(From my coming book Memento Mori – Helping the Church Regain the Lost Art of Dying Well)

In 2017, Rod Dreher offered his version of “dying to the world” which he names the “Benedict Option” because he “came to see the churches, including my own, as largely ineffective in combating the forces of cultural decline.” His option is named after Saint Benedict, the 6th century father of Western monasticism responding to the collapse of Roman civilization. Dreher explains,

“I called the strategic withdrawal prophesied by MacIntyre “the Benedict Option.” The idea is that serious Christian conservatives could no longer live business-as-usual lives in America, that we have to develop creative, communal solutions to help us hold on to our faith and our values in a world growing ever more hostile to them. We would have to choose to make a decisive leap into a truly countercultural way of living Christianity, or we would doom our children and our children’s children to assimilation . . .I have written The Benedict Option to wake up the church and to encourage it to act to strengthen itself, while there is still time. If we want to survive, we have to return to the roots of our faith, both in thought and in practice. We are going to have to learn habits of the heart forgotten by believers in the West. We are going to have to change our lives, and our approach to life, in radical ways. In short, we are going to have to be the church, without compromise, no matter what it costs.“

Dreher has some strong points in his argument for his Benedict Option. Children and teenagers, whose worldview is still being formed, need to be temporarily shielded from the culture. On a practical level, most parents instinctively understand this and protect their children from certain things that have devastating consequences—i..e, x-rated movies, drugs, alcohol, etc. The same is true for worldviews. Until their worldview is formed, children need to be protected from cultural worldviews that are antithetical to the Biblical worldview. No sane parent would let their child explore and indulge nihilism; the results would be catastrophic. A strong argument can be made in today’s culture to withdraw children from public education and school them in private education or home-schooling.

But “dying to the world” does not mean wholesale abandonment of the culture and withdrawal to a monastic environment. The church is “in” the world but not “of” the world. 1 John 2:15 exhorts us “Do not love the world or the things in the world. If anyone loves the world, the love of the Father is not in him.” This does not mean that we abhor God’s beautiful (though fallen) creation. It means we experience increasing alienation from the world’s system of values. As Christians mature in Christ and die to the world, they experience increasing enmity with the world (John 15:18-19). When Dreher speaks of “creative, communal solutions to help us hold on to our faith and our values in a world growing ever more hostile to them”, he is articulating the character of the church. As we shall see in chapter nine, embracing the local church is key to dying well.