The Benedict Option and a Boisterous, Noisy, Generous, Faith

Generous. Boisterous. Noisy.

That’s the description Giles Fraser used when writing about what was lost in the English Reformation.

Rod Dreher learned the wrong lesson from Benedict.

Dreher’s Benedictine option rightly critiques the consumerism inherent both in modern religiosity and in American culture, but he supplants it with his own rigorous, protestant, self-righteous, judgmental moralism that could not be farther than the world the Benedictines inhabited.

“A religion of inwardness, devoid of external pegs or props. Sitting in an empty room, mid the ruins of smashed statues, in silence, doing nothing.” Except judging gay people and women, Inwardly sanctified and horrifyingly self abusive and judgmental.

Or an ordered and practical Christianity, built on the liturgical rhythms of the church and centred on the Mass— inclusive, noisy, generous and non-judgmental. “boisterous God-infused praxis,”

I’ll take the noisy, generous Benedict. Not the imaginary, self-righteous one.