Alan Jacobs

“This is a medium-sized temple. But this is a LARGE temple.”

“And then he fell in love with a boy. Well … the homosexual laws … "

“Some of the emperors were very bad indeed.”

“This is marble intaglio. Do you follow me?” [N.B. Pretty sure there’s no such thing as marble intaglio.]

“There are several triumphant arches here in the Forum.”

“I’ll just be back at the apartment if you need me.”

Sometimes rhetoric has consequences. If you spend days, weeks, months, years telling people they are under threat, that their country has been stolen from them, that they have been betrayed and sold down the river, that their birthright has been pilfered, that their problem is they’re too slow to realise any of this is happening, that their problem is they’re not sufficiently mad as hell, then at some point, in some place, something or someone is going to snap. And then something terrible is going to happen.

We can’t control the weather but, in politics, we can control the climate in which the weather happens. That’s on us, all of us, whatever side of any given argument we happen to be. Today, it feels like we’ve done something terrible to that climate.

Sad doesn’t begin to cover it. This is worse, much worse, than just sad. This is a day of infamy, a day in which we should all feel angry and ashamed. Because if you don’t feel a little ashamed – if you don’t feel sick, right now, wherever you are reading this – then something’s gone wrong with you somewhere.

— Alex Massie

I don’t know, maybe I’m eventually going to get used to writing on a phone….

I just want to take a moment to emphasize again how strongly I agree with Matthew Loftus’s insistence that if any particular version of the BenOp is not oriented towards the core mission of the Church, then it will fail as a Christian movement even if it succeeds in numerical terms.

But I also want to suggest that there are elements of the BenOp strategy as it is formulated by Rod Dreher and like-minded people that missional endeavors like those Loftus commends should also keep in mind and learn from.

People often criticize proponents of the BenOp for acting out of fear, but in general I think that American Christians are, as Aragorn said to Frodo, insufficiently fearful. (“You fear them, but you do not fear them enough, yet.”) Their fears are sometimes misdirected, to be sure; but it is not irrational to fear when you live in the neighborhood of something more powerful than you that does not mean you well, even when it genuinely thinks that it wants the best for you. (I refer not to Nazgul but to disenchanted modernity.)

In such circumstances I believe we do well to fear our enemies, but even better to fear ourselves — our internal dividedness, our weakness. About four hundred years ago, Thomas Browne wrote in Religio Medici:

I have no genius to disputes in religion: and have often thought it wisdom to decline them, especially upon a disadvantage, or when the cause of truth might suffer in the weakness of my patronage… . Every man is not a proper champion for truth, nor fit to take up the gauntlet in the cause of verity; many, from the ignorance of these maxims, and an inconsiderate zeal unto truth, have too rashly charged the troops of error and remain as trophies unto the enemies of truth. A man may be in as just possession of truth as of a city, and yet be forced to surrender; ‘tis therefore far better to enjoy her with peace than to hazard her on a battle.

And with that in mind, I’d like to say that the most important question we can ask about projects of mercy and charity and neighborliness like the ones that Loftus commends in his post, or that my friend Charles Marsh describes in his wonderful book The Beloved Community, is: Why do they so rarely last? Why do they tend to fall apart after a few years of effective ministry?

One reason, of course, is that such work is tiring, and people wear out. But I think another and more important reason is that people get involved in ministries like this out of what Browne calls “inconsiderate zeal” — zeal that is not fully considered. And what people typically fail to consider is whether they are prepared, whether they have been formed as Christians in such a way that they have adequate resources to withstand the temptations and the challenges and and plain old exhaustion that accompany any long-term attempt at genuinely Christlike love.

I don’t think Christians reflect nearly often enough on the fact that Jesus, who at the age of twelve was able to enlighten the rabbis in the Temple about Torah, did not begin his public ministry until he was thirty. What a waste of years! Think of all he could have accomplished!

What did he do in that time? He studied, he prayed, he trained in and worked at a job, he “grew in grace and in favor with God and with man.”

This, I think, is where BenOp strategies and “missional” strategies ought to converge: on a commitment to ministry to the whole world that recognizes that people can only carry out such ministry if they are well and properly formed, and formed not just by going to church most Sundays but by deeper, more ancient, more demanding practices of the Christian faith. This is why I have insisted on the necessity of paideia and catechesis: without such formation exciting missional enterprises will spring up quickly, but in the heat of the day they will wilt and die.

I’m not sure I have a firm grip on Matthew Loftus’s response to my questions for critics of the Benedict Option. His chief criticism of my post seems to be that I have phrased the core ideas of the BenOp in ways that he’s not sure how to disagree with.

Well, you know, that was the point. As I tried to explain in a follow-up post, I’ve been trying to isolate the sources of disagreement. If you disagree with any of those three key premises, then we’ll have one kind of conversation, one largely about ends. But if you agree with the premises and the conclusion, then we’ll have a very different conversation, one that on the basis of shared ends debates the best means.

When Loftus writes, “the Benedict Option is destined to flounder if it does not deal with how the Great Commission or the Great Commandments shape our Christian lives and communities,” I think: Absolutely. But then I think: and that’s true about every single Christian endeavor without exception. And then I think: I understood that reanimating our commitment to the Great Commission and the twofold Great Commandment was pretty much the BenOp’s whole reason for being. I thought that forming Christians in such a way that we are properly equipped, in knowledge and virtue, to do what Jesus tells us to do was the only reason for there to be a BenOp.

So maybe I’m the one who doesn’t understand the BenOp. But if I do understand it then Loftus’s criticism seems peculiar.

As for the rest of his post: every concern he raises is extremely important and I affirm the whole tenor and substance. If there’s one thing that every single instantiation of the BenOp must avoid it’s the temptation to practice love of my neighbor by ensuring that my neighbors are people I find easy to love. But those warnings and concerns seem to me more “how to do the BenOp right” rather than “we don’t need to devote more energy and attention to our Christian institutions.”

There’s much more to say but I can’t do long posts on my phone and I won’t be able to write more while I’m traveling. So this is the best I can do for a while.

Cooks on a break, sitting outside their café 

Cook (in what might be an Italian accent): Excuse me, sir — are you English? 

Me: I’m afraid not, I’m American. 

Cook: Even better! Sir, do you know the name of the city where President Kennedy was shot? 

Me: Dallas. Dallas, Texas. 

Cook: Yes! Thank you so much! 

Second cook: Of course. Dallas.  

I’m working in the British Library this morning and it feels like sanity, you know? People of all shapes and sizes and colors seeking to discover and share knowledge. I think of what old AEH says in Stoppard’s The Invention of Love:

“A scholar's business is to add to what is known. That is all. But it is capable of giving the very greatest satisfaction, because knowledge is good. It does not have to look good or even sound good or even do good. It is good just by being knowledge. And the only thing that makes it knowledge is that it is true. You can't have too much of it and there is no little too little to be worth having. There is truth and falsehood in a comma.”

So here we all are, seeking to know truth from falsehood, in a miscopied line or an artfully told tale or even, yes, in a comma. I'm writing this while sitting twenty feet from a copy of the Magna Carta, a few words with the power to restrain the whims of a proud King; and the Codex Sinaiticus, a big book full of Good News about God's love for us.

There are wicked books too, of course, and people who use good books wickedly. But for the moment it’s comforting to be here among the records of the wise and the living, breathing bodies of those seeking wisdom. It feels sane. It feels safe. Not everyone has either sanity or safety.

Don't let anyone steal that disgust from your heart. It is a precious thing. You should treasure your disgust as a sign of your decency, particularly because hardly anyone else will. Don't let anyone tell you that the nearly uncontrollable urge to retch at the thought of this election is disproportionate, or somehow uncivil. When you contemplate the fate of your country in 2016, you have the right to be depressed, or even despairing.

— Michael Brendan Dougherty. Amen.

Carl [Trueman] is right to note that the Benedict Option does not entail withdrawal from politics. It entails something far worse—a continuation of the culture war's politics of resentment.

“The Benedict Option” is a phrase now so thoroughly jawed over that it effectively means whatever you want it to mean. No amount of effort by Rod Dreher to clarify what he means by it can prevent everyone else who is looking for something new from using it to mean whatever they happen to be fascinated by.

— Greg Forster. So by his own account Greg Forster wants the BenOp to mean “the culture war’s politics of resentment.” (He’s like Humpty Dumpty, who says that a word means whatever he chooses. “The question is which is to be master, that’s all.”) The first question is: Why does he want it to mean that? The second question is: Why is he so quick to abandon the search for mutual understanding among Christians?

Like most criticisms of the BenOp, this one lacks reason and charity. It’s just a content-free grumble.

In response to my recent question for the critics of the BenOp, I got a great many content-free grumbles. But among those responses, the two most coherent ones go something like this:

(a) Rod Dreher is promoting this whole project in such an apocalyptic, hysterical  way that the only people he’s going to attract are paranoids and weirdos.

(b) Christianity has a long history of self-enclosed communities whose leaders, promising to protect their people from a hostile world, use that rhetoric to control and/or abuse their members.

To me, these are not reasons to reject the BenOp, but opportunities to correct it — both to make a better case for its varying possibilities and to build in safeguards against abuse. Moreover, I think many of these respondents assume that the BenOp necessarily involves living in some kind of Christian compound, whereas I think that’s only one way to strengthen our institutions, habits, and practices. (And one I don’t intend to follow. If I devote more thought and energy to building the Christian culture here at the Honors College of Baylor, and to my parish church, and try to work with like-minded others in those projects, while continuing to live in my ordinary city neighborhood, then that’s a mode of embodying the BenOp idea too.)

But let me put my challenge in a different way by asking skeptical readers to pretend that they’ve never heard the phrase “Benedict Option” or the name Rod Dreher. Now, having thus purified your minds, look again at the premises and conclusion I articulated earlier:

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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.

Therefore: 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.

Now: What there do you disagree with?

here

It grieves me to see that as religious freedom for American Christians comes increasingly under attack, some American Christians — I'm not even going to link to them — are hoping to undermine religious freedom for Muslims. They are depressingly unaware that they are eagerly weaving the rope from which their own religious freedoms will be hanged. In such a climate I want to re-post something I wrote for The American Scene six years ago, when there was a fuss over the possibility of a mosque being built near the World Trade Center site. I would especially call your attention to the link to George Washington's letter to the Newport Synagogue, one of the most important documents in the history of religious liberty and far too little noticed today.

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Of course Mayor Bloomberg is right — of course. It’s sad that there should even be debate about the core legal principles involved. Whether the building of a mosque so near Ground Zero is a good idea — whether it promotes the health of the city, as some of the proponents of the scheme say they want to do — is a completely different question, a matter of social prudence. About this reasonable people will disagree.

But legally the situation is simple, as the mayor points out: “with or without landmark designation, there is nothing in the law that would prevent the owners from opening a mosque within the existing building. The simple fact is this building is private property, and the owners have a right to use the building as a house of worship. The government has no right whatsoever to deny that right – and if it were tried, the courts would almost certainly strike it down as a violation of the U.S. Constitution.” He could delete the “almost” in that last sentence.

But the really sad thing is that people who call themselves conservatives — Newt Gingrich, Sarah Palin — should be crying out for apparatuses of the state to limit and police voluntary religious association. This is a profoundly anti-conservative view in two ways. First, it is historically myopic, as Mayor Bloomberg’s brief history of controversies about religious freedom in New York City demonstrates. It’s remarkable that people who invoke the Founders so regularly and in such tones of devotion could be utterly deaf to the Founders’ concern to ensure freedom for mistrusted minority religions. They might start by reading George Washington’s once-famous letter to the Newport synagogue, paying special attention to this sentence: “It is now no more that toleration is spoken of, as if it was by the indulgence of one class of people, that another enjoyed the exercise of their inherent national gifts.” In Washington’s understanding, it is misbegotten even to ask the question, “Should we tolerate this?”

Moreover, the Gingrich-Palin view of the matter is as blind to the future as it is to the past. No one would make such an argument who did not anticipate that his or her own religious preferences will forever be enshrined as the socially dominant ones. Having endorsed the principle that minority religions can be policed by the state, Gingrich and Palin may well be unpopular figures to their descendants, if Christianity continues to decline as a force in American culture.

In its origins, with Burke, conservatism was supposed to be about taking the long view, having proper deference to the wisdom of our ancestors and taking proper care for the flourishing of our descendants. This is also what Chesterton meant when he said that tradition is “the democracy of the dead.” Burke thought this long view was most likely to be taken by the aristocracy, but in a society without an aristocracy there needs to be a body of intellectuals who take it as their special mission to meditate on the “first things”, one might say, that link us to those who went before us and those who will come after.

The approach Gingrich and Palin take to the proposed lower Manhattan mosque has nothing to do with conservatism in this sense. It is neither conservative, nor liberal, nor anything else worthy to be called “political thought.” It is an infantile grasping after a fleeting and elusive cultural dominance.