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.