A few days ago, Rod Dreher was on Tucker Carlson Tonight to talk about his new book The Benedict Option which has finally been released.
If you follow Rod Dreher at The American Conservative, it seems like he has been blogging about The Benedict Option for years now. I don’t want to say too much about it until I have read the final product. I already know enough about The Benedict Option though to have mixed feelings about it.
1.) Rod Dreher is correct that Millennials have mixed feelings about Christianity. I know that is definitely true in our community. I’ve personally been alienated from Christianity. It is hard for our community to identify with Christianity given the stance its institutions have taken on race. Here in the South, this wasn’t an issue for our ancestors who didn’t see a conflict between their racial and religious identity, but now Southern Baptists are represented by the likes of Russell Moore who say polarizing things like we must choose between The Cross and the Confederate Flag.
2.) Rod Dreher is correct that Christianity is waning in American life. The Atlantic recently boasted about the decline of White Christian America. Since President Trump won the 2016 election though, I have noticed a sense of remorse developing on the Left about the decline of the Religious Right. They are now embroiled in a new kind of culture war.
3.) I have no objection to Christians decoupling their identity from the ideology of Americanism and the American state. Psychologically, the Alt-Right has already done so. What does Christianity have in common with liberalism as it exists today in the age of transgenderism?
4.) I am a big fan of Alasdair MacIntyre and agree with his analysis of the West’s moral decline.
Here is where I disagree with Rod Dreher:
1.) Rod Dreher comes across to me as a late 20th century American conservative. Everything he writes is colored by his time and place and ideology. It’s like he is pulled in two different directions. Intellectually, he is pulled away from the “mainstream.” Socially though, he has a deep desire to fit in with the “mainstream” and to be considered “respectable.”
2.) Rod Dreher subscribes to what some of us have labeled “Americanity.” He subscribes to a theology which is a product of late 20th century America. He fits in with Russell Moore’s crowd. He wouldn’t have fit it with Southern Christianity as it existed 100 years ago.
3.) Contrast Rod Dreher with Stonewall Jackson or Robert E. Lee or James Henley Thornwell or John C. Pemberton or Robert Lewis Dabney. Jackson and Lee were pious men. They were also STRONG men. If you look at Rod Dreher though, you see a WEAK man.
4.) Finally, Dreher has a completely different outlook on technology. The Alt-Right has been emboldened by technology. We have seized on technology to fight a culture war. In contrast, it seems like the Religious Right (or at least the Rod Dreher crowd) has lost its will to fight at the exact moment when liberalism has exhausted itself and has begun to show signs of weakness.
I’ve asked Rod Dreher many times how would Benedict option work against managerial state hellbent on destroying Christian morality but he has never responded to me with anything.
Does anyone seriously believe that we would be allowed to withdraw from the modern totalitarian state? We have no choice but to fight back because our extinction is the ultimate goal of our enemies.
Just turn off get away from TV
That a huge withdrawal
I did that years ago. But withdrawing as individuals and isolated families isn’t going to save us. We need communities, and communities have to have boundaries defining who is part of our group and who isn’t, and if that began to happen on any significant scale it would bring the full weight of our anti-discrimination (at least for Whites) regime against us to break it up.
Like the character in Submission I’m not sure Christianity can be reignited to inspire whites. But then what?
Oh good reference.
Yes Christianity needs to become Anti-Semitic again…
The desire to be “respectable” to the White Hating Jew, and the Jew’s horde of feral Orcs, drains your will, energy and soul.
White self hatred is sick!
Well, I have no idea what the “Benedict Option” is so it could have used a few sentences to explain this at the start of the argument to make it a better read.
We will get into it.
Withdraw from American popular culture , PC academia, the public schools, TV
Set up separatist schools , monestaries, think of the government , media , judiciary, academia as hostile forces that need to be avoided.
Stop being so patriotic to our country dominated by Hollywood and Harvard Law School.
Most all US military missions aren t going to be for us, so stop waving the flag and “supporting the troops”
Support the Russian troops .
Christianity these days is like Cuckservatism- sugar coated Leftism in disguise. They support mixed marriages, massive third world influxes and endless foreign aid and then with a straight face, claim to be conservative. The only thing conservative about them is they support endless war and interference in other nations that many are tired of.
I’m thinking of just staying home on Sunday with my bible and personal prayers. I love Christianity but hate most churches.
Cuckservatives and most churches these days are Leftie lites. They don’t speak for us…haven’t done for years.
What you’ve written is very true. However, historic and authentic New Testament teaching provides no justification for current multicultural dogma. Such notions simply cannot be found in the writings of the apostles. Those that supposedly are have been twisted from their historical context and cultural setting. In no place does the New Testament envision or give its stamp of approval on miscegenation, borderless nations, or any form of a soft genocide on any racial or ethnic group of people.
People confuse Christ’s mandate to proclaim the Gospel to all nations with multiculturalism and the ‘diversity’ creed. The two are totally unrelated. Neither Jesus nor His apostles demanded that Jews stop being Jews (culturally), not that Greeks stop being Greeks (ethnically and culturally). Yes, they condemned idolatrous religious practices, but they did not condemn that which was unique to them as a people in the form of received customs, traditions and cultural identity.
Totally agree. Though I’m no expert, I can see that churches, like our schools, colleges, media, etc is riddled with Leftie / Jewish influences. Their teachings and influences are in everything we see, hear and grow up with. Thats what our side are up against.
All these Leftwing infestations have created a culture where white genocide, white hate and homo love is normalized and mainstream and our beliefs – mainstream 100 years ago- is now ‘extreme Right wing’!
What it will take to undo this, I don’t know.
Enjoy your evening sir.
We need to recapture the exclusionary nature of honest orthodox, biblical Christianity. The only two groups that were ever considered proper proselyte classes, were the Hellenists -i.e. the Roman empire or Europe, and the Hebraicists i.e. those who were of the nation, of the land of Judea… But only at the time of Christ’s Advent.
After A.D. 70, the church is now God’s ‘Israel’ -Galatians 6:16.
The accommodation of Rome, all the Protestant churches, the heretical Baptist dispensationalist fiends, and the other heretical sects, all drinking the Jonestown look-aid, that the fallacy that apostate Judaism has any relation to Christianity: it is the great Satan of the modern era.
Christianity is for cucks and junkies. Bending down in front of middle eastern Jew Jesus will further emasculate whiteman. To tackle the Jew whites need to go back to invent a new religion. We r inventors. Pastor cucks should be driven out of wn.
Josh, you’re a traitor to your own name. It’s a biblical name. Joshua. The son of Nun. Who obeyed Moses, YHWH God and, & led the Israelites into the promised land. You, OTOH, with these narrow-minded, bigoted Left-Wing opinions, are merely spinning around… in the desert of Sin.
Rod Dreher is not a conservative or a genuine representative of Christianity or the religious right. Christianity IS Christianity. That may not mean much to unbelievers who see arbitrary standards, but without belief, what is Christianity? The absence of Faith among “respectable” conservatives was always fatal. It was always a con with those people. The change that has occurred in society in the last fifty years IS the reason for Western decline, and it won’t be reversed with by the “Alt-Right.” It will be reversed by the sort of people who understand what has changed and the necessary actions to reverse it. It will take a Phillipe Le Bel.
Incidentally, Joseph Ratzinger was a Teilhardian obscurantist, a neo-modernist. He just wasn’t an out an out Anti-clerical Leftist like Bergoglio. The “Benedict Option” is just the cuckservative “lay down and die” option. Personally, I think the “deep state” meddles a lot in religion, there are people who act as though they were hired who promote an agenda of retreat from traditional values in the most ostensibly “traditional” communities around. Many traditional clergy are bought and black-mailed and they are not in any way serious about a Catholic revival. There is not genuine freedom of religion in the USA. The Jews have no interest in permitting Christianity to freely exist in the USA, which is why I fear that Trump’s promises to Christians will be the most difficult to keep.
Eastern Orthodox Christianity would seem to be the last denomination of that religion that hasn’t fallen to the Cultural Marxists. Unlike Western churches I think they have always had the proper kind relationship with State authority.
They had to deal with the Jewish Bolsheviks for 70 years! That will teach you a hell of a lot in any other instance.
Peter I (Peter the Great) reorganized the Russian state bureaucracy so that his authority wouldn’t come into conflict with Church authority. The Russian Orthodox Church suffered greatly under Soviet rule but persevered in the end. This week marks the100th anniversary of Nicholas II’s abdication. Predictably enough the demonic jewsmedia has been silent about it.
Of course the only canonical jurisdiction which has not capitulated in the US to cultural marxism is Rocor and maybe the Ukrainian metropolia. On a practical level the laity are alienated from the orthodox phronema.
Canonical my foot! What happened to ROCOR in this last two decades, is nothing short of heinous. The roll call is still out on Russia, and ROCOR is eating itself alive at the present moment. While there are problems with the small traditionalist Orthodox Church jurisdictions, i’d rather take my chances with them, frankly. One has to remember what Father Seraphim Rose wrote down, as a watchword for this era- “In the end, all the churches will serve antichrist.” My two cents.
Get rid of Christian ethics and whites will turn into Social Darwinists.
They thought they hated the Christian Right. They are really going to hate the Post-Christian Right. But by then, they’ll be taking their last helicopter ride.
He is a cuck who would never think of dicrediting the left, but then again all conservatives are essentially useless in that regard. The Left is a big fat friggin target and our genius intellectuals instead write essays telling us of their genius.
Hard to believe Cuck Dreher edits AmCon, the magazine that laid the groundwork for the Alt Right in the 2000s when Spencer, Taki, and Buchanan wrote there.
http://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/punching-richard-spencer/
I am on the record in this space as rejecting and loathing everything
Richard Spencer stands for. He has publicly denounced me, and said that I
represent the decline of this magazine.
And Spencer is correct.
OK. I want to see where he lives. I just learned that Bernie Sanders pays only a 13.5% tax rate. I already knew he lived in a state where you will not see a black person if you spend almost 2 weeks there as I did last summer. We all know that the Christians who lecture us about evil racism are phonies. They’re not fooling anyone. We might be moving into a time where other people stop being so nice and tolerant of the phonies.
The NY Times ran an OpEd https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/14/opinion/are-we-raising-racists.html?smid=tw-nytimes&smtyp=cur The part I found so . . . interesting was how we are supposed to look to black and Latino parents on how they talk to their children about race. Nobody believes that black parents are our role models. Latinos are still more of a mystery to me but I’ve seen black people my whole life. They are not role models, by and large.
That’s easy: https://www.google.com/search?q=baton+rouge+flood&btnG.x=0&btnG.y=0&domains=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.theamericanconservative.com&sitesearch=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.theamericanconservative.com
He was just outside the flooded area.
This weirdo with the big glasses wants to talk about St. Benedict’s example. “A Canticle for Leibowitz” in a Brave New World? No, of course not. When we think of St. Benedict, let’s think of Monte Cassino, and the FANATICISM that is necessary when defending.
This guy said nothing new that hasn’t been said by a host of other Christian authors. The entire concept of Christians being more ‘relevant’ to the unbelieving world has been around since at least the 1980s with the ‘Church Growth Movement.’
As expected, he offered no details on how to be ‘relevant’ to a new and unbelieving age. What they usually say are things like, ‘invite unbelievers to your home for dinner,’ ‘smile and say hello to your neighbors more often,’ ‘invite them to church,’ ‘think of creative ways in which to deliver the Gospel,’ etc.
What Rod Dreher said was good, but it was nothing new. Looking and hearing him, I suspect that he’s a milquetoast Arminian, anti-Calvinist type who is barely on the fringes of evangelical orthodoxy. Give it enough time and he’ll eventually be aligned with the liberal, universalism crowd.
Little does he know that his desire to be ‘relevant’ and ‘respectable’ will be his demise. Whenever Christians get caught up in these vain pursuits, the Gospel gets watered down. He hasn’t yet realized that his primary job is to simply proclaim the Gospel accurately, and to leave the results to God.
Amen-preach it!
My point exactly
Bunch of bs. mobilize states militias.
Rod Dreher comes across to me as a late 20th century American conservative.
You misspelled ‘cuckservative’, Dreher pretty much defines the term.
Dreher is ready to throw in the towel because he can’t even admit to himself who the enemy is. Name the Jew, Rod, and free yourself.
The liberals have no place in Christianity. The Church should be controlled, funded, and occupied by radical right wing Christians. That’s how Christian Reconstruction will be successful in the World. WPWW !