I just finished a recently published book by Rod Dreher, an American writer and blogger on issues of politics and religion.
The work is tittled, The Benedict Option: A Strategy for Christians in a Post-Christian World.
Dreher’s view of the current state of Christianity is distinctly negative, a point of view I share with him somewhat.
He writes: “The light of Christianity is flickering out all over the West. There are people alive today who may live to see the effective death of Christianity within our civilization. By God’s mercy, the faith may continue to flourish in the Global South and China, but barring a dramatic reversal of current trends, it will all but disappear entirely from Europe and North America. This may not be the end of the world, but it is the end of a world, and only the willfully blind would deny it.”
He continues: “Today, we can see that we’ve lost on every front and that the swift and relentless currents of secularism have overwhelmed our flimsy barriers. Hostile secular nihilism has won the day in our nation’s government, and the culture has turned powerfully against traditional Christians. We tell ourselves that these developments have been imposed by a liberal elite, because we find the truth intolerable: The American people, either actively or passively, approve. … American Christians are going to have to come to terms with the brute fact that we live in a culture … in which our beliefs make increasingly little sense. We speak a language that the world more and more either cannot hear or finds offensive to its ears.”
Dreher derives the title of his book not from the recent Pope Benedict XVI, but from the sixth-century St. Benedict of Nursia, who founded about a dozen monastic communities and authored the famous Benedictine “Rule” for monks. Because of his pivotal role in Europe’s emergence from the so-called “Dark Ages” that followed the collapse of the Roman Empire, Benedict is considered the continent’s “patron saint.” The choice of Benedict’s name already suggests something of Dreher’s overall advice for Christians, which involves a combination of withdrawal, sinking deeper roots, and re-engagement.
Modern Christianity has sought to establish a rapport with the world in the hope that, being less critical and judgmental of secular values, it might at least live in a state of peaceful co-existence with those who either ignore the Gospel or are hostile to its message.
But historical Christianity has shown that, when Christian communities gathered in a simultaneous commitment to preaching the Gospel and actively resisted the darker forces of the world with a message of charity and forgiveness, the Church itself flourished and the advancement of Western civilization along with it.
Dreher reminds us that, as followers of Christ, we are “to be in the world but not of the world”, a wisdom the Christian Church seems to have abandoned in recent times.
Without question, Western civilization is in peril of extinction as the influence of Christianity continues to diminish.
If the faithful do not separate themselves from the values of the world, the Christianity itself cannot and will not survive for another generation or two.
I agree with all those who will react and say that Dreher’s view and mine are pessimistic without a doubt.
The question remains: are we simply wrong or truly insightful?
What thinkest you?
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