Commentary
In 2017, my friend Rod Dreher published his popular book, “The Benedict Option: A Strategy for Christians in a Post-Christian Nation.” Dreher’s basic prescription, already intimately familiar to Orthodox Jews, is a localist focus on the cohesive formation of tight-knit, virtuous, religious communities as the best way of enduring the cultural onslaught of progressivism and secularism.
There is nothing at all wrong with Tocquevillian localism, and surely it is part of the survival strategy for America’s more traditionally inclined. But further extrapolated to its logical conclusion (something Dreher doesn’t do in his book, to be very clear), the strongest-possible version of this argument—a singular emphasis on retreat to communal redoubts at the expense of the public contestation of core issues—is self-defeating, a surefire losing strategy. It amounts to one big “LARP,” to use the common online abbreviation for “live-action role-playing”—an attempt to escape from reality and instead live in a different world than that which we actually inhabit….