Rod Dreher's Benedict Option™: who put the BOp in the BOp shoo BOp shoo BenOp?

Who was that man?

I'd like to shake his hand.

For, you see, there may be an unanticipated dividend to Rod Dreher's Benedict Option™, or as Prophet Dreher has prescribed it for the faithful, "BenOp" (Google plaintively asks instead, "Did you mean bebop?".

It might be great for getting chicks.

Hit it, Barry:

I'd like to thank the guy
Who wrote the song
That made my baby
Fall in love with me

Who put the bomp
In the bomp bah bomp BenOp?
Who put the ram
In the rama lama ding dong?
Who put the BOp
In the BOp shoo BOp shoo BOp?
Who put the hip
In the hippy dippy BenOp trip?
Who was that man?
I'd like to shake his hand
He made my baby
Fall in love with me (yeah!!)

When my baby heard
"Bomp bah bah bomp "
"Bah bomp bah bomp BenOp"
Every word went right into her heart
And when she heard them singin'
"Rama lama lama lama"
"Rama ding dong"
She said we'd never have to part
So

Who put the bomp
In the bomp bah bomp BenOp?
Who put the ram
In the rama lama ding dong?
Who put the BOp
In the BOp shoo BOp shoo BOp?
Who put the dip
In the hippy dippy BenOp trip?
Who was that man?
I'd like to shake his hand
He made my baby
Fall in love with me (yeah!!)

Each time that we're alone
Boogity boogity boogity
Boogity boogity boogity shoo
Sets my baby's heart all aglow
And everytime we dance to
Hippy dippy BenOp trip
Hippy dippy BenOp trip
She always says she loves me so
So

Who put the bomp
In the bomp bah bomp BenOp?
Who put the ram
In the rama lama ding dong?
Who put the BOp
In the BOp shoo BOp shoo BOp?
Who put the dip
In the hippy dippy BenOp trip?
Who was that man?
I'd like to shake his hand
He made my baby
Fall in love with me (yeah!!)

*    *    *

And once you've found the BOpper girl of your dreams, use the rest of your charm to sweep her away from that charismatic cult and into a full and more appropriate, real world Christian life, how 'bout.

 

If you're still taking Rod Dreher's Benedict Option™ seriously, now I'm just laughing at you

Rod Dreher's Benedict Option™

In another 3,200-word eruction entitled - what else? - Talking Benedict Option, our favorite tailor to credulous emperors and their courts Rod Dreher does just that, talk, talk, and talk some more about people talking about Rod Dreher talking about Rod Dreher's Benedict Option™.

Here is why I and others are laughing at you: not just because you thought those Shake Weights would knock that spare tire around your middle right down, not because you still want to maintain to your snickering friends that those premium-priced Monster cables deliver a noticeably higher quality audio-video experience, but because you are unequivocally one of these people:

Everyone said, loud enough for the others to hear: "Look at the Emperor's new clothes. They're beautiful!"

      "What a marvellous train!"

      "And the colors! The colors of that beautiful fabric! I have never seen anything like it in my life!" They all tried to conceal their disappointment at not being able to see the clothes, and since nobody was willing to admit his own stupidity and incompetence, they all behaved as the two scoundrels had predicted.

That's right. You're a goober, a mark, a chump, a sucker, the eager tool of a relentlessly self-promoting impresario who really does nothing else in life but promote himself. Because, bless your heart, that's just how you roll.

But perhaps not all of you. It's statistically impossible for all of you to naturally be that witless. And, moreover, one of the most salient aspects you share with Rod Dreher is the unquenchable need for your own Internet presence to constantly be reaffirmed, particularly by the highest god of the realm you serve, the one whose name also cannot be spoken and which also begins with a G.

In this ghostly, drifting penumbral nebula of cyber-pseudo-Christianity within which you promote yourself, everyone involved clearly understands Rod Dreher's Benedict Option™ isn't something to be practiced, it's the Internet that is to be practiced instead.

Rod Dreher invents the Emperor's New Clothes of Rod Dreher's Benedict Option™ and wants to get everyone talking about it, because to talk about Rod Dreher's Benedict Option™ is to talk about the narcissistic black hole at the center of the Rod Dreher's Benedict Option™ event horizon, Rod Dreher.

But if there's something on a trending ballistic within that ectoplasmic cybermist of pseudo-Christianity that defines you, you don't want to be left out, do you? Maybe talking about Rod Dreher talking about Rod Dreher's Benedict Option™ will raise your own cyber-pseudo-Christian profile as well. And that will make your great god G very happy.

So for all of you more-than-mere-goobers, Christianity and Christian culture really become the means; mutually and reciprocally talking about Rod Dreher's Benedict Option™ as a thoughtful, serious option for Christians in order to raise the Internet profiles of all of you doing so becomes the true end.

And so as you peer into and talk about Rod Dreher's Benedict Option™ with a spiritual seriousness either credulous or cynical, the misty abyss of Rod Dreher's Benedict Option™ will rejoice and peer into and talk about you. And not only will that flatter you, it will make your great god G very happy.

But eventually, after Rod has landed his Rod Dreher's Benedict Option™ book deal - you do understand all of this Rod Dreher's Benedict Option™ noise, all of it, is nothing but an Astroturfed buzz campaign to land him a book deal, right? - and after he has sold many dozens of books and garnered dozens of five-star Amazon reviews from those blog followers whose comments flatter him, the hot sun of the real world will rise again, the misty vapor of Rod Dreher's Benedict Option™ will lift from your eyes, you will find yourself inexplicably babbling about a naked emperor, and you will sheepishly realize this

“Our revels now are ended. These our actors,
As I foretold you, were all spirits, and
Are melted into air, into thin air..”

Or maybe you prefer a more contemporary version

All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned...

You can even read all about this orbital ghost realm you and Rod Dreher are cheerfully cultivating instead of Christianity and Christian culture here.

In the meantime, though, I'll just be laughing at you. Because, like the Emperor, his courtiers, and his townspeople, you've worked hard for it, and you've earned it.

UPDATE (as they say): As my colleague Pikkumatti pointed out, in order to avoid the unfortunate fate of busy people referring to Rod Dreher's Benedict Option™ as "Rod's BO", our Prophet has now launched on the hilariously entertaining course of recursively micro-branding his original brand. No detail is too small for the Mad Man Prophet. I expect T-shirts any day now.

In this brand-branding establishing post, Prophet Dreher gratuitously inserts the term "BenOp" no less than ten times including title and tags:

"BenOp"    "New, Improved Tide"
"BenOp"    "New, Improved Tide"
"BenOp"    "New, Improved Tide"
"BenOp"    "New, Improved Tide"
"BenOp"    "New, Improved Tide"
"BenOp"    "New, Improved Tide"
"BenOp"    "New, Improved Tide"
"BenOp"    "New, Improved Tide"
"BenOp"    "New, Improved Tide"
"BenOp"    "New, Improved Tide"

Hear his offering, Lord Big G, little double o, and reward him with first page recognition!

Go ahead, use our Prophet's hastily fabricated, Newspeak term "BenOp". Represent.

Mark Shea on the Benedict Option

Since my friend Joseph is always bringing up the somewhat relevant Catholic author Mark Shea, I thought I should check out what Mark Shea recently had to say about the Benedict Option:

Instead of withdrawal from the world, how about sharing the fruits of prayer and contemplation with the world? God did not so love the world that he hunkered down in Fortress Katolicus seeking the perfect liturgy, scrutinizing people for heresy, and repelling everybody who sought him as an invader.

The world is to be loved, not feared or worshiped. Father Dominic got this.

Seriously. Who at this point hears Benedict Option and doesn't think "bunker"? If the so-called Benedict Option was truly a strategic withdrawal then no one would even know about it as I've said before. Conceding defeat in the war of ideas isn't strategic. How can you even purport to be a standard-bearer for Burkean ideals and leave the fight?

Shea and I disagree on many things and his reflexive moral equivalency in the political sphere is tiresome, but we agree (along with Tom) that the so-called Benedict Option isn't to be considered either because it isn't really Christian or it doesn't really exist. Or... maybe a bit of both.

Dog and Child Explain the Benedict Option

Rod Dreher's don't-be-Left Behind Benedict Option™ & church to go

Recently, Rod Dreher picked a fight with Pastor Dan Phillips of Copperfield Bible Church in Houston, then, because he is Rod Dreher, ran away and blocked him on Twitter:

Over the weekend, I got into a brief Twitter exchange with a pastor of a nondenominational “Bible church” (as if all churches aren’t Bible churches) in Texas who said that I am not a Christian, because Orthodox and Catholics are not Christian. I pointed out to him that Christianity did not begin with the Reformation, but then decided to block the guy on Twitter, because the last thing I wanted to do was get into an exchange with a guy like that.

The offense seems to have been the tweet I've highlighted among these remaining:

Jon Swerens says:

May 25, 2015 at 2:16 pm

 

All of the tweets that I could find:

@DennyBurk @roddreher Don’t know Dreher besides that he’s a name. Christian, or Roman Catholic, or something else? http://twitter.com/BibChr/status/602223403253149696

@BibChr @DennyBurk Christian “or” Roman Catholic? I used to be a Catholic, and was at that time also a Christian. Still am a Christian. http://twitter.com/roddreher/status/602242438187520000

@roddreher @DennyBurk Yes, “or.” It is impossible to affirm what the Bible teaches and what Roman Catholicism officially teaches. http://twitter.com/BibChr/status/602282578083643392

@BibChr @DennyBurk This doubtless comes as a shock to you, but Christianity didn’t start with the Reformation. http://twitter.com/roddreher/status/602242769336143873

@roddreher @DennyBurk That’s interesting. I don’t know you, so I ask, rather than assume. You seem to know my level of education. How? http://twitter.com/BibChr/status/602282998474539008

Yes, “doubtless,” for disagreement equals ignorance.

[NFR: I was being snarky. Dang literalists. Note the "Christian or Roman Catholic or something else" -- as if by "something else," I couldn't possibly be a Christian. -- RD]


[NFR.2: Anyway, thank you for digging up the tweet thread. I couldn't find it, but I'm very bad at Twitter. -- RD]

After congratulating himself for his beliefs of the moment after Methodism, agnosticism, and Catholicism

 An hour later, I was standing in our Orthodox vespers service, thinking about that guy and smiling. There we were, praying in a church that can trace itself in an unbroken line back to the apostles

and following a critique of Phillips dimensionally beyond anything contained in Phillips' actual tweet above, the theological disagreement between Phillips and Dreher sets Dreher up to raise this ominous a priori eschatological question:

Well, anyway, I have no interest in engaging in theological disputation here, and won’t. What prompts this post is my curiosity about this question: Does laying hold to a position so extreme and so ungrounded in history leave people like Mr. Bible Church vulnerable in other ways to the forces of modernity, which deny the authority of the past? That is, does the nature of their conservatism leave Christian fundamentalists particularly vulnerable to the cultural forces that are tearing Christianity apart in the West

But it seems that it's not just fundies like Phillips who are vulnerable to the "cultural forces that are tearing Christianity apart" foreseen by Prophet Dreher. Just about everyone else is, too: conservatives, Protestants, even Catholics:

This reminds me of firebrand political conservatives who seem to think conservatism began with Ronald Reagan, and that before his appearance among us, there was a vast void between the age of the Founding Fathers, and Reagan’s coming. Their historical ignorance denies them deeper philosophical resources that they could rightly draw on to defend their position against contemporary challenges. All true conservatives — as opposed to ideologues — lay hold to continuity with the past, and the democracy of the dead.

Christians who refuse, even denigrate, the Church’s deep theological roots in history, strike me as holding a conservatism that is a hard outer shell. What happens when the experience of living in modernity, with its valorization of radical autonomy, erodes or pierces the armor? With their creedless, non-denominational, make-it-up-as-you-go-along approach to Christianity, they are sitting ducks. They deny themselves the wisdom and profundity of tradition, which would give them deep roots. Ironically, their approach to ecclesiology is itself part of modernity, the very thing they oppose so fiercely. Christian fundamentalism, especially in its nondenominational variety, is parasitic on older, more ancient forms of Christianity, in ways that its adherents don’t appreciate.

It’s like political conservatives who don’t grasp that conservatism is a far broader and deeper thing than Reaganism and post-Reaganism. Given Reagan’s celebration of the free market, they don’t know what to say when questions are raised about the market’s role in undermining traditions that conservatism has historically stood for upholding. So they double down on dogmatism and ideology, which, as time goes on, persuades or attracts fewer and fewer people.

This is going to happen to fundamentalist Christianity, I think. It is an unstable thing, and far more vulnerable to the vicissitudes of time than its believers think. We can all look at liberal Protestantism and liberal Catholicism, and see how they are withering. Fundamentalism looks strong by contrast. I think this is deceptive.

And yet, it must be conceded that all that tradition, and all that doctrinal depth and comprehensiveness, is not producing Catholics who believe in what their own church teaches,

When all these other institutions and structures ultimately crumble and fall, as Prophet Dreher has foreseen they must, this tacitly leaves one Last Church Standing with roots deep enough and a - what? appropriately not-hard outer shell - to ultimately withstand and weather  the "cultural forces that are tearing Christianity apart in the West". Which church could that be?

Why, Rod Dreher's own personal current church of choice, Eastern Orthodoxy, of course.

As one of his commenters explains and which Dreher, who constantly adds NFRs to comments he disagrees with, makes no effort to deny or repudiate,

There is no such thing as “small-o Orthodoxy.” None whatsoever. There is the Church, and then there is everything outside it. This does not mean that there are no God-fearing people outside the Church. Far from it! I think of God-fearing people, outside the Church, as contemporary versions of Cornelius the Centurion in the Gospels, whose hearts are in the right place, but who simply haven’t received the whole truth yet.

However, what this does mean, is that a Christian life is not possible outside the Church. Only within the Church is a fully Christian life possible...The New Martyr, Metropolitan Hilarion Troitsky, explains this further in his sermon “Christianity or the Church?”

So, if you're going to take Rod Dreher's Benedict Option™ in order to strategically withdraw (as Dreher did from his Twitter fight with Phillips) from the world and cultivate your Christian values offline rather than fighting for them openly in the public square, there's really only one political and religious option within which Rod Dreher's Benedict Option™ can be warranted safe and effective for you and your family if taken as directed: Rod Dreher's personal church of choice.

You want to be Saved from the "cultural forces tearing Christianity apart", don't you, particularly your own fragile, shallow-rooted, inferior Christianity or, worse, God-less social conservatism. Don't you?

Then don't risk being Left Behind in the apocalyptic cultural wasteland Prophet Dreher foresees for you.

Run, don't walk, and convert to the one true church guaranteed by Prophet Dreher to deliver a satisfactory Rod Dreher's Benedict Option™ today. Operators are standing by.

The Permanent Thangs

No to be confused with The Permanent Things. Whatever they are.

Long after our current President is known as "that dark-complected guy who talked too much" I hope people remember the blond, white chick with the smart-girl glasses who epitomize his presidency. One of the thangs to remember her by is this hashtag.

She is truly unbelievable. We are truly dumbfounded to find anyone this dumb.

A Kid's Imagination

Or maybe a dad's imagining of a kid's imagination. 

Not everyone may understand this . . . only the "classically trained".  

Those, like me, who raised classically trained children will get it too.

(H/T Guns.com)

What we're up against

As promised here, it's time for an installment of my take of By the People by Charles Murray, which I am in the process of reading.  The first portion of the book summarizes his take on how we got to where we are today, under the boot heel of a lawless regulatory state.  The book will later get to his prescription for how we can deal with that, which I will get to in later posts.

But for our purposes here in analyzing the so-called and undefinable Benedict Option and perhaps other options to that Option, the first part of the book usefully illustrates just what we, as nominally free people, are up against.  Pace Barack Obama, we should identify the actual enemy in order to develop our strategy. Mr. Murray summarizes that quite well, I think:

To simplify, progressive intellectuals were passionate advocates of rule by disinterested experts led by a strong, unifying leader.  The were in favor of using the state to mold social institutions in the interests of the collective.  

And quoting Woodrow Wilson:

...government is not a machine, but a living thing.  It falls, not under the theory of the universe, but under the theory of the universe, but under the theory of organic life.  It is accountable to Darwin, not to Newton. ... All that progressives ask or desire is permission -- in an era when "development," "evolution," is the scientific word -- to interpret the Constitution according to the Darwinian principle.

Brought to you by the progressive movement

By the People sets out how the progressives put these ideas into practice via the judiciary:  elimination of constitutional limitations on the federal government, enabling use of civil litigation as a tool of wealth transfer for the "collective good", and unleashing the lawless regulatory state.  Mr Murray also sets out why we can't undo those actions directly.

My take from this is that we are up against a progressive movement that believes that the experts and elites ("disinterested", of course) can and ought to use the power of the State to change social institutions for the collective good as they see it.  Worse yet, the progressive movement seems to believe that human nature has evolved -- in the Darwinian sense -- such that the constraints presented by pre-modern documents such as the Constitution, as written and adopted, must also evolve.

And this is why, IMO, the so-called Benedict Option (as best one can understand it) would be useless.  Our progressive regulatory oppressors, or at least the true believers among them, will not accept limits on their ability to mold social institutions in the interests of the collective, even to the extent of leaving small insignificant groups alone.  And arguing merely from "tradition" (as in the weak tea of Dreher's SSM opposition) will be considered irrelevant by the progressives; after all, human nature has evolved, and constitutional liberties are to be interpreted according to the Darwinian principle as a result.

To the extent argument can still be used (which Murray seems to believe will be eventually fruitless -- but I'll see how the rest of the book turns out on that point), it will be essential to apply reason, backed by the knowledge that acting in accordance with reason is consistent with revealed truth and God's nature.

And in a more practical sense, we must say "no".  This will be the topic of the second part of By the People, and I will keep y'all updated as I work through it.