The Benedict Option
In a radical vision for the future of Christianity, New York Times bestselling author and American Conservative columnist Rod Dreher calls on American Christians to prepare for the coming Dark Age by embracing an ancient Christian way of life. From the inside, American churches are hollowed out by the departure of young people and by an insipid pseudo-Christianity. From the outside, they are beset by challenges to religious liberty in a rapidly secularizing culture. Keeping Hillary Clinton out of the White House might have bought a brief reprieve from the state's assault, but it will not stop the West's slide into decadence and dissolution. Rod Dreher argues that the way forward is actually the way back -- all the way to St. Benedict of Nursia. This sixth-century monk, horrified by the moral chaos following Rome's fall, retreated to the forest and created a new way of life for Christians. He built enduring Christian communities based on principles of order, hospitality, stability, and prayer. His spiritual centers of hope were strongholds of light throughout the Dark Ages, and saved not just Christianity but Western civilization. Today, a new, post-Christian barbarism reigns. Many believers are blind to it, and their churches are too weak to resist. Politics offers little help in this spiritual crisis. What is needed is the Benedict Option, a strategy that draws on the authority of Scripture and the wisdom of the ancient church.
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- That would have been a nuanced conversation with some breadth (albeit skewed right) given that JD Vance was recently warned by a right wing source about the recent even more right wing Groyper takeover of the GOP.
JD Vance Received a Dire Warning About the Groyper Takeover of the GOP From a Strange Source (November, 2025)
and“After these last three days in Washington, I am more convinced than I have ever been that we are moving towards some kind of totalitarianism — or at best, authoritarianism,” said Dreher. The claim that more than a third of young GOP staffers are at least sympathetic to Fuentes isn’t entirely shocking. Recent years have seen numerous indications that this new brand of neo-Nazism and white nationalism has increasingly taken hold in the right-wing establishment.
~ https://talkingpointsmemo.com/news/jd-vance-received-a-dire-...what’s notable about Dreher’s post isn’t the idea that Groypers are ascendant in the MAGA era. The remarkable thing here is the fact this message to Vance came from fairly far out on the right. Dreher is perhaps most famous for his 2018 book — The Benedict Option — in which he pitched the idea that conservative Christians should form their own separatist communities due to their concerns about modern, secular values and the increasing acceptance of the LGBTQ community. In a 2022 essay where Dreher discussed the fact his father had been a Klansman, he described himself as a “race liberal” while also asserting “black people and white people really were very different in terms of culture,” including what he called a “sexual code” among African-Americans that includes teenage motherhood and absentee fathers. In the very essay where he decried the rising tide of Groyperism in D.C., Dreher repeatedly empathized with the roots of these young extremists’ anger and declared that, while anti-Semitism is misguided, Europe has been overwhelmed by a “Muslim mob.”So much for those that claimed MAGA lacked diversity, disagreement about the angle of salute has scale akin to that of Lilliput and Blefuscu.
- Graeber, the anarchist anthropologist who coined the phrase "we are the 99%" and wrote Debt: The First 5000 Years talks about the idea of revolutionary non-confrontation in Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology.
One of the ideas he discusses is intentionally keeping your literacy low and your population itinerant.
"...under the French, administrators would complain that they could send delegations to arrange for labor to build a road near a Tsimihety village, negotiate the terms with apparently cooperative elders, and return with the equipment a week later only to discover the village entirely abandoned—every single inhabitant had moved in with some relative in another part of the country."
Graeber on the myth of the ignorant savage: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EvUzdJSK4x8
I'm not sure that itinerance or illiteracy are strategies I would recommend to anyone. :)
Dreher's Benedict Option seems like a Western perspective of a similar strategy.
- The Benedict Option[1] having been mentioned on HN, I recently read a translation of Benedict's Rule. He's pretty clear that entering by the narrow gate implies giving up not only private property, but also personal property, and even personal volition.
https://www.gutenberg.org/files/50040/50040-h/50040-h.html#c...
Given that doctrine in 516, it's no wonder the early christian church appealed mainly to slaves and poor people.
[1] St. Benedict is not fond of Sarabaites.
- You sound like you've been reading a lot of Rod Dreher :-). If you haven't been, you might be interested in his blog, where he discusses "The Benedict Option" as a (Christian) response to this sort of cultural decline. He's also working on a book on the topic...
