Ted Grimsrud

Rod Dreher’s book , The Benedict Option: A Strategy for Christians in a Post-Christian World (Sentinel, 2017), presents itself as a challenge to Christians in general to make their faith more central to their lives and to respond to the alleged anti-Christian influences of contemporary North American culture by developing countercultural communities that empower faithful living (see my first, positive, post on Dreher’s book).

Now, as I elaborate in my second post in this series, Dreher’s argument, as it unfolds, actually presents many problems. At their core lies what I perceive to be a marginalizing of Jesus’s message, most especially Jesus’s call to costly love even toward one’s enemies. As I read Dreher, both in this book and in his prolific blog posts, I see his inattention to Jesus’s message of love to be most apparent in his treatment of same-sex marriage.

The most-discussed problem according to Dreher

Over and over throughout the book and in his blog posts and other writings, Dreher mentions same-sex marriage (s-s-m) and the more general acceptance of same-sex intimate relationships (which is what I assume he means in his common use of the term “homosexuality”—see especially his 2013 blog post, “Sex after Christianity”) as the paradigmatic expression of deeply problematic Western culture. Such acceptance is antithetical to “orthodox Christianity.” Dreher’s discussion suggests that perhaps the main manifestation of the dangers “orthodox Christians” face in our society now and in the near future is the persecution that those who are not accepting of s-s-m face and are sure to face even more in the days to come.

I don’t think he so much means to say that s-s-m is the most important of all issues as that it is our currently paradigmatic issue that shows just how thoroughly Christianity is being routed in our recent “culture wars.” It is the issue that catches up the problems of our society’s movement away from being a Christian culture. He doesn’t clearly explain why he continually cites s-s-m when he needs an example of the growing darkness and the growing danger that “orthodox Christians” will be treated ever harshly by the rulers of the present age (though I expect he would say the above cited essay, “Sex after Christianity” is an attempt to do so; I didn’t find it very illuminating, though). Continue reading “Dreher’s “Benedict Option”: Part 3—Same-sex marriage as the paradigmatic problem” →