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.