Then you'll need a Safe Space in which to do your thing, whether it's to thoughtfully discuss the many possibilities of what Rod Dreher's Benedict Option™ could even be on the Internet - oh, and for that you'll also need an Internet and someone to keep it up, won't you - or simply to pray hard, eat crawfish, drink beer, and keep singing, because "as long as you can still make a roux, everything’s going to be alright" anyway (because, as everyone else knows, this whole charade you've been gulled into is nothing more than a marketing campaign for an unwritten book).
Of course, you won't be capable of creating and maintaining that Safe Space yourself, sillies. Don't be ridiculous. If you were that strong-willed and capable, you wouldn't be retreating into playing Dungeons & Dragons for Christians (D&D/C) in a vain attempt to overcome your post-Modern ennui, would you, you would just be another real Christian making his way through life as he finds it.
But since you are one of those fluffy, fantasizing BOpper lambs instead, let me introduce you to two guys who will be creating and maintaining that Safe Space within which you can safely let your eyes roll back in your head as you await that time after the collapse when you will miraculously emerge from your fantasy and restore moral order on Earth.
The one on the left is Mr. Police Officer (po-LEECE OFF-ih-sir) and the one on the right is Mr. Soldier (SOUL-djer).
Neither of them have the luxury of chatting on the Internet between eating crawfish, drinking beer and singing, because they have real and important jobs to do, little lambs, which is to keep your self-indulgent, post-Modern Christian hippie asses safe at the risk of losing their own while you complain about how the food out there is so ordinary, the choices on TV are so poor, and how everything that's wrong with your children is someone else's fault while you play Dungeons & Dragons for Christians as a way to escape the horror of it all.
Don't you worry, little BOpper lambs, they'll be there to keep your Safe Spaces safe while you await that far eschatological moment in history reserved just for you.
And while you wait, look! I've created a badge to honor you, special little BOpper lambs, yes you!
Unlike real Christians who throughout history simply played the cards they were dealt and soldiered through on their faith and will until this glorious moment to give birth to you finally, finally arrived, I know how you so detest the "culture" that you find yourself so cruelly born into. And so to signify your rejection, I've enclosed that hateful landscape in a big red no-no circle and slash. I've even distilled your essence into a motto for you.
Sleep tight, little BOpper lambs, and then awake, refreshed, to pray hard, eat crawfish, drink beer, sing, and play another round of Dungeons & Dragons for Christians on the Internet with your friends. Mr. Police Officer and Mr. Soldier will be there to protect you from your enemies and keep you safe, and now you even have your very own badge to represent you.
Bravo.
ReplyDeleteActually, Bravo Oscar, come to think of it.
Lol.
DeleteIf the serious bug ever strikes, you better believe I'll be talking in terse, guttural tones about finally going Bravo Oscar. With my knife named Mike.
Just in case Sierra Hotel Tango Foxtrot.
DeleteIn today's offering (actually in response to a comment), Dreher poses that a non-religious public boarding school is an instance of BenOp:
ReplyDelete... I had not quite thought of it like this, but LSMSA was, for people like me, a Benedict Option kind of place, in that it was a community that worked to achieve the proper end of schooling: education. This is not primarily because of the (excellent) academics, but because the crude socialization so many of us experienced in our local schools — e.g., being bullied, or made to feel that you ought to be ashamed of being bookish and smart — interfered with the purpose of education. We helped form an alternative community for the sake of learning, and fulfilling our own ends as students — and it worked brilliantly. ... Anyway, I keep saying that the Benedict Option is not about creating utopia; utopia doesn’t exist. It is about creating alternate communities within which Christian virtues can thrive in a world grown hostile to them. Mind you, LSMSA was not a religious school (though in my day, it had religious kids in it [I was not one of them]), but it seems clear to me that in any kind of real-world Benedict Option, there will of necessity be trade-offs people have to make....
Well, that broadens the definition, to the extent there was one. Lest you think the BenOp was about preserving Christian culture (because he's told us that countless times), now it's not even about that because, you know, "there will of necessity be trade-offs people will have to make". I didn't realize before that the "Option" in BenOp was referring to Christian faith being merely an available option.
P.S. While this comment is written with a facetious tone, one wouldn't write it without the thought having crossed the mind. #codependency
And another seal barks.
Because Dreher has at this point spared no effort to reveal his BO as, ironically, the most meta-abstractly-fabricated-meta-postModern-meta book/movie pitch in Western history, a protean, omni-inclusive ghost-snipe to be hunted that, if ever published or produced, would become the equivalent of a TV series based on a focus group-selected signature catch phrase uttered by a character in the dream of a character in a TV series spun off from a movie made about a character in an obscure comic book series, the real ground zero of interest in this entire touchstone of exactly what is corrupt and damaged about modern mass culture at large, at least for me, has now shifted to who among Christians and conservatives are buying into it - and particularly those like, I fully suspect, Father Longenecker, buying into it for their own cynically self-serving reasons of hoping to see their own profiles raised by association - and those Christians and conservatives who are the children in the audience at this Emperor's fashion show and with fearless innocence are declaring this whole charade to be the sham it is.
DeleteIn this way Dreher actually serves a very useful purpose far larger than his rhetorical masturbation: he becomes like a radioactive dye injected into the social tissues of modern Christianity and conservatism that lights up the compromised or malignant portions that might otherwise appear identical to those surrounding them.
The more Dreher babbles on about his BO, the more he simply parodies himself and the more opportunities he presents to others to parody him as well (and, spirit of irenicism or not, you better believe Jesus himself knew a hundred jokes beginning, "So, what did the Pharisee say to the ..."). But now that he's wafted that BO vapor as broadly as he has, we get to see the really interesting stuff: what will a Jonah Goldberg, for example, have to say about it? Who will naively buy in or suck up, who will equivocate, and who will rightly just snort and bark?
Wow. As I've mentioned before, my husband taught at the Louisiana School during the very years Dreher was there (i.e., from its inception). Needless to say, we have a more jaundiced view of the place. (Loved the teachers. The administration, not so much. And the kids were a mixed lot. Many were brilliant, but some should definitely not have been there.)
ReplyDeleteBut a BenOP place? Um, a coed *boarding* school with raging hormones all over the place? Are you sh*tting me?
As Dreher himself has said, Diane, it's all connected. Om.
DeleteIf it exists in this dimension of the multiplex space-time continuum, it's a BO iteration: your father's Buick: BO; that gyre of Styrofoam way out in the mid-Pacific: BO; a drop of rain: BO; a child's laugh: BO; that crusty stuff that collects at the top of the ketchup bottle: BO.
It's all connected. It's all BO. OM.
BTW, need I point out that Dreher's post about this school leans heavily into his anonymous source genre, ie, he can count on few if anyone popping up and contradicting his account of whether it was a BO place or not.
DeleteUnless of course there was someone who actually was there at the same time will to write a guest post about what the place was really like ::cough::
I just thought it was funny (and so revealing) to read the comment by Todd, the NFR thereon, and then the NFR on Todd's rephrasing of the question.
Deletehttp://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/thirty-years-since-finding-our-tribe/comment-page-1/#comment-7483591
. . . followed by:
http://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/thirty-years-since-finding-our-tribe/comment-page-1/#comment-7483647
Rod disses Todd's first comment as "trollbait." When Todd rephrases the question and calls Rod "brilliant," it's a whole new question and calls forth Rod's thoughtful response. In which he articulates anew his righteous quest to get away from his family, framing it even more as a Christian calling than he has before, AFAIK.
Not to mention, now a private school experience romanticized by 30 years of nostalgia is BOp, too? Well, at least this alludes the the class restrictions embedded in Rod's BOp. Tuition and fees, in one way or another, will be charged.
The higher he builds this tower, the funnier it will all be when it collapses.
DeleteActually, the Louisiana School was and is public, not private. Admission is competitive. Once you are in, though, your education is paid for by the State of Louisiana. The state also covers your room and board. It's a pretty sweet deal.
DeleteKeith--if I ever get through my fall web copy, I will happily write a choice word or two about La School (as we called it).