from the guy who literally just finished writing the book on the Benedict Option:
DeleteMary Winn says:
June 29, 2016 at 8:03 am
“…it’s time to take action, to prepare yourself, your family, and your community spiritually and otherwise, for the trials ahead.”
I’m with you 100%, but I’m wondering specifically what I should be doing, how I should be preparing. I talk to my teenagers about the threats to religious liberty threats (we’re orthodox Roman Catholic), they seem to get it. We pray together, my daughter is going to go to an orthodox Catholic university. I would love our family to be part of a community like you describe in Norcia and Oklahoma. Could you be specific in how one should prepare?
The final score is in...
ReplyDeleteLocalism/Stability/Family/Home: 0
Convenience: 1
That is why we have had to make the hard, hard decision to move this summer just down the road to Baton Rouge. Before we had the mission, we would drive 45 minutes each way on Sundays to the Orthodox mission there. We were glad to have the Baton Rouge church, but it’s hard to be a real part of a parish’s life if you’re so far away.
Before we received the shock about St. John’s last week, we had enrolled all three of our kids in Sequitur Classical Academy in Baton Rouge. My son Matthew was in Sequitur for its first two years, but then withdrew because of his own particular needs. Now he’s returning for his 11th grade year, and he’s bringing his brother and sister with him. The school is really growing, and we want to give everything we have to building it up. Julie has been working for months with our friends who lead Sequitur, and has been planning to open in Fall 2017 a sister school in St. Francisville. Father Matthew was key to that plan. Without Father Matthew, a classical Christian school in St. Francisville becomes untenable. We had planned to take the hit of driving 90 minutes round-trip to Baton Rouge four days a week so the kids could have a year of Sequitur before opening our local school. Now we not only wouldn’t have a local classical Christian school to look forward to, but we would also have had to add another day of 90-minutes driving, this time on Sunday. It made no sense.
You know what else doesn't make sense? Listening to Drerod preach how "we" are all going to have make sacrifices for our faith, sacrifices that if you're not willing to make he calls you validity a "real" Christian into question when he's not willing to drive what most urban dweller's consider a normal workday commute to attend church or educate his children. What a piece of work.
-Anonymous Maximus
You know, if Rod were a normal human being, I wouldn't have a problem with any of this. I'd applaud it, actually - if he picks the right neighborhood, he gets walkability and community and all those good things that someone like Notre Dame's Phillip Bess (who someone named Rod Dreher took pictures of himself with SEVERAL DAYS AGO) has written books about. Great. Good for him. Seriously. I mean it. Find a great home for your family in a great place and enjoy it.
DeleteBut it's sometimes as if Rod himself doesn't understand how the Internet works. In recent memory Rod's ranted on and on about staying put and the wonders of where he bought his house and how much it means to his mom and dad and Ruthie (remember them?) and how his little storefront tax dodge of a mission church is the only pure church left on the planet - he's even writing a freaking book about it (at least that what I think Rod's BO is all about). He flies around the world, prancing hither and yon, while his priest can't afford to support his handicapped child and finally has to bug out (as severance, he gets a tribute from Rod, which as severances go, is the kind of thing I'd say "um, thanks, but I'll just take cash). Meanwhile, I'm sure he'll continue to rant to us about stability and roots and all that, even as he tries out new spiritual path after new spiritual path (what, you expect him to stick with Orthodoxy? Why, so many Orthodox, both cradle and convert, were meanies to him!). And anyways, how long do you think Baton Rouge will keep Rod's ambitions in check? He'll flit off again, probably with another book about how everyone else not named Rod Dreher needs to stay put.
Anonymous: But it's sometimes as if Rod himself doesn't understand how the Internet works.... ....probably with another book about how everyone else not named Rod Dreher needs to stay put.
DeleteYes; I'd almost say that one could sum up Dreher's main problem by saying that he takes things too far. Hugh Hewitt stated something very wise once on his show to a hysterical caller about his overblown rhetoric: "When you overstate your case, you lose your credibility and your authority on the topic under discussion." Dreher has demonstrated this to a stunning degree ever since the days of Crunchy Conservatives. Things which most conservatives would call a good idea like staying put for a length of time Dreher has characterized as an ABSOLUTE IMPERATIVE. That is what the Benedict Option is all about. Taking a certain lifestyle choice, imbuing it with quasi-spirituality, then implying that if you don't practice your faith in this way you are not serious about your faith.
Dreher is making the same calculated move of convenience under the cover of an unrelated distraction that he did when moving from Catholicism to Orthodoxy. In the former case, he became so unraveled from his own reporting on the Scandal that he was forced at peril of his very wits themselves to take refuge in a communion that allowed artificial birth control once he had had three children. Because, as he's said, contraception can be rough on marriages.
ReplyDeleteNow, he's already mined all possible value out of St. Francisville, and the costs of local disapprobation have begun to far outweigh any residual benefits to be gleaned. Save for his mother, his family and neighbors hold him in undisguised contempt. Control of his Walker Percy Weekend has been taken out of his hands. And now, crocodile tears, his little Orthodox mission church which he could easily have sustained himself is conveniently being allowed to collapse, providing him with this story's convenient departure cloak.
What a piece of work indeed. But there are more than enough suckers born every minute to send him assistance money even now.
Keith, I think what you mean to say is that Dreher's belief is that "the Roman Catholic church's teaching on contraception can be rough on marriages." Here's the source for that statement. Excerpt (response to Agathonika):
Delete[NFR: I agree. Some people have, and have had, a great experience with NFP. Ours was not. We did it out of obedience, as Catholics, but it was pretty destructive, all in all. — RD]
I should probably do an entire post on this as it relates to Ben Op versus Catholicism. It would seem that in a Ben Op community there would be plenty of contraceptive use in order to enjoy life to the fullest while building the aging hippie City of God that the adherents prefer.
Rod Dreher's best-selling book ever will be written in about 20 years and the working title will be "Ben Op 2nd Gen Rumspringa".
It is hard to maintain a church when you are doing jaunts to Maui, Italy and everywhere "the beautiful people" are.
DeleteI still think the height of ickiness is Rod "Book Advance" Dreher flying off around the world and posting pictures about it while his priest - in a mission church of only a few families - raises his family on a poverty-level income. Which Rod could have easily raised with just one check, being one of his only parishioners and all.
DeleteAnon Max: You know what else doesn't make sense? Listening to Drerod preach how "we" are all going to have make sacrifices for our faith, sacrifices that if you're not willing to make he calls you validity a "real" Christian into question when he's not willing to drive what most urban dweller's consider a normal workday commute to attend church or educate his children. What a piece of work.
ReplyDeleteThis is all too priceless. Thatcher's quote stating "the problem with socialism is that you eventually run out of other people's money" could probably be adapted to explain the eventual demise of any cult/commune concept like the Benedict Option. Maybe some like "the problem is that eventually other people run out with what's left of their money."
Baton Rouge will provide Rod with a better standpoint from which to select his post-Benedict Option book life's calling than would continuing to pretend to like living among hoi polloi in St. Francisville.
DeleteI think he'd be great opposite Rachael Ray.
The problem with the Benedict Option, like the problem with the Ponzi Option, is that eventually you run out of innocent new marks.
DeleteThe Benedict Option payoff:
ReplyDelete...I got the statistics for this blog’s readership for the past month, and the second quarter. We have had a record-setting year. For that, I thank you all.
No, thank you, Rod, for your outstanding work in defense of click liberty.
Well whaddya know - looks like Rod's finally tossing St. Francisville, his much-written-about hometown, overboard, right after his personal priest finally said "screw it" and left.
ReplyDeleteThere's a lot of things to wonder about - how much did Rod's presence contribute to the failure of the mission church, how long will Rod stick with Orthodoxy when the only option is those namby-pamby Greek Orthodox who aren't the kind of spiritual Navy SEALs that Rod needs to discipline him, etc. Any bets on Rod's next spiritual path? I'm putting my money on hyper-Calvinism myself. He's said so many nice things about it that it's a wonder he's not moving up to Grand Rapids or something.
I think he will go back to being a Methodist.
ReplyDeleteIs there no ROCOR in Baton Rouge? Really?
ReplyDeleteDiane I found out Baton Rouge has a Greek Orthodox and a Orthodox Church of America Church. Considering the OCA was the group he left in Dallas for the ROCOR, I doubt he will return.
ReplyDeleteIn which Rod gets the vapors over the singing of "God Bless America" in a church ....
ReplyDeleteAfter outing himself as flamboyantly bisexual, politically speaking, his rebranding now necessitates posing as the most worldlessly pure and only hope for Christianity available.
DeleteAs with any Ronco product, a predictable audience will be eager to order now, whether or not they ever open the package.
His (God bless) America! is offered ironically, one understands. That's how the appeal to Stockholm Syndrome works.
It's at least amusing if not important to note that ISIS and the Benedict Option are both surfing the same wave of psychological yearning to be among the chosen of their respective charismatic messianic movements.
DeleteISIS devotees want to be fierce countercultural warriors wielding the sword in the service of establishing the New Caliphate.
BenOp devotees want to be mellow countercultural warriors wielding the really good, authentically sourced dinner party in the service of establishing the New Crunchy Christendom.
In the pursuit of the goals of each, the established order is an impediment to be discredited and overcome.
Personally, I think he may very well employ the rhetoric he's been polishing over the last year or so beating the bushes of anxiety and dissatisfaction in pursuit of his Benedict Option to prospect whatever Orthodox church he joins for unhappy splinterers from which to constitute a subsequent ROCOR church of his own.
ReplyDeleteThat would then consolidate his twin passions, prayer as indoor exercise and the Benedict Option, and he would only be leaving behind mosquitoes and the deprivations of rural living. When his mother finally dies, he can move everything - including a newly BO'd ROCOR church - back to his patrimonial acreage.