Recently in Benedict Option Category

Patrick Deneen says what's happening to the Benedictine Belmont Abbey College shows why the idea that we traddie types can retreat into our own leave-us-alone communities is unworkable. The government will not leave you alone, and you have better stay engaged to fight for your rights.

You've probably heard of Ave Maria, the southwest Florida enclave developed by Tom Monaghan, and designed to be the perfect orthodox Catholic town. Did you know, though, that it's like Disneyland, in that the people who live there do not now and never will have a right to vote on the policies that govern them -- and that at least some faithful Catholics who moved in weren't aware of this? That's what a Naples Daily News series reports. What a mess. This thing might not even be constitutional.

Let it suffice to say that this is not the way to do the Benedict Option!

In the new issue of Newsweek, Jon Meacham explores the decline of Christianity as the animating spirit of American life. Excerpts:

Let's be clear: while the percentage of Christians may be shrinking, rumors of the death of Christianity are greatly exaggerated. Being less Christian does not necessarily mean that America is post-Christian. A third of Americans say they are born again; this figure, along with the decline of politically moderate-to liberal mainline Protestants, led the ARIS authors to note that "these trends ... suggest a movement towards more conservative beliefs and particularly to a more 'evangelical' outlook among Christians." With rising numbers of Hispanic immigrants bolstering the Roman Catholic Church in America, and given the popularity of Pentecostalism, a rapidly growing Christian milieu in the United States and globally, there is no doubt that the nation remains vibrantly religious--far more so, for instance, than Europe.

Still, in the new NEWSWEEK Poll, fewer people now think of the United States as a "Christian nation" than did so when George W. Bush was president (62 percent in 2009 versus 69 percent in 2008). Two thirds of the public (68 percent) now say religion is "losing influence" in American society, while just 19 percent say religion's influence is on the rise. The proportion of Americans who think religion "can answer all or most of today's problems" is now at a historic low of 48 percent. During the Bush 43 and Clinton years, that figure never dropped below 58 percent.

Many conservative Christians believe they have lost the battles over issues such as abortion, school prayer and even same-sex marriage, and that the country has now entered a post-Christian phase. Christopher Hitchens --a friend and possibly the most charming provocateur you will ever meet--wrote a hugely popular atheist tract a few years ago, "God Is Not Great." As an observant (if deeply flawed) Episcopalian, I disagree with many of Hitchens's arguments--I do not think it is productive to dismiss religious belief as superstitious and wrong--but he is a man of rigorous intellectual honesty who, on a recent journey to Texas, reported hearing evangelical mutterings about the advent of a "post-Christian" America.

More:

Which is precisely what most troubles [Southern Baptist theologian Al] Mohler. "The post-Christian narrative is radically different; it offers spirituality, however defined, without binding authority," he told me. "It is based on an understanding of history that presumes a less tolerant past and a more tolerant future, with the present as an important transitional step." The present, in this sense, is less about the death of God and more about the birth of many gods. The rising numbers of religiously unaffiliated Americans are people more apt to call themselves "spiritual" rather than "religious." (In the new NEWSWEEK Poll, 30 percent describe themselves this way, up from 24 percent in 2005.)

Roughly put, the Christian narrative is the story of humankind as chronicled in the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament--the drama of creation, fall and redemption. The orthodox tend to try to live their lives in accordance with the general behavioral principles of the Bible (or at least the principles they find there of which they approve) and anticipate the ultimate judgment of God--a judgment that could well determine whether they spend eternity in heaven or in hell.

... "The moral teachings of Christianity have exerted an incalculable influence on Western civilization," Mohler says. "As those moral teachings fade into cultural memory, a secularized morality takes their place. Once Christianity is abandoned by a significant portion of the population, the moral landscape necessarily changes. For the better part of the 20th century, the nations of Western Europe led the way in the abandonment of Christian commitments. Christian moral reflexes and moral principles gave way to the loosening grip of a Christian memory. Now even that Christian memory is absent from the lives of millions."

Read the whole piece. There's a lot of talk about the error conservative Christians made in thinking that politics was the best, or at least a sufficient, way of halting and reversing the advance of post-Christian America. I think this is entirely correct. It ends with Al Mohler making a sobering -- and again, an entirely correct -- observation that we don't know what's going to come next, as the post-Christian identity of the US begins to gel, but we can know for sure that it's going to be very different from what came before.

The other day, a Christian friend suggested to me that perhaps I am so gloomy about the future for traditional Christians because I work in the media, and am surrounded by so many signs of decline. He suggested that maybe my view is distorted. And he had a point. But it's also possible that his view is distorted by the fact that he lives in a fairly strongly Christian milieu. Generally speaking, life in Dallas is far more congenial toward public Christianity than anywhere else I've lived. This is, relatively speaking, a socially conservative city. Dallas is, in my experience, significantly out of step with the rest of the country in those terms. This is one reason (probably the main one) why I like living here, but it is what it is, and anyway, Dallas is not an island (it surprises people to learn that politically, Dallas County went Democratic a couple of election cycles ago; as a purely political matter, George W. Bush now lives in Blue America).

I strongly believe that traditional Christians need to read the signs of the times, and soberly to assess where we stand today, and figure out how we and our children are to live in a political and cultural order ever more alien and hostile to what we know to be true. This is not the end of the world, but it's the end of a world, and we should get that straight in our minds, and prepare for how to live as Christians in it. You can read some of the comments on various threads in this blog -- well, you could have read them if you got to them before I deleted them -- and seen flashing rage at traditional Christians, and in that a presentiment of what I believe is going to become more common, though probably in a milder form (at least at first), as the years and decades pass. I see no prospect of this being turned around in the near long term, which is another way of saying it's going to get a lot worse before it gets better. Better to get that learnt right now, and soberly make spiritual preparation. Which could include this:

A message from the prior of Clear Creek Monastery, a Benedictine abbey in Oklahoma. Excerpt:

What does the great monastic tradition issuing from Saint Benedict have to say about this essential relationship with creation?

In fact, for men and women living in Saint Benedict's day, the question would have had little meaning. The vast majority of human beings lived in rural areas then, and for them life was intimately and necessarily connected to the rhythm of nature. The day's activities were programmed according to the hours of sunlight. The year was punctuated by the various seasons in which planting, harvesting and every important task found its appointed time. In such a world, excepting the case of a few very rich people in large cities, it was scarcely possible to become disconnected from the rhythm of creation.

Nonetheless there is much in the wisdom of Saint Benedict that speaks to our present needs in terms of returning to a wiser way of life, a life closer to the land.

One of the pillars of the Rule is evangelical poverty. There would be neither an economic crisis in the world today, nor an ecological threat, were it not for the evil done by greed. Monastic poverty means being content with the simple things that sustain human existence in its inherent goodness. This poverty allows man to live in harmony with field and forest, without feeling the need brutally to strip the earth of her resources in order to realize an immediate gain. Although the economic reality in America has become increasingly complex in our day, it is still possible to recapture this joyous sort of poverty. We are not speaking of the tragic misery of the desperately poor, but of an attitude rooted in the Christian faith. E.F. Schumacher's Small Is
Beautiful: Economics As If People Mattered (first published in 1973) offers insights that seem more timely than ever. Another important work, Flee To The Fields: The Founding Papers of the Catholic Land Movement, with a preface by Hilaire Belloc, charts a way forward in terms of an explicitly Catholic perspective.

Read the whole thing.

I had a strange and very vivid dream last night. In it, I was in Belgium, on the outskirts of some conference, and ran into the Greek poet C.V. Cavafy. In the dream I knew that he had been dead for many years, but there he was, wearing a grey suit, lingering on the grounds of the conference. It was evening. I thought (in the dream) oh, what good fortune, to be here at this conference about the current crisis, and there's a dead poet to interview who might be able to give some insight into the situation.

I don't read poetry much, and I don't think I've read Cavafy. But when someone pointed him out to me, I recall that he'd written a poem about the barbarians coming. Someone two or three years ago showed it to me, I think, after I gave a talk at a school. In the dream last night, I approached Cavafy, and introduced myself as a journalist who wanted to speak with him. Fine, he said, but listen, can you hear that? Then he pointed out a large stone barn in the near distance. Or maybe it was a church. I couldn't tell. I heard what sounded like deep church bells from within the church sounding the call to evening prayer, but as I listened more closely, under Cavafy's instruction, I discerned that the church bells were actually the sound of cattle lowing in unison. I found that both beautiful and unnerving.

I tried again to talk to Cavafy about politics, but he gently and kindly told me to be quiet. He pointed out a bottle of Belgian beer sitting in a nearby cafe window. He took it in his hands and told me to look at it. He talked about how the beer was made, in a little brewery around here. He read the Flemish words on the label aloud, pronouncing them carefully, and with delight, as a kind of poem celebrating this place in the world. Isn't it a fine thing, that this bottle of beer has come from this place.

Cavafy was smiling at me, seeing that I wasn't quite getting it. Then some others came up to talk to him, and I stepped back. I resolved to make one more attempt to talk to him about politics, culture and his poem about barbarians ... and then my alarm went off. Time to get up.

Just now I looked that poem up. What I saw startled me -- and not just because except for the mustache, the Cavafy in my dream looked a lot like the real-life Cavafy, whom I've never seen an image of. Here's the poem: