CHAPTER 4

A New Kind of Christian Politics

Like the people of other Western democracies, Americans are living through a political earthquake shaking the foundations of the postwar order. The old, familiar categories that framed political thought and discourse are dead or dying. Where do orthodox Christians fit into this emerging reality? Which side should we be on? Or do we have a side at all?

The answer will not satisfy conservative Christians who understand the church as the Republican Party at prayer, or who go into the voting booth with more conviction than they show at Sunday worship. Though there remain a few possibilities for progress in traditional politics, growing hostility toward Christians, as well as the moral confusion of values voters, should inspire us to imagine a better way forward.

The Benedict Option calls for a radical new way of doing politics, a hands-on localism based on pioneering work by Eastern bloc dissidents who defied Communism during the Cold War. A Westernized form of “antipolitical politics,” to use the term coined by Czech political prisoner Václav Havel, is the best way forward for Orthodox Christians seeking practical and effective engagement in public life without losing our integrity, and indeed our humanity.

The Rise and Fall of Values Voters

As recently as the 1960s, with the notable exception of civil rights, moral and cultural concerns weren’t make-or-break issues in U.S. politics. Americans voted largely on economics, as they had since the Great Depression. There was sufficient moral consensus in the culturally Christian nation to keep sex and sexuality apolitical.

The sexual revolution changed all that. Beginning with the Roe v. Wade abortion decision in 1973, Americans began sorting themselves politically according to moral beliefs. The religious right began to rise in the Republican Party as the secular left did the same among the Democrats. By the turn of the century, the culture war was undeniably the red-hot center of American politics.

“Whereas elections once pitted the party of the working class against the party of Wall Street,” wrote journalist Thomas Byrne Edsall in the Atlantic, “they now pit voters who believe in a fixed and universal morality against those who see moral issues, especially sexual ones, as elastic and subject to personal choice.”

That was 2003. Today the culture war as we knew it is over. The so-called values voters—social and religious conservatives—have been defeated and are being swept to the political margins. Moral issues may not be as central to our politics as they once were, but the American people remain fragmented, often bitterly, by these concerns. Though Donald Trump won the presidency in part with the strong support of Catholics and Evangelicals, the idea that someone as robustly vulgar, fiercely combative, and morally compromised as Trump will be an avatar for the restoration of Christian morality and social unity is beyond delusional. He is not a solution to the problem of America’s cultural decline, but a symptom of it.

The diminishment in the drama of American politics has allowed the natural tensions within both parties over economic issues to assert themselves boldly. The nation is fracturing along class lines, with large numbers on both the young left and the populist right challenging the free market, globalist economic consensus that has united U.S. politics since the Reagan and Bill Clinton presidencies. In 2016, the Republican nominee ran as a nationalist opponent of trade deals while the Democratic candidate, a globalist to the fingertips, was Wall Street’s favorite.

This is the first wave of a tectonic political realignment, based around competing visions of free trade and national identity. Race and class will be front and center, for better or worse, and we may look back fondly to the years when abortion and gay marriage were the things animating our fiercest fights. Welcome to the politics of post-Christian America.

Where do the erstwhile values voters fit in the new dispensation? We don’t, not really. The 2016 presidential campaign made it clear—piercingly, agonizingly clear—that conservative Christians, once comfortably established in the Republican Party, are politically homeless.

Our big issues—abortion and religious liberty—were not part of the GOP primary campaign. Donald Trump captured the party’s nomination without having to court religious conservatives. In his convention acceptance speech, he ignored us. During the general election campaign, some prominent Evangelicals and a handful of leading Catholics climbed aboard the Trump train out of naked fear of a Hillary Clinton administration. In his upset victory, Trump captured 52 percent of the Catholic vote, and a stunning 81 percent of the Evangelical vote.

Will Trump govern as a friend to Christian conservatives? Perhaps. If he appoints Supreme Court justices and lower court judges who are enthusiasts for religious liberty, then his administration will have been a blessing to us. Though Trump’s conversion to the pro-life cause was very late and politically expedient, it’s a reasonable bet that his administration will cease its predecessor’s hostility to it. For Christians who anticipated four more years of losing ground under sustained assault by a progressive White House, these are no small things.

However, there are a number of dangers, both clear and hidden, from the new Washington regime. For one, Donald Trump’s long public life has shown him to be many things, but a keeper of his promises is not one of them. The Psalmist’s warning to “put not your trust in princes” remains excellent advice.

For another, the church is not merely politically conservative white people at prayer. Many Hispanics and other Christians of color, as well as all who, for whatever reason, did not vote for the divisive Trump, do not thereby cease to be Christian. Holding the church together during the Trump years will pose a strong challenge to us all.

Besides, fair or not, conservative Christianity will be associated with Trump for the next few years, and no doubt beyond. If conservative church leaders aren’t extraordinarily careful in how they manage their public relationship to the Trump administration, anti-Trump blowback will do severe damage to the church’s reputation. Trump’s election solves some problems for the church, but given the man’s character, it creates others. Political power is not a moral disinfectant.

And this brings us to the more subtle but potentially more devastating effects of this unexpected GOP election victory. There is first the temptation to worship power, and to compromise one’s soul to maintain access to it. There are many ways to burn a pinch of incense to Caesar, and some prominent pro-Trump Christians arguably crossed that line during the campaign season. Again, political victory does not vitiate the vice of hypocrisy.

There is also the danger of Christians falling back into complacency. No administration in Washington, no matter how ostensibly pro-Christian, is capable of stopping cultural trends toward desacralization and fragmentation that have been building for centuries. To expect any different is to make a false idol of politics.

One reason the contemporary church is in so much trouble is that religious conservatives of the last generation mistakenly believed they could focus on politics and the culture would take care of itself. For the past thirty years or so, many of us believed that we could turn back the tide of aggressive 1960s liberalism by voting for conservative Republicans. White Evangelicals and Catholic “Reagan Democrats” came together to support GOP candidates who vowed to back socially conservative legislation and to nominate conservative justices to the U.S. Supreme Court.

The results were decidedly mixed on the legislative and judicial fronts, but the verdict on the overall political strategy is clear: we failed. Fundamental abortion rights remain solidly in place, and Gallup poll numbers from the Roe v. Wade era until today have not meaningfully changed. The traditional marriage and family model has not been protected in either law or custom, and because of that, courts are poised to impose dramatic rollbacks of religious liberty for the sake of antidiscrimination.

Again, the new Trump administration may be able to block or at least slow these moves with its judicial appointments, but this is small consolation. Will the law as written by a conservative legislature and interpreted by conservative judges overwrite the law of the human heart? No, it will not. Politics is no substitute for personal holiness. The best that orthodox Christians today can hope for from politics is that it can open a space for the church to do the work of charity, culture building, and conversion.

Traditional Politics: What Can Still Be Done

To be sure, Christians cannot afford to vacate the public square entirely. The church must not shrink from its responsibility to pray for political leaders and to speak prophetically to them. Christian concern does not end with fighting abortion and with protecting religious liberty and the traditional family. For example, the new populism on the right may give traditionalist Christians the opportunity to shape a new GOP that on economic issues is about solidarity more with Main Street than Wall Street. Conservative Christians can and should continue working with liberals to combat sex trafficking, poverty, AIDS, and the like.

The real question facing us is not whether to quit politics entirely, but how to exercise political power prudently, especially in an unstable political culture. When is it cowardly not to cooperate with secular politicians out of an exaggerated fear of impurity—and when is it corrupting to be complicit? Donald Trump tore up the political rule book in every way. Faithful conservative Christians cannot rely unreflectively on habits learned over the past thirty years of political engagement. The times require much more wisdom and subtlety for those believers entering the political fray.

Above all, though, they require attention to the local church and community, which doesn’t flourish or fail based primarily on what happens in Washington. And the times require an acute appreciation of the fragility of what can be accomplished through partisan politics. Republicans won’t always rule Washington, after all, and the Republicans who are ruling it now may be more adversarial to the work of the church than many gullible Christians think.

Yuval Levin, editor of National Affairs magazine and a fellow of Washington’s Ethics and Public Policy Center, contends that religious conservatives would be better off “building thriving subcultures” than seeking positions of power. Why? Because in an age of increasing and unstoppable fragmentation, the common culture doesn’t matter as much as it used to. Writes Levin:

The center has not held in American life, so we must instead find our centers for ourselves as communities of like-minded citizens, and then build out the American ethic from there. . . . Those seeking to reach Americans with an unfamiliar moral message must find them where they are, and increasingly, that means traditionalists must make their case not by planting themselves at the center of society, as large institutions, but by dispersing themselves to the peripheries as small outposts. In this sense, focusing on your own near-at-hand community does not involve a withdrawal from contemporary America, but an increased attentiveness to it.1

Though orthodox Christians have to embrace localism because they can no longer expect to influence Washington politics as they once could, there is one cause that should receive all the attention they have left for national politics: religious liberty.

Religious liberty is critically important to the Benedict Option. Without a robust and successful defense of First Amendment protections, Christians will not be able to build the communal institutions that are vital to maintaining our identity and values. What’s more, Christians who don’t act decisively within the embattled zone of freedom we have now are wasting precious time—time that may run out faster than we think.

Lance Kinzer is living at the edge of the political transition Christian conservatives must make. A ten-year Republican veteran of the Kansas legislature, Kinzer left his seat in 2014 and now travels the nation as an advocate for religious liberty legislation in statehouses. “I was a very normal Evangelical Christian Republican, and everything that comes with that—particularly a belief that this is ‘our’ country, in a way that was probably not healthy,” he says.

That all fell apart in 2014, when Kansas Republicans, anticipating court-imposed gay marriage, tried to expand religious liberty protections to cover wedding vendors, wedding cake makers, and others. Like many other Republican lawmakers in this deep-red state, Kinzer expected that the legislation would pass the House and Senate easily and make it to conservative Governor Sam Brownback’s desk for signature.

It didn’t work out that way at all. The Kansas Chamber of Commerce came out strongly against the bill. State and national media exploded with their customary indignation. Kinzer, who was a pro-life leader in the House, was used to tough press coverage, but the firestorm over religious liberty was like nothing he had ever seen.

The bill passed the Kansas House but was killed in the Republican-controlled Senate. The result left Kinzer reeling. “It became very clear to me that the social conservative–Big Business coalition politics was frayed to the breaking point and indicated such a fundamental difference in priorities, in what was important,” he recalls. “It was disorienting. I had conversations with people I felt I had carried a lot of water for and considered friends at a deep political level, who, in very public, very aggressive ways, were trying to undermine some fairly benign religious liberty protections.”

Kinzer had already decided to leave state politics anyway, to return to his law practice and spend more time with his family. The debacle over religious liberty legislation confirmed that he had made the right decision.

It wasn’t simply exhaustion with the political process but more a recognition that given “the reality of the cultural moment,” it was more important to shore up his local church community than to continue his legislative work. Though a lifelong churchgoer—he and his family worship at a Presbyterian Church in America congregation in Overland Park, a Kansas City suburb—Kinzer concluded that he ought to do more locally.

“It’s easy when you’ve chosen politics as a vocation to convince yourself that you’re doing fundamental work for the Kingdom by what you’re doing in the legislature,” he said. “I started to question that. It’s not whether or not it was worthwhile to have worked on those issues, but rather a growing sense inside of me that there’s a real work of cultural reclamation and renewal, not outside the church but inside the church, that really needs to happen first, before we can think about much longer-term goals.”

Even though Kinzer and his family attend a conservative church within a conservative denomination, he found that many of his fellow congregants were largely unaware of their own Reformed tradition—and in turn, were oblivious to the wealth of resources that that tradition offered to ground them more deeply in the faith.

“I grew up very much with the idea church was a place you go for teaching and fellowship, but you’re really there for a kind of pep talk before you go out there and live your real life the rest of the week,” he says.

Given the post-Christian turn in American culture, that is no longer enough. Kinzer has plunged more deeply into the life of his congregation, teaching a class on Augustine’s City of God and organizing a new prayer meeting for men and women. The former legislator sees this as vital work to prepare his own congregation for the new reality—one that American Christians still don’t grasp.

“The big challenge, especially for Evangelicals who always believed that there was some sort of silent majority with them, is to come to terms with the fact that this is just not true,” he says. “This is difficult, this is disorienting. Internalizing the fact that that is not the case is difficult, is disorienting to a lot of people.

“By the same token, I think it’s vital for the health of Christianity, and even for Christian engagement in the political sphere, for them to do just that,” he continues. “And it needs to be more than just an intellectual exercise. You need forms of living that reinforce your distinctiveness, that reinforce the kind of ‘strangers in exile’ sense that’s well grounded in Scripture.”

Yet Kinzer has not left politics entirely. The first goal of Benedict Option Christians in the world of conventional politics is to secure and expand the space within which we can be ourselves and build our own institutions. To that end, he travels around the country advocating for religious liberty legislation in state legislatures. Over and over he sees Republican legislators who are inclined to support religious liberty taking a terrible pounding from the business lobby. He doesn’t know how much longer they will be able to hold out. Pastors and lay Christian leaders need to prepare their congregations for hard times.

“It’s important to avoid being alarmist, but people really do need to recognize the seriousness of the threats that Christians face, and the real, deep difficulty of the political environment,” Kinzer says. “They need to internalize what it really means to be in a minority posture, and beginning to think like that is really critical. If we don’t, we’re going to continue to operate out of a playbook that has very little to do with the game that’s actually being played.”

Kinzer contends that even as Christians refocus their attention locally and center their attention on building up their own local church communities, they cannot afford to disengage from politics completely. The religious liberty stakes are far too high. What does this mean at the grassroots level? He offers these suggestions:

Most American Christians have no sense of how urgent this issue is and how critical it is for individuals and churches to rise from their slumber and defend themselves while there is still time. We do not have the luxury of continuing to fight the last war.

“We are facing the real risk that the work of the church, and its ability to form our children according to the things we believe are most important in life, is under threat by a hostile government,” warns Kinzer. “And I don’t think it’s alarmist to say so.”

True. As important as religious liberty is, though, Christians cannot forget that religious liberty is not an end in itself but a means to the end of living as Christians in full. Religious liberty is an important component in permitting us to get on with the real work of the church and with the Benedict Option. If protecting religious liberty requires us to compromise the moral beliefs that define us as Christians, then any victories we achieve will be hollow. The church’s mission on earth is not political success but fidelity.

Antipolitical Politics

The Benedict Option calls for a new Christian politics, one that grows out of our own relative powerlessness in contemporary America. It might sound strange to call the Rule of Saint Benedict a political document, but it is nothing less than a constitution governing the shared life of a particular community. Because it dictates how Benedictine virtues are to be lived by monastic communities, the Rule is political.

The concept is hard to grasp because when we think about politics, we imagine campaigns, elections, activism, lawmaking—all the elements of statecraft in a democracy. In the most basic philosophical sense, though, politics is the process by which we agree on how we are going to live together.

As we have seen, the politics of a Benedictine monastery are very different from the politics of a liberal democracy. This is how it should be. The telos, or ultimate goal, of a monastic life is not the same as the telos of life in a secular state.

Nevertheless both communities—like all communities—are governed by a vision of order constructed according to some shared sense of the Good. All laws reflect this.

Benedict Option politics begin with recognition that Western society is post-Christian and that absent a miracle, there is no hope of reversing this condition in the foreseeable future. This means, in part, that what orthodox Christians can accomplish through conventional politics has narrowed considerably. Most Americans will not only reject many things traditional Christians consider good but will even call them evil. Trying to reclaim our lost influence will be a waste of energy or worse, if the financial and other resources that could have been dedicated to building alternative institutions for the long resistance went instead to making a doomed attempt to hold on to power.

Instead, Christians must turn their attention to a different kind of politics. Part of the change we have to make is accepting that in the years to come, faithful Christians may have to choose between being a good American and being a good Christian. In a nation where “God and country” are so entwined, the idea that one’s citizenship might be at radical odds with one’s faith is a new one.

Alexis de Tocqueville was convinced that democracy could not survive the loss of Christian faith. Self-government required shared convictions about moral truths. Christian faith drew men outside themselves and taught them that laws must be firmly rooted in a moral order revealed and guaranteed by God.

If a democratic nation loses religion, he wrote, then it falls prey to inordinate individualism, materialism, and democratic despotism and inevitably “prepares its citizens for servitude.” Therefore, said Tocqueville, “one must maintain Christianity within the new democracies at all cost.”

We have not done that. If Tocqueville is right, conservative Christians must now prepare ourselves for very dark times. The 2016 election was a harbinger. Americans had to choose between an establishment Democrat deeply hostile to core Christian values and to religious liberty, and an outsider Republican of no particular religious commitment who sold himself as a strongman who would impose order by force of will.

What’s more, we must now face a question that will strike many of us as heretical according to our civic catechism. It has previously been unthinkable, certainly to patriotic Christians. But it must be confronted.

In his 2016 book Conserving America?: Essays on Present Discontents, Patrick J. Deneen, a Notre Dame political theorist, argues that Enlightenment liberalism, from which both U.S. parties are descended, is built on the premise that humans are by nature “free and independent,” and that the purpose of government is to liberate the autonomous individual. Making progress toward this goal, whether promoted by free-market parties of the right or statist egalitarian parties of the left, depends on denying natural limits.

This is contrary to what both Scripture and experience teach us about human nature. The purpose of civilization, in Deneen’s words, “has been to sustain and support familial, social and cultural structures and practices that perpetuate and deepen personal and intergenerational forms of obligation and gratitude, of duty and indebtedness.”

In other words, civilization doesn’t exist to make it possible for individuals to do whatever they want to do. To believe that is an anthropological error. A civilization in which no one felt an obligation to the past, to the future, to each other, or to anything higher than self-gratification is one that is dangerously fragile. In the waning decades of the Western Roman Empire, Augustine described society as preoccupied with pleasure-seeking, selfishness, and living for the moment.

Because it prescribes government of the people, liberal democracy can be only as strong as the people who live under it. And so, the question before us now is whether our current political situation is a betrayal of liberal democracy or, given its core principles of individualism and egalitarianism, liberal democracy’s inevitable fulfillment under secularism. Writes Deneen:

We have reached a culminating moment when it is less a political movement that is needed—as important as it might be to seek certain public goods—than a revival of culture, of sustainable practices and defensible ways of life born of shared experience, memory and trust. However, such a revival can’t occur by attempting to go back or recover something lost. Rather, ironically what is needed is provided by the very vehicle of destruction, and found amid the strengths of liberalism itself: the creative human capacity of reinvention and new beginnings.2

Hence the need, not for the second coming of Ronald Reagan or for a would-be political savior, but for a new—and quite different—Saint Benedict.

What kind of politics should we pursue in the Benedict Option? If we broaden our political vision to include culture, we find that opportunities for action and service are boundless. Christian philosopher Scott Moore says that we err when we speak of politics as mere statecraft.

“Politics is about how we order our lives together in the polis, whether that is a city, community or even a family,” writes Moore. “It is about how we live together, how we recognize and preserve that which is most important, how we cultivate friendships and educate our children, how we learn to think and talk about what kind of life really is the good life.”3

In thinking about politics in this vein, American Christians have much to learn from the experience of Czech dissidents under Communism. The essays that Czech playwright and political prisoner Václav Havel and his circle produced under oppression and persecution far surpassing any that American Christians are likely to experience in the near future offer a powerful vision for authentic Christian politics in a world in which we are a powerless, despised minority.

Havel, who died in 2011, preached what he called “antipolitical politics,” the essence of which he described as “living in truth.” His most famous and thorough statement of this was a long 1978 essay titled “The Power of the Powerless,” which electrified the Eastern European resistance movements when it first appeared.4 It is a remarkable document, one that bears careful study and reflection by orthodox Christians in the West today.

Consider, says Havel, the greengrocer living under Communism, who puts a sign in his shop window saying, “Workers of the World, Unite!” He does it not because he believes it, necessarily. He simply doesn’t want trouble. And if he doesn’t really believe it, he hides the humiliation of his coercion by telling himself, “What’s wrong with the workers of the world uniting?” Fear allows the official ideology to retain power—and eventually changes the greengrocer’s beliefs. Those who “live within a lie,” says Havel, collaborate with the system and compromise their full humanity.

Every act that contradicts the official ideology is a denial of the system. What if the greengrocer stops putting the sign up in his window? What if he refuses to go along to get along? “His revolt is an attempt to live within the truth”—and it’s going to cost him plenty.

He will lose his job and his position in society. His kids may not be allowed to go to the college they want to, or to any college at all. People will bully him or ostracize him. But by bearing witness to the truth, he has accomplished something potentially powerful.

He has said that the emperor is naked. And because the emperor is in fact naked, something extremely dangerous has happened: by his action, the greengrocer has addressed the world. He has enabled everyone to peer behind the curtain. He has shown everyone that it is possible to live within the truth.

Because they are public, the greengrocer’s deeds are inescapably political. He bears witness to the truth of his convictions by being willing to suffer for them. He becomes a threat to the system—but he has preserved his humanity. And that, says Havel, is a far more important accomplishment than whether this party or that politician holds power.

“A better system will not automatically ensure a better life,” Havel goes on. “In fact the opposite is true: only by creating a better life can a better system be developed” (emphasis mine).

The answer, then, is to create and support “parallel structures” in which the truth can be lived in community. Isn’t this a form of escapism, a retreat into a ghetto? Not at all, says Havel; a countercultural community that abdicated its responsibility to reach out to help others would end up being a “more sophisticated version of ‘living within a lie.’”

A good example of what this better life could look like comes from the late mathematician and dissident Václav Benda. A faithful Catholic, Benda believed that Communism maintained its iron grip on the people by isolating them, fragmenting their natural social bonds. The Czech regime severely punished the Catholic Church, driving many believers to privatize their faith, retreating behind the walls of their homes so as not to attract attention from the authorities.

Benda’s distinct contribution to the dissident movement was the idea of a “parallel polis”—a separate but porous society existing alongside the official Communist order.5 Says Flagg Taylor, an American political philosopher and expert on Czech dissident movements, “Benda’s point was that dissidents couldn’t simply protest the Communist government, but had to support positive engagement with the world.”

At serious risk to himself and his family (he and his wife had six children), Benda rejected ghettoization. He saw no possibility for collaboration with the Communists, but he also rejected quietism, considering it a failure to display proper Christian concern for justice, charity, and bearing evangelical witness to Christ in the public square. For Benda, Havel’s injunction to “live in truth” could only mean one thing: to live as a Christian in community.

Benda did not advocate retreat to a Christian ghetto. He insisted that the parallel polis must understand itself as fighting for “the preservation or the renewal of the national community in the widest sense of the word—along with the defense of all the values, institutions, and material conditions to which the existence of such a community is bound.

I personally think that a no less effective, exceptionally painful, and in the short term practically irreparable way of eliminating the human race or individual nations would be a decline into barbarism, the abandonment of reason and learning, the loss of traditions and memory. The ruling regime—partly intentionally, partly thanks to its essentially nihilistic nature—has done everything it can to achieve that goal. The aim of independent citizens’ movements that try to create a parallel polis must be precisely the opposite: we must not be discouraged by previous failures, and we must consider the area of schooling and education as one of our main priorities.6

From this perspective, the parallel polis is not about building a gated community for Christians but rather about establishing (or reestablishing) common practices and common institutions that can reverse the isolation and fragmentation of contemporary society. (In this we hear Brother Ignatius of Norcia’s call to have “borders”—formal lines behind which we live to nurture our faith and culture—but to “push outwards, infinitely.”) Benda wrote that the parallel polis’s ultimate political goals are “to return to truth and justice, to a meaningful order of values, [and] to value once more the inalienability of human dignity and the necessity for a sense of human community in mutual love and responsibility.”

In other words, dissident Christians should see their Benedict Option projects as building a better future not only for themselves but for everyone around them. That’s a grand vision, but Benda knew that most people weren’t interested in standing up for abstract causes that appealed only to intellectuals. He advocated practical actions that ordinary Czechs could do in their daily lives.

“If you didn’t like how university education was going, help students find an underground seminar taught by one of these brilliant professors kicked out of university by the government,” Taylor says, explaining Benda’s principles. “Print good novels by samizdat and get them into the hands of the people, and let them see what they’re missing. Support theological education in one of the underground seminaries. When people see [that] resistance is connected to something that’s really meaningful to them, and that is possible only if there are a certain number of people committed to preserving it in the face of the state’s opposition, they will act.”

Whether you call it “antipolitical politics” or a “parallel polis,” what might the Czech dissidents’ vision look like in our circumstances? Havel gives a number of examples. Think of teachers who make sure kids learn things they won’t get at government schools. Think of writers who write what they really believe and find ways to get it to the public, no matter what the cost. Think of priests and pastors who find a way to live out religious life despite condemnation and legal obstacles, and artists who don’t give a rip for official opinion. Think of young people who decide not to care about success in society’s eyes and who drop out to pursue a life of integrity, no matter what it costs them. These people who refuse to assimilate and instead build their own structures are living the Benedict Option.

If we hope for our faith to change the world one day, we have to start locally. Benedict Option communities should be small, because “beyond a certain point, human ties like personal trust and personal responsibility cannot work.” And they should “naturally rise from below,” which is to say, they should be organic and not handed down by central planners. These communities start with the individual heart and spread from there to the family, the church community, the neighborhood, and onward.

In order to know what our neighbors need and want, we will have to be close to them. In Benda’s time, the Czech people had little concept of themselves as a community. The totalitarian government had taken that away from them. Benda’s attempt to repoliticize the people consisted of activating their desire simply to be together, to be social in whatever way they found pleasing.

“Benda teaches us an important lesson,” Taylor says. “In my case, I don’t really know my neighbors, other than one family next door. There’s no neighborhood bar for me to go see people in my community. Maybe there’s something to be said for reactivating people’s social natures. We probably don’t know what we’re missing.”

A friend of mine who led a wild, hedonistic life converted to Christianity after seeing her brother’s genuinely happy family and knowing the light in their faces and the love in their hearts came from faith in Christ. She told me, “I realized later that I just needed somebody to give me permission to be wholesome.” As the West declines into spiritual acedia, there will be more and more people who are seeking something real, something meaningful, and yes, something wholesome. It is our mandate as Christians to offer it to them.

No matter how furious and all-consuming partisan political battles are, Christians have to keep clearly before us the fact that conventional American politics cannot fix what is wrong with our society and culture. They are inadequate because in both their left-wing and right-wing forms, they operate from the position that facilitating and expanding human choice is the proper end of our politics. The left and the right just disagree over where to draw the lines. Neither party’s program is fully consistent with Christian truth.

By contrast, the politics of the Benedict Option assume that the disorder in American public life derives from disorder within the American soul. Benedict Option politics start with the proposition that the most important political work of our time is the restoration of inner order, harmonizing with the will of God—the same telos as life in the monastic community. Everything else follows naturally from that.

Above all, this means being ordered toward love. We become what we love and make the world according to our loves. We should act from a place not of fear and loathing but of affection and confidence in God and His will.

When we are truly ordered toward God, we won’t have to worry about immediate results—and that’s a good thing. In interviewing surviving dissidents from the Czech Communist era, researcher Taylor discovered something they had in common with Saint Benedict and his monks. They never expected to live to see the end of totalitarianism, and they did not really believe their activities would have any effect in the short term. But this worked to their advantage.

“They surrendered themselves to the idea that these things were worth doing in and of themselves, not because they might have definite, measurable consequences,” Taylor says. “Havel, Benda, and the other dissidents made it clear that once you start down the path of consequentialism, you will always find a reason not to do anything. You have to want to do something because it’s worth doing, not because you think it will make the Communist Party fall in four years.”

Building Benedict Option communities may not turn our nation around, but it’s still worth doing. Those engaged in building these structures should not be discouraged by failures in the short run. These are bound to happen. Rather, they must keep their balance and stay focused on, in Havel’s words, “the everyday, thankless, and never-ending struggle of human beings to live more freely, truthfully, and in quiet dignity.”

Don’t be deceived by the ordinariness of this charge. This is politics at its most profound level. It is politics during wartime, and we are fighting nothing less than a culture war over what C. S. Lewis called “the abolition of man.”

“The best resistance to totalitarianism is simply to drive it out of our own souls, our own circumstances, our own land, to drive it out of contemporary humankind,” said Václav Havel. The same is true for the corrosive anti-Christian philosophy that has taken over American public life.

At their best, Benedict Option communities can provide an unintentional political witness to secular liberal culture, offering a potent contrast to a set of increasingly cold and indifferent political and economic arrangements. The state will not be able to care for all human needs in the future, especially if the current projections of growing economic inequality prove accurate. The sheer humanity of Christian compassion, and the image of human dignity it honors, will be an extraordinarily attractive alternative—not unlike the evangelical witness of the early church amid the declining paganism of an exhausted Roman Empire.

Here’s how to get started with the antipolitical politics of the Benedict Option. Secede culturally from the mainstream. Turn off the television. Put the smartphones away. Read books. Play games. Make music. Feast with your neighbors. It is not enough to avoid what is bad; you must also embrace what is good. Start a church, or a group within your church. Open a classical Christian school, or join and strengthen one that exists. Plant a garden, and participate in a local farmer’s market. Teach kids how to play music, and start a band. Join the volunteer fire department.

The point is not that we should stop voting or being active in conventional politics. The point, rather, is that this is no longer enough. After the 1992 Planned Parenthood v. Casey decision upheld abortion rights, the pro-life movement understood that it was not going to be possible in the short run to overturn Roe v. Wade. So it broadened its strategy. The movement retained lobbyists and activists fighting the good fight in Washington and state capitals, but at the local level, creative pro-lifers opened crisis pregnancy centers. These quickly became central to advancing the pro-life cause—and saved countless unborn lives. This is a model we traditional Christians should follow. Times have changed dramatically, and we can no longer rely on politicians and activists to fight the culture war alone on our behalf.

Many conservative Christians felt relief over the fate of the Supreme Court upon hearing the shocking (even to his supporters) news that Donald Trump had won the presidency. This is understandable, and we should urge the new administration to appoint justices strongly committed to religious liberty and protecting unborn life. But it can’t be repeated often enough: believers must avoid the usual trap of thinking that politics can solve cultural and religious problems. Trusting Republican politicians and the judges they appoint to do the work that only cultural change and religious conversion can do is a big reason Christians find ourselves so enfeebled. The deep cultural forces that have been separating the West from God for centuries will not be halted or reversed by a single election, or any election at all.

We faithful orthodox Christians didn’t ask for internal exile from a country we thought was our own, but that’s where we find ourselves. We are a minority now, so let’s be a creative one, offering warm, living, light-filled alternatives to a world growing cold, dead, and dark. We will be increasingly without influence, but let’s be guided by monastic wisdom and welcome this humbly as an opportunity sent by God for our purification and sanctification. Losing political power might just be the thing that saves the church’s soul. Ceasing to believe that the fate of the American Empire is in our hands frees us to put them to work for the Kingdom of God in our own little shires.