What I don’t do, either in the book or my writing, is allow people to think that political activism is the solution to our crisis. Hear me: I believe that political activism is important, and should continue. My objection is to the belief widespread among conservative Christians, my own tribe, that our problem is essentially a matter of not having gotten the politics right. Austin Ruse is a political activist by profession. He runs a United Nations lobbying organization called C-Fam. Good for him! I mean that seriously. He should keep going. What he does is not the problem, except insofar as ordinary Christians believe that kind of activism Ruse does is not only necessary (which it is), but sufficient (which it absolutely is not).
In my conversation this morning with Gavin Ashenden, which I’ll post as soon as he does, we talked about how hard it is for modern Christians to recognize what we have lost, and how serious this crisis around us is. In a real sense, what Christians lack today is a proper fear, in the “fear of the Lord” sense. That is, they don’t have a proper respect for the enemies of the faith. I can give you an example from a conversation I had with a Christian friend last week. She was telling me about how she and her husband have been very strict with their kids about smartphones and access to the Internet. For various reasons, including a desire to trust their kids’ Christian school peers, they allowed themselves to lower their guard — and it could have ended in disaster. They discovered that one of their kids was on the verge of being led into some pretty destructive stuff, and had concealed it all from the parents.Urban-dwelling Americans do have overconfidence and a belief that the Ameircan way of life will keep going, even if in a more green form. Those in red America? Not sure.
My friend was really shaken up by it all. She told me that she and her husband had believed that they were on top of all of this because they were the strictest parents in their kids’ school about smartphones and the Internet. Yet even they were deceived, because (as she sees it now) they underestimated the power of the malicious, destructive culture that thrives on the Internet to find a way to get to their family. It sounds like my friend and her husband lacked appropriate fear of the Internet, vis à vis their children. My sense is that these parents discovered the hard way that they believed that setting up relatively strict protocols in their home, and trusting the fact that their kids went to a Christian school, and hung out with Christian kids, would be enough.
It wasn’t. That family lives in a community a lot like the one Ruse says he and his family lives in. It was helpful, but not enough. The price of being Christian in post-Christian modernity is eternal vigilance.
So Austin Ruse and I are talking about two different kinds of fear. There is the neurotic fear that keeps you from going outside, because Something Bad Might Happen. And there is fear in the sense of “healthy respect for danger” — the kind of fear that would keep you from allowing your children to play in a park known to be infested with copperhead snakes.
Ruse surmises that my forthcoming book, Live Not By Lies, is a fraidy-cat manifesto, because as I have described it, it takes seriously what people who grew up under Soviet bloc communism are saying about what they are observing in our own society. This might end up being another book that a lot of bien-pensants never read, but think they understand. I hope not, but the Benedict Option example doesn’t inspire a lot of confidence. Anyway, the title is from an Solzhenitsyn essay. Solzhenitsyn said, in his introduction to a 1983 edition of The Gulag Archipelago, that people who tell themselves that what happened in Russia could not happen in their country are lying to themselves. It could happen anywhere on earth, he said. He was right about that — and these people who lived through communism, and who see things that they lived with back then manifesting themselves in Western society today, must be listened to.
All those who live in the US told me that they cannot get American friends to understand them. There is something doggedly optimistic in the American psychology. We confuse optimism with hope. And we cannot conceive that we are susceptible to the same tragedies of history that bedevil all other nations. We think we can go stomping through the high grass as we like and no serpent will strike at our heel, because we are an especially blessed people. One of my sources, a Czech who emigrated from communist Czechoslovakia to the US as a young man, told me that it is useless to try to explain any of this to Americans, that we Americans will have to learn this for ourselves. Maybe so. But I have to try, which is why I wrote the book.
In his Crisis column, Ruse seems to pooh-pooh the intense concern I have about LGBT and the future of Christianity. I’m sure that he and I have pretty much the same moral evaluation of the Sexual Revolution and its contemporary vanguard, the LGBT movement. I wonder, though, if Ruse has ever given sustained thought to why the LGBT movement triumphed as thoroughly and as quickly as it did. It’s an incredible thing. A friend of mine, a secular liberal in her 70s, and someone who is thrilled with what the LGBT movement accomplished, told me it’s the most amazing phenomenon she has seen in her lifetime (which includes the black Civil Rights movement). She is correct, too. The fact that it all seems so normal to us now is a big flashing neon sign of the times.Even if Christian institutions were not plagued by institutional inertia and a lack of dynamis, could they have resisted those in the state and lobbyists who have been pushing for changes in the laws? Prayer may be not enough, despite the pious beliefs of the devout, and the sort of political activism which Dreher admits is a necessary response is not enough.
What it tells us is that the decay of Christianity, and the metaphysical basis upon which Christianity rests, is far advanced in this society. I wrote about that here, in a 2013 piece that became one of the most popular things I’ve ever written for TAC. If you want to know more, read that piece. My argument for most of the past twenty years has been that the LGBT movement succeeded so quickly because the Christian foundations of our society had rotted so completely, behind the façade of big churches and strong voter turnout. The world of intellectually engaged, activist conservative Christians is not the world in which most people, even most Christians, live. I used to be part of that world and its false assurances, until the sex abuse scandal revealed to me (among other things) the radical difference between the Christianity of books and journals, and Christianity on the ground. The fact that even a man as wise and worldly as Richard John Neuhaus could be deceived by his respect for appearances, and his belief that the line between good and evil ran between political and theological factions in the Catholic Church — that was a powerful lesson to me.
We live in Babylon, and the greatest struggle we Christians have among ourselves today is to keep Babylon from living in us. I have said here before (first of all, on the day that I saw it) that the recent Terrence Malick film A Hidden Life is the best evocation of The Benedict Option that I’ve ever seen (though to be clear, I have no reason at all to think that Malick knows anything about my book). Franz Jägerstätter lives in a Catholic village in the Austrian Alps. When the Nazis show up and demand that he swear allegiance to Adolf Hitler, an Antichrist, Franz refuses. Nobody in his village understands why he won’t just go along. But Franz knows. He pays for it with his life. (It’s a true story.)
The point of the Benedict Option is not to find a place to go hide where the evils of modernity cannot find you. They will always find you. The point is to live in such a way that when the Nazis show up asking you to swear allegiance to Hitler, you will have both the clarity of mind and the strength of heart to say no, no matter what it costs.
So many of us Christians today say yes to Babylon, even as we convince ourselves that because we hold anti-Babylon convictions, and vote for politicians we believe are Babylon’s enemies (Ruse’s next book is called The Catholic Case For Trump), and because maybe we even give money to activist groups that fight Babylon’s agents in the arenas of power, that we are the Good Guys. Then we can’t figure out why we keep losing. And we are losing. All the political victories in the world matter not at all if we cannot pass the faith intact along to our children. In Europe, this has already happened. In America, we are living through this nightmare. The numbers are all in The Benedict Option, and they don’t lie. But you have to read the book. If you haven’t read it, and seen the facts upon which I build my case, don’t come at me complaining that I’m inordinately fearful, or too gloomy.
Dreher also references the new biography of Benedict XVI.
CNA/CWR: In new biography, Benedict XVI laments modern ‘anti-Christian creed’
The biography, written by Peter Seewald and issued by Munich-based publisher Droemer Knaur, is available only in German. An English translation, “Benedict XVI, The Biography: Volume One,” will be published in the U.S. in November.
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