Over the last few posts I've been reflecting on the vision of postliberal theology.

Specifically, postliberal theology posits a hard (or clear) church/world contrast. The point of this contrast is to create a thick cultural community where the Christian virtues can be formed. This "community of contrast" exists as a "colony of heaven" within the larger pluralistic and liberal culture. Such communities can be called "Benedict Option" communities.

Given the church/world contrast, David Congdon worries about an implicit dehumanization that can tip over into political illiberalism. A postliberal ecclesiology becoming a postliberal politics. And you see examples of this trend. Rod Dreher, the author of The Benedict Option, shilled for Orbán's political vision for an "illiberal state" (Orbán's own description) in Hungary. Doug Wilson built a Christian community in Moscow, Idaho, and using Canon Press to promote an ethnocentric and misogynistic vision of Christian nationalism.

For my part, as a post-progressive Christian, I also work with a strong church/world contrast. I think the church matters. But the boundary markers are not the culture wars. To be sure, a moral vision is espoused, catechesis and formation are necessary, but moralism is not the boundary marker. Witness Jesus' embrace of sinners here. Moralism wasn't his boundary marker. The main boundary marker of the post-progressive church/world contrast is sacramental. Making God visible. The church is that place where, in the midst of the world, God is encountered, confessed, and worshiped. 

Okay, so having sorted through some of my thoughts about postliberal ecclesiology, noting all the dragons to the right and left, let me turn now to the issue of postliberal politics, the illiberal and authoritarian projects of Christian nationalism and Catholic integralism.

Maybe this is an oversimplification, but it seems to me, having pondered Congdon's article, that the critical issue here is cultural pluralism. Liberal democracy produces cultural pluralism. Indifferent to the good, the liberal and democratic state allows its citizens scope for "the pursuit of happiness," however they envision that happiness. In the space created by this liberty Americans move in many different directions.

According to the postliberal political thinkers, people like Patrick Deneen, and leaning upon the earlier work of Alasdair MacIntyre, this pluralism in relation to the good within liberal democracies tends toward cultural dissolution and conflict. Unable to "pull together" as a nation toward a shared vision of societal flourishing, the nation slowly falls and/or comes apart.

And so postliberal political thinkers draw the straightforward conclusion: The state must impose a Christian vision of the good upon the populace. Crucially, if this effort is to be both comprehensive and stable, lasting longer than the short four years of a presidential term in office, the democratic values of freedom and liberty must be suspended and subordinated to the state. For the nation to flourish a turn to illiberalism and authoritarianism is necessary.

The logic here is clear and uncomplicated. But few Christian thinkers are willing to grasp the nettle here. For doing so is to reject a core feature of America's founding, freedom from a coercive state and the liberty to pursue your own happiness as you see fit. And yet, with the rise of Donald Trump, postliberal political thinkers have been increasingly willing to flirt with or embrace an illiberal politics. The most well known example is how Patrick Deneen followed up How Liberalism Failed with Regime Change.

Okay, so how does a post-progressive Christian think about illiberal, postliberal politics?

Well, let's lean into the progressive side first. Postliberal political thinkers tend to describe liberalism as a cesspool of depravity and moral relativism. But this is not true. Liberalism has a moral vision, and as Tom Holland has pointed out, it's the vision it inherited from Judeo-Christianity. The two most important examples here are slavery and women's rights. Consequently, it's diagnostic that the postliberals have to deal with misogyny and racism within their ranks. And I will commend both Rod Dreher and Doug Wilson for the work they have done pushing back against these elements on the postliberal right. But the fact that these two sins—misogyny and racism—haunt postliberal politics illustrates the bankruptcy of the claim that liberalism is morally relativistic. Liberalism has secured moral goods for the world. To ignore and deny those goods invites some dark forces back into our world, the very same forces the liberal state defeated. This is why the postliberals might be better described as antiliberal, given how they refuse to recognize, praise, and secure the moral goods of liberalism precisely as the moral goods of liberalism.

A progressive Christian view of liberalism, by contrast, given its liberationist vision of the gospel, will praise liberalism as an emancipatory power within world history. Precisely because this emancipatory power is rooted in the Judeo-Christian tradition. Thus, to deny or ignore these moral goods of liberalism is to deny the gospel itself. In this sense, the antiliberalism of the postliberals is also antichristian.

For their part, many on the postliberal right see this clearly, the moral incompatibility between Christianity and illiberalism. They are aware that the illiberalism and authoritarianism they are espousing is better served by Nietzsche's will to power than the Crucified Christ. The "strong gods" of paganism are much more suited for the postliberal political vision.

That said, the moral report card of liberalism is mixed. Postliberals look past liberalism's moral achievements to decry its existential bankruptcy and decadent libertinism. On these points I often find myself, as a post-progressive, in common cause. Hunting Magic Eels describes what I call "the Ache" produced by our culture. In The Shape of Joy I survey our mental health crisis. I blogged through Louise Perry's The Case Against the Sexual Revolution, noting how the sexual politics of our liberal and progressive culture have produced some very bad outcomes.

Notice, however, how my concerns and criticisms about liberalism are being expressed. Instead of throwing culture war bombs I'm offering immanent criticism from within the liberal order. On its own terms liberalism fails. Which is why, as a post-progressive, I believe liberals need the gospel. The moral goods of liberalism shouldn't be jettisoned, the demons of racism and misogyny shall remain locked up, but the ailments of liberalism demand medicinal interventions. The church beckons.

Which brings me to a final reflection. My post-progressive perspective remains exclusively ecclesial. The tools of social transformation are persuasive and evangelistic rather than authoritarian and coercive. This commitment is not defeatist, as many on the postliberal right describe it, but theological. The church follows a crucified Messiah. The power revealed in Jesus is persuasive, invitational, and self-giving rather than coercive. Jesus did not seize the levers of imperial power to impose the kingdom of God. In the temptation narratives Jesus explicitly rejected this diabolical option. Rather, Jesus proclaimed good news, healed the broken, welcomed sinners, and suffered violence rather than inflicting it. If the church is the body of Christ its methods must mirror the life of Christ. More, faith cannot be compelled, for the moment belief is produced by political pressure it ceases to be faith and becomes conformity. Which is why the church's tools of social transformation are proclamation, witness, repentance, and conversion. In keeping with its sacramental vocation the church makes God visible in the midst of the world and leaves the response to the freedom of those who encounter that witness.

Now, this is not to say, to go back to my colleague Brad East's essay on Christian nationalism, that Christians cannot participate in democratic elections as Christians to win victories for their preferred policies. That's just regular old democracy, and they shouldn't be decried as "Christian nationalists" for such efforts. That said, should Christians experience political losses or reversals, they must lick their wounds and resign themselves to the will of the people. Crucially, given what I've shared in this series, they cannot let their political desires cause them to become unwitting or functional Christian nationalists, trafficking in conspiratorial and prophetically couched election denialism. Scripture describes Christians who are deluded like this as being in league with the Antichrist.

Stepping back and taking in the whole of this debate, I can see how a strong church/world contrast can be tempted toward dehumanization and make one sympathetic, or supportive of, authoritarian politics. The slide David Congdon frets over has happened and does happen. That said, a whole lot depends upon how one envisions both the church and world sides of the equation. I would never contend that the views I espouse don't have their own particular temptations. No matter where you stand, there are dragons to your right and your left. To say nothing of those above, below, facing, behind, and within you. Sin will hunt you precisely where you are. You and I are not immune. Duly noting this, however, I've tried to sketch across these posts a vision of the church/world contrast that, I think, is necessary yet avoids many of the pitfalls one finds on both the liberal and postliberal sides of this debate.

One of the things I wholeheartedly embrace from the postliberal theological vision, from people like Hauerwas and John Howard Yoder, is their focus upon the church. And in this regard, there is a lot I like in Rod Dreher's postliberal description of the Benedict Option.

And yet, I take to heart David Congdon's concern that the hard church/world contrast found in postliberal theology can tend toward othering and dehumanization. Why do I take that concern seriously? Well, because you see a lot of dehumanization coming from people like Rod Dreher and Doug Wilson.

Back in 2015 I described how BenOp communities tend toward the Pharisaical and how the gospels raise questions about that tendency. Specifically, a debate about the BenOp is at the heart of the gospels. In the gospels we observe a conservative religious group who, reacting to the corruption of the political and religious establishment under empire, decide to turn inward to reclaim their distinctive culture and traditions in order to cultivate the virtues that would sustain them. This BenOp group were the Pharisees.

The Pharisees were the conservative advocates of the BenOp of their day. Observing how the political and religious institutions had been co-opted by empire, the Pharisees called for a BenOp, a call for communities to invest in local synagogues where teaching, liturgy, and the daily practices of Torah observance would sustain the Jewish people in the dark age they were living in.

According to modern BenOp proponents, that first-century situation is not unlike our own, which means that today's calls for a BenOp are going to be haunted by this same shadow of Pharisaism.

Given this temptation I've called for a progressive vision of the BenOp, one that will resist the Pharisaical tendency. Consider, as an example here, Jesus' parable of the Pharisee and the tax collector:

He also told this parable to some who trusted in themselves that they were righteous, and treated others with contempt: “Two men went up into the temple to pray, one a Pharisee and the other a tax collector. The Pharisee, standing by himself, prayed thus: ‘God, I thank you that I am not like other men, extortioners, unjust, adulterers, or even like this tax collector. I fast twice a week; I give tithes of all that I get.’” (Luke 18.9–12)

According to Jesus, a Pharisaical BenOp involves the contemptuous moral sorting of the world into the saints and sinners, the good guys and the bad guys, Us and Them. Precisely what you see from people like Dreher and Wilson. A Pharisaical BenOp turns inward and polices boundaries of moral purity. The BenOp of Jesus, by contrast, turns outward and violates those boundaries:

And as Jesus reclined at table in the house, behold, many tax collectors and sinners came and were reclining with Jesus and his disciples. And when the Pharisees saw this, they said to his disciples, “Why does your teacher eat with tax collectors and sinners?” But when he heard it, he said, “Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick. Go and learn what this means, ‘I desire mercy, and not sacrifice.’” (Matthew 9.10–13)

A progressive expression of the BenOp will exhibit the radical hospitality of Jesus. Examples of progressive BenOp communities practicing community and radical hospitality are Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove's Rutba House and the Catholic Worker movement. And it's so diagnostic, damning really, that Dreher didn't give attention to Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker in The Benedict Option. Dorothy Day's commitment to social justice and radical hospitality just didn't fit with Dreher's Pharisaical vision, so he left her out.

Beyond the Pharisaism that shadows the BenOp, a related concern is how many BenOp expressions on the political right are patriarchal. While there are healthy BenOp communities that practice traditional gender roles, it's also true that women and children are especially vulnerable in insular patriarchal communities. This history of abuse is the dark side of the BenOp.

All that to say, I think that there are Dreher and Wilson–style BenOps that are Pharisaical and explicitly traffic in the dehumanization that Congdon worries about. But as I've just described, taking a cue from Dorothy Day, there are progressive expressions of the BenOp. Rather than damning the world, stones in hand, progressive BenOp communities exist, to borrow from Bonhoeffer, for the sake of the world. As Bonhoeffer wrote, “The church is the church only when it exists for others.” To make a contrast with Dreher's vision, I've described this as The Francis Option, given how the early Franciscans were noteworthy for their care in leper colonies. Pope Francis, not coincidentally, also promoted this vision.

So those are the dragons to the right: Rod Dreher's Pharisaical BenOp, along with its insular patriarchy. What are the dragons to the left?

These were the dragons that Dorothy Day had to deal with when young liberal activists showed up at the Catholic Worker. Day's Catholic devoutness, her intense and committed religiosity, conflicted with the irreligion and moral libertinism of the younger Workers. Just as challenging was Day's commitment to Catholic personalism. Dorothy Day could protest with the best of them, but her daily praxis was sitting with the poor, demented, and insane and having a cup of coffee with them. Day's mission was simple: the Works of Mercy. For the younger Workers yearning for revolution, feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, and burying the dead didn't seem relevant enough. Rather than Jesus of Nazareth they wanted Che Guevara.

That tension persists. Progressive churches struggle because of the political reductionism I've described in this series. When church reduces to political activism or becomes a local non-profit, its reason for existing evaporates. This is what has happened to the Protestant Mainline. Consequently, when a church begins to exist for others it has to hold onto the truth that it also exists before God. God cannot be eclipsed by the political. And this isn't a moral demand. It's for progressives' own good. From our mental health crisis to our "bowling alone" isolation, we need God. I tell this story in Hunting Magic Eels and The Shape of Joy. As I've argued, ontology matters for mental health.

Which is another contrast between how the Pharisaical BenOp talks about church and how I, as a progressive, talk about church. Pharisaical BenOps define themselves through culture war contrasts with the world. This is why they overflow with bile. The progressive BenOp, by contrast, exists for the world and doesn't define itself with culture war boundary markers. The question of God, in these spaces, concerns ontology, the reality of God. Again, Dorothy Day broadly shared the political vision of the younger Workers. Their differences concerned ontology, the reality of the living God, the issue of religiosity. And progressives desperately need this religiosity as they blindly bump around in the spiritual-but-not-religious fog. This is what animates my post-progressive quarrel with them: the reality of God and their need for God. And it's here where I agree so much with the postliberal calls for a thick and rich sacramental community, a place where ontological realities come into view. A progressive vision of the BenOp is able to hold the activism and ontology together.

Having described postliberal theology and postliberal politics, we can turn, now, to the debate kicked off by David Congdon's article in The Journal of Religion entitled “What Has New Haven to Do with Hungary? On Theological and Political Postliberalism." 

To recap a bit from the last post. Both postliberal theology and postliberal political theory have decried the impact of liberalism and its inability to form the virtues necessary for human flourishing, personally and collectively. Noting this, postliberal theology posited a hard church/world contrast. Christian virtues could only be formed from within the particular and distinctive Christian community over against the pluralism of the surrounding culture. As Stanley Hauerwas famously said, "the first task of the Church is to make the world the world." The church would carve out a space from within the pluralistic culture, living as a "colony of heaven" in the midst of the world. There the church would function as a counter polis, a community of contrast making visible the politics of the Kingdom of God over against the kingdoms of the world. 

To accomplish this, a degree of cultural quarantine is needed so that the shared life of the Christian community will not be diluted or compromised. This vision of retreat in order to protect cultural homogeneity reached popular expression in Rod Dreher's book The Benedict Option. There has been a lot of debate about what Dreher means by a "retreat" from the world. He is not advocating for an Amish-like withdrawal. But that debate does not concern us here. All we need to note is how postliberal theology argues for the necessity of a thick and homogeneous cultural life carved out from and lived in contrast to the surrounding secular and pluralistic culture.

The postliberal political thinkers reject this "colony of heaven" approach. According to the postliberal political theorists, the forces of pluralism, secularism, and liberalism are so dominant and powerful that they generally overwhelm Christian attempts to form a distinctive identity. The cultural withdrawal demanded is so severe and the costs so high that most Christians balk. Most churches are unable to create thick cultures of community, providing instead a worship service on Sunday morning and leaving their members to navigate the secular and pluralistic culture on their own and as best they can. The results, as you know, have not been good.

Consequently, postliberal political thinkers believe that the church cannot be the sole focus of Christian engagement. The toxicity of the culture must be directly addressed. This will, however, mean a turn toward an illiberal and authoritarian politics that imposes a Christian culture upon the nation. Liberty and freedom are set aside to pursue a particularist vision of the collective good.

While postliberal theology and postliberal politics have different foci—the church versus the nation—Congdon argues that postliberal theology set the stage for the authoritarian turn among many Christians, as seen in their embrace of Donald Trump. An example of this is Rod Dreher himself. After espousing the postliberal theological vision in The Benedict Option, Dreher pivoted to embrace the illiberal political vision of Hungary's Viktor Orbán. Dreher was a champion of Orbán's government as a political model for Europe and America. In turning away from The Benedict Option toward Christian nationalism, Dreher illustrates the church-to-nationalism shift, the slide from the particularist ecclesiology of the postliberal theologians toward the authoritarianism of the postliberal political thinkers.

Here's how David Congdon describes this trajectory:

Postliberal theology erected an entire edifice rooted in the idea that church and world (or state) are in a metaphysical battle to the death, with only one potential victor, in which the only hope for humanity is to gather in small-scale, tradition-homogeneous communities where proper Christian virtue and character may be cultivated and lived out. Most people, however, do not have the capacity to leave their jobs and social networks behind to establish a commune in the woods, and most do not wish to flee to Hungary. Is it any wonder, then, that Christians catechized on a diet of Hauerwas and Milbank would eventually seek to take over the reins of political power in the United States and elsewhere? The idea of having a template for a happy life but resigning oneself to a politics of lament would strike most as an unnecessary form of defeatism....The charge of “sectarian temptation” that Gustafson leveled against Hauerwas has now matured into the authoritarian temptation of the political postliberals. These are not opposed positions but rather two sides of one coin—namely, the antiliberal coin that posits a binary between church and world and requires cultural homogeneity as a precondition for human flourishing...

Once “the world” is perceived as a vast wasteland of heresy and ungodliness, it is but a short step from we must avoid the world to remain pure to we must purify the world. Postliberal theology taught Christians to see the cultural Other as utterly alien, incapable of understanding or engaging with the truth revealed to the church. After a generation of being conditioned to view others this way, is it at all surprising that some have decided such people should not be allowed to govern society?

This is a provocative and contentious claim. To blame theologians like Stanley Hauerwas, given his theology and witness, for the rise of Donald Trump is pretty outrageous. So there has been pushback. David Fitch has written a series of responses on his Substack, the first of which is here. (Fitch's posts were how I became aware of Congdon's article.) James K.A. Smith shared a critical yet more sympathetic response on his Substack. Congdon replied to Fitch on his Substack.

Okay, I've taken two posts to set this controversy before you. The question before us is this: Does postliberal theology tempt us toward a postliberal politics? Does, as Congdon argues, a hard church/world contrast teach Christians to view the "cultural Other as utterly alien"? Is there a dehumanizing temptation at work in "the first task of the Church is to make the world the world"? Relatedly, have the postliberal ecclesial expressions proved so severe and costly, and churches so impotent in forming their people, that pastors and church leaders eventually concluded that something more drastic was warranted by way of addressing the culture? If being the postliberal church is very hard in a liberal and pluralistic world, might it be a good idea to create a nation where it is easier to be the church?

While I understand why people will want to rush to defend Hauerwas from what they take to be an ugly smear from David Congdon, implicating him in Trumpism, I find myself pondering the questions above, if only for my own benefit. As I've shared recently, I love Hauerwas. But I also have a progressive, liberal, and humanistic streak in me that inclines me to adopt a more positive posture toward "the world." Consequently, on one of the central issues in this debate—Is pluralism good or bad?—I find myself pulled in two different directions. So I'm going to try in this series to think aloud and sort a bit of this out. Feel free to follow along and share your own thoughts.

Given the modern loss of a taken-for-granted Christian culture, what have been some Christian responses? Where do we see people trying to recover a thick culture?

First, there are the political movements.

There are some, like the Catholic integralists, who want to restore the culture of Latin Christendom. This vision is stronger and more systematic than the evangelical pursuit of “Christian nationalism.” For Catholic integralists, secular political authority must be subordinated to ecclesiastical authority. The ideal is hierarchical, a recovery of the medieval order in which the pope exercised spiritual supremacy over kings and princes, including the emperor of the Holy Roman Empire.

Christian nationalism is a similar but distinct project. Its goal is to make Christianity more publicly visible and to pass laws shaped by Christian moral commitments. The vision is cultural rather than ecclesiastical, to build a nation where it is easier to raise children as Christians and where public institutions affirm Christian values. The state is seen as a partner in sustaining a broadly Christian moral order, not as subordinate to the Church.

Next, there are family, church, and communal approaches. These approaches assume the secular and liberal political order as a given. The goal is not to overturn it but to carve out spaces within it where a thick moral and religious culture can be practiced and sustained. Examples include the homeschooling movement, intentional Benedict Option–style communities, and churches seeking to cultivate deeper forms of spiritual and moral formation.

Finally, we're seeing low church evangelicals "converting" to Orthodoxy or Catholicism. The Protestant privileging of the individual conscience as the ultimate authority is reversed by returning to a magisterial tradition. Instead of the free-wheeling and entrepreneurial experience of DIY non-denominationalism, there is submission to an old, venerable, and authoritative ecclesiology. There is no call for intentionality here. The tradition meets you as an unchanging and objective reality. You don't have to create, decide, or make anything up. You simple receive and submit to an inviolate truth. 

However, each of these moves has its problems. 

With the political efforts, Catholic integralism is largely an exercise in nostalgia. Medieval Christendom isn’t making a comeback any time soon. The challenge for Christian nationalism is different: there is no cultural “steady state” in a liberal democracy, given the volatility and sharp swings of electoral politics. As a result, Christian nationalism is always tempted toward authoritarianism as the only way to secure a “Christian culture” against the shifting tides of majority rule. 

Regarding family, church, and communal approaches, life in these spaces isn’t wholly insulated from the surrounding culture, and the degree of separation varies. Churches attempting to provide a richer cultural and spiritual life often struggle to get people to fully participate. Members opt in and opt out, creating much the same DIY, “choose your own adventure” experience of church. 

Homeschooling faces similar challenges, particularly from social media and cultural exposure. Once children turn eighteen, they plunge into the wider world. A truly thick moral culture should carry a person from cradle to grave, yet homeschool parents can only hope they’ve “done enough” before their children leave home. 

In addition, the more insular and restrictive the homeschool or communal culture, the sharper the contrast with broader cultural libertinism. Children inevitably observe the freedoms their peers enjoy, and resentment or rebellion can follow. In short, these “carve-out” communities face an uphill battle. This is a battle deemed worth fighting, of course, but one where success is far from guaranteed. 

Finally, regarding the drift of low-church evangelicals to Orthodoxy and Catholicism, I'd like to turn to that issue in the next post.

One more post sharing reflections on faith from Joseph Ratzinger's (the late Pope Benedict XVI) popular book Introduction to Christianity. 

Again, Ratzinger's famous definition of faith concerns the meaning-fullness of existence, a meaning upon which I take a stand. Ratzinger reflecting more on that idea:

The tool with which man is equipped to deal with the truth of being is not knowledge but understanding: understanding of the meaning to which he has entrusted himself. And we must certainly add that "understanding" only reveals itself in "standing", not apart from it. One cannot occur without the other, for understanding means seizing and grasping as meaning the meaning that man has received as ground. I think that is the precise significance of what we mean by understanding: that we learn to grasp the ground on which we have taken our stand as meaning and truth; that we learn to perceive that ground represents meaning. 

The contrast Ratzinger is making here between knowledge and understanding is the difference between scientific insight and technological mastery--what Jacques Ellul calls technique, "the totality of methods, rationally arrived at and having absolute efficiency in every field of human activity"--with an understanding of human existence that embeds us in the fullness of truth, beauty and goodness. For Ratzinger, coming to trust in that fullness, taking a stand upon that ground, is faith. 

But there is more. What makes the ground of life meaning-full is that it subsists in the Logos. Existence is meaning-full because material existence isn't lifeless and inert but is held and ordered by the Logos--the Word, the Mind, the Intelligibility, the Meaning. But most importantly, the Logos is the Person.

The Logos is more than the Rationality and Meaning-fullness of created existence. The Logos is a Person--the Son, the Second Person of the Trinity, who became incarnate in the life of Jesus of Nazareth. Thus, taking a stand upon the Meaning-fullness of Existence is not an exercise in existential philosophy. Even though the Logos is Rationality Itself, our relationship with the Logos isn't solely or primarily intellectual. The Logos is a Person. Thus, meaning is inherently relational. 

Ratzinger observes:

In all that has been said so far the most fundamental feature of Christian faith or belief has still not been specified; namely, its personal character. Christian faith is more than the option in favor of a spiritual ground to the world; its central formula is not "I believe in something", but "I believe in you." It is the encounter with the man Jesus, and in this encounter it experiences the meaning of the world as a person...In [Jesus'] life, in the unconditional devotion of himself to men, the meaning of the world is present before us...The meaning of the world is the "you"...

...Christian faith lives on the discovery that not only is there such a thing as objective meaning but that this meaning knows me and loves me, that I can entrust myself to it like a child who knows that everything he may be wondering about is safe in the "you" of his mother. 

Or, stated even more simply, Ratzinger shares this lovely line:

[We live in] a world that in the last analysis is not mathematics but love.

That is Christian faith in a nutshell, the conviction that the ground of the world isn't mathematics but love, and that taking a stand upon this love, relationally entrusting yourself to this love, is the very ground of your existence.

Last post in this series, reflecting on the spiritual gifts of the Taizé community. 

I've mentioned that Eucharist is celebrated every morning at Taizé during the morning service. And in their Eucharistic practices we find another charism of Taizé.

In an increasingly post-Christian world it seems that many churches face a choice. On the one hand, there is the move to make Christianity more inclusive and welcoming by making everything in the faith mean less. Christian faith is therapeutically demythologized, so you don't have to believe anything. Christian praxis simply becomes social justice, so your ethics can remain exactly as they are. And so on.

Pushing against this trend, the other choice is to make everything mean more. Double-down on all that is the weird, supernatural, and doctrinal in the faith. Invest in the strangeness. Instead of making Christianity fit in with the reigning moral and therapeutic consensus of the world, stand apart from the world. Draw a line and make a contrast. 

In my own faith journey during the season of this blog (2007 to the present), I've made a journey from the former to the latter option. Early in the history of the blog, I was a part of the trend to make Christianity mean less so that it could be more inclusive and welcoming. Today, however, I see the pointlessness of that activity and now stand as a critic of those progressive voices still engaged in this project. This is a part of why I call myself a post-progressive Christian. 

And yet, post-progressive doesn't mean anti-progressive. I still want Christianity to be inclusive and welcoming. I just want it to accomplish that by making Christianity mean more rather than less. Trouble is, you just don't see a lot of examples of this. Making Christianity mean more often involves barriers and boundaries. This makes a lot of sociological and psychological sense. If you want something to mean more, to experience something as unique and special, you have to set it aside and protect it. Imagine a cherished heirloom like china dishes. You put those dishes in a cabinet and don't use them very often. A similar logic holds in the religious world as well. Just look at the book of Leviticus. 

So you appreciate the predicament. How do you make Christianity mean more yet keep it open and inclusive? That question brings me back to Taizé.

In my estimation, in their Eucharistic practices, Taizé pulls off the trick of making something mean more while extending an open invitation. Eucharist means more at Taizé compared to most churches. You begin each day with the celebration. And the liturgy around the ritual is rich and beautiful. At Taizé, the mystery of the Eucharist is elevated rather than diminished. 

The practices here are even more interesting. Accurate details are hard to confirm, so any knowledgable readers can clarify, but my understanding (and online research) suggest that the bread and wine offered at Taizé have been consecrated in a Catholic service that takes place prior to the morning prayer service. Blessed bread is available for the unbaptized, but almost everyone in the service--Catholic and non-Catholic, baptized an unbaptized--go to the brothers during communion. Given Taizé's call toward ecumenical reconciliation, this practice isn't discouraged. So, if I have the details right, Taizé is the one place where non-Catholics, and even the unbaptized, can receive consecrated bread and wine.

If I have these details right, and the Taizé community doesn't frown on or discourage this practice, this is another, very unique, example of making something mean more while also making it radically open. If the bread and wine at Taizé are consecrated, Eucharist can't get any "more" than that. And if Taizé is practicing an open table, then you can't get any more "open" than that.

Regardless, even the bread is not consecrated in a Catholic mass, the daily morning liturgy around Eucharist at Taizé makes the ritual mean more rather than less. You experience the "real presence" of Christ. And the welcome extended to the Table is generous and hospitable to all.

When you worship at Taizé you see how it is possible to make Christian life and practice mean more without it becoming exclusive, judgmental and insular. You don't see it very often, but more can mean open. And in my estimation, this More + Open option provides rich evangelistic opportunities in a post-Christian world. To be sure, I have some readers (you know who you are) who will push back on this, arguing that More Means Closed is the only faithful way forward. (A voice like Pope Benedict comes to mind here.) But as a post-progressive (rather than anti-progressive) Christian, I think More + Open, as you experience at Taizé, has a lot of evangelistic upside in an increasingly post-Christian world and provides better spiritual formation for churches whose insularity makes them vulnerable to dysfunctional leadership and prone to culture war capture.

After escaping from the orcs, who were rushing to take them to Saruman, Merry and Pippin meet one of the most remarkable and surprising characters in the tale: Treebeard, the great caretaker and shepherd of the forest of Fangorn.

After interrogating Merry and Pippin, Treebeard comes to realize that Saruman has become a threat to Fangorn and the whole of Middle Earth. The news isn't wholly unexpected, as Treebeard has been watching and worrying about Saruman for quite sometime. But the tipping point has come, action must be taken. Treebeard concludes:

"I cannot overlook him. I must do something, I suppose...I think that I now understand what he is up to. He is plotting to become a Power. He has a mind of metal and wheels, and he does not care for growing things...And now it is clear that he is a black traitor."

Fleming Rutledge makes a contrast here between Tom Bombadil and Treebeard. Recall our WILDLY CONTROVERSIAL Week 7 post on "the uselessness of Tom Bombadil," where, in contrast to Rivendell, Rutledge criticizes Bombadil for not caring about or participating in the struggle against Sauron. Many didn't like Tom being called out, arguing that Tom's work in caring for his patch of the world is a form of resistance. Alan Jacobs even speaks of us choosing the "the Bombadil Option."

All of which is very well argued and observed. Resistance can involve withdrawing from the larger fight to control history to care for the particular and the local. And yet, in the middle of that debate we find Treebeard, who seems to embody the best of both Rivendell and Bombadil. Like Tom, Treebeard is a caretaker and steward of the local and the particular. And yet, while slow and deliberative, Treebeard can be roused to take action against evil, joining Rivendell in the fight. 

I know, I know, of the making of "Options" there seems to be no end. But our choice isn't just the Rivendell Option or the Bombadil Option, choosing, for example, between social justice warriors and the withdrawl of the Benedict Option. Between involvement in history versus care of the local and particular. There is a middle path here. There is the Treebeard Option. A preference for the local and the particular. A slow, considered, deliberative, wise and watchful approach to "getting involved." No emotional hot takes from the Ents! But also a capacity to be roused and get involved "for such a time as this." 

For even the Ents, slow and patient as they are, get to a point where even they have to say, "I must do something."

In light of my recent posts about post-evangelical Christian loss and nostalgia, our longing for a tribe, let me point you to Christine Emba's recent column in the Washington Post, "Liberalism is Loneliness."

Emba's column is a reflection on Patrick Deneen's recent book Why Liberalism Failed.

The heart of the matter, as I wrote about two weeks ago, is how Western liberalism dissolves traditional and historical sources of connection and community. Liberalism dissolves group affiliations and treats us as rights-bearing individuals who stand alone before the state. In my posts I said that liberalism has an aerosolizing effect upon groups, it atomizes and then disperses us.

Here is Emba summarizing this impact and its consequences:

As liberalism has progressed, it has done so by ever more efficiently liberating each individual from “particular places, relationships, memberships, and even identities — unless they have been chosen, are worn lightly, and can be revised or abandoned at will.” In the process, it has scoured anything that could hold stable meaning and connection from our modern landscape — culture has been disintegrated, family bonds devalued, connections to the past cut off, an understanding of the common good all but disappeared.

And in the end, we’ve all been left terribly alone.

That’s the heart of it, really. Liberalism is loneliness. 

And like I mentioned in my series on tribes and progressive Christianity, we suffer when we're not a part of a tribe. As Emba observes:

Over the past 15 years, the U.S. suicide rate has increased by 24 percent; the rise in so-called deaths of despair is constantly in the news. The most liberal nation in the world reports less happiness and more pain than its illiberal counterparts. We may have traveled to the “end of history,” but the majority of Americans believe that the country is on the wrong track. And we’re desperately, desperately lonely. 

So what's the solution? Emba concludes by suggesting that we're going to have to become a whole lot more intentional about forming close knit communities. She brings up the Benedict Option, a vision that appeals to conservative Christians but leaves progressive Christians cold. But as I've argued, progressives need their own version of the Benedict Option to deal with the isolation and loneliness that liberalism is producing.

But this is going to be a hard labor, especially for progressive Christians whose embrace of liberalism makes it hard for them to form the close-knit churches they crave. Again, progressive Christians need to embrace their own Benedict Option. As Emba concludes:

Yet the deepest solution to the problem of liberalism is as personal in scale as its deepest quandary. To overhaul liberalism, we will have to overhaul ourselves, exchanging an easy drift toward selfish autonomy for a cultivated embrace of self-discipline and communal responsibility. As daunting a project as reforming a political order might seem, this internal shift may be just as hard.

In my post yesterday about raising Millennials as liberals, I bet a few readers were thinking, "What about the Benedict Option?"

That is, isn't one of the big points made by Rod Dreher in his book The Benedict Option that we need to raise our children in a tribe if we want them to be faithful Christians?

So let me say a few things about tribes and the Benedict Option.

Let me start with this. I agree with with Rod Dreher on two key points.

First, Christianity demands more than liberal tolerance.

Second, tribes are necessary for spiritual formation.

I've described all this before in my call for a progressive version of the Benedict Option. Cruciform, self-donating love is way, way more than liberal tolerance. Cruciform, self-donating love is hard, sacrificially hard. Consequently, we need a tribe to form us into the ways of Jesus.

In short, progressive Christians need a Benedict Option.

My problem with Rod Dreher's articulation of the Benedict Option--that the counter-cultural way of Jesus requires a community of spiritual formation--is how little he talks about Jesus. Rod talks a ton about prayer, liturgy, church going, orthodoxy, tradition, monasticism, and sexual ethics. But he rarely writes about Jesus. He rarely talks about love.

The greatest failure of Rod's book The Benedict Option is how he left out the progressive versions of the BenOp, intentional communities like the Catholic Workers and the New Monastics such as Jonathan Wilson Hartgove's Rutba House. To say nothing of Jean Vanier's L'Arche communities. Rod says he left these groups out of the book because he finds their way of life too radical for ordinary Christians to emulate.

But I call bullshit on that.

For example, in his book and on his blog Rod waxes on and on about the monks of Norcia. But why doesn't Rod find the monks of Norcia too radical for ordinary Christians to emulate? I doubt many of us are lining up to take vows of celibacy and poverty. Rod sure isn't.

But what the monks of Norcia can do for us, as they do for both Rod and I, is inspire a monastic way of life that we can, to greater or lesser degrees, emulate in our own lives. I pray the Liturgy of the Hours.

But if that's true of the monks of Norcia, why can't that also be true of the Catholic Workers and the New Monastics? This is my point.

I agree with Rod that Christians with day jobs, families, and mortgages aren't going to live the way the Catholic Workers live. But nor will they be able to live like the monks of Norcia! Yet both groups can inspire ways of life that we can, to some degree, emulate. And yet, the monks get included in the Benedict Option and the Catholic Workers do not. Why?

I think Rod left them out because the progressive politics of these communities don't fit with his preferred narrative of what the BenOp is supposed to be and look like. In short, Rod's vision of the BenOp is too partisan. And that's a shame. There is a progressive Christian version of the BenOp and Rod is refusing to call attention to how these Christians are living into the way of Jesus in sacrificial and beautiful ways.

All that to say, progressive Christians have a BenOp and they need a BenOp.

Even liberals need a tribe for spiritual formation.

Rod Dreher's book The Benedict Option is continuing to generate conversation, so I wanted to revisit my recent post contrasting Rod's vision of the BenOp with what I've described as a progressive vision of the BenOp.

To summarize my recent post about a progressive BenOp, I contrasted Christian culture with cruciformity. Rod tends to focus his discussions of the BenOp upon preserving Christian culture: orthodoxy, liturgy, and piety.

My concern with making culture the focus of the BenOp is the same concern Jesus leveled at the BenOp proponents of his time and place: the Pharisees.

My argument is that a progressive BenOp will focus not on culture but upon cruciformity, spiritually forming cross-carrying followers of Jesus. Another way to make this contrast is that Rod's BenOp is inspired by medieval monasticism, where the BenOp I'm describing is inspired by the gospels.

Examples of these sorts of BenOps are the Catholic Workers, the new monastics, and the L'Arche communities.

Now, readers have pushed back on me for characterizing these BenOps as "progressive." Can't orthodox and traditionally conservative Christians practice lifestyles of radical care and hospitality? Wasn't Dorothy Day, the founder of the Catholic Worker, orthodox, pious and traditional in her ethics?

If so, why describe these BenOps as "progressive"?

This is a fair point. Three reflections/responses.

First, I called these BenOps "progressive" as I was trying to show fellow progressives how we need and can create a BenOp. That is, I was casting a BenOp vision for progressives. Thus a "progressive vision of the BenOp."

Second, Rod hasn't included these communities in his BenOp descriptions. The Catholic Workers, new monastics and L'Arche don't appear in The Benedict Option. Presumably because these communities are focused more on radical hospitality than preserving Christian culture (orthodoxy, piety, liturgy). They don't hit the bulls eye for him, so they aren't great exemplars of his vision. Which is fine, but for a progressive like me these communities are precisely on target, especially when you have Jesus as your target rather than medieval monasticism.

In short, I used the label progressive because BenOps focused on radical hospitality seem to fall outside of Rod's vision, precisely because of what makes them so attractive to progressives.

Third, but the point is well taken. Conservative Christians can create these sorts of communities as well. So a more inclusive label may be in order.

I've suggested calling these cruciform BenOps the Franciscan Option. But since these BenOps are focused on the gospels another name could be the Gospel Option, or even the Jesus Option.

Rod Dreher's book The Benedict Option is now out with lots of reviews and commentary appearing online.

As regular readers know I've made the argument on this blog that progressive Christians need their own version of the BenOp. In fact, progressive Christians already have a rich history with the BenOp, witness the Catholic Worker and the New Monastic movements.

That the BenOp is as important for progressive Christians as it is for conservatives, though for different goals and reasons, is highlighted in Ross Douthat's review of Dreher's book:

And [the BenOp is for] not only conservative churches. The basic model could be applied just as easily to non-Christian faiths, and it could be embraced by the progressive Christians who find Dreher’s vision — and Chaput’s, and Esolen’s, and Russell Moore’s — too dogmatic and rigid and anti-modern.

Being a bit of a dogmatist myself, I’m skeptical that a robust institutional Christianity can be built on the premises of contemporary liberal theology and the cultural shifts that it accommodates. But that’s all the more reason for liberal Christians to set out to prove the conservatives wrong, to show that monasteries and missionaries can come forth from progressive fields, to effectively out-Benedict Option the reactionaries and force us to concede that we misjudged them.

In doing so they wouldn’t be abandoning political engagement, but they would be laying a foundation for faith’s endurance when political activism fails. As fail it so often does, as both progressive and conservative Christians have learned at different times across the last few decades — and may soon learn again. 

That's exactly the point I've been making about progressive Christianity's need for a BenOp, how our imagination for resistance has been captured by statism.

But as Kaya Oakes points out in her review of Dreher's book, there will be big differences between conservative and progressive versions of the BenOp.

Specifically, Oakes highlights the point I've made, that a progressive BenOp will live into Jesus' practices of radical hospitality. This, I've argued, combats the temptations toward phariseeism in conservative calls for the BenOp, the same temptation that Jesus battled in his debates with the Pharisees concerning their rival visions of the BenOp in the gospels. To highlight this difference I've called the progressive vision of the BenOp the Franciscan Option, as the early Franciscans were an intentional monastic community who specialized in living among and caring for lepers.

Basically, a progressive BenOp will look the same way Jesus' BenOp looked to the Pharisees: A community that embraces the unclean, privileges empathy over piety, isn't overly pious, and is the friend of sinners.

Again, read my summary post highlighting why progressive Christians need a BenOp and how a progressive BenOp differs from the conservative version.

But for this post I'd like to simplify and distill the contrast.

The basic contrast between a progressive and conservative version of the BenOp is this: cruciformity over culture.

Whenever you hear Dreher and other conservative Christians talk about the BenOp the focus is on preserving and investing in Christian culture. The focus is on doctrine, orthodoxy, values, moral codes, spiritual practices, Christian institutions, and liturgy. The conservative vision of the BenOp is focused upon creating a group of Christians who are appropriately orthodox and pious.

By contrast, a progressive BenOp is focused upon cruciformity, people who are spiritually formed to exhibit the self-donating love of Jesus--for enemies, lepers and the sinners of the world.

As we all know, orthodoxy does not produce cruciformity.

Neither does piety.

Neither does liturgy.

A progressive Christian BenOp isn't interested in preserving Christendom or medieval monasticism. A progressive Christian BenOp is interested in forming Christ-followers who care for the least of these, a people who locally practice the works of mercy.

From a progressive Christian perspective, then, preserving Christian culture, in and of itself, is pointless. Worse, it's Pharisaical. Jesus wasn't all that interested in orthodoxy, piety or liturgy. The Pharisees were, but Jesus wasn't.

So why do progressives need the BenOp?

Progressives need the BenOp because you don't fall out of bed loving the way Jesus loved. Cruciformity requires practice, discipline, intentionality and communal accountability.

More, to cut off a conservative objection, cruciformity also requires holiness, as holiness, in the progressive imagination, makes us increasingly other-oriented and available to each other. (My deeper exploration of the connection between holiness and love is in Chapter 12 of Reviving Old Scratch). For progressive Christians holiness is kenosis.

Progressive Christians need a BenOp because social justice, while vital and important, isn't the same as cruciformity. Progressive Christians need a BenOp because being a Democrat isn't the same as cruciformity. (Similar to how, for conservative Christians, piety, liturgy and orthodoxy aren't the same as cruciformity.)

Progressive Christians need a BenOp because you can be right on all the political issues, but unless you're sharing life in a local leper colony, an abandoned outpost of empire, practicing the works of mercy, you're not living into the cruciform life of Jesus.

We need a BenOp because a worshiping community caring on the edges of empire is vital in forming cruciformity. And here I agree with the the work of James Smith, but with a crucial difference. (For more on this point this is my progressive twist on Smith's "you are what you love".) Witness the hospitality of the Benedictines and Franciscans, along with the Catholic Workers, the New Monastics and Jean Vanier's L'Arche communities. These expressions of radical hospitality flow out of shared community and a culture rooted in gratitude, promise-keeping, truth-telling, and hospitality.

And on that distinction, creating a Christian culture as a means toward forming cruicformity versus preserving a Christian culture as a pious and orthodox end in itself, is the contrast between a conservative and a progressive BenOp.

As a liberal Christian one of the most challenging things I read in Yuval Levin's book The Fractured Republic: Renewing America's Social Contract in the Age of Individualism is his analysis regarding how we, as individuals, now stand isolated and alone before the state.

I think this is a potent analysis that we really need to ponder.

In Part 1 we used the words "fracture" and "diffusion" to describe our increasingly individualized society. What do we mean by these descriptions?

According to Levin, over the last few generations we've seen a breakdown in the mediating structures of American civic life. By mediating structures we mean local communities that stood between the individual and the state. Families, unions, churches, civic organizations, etc. In generations past there was more to civic engagement than "the state." Civic and social engagement took place within and through these smaller, local organizations.

But over the last few generations these mediating institutions have broken down or vanished altogether. And so what does that leave us with? Two things: individuals and the state. There is no mediating social structure between the two. There is just me and you, and we both, as isolated individuals, stand before the state.

In Levin's words, this is the great "bifurcation of American life," an increased pull toward individualism on the one hand combined with an increased focus and reliance upon a centralized state. The middle institutions between individuals and the state have vanished.

Here's Levin (p. 89):

...the bifurcation of American life...[is caused by] a greater centralization of power in the federal government to accompany greater individualism in the culture and economy. Increasingly, society consists of individuals and a national state, while the mediating institutions--family, community, church, unions, and others--fade and falter...[We] find concentration at the ends and a growing vacuum in the middle.

I think this is a huge, huge insight. I'd like to unpack some implications, keeping my eye on my progressive Christian tribe.

That the middle, mediating structures have evaporated in America, leaving only individuals and the state, explains why our politics has become so polarized. When only individuals and the state exist all social action must, necessarily, be done by and through the state. The state has become the only game in town.

Individuals, by themselves, can't do much, and the only other actor on the stage is the state. Thus the inevitable conclusion: If we want to do anything to solve our social problems we have to get the state to do it.

And both liberals and conservatives are affected here. Conservatives desiring to conserve "American values" and the "American way of life" want the state to protect and preserve American culture. Liberals, by contrast, want the state to fix and address economic inequities.

Either way, the solution to what ails America is the state.

Which means that both liberals and conservatives find it necessary to take control of the state. And so we fight over that control. And it's this fight to take control of the state that has made our politics so polarized. As individuals we fight to take control of the state, trying to wrest control away from others. Politics becomes a winner-take-all cage match.

But let's return to Levin's point. The reason we are fighting over the state is because we have an impoverished social and political imagination. We fight over the state because the state is the only thing we can imagine effecting change in the world. As individuals we are too small. So in our imaginations the only thing capable of making a difference in the world is the state.

The trouble with this, as Levin points out, is that while the state is a good solution for many of the problems facing us, it's not so good for other things. A lot of stuff that is broken in our neighborhoods can't and won't be fixed by Congress passing new laws. Many of the problems we find in our local communities can only be addressed on a smaller and more relational scale.

I find myself in agreement with this analysis. As I noted in my posts about a progressive vision of the Benedict Option, one of the things that plagues progressive Christian visions of social action is statism, the belief that social action is primarily done by and through the state. Progressive Christian social action is almost wholly focused on the machinations of the US judiciary, legislature and presidency.

Progressive Christian social action often reduces to getting the state to do progressive things.

Speaking as a progressive, of course I think we should get the state to do progressive things. But the problem with statism is that it doesn't look very much like Jesus' vision of social action, which was a lot more local, relational and intimate. Consider how Jesus gives little political attention to the Roman state but massive amounts of personal attention to hurting people on the street.

Beyond Jesus, a related problem with statism is how it has no room for the church. If the state is the only actor who can get anything done in the world then the local church is irrelevant.

Let's conclude by revisiting the main insight.

The mediating social institutions that stood between individuals and the state have been vanishing in America, leaving the state as the only player on the field big enough to address our social ills. But while the state can help solve many of our problems, it can't solve all of our problems. Especially those problems where the systemic and the personal intersect and interact, from poverty to race relations to chemical dependency to social and familial breakdowns.

I understand that the state can do more or less harm. Like many progressives I'm worried about the next four years. But the state, to take one example, cannot solve our racial issues. During the next four years let us not forget that Ferguson, all the other police shootings and the rise of Black Lives Matter occurred during the Obama administration. Having a progressive in the Oval Office did not and will not solve our racial issues.

The political imagination of progressive Christians needs to expand beyond electoral politics.

And yet, for far too many Christians electoral politics is the only tool we focus on in order to fix our social problems. We lack the imagination for anything else.

And if all you have is a hammer, everything starts looking like a nail.

Last January I wrote six posts dedicated to articulating a progressive vision of the Benedict Option. I want to pull those posts into a single summary post for easy consumption and sharing.

What is the Benedict Option?

The "Benedict Option" is the brainchild of conservative author and journalist Rod Dreher. To catch yourself up, read Rod's Benedict Option Frequently Asked Questions post summarizing his thoughts over the years and his responses to various questions and criticisms of the Ben Op.

Succinctly, the Ben Op argues that Western liberalism--especially, I would argue, its neo-liberal economic manifestations--has been corrosive to the Christian faith. To survive in cultures shaped by modernity, neo-liberalism, and capitalism proponents of the Ben Op argue that Christians will need to invest in creating rich, thick and distinctive cultures that cultivate the counter-cultural virtues necessary to sustain the church and Christian spiritual formation.

In his FAQ post here is how Rod describes the Ben Op:

The “Benedict Option” refers to Christians in the contemporary West who cease to identify the continuation of civility and moral community with the maintenance of American empire, and who therefore are keen to construct local forms of community as loci of Christian resistance against what the empire represents. Put less grandly, the Benedict Option — or “Ben Op” — is an umbrella term for Christians who accept [Alasdair] MacIntyre’s critique of modernity in [his book After Virtue], and who also recognize that forming Christians who live out Christianity according to Great Tradition requires embedding within communities and institutions dedicated to that formation.

As you can see from Rod's description--the Ben Op as resistance to empire--there's much in his description that resonates with progressive Christians. Resistance to empire is very close to the heart of the progressive Christian vision.

Conservative Christians have been talking about the Benedict Option, why should progressive Christians be talking about it?

Progressive Christians have their own unique struggles with the corrosive effects of modernity, capitalism and liberalism. Here are four particular struggles at work in progressive Christianity:

1. Statism
The belief that the state is the sole and final arbiter of social and moral affairs, thus reducing Christian social action to taking control of the state. Rather than practicing the works of mercy--personally visiting the sick and incarcerated, personally feeding the hungry and clothing the naked--progressive Christianity has become almost wholly politicized, a fight to control the state, a fight to rule the empire.

This is not to dismiss the vital and important role of political activism, but progressive Christian social action must been rooted in Jesus' vision of social action in Matthew 25: the very personal, local, face-to-face practices of the works of mercy.

2. Individualism
As Westerners progressive Christians privilege individualism over collectivism. This fierce commitment to radical autonomy and independence makes it difficult for progressive Christians to form communities that participate God's ongoing story of covenantal promise and fidelity.

This is a major reason why progressive Christians desperately need the Ben Op. Progressive Christians need to recover what it means to be the church, not abstractly, situationally and universally but intimately, intentionally, and locally.

3. Functional atheism
There is often little that is distinctive about progressive Christians when compared to secular humanists or liberal Democrats. Progressive Christians are also often embarrassed or defensive about their faith. That, or increasingly filled with doubt about their beliefs. The ranks of progressive Christians are filled with agnostics and atheists.

Pervasive doubt and agnosticism, along with an inability to articulate anything particularly or distinctively Christian in prophetic contrast to the prevailing liberal and humanistic consensus, suggests that progressive Christians need the Ben Op to recover confidence in the distinctive particularities of the Christian faith--morally, spiritually, culturally, politically, socially, and religiously.

4. Shame, Neurotic Status Anxiety and Exhaustion
The competitive meritocracy of capitalism fills our lives with neurotic status anxiety--what Brené Brown calls "the shame-based fear of being ordinary"--which drives us to emotional and physical exhaustion as we work and perform for self-esteem, success, relevance and significance.

Social media exacerbates the problem as we compare our lives to the happiness and successes we see on Facebook. In addition, the capitalist marketing, advertisement, media and entertainment environments saturates you with images of bright, shiny people who are successful, fit, happy and attractive.

And so we push ourselves to be successful, noticed or relevant. But the pricetag of all this pushing and striving is often emotional and physical exhaustion. That, or a keen sense of shame if you "fall behind" in the metrics of success. 

All this anxious pushing and striving so fills up our lives that we have no margin, time, or energy left to invest deeply in local community, especially if that investment in local community doesn't have a significant impact on the metrics we use to label ourselves as "successful." In the end, are too busy, distracted and tired to invest in church in any meaningful way.

In summary, as Westerners progressive Christians have been spiritually formed by modernity in ways that make it difficult for us to live in distinctively Christian ways.

So what would a progressive expression of the Benedict Option look like?

As I envision it, a progressive expression of the Benedict option will embody three main components.

A progressive Benedict Option will be a Franciscan rather than a Pharisaical community
 
A debate about the Ben Op is at the heart of the gospels. In the gospels we observe a conservative religious group who, reacting to the corruption of the political and religious establishment under empire, decide to turn inward to reclaim their distinctive culture and traditions in order to cultivate the virtues that would sustain them. We know this Ben Op group as the Pharisees.

The Pharisees were the conservative advocates of the Ben Op of their day. Observing how the political and the religious institutions had been co-opted by empire, the Pharisees called for a Ben Op, a call for communities to invest in local synagogues where teaching, liturgy and the daily practices of Torah observance would sustain the Jewish people in the dark age they were living in.

According to modern Ben Op proponents, that first-century situation is not unlike our own, which means that today's calls for a Ben Op are going to be haunted by the shadow of Phariseeism.

A progressive vision of the Ben Op will resist this Pharisaical tendency. So according to Jesus, how does the Ben Op get off track and become Pharisaical? Consider the parable of the Pharisee and the tax collector:

Luke 18.9-12
He also told this parable to some who trusted in themselves that they were righteous, and treated others with contempt: “Two men went up into the temple to pray, one a Pharisee and the other a tax collector. The Pharisee, standing by himself, prayed thus: ‘God, I thank you that I am not like other men, extortioners, unjust, adulterers, or even like this tax collector. I fast twice a week; I give tithes of all that I get.’"

According to Jesus, a Pharisaical Ben Op involves the contemptuous moral sorting of the world into the saints and sinners, the good guys and the bad guys, Us and Them.

A Pharisaical Ben Op turns inward and polices boundaries of moral purity. The Ben Op of Jesus, by contrast, turns outward and violates those boundaries:

Matthew 9.10-13
And as Jesus reclined at table in the house, behold, many tax collectors and sinners came and were reclining with Jesus and his disciples. And when the Pharisees saw this, they said to his disciples, “Why does your teacher eat with tax collectors and sinners?” But when he heard it, he said, “Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick. Go and learn what this means, ‘I desire mercy, and not sacrifice.’"

A progressive expression of the Ben Op will exhibit the radical hospitality of Jesus. Examples of progressive Ben Op communities practicing community and radical hospitality are Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove's Rutba House, the Catholic Worker movement, and Jean Vanier's L'Arche communities.

In sum, Progressive expressions of the Bne Op will be Franciscan communities. St. Francis and the early Franciscans were known for their care of lepers, living among and caring for that ostracized, unclean and marginalized community. This Franciscan impulse to embrace leper colonies keeps the Ben Op looking like Jesus--outward-looking, oriented toward hospitality and embracing of the unclean in table fellowship.

Progressive expressions of the Ben Op will share life with a leper colony, places in the local community that have been abandoned by the American Dream. Jails and prisons, underfunded schools, housing developments, city missions, hospitals, a neighborhood or zip code, assisted living facilities, senior-citizen homes, non-profits serving a marginalized group (e.g., refugees, domestic abuse victims, the homeless), and so on.

The goal in these location isn't to create a program or ministry to "save" or "rescue" or even "help." The goal, to take a cue from Samuel Wells (PDF), is simply "being with," to accompany and share life in an abandoned nook of empire.

It's this Franciscan impulse that will break the hold of statism upon the progressive liberal imagination and ground their social action in Matthew 25 with the practice of the works of mercy.

A progressive Ben Op will practice Sabbath as resistance

Beyond Western individualism, the other reason it is difficult for progressive (and conservative) Christians to invest in deep, committed and faithful Christian community is "the scarcity trap," our neurotic pursuit of self-esteem, success and significance in our Western meritocracies that emotionally and physically depletes and exhausts us. The felt scarcity of not "being enough" causes the scarcity of not "having enough," like enough time or energy.

Due to the "scarcity trap" Western Christians are increasingly unable to find any margin in their lives for authentic Christian community. Western Christians are too busy or exhausted to "do church." We don't have the time or energy for Christian community and spiritual formation.

Consequently, progressive Ben Op communities will practice what Walter Brueggemann has called "sabbath as resistance." As Walter writes:

In our own contemporary context of the rat race of anxiety, the celebration of Sabbath is an act of both resistance and alternative. It is resistance because it is a visible insistence that our lives are not defined by the production and consumption of commodity goods.

The Ben Op is often described as a withdrawal from the world. For progressive Christians this withdrawal isn't geographical, but psychological. A physical or geographical withdrawal would be antithetical to the Franciscan impulse to practice the works of mercy in an abandoned outpost of empire. But progressive Christians will have to psychologically withdraw from and opt out of the competitive, anxious meritocracy that drives the pursuit of the American Dream. We opt out of the rat race. We renounce the American Dream. Sabbath as resistance.

For progressive Christianity to become a locus of resistance to empire we have to be doxologically and liturgically formed into people who renounce--opt out, psychologically withdraw from--the way empire defines success and significance. But this renunciation will require--and this is key to why the Ben Op is so necessary--an enormous amount of shame-resiliency to remind ourselves that we aren't losers in the face of the shaming we will experience from the world when we stop chasing the American Dream.

The Ben Op community is where we will cultivate through doxology and spiritual formation the social and psychological antibodies necessary to live counter-culturally in a capitalistic meritocracy that will shame us for "falling behind." Consider an example I shared in my book Reviving Old Scratch, the story of a young man who left a prestigious educational institution to teach history at a poor, inner-city high school. That's opting out of the American Dream, the Franciscan call to share life in an abandoned outpost of empire to pursue a cruciform vision of success and significance.

But to sustain these sorts of choices, to forgo "success" to serve in ignoble ways in an abandoned outpost of empire, we need a community that will support and honor these choices. To opt out of empire is to experience shame. Which means that we have to become shame-resilient if we want to resist empire, individually and collectively.

And that's why we need the Ben Op, an intentional community practicing Sabbath as resistance so that we can develop the shame-resiliency necessary to live ignoble, foolish and cruciform lives in the midst of empire.

A progressive Ben Op will be egalitarian in gender roles

Beyond the temptation to become inward-looking and Pharisaically self-righteousness, Ben Op communities will also struggle if they are patriarchal.

Insular patriarchal communities are not safe for women and children. To be clear, this is not to say that insular and patriarchal communities are inevitably and always unsafe to women and children, just that insular and patriarchal communities are more prone to harm women and children than are more open and egalitarian communities. Women and children are always safer in communities where women share leadership with men. Especially in communities which are insular and cut-off from the world. And given that Ben Op communities will gravitate toward the insular it's safer if Ben Op communities are egalitarian rather than patriarchal.

Women and men have to share leadership responsibilities in Ben Op communities if they want to protect their women and children. Thus the final feature of a progressive expression of the Ben Op: A progressive Ben Op will be egalitarian in regards to gender roles and leadership.

I love liturgy as much as the next person, but liturgy is way, way overrated.

On Christmas eve when Jana and I were home visiting my family in PA we drove down to the Catholic cathedral for the midnight mass. I'm not Catholic, but again, I love liturgy and the liturgical calender. So I really look forward to Christmas eve liturgical services. These experiences are important to me.

As Jana and I were listening to the pre-service readings and music before the mass started a family entered and sat in front of us. They were very, very dressed up and you could tell that this was a part of their Catholic family Christmas eve ritual. Dress up, go out to a late night dinner and then go to mass.

As the family settled into the pews you could tell they were a bit tipsy from dinner or after-dinner drinks. And once the mass started they ignored the proceedings and whispered among themselves.

I'm not judging the family. I mentally check out of worship services all the time. I bring up this Christmas eve experience just to make a simple point: liturgy is over-rated when it comes to spiritual formation.

A lot of evangelicals find liturgy exotic and mysterious and therefore filled with spiritual potency. There is nothing more irritating than talking with an evangelical who has just discovered liturgy. Liturgy is the solution for what ails everything in the church! Liturgy is the answer to everything! Especially spiritual formation.

It's all total hogwash.

If you've spent any time at all in liturgical communities you know those communities aren't creating committed followers of Jesus any better than non-liturgical communities. In fact, if you look at the rates of the religiously-unaffiliated and where they are originating from, many of these liturgical traditions are struggling more than their non-liturgical evangelical counterparts.

Again, let me be very clear. I love liturgy and liturgy plays a central part in my own spiritual formation. There's a reason Jana and I were at that Christmas eve mass. Everyday I say Morning and Evening prayers with either the Book of Common Prayer or the Liturgy of the Hours.

But you only get out of liturgy what you put into it. You can go to Christmas eve mass tipsy and bored. Or you can go to mass expectant and full-hearted. It's a Chicken and Egg problem. You get out of liturgy what you put into it. Which implies that liturgy, as a spiritual formation tool, assumes some prior, extra-liturgical spiritual formation.

You have to care about liturgy to get anything from it. But that leaves open the question, where shall that caring come from?

I'm being hard on liturgy because I think an overly nostalgic and optimistic view of liturgy infects a lot of the Ben Op discussions. James Smith's book Desiring the Kingdom is a huge hit among Ben Op proponents. Desiring the Kingdom is a great book, one of the best I've read in the last ten years.

But one of my criticisms of Desiring the Kingdom is its overly optimistic vision of liturgy as a tool of spiritual formation. The impression of you get from Desiring the Kingdom is that liturgy has this profound ability to shape and direct your disordered desires. No doubt liturgy does do this. It does it for me. But again, that's because I have desires that I carry into the liturgy. And it's those extra-liturgical and pre-liturgical desires--those aching, expectant desires to seek the kingdom of God as I attend a Christmas eve mass--which are decisive.

It's like that joke about psychologists changing a light bulb. How many psychologists does it take to change a light bulb? Just one. But the light bulb really has to want to change.    

Liturgy is like that. Can liturgy help you desire the kingdom? Yes it can. But you have to desire the kingdom first if liturgy to be of any help.

So what we need, in addition to liturgical practices that help us desire the kingdom, are practices that help us become the kingdom.

In sum, I think the Ben Op has to be a pincer movement. On the one hand, as I described in my last post, we need liturgy to practice "sabbath a resistance." We need liturgy to help sustain our desiring the kingdom, especially in the face of the social shaming we will face as we opt out of the American way of life to live into the foolishness of the cross.

The second part of the pincer movement is creating a community that practices and incarnates the kingdom of God in their midst. The kingdom of God practiced intentionally, intimately, and locally.

Obviously, there is going to be some debate among Christians of various stripes about what practicing the kingdom of God should look like. As I argued it in Part 2 of this series, progressive Christians will reject a Pharisee-oriented Ben Op, an expression of the kingdom that focuses on monitoring orthodoxy and enforcing moral codes. As we've discussed, progressive proponents of the Ben Op will practice the kingdom through radical hospitality and the works of mercy (Matthew 25). Progressive exemplars here are the Catholic Workers, the new monastic movement, and Jean Vanier's L'arche communities.

In sum, a progressive Ben Op isn't just a liturgical community, a progressive vision of the Ben Op will be a Franciscan community.

We're all familiar with how Saint Francis opted out. How Francis stripped himself naked and renounced his family's wealth to live in poverty. That's part one of the pincer movement. But the second noteworthy thing Francis and his followers did, the second part of the Ben Op pincer movement I want to draw our attention to, is how Francis and the early Franciscans were known for their care of lepers, living among and caring for that ostracized, unclean and marginalized community.

When the Franciscans lived with leper colonies they were doing more than liturgically desiring the kingdom, they were becoming the kingdom.

And it's this second part of the Ben Op--the Franciscan impulse to embrace leper colonies--that keeps the Ben Op looking like Jesus, keeps the Ben Op outward-looking and oriented toward hospitality, helps the Ben Op incarnate Jesus' embrace of the unclean in table fellowship.

It's this Franciscan impulse that moves the Ben Op community away from lighting candles and incense in churches to washing the feet in the world. It's this Franciscan impulse that grounds the life of the Ben Op community in Matthew 25 and practicing of the works of mercy.

And again, it's this Franciscan impulse--caring for the "lepers"--that characterizes the progressive Ben Op communities we've pointed to: the Catholic Workers, the new monastic movement, and Jean Vanier's L'arche communities. Each of these communities illustrate both parts of the progressive Ben Op pincer movement, a Franciscan lifestyle of caring for and living for others along with being a richly liturgical community to sustain spiritual vibrancy and identity as we walk an ignoble, foolish path in the world as a community of the Cross.

So that's the heart of the progressive vision of Benedict Option. A progressive Ben Op is a liturgical, Franciscan community. And by liturgical I mean a community that practices sabbath as resistance, opting out of the American Dream to create the space and margin in our lives necessary to live as Franciscan communities, communities that exist to wash the feet of the "least of these" in our local contexts.

And yet, all this raises the million dollar question. How are we going to pull this off? The complaint will come: the local church is filled with families and busy people with mortgages and day jobs! You're not going to get bourgeois American Christians to adopt Catholic Worker and new monastic lifestyles!

You're totally correct. It's very, very hard to detox from the American Dream. So let me conclude these posts with some practical suggestions. Franciscan baby steps for bourgeois American Christians.

Again, the impulse of the Franciscan community is to be an outward-looking community committed to a lifestyle of hospitality.

And if you make a study of some of the great modern practitioners of Christian hospitality, people like Dorothy Day and Mother Teresa, they tell us that they were followers of the Little Way of Thérèse of Lisieux.

As I've gone around telling churches about the Little Way I've framed the heart of the Little Way as a practice of hospitality. Here's how I recently described the Little Way:

When you hear the Little Way described it's often described as a practice of self-mortification, of putting up with people when they frustrate and irritate us.

But that's not how I see it. For my part, as I teach the Little Way, I see it as a practice of approaching people, moving toward people in love. As I explain it, the Little Way is a practice of welcome, embrace and hospitality.

For example, in the Story of a Soul an overriding theme in Thérèse's descriptions of the Little way is that of approaching others with small expressions of warmth, welcome and kindness. Thérèse describes how the Sisters in her convent were variously popular or shunned. And having noted these distinctions--the socially rich versus the socially poor--Thérèse goes on to describe how the practice of the Little Way is a practice of hospitality, of welcoming the Sisters who were shunned and marginalized

The Little Way of hospitality is welcoming others, especially the most marginalized persons, with small acts of kindness and inclusion. As Thérèse wrote, "a word, an amiable smile, often suffice to make a sad soul bloom."

Small things, yes, but hugely difficult to do. Imagine how your life would change if you started daily and intentionally seeking out the most difficult to love people in your life to welcome them with a bit of warmth and kindness. Think, even, of how you might practice the Little Way on social media with hard to love people!

The Little Way may be little but, in the words of Dorothy Day, it is a harsh and dreadful discipline.

And here is the critical point: the Little Way is a discipline of hospitality that anyone can do, anywhere and at anytime. Day job or not.

So that's the first Franciscan baby step. Progressive Ben Ops will be communities that will place the practice the Little Way at the center of their lives, individually and collectively. Thérèse of Lisieux will become the patron saint of Ben Op spiritual formation.

And I think Rod might agree with me about that.

Beyond the Little Way, another Franciscan baby step is simply to take a cue from St. Francis.

Share life with a leper colony.

And by a leper colony I mean find people in your local community who have been abandoned by the American Dream. Look around your city and adopt a place and community that has been abandoned by empire, a place where people are lost and lonely. Here are some ideas:

• A prison or jail
• A poor school
• A housing development
• A city mission
• A hospital
• A local laundromat
• A neighborhood or zip code
• An assisted-living facility
• A state school
• A senior-citizen home
• A local non-profit serving a marginalized group (e.g., refugees, domestic abuse victims, the homeless)

The list can be expanded and expanded. But the goal in each instance isn't to create a program or ministry to "save" or "rescue" or even "help." The goal, to take a cue from Samuel Wells (PDF), is simply to be there, to accompany, to share life there. To be sure, you will likely serve, help and work for people in all of these locations. But like the Franciscans and their leper colonies, the goal is simply for the church to share life in an abandoned nook of empire.

No one in the church has to sell their home or quit their job or live in voluntary poverty. But there will have to be some opting out of the American Dream, some sabbath as resistance, if we are to make margin in our lives to share life with others. Being with others mostly means simply showing up. Everyday. So the members of the church have to make margin for it. Sharing life in a leper colony, being with others in an abandoned outpost of the American Dream, isn't a program or ministry. It's a lifestyle the church takes on as her core identity.   

You'll know you're heading in the right direction when there is absolutely no budget for this endeavor. When all you do as church is just show up for people. What William Stringfellow calls the sacrament of mere presence and Jean Vanier calls accompaniment.  Being with those abandoned by the American Dream. You know you're on the right track when the entire church is able to say, to a person, we live there. Everyday we are there--in that school, in that jail, in that cancer ward, in that mission, in that assisted-living facility, in that apartment complex--we are there, as a church, everyday.

We, all of us, our children and our elders, our clergy and our laity, our CEOs and our janitors, in one way or another, all of us, are there, everyday.

Being with. Sharing our life together.

Do this and God will do the rest.

For in that leper colony, in that abandoned wasteland of empire, we will find our church, our Christ, our God and our salvation.