Book Report: The Benedict Option by Rod Dreher

I love this book. Dreher distills a bewildering amount of history, theology and orthopraxy into a splendid whiskey blend. My favorite whiskeys are those that require something of you. The draught may be smooth, but it should never be easy. So it is with The Benedict Option. It requires my full attention at every turn, and every turn is as lovely as it is compelling.

Perhaps that makes it a bit more like a scenic drive around precipitous overhangs through mountain passes. Because, surely, our culture, inside and outside the Church, whichever tradition you inhabit – people are falling off of the pass in droves. Such hysteria and degradation are the impetus fueling the writer’s intentionality.

In writing this book, Dreher has drawn a very hard line, one that requires every church henceforth to affirm or deny its position as a Benedict Option community. Hard lines are good, so long as they are drawn well. Cartography cannot exist without the likes. I have found so much helpful orienteering within Dreher’s map.

In truth, not a single chapter or page felt tedious to me. The book ended sooner than I would have liked. But the first place where wordsmithing really hit me between the eyes was in chapter 2, pg. 23:

”History is a poem, not a syllogism.”

Now, I have read some reviews that fault Dreher for summarizing such a broad sweep of history too rapidly. These detractors, depending on their biases, insist that his history leans either too idealistically to one side or too ignorantly to the other.

Nevertheless, I still love it. These criticisms smack of genre confusions to me. Those who want to vet his summation can see his works cited at the end of the book. However, knowing that most of his audience will not willingly slog through much history, he keeps it brief. I am still astounded at his deftness. At no point does he invite us to return to the life of any one century as the only time the Church got it all right. In a courageous sobriety he addresses the successes and shortcomings of every epoch while, over all, drawing the singular arching line over the centuries that has brought us to where we are today. Chapter 2 is Church History and Philosophy 101 that should appeal to the abject novice in its brevity as much as it impresses the seasoned student in its succinctness.

In chapter 3, A Rule for Living, Dreher plays out connotations of λογος that I had never considered nor heard taught. The ordering of all things and our responsibilities thereby is portrayed in so much beauty that it beckons you to find your place and begin right away. This is work worth doing, and it requires all of us.

Indeed, the thread running throughout chapter 3, that of throwing our very bodies into holiness, is brilliant. Dreher begins gently yet forcefully depicting the anti-creationism of our culture, how living the right kind of life will be inherently counter-cultural.

”We are only trying to build a Christian way of life that stands as an island of sanctity and stability amid the high tide of liquid modernity.” pg. 54

This doesn’t strike me as a big ask. Yet, the detractors… it’s as if they didn’t read certain parts of the book at all.

“The balance is not one between good and bad but between different kinds of good.” pg. 74

Is this not wisdom of the highest kind?

At the bottom of it, I suspect chapter 4 is the one that leaves most people in the dust, and not the dust of the rabbis (though they would do well to be so dusted there). For far too long, the American Church has embroiled its religiosity with its politics. The lines have become indiscernible in most circles. America-is-the-Church Christians cannot see beyond their politics, cannot read Scripture without their favorite candidate in mind. So, it’s no surprise that Dreher loses folk on the right and the left for suggesting that both sides have sinned egregiously and desperately need a recalibration.

“The real question is not whether to quit politics entirely, but how to exercise political power prudently, especially in an unstable political culture.” pg. 83

Once again, Dreher walks a tenuous line between two extremes. We don’t abandon the culture altogether, neither do we throw our lot in with it entirely. We begin with an honest assessment and then proceed with realistic expectations, grounded in the Kingdom all the way.

“Benedict Option politics begin with recognition that Western society is post-Christian and that absent a miracle, there is no hope of reversing this condition in the foreseeable future.” pg. 89

“Losing political power might just be the thing that saves the church’s soul.” pg. 99

If Dreher doesn’t have someone by the time they get to chapter 5 then they are in for another violent blindside. His criticisms of big-screen cultures of worship and anemic liturgies will fall on deaf ears if someone sees Jesus in their iPad more than anywhere else. Again, he insists on the bodily engagement of disciplines steeped in the most ancient and enduring expressions of the faith. Sacramentality, corporeality, habituation, liturgy, and church structure and outreach are all bound up in the same body of knowledge as well as bodies of practice.

As if he hasn’t risked enough of his reputation already, in chapter 6 he brazenly endorses the communal expressions of orthodox Jews and Latter-day Saints. We have things to learn from them, he insists. Orthopraxy is just as important as orthodoxy. Let’s not ignore one in our obsession with the other.

“Turn Your Home into a Domestic Monastery” is one of my favorite sub-headings of all time. I like it so much, I wish it were its own book. Maybe that comes next. Even so, he cautions us against the kind of sanctimonious nepotism we see at work so often.

“When members of the family consider its existence to be an end in itself, as opposed to a means to the end of unity with God, the family risks becoming tyrannical.” pg. 129

The practicality of geographical expressions of the church as well as the necessity of ecumenism receive due attention and verve. Furthermore, the energy he expends against idealizing community is reminiscent of Bonhoeffer in Life Together.

“The more insidious forces of secular liberalism are steadily… making us pawns of forces beyond our control.” pg. 145

With that, Dreher begins his case for classical Christian education as the ultimate goal of every church and household, with homeschooling at a close second. Public schooling: Dreher throws it under the bus and rolls over it for the entire chapter. Understandably, this is another hot button issue; disagreement with him here could lead to dissent everywhere else, just because. While the issue is another raw nerve ending (what isn’t nowadays?), the chapter is also full of hope-giving stories, real-life accounts of communities being transformed through education.

“It’s important to recognize the ways that classical Christian schools can boost a healthy ecumenism in the face of a common enemy.” pg. 162

In elegant balance of composition, chapter 8 has us rolling up our sleeves right after furrowing our brows. Dreher has not forgotten the necessity of engaging the body in the spiritual disciplines, and he will not allow us to forget it, either. More daunting, he stares down the double-barreled shotgun of secularism as it funnels through education and the professions. Christians are losing ground to simply be themselves; we are being coerced into not only tolerance, but agreement with worldviews and practices inherently antithetical to our ancient inheritance. If we are sober, this requires gritty preparation devoid of any wishful thinking.

Literally my one and only grievance with Dreher in the entire book is found on page 191, where I think he too quickly discredits the necessary and enduring work of the Southern Agrarians, which is strange for how many instances he eagerly quotes Wendell Berry. Were he to have contended with the idealism of the gardening ilk, that would have been something. But no, he stacks farming up against the trades of industrialism and insists that only the latter is a viable option. To be clear, I love how much energy he gives to the trades in general. It reminds me all along of the “Torah and a trade” tradition of the Sages, which delights me still. However, not recognizing farming as such a trade, and our need in Christendom to reclaim sustainable farming practices – it’s still alarming to me that Dreher misses this.

The raucous circus of sexuality is sure to be the single most divisive discussion from the entire book. Dreher bravely goes against the current of today’s culture. He has been doing so all throughout the book, but he spells out his dissent from the LGBTQ agenda in bold, plain language in chapter 9. And he doesn’t pull his punches as regards the Church, either. He reminds us that the sexual restraint and self-control of the early Christians was the primary marker that set them apart, and ultimately transformed their surrounding cultures. However, pornography and divorce are as much a scourge in churches as they are outside. Even so:

“Easy divorce stretches the bond of matrimony to the breaking point, but it does not deny comlementarity. Gay marriage does. Similarly, transgenderism doesn’t merely bend but breaks the biological and metaphysical reality of male and female.” pg. 201

In valiant intellectual honesty, Dreher lays the blame at the feet of the Church.

“We have gay marriage because the straight majority came to see sexuality as something primarily for personal pleasure and self-expression and only secondarily for procreation.” pg. 203

The onus on parents to steward their children toward purity, not acquiesce them into assumed pornographic cravings, plays out with terrifying statistics. And the responsibility of the church to care for the celibate among their ranks, whether temporarily or permanently so, is as tender as it is pragmatic.

Chapter 10, Man and the Machine, has too many moving parts for me to summarize adequately. I have marginalia and post-it notes littering the entire book, but this chapter is by far the busiest with my scrawls and laminates. Suffice it to say that my eyebrows nearly fell off of my face. I thought that the data on pornography from the previous chapter would be the height of my surprise. I was wrong. The death that permeates fertility clinics smashes my imagination into smithereens.

Again, in some of the reviews that I have read, I have seen Dreher’s detractors assail him as if they didn’t read this chapter at all. They cherry-pick a few anti-technology sentiments and accuse him of becoming a Luddite. Nothing could be further from the truth. Dreher only calls us back to discipline, to be the masters of our machines rather than to remain mastered by them. Anyone who accuses Dreher of absolute prohibitions against smartphones or the internet is either deliberately lying or accidentally stupid.

“The core reason is that immersion in technology causes us to lose our collective memory. Without memory, we don’t know who we are, and if we don’t know who we are, we become whatever our momentary passions wish us to be.” pg. 235

All in all, this book is a prodigious gift to the lifeblood of the covenant keeping people of God. I have not been so enlivened by a book since I read The Divine Conspiracy over 15 years ago. It is comprehensive in its scope in past, present and future reckonings. It is compelling in its ethic; it demands agreement or dissent, as there is no ambiguity anywhere in its pages. It is conscientiously gentle even as it is culturally ferocious. It is ecumenical.

I suspect that in no more than 5 years, churches everywhere will have to disassociate or designate themselves as Benedict Option communities. Even the pastors that refuse to read it will have to become familiar with it at least – too many of their parishioners are going ask them about it. For my part, I am all but ready to say that the Soulwrights are now and will remain a Benedict Option community.

My only hesitation is one of diligence. I’m a stop-on-a-dime kind of guy, but I have also learned enough of that about myself to be careful with that impulse. With some vetting and a bit of waiting, Dreher’s wisdom within this book will be weighed and acted upon accordingly. I invite anyone who reads this review to engage with me in good spirit regarding the text and what it means for our trajectory.

May the Holy Spirit continue to guide us into all truth.

-Wailer