Good Ben Op, Bad Ben Op

And: 'Critical Trade Theory'; LNBL #2; Are We Better Off Today?

The irrepressible Marco Sermarini, the Doge of the Benedict Option

Look at this:

An Evangelical friend asked me last night what I thought about several intentional Christian communities whose profile is, shall we say, troubling — communities that have adopted fierce right-wing politics as part of their identity. Is this the Benedict Option?

I responded that yes, it does seem to be, though I don’t think of the Ben Op as being about manufacturing Christian Nationalists or other kinds of explicitly political actors. I don’t have an Anabaptist view in which the point of religious communities is to be explicitly apolitical. As I say in the book, we have to be involved in politics to some degree, if only to fight for religious liberty (there are other good reasons, of course, but at least that one is crucial). Yet the purpose of a Ben Op community, as I see it, is chiefly to practice the authentic Christian faith in a way that makes its members resiliently faithful in the face of liquid modernity, and that passes the faith on to the next generations. I would expect people within those communities to vote in accordance with their Christian beliefs, but politics must not be the telos of those communities. The particular communities he mentioned are not ones I would have any interest at all in joining, or supporting, precisely because they strike me as driven primarily by anger and resentment. From the outside, at least, they come together less by Who and what they love, and more by what they hate.

When I was in the US recently, I found myself in conversation with a couple of older Christians who are super-anxious about the emergence of Islamic Ben Op communities. I believe there is at least one in Texas. Well, if I were a serious Muslim, I would want to be part of such a community — provided it was not primarily a political community. I thought about a conversation I had back in 2006 with an Egyptian Muslim woman who lived in London. She told me that she and her husband took their faith seriously, but they are not what we call “fundamentalists.” She said that they were in a real dilemma regarding educating their children. If they put their daughters in a British school (public or private), given the state of British culture now, they would expose the girls to all kinds of deleterious things. On the other hand, the only Islamic alternatives they saw were Saudi-funded fundamentalist schools — and they did not want to raise their daughters like that. There were (at that time, anyway) no alternatives.

I felt bad for her; she was sincerely worried for her kids, in a way I understood. That was almost twenty years ago. I wonder how she and her husband resolved their dilemma. If I were a Christian having to choose between a typical American public school, or an alternative run by one of the hard-right communities that my Evangelical friend cited in his query to me, I would be hard-pressed to make a call — though I would probably opt for the public school as the less-bad choice, simply because I would not want my kids to adopt what I would regard as a poisoned form of the faith.

Fortunately in America, we have the liberty to come together to create alternatives. When I was in the US recently, I visited the very attractive Catholic church and school that Father Dwight Longenecker and Our Lady of the Rosary parish in Greenville, SC, are running. It is “traditional” not in the “Trad” sense, but in the sense of being authentically and robustly Catholic. As with my beloved Tipi Loschi in Italy, led by the good and the great Marco Sermarini, they are really Catholic, but they’re not mad about it. Sandra Miesel tells me that there’s a new book out by some liberal Jesuit tying me and my ideas to a separatist Catholic community in Kansas — as if the Benedict Option can only mean that kind of thing. This is malicious and wrong. But in fairness, it must be admitted that the Ben Op concept does not guarantee that all religious communities that choose to live counterculturally are going to be healthy places, on balance. The existence of bad Ben Op communities doesn’t negate the idea, nor does the existence of good ones mean that bad ones can’t exist.

In any case, we are going to see more of these things arise as the younger generations of religious believers become more serious about their faith. Just yesterday I was telling a Danish journalist how, back in 2018, when I was in France to promote the French edition of the Ben Op book, I was puzzled by the fact that many French Catholics my age (I was then 51) and older were really irritated by the concept, while those younger (especially age 40 and below) were wide open to it, and excited by it. I finally figured it out, or at least I think I did: the older Catholics were still clinging to the idea that the Church community could be relevant to the broader society, if only it changed to fit in; the younger Catholics had given up the belief that there was a real place for them in post-Christian France, and instead sought ways to live faithful Catholic lives within an aggressively secular society.

Obviously I think the younger Catholics are right about that. I would say that the data Ryan Burge cites above, about younger Christians in the US, is an example of the same. I would bet my next paycheck that of those younger US Christians who are going to church more, almost all of them are attending more conservative churches — that is, ones for whom serious Christian living is a priority. That does not mean, however, that all of those churches, or communities, are worth celebrating and emulating. But if we take the liberal Jesuit’s view that any and every attempt to live counterculturally in traditional Christian community is bad, well, that is a sure way to be assimilated out of existence. Which is probably why the SJ lib is for it.

By the way, Part Two (of four) of the documentary Live Not By Lies is out today at the Angel Studios platform. More on it below. I hope you’ll sign up to watch it! In the opening minutes of Part II, the anti-communist dissident Kamila Bendova points out that we have to resist utopian thinking. She says that communism promised that if we only do this and that, then we will have paradise on earth. “There will never be paradise on earth,” she warns. It is true with communism, and it’s true with any utopian concept, political and religious alike. That said, a sane and reasonable anti-utopianism does not mean we are condemned never to try to improve our situation. It only means that we must accept limitations.

I wrote the other day about how my painful experience with Uncle Ted and losing my Catholic faith left me with a permanent suspicion of religious authority — not just Catholic authority, but all of it. Yet I did not become Anabaptist! I believe that valid religious authority exists, and that it is good and important. Yet we must keep front to mind that our religious authorities are sinners too, and even the rare saints among them — St. John Paul II, for example — can also be flawed. This is not to deny their authority, only to recognize that being in authority does not make you a saint, and that even institutions like the Church, though ordained by Jesus Christ himself, are not perfect, nor can be. Reading the testimonies of shattered Soviet true believers in Svetlana Alexievich’s great oral history Secondhand Time: The Last Of The Soviets has given me real insight into the profound and urgent need of all humans for a golden dream, and for the certainties that utopian thinking gives to one. As I will write here when I’m finished with the book, reading the words of Russian communists who continued to believe in communism even as they admitted the horrors actual communists in power wrought — what gutting insight into the human condition!

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