Thank you, God, Supreme Court, Trump, RBG, Mitch McConnell, etc.

I feel bad I did not post this a few days ago when it happened, but I was really busy. But obviously the fall of the Roe v Wade decision is pretty much more important than any other news, or any opinion of mine, or petty like or dislikes. In fact, I really can't say it any better than this:

What a day! Of course this only means that abortion policy is now up to each state to regulate as it sees fit. There’s lots of work left to be done for the unborn.

Let us be thankful for all the faithful men and women and even children who marched, who prayed, who donated, and who sacrificed over the past 49 years to make this day a reality. Let us be thankful for the courage of Justices Alito, Barrett, Thomas, Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, and even Roberts, despite his waffling.

Let us be thankful for Donald Trump; I didn’t vote for him in part because I didn’t think he would do anything on abortion in the courts; I have scarcely been happier to admit I was wrong. This would not have happened without his presidency. And thank you, Federalist Society!

I am not a Catholic, but I want to give special thanks to the Catholic Church in the United States, for never once failing to fight for life. Thanks to to all the churches and church leaders who stood publicly for life. In America, the Catholics were always there, without fail. Thank you, National Right To Life and all other pro-life lobbyists.

It is always good to see people on the prolife side putting aside differences to give credit where it is due, so it is good to see Mr. Dreher doing so here.

Also a special thanks to my own mother who died on February 3, 2020. She always said what everyone else in the prolife movement said: Roe will fall, but that will not mean it is time to rest. But she worked at a crisis pregnancy center, went to the marches, and got tons of people involved in the effort including my brother and me. So she gets to rest now.

Catholic Priest to Rod Dreher: "Enough!"

It's a great word. "Enough!" A word of command, in my opinion. When I use it with my kids in a one word sentence I generally mean "too much, you guys are going overboard with [whatever], and I have been indulging you for [duration], but now you're done." Some examples might be "Enough of the Fortnight Dance demonstration", or "Enough of the collection of 'perfect snowballs' you stored in the kitchen freezer when it is 25 degrees outside."

So it is, I think, for Father Richard Munkelt in this open letter to Rod Dreher, regarding the latter's continuous, spiteful criticism of the Roman Catholic church twelve years after he left. I think from the tone and content of the article we may infer that Father Munkelt, like many of us at this humble blog, believe that when it comes to Mr. Dreher's coverage of everything bad going on in the Catholic Church, we have long since passed from abundance, to superabundance, and then on to super-duper-abundance....

...but ENOUGH! already of my commentary, and straight to the article. He begins:

Your recent articles in The American Conservative on "Catholic Triumphalism," constituting your latest broadside against the Catholic Church, were brought to my attention. After reading the articles, and in close connection with your remarks, I have some sobering thoughts concerning your departure from the Church and ongoing vilification not just of her abusive personnel (who are fair game) but of her very person. As such, I am not writing to you alone but also to those among your Catholic readers who may not be fully cognizant of your not-so-hidden campaign to turn souls away from and against the Bride of Christ. To them I say, there is nothing more unprofitable than to try to pick figs from thistles. It is my duty, therefore, to assist my fellow Catholics in not becoming unwitting purveyors of your Anti-Catholicism.

Oh, yeah, I forgot to mention that some of what Father says makes my criticism of Dreher seem tame, at least to me. Perhaps not to purveyors of what I'm calling the cringeworthy mantra, but more on that later.

If you care to read on, brace yourself, for charity sometimes carries a stick, as St. Augustine noted. And I shall not spare it, especially since you boast of being irreformable. I promise you, therefore, something in the spirit of St. Jerome.

Right; I think the "you asked for it" is warranted, especially considering how many times Dreher has assured us that he will never come back to the Catholic Church.

[He does it again — hilariously — at the end of his response to this article with the remark that if he ever came back it would be in spite of horrible "rad-trads" like Fr. Munkelt.]

1) Catholic Moral Teaching? In the two articles in question, possibly the most astonishing statement you make is this: "More importantly, though, where are the other churches who allow in their teaching for the sexual molestation of minors?" [My emphasis.] In all my years of study in theology and in the history of the Church, this putative Catholic teaching permitting the molestation of minors has completely escaped me. To be frank, without a citation from an authoritative doctrinal source, and of course none can be found, your statement is not only evidence of your brazen malice, it is sinister.

Dreher has insinuated that the teaching magisterium of the Catholic Church is "OK" with horrible sexual predation of children on the part of clergy many times, and he finally comes out and writes it. In his response, he claims this was taken out of context. No, dude... you're busted.

2) Emotion vs. Reason. From your own words, all indications are that you left the Catholic Church not because you had any theological argument against it but because you had an emotionally charged reaction to the clerical scandals and only afterwards adopted a new theology. As you put it: "I had never really considered Orthodoxy until my Roman Catholic faith had turned to dust." This suggests that an irrational response then went in search of cognitive validation, rather than rational reexamination. While your initial revulsion and anger at the revelations of clerical misconduct are quite understandable (who couldn't feel the same?), you lost all mental proportion and threw the Christ child out with the bath water. Failing at self-control, you failed to distinguish between (moral) teaching and (immoral) practice, and thus incredibly and pervertedly equated the two, as we just saw in paragraph #1. Therefore, when rightly attacking the faults of various members of the Catholic hierarchy you regrettably resort to hyperbole and the fallacy of tu quoque, a fallacy Our Lord was careful to avoid when criticizing the doctors of the Law. Then, with your mind shot, there was nothing left but to create a fantasy of a religious paradise in the green pastures of Orthodoxy. Except you found, or rather others like me would find for you, that you had one foot in a cow pie and the other about to step in a second. With that, let's discuss reality rather than fantasy.

Brutal, but just wait. All these punches land, and they are well documented in this blog. I'm too lazy to link them, but not to humble to list them: emotion over reason, lack of proportion, search for cognitive validation, throwing the baby out with the bath water, creation of a non-existing Edenic Russian orthodox church in your mind (and your backyard), etc. We've hit on all of these.

Of course, in knowingly and purposely separating yourself from the Catholic fold, you are undeniably a formal schismatic. A situation aggravated, I should add, by your having made a career of assailing the Church, all the while absurdly preaching to Catholics how to live better lives as Catholics. Pertinent to this last point, you wrote a book called The Benedict Option and artfully curry favor with--and sales from--Catholics as well as Catholic communities and organizations, who in some cases have been foolish enough to throw you a party. Why didn't you call it The Orthodox Option?

The closest Catholic gift shop to me has a great stock of Catholic books. But they also carry The Benedict Option by Rod Dreher. I am guessing the nice ladies who run the store have no idea that Dreher is an anti-Catholic, God bless 'em. But it was pushed out to Catholic stores by a publishing company who would never get the cha-ching they want from a book with the word Orthodox in it.

In addition, you make a declaration of your personal failings and seem to admit the superficial nature of your faith and spirituality while you were a Catholic, and then effectively blame the Church for your shortcomings! Strikingly, it is as if you stepped right out of the pages of the Gospel: your faith failed to take root, troubles came along, and you fell away. And now you proudly announce yourself practically immunized against any possible scandals in Orthodoxy by the device of downplaying the institution qua institution. Then why don't you try that back in the Catholic Church? Or how 'bout the Eastern Catholic Church? There you've got nice liturgy and no schism. That is not an "impassioned plea" for your return to the Household of Faith, for which I make no pretense. I am merely writing to direct attention to your penchant for subterfuge.

Told you it got more brutal. Penchant for subterfuge — bingo. Recently I've had to characterize this for a number of people unfamiliar with Rod Dreher's history of alternatively getting scandalized by Catholic scandals and not getting scandalized by Orthodox scandals. It works something like this: "I, Rod Dreher, looked at scandals in my own Catholic faith, and my faith was ruined! So I had to get a new one. So lucky that the Orthodox faith was there. And I learned my lesson: never report on scandals in my own faith community again. Only in others... and one other in particular: the Catholic Church. So convenient...." I know that is not exactly what Father is claiming that he does, but there is no logic in either characterization. Plus there is the added fact that there are very few people who leave the Catholic Church, attack it constantly, and still can be said to have any respect for it. That there are Catholics that don't realize this is the main reason for my bafflement about Dreher and why his condemnation is an ongoing necessity.

7) The Theological Question. It is in this area where you are most vulnerable, and so you tend to avoid it, preferring to whine that you just couldn't take the scandals anymore but still "honor" those who stuck with the Church. As you know and recall, I for one did, and could, as a newly ordained priest, reasonably claim to have undergone a greater conflict and ordeal than you went through. And so I thank you for your honoring and self-depreciation. I must admit, therefore, that in the context of spiritual warfare you remind me of the soldier that General Patton slapped in World War II.

"Don't know much about theology" has been one of Dreher's silliest cop-out lines. The guy has made his living in the world of religion writing.

In the wake of this theological adventure of yours (Protestant saints etc.), and in relation to your preposterous claim that you were "raised within historical Christian orthodoxy," I finally realized that your religion is not Orthodoxy at all. It is instead Pluralism, with devotion to all her pallid issue and slogans flitting about the walls of your cave...diversity, relativism, indifferentism, inclusiveness and the like. Either that or you are just invincibly ignorant of the massive break with historical Christianity that the Reformation represented, including Anglicanism, Arminianism, and Methodism. You should know that the Lutherans, in the sixteenth century, made an overture to the Patriarch of Constantinople and he rebuffed them on the central questions of justification by faith alone and the sacraments. But if you were raised as you say, why the need to become Catholic or Orthodox? Or is there some arcane difference between orthodoxy and Orthodoxy?

Certainly there is plenty of evidence to support Father's point in the 2013 book Little Way of Ruthie Leming, for which I wrote an early review. The faith of his sister which he praises so much can be easily seen to be really the "Moral Therapeutic Deism" which is so often derided by Dreher as the fake, Americanized version of the Christian Faith. And of course the Benedict Option is open to ALL Christians, and Jews, and Muslims....

"A figure like Pope Francis is unthinkable within Orthodoxy." Well, unthinkable until one thinks of Metropolitan Kallistos Ware, who is open to the ordination of women and same-sex marriage on the basis of "consensus," not excluding heretical communions. Ironically, Orthodoxy's continuous flirtations with Anglicanism and the heretical potpourri known as the World Council of Churches surely has, and will make, inroads into Orthodox teaching, especially in the moral arena.

That was just too easy.

All right, I'm just going to laze out the whole way and pull the ol' blogger standby: read the whole thing. There; I included a link for your convenience, O dear reader. I have to admit to be wondering whether or not Father Munkelt will be hit with the cringeworthy mantra. "What is the cringeworthy mantra you keep mentioning, Pauli?" In time, my friends, in time. As Robert Plant sang in Kashmir, "All will be revealed."

I will say one more thing for now. I've waited for something to come along like this, a long-form criticism of Dreherism coming from a member of the Catholic clergy and pointing out the tendencies which I and others have noted for some time. I have been impatient, I confess. It has taken a while for this to take place because this is the wise Catholic way. Many people are impatient for the church to act in small matters and great. "How long, O Lord" right?

I think that a quote from Pope Gregory VII pertains here: "It is the custom of the Roman Church which I unworthily serve with the help of God, to tolerate some things, to turn a blind eye to some, following the spirit of discretion rather than the rigid letter of the law." In following the spirit of discretion, silent reflection is often the correct choice.

But St. Jerome tells is that, at some point, silence fails the virtue of justice. He sums up his reason for overcoming his reluctance and finally writing his letter against Helvidius, whom he considered an ignorant boor: "But all these motives for silence, though just, have more justly ceased to influence me, because of the scandal caused to the brethren who were disgusted at [Helvidius's] ravings." And we have been disgusted at Rod Dreher's ravings. So thank you, Father Munkelt, for your erudition in presenting the errors contained within the ravings. The friends and supporters of Rod Dreher have already begun to nit-pick at your work, but your words are just and true in defense of the Roman Catholic Church, and we welcome them.

Monsignor Gänswein appears to be sold...

This may be my "just-when-I-thought-I-was-out-they-pull-me-back-in" blog post.

But I'm gonna let all y'all do the conversing in the comboxes. I'm verklempt.

If and when the Benedict Option is ever understood...

...what then?

The inchoate and incoherent marketing phrase "Benedict Option", test-marketed at the end of Rod Dreher's Crunchy Cons, was just that: a phrase, nothing more.

Years of blogging since based on that marketing phrase are just that: years of blogging based on that marketing phrase, nothing more.

A book titled The Benedict Option based on those years of blogging based on that marketing phrase is just that: a book titled The Benedict Option based on those years of blogging based on that marketing phrase, nothing more.

Examples of various, wildly disparate Christian endeavors predating a book titled The Benedict Option based on those years of blogging based on that marketing phrase and collected anecdotally post hoc are just that: examples of various, wildly disparate Christian endeavors predating a book titled The Benedict Option based on those years of blogging based on that marketing phrase and collected anecdotally, nothing more.

Spirited current talk provoked by examples of various, wildly disparate Christian endeavors predating a book titled The Benedict Option based on those years of blogging based on that marketing phrase and collected anecdotally post hoc is just that: spirited current talk provoked by examples of various, wildly disparate Christian endeavors predating a book titled The Benedict Option based on those years of blogging based on that marketing phrase and collected anecdotally, nothing more.

What, if anything, does any of this derivative, discretely and completely independent, free-floating cloud of abstract talkety-talk reality have to do with actual Christianity as practiced for the last 2,000 years? Need it? No, not at all, really, no more than the loquacious quadriplegic football fan need suit up and actually hit the field. All such abstracted fans, ordained and not, can remain blissfully happy their entire lives, perpetually circulating in their respectively flavored cloud realities.

Why has the derivative, Benedict Option cloud reality never before been proposed until Rod Dreher arrived to propose it to us? Is Rod Dreher the singularly visionary Christian prophet of our time?

Or is the problem ultimately simply the perennial one of trying to live as an actual earthly Christian, in the actual human world in which we find ourselves, in the actual historical years into which we have been born - rather than in an abstract cloud map?

Will the new, improved, aftermarket Christian additive - the abstract, derivative talkety-talk cloud reality of Rod Dreher's Benedict Option, hovering like a disembodied spirit over the human corpus Christi - really make Christianity and us as Christians perform better than the original?

How could it?

None of this of course means that Rod Dreher's Benedict Option phrase and its book may not sell some copies on Amazon, make Rod the talk of Christian blogging for a time, get him invited onto some high visibility  TV shows, or anything else coveted by the professional writer.

It simply means that, at the end of the day, even the most celebrated abstract aftermarket map remains just that, nothing more.

The territory - and Christianity's role within it - remains the same problematic, grubby, gritty human reality it has always been since that day on Calvary, the wonderful modern development of the Internet combox salon/book marketing portal notwithstanding.

TL;DR version: the "Benedict Option" is a faith unto itself.

On Miswriting The Benedict Option

The Benedict Option is not like this at all, except to get you to buy it.

You can't judge a book by its cover.

Or its contents.

Or reviews of its contents, by people who have bought the book, read what's in it, and told you what's in it. They might have misread it. So who can you trust?

When it comes to this book, the only person you can trust is you and Rod. And, frankly, you probably put too much trust in yourself as well.

You see, Rod Dreher's a professional writer, but are you a professional reader? Of course not; there's no such thing. So you probably misread it, too, whether or not you think you "get" the Benedict Option.

As George Weigel says,

There has been a lot of talk about a “Benedict Option” recently, and while no one seems to know precisely what that might mean, the Ben-Op, at least as advertised, does suggest a certain withdrawal from public life for the sake of forming intentional communities of character.

But there's a 50/50 chance that George Weigel misread the book as well, and since reading Ben-Op-type books is his business, what chance do you have of getting it right?

That's right, flatfoot - none at all.

So why even take the chance of embarrassing yourself by becoming confused over details you will almost certainly misread and misunderstand? Just leave the book out of it entirely.

Instead, send an Interac e-transfer for $14.98 (the Amazon hardcover price) with the subject line "I get the Benedict Option!" to

rod@amconmag.com

There!

Now, you, too, can be officially on record as someone who "gets" the Benedict Option, but, even better, you have now perfectly insulated yourself from the all too likely charge of having misread it.

UPDATE: A law professor at one of the country’s elite law schools - I'm going to call him "Professor Kingsfield" to preserve his privacy - just emailed me to ask,

But, Keith, this misreading plague...is no one immune from it? What about Rod Dreher himself? When we read his blog, which amounts to little more than links to his readings of others stitched together with his commentary - is it possible he could be guilty of misreading, too?

The professor was clearly rattled. After all, like Wile E. Coyote and his precipitous dash off the cliff, the good scholar knew he had just opened a void of nihilism beneath his feet, one where no one ever read things correctly, and the world was nothing but a compound horror of misreading piled upon misreading.

But I was happy to reassure him: only other people misread things. As with the research behind his Benedict Option, and going back to the very first note he copied from a kindergarten mate to stick on Mam and Paw's refrigerator, Rod Dreher always gets it right.

The Benedict Option as Triumph of the Therapeutic

In which the blogger, c'est moi, overcome by a tragic attack of laziness, in the style pioneered by Rod Dreher recycles a commenter's comment as his own post filler. In this case it's the 61st comment from the Rod Dreher on Sam Rocha post below by our own Anonymous

April 11, 2017 at 2:00 AM

Rebecca Bratten Weiss (linked to by Rocha):

"And there are other problems: when you try to come Out (or In?), whatever you feared in the World comes in with you, into your microcosm. It’s ironic that my father’s first community was called “New Eden.” Into every Eden, a serpent will come. We tend to bring it in with us. Want to escape from overweening tyrannical power? Too bad, you probably brought it with you, and you will find the community dominated by whichever leader (usually male) has the loudest voice and the least empathy. Want to escape from sexual perversion? Ha. Have I got some stories! It’s amazing just how perverse people can be, on the land, when no one is looking. Want to escape from a welfare system in which those who don’t work won’t eat? I can assure you, you will be shelling beans or building a cabin while nearby some hanger-on rambles on forever about how misunderstood he is. Tired of nitpicking bureaucracy? Your community will be filled with nitpickers, happy to call you out if your daughters’ skirts are too short, or if your sons have been listening to evil music like (gasp) Simon and Garfunkel.

"Communities like this tend to attract those who are unable to get along in the ordinary world, and whatever it was that made them unable to get along, they will bring in with them."

The last point seems to be the most salient re Rod and his BO. Rod can never fit in, and can never follow the rules. He would bring that with him into any intentional community. He basically had to found his own church, because no existing one is good enough for him! He doesn't fit in in East Podunk, or the big city, or his own family. He would bring that same problem with him. As would the other Optionists. They are, like Rod, all would-be chiefs, and no Indians.

More from Weiss:

"But the main thing I want to touch on, here, is why the idea of radical separation into intentional community is delusional from the start. And that has to do with money. Money creates systemic dependence. That’s why agrarianism is a needed component in any marginally successful effort..."

Of course. Without a material basis, the whole thing is play acting. You can't work for Dow Chemical all day, and then pretend you are a monk or a Pilgrim at night. Or, rather, you can, but it is stupid.

As for the agrarianism, good luck with that! Being a subsistence farmer is a lousy lot in life. Real subsistence farmers dump that lifestyle as soon as they are able. Being cold, hungry and sick, and not having access to warmth, food and medical care is not a good thing. And nobody in their right mind wants it. But those conditions, and worse, are very real possibilities for truly agrarian intentional communities.

Otherwise, again, it is playacting. Thoreau at Walden going in to Concord to have dinner at his Mom's or over at Ralph Waldo's when he got tired of his beans for breakfast, lunch and dinner diet!

How is Rod Dreher's personal, idiosyncratic Benedict Option therapeutic in the manner of his beloved Philip Rieff?

Because, upon critical analysis it proves to be not historical, nor theological, nor even geometrical enough to pass muster with Ignatius Jacques Reilly.

It is, instead, in the foundational formulation of our own pikkumatti, the confusion and conflation of Rod's personal taste with truth, also arrived at independently at by Sam Rocha himself:

Here is an insecure man selling his internal condition wholesale to other insecure Christians.

The Benedict Option is what, solely to therapeutically satisfy the psuchological distempers of Rod Dreher and others like him, what religion should be.

Not just Catholicism, because the Benedict Option gambit isn't Catholic, nor limited to Catholicism.

Not just Orthodoxy, because the Benedict Option gambit isn't Orthodox, nor limited to Orthodoxy.

Not just Evangelical, because the Benedict Option gambit isn't Protestant, nor limited to Evangelical Protestantism.

No, the Benedict Option is what the entire human enterprise of religion itself should be, if rewritten from scratch to therapeutically satisfy the psychological-aesthetic needs of Rod Dreher and those enamored of his cult of personality.

To be sure, Rod Dreher's Benedict Option™ isn't MTD - Moralistic Therapeutic Deism.

It's really more like MDF - Medium-Density Fiberboard, a recomposition of sawdusted chunks of many religions, all hastily pasted together with psychological Rod-Glue.

I wouldn't count on it standing up to a hard rain. 

In pursuit of pyrrhic victory: Rod Dreher on Sam Rocha

You tell him, Rod!

Let's begin by remembering that Rod Dreher, via his Benedict Option marketing gambit and the book that resulted from it, proposes to instruct the rest of the world how to be better Christians.

Sam Rocha's review of Rod's Book

Rod's review of Sam's review: Sam Rocha: The Critic as Failed Oyster

Useful associated links:

#BenedictOption = boot camp for the Church Militant

“Christian America” and the Benedict Option

Guilt by association...


My comment from the post below where I first posted these links: "Dreher's pyrrhic victory is so close - so close!"

UPDATE 1 - Poink!:

A Noise Annoys An Oyster: A Critical Review of Rod Dreher’s Review of Sam Rocha’s Review of The Benedict Option

Early returns for "The New Christian Paradigm"

In the comments I have already pointed out that Rod Dreher, in some euphoric rush of unknown provenance, has most recently elevated his Benedict Option book to the grandiose status of "The New Christian Paradigm".

Here he is last night on Tucker Carlson's show revealing this epochal transformation of Christian civilization to America at large:

Discerning viewers will note Carlson's treatment of the transformational prophet Dreher.

Polite. Solicitous. Charitable. All completely appropriate for a conservative Christian talk show host. Also, as Dreher brings the beige, indistinguishable from Carlson probing either a seven-year-old nephew or Triumph the insult comic dog over the technical workings of a gamma ray burster.

Meanwhile, the Lord God Almighty has determined that one of his n-grandnieces, Stella Bombogenesis, should cover Rod Dreher's week long NYC media launch extravaganza as well.

As Dreher himself remarks as to the launch of his book on the feast day of St. Benedict: coincidence.

Rod, dedicate your Benedict Option book proceeds to Norcia

We shall surely know Rod Dreher as a good and decent Christian man when we hear the monks of the Monastery of St. Benedict in Norcia, Italy give their public thanks to him for having donated all proceeds of his Benedict Option book to rebuild their earthquake ravaged places of worship.

Not only do the monks feature prominently in the writing of Rod's current book for sale, but in his blog posts - heavily labeled with self-promotional "Benedict Option" tags - he informs us just how heartbreaking their situation is, from

Norcia: The Basilica Is Destroyed

to

Every Church In Norcia Is Gone

Every.Church.In.Norcia.Is.Gone.

And yet, with preorders, Rod Dreher is already collecting a rich revenue stream from having used the monks of Norcia as living examples of the thesis he wishes to promulgate in that very same book.

Return their Christian charity and service to you, Rod, and pledge publicly to dedicate all proceeds from The Benedict Option to the rebuilding of Norcia and its churches.

Don't just use them and discard them when you're done with them as you did with Father Matthew Harrington, the Orthodox priest late of St. John the Theologian Mission in St. Francisville, abandoned destitute, penniless and unemployed, with an expensive special needs child to care for.

Do now for the monks of Norcia what you should have done then: instead of offering superficial, lip-service prayers, show you truly mean it by digging deep into the wealth you are piling on top of your million dollar Little Way book advance with the help of a roaring bull market and a savvy financial advisor like Chris Currin:

We most certainly didn’t have a lot of money to invest when we found Chris Currin. In part because of Chris Currin’s wise stewardship of our resources, we have significantly more to invest now.

So now, Rod, when you not only have significantly more to invest but also a new river of book sale proceeds beginning to flow in into that vast lake Chris Currin is husbanding for you, invest for awhile in God's works instead of Caesar's.

Publicly pledge that you will dedicate all proceeds from The Benedict Option to the rebuilding of Norcia and its churches.

This, in turn, can only help your book sales and thus help the monks even more.

Of course, I suppose you could spend it on food at Torchy's Tacos and other delicious things, as is your habit.

But maybe, just maybe, this is the moment to think beyond your belly and put your money where your mouth is.Or where it should be.

Benedict Option: The Main Dilemma

I have an acquaintance who is a member of Opus Dei, a very intelligent person and a devoted Catholic. I have heard him on more than one occasion make the assertion "It's a big Church," usually while he was giving an official talk as a member of Opus Dei. I call it an assertion, but measured in membership numbers, it could probably be called an accepted fact. What are we at now? One point two billion, give or take?

However whenever I heard my friend make this statement, he wasn't drawing focus mainly upon the quantitative measure of the souls on board the Ark, or the Bark, whichever you prefer, but on the qualitative ability of the vessel itself to accommodate every type of "creature", if you will. Obviously the birds who survived on Noah's big ship mainly needed a landing pad and a big bag of seeds whereas the camels and lions needed their own living quarters.

Looking both at Christ's analogy of many rooms or many mansions and at Saint Paul's proclamation that there are "many charisms, One Spirit" we can see what he was talking about. There is a place for everyone in the Church, both the activist and the contemplative, both the ardent intellectual and the extroverted charismatic.

All of these Catholic associations, religious orders, groups, subgroups, "small groups", etc. can be seen as the many rooms, the many gifts (charisms), the many colors of the rainbow — choose your analogy. The contexts in which my friend used this line were several. Sometimes it was in sort of a complementary way since many members of Opus Dei are active in groups like Catholic Worker Movement and Knights of Columbus. So it was kind of a "yeah, you can be in Opus Dei and do that also."

Other times it was in a more differentiating way; e.g., "this other group does this thing, we do not, that's okay, after all it's a big Church." St. Josemaria the founder of Opus Dei has a point in one of his writings about those who might seek to make the world into a cloister. On the other hand, the greatest respect is shown to the religious orders in Opus Dei and all Catholic lay groups I've ever encountered. Likewise I've never run into a religious sister or religious brother who dissed the sacrament of marriage or the local parish church even though they were given a completely different vocation than lay people.

A quote attributed to saint Therese of Lisieux is one way to summarize Catholic both/and thinking as it relates to the place of each individual Catholic in the mission of the Church: "Some give by going to the missions, some go by giving to the missions. Without both, there are no missions." Another example of how devoted Catholics are to this "both/and" concept for vocations, check out the Devotion to St. Martha. Even though everyone would agree that Martha ends up looking like sort of a loser compared to her sister in the Gospel story, she gets to kill the Ancient Serpent like St. George and St. Michael, making her kind of the Wonder Woman of the saints.

The Benedict Option, as I see it, has to represent one of two things. It has to represent merely another charism in the Church or it has to represent an absolutely indispensable part of each Christian's life, like prayer, the practice of the virtues, reception of the sacraments and weekly attendance of the Liturgy. There might be a third thing, a return to something which existed in the past within Christendom but which no longer does. However as a practical matter, that would still seem to place it into either the first or second category. Either it is truly only an option or it is a necessity.

Looking at the first case, and let's call it the Subgroup Option, what if the Benedict Option is one of many ways to live out one's life as a faithful Christian? It would mean living in a community with other like-minded people, celebrating the Sacraments together, praying together, eating together and celebrating together. Perhaps working together in a cottage industry and running a school for the children as well. These things exist already for both married and celibate people. It is true, more often these are for celibate people for obvious reasons, but there are groups of families living in close proximity. The forthcoming Benedict Option book could, in theory, become a good — perhaps even invaluable — instruction book about how to achieve life in this type of community for anyone aspiring to it.

What are the problems with this approach? As I can see it the problem is limited appeal which would translate into limited book sales. People wanting to do this stuff might want to have a lot of source material in one place and they might scoop this book up right away. My prediction is that they will. But the normal Joe Six-pack won't really "get" the Benedict Option as something to pursue. If you doubt this, talk to someone in any Christian subgroup about how hard it is to get people involved in existing groups. Add to that the conceptual, I would even say ethereal, nature of the Benedict Option as a separate charism and it is going to be hard for it to compete with concrete established groups like Miles Christi, K of C or Opus Dei in the Catholic world or Intervarsity Fellowship in the Protestant world.

The second case I would like to call the Apocalyptic Option. This is the way I see the Benedict Option marketed and presented most often by Rod Dreher himself, as Keith has noted here. Rod says in the quoted post,

"Sooner or later, religious conservatives will have to take the Benedict Option, or be assimilated. I know of no feasible alternative. The longer you put off the decision to start thinking and moving in the Ben Op direction, the harder it’s going to be."

This definitely presents the Benedict Option as an absolute necessity, and asserts that the results of not doing so are cataclysmic. The problems with this approach are many more and much greater. First of all, why is the architect of this last, best hope for an escape plan Rod Dreher, a man who left the Catholic Church over Papal Infallibility and contraception and who incessantly reacts to the kind of seedy gossip/news that most Christians turn their heads away from? Why has this plan been revealed now rather than during the sexual revolution in the sixties, or in 1930, or in 1917, etc.? Why does all the breathless hype over this still seem more like that around the new Robert Langdon movie, or one of the author's other book releases? I mean he has pretty much done the standard book thing, e.g., thrown out teasers, refused to reveal too much — that sort of thing. Kind of fishy if there really is impending doom around the corner.

(Just a bit of an aside. It always struck me that "prophets" like Harold Camping always predict that the world will end in the near future. I mean, I think Nostradamus was a bit kooky, but I'm not sure he even lived to see half his predictions come true or not. There is a difference in the ickiness factor between pure kookiness from a true believer and kookiness sold for filthy lucre to true believers. I have to believe that there is a difference in the punishments doled out on Judgment Day as well....)

Another question comes to mind when I read all the negative aspersions cast upon those who are skeptical of the Benedict Option. Can you blame any Christian for not "taking the Benedict Option"? Are missionaries who are sacrificing comfort, seminarians preparing to sacrifice married life and Catholic families willing to sacrifice European vacations to have lots of kids really dropping the ball if they don't drop everything to go "take the Benedict Option?" It seems like the Benedict Option entails doing a lot of extra material actions to the detriment of spiritual actions whenever it becomes an absolute necessity. It also seems to superimpose its own authority structure over the normal hierarchy of faith and family for "the normal, average Christian". Plus all the things I mention here are things which the architect of the Benedict Option has refused to sacrifice in the normal, average Christian world. So this Benedict Option seems to be a new way which is on par with celibacy and living conjugal unity.

I admit that most of my questions are rhetorical and that no one is going to convince me that the Benedict Option is any more than what our friend, Tom, stated about it long ago:

If you ever come across the term "the Benedict Option," there's really only one thing you need to know about: It's nonsense.

More precisely, it's a meaningless term, a cypher. The thing it refers to is a non-thing. As such, it can mean anything. And a term that can mean anything isn't worth talking about.

But the Benedict Option has a long and storied history of having rhetorical questions asked about it, and generally, the frankness experienced by Nicodemus when asking his sincere question of Christ about Baptism has been missing from the responses. Keith detailed some over a year ago:

Mike W says:
March 19, 2015 at 12:25 pm

A few questions. As a practical matter, how would the Benedict option look? What would be the general attributes of someone (or a community) following the Benedict option? How would you know if you were actually doing it properly? How do you “modernize” the approach to deal with 21st century pressures such as 24/7 media, etc. Who’s doing it now? How successful are they (and how do they define success)?

And the response...

[NFR: All great questions ... but ones I am not prepared to answer. All of them I have to explore while working on the book. -- RD]

Yes, well, we eagerly await this book and it will be read and reviewed at the time of its release. And lest anyone forget, here are some other questions the author was not prepared to answer from a colleague, Noah Millman who is also, as was Nicodemus, a wise, Jewish man.

Brand confusion about the Benedict Option

I had been meaning to post on this for awhile, but better late than never. I was reading a post from Father Shenan Boquet of Human Life International when another of his older posts caught my eye about Sanctuary Cities for Christians. Immediately I though "Hmmm, sounds kind of Benedict Option-y." And since he invokes the term and links to Dreher's blog, it seems upon a quick, first like he's getting on board the BenOp train. Except:

Still, it’s time we give this a shot before it is too late, if for no other reason than to help awaken those believers who are still sleepily going along with the culture. As one LGBT-celebratory Christian leader has recently argued, the “middle ground is disappearing.” Writer Rod Dreher and others have noted this has been underway for some time. Dreher reports on his blog how a growing number of parents are surprised to find themselves having to pull their children out of grade school as gender ideology has become dogmatic seemingly overnight, and schools are constantly undermining parental rights and privileges.

He even throws in the obligatory Benedict Option "we're not cutting and running" disclaimer which we are used to hearing:

I want to make this perfectly clear: There is a difference between running in fear and trying to escape reality, and a strategic retreat to a place of strong footing, from which a community can act in love and truth and build a real culture again.

Upon a closer reading, however, Father seems to be asking for a greater civic involvement of Christians and other people of good will who respect religious freedom to achieve the goal of justice and spiritual flourishing. The tone of the article is much more akin to "taking the country back" than the building of religious Christians-only safe spaces. One of the reasons it's difficult to see this first is that Fr. Boquet is very careful not to call for any direct political action, but instead uses the illegal-alien sanctuary city concept analogically:

....We need sanctuary cities for Christians.

There is a precedent for this: There are some 200 cities in the United States that have decided, through official policy if not in law, to not enforce federal laws on immigration. In essence, these “sanctuary cities” refuse to cooperate with federal agents when it comes to reporting crimes committed by those in the country illegally, arguing that such reporting would create a climate of fear and would ensure a lack of cooperation between migrant communities and local law enforcement.

There is an insinuation between the lines that in his proposed Christian sanctuary cities, officials would look the other way when someone refuses to sign a same-sex marriage license or break any other ordinance which violates a federal ordinance and yet upholds the moral law. That is his clear intention, yet, as I stated, he is careful not to explicitly lay out this rebellious course of action.

I think that Fr. Boquet is "glomming onto" the Benedict Option because it is a term out there already, but there is a pretty big difference between it and what he is advocating. A Christian Sanctuary City as he describes is would be a place where you don't have to be a Christian to live in or belong to the way a Benedict Option community is described. These cities would become strategic outposts in the culture wars rather than strategic withdrawals from the culture wars.

It has become unfashionable to speak of the "culture wars" due to the scorn of the elite cultural leftists who are claiming victory, those like Dreher who are advocating surrender and those still fighting in the ranks but tempted by war-weariness to cease. But this war is merely a part of the ancient War of good versus evil, and there is no reason to shy away from calling it a war. We didn't start it, and it will never end until Judgment Day. Each Christian and person of good will must fight these battles in the way he sees fit, trying not to rebuke others who fight it differently, at least not publicly.

On the other hand, I will continue to rebuke the Benedict Option because it represents a refusal to fight, withdrawing from the battle to instead hurl inane insults from their towers at those still fighting on the ground like those Frenchmen in Monty Python and the Holy Grail. The rest of us will continue to fight the culture war, even if to many it seems like we're merely banging coconuts together.

Life before and since The Day That Rod Was There

No matter which way he was heading, or what he was actually doing, on The Day That Rod Was There, he was definitely doing something.

Has it really been fifteen years?

Rod's recent post, Life Before 9/11, made me suddenly realize that it really has been fifteen years today since The Day That Rod Was There.

And as that realization dawned on me, I began to look up slightly, into the middle distance, stroked my chin thoughtfully, and, as harp music from somewhere began to ripple and the background became all flashback swirly, I suddenly found myself magically transported back into Kathleen's marvelous record of the many subtly different first person accounts of The Day That Rod Was There:

Hey everyone, let's not forget: the fifth anniversary of The Day That Rod Was There is coming up on 9/11. Of course, whether The Day That Rod Was There was also The Day That Rod Saw The Towers Fall Before His Own Eyes depends if you are reading Rod from March 2006 ("I stood on the far side of the bridge watching the tower collapse) and April 2006 ("having been a New Yorker on 9/11, and seen the south WTC tower collapse in front of my own eyes") or the Rod from 2002 ("Though I didn't see it with my own eyes, others did.") Good thing he had that handy reporter's notebook he kept writing in so he could record what he was seeing before his own eyes [cough] .... or maybe just hearing? .... But hey, details, details. What's important is that 9/11 is The Day That Rod Was There. Not that he would give you the chance to forget:

9/8/06, Beliefnet Crunchy Con blog: "I'm sitting here at my desk in downtown Dallas, almost five years and half a country away from 9/11, but I can still remember exactly how it sounded when the south tower of the World Trade Center collapsed. I was standing on the Brooklyn Bridge, just about to run off and into Manhattan, and had just told a colleague that the towers wouldn't fall. Suddenly, the south tower fell. It fell with a faraway roar that sounded exactly like what it was: a Niagara of dust and glass."

8/06, Beliefnet: " All 9/11 did was show who they really were when put to the test. It happened to me, in my own small way. I was a columnist for the New York Post that morning, and hustled from my waterfront apartment across the Brooklyn Bridge, notebook in hand, to cover the catastrophe. I made it as far as the Manhattan side of the bridge before I ran into a Post colleague. “Don’t go down there,” she said. “Those things are going to fall.”“Oh come on, they’re not going to fall,” I said, genuinely disbelieving her. “That’s the World Trade Center.” Moments later, down came the south tower. I staggered backward, and held on to her to keep my knees from buckling. I scrawled these words on my reporter’s notebook, which I still have: “the building isn’t there it’s gone.”

5/1/06 Beliefnet: "I remember that morning, rushing from my apartment on the Brooklyn waterfront across the Brooklyn Bridge toward the fires in lower Manhattan. Every step of the way I was in denial about what was happening in front of me. Halfway across the bridge, a man with a portable radio shouted to the crowd, "They've hit the Pentagon!" And I thought, "You jerk, quit scaring us with false rumors." On the other side of the bridge, a colleague of mine from the New York Post told me not to go down there, that those buildings were going to fall. I told her don't be silly. Within a minute or so, down came the south tower.

4/17/06, Beliefnet: "I realize in bitter retrospect that, having been a New Yorker on 9/11, and seen the south WTC tower collapse in front of my own eyes, I wanted vengeance."

3/29/06 NRO Crunchy Con blog: I’ve told the story before, so I won’t go into it in detail again, but I will never forget as long as I live the experience of that morning. When I walked out my front door on the Brooklyn waterfront and saw the towers burning, I ran for the Brooklyn Bridge, to get over to the site to cover the story. Within the hour, I stood on the far side of the bridge watching the south tower collapse. Seconds before it came down, a NYPost colleague told me not to go down there, that those things were going to fall. I looked at her with total sincerity and conviction, and said, “Come on, that’s the World Trade Center, they’re not going to fall." Nothing that ever happened to me was as traumatic as what followed”

7/05 Dallas Morning News: Over and over that morning, even as I ran with my reporter's notebook across the Brooklyn Bridge toward the burning towers, I effectively denied what was happening, literally disbelieving my own eyes. When I made it to the Manhattan side of the bridge and was about to go down into the city, I ran into a journalist colleague. "Don't go down there," she said. "Those things are going to fall." "They're not going to fall," I told her with utter confidence. "C'mon, that's the World Trade Center." Seconds later, there was a terrible roar, and down came the South Tower,..."

9/04, National Review Online, the Corner: "POSTCARD FROM THE PAST [Rod Dreher] A friend forwarded to me today the e-mail I'd sent to some friends that morning three years ago. It's startling to me to read this now. Notice the date and time stamp. I'd just walked in out of the conflagration: Subject: Unbelievable Date: Tuesday, September 11, 2001 10:09 AM I'm not going to tie up the phone lines long, but I wanted to tell you that we're okay. My dad phoned this morning to say, "The World Trade Center is on fire. Go look out your front door." You can see them clearly across the harbor from our front door. "Oh my God! Julie come see!" I said. I ran down to grab my reporter's bag, knowing I'd have to go over to the fire. At that point, we didn't know what caused the fire. Then, while downstairs, I heard a tremendous explosion and screams. I ran out to the street. "A plane just hit the second tower!" a man screamed. I knew the subways would be out, so I decided to walk across the Brooklyn Bridge to get to the scene....I made it to the last pillar of the Brooklyn Bridge before going into downtown. I ran into a colleague of mine. She said, "We better not go over there. Those towers are going to blow up. One minute later, the south tower fell in on itself. I nearly fainted. It ... well, I can't describe it now. I'm too shaken. Everybody on the bridge screamed. Some collapsed in tears. A woman started to vomit. My knees went weak, and a huge plume of soot and smoke barrelled toward us. I decided to turn around and go home."

National Review 3/03: "And there was one of the towers, billowing smoke and paper, which was being carried by the wind right over our house in Brooklyn. While I was downstairs gathering my notepad so I could run across the bridge to cover the fire, I heard the explosion of the second plane hitting. It shook our building. I opened the door, saw the second tower burning, kissed Julie goodbye, and told her, "I'm going to get as close as I can. ...There was an exodus of workers crossing the bridge out of Manhattan. I stopped to talk to some of them. They were gasping and sobbing, talking about having seen people jumping to their deaths from the upper floors. I have never seen that kind of trauma in anyone. They were very nearly in shock. I am fortunate that I stopped to talk to them, because I had plenty of time to have made it to the south tower. As it was, I was standing on the bridge watching the fire, about to begin my descent into Manhattan, when the south tower collapsed. My knees nearly buckled. I was sure I had just seen tens of thousands of people die. I turned back toward home, because there was no getting into Manhattan now."

National Review 9/02: " Nor shall I forget the sound of my voice telling a New York Post colleague I was trying to coax to follow me off the Brooklyn Bridge and into lower Manhattan, "Oh, come on, they're not going to fall." I believed it. Thirty seconds later, the south tower fell. Though I didn't see it with my own eyes, others did..."

Crisis Magazine, 11/01: "I live on the Brooklyn waterfront, just across the harbor from lower Manhattan. On that horrible morning on September 11, my father phoned me from Louisiana to tell me to look out my front door, the World Trade Center was on fire. It was, and I ran down to the basement to grab my reporter’s pad. Then I heard the explosion from the second crash and scrambled upstairs and out my front door. A stunned and cursing plumber from the hospital next door screamed, "It was a passenger plane!" He must have that wrong, I thought. But he wasn’t wrong. None of us was conditioned to understand what was happening. Twenty minutes later, I was hustling across the Brooklyn Bridge toward the calamity—wending my way through the exodus out of the city—when a man with a radio screamed, "They’ve hit the Pentagon!" That can’t be true, I thought; it’s too cinematic. I am a professional movie critic, and I tend to think of movies as simile and metaphor. Don’t most of us? The movies are our common language, the only interpretative framework any of us have for a disaster this spectacular. And as we all know—or knew until recently—real life isn’t like the movies. Eight minutes later, I watched the first tower come tumbling down in a cataclysm of flame, concrete, and glass"

As the man himself says, read the whole thing.

Tragic as the events of 9/11 were, though, what can we learn from narratives like this going forward?

Why, that, like life itself, many narratives ultimately end up being fluid, protean, anecdotal butterflies tossed by the mind's tormented winds of desire for a really good, knock-'em-dead line or maybe a tasty snack. As Heraclitus of Ephesus himself pointed out some 2,500 years ago, "τὰ ὄντα ἰέναι τε πάντα καὶ μένειν οὐδέν" - "no man ever steps in the same Benedict Option twice, for it's not the same Benedict Option and he's not the same man".

So, as we solemnly commemorate the horrors and the losses of fifteen years ago, let us at the same time try to take away at least one optimistic sliver of hope that maybe, finally, we have learned a lesson about powerful narratives and those that tell them.

Benedict Option: the sound of one hand clapping

It will all be explained in the book

In We Have Been Warned, Rod Dreher gives us his most succinct and salient explanation for his Benedict Option to date. All emphases in the paragraph below are Dreher's:

I find that even at this late date, it is difficult to get ordinary Christians, including pastors, to understand the reality of what’s coming. You should believe David Gushee. He has done us all a favor here. He and his allies — that is, the entire American establishment — are going to do everything they possibly can to eliminate any place of retreat. When people say that if the Left has its way, there will be no Benedict Option places left to retreat to, I agree. That does not mean they will succeed, at least not at first, but it’s just a matter of time. This means that we will need the Benedict Option more than ever. The Ben Op is not about escapism; it’s about building the institutions and adopting the practices required for the church to be resilient, and even to thrive, under harsh conditions. The church will be under unprecedented pressure, legally and socially, to capitulate. But it will be possible to resist, though not without paying a high cost. I talk about how to do this in my forthcoming book.

Because this is such a rare gift of plainly stated gold, let's unpack it one logical line at a time, shall we?

When people say that if the Left has its way, there will be no Benedict Option places left to retreat to, I agree.

So there will be no Benedict Option places left to retreat to?

That does not mean they will succeed, at least not at first...

So there may be Benedict Option places left to retreat to?

but it’s just a matter of time. 

So there won't be Benedict Option places left to retreat to. So...because there won't be Benedict Option places left to retreat to,

This means that we will need the Benedict Option more than ever.

Because?

The Ben Op is not about escapism; it’s about building the institutions and adopting the practices required for the church to be resilient, and even to thrive, under harsh conditions.

Very well. In this place from which the church has no escape from or means of avoiding the predations of the Left, we will nevertheless need Rod's Benedict Option more than ever to show us how to build the institutions and adopt the practices required for the church to be resilient, and even to thrive, under harsh conditions.

Let's make sure we clearly understand the meaning of some things right now.

If there really is no escape - Rod's own premise*, which we're following; and even if there were a means of escape, the Benedict Option wouldn't be about taking advantage of it anyway - then this means the Left potentially seizing property and bank accounts of non-compliers and even having Child Services remove children from the homes of non-compliers (ask the radical LDS church about this).

That's what no escape means. That's what happens to those with no escape. It doesn't mean that, because you can't relocate to Lichtenstein or Monaco, that there will still be a pinky promise floor supporting what you don't need to worry about escaping from.

If Rod is being serious, what I described is what he means by "no escape" - ultimately, the possibility of renouncing either your faith or your children.

If he's merely being dramatically hyperbolic in order to sell a book, then his Benedict Option becomes as optional as that book purchase.

So when Rod proceeds to talk about "building the institutions and adopting the practices required for the church to be resilient, and even to thrive, under harsh conditions", he is very clearly now not referring to material things or means. Remember, in a "no escape" scenario, the Leftist State has just run its Komatsu D575A-3 over your church's remaining bricks.

He is referring to something else. Non-material things and means to build solely mental/spiritual institutions and adopt solely mental/spiritual practices required for the church to be resilient, and even to thrive, under harsh conditions.

In sum, Rod's Benedict Option is being offered as, in essence, your conceptual Christian AndroGel, the solution to the problems your unfortunate Christian "low-C" will clearly enable in the face of the ultimately inescapable predations of the left. Had your Christian faith been, like Rod's, sufficiently potent to begin with, obviously none of this Leftist predation would have been allowed to happen.

Very well. Logically, we have finally come face to face with the real enemy, and he is you and your feeble, low-C Christianity.

Now this is actually plausible, at least in part. Feeble Christians who end up allowing an ultimately inescapable and irresistible Leftist State to overrun them could very easily, at least following these logical premises that Rod lays out, find themselves in the conundrum of renouncing their faith in order to retrieve their own children from Leftist State Child Services foster care.

So the questions remaining unanswered are

2. If the material, political realm (including, implicitly, armed revolt) has already been foreclosed upon, or if you have already written it off as lost, through what avenues other than prayer do you intend to act to ensure you're never forced to choose between your faith and your children?

1. If, as Rod's logic leads us inescapably to conclude, the problem is ultimately your own insufficiently potent faith (because every possible alternative has already been written off conceptually, in Rod-tendered despair), what reason do we have to believe that blogger Rod Dreher is the person with the magic cream to cure what ails you and, reciprocally, your very church itself?

But, really, if you accept that you and your church truly are Rod-defined impotent, and if you're still foolish enough not to call Rod, who ya gonna call?

Who?

Epilogue: In the scenario of Rod's Benedict Option logic and the settings he ascribes for it, there is no way to account for the timeline of the Leftist State finalizing its "just a matter of time" and the timeline of Rod himself triumphantly having implemented his Benedict Option becoming benevolently synchronous in Rod's favor.

So if the Leftist State has already moved to foreclose his escape and, because he is obviously a high-profile troublemaker, Child Services already has his children, which will Rod himself choose?

1. He weeps for his lost children, but he refuses to publicly renounce his faith.

2. He publicly renounces his faith, and his children are returned to him.

I believe I'll coin this the Benedict Option Choice.

*In this post I am following Rod's own clearly stated premises to their logical conclusions. If his Benedict Option is salted with an open-ended number of handy ad hoc sophistic escape hatches and do-overs instead, then his Benedict Option remains what we always cynically believed it was, that is, whatever he says it is, on any given day, as long as it lures you into giving him your money in exchange for his book about it.

Why Rod Dreher is pushing a Hillary Clinton victory

Various email discussions over the past weeks have pondered who Rod Dreher will be voting for in the upcoming presidential race and have given several plausible reasons why, although Dreher himself has been coy about the matter on his blog in order to technically protect TAC's tax-exempt status.

Regardless of which candidate Dreher actually ends up pulling the lever for, here is who he is pushing to win, and why.

Who: Hillary Clinton

Why: The candidate most damaging to Christians will do the most to promote sales of his forthcoming Benedict Option book, delivered to the publisher just today, a book about, as Dreher himself touts it, the last, best and only hope for Christians at the end of the cultural line.

The better things are for Christians, the worse a book about a pointless and needless Benedict Option will sell. The worse things are for Christians, the better a book that purports to offer any hope at all will sell.

Demand, meet Supply. Or, rather, Supply, meet a Demand massaged as best the Supplier can manage to massage it.

Well, Keith, why do you say such a thing, readers may ask. Rod has already told us he cannot tell us who he favors for President. Why shouldn't we believe him?

He doesn't have to. His actions speak louder than any words ever could. And besides, it doesn't even matter who he votes for. What matters is how many votes he can steer to the candidate he needs to win to maximize his personal book sales profits. He doesn't need to vote at all so long as he steers enough votes to produce a Hillary win.

If one reads his posts over the last year, they are Trump-this and Trump-that out the wazoo, most of them either actively or passive-aggressively negative, with virtually no posts at all about candidate Hillary or any of her sins dating back decades.

Debbie Wasserman Schulz herself could have scheduled these non-existing Hillary posts in the same manner and for the same reasons she made poor Bernie Sanders try to make his case on television on a Saturday freaking night, for goodness sake, in order to effectively render the subject - in Dreher's case Hillary, in Schulz' case Bernie - virtually invisible.

But isn't Donald Trump just naturally more..."newsy"?

Sure enough. Trump is always saying things to make people's tongues wag.

But, although his style will always be Gawkerish at heart, believe it or not Rod Dreher's current beat really isn't the juiciest, most gossipy newsy tidbits of a TMZ or a Gawker. According to Rod, his passion and focus is being ostentatiously hip-deep in his own personal Christian holiness and, above everything else worldly, religious liberty and a fierce dedication to the protection of that religious liberty.

A religious liberty a Hillary Clinton presidency would end up stomping like Godzilla, before Godzilla then ate whatever mush remained.

But he hardly ever mentions Hillary Clinton. Why not? Why does he never mention the one candidate that everyone knows and every liberal dreams will do the most to damage the religious liberty of Christians in every way possible?

Because he needs a religious liberty stomped to mush by a Hillary Godzilla Clinton in order to drive sales of his prescriptive solution for mush-stomped religious liberty - his Benedict Option. If the financial motive were not so glaringly obvious, one might suspect Munchhausen by proxy.

To follow Dreher's comparative interest in Hillary Clinton is to be led to the belief that Hillary is spending her time only doing yoga and playing with her grandchildren, not trashing national security, not selling access to government for personal gain, definitely not working every angle available to change "...deep-seated cultural codes, religious beliefs and structural biases..."

Prove me wrong. Watch Dreher's past, present and future posts about the presidential candidates and score things for yourself. Trump will be held up as an appalling pariah; Hillary will be invisible; and a dependable percentage of Dreher's readers will end up voting for the major party candidate who has not been held up as an appalling pariah.

And, then, after Hillary ends up doing enough of this and that, particularly with the help of her newly energized Supreme Court, even you might fall into enough despair to buy Rod's Benedict Option book, if only as the worthless placebo you nevertheless desperately need in lieu of no other hope at all.

This is the true cultural wasteland for Christians, what Hannah Arendt called the "banality of evil": in this case, casual, premeditated betrayal by those you trust most. Your mother sells you to the biker gang passing through for a bag of meth. Your ostensibly most (self-declared) Christian hero sells you out with a smile to line his own pockets.

By the way, I hear Rod's Benedict Option book goes on sale shortly after Hillary's inauguration. Just in time.

BenOp PineApp

One of the ways I keep up on what's going on with Rod Dreher is by reading a Topix forum dedicated to him by the residents of St. Francisville. Here's one of the latest entries, suggesting that Dreher flew to Hawaii to bring back a parting gift in the form of a pineapple for his priest who's leaving his backyard church. The real story will be forgotten, though, while the memory of that picture lives on forever....

The natives were so grateful for his missionary work they gave him a pineapple.

You just can't get a pineapple worth eating around here, you know.

Too funny.

Response to Alan Jacobs on the Benedict Option

Matthew Loftus writes a good article, mostly stuff we've already said here. Excerpts:

[T]he potential for good-hearted Christians to go to war with one another about anything seems to be elided in most BenOp discussions. Every Christian community I have ever participated in has seen heated debates about theological or practical issues drive friendships apart; the more intense communities seemed to be the ones with the greatest potential for enmity. There is no amount of liturgy or localism that will address this fundamental defect in the human heart that is one of Satan’s greatest strategies against ministries all over the world. I cannot say for certain that it is any worse in modernity, but the discipline of Christian love for one another deserves more serious consideration as we talk about how to form more intense Christian communities. How would parachurch organizations, nonprofits, and churches work together in a BenOp vision, and how would the BenOp schema alter the tendency towards petty infighting that often besets attempts at such cooperation?

That bit reminded me of this. Here's another:

After all, another theme that dominates Dreher’s writing is the cultural morass which various communities in the West seem to have found themselves; presumably many BenOp communities would find themselves in proximity to the people drowning in the waste products of promiscuity, drug abuse, and self-centeredness that cultural elites have flushed downstream. It seems obvious to me that for every BenOp community nestled into an isolated riverbend, there should be two in a trailer park or neglected inner-city neighborhood. Yet I still get the sense that the BenOp is trying to protect us from lost people as much as it is trying to be a light to them. The Bible clearly teaches both, but it always speaks as if the lost– powerful cultural elites and powerless victims of sins– are a present fixture in our lives to bring the Holy Spirit to bear upon. I suspect that the healthy fear that animates much of the BenO might lead us to hide our light under a bushel unless we clearly plan ahead to do otherwise.

Rod Dreher Orlando Confidential

What Rod Dreher thinks may have killed 49 in Orlando

Rod Dreher writes:


1. He was likely a closet case.

2. He was probably mentally ill. 

3. He was filled with rage at everybody. 

Before I go any further I need to stress for readers who may be confused that this is not a confession. Rod is not talking about himself, but rather about Omar Mateen, the self-professed ISIS martyr who killed 49 in an Orlando gay club and wounded at least as many more.

Rod takes pains to elaborate under 1.

What kind of devout Muslim goes drinking booze at a gay bar? You’re going to blame Islam for this guy? Really?

Um...well, yeah, Rod...really.

The guy whom the FBI investigated twice previously for Islamic terrorism. Yeah, really.

The guy who shouted "Allah hu Akbar" as he methodically shot gays - who are routinely murdered in Islamic nations when not formally sentenced to death by their various governments - yeah, really.

The guy who calmly pledged allegiance to ISIS on 911. Yeah, really.

Commenter Fran Macadam points out:

He’s not the first Islamist terrorist to enjoy a libertine Florida lifestyle; so did the 9/11 perpetrators.

Yeah, really, really, really.

But Rod has a big problem that desperately needs a solution. His blog boasts more than a few Muslim and gay readers, and so he needs a narrative solution to Orlando that won't dare alienate even one of them, because they might also purchase his upcoming Benedict Option book, if only out of fondness for his blog or curiosity.

So Rod needs an Orlando narrative that pops into our universe, does its dirty work, and then vanishes back into the mysterious alternate universe from whence it came - sort of like the Sta-Puft Marshmallow Man in Ghostbusters.

What can pull off this neat trick of producing a mysterious one-off, other-dimensional, self-extinguishing injection of mass murder into our universe?

Why, a unique, mentally ill, self-loathing homosexual.

Rod's Muslim commenter Jones? Not implicated. Rod's mentally "healthy", butt-humping gay commentariat at large? Not implicated.

Just Sta-Pufty Omar Mateen, random, idiosyncratic, incomprehensible hate-bot.

"Dangerous faggot" Milo Yiannopoulos, an actual conservative not needing to desperately suck up to every possible Muslim, liberal, or even gay reader, sees things a bit differently

Liberals: the problem with putting Muslims at the top of your victimhood hierarchy is that THEY WANT TO KILL EVERYONE ELSE ON THE LIST

— Milo Yiannopoulos ✘ (@Nero) June 12, 2016

Milo will be expanding on this epiphany today at 6:00 PM EST at the University of Central Florida, Orlando.

Rod's newly discovered existential innocence obviously has implications for his Benedict Option - or does it?

Come to think of it, Rod's Benedict Option has always explicitly declared it was never about resistance to, well, anything other than those particular elements of contemporary culture each BOpper decides for themselves they find aesthetically unattractive.

Instead, it has always instead used the vague term "thickening", which cynical readers can't be blamed for believing probably refers to over-consuming the delicious goodies featured in Rod's regular food porn posts.

So...eat, drink, and thicken, pretending you're invisible to everyone else, and hope that Sta-Pufty doesn't suddenly burst into your universe inexplicably shouting "Allah hu Akbar" while pumping slugs into your little girls head.

UPDATE (as they say):  Beyond Rod's immediate publishing interests, what other factors might be contributing to the fantasy balloon commenter Fran Macadam so neatly popped?

Hmmm...what does Wick Allison, the guy who ultimately pays for Rod's health care and other family benefits think about this?

Well, he thinks, through his FrontBurner blog puppets, this:

Dan Patrick Biblical Tweet, conceivably but not at all necessarily pointing to Orlando - bad.

Lovely gay marriage celebration as Dan Patrick-cleansing mouthwash - good.

So good, in fact, that new D Magazine Executive Editor Kathy Wise comments

 Beautiful. Thanks Peter! Reminds me of my wife's wedding proposal. Minus the blindfold. And the dancers. And the ribbon wavers. And the choir robes. #loveisloveisloveisloveislove

So, if Rod wants to keep his kids in braces, he'd better understand how the cow eats the cabbage: the people who buy the fabulous, high end stuff Wick Allison depends on to keep his magazine afloat have the tastes and disposable income concentrated in gay communities, so Orlando must implicitly become an act of "homophobic terrorism", not something divisive and distracting like Islamic terrorism.

And besides, Sta-Pufty can't be killed by a Sig Sauer MCX, not even by "a Glock with a lot of clips in it".