Many believers are convinced that America runs on a two party political arrangement with dominant left and right parties. They are concerned that a “religious right” will arise enacting coercive laws ultimately resulting in government enforcement of an act of worship known as the mark of the beast.

This is at least partly mistaken. America does not have a major right political party; it has a very extreme left major party and an extreme left major party.

Two-party systems soon begin to function as if there is a single party. The two parties will agree on large issues, with real disagreements manifesting only in smaller ones. The left/right paradigm obfuscates a different reality: that at this moment in time, Christians have reason to be more wary about the present wholesale replacement of Judeo-Christian values and the societal descent into soft totalitarianism. Almost under our feet the world has changed.

In 2017 Rod Dreher wrote The Benedict Option (TBO).(1) We are thrashing desperately in the midst, says he, of liquid modernity, with change occurring so rapidly that we can hardly latch down moorings to anything. It is difficult not to concur with Dreher’s gloomy assessment of Christian prospects in the world:

The light of Christianity is flickering out all over the West. There are people alive today who may live to see the effective death of Christianity within our civilization. By God’s mercy, the faith may continue to flourish in the Global South and China, but barring a dramatic reversal of current trends, it will all but disappear entirely from Europe and North America. This may not be the end of the world, but it is the end of a world, and only the willfully blind would deny it.(2)

Dreher calls his response the Benedict Option,

Not an escape from the real world but a way to see that world and dwell in it as it truly is. . . to bear with the world in love and transform it as the Holy Spirit transforms us. [TBO] changes the way Christians approach politics, church, family, community, education, our jobs, sexuality, and technology. (3)

He gleans ideas from Benedict of Nursia, whose organizational approach gave staying power to monasticism. Monastaries have continued for 1400 years. Few Bible Protestants are interested in adopting medieval Catholic practices, but that’s not what Dreher is proposing; he sees Western Christianity in an advanced state of decay, too late to preserve. What he suggests is that Christians return to a more self-disciplined lifestyle, and that to we can preserve a Christian way of life if we build a kind of parallel society.

According to Dreher,

[W]e in the modern west are living under barbarism, though we do not recognize it. Our scientists, our judges, our princes, our scholars, and our scribes—they are at work demolishing the faith, the family, gender, even what it means to be human. Our barbarians have exchanged animal pelts and spears of the past for designer suits and smartphones. (4)

What especially helps identify these barbarians?

Barbarians are people without historical memory. . . released from all authoritative pasts, we progress towards barbarism, not away from it. (5)

Statues and historical accounts rooted in a Christian worldview are being replaced. Today’s thought-leaders are bent on erecting a secular technocratic utopia, and, clearly, Christians haven’t been invited to the “new” civilization. The “old” civilization must be destroyed so that the new one can rise. This is not a new project.

In America, from 1870 through 1930, these elites worked what sociologist Christian Smith terms a ‘secular revolution.’ . . . . It pushed religion to the margins of public life, advocating science as the primary source of society’s values and as a guide to social change. Within Christianity, it replaced the religious model of the human person with a psychological model centered on the Self.(6)

This was a fundamental shift in what America was. The high priests of the new era were not clergy but scientists. Virtue and the transcendent were replaced by it with pragmatic and “scientific” pronouncements. Humans are now understood to be the product of an unintelligent, unguided, evolution from single-celled creatures into upward-evolving intelligences. Our civilization has been remade with a fatal loss of the transcendent:

[F]or the first time in history, the West was attempting to build a culture on the absence of belief in a higher order that commanded our obedience. . . instead of teaching us what we must deprive ourselves of to be civilized, we have a culture built on a cult of desire, one that tells us we find meaning and purpose in releasing ourselves from the old prohibitions, as we self-directed individuals choose.(7)

In the absence of that which is higher than the material, desire becomes supreme. Not the other is supreme, but what self wants for itself. In other words, in the society that is being built up, the individual has no higher goal than self-satisfaction. The Benedict Option is an attempt “to build a Christian way of life that stands as an island of sanctity and stability amid the high tide of liquid modernity.”(8)

Changes are overwriting the world we once knew. But most churches have already lost much of their distinctiveness.

Christians often talk about ‘reaching the culture’ without realizing that, having no distinct Christian culture of their own, they have been co-opted by the secular culture they wish to evangelize.(9)

A church that looks and talks and sounds just like the world has no reason to exist.(10)

One example of this intermingling of the world with Christian values is seen in the destruction of the family and hedonistic approach to marriage. Dreher:

Americans accepted gay marriage so quickly because it resonated with with what they had already come to believe about the meaning of heterosexual sex and marriage.(11)

A vast shift has occurred in the past two centuries so that marriage is broadly perceived as being more about the personal pleasure than about community or virtue or giving. For many, it no longer is about giving to one’s partner, but more about “what’s in it for me?” When marriage presents this hedonistic cast rather than a mutual giving of oneself, it has become a different—and optional—institution. Marriages built on giving are often rich and lasting, while those formed on the hedonistic contract design tend to collapse under pressure. Although there was a momentary astonishment after the 2015 Supreme Court decision on gay marriage, it was not long before most of us shrugged and forgot about it.

Worldliness is a great challenge. If we cannot maintain a truly Christian identity, we have nothing to offer the culture. Dreher is right: “We are on the brink of entire areas of commercial and professional life being off-limits to believers whose consciences will not allow them to burn incense to the gods of our age.”(12) His advice about employment is also on target:

Any job, no matter how benign, that compels one to affirm (as distinct from withholding approval of) something un-Christian and untrue is not worth keeping, no matter what the cost.(13)

Among the helps and solutions suggested by Dreher, is intentionally creating more distinctly Christian community. If we engage more intimately in Christian community, we’ll be better able to maintain a Christian identity.

Community. . . builds a social structure in which it is easier for Christians to hear and respond to God’s voice and in which others hold them accountable if they lose the straight path.(14)

Dreher favors more separation between believers and the world. More self-control is needed.

If you don’t control your attention, there are plenty of people eager to do it for you. The first step in regaining cognitive control is creating a space of silence in which you can think.(15)

This has consequences for what we watch, listen to, and invest our time in on all our screens, large and small. If we are plugged into a decadent society we will soon discover we have become embedded in it. Christians won’t have anything to offer if we don’t live by a Bible Christianity.

We should appreciate most of the points made by Dreher in The Benedict Option. It is difficult not to agree that many of us are deeply embedded in the culture and mostly adrift. Meanwhile the whole world seems like its being transferred on rollers into a soft totalitarian techno-utopia.

I would recommend Legutko’s 2016 book The Demon in Democracy (16) which helps us see why our world is changing, as well as Dreher’s 2020 volume, Live Not by Lies (17) which says a lot more about how to resist those changes.

The Benedict Option is helpful but those two books will do more for the reader. The immediate picture is grim. Many Christians have no space in their prophetic interpretation for the rise of essentially a soft totalitarian America. Dreher sees it and I see it too. His book may not deliver all we would like it to, but its a call to action. He tells why he wrote it:

I have written The Benedict Option to wake up the church and to encourage it to act to strengthen itself, while there is still time. If we want to survive, we have to return to the roots of our faith, both in thought and in practice. We are going to have to learn habits of the heart forgotten by believers in the West. We are going to have to change our lives, and our approach to life, in radical ways. In short we are going to have to be the church, without compromise, no matter what it costs. (18)

If we want that, and move forward in that conviction, God will do wonders!

Larry Kirkpatrick serves as pastor of the Muskegon and Fremont MI Seventh-day Adventist churches. His website is GreatControversy.org and YouTube channel is “Larry the guy from Michigan.” Every morning Larry publishes a new devotional video.

Notes.

1. Rod Dreher, The Benedict Option, (New York: Sentinel, 2017), 262 pp.

2. Ibid., p. 8.

3. Ibid., p. 77.

4. Ibid., p. 17.

5. Ibid., p. 154.

6. Ibid., p. 40.

7. Ibid., pp. 42-43.

8. Ibid., p. 54.

9. Ibid., p. 102

10. Ibid., p. 121.

11. Ibid., p. 203.