Benedict Option, 1

In the debate swirling around Rod Dreher's new book, The Benedict Option: A Strategy for Christians in a Post-Christian Nation, one of the persistent claims has been that Dreher is advocating some sort of broad withdrawal from American culture. I'm about 100 pages in and so far I simply cannot see how such a conclusion could be drawn apart from the willful desire to read such a conclusion into the text.

Not being one to prooftext, allow me to prooftext. From page 82 in the chapter "A New Kind of Christian Politics": "To be sure, Christians cannot afford to vacate the public square entirely." I don't know what sort of brokedown Google translator renders this back as "Grab your guns and head for the hills," but that is what some critics seem to see in such admonitions. It makes one wonder--and this is the cynic in me--if they actually read the book. Reading is so tedious. Throwing shade is considerably more fun.

Dreher's central point, and I'll stick with this chapter on politics for now, is that our whole system is screwed up and political salvation doesn't exist. Christians can't wait for the Republican on the white horse to ride in and restore the abandoned moral order. We need to be doing work, building institutions parallel to secular institutions that sustain and nourish our people in a dark time. Dreher marshals the examples of Czech dissidents Vaclav Havel and Vaclav Bendel to show an historical example of just such a counterculture. Frankly, I don't know how such a claim is in any way outlandish for a Christian. Indeed, one of the things that has struck me in my reading on the Benedict Option is how obvious much of it seems. Anyone who has read or even heard of Augustine's City of God ought to recognize just such a distinction in Christian history. St. Paul might have had a thing or two to say on the matter as well. We are always off base when we conflate a worldly kingdom with the eternal kingdom. Yet the temptation is ever-flourishing.

I'll end this mini-post (I'm sure this is the first of many on this important book) by letting Dreher talk for a minute. Here are two block quotes from the end of the chapter on politics:

"Here's how to get started with the antipolitical politics of the Benedict Option. Secede culturally from the mainstream. Turn off the television. Put the smartphones away. Read books. Play games. Make music. Feast with your neighbors. It is not enough to avoid what is bad; you must also embrace what is good. Start a church, or join a group within your church. Open a classical Christian school, or join and strengthen one that exists. Plant a garden, and participate in a local farmer's market. Teach kids how to play music, and start a band. Join the volunteer fire department."

Let's juxtapose that with the caricature of the critics: Buy a huge plot of land and put a bomb shelter on it. Make your daughters wear head coverings that they make on your home loom. Pray for the return of 1950s gender norms. Judge your neighbors... who are probably gay. Prevent your kids from having a life. Make sure they turn out as weird as possible. 

I'd love to read an honest critique of that paragraph. Making music is hegemonic! Smartphones are making us smarter! More like, feast with your (white) neighbors! Seriously, what are people actually taking issue with? That paragraph is a beautiful vision of Christian engagement with the world.

More Dreher:

"But it can't be repeated often enough: believers must avoid the usual trap of thinking that politics can solve cultural and religious problems. Trusting Republican politicians and the judges they appoint to do the work that only cultural change and religious conversion can do is a big reason Christians find ourselves so enfeebled. The deep cultural forces that have been separating the West from God for centuries will not be halted or reversed by a single election, or any election at all."

I understand having quibbles here if you're a secularist who lauds the demise of belief in the West. I don't understand how you can have a problem with this if you claim Christ. And here I don't care if you're a liberal or conservative Christian. What's to dispute? We find ourselves enfeebled because we have enfeebled ourselves. We have refused to do the hard work of culture building, trusting instead to a Moral Majority mindset that uses the cudgel of the state to enact our morality. Well, we lost that fight. Conservative Christians should acknowledge this and restructure. Liberal Christians should acknowledge that the new moral order is not all sunshine and roses. However, conservative Christians seem more eager to get the club back in our hands than to actually making sure our own house is clean. Liberal Christians deny that there is any problem at all. 

But if we can see through the lies on both sides we can see that the path forward for the church is increased faithfulness to the call to take up our crosses and die. That, ultimately, seems to be Dreher's primary interest: building up the church so that we can be of use to the world. I'll keep reading, but I have a hard time seeing how I'll end up disagreeing.

The Virtue in Boredom

Jordan Bloom of The American Conservative writes about a San Antonio megachurch that has recently spent $5 million dollars on an animatronic ark for their children's ministry. Given Bloom's high church leanings, he does the standard guffawing over such ostentatious expenditures (it's a good thing none of the older denominations of Christianity ever spend money frivolously). And he's right, of course, in a broad sense. It is pretty ridiculous to spend $5 million bucks on fake giraffes for children's church. Back in my day (the early 90s), we cut Bible characters out of coloring books, colored them with crayons, and then glued them to a Popsicle stick. Boom. Sunday School.

Look, its easy to make fun of excesses like this. The stories write themselves. But the pastor of the megachurch who defends the expenditure is absolutely correct when he points out that the church is competing against a lot of fancy enterprises more than willing to spend ludicrous amounts of money to get people to come by. We are a nation absolutely addicted to entertainment, and it is easy for people like me to talk about how church isn't the place for entertainment but I'm already a believer. When your goal is to bring new people into the fold, and you're competing against Disney World and Las Vegas, it is petty to impute bad motives to people who are trying to attract nonbelievers to their places of worship.

So the substance of Bloom's critique, and others who make similar critiques, ought to be directed more broadly against our culture itself. A culture that, above all, is absolutely terrified of being bored. I'm only being slightly tongue in cheek when I say that it is probably our greatest fear. Our entire cultural apparatus is constructed so that we will be protected from creeping boredom. Three year olds can operate smart phones so they can play Angry Birds while mom shops and they don't have to, even for a second, think of how to entertain themselves. Or just be bored and deal with it. A recent Sprint commercial informed its audience that we have a right (ah, the language of rights) to unlimited data. We are entitled to never having to be bored.

It is fair to hold the Church to a higher standard and worth arguing that we ought not be complicit in the dumbing down of our culture, but I don't know that we can point at San Antonio and say that is what they are doing. The church I went to in Manhattan met in a small, old-style church building with a steeple, a small meeting room and a basement with an open space and a kitchen. A hip Christian ideal. There was no room for any sort of children's church, and, in a classic case of chicken and egg, there were hardly any families with small children that attended. That was reality. And it wasn't going to suddenly change unless we bought a new place. We may bemoan it, bewail it, decry it, and gnash our teeth as we wish for the good old days of bewigged preachers and two hour sermons, but it is a fundamental reality of the culture the church is trying to reach.

Any change must start on the individual level, by encouraging Christian parents to unplug their kids. No smart phones (EVER!), allotted time for video games, allotted (and monitored) internet usage, mandatory reading time, mandatory backyard time. Make them sit in church with you and stay awake and take notes. (In junior high I went to a church with a Baptist preacher of the windbaggery persuasion and can tell you that kids can sit through 80 minutes of very boring sermoning maintaining good posture and a respectful demeanor.) Part of my goal in parenting Owen and the ones to come is to force them to be bored for at least part of every day. There is no virtue in boredom, but there is virtue in the fruits of boredom, properly channeled. And, yes, I have heard the old phrase "idle hands are the devil's playground." Two things: first, boredom is not the same thing as idleness; second, if idle hands are the devil's playground then what are young hands on an unbound technological device?

Implicit in my tiredness with these critiques of megachurch excess--critiques, remember, that I agree with--is that most of us making them are still complicit in the entertainment-saturated nature of our culture. For example, after writing a paragraph on the virtues of boredom I switched over to the Amazon tab on my browser and watched an episode of Justified on my prime account, afraid that this book on the Trinity I am reading would be less engaging than watching Timothy Olyphant strut around and shoot bad guys. In other words, we inundate our average lives with entertainment, hopping from blog to blog or video to video and then expect our churches to silence all of the noise for an hour and fifteen minutes on Sunday morning so we can contemplate in peace before we rush off into the next thing.

If we want the church to be different we need to be different. If we want the church to stand out from the constant noise of our culture we need to stand out from it as well. We can keep making fun of the megachurches which is a good enough time, but unless we are cultivating different habits in our daily life, habits which would make the church feel as if it weren't part of its mandate to entertain, then all we are really going to be doing is making fun of other Christians for being just like us every other time but Sunday morning.

Why the Church Loses Its Kids

I am linking hereto an article that has been making the rounds in the Christian corner of the interwebs. I recommend that you read it or at least browse it in order to have my comments make sense.

Articles like this have really started to bother me. I don't want to impute bad motives to the author or anything like that. At one time in my life I would have really enjoyed an article like this. I enjoy many things I get to nod along knowingly to, as if I am the bearer of some profound insight somehow shared by the author. But now they feel too out of touch and too simple, much like the arguments of many Republicans in the wake of the last election: it is not our policies that are turning people away, but our packaging! Maybe if Marco Rubio says the same old stuff Latinos will vote for us in droves. Christians fall into this same trap. We can think: maybe it is not that Christian doctrine is really, really hard to swallow and follow in our instant gratification, intensely individualistic, insanely privileged world, but that we are doing some easily correctable thing wrong that once we correct will lead to massive revival. But Christian doctrine is divisive and unsettling. It requires us to believe things absolutely unpalatable to our culture. And once kids raised in the church get out and fully immersed in that culture, this reality can become too much to bear.

Articles like this are indicative of what Kenneth Stewart of Covenant Seminary recently called evangelicalism's "liturgical inferiority complex." We don't have all of the fancy ritual of other, older denominations and now that we are in a brief zeitgeist where older and liturgical is hipper than newer and free-flowing we are scrambling to keep up and reconsidering traditions jettisoned recently by the seeker sensitive movement.

Stewart's example was the recent move by many lower church evangelicals to embrace Lent. I like the tradition of Lent, and generally practice some form of mild observance, but it is not the ancient practice its advocates make it out to be and uneducated laity believe it to be. Neither is it based on anything strictly Biblical. This doesn't mean it is wrong to celebrate Lent, merely wrong to act as if the majority of evangelicals who do not observe the season are somehow deficient for refraining from an extrabiblical tradition. We may wish for the return of liturgy to the church, but there is nothing inherently Biblical about liturgy. One can appreciate Cranmer's Book of Common Prayer or the Westminster Catechism, but if one actually takes seriously the prayers and claims in the liturgical works, the last thing it ought to make one is proud. 

Furthermore, this author sort of blithely accepts that Christian youth who leave the church when they march off into the gaping maw of the university do so because they were unprepared by their parents and their church. "Train a child in the way that he shall go and when he is old he will not depart from it," is a proverb, not doctrine. Want proof? How did the kids of the guy who wrote this proverb turn out? Some kids will fall away. Most will not fall away because they read Nietzsche and now harbor deep theological reservations about Biblical Christianity, but because they want to have sex and get drunk without feeling guilty. There are exceptions, but that is the rule.

Also, #10 and #9 on this list are directly the result of a previous movement to make church more attractive to kids, by the previous generation of evangelical parents that were freaked out when their kids started leaving the church. In other words, stuff gets complicated when your goal becomes not to lose the kids. One generation tends toward severer discipline, the other towards entertainment, both with the same goal in mind. Raising kids on a diet of grace, as this author recommends, is great as long as you understand (and teach them) that grace binds as well as frees. God does care how we act, even though we are saved through his favor alone. I hate how carelessly character and good works are dismissed by these purveyors of grace as if conduct no longer matters. Of course a tally sheet shouldn't be kept at youth group to keep track of how good each individual is doing in arbitrary categories, but there ought to be accountability, especially with high schoolers. I am not yet far enough removed from high school to forget that high school aged people are very stupid. Even the smart ones.

I think it is hard to know why people leave or why they have dark times of doubt. I was beset by a severe dark night of the soul my senior year of college. I still don't know what caused it or why it happened when it did. I have theorized multiple things, all possible, but even eight years later I can't say fully why it happened. It just did. My guess is these kids who gave these answers about why they left the church actually have little idea why they left. Or they know, but it is better to complain about Noah's ark themed playrooms and the ignorance of their former leaders. Anything but turning the gaze inward. In any event, the severely anecdotal observations related in this article probably should not be made too much of. The reason for most church loss is in many senses far easier than all of this handwringing leads us to believe. Our grandparent's generation had a word for it. It was sin.

Commonplacing: Alan Jacobs on the Task of the Christian Cultural Critic

One of my favorite living Christian scholars is Alan Jacobs, whom I have mentioned in this space before. Nearly everything he says rings true to me, and even when I disagree with him I learn something from hearing him out. He just started blogging for The American Conservative, perhaps the only website out there that espouses consistently the type of conservatism I feel most drawn to (and one that has very little place in today's GOP). I recommend it as must read material. In his first post at TAC he links to an old essay of his, written for Books and Culture, another great magazine I wish I had the time to read more consistently. I had read it before, but after two years of graduate school its words seemed fresher than ever (of course he hooks me in with some good discussion of Milton at the beginning). Enjoy (read the whole thing):

It seems to me that the careful dance, the difficult balance, of Christian cultural criticism is to be endlessly attentive to the form and the details of the world around us, while simultaneously practicing the "politics of long joy"—and in this way avoiding an unhealthy obsession with "trophies," and avoiding also being conformed to the ways of this world. It's a tough walk to walk, because one of the peculiarities of fallen human nature is that we find it difficult, over the long haul anyway, to remember that there is a world of difference between "I have no control over this" and "this isn't very important." We tend, against all reason, to diminish the importance of everything we cannot shape or direct. But our joy will be short if it is grounded in circumstances and events, because circumstances and events always change: if they please us now, they will displease us later. And then what will we do?

Central to this discipline, for me anyway, is a constant striving to remember who human beings are and what we are made for. . . The truth of who we are, given the extremes of divine image and savage depravity, is hard to discern; perhaps we can only achieve it in brief moments; perhaps we only catch rumors of the glory that is, and is to be. But even those rumors can sustain us as we walk the pilgrim path.

Alan Jacobs,  "The Politics of Long Joy"