Benedict Option Marketing Problems

Let's get a few things out of the way at the outset. Despite Rod Dreher's wish to evoke and insinuate any or all of these, his so-called Benedict Option was never practiced by Benedict of Nursia, nor did Alasdair MacIntyre ever recommend a "Benedict Option" in After Virtue. As Pauli has already said most succinctly of Dreher's calculatingly manufactured phrase, "It's not Benedictine and it's not an option."

What is it I'm addressing here, then?

Although Rod wants to draw on several threads in Christian tradition in compounding a marketing brand about which to then write and sell a book, resonant as Benedict of Nursia, Pope Emeritus Benedict, or MacIntyre's invocation of the name Benedict might be within those traditional Christian circles searching for a silver bullet to save themselves from what troubles them about the age we live in, outside such limited circles the phrase "The Benedict Option" itself immediately becomes as intuitively opaque a name for a brand as Snapple. Unless you already know what it refers to, you haven't a clue what it refers to.

Let's not forget, as its creator himself has explained on more than one occasion "The Benedict Option" is not a collection of examples Dreher is struggling to give a name to but just the opposite, a phrase he continues to struggle to explain and provide uniquely meaningful representative examples of.

As a matter of fact, enter "Benedict" into Google, and the first thing that pops up is the face of this guy:

Wrong Benedict

Rod Dreher chose the phrase "The Benedict Option" for his book-to-be marketing project for several reasons, first, as mentioned, for the evocative value of "Benedict" among traditional Christians, his hoped for core readership. His now moribund sock puppet side project "The Benedict Post" pursued the same strategy.

Second, branding it as a capitalized "Option" gives it powerful dynamism, particularly with respect to any group currently feeling helpless. Benedict + Option, opaque as that compound still is, now becomes a murky clarion call to action, somewhere between a pre-planned "Take the children and go to your sister's!" and the hopelessly unpredictable results of firing off a six shooter in the night in the midst of a herd of cattle.

Hopefully, though, with this dynamic "Option" now an equal ingredient in the marketing phrase someone, somewhere will now want to do something Rod can write about.

But the problem of the opacity of the phrase stubbornly remains, dynamism or not. Here is "The Benedict Option", now placed within a field of phrases which similarly do not contain their meaning within themselves:

The Network Effect
Beneful
The Benedict Option
The Spearmint Rhino
The China Syndrome
Heaven's Gate
The Holcroft Covenant
The Apocalypse Watch

I really have no doubt that Dreher chose "The Benedict Option" to evoke the same dynamic thrill intended to be invoked by this list. Perhaps he had visions of Shawnee Smith or someone else headlining a made-for-TV anti-cultural Christian thriller, but in his zeal to unilaterally attempt to generate publicity buzz for a not-yet-existent Christian movement in order to then someday write a book about it, he unfortunately managed to couple an intuitively opaque branding vehicle with a concept he could never hope to trademark or otherwise protect.

Why is this a problem? We'll see in further detail below.

First, Dreher could have formed an organization incorporating "The Benedict Option" as part of its legally protected identity and then pushed franchises. Unfortunately that option would be obviously even more self-serving than his current efforts and, needless to say, far harder to sell by appeals to "the disaster of the Enlightenment and modernity itself."

But even if he had given his inchoate phrase-concept such a definitive rooting, legally protected brands can still find themselves either unexpectedly on the wrong side of history like this once happy and promising product

"Why take diet pills when you can enjoy Ayds?"

or else somehow hopelessly ill-conceived from the start.

So. Even though Rod is burning his candle at both ends trying to recruit other Christians under an umbrella label they, but most often he and he alone, regardless of their interest or consent, refer to as "The Benedict Option", he can't legally protect his only-a-concept - now containing and implicating their lives as well - in any way whatsoever. Such as, for example, from ending up in the Urban Dictionary alongside "truffle butter" (not safe for decent people to look up; you have been warned). Just take my word for it, it's not a French delicacy.

Or from having someone else subsequently appropriate Dreher's coolly hip "Benedict Option" phrase for their own ends and actually trademark it as their exclusive legal property after the fact of his having unilaterally subsumed every other Christian he can manage to rub up against under it, like this hypothetical future entrepreneur of a chain of decidedly non-Benedictine establishments decided to do.

His focus at least seems to be heterosexual:

The next one's need not be.

Yes, there's Wikipedia disambiguation, but do you really want your non-immediate friends and relatives even wondering why on Earth you and your family are somehow mixed up with that chain of gay bathhouses you heard about on the news named "The Benedict Option"?

So let me summarize the problems surrounding Dreher's attempt to create a marketing brand called "The Benedict Option" in order that he can further his career as a writer by writing a book about it:

• Outside of those already practicing what they need to be doing and who already know what the words refer to, "The Benedict Option" is an inscrutably opaque phrase, meaning nothing - or anything - to the broader population at large.

• The only-a-concept "Benedict Option" and the phrase referring to it as Dreher wishes to employ it cannot be patented or trademarked or otherwise legally protected from any sort of abuse; but

• Anyone else can, after Dreher has already published that your wife is a "Benedict Option Mama" and your kids are "Ben Op" kids, subsequently appropriate the phrases  "The Benedict Option" and "Ben Op" to his own, including conceivably quite nasty, ends while legally protecting his exclusive use of them - for example, suing you for illegaly using them - to whatever those ends happen to be.

Here's the bottom line as I see it. Do you feel a need to replenish, recharge, reassert your Christianity? If so, why would you want to consign yourself and your family to this sort of "Benedict Option" branding trap? What could you possibly hope to gain by assuming Dreher's manufactured mantle of faux-authenticity?

Instead, here are a number of already proven and well-established hallmarks under the aegis of which to assemble your efforts:

Jesus Christ, Our Lord and Saviour
The Catholic Church
The Presbyterian Church
The Methodist Church
The Episcopal Church
The Baptist Church
The Orthodox Church

You get the idea. And there are many, many others, all intuitively transparent, completely unambiguous, and every one immune to reappropriation to commercial ends you may not have considered, the worst of which I have already effortlessly imagined for you above.

We are called to be salt and light to the world. One of the assumptions underpinning that divine commission is having a grasp above that of a six-year-old of how that doggone real world works in the age in which one is commissioned. I have serious doubts that Rod Dreher has a clue, but that at worst need only be a problem for him and his family, not you and yours.

Please, fellow Christians, just think before you allow someone else to label you and your family to suit his own commercial ends above all others. Your children may end up thanking you most of all.

Rod Dreher's Benedict Option™: Christianity's Don Draper in action

Because, as Pauli and Pikkumatti have each just amply demonstrated above, the one thing Rod Dreher's Benedict Option™ simply cannot be about logically is the defense and preservation of traditional Christianity in turbulent times, at the end of the day what is it?

Pure, unadulterated Madison Avenue, baby, where the Mad Man and his product are one and the same

Let's understand a reality at the outset. Like the very best whores, who don't present themselves as whores at all but as that woman you've been waiting for all your life (maybe a little bit of Mom, maybe a little of the Girl Next Door, and just enough of that one you really should have asked out but didn't but next time if there is one you betcha), the real Don Drapers of the world don't look or act like Don Drapers. They don't look like this:

That's what a TV show about a Don Draper Don Draper looks like.

Instead, a real Don Draper looks like this:

Awwww?!?! Like he just found a puppy! To the insecure, elderly lady who would easily drop kick the phone when the Jamaican scammer calls, this looks like what the aging, underutilized bosom has been waiting its whole life to embrace with a big old hug. What a sugar lump! Book ordered!

Similarly with other unfortunates of all stripes, from the revengeless nerd to the tenureless adjunct professor, this is the Online Friend, more important than they are, to be sure, but Not Too Good to like them. And to want to tell their story. And show them how to be saved.

Puppy Lump above is popularly known as a writer, occasionally mistakenly referred to as a journalist, but what he has in fact been for most of his career is a Don Draper, a packager and marketer of hopes, fears, anxieties and ideas, scavenged from others usually, but always in the service of his biggest client, himself.

His first book, Crunchy Cons, was just such a granola of disparate lifestyles and ideologies arbitrarily pulled together, slickly packaged, with a VW minibus and a Republican elephant (although Dreher has nothing but contempt for Republicans) on the cereal box cover instead of a toucan. And, of course, his breakthrough trademark brand: Crunchy Cons™.

Failing in the political counter-culture genre, he turned to the more dependable arena of bereavement: not everyone wears Birkenstocks, but everyone has family who die.

The rather foreseeable family backlash from turning his deceased sister into the next big breakfast cereal proved not to be a crisis for Don Puppy Lump, tilter at markets for himself, but another breakthrough opportunity: Ecce Puppy Lump, behold the victim, unjustly scourged by his own family, betrayed by his own body, ultimately to be saved by Dante - because Dante is quite trendy right now if you didn't know, but, more importantly, because a Medieval Italian poet provides a gateway back into the marketplace for Big Ideas.

Don Puppy Lump's first charge at the Big Idea market as editor of The John Templeton Foundation's new at the time Big Ideas Online blog (since reinvented at the liberal Slate) didn't fare that well. It seems someone named "Muzhik" couldn't keep his eye on the windmill and tried to run a squirrel up a tree instead.

But now he's back, making another run at the Big Ideas market with a brand pre-registered in the public consciousness as The Benedict Option™.

No one is quite sure what The Benedict Option™ product or service actually is or will be, but we are all already well-aware of its primary quality: it is as adhesive as The Booger from Hell. If you have an idea, or if a word is so reckless as to escape your mouth, The Benedict Option™ immediately sticks to it and incorporates it into itself like an amoeba absorbing its prey.

Unfortunately for Christians, somewhere along its travels this amoeba absorbed Christianity as its driving RNA. Conglomerated with everything else this amoeboid BO has accumulated along its eating tour - including not a small amount of its marketer's paranoid apocalyptic secular millenarianism - the Christianity of Rod Dreher's Benedict Option™ is now expressing itself genetically like this from the apocalyptically entitled Christianity in Collapse:

Again and again: these are not normal times. We can’t be about business as usual. The future of Christianity in America will be Benedictine — as in Benedict Option — or it won’t be at all.

Well, there you have it, folks. From Christ's lips through Don Puppy Lump's white board to - who knows? - Guyana and beyond.

This is how a Don Draper repackages and markets ancient Christianity in an anxiety-ridden 21st CyberCentury. Call today! Operators are standing by.

Of course, you know, you could just go to church or Mass instead.

Rod of Arc

In his most recent post donkey punching the GOP, Rod Dreher draws his line in the sand, pokes his finger in the dike, and makes his stand in the pass at Thermopylae:

I am not a libertarian; if anything, I’m a Red Tory, or a Christian Democrat in the European sense. But ours is not a culture where Red Toryism or Christian Democracy makes much sense. It might have at one time, but not anymore. I have been thinking for a couple of years now that if I’m going to protect my religious liberty rights (the most important right, in my view), I’m going to have to figure out how to do so within a libertarian framework.

So here we have Dreher's latest branding: no longer the impossible to sell Crunchy Con, he has now burst forth transcendentally from that crunchy chrysalis to become the Jean D'Arc standing between you and the lime eaters ready to strip you of your religious liberty.

First question(s): How much relief and confidence does Rod's new stance instill in you? Enough to overlook his _______ (fill in the blank)?

Second question(s): Clearly in our current environment this is a gambit with potential. If you yourself wouldn't follow Rod to the barricades, who do you see as his most likely market and followers?

Final question(s): If your individual liberty ends up getting discounted and falling somewhere behind your religious liberty, are you still okay with having your religious options preserved for you by some non-individual-you religious group (the alternative to your own individual choice)? Might be the religious group you belong to now. Might not.

Oh...and where would you look to politics and in particular any of the political parties in all of this?

Moral Therapeutic Dante

The Southern Bookman writes about the upcoming Divine Comedy self-help book. Excerpt:

Conservative writer Rod Dreher is cutting his way into the self-pity-therapeutic literature market staked out on the left by Anne Lamott. Dreher, who wore his heart on both sleeves, pants legs and shirt collars in his memoir of his late sister, Ruthie Leming, recently discussed his further bouts of depression and how he's cured himself by reading Dante. His account of his continual self-actualization appeared on the front page of the Wall Street Journal's Review section on Easter Saturday.

Dante's great poetic work is really a self-help book, Dreher says. Why, one of Dreher's correspondents even quit smoking by reading Dante. Somehow, I missed the canto about the Marlboro Man in one of Dante's circles of hell.

Dreher's "The Little Way of Ruthie Leming," tells the story of Dreher moving back to his hometown of St. Francisville, La., and rediscovering the importance of community from the support given his family through the illness and death of his beloved sister, Ruthie. He moved back home after a dispiriting stint in New York and Washington as a budding conservative pundit. Dreher's book gives a memorable portrait of his sister and delivers an in-depth examination of small-town life, but his emotional extremes ruined the book for me at the end.

My shelf is devoid of anything by Anne Lamott, but I do have some for Dummies books. But there's no Dante for Dummies book yet. So I was thinking that maybe Dreher is writing for that imprint, a division of Wiley. Or even better he could start a whole new brand of Can Save Your Life books. If that happens, I want to sign the contract to do How Blessed Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius Can Save Your Life just for the Trivial Pursuit card.

Do people still play Trivial Pursuit?

"Give a nod to Rod"

Because "Better Call Saul" was already taken, that's my offering to help fill the aching void that drives Rod Dreher's one true Holy Grail in life, being known for coining a popular internet meme or other type of catchy slogan.

The latest corpse once again in the sweaty hands of Reanimator Rod is his "Benedict Option" which, as best I can tell from Dylan Pahman's thoughtful analysis here, and a commenter named WorldWideProfessor's remarks here and here, has the same claim to religious or cultural gravitas that the "Danish-sounding" "Häagen-Dazs" does: it's nothing more than a brand name invented to flog a product to naive rubes.

Except that with Häagen-Dazs, you actually get something for your effort, not a vague Mosquito Coast or Jonestown that ends badly, and shouldn't be pursued in the first place for the very good reasons Erika Rudzis has already explained here.

With the so-called "Benedict Option", Rod Dreher gets cash-yielding blog meme hits that allow him to live the good, Paris-vacationing, wine-sipping, newest Apple products, non-Benedict Option life - and you get left holding the bag like a chump.

Remember "Crunchy Cons"? Yeah, me, too - barely.

But whatever was valid (if it ever was) about "Crunchy Cons" when that was all the Rod Dreher rage is certainly no less valid today. So what, if anything, changed? Why isn't Dreher still blogging heavily about "Crunchy Conservatism"? It certainly isn't as if that wouldn't fit in the garage sale of post-graduate thinking that fills his current home, TAC, today.

What happened to "Crunchy Cons"? At the end of the day it simply turned out to be - and first and foremost for its creator himself - nothing more than that other made-up ice cream name, "Bloggin Snotz", the one that never caught on and so vanished into the dustbin of failed brand names like a red-headed stepchild.

Bye-bye, Crunchy Cons...(but, hey, whoa...has anyone tried "Dante Dads" yet?)

So "give a nod to Rod" and help him try to come up with something, anything in the way of a catchy internet slogan he can become famous for so that he can finally stop perverting the saints of the Church into his own instantly forgettable version of a brand name dessert.