The ex-Christian, feminist blogger Libby Anne says that she grew up in a Benedict Option, and it didn’t work. Excerpts:
Well, as a homeschooled child, I grew up with this greater degree of separation, and it didn’t work. Let me explain why it didn’t work.
On the surface, it probably looked like it worked. As a child, my life revolved around church, Bible study, Bible club, homeschool co-op (you had to sign a statement of faith), homeschool debate club (another statement of faith), and children’s choir at our church. We had a large number of families in our social circle, and all were evangelical or fundamentalist Christians like us. All of the other children I was friends with were homeschooled, and all integrated religion into their curricula. My mother read the Bible aloud to us every morning after breakfast, and we were required to read the Bible to ourselves before breakfast as well. My father prayed with us before bed, and we memorized hundreds of Bible verses and studied theology and apologetics. All of our subjects were taught from a Christian perspective.
Growing up, we each made a profession of faith and we were each baptized. We were isolated from the influences we might have received had we attended public school. We didn’t date, we didn’t party, we never tried smoking or drugs. By all appearances, we were good Christian kids. In fact, at our evangelical megachurch—where we eschewed youth group as too worldly, because there were public school kids there—we were seen by many as the quintessential example of a godly Christian family. Our faith was woven seamlessly through our lives.
Despite all that, Libby Anne left the church anyway. When she went off to college, she was totally unprepared to engage people who didn’t see the world as she did. For another:
There’s another problem, too. Growing up within Christian community, I only ever heard the other side’s arguments through a sort of filter. For example, I studied evolution out of creationist textbooks which explained evolution in an incomplete way and was full of straw men of evolutionary scientists’ positions. The same was true with basically everything. I didn’t hear the other side’s argument from the horse’s mouth, as it were, until I was in college, and when I did I was surprised, because what the other side actually said didn’t line up with what I’d been taught it said. This created a crisis of faith, because I no longer felt I could trust what my parents had taught me.
Because what I call the Christian bubble filter is so common across congregations and communities, raising children under a more separate Benedict Option could potentially mean that all of their information about the world outside the bubble would be filtered and thus distorted. This is a problem because when they eventually hear something from someone outside of the bubble, unfiltered—the moment they meet an ordinary gay couple happily raising children, or learn that using entropy to argue against evolution fails on the most basic level—-it won’t line up with what they’d been told inside the bubble. And frankly, postponing this moment until adulthood spells trouble.
There’s a lot more, but I don’t want to overquote her here. Let me just say, read the whole thing.
I appreciate her very challenging comment. As I’ve said here before, I grew up in a family where the approach to Christianity was undemanding. Believe it or not, even though I was raised in the Deep South, fundamentalists were thin on the ground in my town. I don’t think I met an actual fundamentalist who behaved in the way Libby Anne describes until I was an adult. Given my background, I longed for a Christianity that was deeper and more rigorous. Had I been raised like Libby Anne, I suspect that I would have similar misgivings about Christianity. It’s impossible to say.
And, I don’t want to push back as hard as I might, simply because as I’m writing the Benedict Option book, I want to learn from the experiences of people like her, for the sake of avoiding, and teaching readers to avoid, the mistakes that led her to lose her faith.
That said, I do want to push back against the idea that the only options on the table are life in a fundagelical bubble, or no separation at all from the world. Insofar as I’m raising my children in a Benedict Option, their childhood looks nothing like Libby Anne’s. I don’t personally know too many people who would say that they are Ben Opping in their families, but of those I do, their lives don’t look like Libby Anne’s family in childhood. At this point in my research, it’s hard to say with any precision what the difference is, but one thing that stands out is that none of us approach the world as a terrifying place from which the kids have to be protected like diamonds in a vault.
For example, all my kids know that gays exists, and that they are people like everybody else. Our kids know what sex is, and that people have sex outside of marriage. Et cetera. Our kids know what we believe to be morally right, and they know that our family’s beliefs in this regard mark us as outsiders in this culture. But they are still true anyway, and as is age-appropriate, we explain why we believe what we believe.
They’re getting normal biological science in homeschooling, but we explain to them how to reconcile what we know from science with what we know from Scripture and Tradition. And again, as age-appropriate, we explain the difference between Science and Scientism. And so on.
This is our general approach to the world outside the home. Is it going to produce resilient Christian adults who hold on to their faith once they leave the nest? We hope so, but we also know that there is no foolproof formula. Weirdly enough, my late sister and I both turned out to be more religiously observant than our parents, but I have had a number of friends over the years who were raised more or less like I was, and who no longer go to church because they believe there’s nothing much to it. On the other hand, I have a friend whose adult children were raised in the best of all conceivable Christian homes, yet one of her three left the faith in a big, bold way. You never know.
But I believe that there are some environments that grow more resilient kids, and some that do not. It would be interesting to me to know what happened to most of the other kids that Libby Anne was raised with. Are they still practicing the faith? Did they stick with fundagelicalism, or did they find a less rigid form of Christianity? Again, the kind of childhood Libby Anne had, I find strongly unappealing. But maybe that says more about Libby Anne and me than it does about that kind of Christianity. More important, I want to highlight that this fundamentalist-or-nothing model that she posits is a false choice. I don’t believe, as a matter of principle, that all Benedict Options are created equal. Again, though, I’m trying, in my research, to discover which practices work better than others. That’s why I don’t want to get too defensive towards the Libby Annes.
I’ve heard a lot before from people who were raised in Ben Op-type situations that went bad. I’d like to hear from those who were raised in these situations that succeeded. What did your parents and community do right?
Raising kids is hard. Always has been. It’s especially so when you’re having to raise them against the grain of the broader culture. Unfortunately, you only get one shot at it, and it’s easy to screw up. But you don’t see what you did wrong, except in retrospect — after it’s too late.