Peanut Butter For Breakfast

I avoided reading this book because it came out at a time when I was enthusiastically uninterested in what the conservative branch of the church was saying about the culture. Since 2015, Obergefell, it’s been the same story over and over with conservatives getting 75% of the story right, but fundamentally misreading our situation. The diagnosis is wrong, and so the remedies are wrong. The energies are wasted. The solutions are light healings. They are not wrong solutions in an absolute sense. They all point to Jesus and the need for repentance. But they are incomplete solutions because they haven’t figured out what Jesus is saying and who exactly needs to repent and what they need to repent of. The Benedict Option, like anything coming out of the mouths of anyone speaking against liberalism, feminism, etc. is fundamentally misreading the world we are living in, but still offers a lot of beneficial insight of the world we live in and how to go forward as the Church in such a world. Incomplete, but not wrong.

In addition to this, I generally don’t respect Evangelical converts to Rome or the East. And I increasingly don’t respect or care much about what the Christian literati are saying. It’s an entire realm of people fawning over the obvious. It’s often reactionary. It can be too soft and accommodating to big-brain centrism. And I simply find most of it boring.

But sometimes, oftentimes, the obvious needs to be stated. And that’s what The Benedict Option is. It’s stating the obvious. It’s just reaffirming the Christian life. G. K. Chesterton once quipped that, “every high civilization decays by forgetting obvious things.”

And given the immense popularity of this book, it’s good that Christians are remembering obvious things. But I also feel like Paul when he’s disappointed with the Christians in his letter to the Hebrews. Why are you guys still drinking milk? Not that I think the book is milk. It’s not even apple-sauce. It’s peanut butter for breakfast. It’s a start, but not a complete meal. Dreher has the self-awareness to realize that this is what he’s doing to an extent, which I appreciated. That he’s simply affirming Christianity as it relates to our context, and came up with a marketable name for it: The Benedict Option.

Intellectual History

I listened to the book on Audio Books, so I’m just recalling everything from memory.

He traces our modern or post-modern sickness, and civilizational decay to nominalism, and affirms Thomistic realism. I also would affirm Thomistic realism. That objective reality really exists objectively. But I don’t think nominalism is the fundamental source of our illness. Here, Dreher evidences humility when he grants that he is giving an intellectual history and reasoning for why we are where we are. He may even say this could possibly be an inadequate accounting. I appreciate his recognition of this fact.

Everyone does this kind of narrative tracing. I do it. You do it. We all do it. I doesn’t mean it’s not true. But some narrative tracing is more true than others. When I engage this kind of thing, I acknowledge that there are other factors involved. I’m not absolutizing my narrative, though I am convinced it is of more weight than competing narratives, just like everyone else. With Nominalism, I would say it may have facilitated an already decaying society further along in its decay. But I would not say it is the root problem.

Scholastic debates in the late middle ages is not the reason for our collapsing civilization. It may be a symptom, or facilitator, but I can’t help thinking these philosophical arguments don’t factor in at all. Sometimes ideas don’t have consequences. I think the average man is a Thomist. The average man is a realist. And I think the average man has more sway over civilizational decay and ascendency than ivory tower scholars and their philosophical debates that are basically unknown to normal people.

The fundamental concept missing from Dreher’s narrative here is obedience to God’s commands. The covenantal reality of our relationship to God. This provides the fundamental explanatory power to fall narratives. Dreher just makes the fall narrative academic. Even here I am not claiming anything absolute, because I can still misread situations. And where sin abounds grace abounds much more. However, covenantal blessings and cursings are in my estimation far more potent at getting closer to the true explanations than scholarly metaphysical debates and frameworks.

Of course, Dreher is arguing that we ought to obey God’s commands. But he doesn’t privilege the covenantal implications nearly enough.

Moralistic Therapeutic Deism

Dreher rightly points out what he terms Moralistic Therapeutic Deism (MTD) in many Evangelical churches. I never experienced this kind of thing, but I know it’s huge in Evangelical and Charismatic churches. I couldn’t even explain it to you. I would just say it’s a drifting away from traditional, biblical, Christianity. We might call it the intermediate phase between conservative Christians who are on their way to being liberal. These kinds of churches are wildly popular and constitute most churches in America. In some ways, these are the slow cousins of Mainline Protestants who are taking a longer road to perdition. Their apostasy has been in slow motion, while the Mainliners started slipping away about 70 years ago. The “fundamentalists” or evangelicals or charismatics fled the Mainline churches to form Bible believing churches, and now the bible believing churches are all apostatizing, too. Hmmmm….I wonder what the deal is? Is it really nominalism that is causing all this to happen? Is MTD the reason this is happening?

Again, Nominalism is philosophically invalid. MTD is weird and wrong. But are these things the fundamental reason for why the churches and society is collapsing? Or is it a much more simple explanation? One that has to do with obeying Jesus.

Sexual Chaos

If I remember correctly, Dreher, like most conservatives, recognize that our current sexuality is one of the most chaotic and morally bankrupt spheres of our culture. And like most conservatives, he simply parrots the same solutions. True solutions, but not specific enough. Yes, marriage is between man and women. Yes, divorce is bad. Yes, we should wait until we are married to have sex. All obvious and true things.

But what about the 20,000 pound elephant in the room? We have an elephant the size of a dump truck trying to hide behind grandma’s rocking chair, and conservatives routinely whistle past it like it’s not there. Giant piles of feces and pools of piss accumulate, and conservatives think they have a sewage drainage problem. The coffee table is splintered into a million toothpicks, and conservatives think it collapsed because of too many mugs. Is anyone going to mention the elephant?

Ascetism & Communal Living

Dreher is at his best on two things: ascetism and communal living. These two aspects of The Benedict Option are the greatest parts of the books. They are real things that Christians can and should do. They are things Christians need to hear.

Christians ought to be working fasting into their devotional life. Dreher draws from the history of the Church as tools for facilitating fasts, but one doesn’t have to be part of a Church that observes Lent to fast personally or corporately for a set time. Fasting helps to kill the flesh. It amplifies prayer life. It puts into practice denying the flesh. Denying things that are lawful teaches the body to restrain the appetites and tame the passions. Fasting humbles oneself before God. It’s sacrificial. It’s costly. Even if you’re just sacrificing one meal, God honors those sacrificial acts of humble faith. Sometimes I fast and it’s just miserable and I don’t feel spiritually edified. Sometimes I’ve fasted at critical points in my life for the purpose of hearing from God, gaining direction, affirmation, things like this, and the Lord answered.

So, Dreher does a good job of emphasizing individual holiness here. And he does an equally good job emphasizing communal holiness. That Christians ought to be intentional in gathering with faithful communities. To prioritize it. To live within walking distance of your parish if you can. To truly live together in a community, instead of merely driving 30 minutes to a church where you only see your brothers and sisters once a week, and don’t really know them, or pray with them. This requires sacrifice. It means you may not have a job that pays as much as you’d like. It means you may have to cut back on your standard of living. It means you may have to give up the worldly comforts we have grown accustomed to.

These two portions of the book are Dreher at his best. It’s a good start. Not a swing and a miss. He connected made a line-drive into the outfield. He got a runner on base. But we need some more power-hitters. We need a homerun.