Brother Boris on the Benedict Option: "The Church as a Purity Cult"

The Internets are truly amazing. Yesterday Tom throws out the phrase "creepy culty", which naturally reminds me of Boris the Spider. This morning I find some musings about the Benedict Option as a "purity cult" by someone calling himself Brother Boris.

I am not sure what to think about Rod Dreher. To be honest, I really don't know that much about him. I have no strong feelings either in favor of him nor against him. From what I have researched on the Internet, Dreher was raised as a Methodist. He converted to Roman Catholicism in 1993 and then to Eastern Orthodoxy in 2006.

Forgive me for being so blunt, but I do not think it is in good spiritual form for recent converts to the Orthodox faith to tell others (especially those outside of the visible Orthodox Church) how to live or to dispense ecclesiastical or spiritual advice. Dreher has been Orthodox for less than a decade. He is still taking his baby steps in Orthodoxy. He is still in the process of acquiring an Orthodox phronema (mindset). This is a process that takes many years, especially for adult converts and especially for American Orthodox converts. The Orthodox Church in the United States is exceedingly small and marginalized. Less than one-half of 1% of Americans are Orthodox.

Brother Boris then explains how he had talked to an Orthodox Bishop about his interest in the monastic life soon after his conversion, and how the Bishop advised him to go live at a monastery for three years, then come back to the United States and go to seminary, get a degree and then decide whether or not to take monastic vows. This makes sense to him now as being wise advice, but at the time he felt it was unrealistic. The insinuation is that he was impatient and wanted to start something before he knew or understood anything about it. Then he goes on:

I say all this just to caution people, especially people who are not Eastern Orthodox, to be cautious about taking spiritual advice from new converts to Eastern Orthodoxy. Our new converts often have zeal, but it is not always a zeal born of knowledge or spiritual discernment. Often it is simply the passion of the neophyte. It can also manifest itself in what political position or cause this neophyte happens to embrace. Be especially cautious about Orthodox converts who take dogmatic political positions on any issue. Remember that politics, of whatever nature, is not and never has been dogma.

Checklist time; let's see. Zeal without spiritual discernment: check, passion of the neophyte: check, dogmatic political positions: check. I admit I said a lot of dumb things when I was converting which I truly wish I could go back and do over, usually by following the advice of St. James: STFU.

Then Brother Boris delivers a warning based on the derangement of another Orthodox convert.

When I became Orthodox twenty years ago, Franky Schaeffer was all the rage. He had just published his book, Dancing Alone, and he had all the answers. He was angry, self-righteous, and he had all the answers to society's shortcoming and yours as well. He was very much a finger-pointer. Now look at him. He's nearly burned out on his own rage. I sincerely wonder now if Franky is even a Christian, let alone Orthodox. In the last youtube videos I've seen of him, he sounds so incredibly depressed and agnostic, almost bordering on being an atheist. It made me wonder if he embraced Orthodoxy because he thought it was true, or because he thought it was the PERFECT Church or the PURE Church. Making the Church into a Purity Cult is always a danger to the adult convert, and perhaps part of Franky's Calvinist heritage that he never could leave fully behind.

I see a similar strain of "Purity Cult" thinking in Rod Dreher's "Benedict Option" and it concerns me. The very idea that Christians should separate themselves from the rest of society and live in intentional communities reminds me a whole lot more of Calvinist New England under the Puritans than Byzantine "symphonia" in Constantinople or Holy Russia. In addition, Dreher's rigorism concerns me, especially where he says:

The community is going to have to be the center of your life, not just something you do on Sunday.

Please don't misunderstand me. I am not advocating nominalism, casual church attendance and spiritual lukewarmness. Its Dreher's tone that concerns me. It's the tone of the fanatic. The Church, especially the Orthodox Church, has always been "here comes everybody." In Orthodoxy it is the whole village at worship, not some sectarian conventicle of the elect few and holy. Again, this seems to go back to the same theme I saw in Franky Schaeffer, the Church as a Purity Cult.

Personally I can't see Dreher ever becoming as deranged as Schaeffer, although anything is possible. Schaeffer did write books slamming his family post mortem, and he has seemed to be driven as a sort of contrarian no matter where he is as we had been discussing.

There can be no doubt, however, that Brother Boris's words are insightful written as someone who has witnessed the effects of flighty zeal without the foundation of experience and discernment.

One more observation and I'll leave the rest to readers. Brother Boris mentions Dreher's "rigorism". I would point out that it is selective rigorism as so much else is with Dreher and as I've noted before.

Former Conservative? Not so much.

The subject of this article, Bart Campolo and his Church of Christ Without Christ, is cause for pity as well as ridicule, but this first paragraph is sort of pitiable as well:

My new colleague and friend, Bart Campolo, is the principal investigator. Bart is the new Humanist Chaplain at the University of Southern California. A former evangelical Christian leader with a national profile in his own right, he is the son of Tony Campolo, the famous evangelical preacher best known as the personal spiritual mentor to President Clinton after the Monica Lewinsky affair. Steadily, over a period of decades, Bart’s credulity in evangelical doctrine eroded away until his wife convinced him that he was theologically past the point of no return. He burst his way out of the conservative Christian bubble, leading to hand-wringing on the pages of Christianity Today, a major evangelical periodical.

OK, insofar as there is a "conservative Christian bubble", Bart Campolo was never part of it and didn't need to "burst his way out". His father is part of the Sojo Christian Left Mafia and that has been known for years. This is sloppy writing on Jim Burklo's part, who is a liberal Christian author, and the only excuse might be that he was thinking of Frankie Schaeffer whom he'd mentioned early. Otherwise I think he just wants to blame those awful, hypocritical conservative Christians for someone losing their faith altogether. As he states later:

Early in his tenure here at USC, I gave Bart a copy of my first book, OPEN CHRISTIANITY, and he read it. “If I had read this a few years ago, I might have become a progressive Christian instead of an atheist,” he told me. But neither he nor I regret it. The whole point of theologically progressive Christianity is that Christianity is not about turning people into Christians, or even making sure that they stay Christian. It’s about the same thing that Bart is about. It’s about love, and creating communities of love. If Bart can spread this love without Christian or any other religious content, I will holler a hearty hallelujia [sic]! His way is a good way, just as my way is a good way.

If Bart Campolo actually stated this verbatim, the obfuscating on his part here would astounding. "I might have become a progressive Christian," he allegedly stated. Campolo has always been on the Christian left! Burklo is illustrating the myth-making propensity of the left once again.

I don't know the man's heart, but I would suggest a more likely story would be that there was no foundation underneath the faith of his father beyond a sort of personality cult. His father is sort of a pope of his own church and his concerns are mostly political rather than theological. Even his Wiki page lists him as a sociologist first, then a pastor. I don't think Bart Campolo "burst out" of anything so much as "dropped down" into his own philosophical comfort zone the way a man sits down in his favorite recliner.

By the way, personality cult pretty much describes the situation with the Schaeffers as well. Francis Schaeffer more or less started his own church community becoming a de facto pope in the process. This is most often not a good environment for a child to forming his faith in, seeing your dad act like a bear at home and some kind of angel out in public. Both these cases are good arguments for the celibacy of the clergy.