# The Benedict Option: A Strategy for Christians in a Post-Christian Nation *Published March 2017 by Sentinel (Penguin). 262 pages. Author: Rod Dreher, then senior editor at The American Conservative. New York Times bestseller. The most debated book in Christian conservative circles between 2017 and 2020, and the text that introduced "strategic withdrawal" as a serious option for the religious right.* The book that told conservative Christians what they didn't want to hear: you've lost the culture war, and the appropriate response is not to fight harder but to retreat — to build thick, intentional communities of faith modeled on the sixth-century monastic communities of Saint Benedict of Nursia, communities that preserved Christian civilization through the Dark Ages by withdrawing from a collapsing Roman world. *The Benedict Option* argued that modern liberal society is that collapsing world, and that Christians should stop trying to win it back. ## The Argument Dreher's starting point is [[Alasdair MacIntyre]]'s famous closing passage in *[[After Virtue]]* (1981): "We are waiting not for a Godot, but for another — doubtless very different — St. Benedict." MacIntyre argued that the moral vocabulary of liberal modernity is incoherent — fragments of earlier ethical systems recycled without their original metaphysical foundations — and that genuine moral community requires starting over. Dreher translates this into a practical program for American Christians: **The diagnosis:** The sexual revolution, the legalization of same-sex marriage (*Obergefell*, 2015), and the cultural mainstreaming of transgender identity represent not policy defeats but civilizational transformation. Christianity has lost its position as the default moral framework of Western culture. This cannot be reversed through political action. **The prescription:** Christians should focus on building intentional communities — classical Christian schools, parish life, economic cooperation among believers, limiting screen time and consumer culture, practicing spiritual disciplines — that can sustain faith and moral formation in a hostile culture. This is not abandonment of the world but strategic preservation: keep the flame alive so it can re-illuminate when the current order exhausts itself. **The analogy:** Just as Benedictine monasteries preserved literacy, agriculture, and theological learning through the collapse of Roman civilization and the subsequent centuries of disorder, intentional Christian communities today can preserve the moral and intellectual inheritance that liberal modernity is discarding. ## The Debate *The Benedict Option* provoked fierce responses from across the right: **From the religious right:** Many evangelical and Catholic activists rejected Dreher's premise — that the culture war is lost — as defeatist. They argued that Christians should fight harder, not retreat. The election of Trump in 2016, just months before the book's publication, seemed to validate this view: why withdraw when you've just won the presidency? The post-*Dobbs* overturn of [[Roe v. Wade]] in 2022 further undermined Dreher's "we've lost" framing for many religious conservatives. **From the post-liberals:** [[Patrick Deneen]], [[Sohrab Ahmari]], and [[Adrian Vermeule]] shared Dreher's diagnosis (liberalism is hostile to Christianity) but rejected his prescription. Their answer was not withdrawal but capture — using state power to reorder society toward the common good. Ahmari's "[[Against David French-ism]]" (2019) was in part a response to what he saw as Dreher's excessive accommodation: if the problem is structural, the answer must be political, not monastic. **From secular conservatives:** Dismissed as irrelevant to their concerns. The Benedict Option is a specifically Christian argument with no secular equivalent — you can't build a monastery around market economics. **From Dreher's admirers:** Many found the book's practical advice (classical education, parish investment, digital fasting, vocational community) valuable regardless of whether they accepted the full MacIntyre-derived civilizational argument. The "small 'b' benedict option" — strengthening local community without formal withdrawal — became its most widely adopted form. ## The Dreher Trajectory The book's reception is inseparable from Dreher's own subsequent trajectory, which significantly complicated its legacy: Dreher left *The American Conservative* in 2022, moved to Budapest, and became an increasingly vocal supporter of [[Viktor Orbán]]'s Hungary as a model for conservative Christian governance — a position that sits in tension with the Benedict Option's emphasis on local community rather than state power. His personal life (a public divorce, struggles he discussed at length on his blog) and his admiration for Orbán shifted the perception of his project from "thoughtful withdrawal" to "finding a state that will do the fighting for you." This evolution mirrors a broader pattern in the religious right: the Benedict Option's emphasis on community-building and cultural formation was genuine, but when tested by the possibility of political power (Trump, Orbán, *Dobbs*), most of its sympathizers chose power over withdrawal. ## Analytical Framework *The Benedict Option* matters in the KB as the **road not taken** — the counter-argument to [[the New Right]]'s dominant strategy of capture and confrontation: 1. **It identified the correct problem.** Dreher's diagnosis — that American Christianity has lost its cultural hegemony and cannot recover it through normal political means — is the same diagnosis that Deneen, Ahmari, and Vermeule offer. The difference is entirely in the prescription: withdrawal vs. capture. 2. **It exposed the religious right's true priority.** The fact that most religious conservatives rejected the Benedict Option in favor of political engagement (Trump, state legislatures, the courts) reveals that their primary commitment is to power, not to the counter-cultural faith formation Dreher prescribed. The Benedict Option was a sincerity test, and most of the movement failed it. 3. **It predicted the integralist turn without endorsing it.** Dreher's argument implicitly warned that if Christians didn't withdraw to preserve their integrity, they would be tempted to seize state power — and that this seizure would corrupt the faith it claimed to protect. The New Right's subsequent embrace of Vermeule's integralism and Ahmari's culture-war aggression is precisely the corruption Dreher warned about. 4. **The MacIntyre connection is real.** Dreher popularized MacIntyre for a mass audience, and MacIntyre's critique of liberal moral incoherence runs beneath the entire post-liberal project — Deneen's *Why Liberalism Failed*, Vermeule's rejection of procedural liberalism, and Ahmari's attack on "French-ism" all build on MacIntyre's foundations. Dreher drew different conclusions but planted the same seeds. ## See Also - [[Rod Dreher]] — The author - [[Patrick Deneen]] — Fellow post-liberal diagnostician with a capture-not-withdrawal prescription - [[Adrian Vermeule]] — The legal integralist whose project represents Dreher's opposite - [[Sohrab Ahmari]] — Whose "[[Against David French-ism]]" is partly a response to Benedict Option-style accommodation - [[Catholic Post-Liberalism]] — The broader intellectual movement Dreher's work overlaps with - [[Why Liberalism Failed]] — The book that shares Dreher's diagnosis but implies a different prescription