WHITHER CHRISTIANITY?
"Already the most discussed and most important religious book of the decade." That was how the New York Times described Rod Dreher’s The Benedict Option: A Strategy for Christians in a Post-Christian Nation. And one can see why. Dreher, a prolific columnist and a senior editor and blogger at the American Conservative, has taken philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre’s contention in After Virtue (1981) – that modernity has impoverished spiritual life, shattering the Classical-Christian source of authority-sustaining morality – and run with it. He poses a critique of secular capitalism, the hypocrisy of liberals and self-obsessed identity politics, while also recognising the perilous situation in which Christianity now finds itself. The result is a work as deeply felt as it is moral.
To pursue some of the issues raised by The Benedict Option, from the decline of faith to the dangers of our emotivist, therapeutic culture, the spiked review’s Sean Collins decided to speak to Dreher.
Here’s what he had to say:
Sean Collins: Is it an exaggeration to say that Christianity is dying in the West?
Rod Dreher: A slight one. Now, the West is a broad term. When I use it, I usually mean the Anglosphere and Western Europe. And I don’t think that Christianity will ever be completely extinguished in the West, but I do think that we are going to see a tremendous diminishment of it over the course of this century, just like what has happened in Europe. I think, strictly speaking, it won’t mean Christianity will be dead in the West, because there will always be signs of it somewhere, but in terms of it being a factor in public life, and in the way that Americans, and Westerners more broadly, think about themselves, yes, it will be just a shadow of its former self.
I do speak in alarmist tones in this book, not only because I am generally alarmed, and I think other people should be, but it’s also because, to quote Flannery O’Connor, when you are trying to speak to a world that is deaf, you have to shout. There are so many Christians in America who don’t see how fragile things are for us. Christians in Europe don’t have this problem, by the way. When I talk to them, they’ve been living with the collapse of the faith within their societies for generations now. They get it straight up. Americans have been very, very comfortable for a long time. In The Benedict Option, I’m trying to raise the alarm, and show them how the apparent strength of Christianity in America – strength in numbers, and strength of influence in society – is really a façade, and if we don’t make some really strong changes now, it’s not going to survive in a meaningful sense.
Collins: What would you say are the key forces that have led to the crisis of Christianity in the US?
Dreher: The key forces are, first, economic. We live in an economy that requires and mandates mobility. It is very hard for people even to think about staying in one place and putting down roots. This is what the Benedictines call stability. Stability, economically, is a hindrance to you getting ahead in our society.
There is also the matter of individualism, which is a broad category, but it’s in the air we breathe in America. This is the idea that we can only live in truth, so to speak, when we are true to ourselves and our own desires. This is something that none of us can escape in modernity.
This is going to have tremendous effects – not only economically and socially, but also in terms of passing on the faith. Mary Eberstadt, in her book How the West Really Lost God (2013), presents evidence that faith is passed across generations by intact families, by the way the faith is lived out within the family. It’s not simply a matter of stating a bunch of propositions, and getting the children to agree with those propositions. It’s much more organic than that. And so if you don’t have intact families where the faith is lived out in a real way, it’s going to be much less likely that the faith will be handed down to the next generation, and the generation after that.
So in that sense the sexual revolution is attacking the stability, credibility and feasibility of Christianity in ways that are only dimly perceived by many Christians. And even conservative Christians, who may affirm Christian sexual morality in a strict sense (no sex outside of marriage and all that), are missing the bigger picture here, of what the breakup of family means, and is going to mean, for the endurance of Christianity in American society.
Collins: In your book you lean on Philip Rieff and his 1966 book The Triumph of the Therapeutic. Rieff argued that religion was being replaced with a gospel of self-fulfillment. What impact specifically do you think the growth of this therapeutic culture has had on Christianity?
Dreher: It’s been absolutely devastating. Christian Smith of Notre Dame has written about how there is religious illiteracy in American culture, across denominations, and even across religions. It’s devastating because young people and people in general – look, I’m 50 years old and I was raised this way, too – don’t associate following a religion with living up to a certain set of standards outside of ourselves. I mean, called outside of ourselves to be sacrificial – not only sacrificial of our own desires, but in terms of our income and our time. To live up to a reality that’s outside of ourselves. So if religion no longer calls on us to make sacrifices for the greater good, to serve God, and to love our neighbour, then religion collapses into something that makes us happy. We come to believe that God wants us to be happy and feel good about ourselves, and that’s the greatest good. I do think God wants us to be happy and feel good about ourselves, but that only comes through holiness, when we are doing what God asks us to do. And that usually means some form of sacrifice.
Sean Collins: Is it an exaggeration to say that Christianity is dying in the West?
Rod Dreher: A slight one. Now, the West is a broad term. When I use it, I usually mean the Anglosphere and Western Europe. And I don’t think that Christianity will ever be completely extinguished in the West, but I do think that we are going to see a tremendous diminishment of it over the course of this century, just like what has happened in Europe. I think, strictly speaking, it won’t mean Christianity will be dead in the West, because there will always be signs of it somewhere, but in terms of it being a factor in public life, and in the way that Americans, and Westerners more broadly, think about themselves, yes, it will be just a shadow of its former self.
I do speak in alarmist tones in this book, not only because I am generally alarmed, and I think other people should be, but it’s also because, to quote Flannery O’Connor, when you are trying to speak to a world that is deaf, you have to shout. There are so many Christians in America who don’t see how fragile things are for us. Christians in Europe don’t have this problem, by the way. When I talk to them, they’ve been living with the collapse of the faith within their societies for generations now. They get it straight up. Americans have been very, very comfortable for a long time. In The Benedict Option, I’m trying to raise the alarm, and show them how the apparent strength of Christianity in America – strength in numbers, and strength of influence in society – is really a façade, and if we don’t make some really strong changes now, it’s not going to survive in a meaningful sense.
Collins: What would you say are the key forces that have led to the crisis of Christianity in the US?
Dreher: The key forces are, first, economic. We live in an economy that requires and mandates mobility. It is very hard for people even to think about staying in one place and putting down roots. This is what the Benedictines call stability. Stability, economically, is a hindrance to you getting ahead in our society.
There is also the matter of individualism, which is a broad category, but it’s in the air we breathe in America. This is the idea that we can only live in truth, so to speak, when we are true to ourselves and our own desires. This is something that none of us can escape in modernity.
The strength of Christianity in America – strength in numbers, and strength of influence in society – is really a facade, and if we don’t make some really strong changes now, it’s not going to survive in a meaningful senseThe sexual revolution is a tremendous factor here, too. Not just because the whole idea of Christian anthropology doesn’t make sense outside of the Christian tradition, and the disciplining of one’s sexual desires. But also because the sexual revolution teaches us that sexual desire is a central component of personal identity. It’s not just what you do, but who you are. We build practices and institutions around that. And I’m not just simply talking about same-sex marriage. The sexual revolution brought no-fault divorce and we’re seeing the fragmenting of families, especially among the poor and the working class.
This is going to have tremendous effects – not only economically and socially, but also in terms of passing on the faith. Mary Eberstadt, in her book How the West Really Lost God (2013), presents evidence that faith is passed across generations by intact families, by the way the faith is lived out within the family. It’s not simply a matter of stating a bunch of propositions, and getting the children to agree with those propositions. It’s much more organic than that. And so if you don’t have intact families where the faith is lived out in a real way, it’s going to be much less likely that the faith will be handed down to the next generation, and the generation after that.
So in that sense the sexual revolution is attacking the stability, credibility and feasibility of Christianity in ways that are only dimly perceived by many Christians. And even conservative Christians, who may affirm Christian sexual morality in a strict sense (no sex outside of marriage and all that), are missing the bigger picture here, of what the breakup of family means, and is going to mean, for the endurance of Christianity in American society.
Collins: In your book you lean on Philip Rieff and his 1966 book The Triumph of the Therapeutic. Rieff argued that religion was being replaced with a gospel of self-fulfillment. What impact specifically do you think the growth of this therapeutic culture has had on Christianity?
Dreher: It’s been absolutely devastating. Christian Smith of Notre Dame has written about how there is religious illiteracy in American culture, across denominations, and even across religions. It’s devastating because young people and people in general – look, I’m 50 years old and I was raised this way, too – don’t associate following a religion with living up to a certain set of standards outside of ourselves. I mean, called outside of ourselves to be sacrificial – not only sacrificial of our own desires, but in terms of our income and our time. To live up to a reality that’s outside of ourselves. So if religion no longer calls on us to make sacrifices for the greater good, to serve God, and to love our neighbour, then religion collapses into something that makes us happy. We come to believe that God wants us to be happy and feel good about ourselves, and that’s the greatest good. I do think God wants us to be happy and feel good about ourselves, but that only comes through holiness, when we are doing what God asks us to do. And that usually means some form of sacrifice.
