The Benedict option
By embracing their minority status, Christians can revive their faith
ROD DREHERhave to go back quite a long way to find a
similar situation: by some estimates, Europe
is more secularised now than at any time
since Constantine’s conversion in the 3rd
century.
What I call The Benedict Option is a
choice made by an increasing number of
Christians living in the secular West: to build
the resilient local communities MacIntyre
calls for. You don’t have to be cloistered as
monastics to learn from the structure and
practices of Benedictine life. The early Ben-
edictines were an example of what the his-
torian Arnold Toynbee called a ‘creative
minority’ — a small group within a larger
society that responds creatively to a crisis in
a way that serves the common good.
Pope Benedict XVI was clear-eyed about
the grim predicament facing European
Christianity. Drawing on Toynbee’s analy-
sis, he called on the Catholic flock to ‘under-H
annah Roberts, an English Cath-
olic friend, was once telling me
about her family’s long history
in Yorkshire. She spoke with yearning of
what she had back home and how painful
it is to live so far away. I wondered aloud
why she and her American husband had
emigrated to the United States from that
idyllic landscape, the homeland she loved.
‘Because we wanted our children to have
a chance to grow up Catholic,’ she said.
It’s not that she feared losing them
to the Church of England — it’s that she
feared them losing Christianity itself. She
and her husband Chris, an academic the-
ologian, are now raising their four young
children in Philadelphia, a city with a his-
torically large Catholic presence. Even so,
Philadelphia is no safe haven, as the Rob-
ertses freely acknowledge. Christianity is
declining sharply in the north-east of the
United States, one of the nation’s least
religious regions. The most recent studies
confirm that the country is, at last, firmly
on the same trail of decline blazed by the
churches of Europe.
The collapse of religion in Britain has
been perhaps the most striking feature
of the last generation. The sheer pace of
the decline has been recorded by Damian
Thompson in this magazine: church pews
are emptying at the rate of 10,000 people
per week. In 1983, some 40 per cent of the
population declared itself Anglican. Now,
it’s 17 per cent. To be a practising Christian
in the West now is to belong to a minority.
How, then, should believers adapt to a
society that is not just unsupportive but often
hostile to their beliefs? In his influential 1981
book After Virtue, the Scottish moral philos-
opher Alasdair MacIntyre warned that the
Enlightenment’s inability to provide a bind-
ing and authoritative source of morality to
replace the Christian- Aristotelian one it
discarded had left the contemporary West
adrift. He likened our age to the era of the
Roman Empire’s fall — a comparison that
Pope Benedict XVI has also made.
The old believers, MacIntyre wrote, need
to respond. Which means to stop trying to
‘shore up the imperium,’ and instead build
‘local forms of community within which
civility and the intellectual and moral life
can be sustained through the new darkages which are already upon us’. MacIntyre
famously concluded by saying that we in the
West await ‘another — doubtless very differ-
ent — St Benedict’.
MacIntyre chose Benedict as his model
because the 6th-century saint’s inventive
response to a religious collapse had enor-
mous historical ramifications. The monas-tic communities he founded spread quickly
throughout western Europe, and over the
next few centuries laid the groundwork for
the rebirth of civilisation in the West. What
would a St Benedict for our day say now?
What would best ensure Christianity’s resil-
ience and long-term survival? Christians doBelievers must recognise themselves
as outsiders, and cease to care about
conforming to secular society