Several years ago, I took a copy of The Atlantic Monthly with me on a non-stop flight from Baltimore to the Los Angeles area. I was still reading it when the plane landed on the West Coast. And that was before Emma Green arrived.
As I have stated before here at GetReligion, Green’s work is magazine-style analysis, yet she is also doing hard reporting as part of that mix — reporting that often drives hard-news beat reporters to have to consider expanding their sources and the points of view included in their work. At times, it seems like we could feature Green in this “think piece” slot every weekend.
This time around, she headed to a state that I am beginning to frequent for family reasons. Kansas is not for everyone, but it is an interesting and unique culture — a real place. It’s as far south and west as you can go and still be in the Midwest, with it’s strong emphasis on family and community. How many public parks are there in Wichita? (The answer is 144.)
Here is the headline on Green’s new piece:
The Christian Withdrawal Experiment
Feeling out of step with the mores of contemporary life, members of a conservative-Catholic group have built a thriving community in rural Kansas. Could their flight from mainstream society be a harbinger for the nation?
The big idea, of course, is that these believers are withdrawing, as much as is possible in this hyperlinked world, from one culture in order to defend another. At the heart of it all is faith and family.
But is this specific community the emerging norm? Here is the overture:
Half an hour down the highway from Topeka, Kansas, not far from the geographic center of the United States, sits the town of St. Marys. Like many towns in the region, it is small, quiet, and conservative. Unlike many towns in the region, it is growing. As waves of young people have abandoned the Great Plains in search of economic opportunity, St. Marys has managed to attract families from across the nation. The newcomers have made the radical choice to uproot their lives in pursuit of an ideological sanctuary, a place where they can raise their children according to values no longer common in mainstream America.
St. Marys is home to a chapter of the Society of St. Pius X, or SSPX. Named for the early-20th-century pope who railed against the forces of modernism, the international order of priests was formed in the aftermath of the Second Vatican Council, the Catholic Church’s attempt, in the 1960s, to meet the challenges of contemporary life. Though not fully recognized by the Vatican, the priests of SSPX see themselves as defenders of the true practices of Roman Catholicism, including the traditional Latin Mass, celebrated each day in St. Marys. Perfumed with incense and filled with majestic Latin hymns, the service has an air of formality and grandeur. To most American Catholics under the age of 50, it would be unrecognizable.
Throughout American history, religious groups have walled themselves off from the rhythms and mores of society.
The decision to focus on this group — as opposed to Catholic, Orthodox or even ecumenical groups in suburban Washington, D.C., greater New York City or other locations — means that this article will reinforce stereotypes that swirl around the work of my longtime friend Rod “Benedict Option” Dreher.
You get the picture. If there were hills in this part of Kansas, these believers would be hiding in them.
Sure enough, Dreher enters the picture and Green does note that the Kansas project is one of many and that this not the only option.
In 2017, the conservative writer Rod Dreher published The Benedict Option: A Strategy for Christians in a Post-Christian Nation, in which he describes growing hostility to Christian values in the secular world. Dreher, a convert to Eastern Orthodoxy, argues that sexual expression has become secular society’s highest god. He laments that Christians have been pressured to accommodate and even celebrate LGBTQ identity. In the face of what Dreher calls the “barbarism” of contemporary American life, he believes the devout have no option but to flee—to build communities, churches, and even colleges where they will be free to live their values and pass the gospel on to the next generation.
Among the conservative-Christian intelligentsia, Dreher’s book was explosive. Charles Chaput, the outgoing archbishop of Philadelphia and an influential figure in the Catholic Church, described it as “a tough, frank, and true assessment of contemporary American culture.” The New York Times columnist David Brooks called it “the most discussed and most important religious book of the decade.” The Benedict Option prompted a flurry of essays in evangelical magazines, panel discussions at Christian colleges, and at least one spin-off book from a young Dreher acolyte. Dreher himself continues to write about so-called Ben-Op communities springing up around the country, from Alaska to Texas to the suburbs of Washington, D.C.
OK. But here is the heart of the piece and it starts, frankly, with a passage that I think goes to far in an attempt to summarize the Dreher thesis.
These groups ostensibly have little in common, but they share a sense that living according to their beliefs while continuing to participate in mainstream American life is not possible.
Whoa. What does it mean to say that the goal to cease participating “in mainstream American life”? One of the major themes in Dreher’s book is that religious believers cannot GIVE AWAY what they no longer possess, that they have no gifts to offer BACK to the broader culture if those gifts are not kept alive in a variety of faithful religious institutions and communities.
Take, for example, that “young acolyte” mentioned in that earlier passage. That would have to be former atheist Leah Libresco, author of "Building the Benedict Option: A Guide to Gathering Two or Three Together in His Name."
She lives in Manhattan, as in New York City, not Manhattan, Kan.
Libresco’s whole book is about building community whenever and wherever possible, especially in the context of the isolated digital silos created by social media. Here’s my column about her work and, please, note the headline: “Beyond tweets and text messages: Many young believers evolve into accidental hermits.” Here’s a bite of what she had to say:
"My goal, always, in building the Benedict Option, is not to turn away from the world," she wrote. "Feeling the need for the thicker community of the Benedict Option … isn't the same as rejecting the world or fearing it. … A claustrophobic feeling can creep into your spiritual life when you practice it alone."
While living in Washington, D.C., then in New York, Libresco started asking a question – to herself and to friends – that seemed embarrassingly simple: "What are the perfectly good things that I do alone that I could do with other people?"
The bottom line: It’s hard to drop out of American life while working as a public intellectual in New York City.
Green gets back on track a few lines later with this broader version of this thesis:
In some ways, these groups are merely practicing an extreme form of the insularity many Americans have already embraced. Deep-blue enclaves such as Berkeley and brownstone Brooklyn are similarly homogenous, sought out by people with a certain set of values and hopes for their children. But the rise of more radical self-sorting poses a challenge to America’s experiment in multicultural democracy, enshrined in the motto e pluribus unum — “Out of many, one.” The dream of a diverse society is replaced with one in which different groups coexist, but mostly try to stay out of one another’s way. The ongoing experiment in St. Marys suggests what might be gained by such a realignment — and what might be lost.
Read it all. And please note that any surviving vision of a common American public discourse will require actual tolerance in public life and law.