The terminal logic of Rod Dreher's Benedict Option: Secular Millenarianism

Or as I more informally tend to think of it, Waiting for Godot Putin (or an equivalent, paraChristian secular warlord). Let's work this out, shall we?

Now, it's true, Dreher's Benedict Option can still be resolved as being nothing more than Dreherian emperorography, that is, one of those Dreherisms that evaporates upon scrutiny into nothing more than a Dreher-promoting reason to talk about Rod Dreher.

Similarly, his Benedict Option might only be one of those Dreher in-group-bonding shibboleths that one either "gets" or doesn't "get", like that liberal "check your [whatever type of] privilege" thing that's temporarily in vogue now.

But if there really is anything to Dreher's Benedict Option, let's try to systematically burrow down and figure out what it is.

First of all, as we begin to notice some familiar contours, we realize there's nothing originally or uniquely Dreherian about his Benedict Option at heart, and had there never been a Rod Dreher, sooner or later we would have inevitably been hearing about Dod Reher's Monastic Option instead. But since Rod Dreher happens to be the one who wants to build his reputation on this sand bar, let's give him all the riverfront footage he needs.

The Benedict Option imagines a certain type of Christian selectively hunkering down, selectively disengaged from contemporary society, not necessarily hermetic (although that would not be a disqualifier) but absolutely not embracing and exercising the Great Commission. The Benedict Optioneer might selectively tweet on Twitter, but he will not watch the Kardashians; or if he watches the Kardashians, it will only be on his computer, streaming, not on his television, and he will only tweet or blog disapprovingly about them, not joke about them in mixed company with the hoi polloi at the company water cooler.

Because, for the Benedict Optioneer, it is not up to him to go among the hoi polloi and explain why there might be better spiritual choices than Kim Kardashian's fat ass: his commission is to hide out selectively to some degree, untainted by them as much as possible, and wait it out until the decadent society supporting them collapses of its own butt weight and is revamped by factors not of his direct doing. The Benedict Optioneer, then, is the quintessentially Passive-Aggressive Christian.

To the extent that he looks forward to a societal collapse that will finally liberate him, allowing him to return from his selective retreat and fully embrace again a society now fully meeting his passive specifications and of which he fully approves, the Benedict Optioneer is also more or less a schadenfreude-driven misanthrope, maybe aggressively so, maybe just sorrowfully, with tears real or just crocodillian.

Either way, something or someone other than the Benedict Optioneer himself will be the one responsible for the Great Restoration. What or who will that someone or something be?

At some point on our journey through the logic of the Benedict Option we really do have to ask: if all society but the cells of the Benedict Optioneers themselves collapses into chaos and barbarism, that is, into that seed bed now fertile enough for the Benedict Optioneer to finally re-emerge - what sort of Christian does that leave the Benedict Optioneer being himself - if any sort at all? Everyone else finally in misery, so he can finally triumph. Exactly what sort of Christian is that?

On our hypothetical journey to the Great Restoration we also have to ask, what about the numerous historical Christian institutions covering the landscape and underpinning all but the most isolated, purely non-Christian outliers? A 2,000-year-old Catholic Church, with 1.2 billion members, its own Magisterium and own Vatican city-state is - dismissible? Insufficient to the Benedict Optioneer's psycho-spiritual needs? Why? Not to mention numerous other communions bringing something quite different than Kim Kardashian's butt to the four corners of the globe on a daily basis. Not good enough?

At this point many of us are probably starting to recognize that the Benedict Option is just a new, topically marketable flavor of an old standby, millenarianism, a psychological eschatological yearning indiscriminately empowering Medieval and End Times Christian, revolutionary Russian Marxist, and Polynesian cargo-cultist alike throughout human space and time. In other words, a purely secular, psychological ideology at heart.

But, wait...how can this Great Restoration of our passive Benedict Optioneering prairie dogs still actually be accomplished, if it ever is to be?

They will not be actively resisting the hypothetical social collapse and armageddon themselves. And, let's face it, any social collapse beyond any significant tipping-point will take all but the most remote, fully prepared Alaskan preppers along with it; the Benedict Optioneers will wash out to sea alongside their Kim Kardashian butt-ogling neighbors.

And it won't be Christ returning to set things right - that would explicitly make the Benedict Optioneers End Times fundamentalists instead, not Russian Orthodox and other traditional and orthodox Christians quietly waiting in their cozy corners.

So who then, will finally, actively ride to the Benedict Optioneers' rescue?

Why, someone very much like this guy,

a powerful, secular Prince who will actively sweep away the decadent landscape for the Benedict Optioneers, indiscriminately grinding Kardashian butts, weirdo transgendered athletes, effete Popes, inferior wines, pussy rioters and all other irritating detritus of what they might regard as human decadence under his social tank treads while recognizing the Benedict Optioneers alone - not the Vatican, not the myriad other Christian and other communions, not the ordinary hoi polloi just trying to get his genes on down the road a bit - as uniquely deserving of his special protection and cultivation.

You just wait until their secular Dad gets home.

This is where the logic road of the Benedict Option inevitably leads me and finally dumps me out: if Rod Dreher's Benedict Option is anything other than pure emperorography or shibboleth, it leads inexorably to the tacit hero worship of a conquering, secular Prince finally ushering in a Great Restoration.

Sorry, but I think I'll just take my chances with Kim Kardashian's fat ass instead.

What more can the "sage" Putin teach us?

What a bad idea it was to get rid of the Czar, maybe? After all, look how that turned out, John McCain.

Phoning in from infinity and beyond somewhere from within his fortress of solitude in the verdant suburbs of St. Francisville, LA,



Rod Dreher turns a question from Ishaan Tharoor (formerly of Barsoom, now writing at the Washington Post) into a statement of fact:

Putin Told Us So

while with trademark Dreher fecklessness retaining Tharoor as his mouthpiece to avoid direct attribution.

So, what more can the "sage" Putin teach us? Well, for one thing, if you want the nicest spot for your Benedict Option in Ukraine or wherever, you should just take it. That's how a strong, pre-Enlightenment Slavic leader runs a masculine organization with a masculine church, right? Well, not directly, of course, no more than using your own words in a blog post. You need a cut-out, either a Tharoor from Barsoom or patriotic separatists you can arm with BUK surface-to-air missiles to make your point at 30,000 feet.

Or am I missing something from today's lesson?

Let's dig a little deeper.

Commenter Chris 1 writes  

According to Tharoor, this is exactly what Vladimir Putin warned about in his New York Times op-ed last September advising the West not to engage in airstrikes against Syria to help the rebels.

Did I miss something? When and where did the West engage in airstrikes to help the Syrian rebels?

Dreher responds:

[NFR: On September 10, 2013, Obama went on national television and said the United States would conduct a "military strike" against Syria to punish it for using chemical weapons. He got significant pushback from the public and from some in Congress over this, and stood down. Click the link and read the speech; Obama plainly wanted to bomb Syria, and asked the public to support him. -- RD]

I think I see now. Obama wanted to draw a red line in the sand as CINC, but then demurred and didn't, and now Putin has told us so about what would happen if he had, but actually didn't.

Even Rachel Maddow-loving commenter Jack Shifflett throws up in his mouth a little bit at Dreher's reflexive prevarication:

I’ll also note that President Obama, for whatever reason(s), did in fact call off last year’s proposed airstrikes, and that he has all along resisted arming the Syrian rebels; and yet here ISIS is anyway. I think the president made the right call–that is, he followed Mr. Putin’s (and Rachel Maddow’s) advice–but in what way did that make the slightest difference about this particular threat?

If you go back and read the entire Putin editorial in question, you’ll see that, as a paean to international law, it’s an astonishing exercise in hypocrisy and disingenuousness. I concede that even a blind pig can find an acorn now and then, but why are you so determined to laud this particular blind pig’s vision?

So, in the end, what was the correct decision?

Leaving the raising of the children almost entirely in the hands of Mrs. Dreher while Rod splits his time reading Dante, chasing the latest food morsel, and sleeping off the effects of Ambien, depression, fanboi worship of strong, masculine, dominating men, mono, or whatever this week's story happens to be, of course.

Putin is his proxy

In my previous post I raised the central question of why a yappy little dog like Rod Dreher would bark in the night in defense of an international (and intranational) geopolitical thug like Vladimir Putin. Even if he disagrees that Putin is the all-purpose thug anyone older than 13 can clearly see he is, why say anything at all? Why speak out in 5 back to back posts, much less in his defense at all?

Because Dreher and his fellow Putinistas badly need Putin's services. Putin is their cutout. Putin is the Christian Dreher would be if only he had a really big brother like Putin to make that a safe and profitable option for him.

Putin is Dreher's proxy.

If you're effectively no more than the pseudo-religious-conservative version of Barbara Walters that Dreher is, running a pop-cultural blog on whatever is topical, with regular food segments for Pete's sake, a pseudo-religious-conservative version of The View, you need a cutout to say and do the tough, incontrovertible things for you so that you don't get your own hands unequivocally "dirty" and so as a consequence that you don't lose the vast chunks of readership you'd lose if those sentiments were directly attributable to you.

So instead of bashing Catholics or Protestants any more directly than you already do, you instead praise the authoritarian leader of a country where Catholicism and Protestantism can never hope to gain any real foothold and where the state-supported national religion just happens to be the one you most recently converted to. If you spoke and acted too directly yourself without the benefit of Putin as your proxy, you might lose readership and influential people might stop linking to you.

If you disapprove of gays at all beyond your vague, mumbling, abstract references to religious liberty, Putin becomes your alter-ego. If you dared to speak and act so directly against gays yourself without the benefit of Putin as your proxy, you would almost certainly lose your large, devoted gay crunchy-foodie readership and influential people like Andrew Sullivan might stop linking to you.

If you disapprove of America being a superpower in the world and doing the things on the world stage that America must do to maintain that status and not relinquish it to another, you let Putin do the speaking and talking instead and then, when the context seems safe, speak out loudly in defense of him. If you spoke and acted directly yourself without the benefit of Putin as your proxy, you might lose patriotic readership and influential people might stop linking to you.

If you disapprove of an all-girl punk band scandalously named Pussy Riot, you feature their name copiously in your posts whenever the NPR and the MSM crowd do (because who isn't drawn to the tag "pussy"?), but you let your proxy Putin give them prison camp terms without raising any protest yourself, then long after the fact murmur that, well, that's not what you would have done. If you had spoken and acted directly without the benefit of Putin as your proxy, you might have lost readership and influential people might have stopped linking to you.

In short, if your self-image is one of a stern, muscular Christian more sternly and muscularly Christian than any Christian could ever possibly have been in the history of stern and muscular Christianity, but if that self-image really lives large only in your nightly, Ambien-fueled fever dreams and in real life you find that prudence and profit dictate that your personal profile must inevitably be as quirky and harmless as that of a Zooey Deschanel...dude, do you ever need a proxy.

So Putin becomes your alter-ego and proxy. Putin is that tough guy you'd be - really, you would - if only groveling and simpering for a buck wasn't ultimately your highest value.

Hey, are you media guys being mean to Vladimir Putin?

The American Conservative seems to think so, and its Senior Editor Rod Dreher is hard on the case, gathering leads in a post cleverly entitled "Putinfreude". Because, dude, if you can coin a meme that ends up going viral, David and Ross will link to you, donchaknow, and you know what happens then, don't you? That's right, bro: big advance.

And...well, aw, shucks, that's not going to fly. Nyet, nyet, nyety-nyet-nyet.

Commenter Paige Belle points out

Putinfreude would mean “joy taken in Putin.” I’m sorry, but the joke does not work.

Nuh-uh, Rod retorts, in his most TACcy Senior Editor retortiness

[NFR: You're being too literal. You know perfectly well it's a play off of the sounds in the word "Schadenfreude." -- RD]

I know how he feels. I'm often gobsmacked myself when I take professional writer Rod Dreher at his literal word.

But, actually, "Putinfreude" ends up serving DreherTAC's purposes twice over, by soliciting the taking of names of those being meanies to the international thug Putin in the service of the inexplicable joy they seem to take in him, as The Washington Free Beacon recently noted (originally linked, I think, by Pik, but I couldn't find the comment; sorry.)

The magazine has recently taken to supporting Russian President Vladimir Putin

In an essay for the January 2014 issue headlined “Russia’s right turn: Moscow has reclaimed its 19th-century conservative role,” William Lind argued, “American conservatives should welcome the resurgence of a conservative Russia” under President Putin, who has passed laws against gay “propaganda.”

The American Conservative also published a pro-Putin column in December by Buchanan, who founded the magazine in 2002.

“While much of American and Western media dismiss him as an authoritarian and reactionary, a throwback, Putin may be seeing the future with more clarity than Americans still caught up in a Cold War paradigm,” Buchanan wrote.

Calls to the American Conservative’s customer service line were unanswered, and editor Daniel McCarthy did not immediately return a request for comment.

So what is it that has DreherTAC forever wishing they knew how to quit Putin but failing?

His strong, Godfather-ly hand in world affairs? Like Syria.

His status as the political head of the church to which at least two of TAC's senior editors belong?

Or just those never-ending beefcake poses?