Alan Jacobs says as far as he can tell, the Benedict Option stems from these three principles:
- The dominant media of our technological society are powerful forces for socializing people into modes of thought and action that are often inconsistent with, if not absolutely hostile to, Christian faith and practice.
- In America today, churches and other Christian institutions (schools at all levels, parachurch organizations with various missions) are comparatively very weak at socializing people, if for no other reason than that they have access to comparatively little mindspace.
- Healthy Christian communities are made up of people who have been thoroughly grounded in, thoroughly socialized into, the the historic practices and beliefs of the Christian church.
More:
From these three premises proponents of the Benedict Option draw a conclusion: If we are to form strong Christians, people with robust commitment to and robust understanding of the Christian life, then we need to shift the balance of ideological power towards Christian formation, and that means investing more of our time and attention than we have been spending on strengthening our Christian institutions.
Read his whole post. Alan says he doesn’t understand how any thoughtful Christians can dissent from this, and asks those who do to explain why.
I’d like to know too. There are good faith and bad faith ways to answer Alan’s query. The bad faith way is, “Because if 1, 2, and 3 are true, then I would have to change my way of living more than I am comfortable doing. Therefore, I will not take it seriously.”
But nobody actually says that. The difficulty is trying to figure out when apparently good-faith criticisms are really bad-faith ones in disguise, ones that don’t deserve a response.