WHERE DREHER'S BENEDICT OPTION LEADS

I rarely waste time reading TAC anymore.  I can read Pat Buchanan's work everywhere, including sites with integrity.  TAC has become a sort of self parody.  It's like a room full of overridden hobbyhorses.  

That said, Rod Dreher's hobbyhorse snapped under him today.  His horse is the "Benedict Option."  It is his pathetic attempt to have something to say after he gave up on Christians retaking their own societies.  The Benedict option is a call for Christians to withdraw from the public square just as he withdrew to rural Louisiana.  It's a cold cruel post Christian world out there so let's just keep a low profile and tend our little common spiritual garden. I don't know if he really believes this, but He has to write something to stay in business.

Today, oblivious to the obvious, he came out with a call for the US to save the remaining Christians of the Middle East.  The headline:  THE GENOCIDE OF CHRISTIANS

Can Dreher really be so un-selfaware as to miss the message here?  

Clearly, if any group of Christians followed the so called Benedict Option, it is these very victims on the point of extinction.  They kept a low profile.  They kept to themselves.  They cultivated their Christian tradition. They were kind to others. They are the perfect exemplar of the Dreher's mealy-mouth mentality and now they face extinction. 

I haven't written at length about the Benedict Option until now.  I don't intend to do so now except to expose some obvious absurdities.  

Dreher doesn't seem to know who St. Benedict was in any detail.  The founder of Western Monasticism  is a poor model for a whole Christian society's withdrawal from an evil society.  By definition Monks are not the basis of a reproducing population.  Becoming a Monk is rather the point of Monasticism.  It depends on a Christian culture to feed it with more recruits. 

A further and more important point here is that St. Benedict did not withdraw from a pagan society.  He operated in a largely Christian one that became more, not less Christian as time went by.  There was no organized opposition to the monastic movement until the reformation.

Dreher is such a History dolt  that he doesn't seem to consider that the "successful" examples of faith communities living within other communities are all, or almost all communities living within Christian ones.  Just how his cloud coocoo-land Benedictine communities could exist in the midst of a truly hostile society is beyond Dreher's imagination. 

This is the last effort I will make to address Dreher or his pitiful hobbyhorse.