Dreher's mono-colored glasses

         The Benedict Option by Richard Dreher fails as a book, and on the whole as a project. It fails not because of what it is but because of what it so obviously ignores.  The Benedict Option as an argument sets out to convince the reader the Church must preserve at all cost.  The Church will do so by retreating, like a turtle into it’s shell, from the larger world and the chaos of postmodernism. It must do so not only because truth and virtue and not valued in our time but also because the Church defends all that is good and beautiful in the West. Instead of Tolkien’s Aragorn pronouncing “Men of the West, Stand and Fight,”  Dreher would have the Church run and hide.  The Church’s act of preservation as Dreher contends will in the end result in creating a Church that is peculiar in the extreme. A church that is outside of the norm as much as a Division One state university not having a football program is to college sports. He pronounces technology dangerous and current sexual practice on par with the like of Sodom and Gomorrah.  I too believe technology needs to be understood and utilized within its proper limits.  I believe that our  current sexual practices and beliefs leave people in absolute ruin.  What troubles me is the alarmist tone which underlines and shadows every claim and piece of evidence.         No, what is needed is something more. Dreher fails to convince that his book is anything more than alarmist hand ringing because he fails to call for something new based on the examples of the past. Indeed the past must be mined. But we can not simply look to recreate that past that has long since fallen into the history books.  He jumps 1500 years in the past in order to find communities that can provide a model for the future.  What he so clearly misses to me is that the church in the recent past has been living out what he argues. 
              Here is what really dooms his book, his mono-culturalism. One of the benefits, blessings even of postmodernism is our awareness of and interactions with dozens of other cultures.  It is no longer the elite ambassadors traveling to foreign countries but it is the local high school student who is shaped and becomes aware of more then his small community. Dreher’s is fixated with white, European, liturgical expression of church in the first millennia. He ignores rich traditions of other ethnicities.
 The black Church for 100 years at least (since reconstruction at minimum) has been developing a peculiar Christian church.  The Black Church has stood fast in the face of racial injustice and a larger corrupt culture bent on shaping the world not into the kingdom of God but a safe kingdom for a particular ethnic identity. There are many lessons and pitfalls that we should learn from.  Or Dreher might have looked to the Chinese Church under communism. Or the Roman Catholic Church in Japan and authors like Suski Endo. His argument what have felt more substantive had he broadened his research sources.
               What I wish Dreher would have written is an analysis of the black church for white Christians who are waking up to their minority status in American culture.  What lesson does the black church have to teach us about being The Church?  What pitfalls and problems has the Historical Black Church faced? How can we avoid these mistakes in the church that will come about in the next 100-200 years?  I look forward to a future taking the tradition of Dante, Augustine and Bach and seeing the creative explosion of new art, music and literature when it is placed in conversation with Endo, Du Bois, and Ellington. Not to mention the countless other Christian communities living out what he argues for in a non-western context.

               He begins his argument by demonstrating that the Church is losing the culture wars. Really?  Is anyone in Western Christianity really still so naive to believe we are wining against secularism? Why thump us over the head, again with what many of us have already come to decades ago?  I  find only the out of touch, arrogant, and cloistered away in ever smaller churches would hold fast to the belief that power politics and strict moralism will save the Church.