CHAPTER 6
The Idea of a Christian Village
During Bill Clinton’s presidency, First Lady Hillary Clinton kicked over a hornet’s nest among conservatives by promoting an apocryphal African proverb: “It takes a village to raise a child.” Social conservatives like me took it as Mrs. Clinton’s nanny-state attempt to justify the government poking its nose into the business of the family.
A few years later, married and expecting my firstborn child, I was corresponding with the conservative radio talker Michael Medved and received an e-mail from him that I have never forgotten. I had mentioned to him that my wife and I were planning to homeschool our children. Well and good, Medved replied, but you should both understand that homeschooling is only a partial measure.
“You need to make sure you live in a community that shares your faith and your values,” he advised. “When your child leaves home to go play with the neighborhood kids, you have to be able to trust that the values in your home are not undermined by the company he keeps.”
That made me see Hillary Clinton’s African proverb in a new light. Today that firstborn child of mine, Matthew, is seventeen, and he has a younger brother and sister. Everything that practical parenting experience has taught me confirms Medved’s counsel. It really does take a village—that is to say, a community—to raise a child.
Does that surprise you? It shouldn’t. God created us to be social beings. Jesus said that the sum of the Law and the Prophets is that we should love the Lord our God with all our heart, soul, and mind and love our neighbors as ourselves. To love requires loving others and letting others love you. Unless you have the rare calling to be a hermit, obeying God and being true to our divinely given nature mean engaging in community life.
The fate of religion in America is inextricably tied to the fate of the family, and the fate of the family is tied to the fate of the community. In her 2015 book How The West Really Lost God, cultural critic Mary Eberstadt argues that religion is like a language: you can learn it only in community, starting with the community of the family. When both the family and the community become fragmented and fail, the transmission of religion to the next generation becomes far more difficult. All it takes is the failure of a single generation to hand down a tradition for that tradition to disappear from the life of a family and, in turn, of a community. Eberstadt is one of a long line of religious thinkers to recognize that when concrete embodiments of the relationship to God crumble, it becomes very hard to hold on to Him in the abstract.1
For decades conservative Christians have behaved as if the primary threats to the integrity of families and communities could be effectively addressed through politics. That illusion is now destroyed. If there is going to be authentic renewal, it will have to happen in families and local church communities. In fact, as the threat to orthodox Christianity grows at the hands of hostile government, Christians should take seriously a Tocquevillian contention made by the sociologist Robert Nisbet, who said that religious liberty itself depends on strong religious communities. Despots, he said, “have never worried about religion that is confined mutely to individual minds. It is religion as community, or rather as a plurality of communities, that has always bestirred the reprisals of rulers engaged in the work of political tyranny.”2
Strengthening families and communities, and thickening our ties to each other and to our churches, requires us to shake off our passivity. It’s unrealistic to hope or expect to live as intensely in community as monks under the Rule do, but in the Benedict Option, we cannot be laissez-faire about the ties that bind us to each other. With so many forces in contemporary culture pulling families and communities apart, we can’t assume that everything will work out if we just go with the flow.
Benedict Option Christians have a lot to learn from our Orthodox Jewish elder brothers in the faith, who have faced horrifying attempts over millennia to destroy their families and communities.
Orthodox Rabbi Mark Gottlieb says that Christians living apart from mainstream culture need “raw, roll-up-your-sleeves dedication to create deep structures of community.” If we are to survive, we need to develop a “laser-like focus and dedication to seeing themselves as the next link in the chain of the Christian story.”
“That sense of urgency, making family come first in your life, strikes me as one starting point and foundational requirement for faithful Christians,” Gottlieb says. “There has to be a very deliberate commitment to the growth of one’s family and the development of healthy and faithful service to one’s family.”
The power of secular culture to break the chains anchoring us firmly in the biblical story is immense. But we are not powerless in the face of the threat.
Turn Your Home into a Domestic Monastery
Just as the monastery’s life is ordered toward God, so must the family home be. Every Christian family likes to think they put God first, but this is not always how we live. (I plead guilty.) If we are the abbot and abbess of our domestic monastery, we will see to it that our family’s life is structured in such a way as to make the mission of knowing and serving God clear to all its members.
That means maintaining regular times of family prayer. That means regular readings of Scripture and stories from the lives of the saints—Christian heroes and heroines from ages past. “Christian kids need Christian heroes,” says Marco Sermarini, a lay Catholic community leader in Italy. “They need to know that following Jesus radically is not an impossible dream.”
Living in a domestic monastery also means putting the life of the church first, even if you have to keep your kid out of a sports program that schedules games during your church’s worship services. Even more importantly, your kids need to see you and your spouse sacrificing attendance at events if they conflict with church. And they need to see that you are serious about the spiritual life.
Catholic writer Rachel Balducci lives with her husband Paul and five children (a sixth is in college) in the same intentional Christian community in which she and Paul were raised. She remembers what an impression her father’s faith made on her. “I grew up here watching my dad do the right thing, even when nobody was looking. I know now that seeing him up in the morning spending time in prayer made a big difference in my life,” she said.
A monastery is a place of hierarchical order, but all members are valued and united in a bond of love. Saint Benedict instructs the abbot to consult even the youngest member of the brotherhood, for he might have wisdom that eludes the older ones. In my own family, we practice the habit of asking forgiveness when we sin against each other. It is hard for me, as a father, to humble myself before my children when I have wronged them, but it’s necessary for my own humility, and it’s important that the kids see that their parents order their lives to Christ as well. A culture of obedience is the mark of a healthy monastery and a healthy family, but members of both communities must see that those given authority over them also subject themselves to a higher authority.
Hospitality is a central principle of the Benedictine life, but I didn’t learn it from the monks. I got it from my folks. My mother and father had a well-deserved reputation for welcoming others to their hearth and table. Southerners, of course, have a reputation for hospitality, but my parents’ open door was particularly pronounced. It is one of the childhood lessons for which I am most grateful, and my wife Julie and I have tried to put it into practice in our own family’s life. We hope our children will remember the laughter and conversation around our hearth and table with travelers and other guests and associate that with what it means to be a Christian family, sharing our blessings with others and receiving in turn the blessing of their company.
A monastery keeps outside its walls people and things that are inimical to its purpose, which is to form its members in Christ. For families, this means strictly limiting media, especially television and online media, both to keep unsuitable content out and to prevent dependence on electronic media. It is also important for parents to do the same for themselves. True, adults should not be expected to keep their movie and TV watching to the level of children, but neither should they feel free to watch whatever they like. Too much exposure to morally compromising material will, over time, dull one’s moral instincts. Remember, life in monastic community is for the abbot’s formation too.
Don’t Be Afraid to Be Nonconformist
Raise your kids to know that your family is different—and don’t apologize for it. It’s not a matter of snobbery. It’s about imbuing kids with the conviction that there are some things that people in our family just do not do—and that’s okay.
“My son has a peanut allergy, and from his very earliest days, we’ve had to teach him to stay away from certain foods,” says Denny Burk, a Southern Baptist pastor and seminary professor in Kentucky. “He’s only five, but he gets it and doesn’t complain about it. He has a great attitude.
“But from the earliest days, we have been talking to him about it. At the church potluck every week, he doesn’t touch the table without checking with us first,” Burk continues. “We Christians have to cultivate our children about morals in the same way. They have to know that it’s fine to be a nonconformist. If you start early with them, it will be easier when they become teenagers.”
The teen years are when kids become intensely aware of their parents’ anxiety about making their children seem like outcasts, or themselves look weird in the eyes of their own parental peers. If Mom and Dad don’t stand firm and are not willing to be thought of as peculiar by their own friends for their strictness, then the kids don’t stand a chance.
Don’t Take Your Kids’ Friends for Granted
It’s important your kids have a good peer group. By “good,” I mean one in which its members, or at least most of them, share the same strong moral beliefs. Though parental influence is critical, research shows that nothing forms a young person’s character like their peers. The culture of the group of which your child is a part growing up will be the culture he or she adopts as their own.
Engaged parents can’t outsource the moral and spiritual formation of their kids to their church or parachurch organization. Interviewing a wide variety of Christians for this book, I often heard complaints that church-affiliated youth groups were about keeping kids entertained more than discipled. One older Evangelical teenager told me she dropped out of her local chapter of a national parachurch group because she grew weary of her peers smoking, drinking, and having sex. “Honestly, I would rather hang out with the kids who don’t believe,” she told me. “They accept me even though they know I’m a believer. At least around them, I know what being a Christian really is.”
Peer pressure really begins to happen in middle childhood. Psychology researcher Judith Rich Harris, in her classic book The Nurture Assumption, says that kids at that age model their own behavior around their peer group’s. Writes Harris, “The new behaviors become habitual—internalized, if you will—and eventually become part of the public personality. The public personality is the one that a child adopts when he or she is not at home. It is the one that will develop into the adult personality.”3
Harris points to the example of immigrants and their children. Study after study shows that no matter how strong the home culture, first-generation offspring almost always conform to the values of the broader culture. “The old culture is lost in a single generation,” she writes. “Cultures are not passed on from parents to children; the children of immigrant parents adopt the culture of their peers.”4
On the other hand, says Harris, is that in most cases, it’s not too late for kids who have been exposed to bad influences. Researchers find that damage to a child’s moral core can often be repaired if he is taken away from a bad peer group. What’s more, determined parents who run a disciplined home, and who immerse their children in a good peer group, can lay a good foundation, no matter how lax they have been until now.
The bad news about the fragility of culture is also good news, according to Harris: “Cultures can be changed, or formed from scratch, in a single generation.”5
Don’t Idolize the Family
I was raised in a good family headed by a strong, loving patriarch, a traditional southern gentleman who valued family and place above all things. From him I learned how to love the good things that are family and place. What I did not realize until much later in my life was that he lived as if family and place were more important than God and the liberty of his children. This caused me grief and suffering later in life, but ultimately it brought me to a much deeper faith and a profound reconciliation with my father before his death.
One of the things I learned in that healing process was that one should never expect more from family than it can possibly give. Even at its best, the family will have its flaws. A healthy family will be a humble and forgiving one—something that is surprisingly hard for many to achieve. Ideally, the family should be an icon of faith, through which the love of God shines to illuminate its members. When members of the family consider its existence to be an end in itself, as opposed to a means to the end of unity with God, the family risks becoming tyrannical.
It sometimes happens that mothers and fathers think they’re serving God by their austere discipline but in fact are driving their children away from Him. I spoke to a high school senior I will call Ellen, an agonized young atheist who had been brought up in a strict home by fanatically religious parents.
“My parents are very paranoid people. They’re conspiracy theorists. They’re afraid that if they exposed their children to the outside world, we were going to be corrupted, because they see the world as this filthy, filthy place,” she told me. “That total sheltering is very damaging, and cutting yourself off from the world like that is exactly the kind of environment you need to develop a cult.”
Ellen says her two older siblings are also atheists, and she expects her younger siblings to follow in the same path, because their mother and father raised them with such fear and anxiety. “I wish you good luck with the Benedict Option,” she told me. “But please tell parents that if they want their kids to stay Christian, not to do what mine did. They smothered us and made us into rebels.”
Live Close to Other Members of Your Community
Geography is one secret to the strength and resilience of Orthodox Jewish communities. Because their faith requires them to walk to synagogue on the Sabbath, they must live within walking distance. This is also convenient for their communal prayer life.
“My day is built around the prayers,” Rabbi Mark Gottlieb told me. “Morning prayers: wake up, go to synagogue. Afternoon prayers: go down the street from where I work in midtown Manhattan. Evening prayers: back home in my New Jersey neighborhood. The ritual of prayer structures every day and every month.
“It’s not enough to say that you go to synagogue on Sabbath,” said the rabbi. “You often see that Jews who are able to go to synagogue two or three times a day, in addition to the Sabbath, are also those most able to maintain a healthy distance from the most nefarious elements of modern culture. It’s a matter not just of theological commitment but of practices and of seeing yourself as part of a larger Jewish community in relationship with God. This is not just for rabbis and scholars but also for the average observant Jew.”
Christians don’t have the geographical requirement that Orthodox Jews do, but many of those who choose to live in proximity have found it a blessing. As newcomers to Eastern Orthodox Christianity, Alaskans Shelley and Jerry Finkler found that living twenty minutes from the cathedral in Eagle River inhibited their ability to partake of the fullness of church life. A number of cathedral families live within walking distance of the cathedral, on land purchased by church members decades ago, when it was affordable.
The Finklers initially thought living in a neighborhood with their church family was weird. Circumstances caused them to live temporarily in the church neighborhood, and they discovered what a difference it made in their family’s life. Later, when they returned to their house in the exurbs, the Finklers missed what they had back in Eagle River. Everybody in the exurban settlement knew each other and were of the same class, but it wasn’t the same.
“There wasn’t the sense of the common good that you have when you’re living around people who share your faith,” Shelley Finkler once told me. “That made a big difference when it came to reaching out to help each other.”
The Finklers soon sold their house and moved again, this time much closer to their church.
When our Eastern Orthodox mission church had to close, my wife and I took stock of how much we and our children had grown in faith and discipleship from four years of praying communally and liturgically with our congregation. We decided that we could not be without an Orthodox parish nearby, so we could be there at every opportunity. That’s one reason we packed up our things and moved to Baton Rouge, forty-five minutes away. We knew that there would be no way to practice our faith properly in community while living so far from the church.
Why be close? Because as I said earlier, the church can’t just be the place you go on Sundays—it must become the center of your life. That is, you may visit your house of worship only once a week, but what happens there in worship, and the community and the culture it creates, must be the things around which you order the rest of the week. The Benedictines structure all their life—their work, their rest, their reading, their meals—around prayer. Christians in the world are not expected to live at the same level of focus and intensity as cloistered monks, but we should strive to be like them in erasing as much as possible the false distinction between church and life.
Recall that Brother Martin of Norcia believes that after experiencing life in Christian community, it’s hard to be fully Christian, or fully human, without it. The Latter-day Saints (LDS, or Mormons) may not be Orthodox Christians, but they are exceptionally good at doing the kind of community building that the monk suggests is a vital part of being a Christian.
Terryl L. Givens, a professor of literature and religion at the University of Richmond and an expert on the LDS faith, says this is because Mormon theology and ecclesiology forge unusually strong social bonds within local churches (or “wards”). Mormons don’t believe in ward hopping. They are assigned their ward based on where they live and have no right of appeal. This compels them to work together to build a unified community of believers, not to wander in search of one. Givens calls this “Zion-building, not Zion-hunting”—a reference to the Mormon belief that adherents must lay the foundations for Zion, the community that Jesus Christ will establish at His return.
American Christians have a bad habit of treating church like a consumer experience. If a congregation doesn’t meet our felt needs, we are quick to find another one that we believe will. I’m as guilty of this as anybody else. But Rachel Balducci can testify to the benefits, spiritual and otherwise, of grounding oneself in a committed community.
She lives with her husband Paul and their kids in the Alleluia Community, a covenanted lay community of charismatic Catholics and Protestants founded in 1973. Paul and Rachel’s parents were among the early settlers of a distressed neighborhood in Augusta, Georgia, where the new community’s members could afford housing. They helped each other fix up their places and began life in common.
Today the Alleluia Community has around eight hundred members, many of whom remain in Faith Village, which is what they call the original settlement. When they married and decided to start a family, the Balduccis realized that what they had been given as children was something worth passing on to the family they hoped to start one day.
Community itself won’t make you holy if you aren’t committed to prayer and cultivating a personal relationship with Jesus, Rachel cautions. Echoing Father Martin’s observation, she says the gift of community is that it builds a social structure in which it is easier for Christians to hear and respond to God’s voice and in which others hold them accountable if they lose the straight path. Living so closely with others can strain one’s patience, concedes Rachel, but it has been good for her and her family.
“If I were a hermit, just God and me, it would be easier to be a saint,” she says. “Living this way is good for my humility. It’s like being in a rock tumbler. It polishes you and wears away your rough edges.”
Chris Currie amplifies Father Martin’s teaching that God disciples us through living in community. Currie, a Catholic in Hyattsville, Maryland, believes that the atomizing structures of American suburban life make it harder to be truly Christian. “A lot of the choices we make about how we live have tremendous consequences spiritually,” says Currie. “The way postwar America decided it wanted to live accelerated the process of cultural disintegration and alienation we’ve all experienced. Secular writers have written about this, but Christians need to understand that as well.
“We were not called to be isolated materialists disengaged with neighbors and accumulating things in our castles,” he continues.
In 1997, Currie and his wife, newlyweds, relocated to the inner-ring Washington suburb. Housing was affordable in the heart of the town, which had been founded in the late nineteenth century, but in the late 1990s it was in decline. The Curries bought a Victorian fixer-upper, and Chris got involved in local civic efforts to revitalize the community along New Urbanist lines.
Soon Hyattsville began its renaissance, and Christians were a big part of it. The pioneering Curries invited other young orthodox Catholic families to join them in the historic district, which was developed before the automobile and was therefore highly walkable. Though Hyattsville is now less affordable than it once was, more than one hundred Catholic families have relocated there, in large part because they wanted to be part of a thick community with a good parish—and now a good school.
The Hyattsville Catholics are not part of a formal organization. Many are rooted in nearby St. Jerome Parish, but some go to other area parishes. Bible studies, prayer groups, and book clubs happen in people’s homes. But the community is also a practical aid to its members, as they assist each other with child care and repair projects, help each other through illness, and meet all kinds of challenges together in ways that living in geographical community makes possible.
Living so close to “the imperial city,” as Currie calls Washington, means that most of his community members work in the nation’s capital. Their close-knit Catholic neighborhood gives them the nurturing they need to be strong witnesses to the faith in the secular city. “We’re not battening down the hatches, hunkering down, and keeping quiet about our faith,” says Currie. “We don’t do it in a belligerent way, but we are not ashamed of who we are.”
He believes the St. Jerome’s Parish community has been called to be a presence in the greater Washington area. The only way they can resist the pressures of worldliness and secularization is by living near each other and reinforcing their religious identity through life lived in common. Their thick community is a strong model of being in the world but not of it. Striking the balance between being an evangelical presence to the wider community while protecting what makes them distinctly and authentically Christian is difficult—but Currie believes that this is the Gospel’s calling.
“Ultimately I think Christians have to understand that yes, we have to be countercultural, but no, we don’t have to run away from the rest of society,” he says. “We have to be a sign of contradiction to the surrounding society, but at the same time we have to be engaged with that society, while still nurturing our own community so we can fully form our children.”
Make the Church’s Social Network Real
In his first letter to the church in Corinth, Paul urged the believers there to “have the same care for one another.
“If one member suffers, all suffer together,” the apostle wrote. “If one member is honored, all rejoice together. Now you are the Body of Christ, and individually members of it.”
The LDS Church lives out that principle in a unique way. The Mormon practice of “home teaching” directs two designated Mormon holders of the church’s priestly office to visit every individual or family in a ward at least once a month, to hear their concerns and offer counsel. A parallel program called Relief Society involves women ministering to women as “visiting teachers.” These have become a major source of establishing and strengthening local community bonds.
“In theory, if not always in practice, every adult man and woman is responsible for spiritually and emotionally sustaining three, four, or more other families, or women, in the visiting teaching program,” says the LDS’s Terryl Givens. He adds that Mormons frequently have social gatherings to celebrate and renew ties to community. “Mormonism takes the symbolism of the former and the randomness of the latter and transforms them into a deliberate ordering of relations that builds a warp and woof of sociality throughout the ward,” he says.
Non-Mormons can learn from the deliberate dedication that wards—at both leadership and lay levels—have to caring for each other spiritually. The church community is not merely the people one worships with on Sunday but the people one lives with, serves, and nurtures as if they were family members. What’s more, the church is the center of a Mormon’s social life.
“The consequence is that wherever Mormons travel, they find immediate kinship and remarkable intimacy with other practicing Mormons,” Givens says. “That is why Mormons seldom feel alone, even in a hostile—increasingly hostile—world.”
Reach Across Church Boundaries to Build Relationships
A generation ago two conservative Christian leaders—Evangelical Chuck Colson and Roman Catholic Richard John Neuhaus—launched an initiative called Evangelicals and Catholics Together. The idea was to foster better relations between Christians in two church traditions that had been mutually suspicious. Colson and Neuhaus realized earlier than many that the post-1960s cultural changes meant that conservative Evangelicals and orthodox Catholics now had more in common with each other than with liberals in their own church traditions. They called their kind of partnership, born in part out of pro-life activism, an “ecumenism of the trenches.”
Times have changed, and so have some of the issues conservative Evangelicals and Catholics face. But the need for an ecumenism of the trenches is stronger than ever. Metropolitan Hilarion Alfeyev, a senior bishop in the Russian Orthodox Church, has on several occasions appealed to traditionalists in the West to form a “common front” against atheism and secularism. To be sure, the different churches should not compromise their distinct doctrines, but they should nevertheless seize every opportunity to form friendships and strategic alliances in defense of the faith and the faithful.
Erin Doom, a longtime employee of the legendary Eighth Day Books, a Christian bookstore in Wichita, Kansas, founded the Eighth Day Institute (EDI) as the store’s nonprofit educational arm. Committed to small-o orthodox ecumenism and to building up the local Christian community, EDI hosts various symposia and events throughout the year. Its signature event, though, may be the Hall of Men, a twice-monthly gathering in EDI’s clubhouse, a kind of Christian speakeasy next door to the bookstore. Catholic, Orthodox, and Protestant men have been coming together there since 2008 to pray, to discuss and debate the works of a great figure of Christian history, then to sit around the table drinking pints of beer and enjoying each other’s company.
The Hall of Men, and its recently launched parallel women’s organization, the Sisters of Sophia, are a way for “mere Christians” to engage the Great Tradition, to root themselves in it, and to go out into the world to renew culture. Doom says the men come together in a spirit of brotherhood, willing to talk about their theological differences in an atmosphere of Christian love. He credits the ecumenical generosity and sense of hospitality of Eighth Day Books owner Warren Farha for setting the tone.
“If we Christians are going to survive, if we’re going to make a difference, we have to be able to come together. Small-o orthodoxy is vital,” says Doom. “I’d like EDI to be a model for other communities. It all begins with Hall of Men, getting the guys involved. Ultimately I want to provide tools and resources for all Christian families to make their homes into little monasteries.”
It’s as simple as starting a book group—but one with the purpose of catechesis, discipleship, and intentional community building. It’s a social event, true, but it has to have a strong focus on something more serious than socializing. The Hall of Men prays when it meets, then discusses a text from the church’s Great Tradition. Participants are expected to argue from their own theological convictions, but nobody is trying to convert anybody else, and it’s all in friendship.
One key to making these ecumenical groups successful is to avoid watering down doctrinal distinctives for the sake of comity. Honoring diversity means exactly that: giving others in the fellowship the grace to bring their full Christian selves to the table without fear of reproach. This mutual respect for difference creates the space where serious theological discussion and community building can occur.
“These guys aren’t all part of my church tradition, but they have become my best friends,” an Evangelical man told me. “Once you start reading this stuff and talking about the early church, you start to see that you have more in common with some believers outside your own tradition. It’s good to be with other guys who take the Christian life as seriously as you do. You realize that we’re all in this battle with the world together.”
Love the Community But Don’t Idolize It
Ellen, the young woman whose controlling family drove her to atheism, comes from a part of the country where religious extremism is not unusual. In fact, after their own religious awakening in adulthood, her parents moved the family to their town to join other families who share their near-apocalyptic views. She describes the besieged community her parents joined as an informal “cult.”
“We were in a small, close-knit community of homeschoolers. Most people in the group were like my family or even more out there than my family. The only kids I interacted with growing up were other kids in this group,” she said. “We didn’t talk to the locals that much and didn’t participate in town events and family events. We didn’t interact with my extended family at all. I guess it was hard for them to see how my parents were bringing us up and how far they went off the deep end.”
Far from being nurturing, said Ellen, her community was extremely controlling. When she began to have doubts about the way they all lived, other kids reacted angrily and shunned her. They also began to treat Ellen’s parents and siblings with disdain. “We knew no one outside this cult, so you felt really pressured to conform,” she said.
The greatest temptation for tight-knit communities is a compulsion to control its members unduly and to police each other too strictly for deviation from a purity standard. It is hard to know when and where to draw the line in every situation, but a community so rigid that it cannot bend will break itself or its members.
In Eagle River, Alaska, the Eastern Orthodox community around St. John’s Cathedral lost a significant number of its members after deep divisions emerged over how strictly to live the Orthodox life.
Father Marc Dunaway, the cathedral’s pastor, lived through the painful departure of friends and family who left in search of a more rigorously observant Orthodoxy. In 2013, he told me, “I think the cure for any community to avoid these sad troubles is to be open and generous and to resist the urges to build walls and isolate itself.
“If you isolate yourself, you will become weird,” Father Marc continued. “It is a tricky balance between allowing freedom and openness on the one hand, and maintaining a community identity on the other. The idea of community itself should not be allowed to become an idol. A community is a living organism that must change and grow and adapt.”
Communities that are wrapped too tight for fear of impurity will suffocate their members and strangle the joy out of life together. Ideology is the enemy of joyful community life, and the most destructive ideology is the belief that creating utopia is possible. Solzhenitsyn said that the line between good and evil runs down the center of every human heart. That axiom must be at the center of every Christian community, keeping it humble and sane.
“It was good for us to develop friendships outside our community,” said one man, still an enthusiastic member of an intentional Christian community. “When the only people you have contact with are the ones you go to church with, it’s hard to know when they’re asking something unreasonable. It’s easy to fall into the trap of thinking that everybody outside the community is corrupt, but it’s not true.”
Don’t Let the Perfect Be the Enemy of the Good Enough
If you spend too much time planning and trying to build the perfect Benedict Option community, you will never start. And if you wait around for the church, or someone else, to get something going, it may never happen. What are you waiting for?
It’s important to have some sort of vision and a plan but also to be open to possibility.
“Only God can understand all the different factors going into the equations of your community. You will never be able to fully manipulate them, and it’s harmful to try,” advises Chris Currie. “Just be open to the movement of the Holy Spirit within the community so people who have a contribution to make will feel open to making it.”
Then you put things to the test. What flourishes builds up the community, and what doesn’t flourish, you abandon and move on. Says Currie, “We have to understand that our minds aren’t primarily directing this. Ultimately, God’s the architect, and we have to primarily be cooperative with grace. Ultimately we’re being led on this journey by God, so we have to be humble about our own ability to shape things.”
The need to control is a sign of the middle-class Christian mentality, chides Marco Sermarini. He and his community friends were raised in what Marco disdainfully calls “this bourgeois church, this church of comfort, this church where people didn’t want to take any risks to live radically for the Lord Jesus.”
The story of how Sermarini and his lay Catholic community began in San Benedetto del Tronto, a small city on Italy’s Adriatic coast, inspires because of its improvisational quality.
Sermarini, who is also head of Italy’s G. K. Chesterton Society, and his community began as an informal group of young Catholic men inspired by the example of Pier Giorgio Frassati, a twentieth-century Catholic layman and social reformer who died at the age of twenty-four. The Blessed Pier Giorgio (he has passed the first stage of canonization, earning the title) was known for helping the poor—and that’s what Sermarini and his friends did in college, reaching out to at-risk youth.
After college, the men found they enjoyed each other’s company, and helping the needy, so they stayed together. As they married, they brought their wives into the group. In 1993, encouraged by their local bishop, they incorporated as an official association within the Catholic Church, an association of families they jokingly called the Tipi Loschi—Italian for “the usual suspects.”
Today the Tipi Loschi have around two hundred members in their community. They administer the community school, the Scuola libera G. K. Chesterton, as well as three separate cooperatives, all designed to serve some charitable end. They continue to build and to grow, driven by a sense of spiritual and social entrepreneurship and inspired by a close connection to the Benedictine monastery in Norcia, just on the other side of the Sybilline Mountains. As the Tipi Loschi’s various initiatives succeeded (and despite some that didn’t), the association of families came to regard each other as something more organic.
They began helping each other in everyday tasks, trying to reverse the seemingly unstoppable atomization of daily life. Now they feel closer than ever and are determined to keep reaching out to their city, offering faith and friendship to all, from within the confident certainties of their Catholic community. This is how they continue to grow.
“The possibility to live like this is for everyone,” says Sermarini. “We have only to follow an old way to do things that we always had but lost some years ago. The main thing is not to go with the mainstream. Then seek God, and after that, look for others who are also serious about seeking God, and join them. We started with this desire and started trying to teach others to do the same, to receive the same gift we were given: the Catholic faith.”
It’s becoming clear, Sermarini says, that Christian families have to start linking themselves decisively with other families. “If we don’t move in this direction, we will face more and more crises.”
Though an ocean separates them, Leah Libresco (now Leah Sargeant) understands what Sermarini is talking about. She is a Catholic and an effervescent Benedict Option social entrepreneur who lives in New York City with her husband Alexi. Before they married in 2016, Libresco organized Benedict Option events among her young single Christian friends in Washington, D.C. She started doing this after becoming convinced that her circle needed more Christian cultural liturgies in their daily lives.
“I used to do things with my Christian friends, and we knew we were all Christian, but the fact that we were Christians never came up,” she says. “There’s something weird when none of the communal parts of your life are overtly Christian. The Benedict Option is about creating the opportunity for those things to happen. It doesn’t feel urgent, but it’s really important.”
Libresco took a similar approach to incentivizing single Christian life as the Tipi Loschi took for Christian family life. Don’t overthink it. Do activities that are pleasurable, not merely dutiful. Let things happen naturally. Be willing to take risks and to fail without falling apart.
Echoing Sermarini, Libresco says that this strategy is not a new thing at all; it only seems so because we have forgotten how to act like a community instead of a random collection of individuals.
“People are like, ‘This Benedict Option thing, it’s just being Christian, right?’ And I’m like, ‘Yes! You’ve figured out the koan!’” Libresco told me. “But people won’t do it unless you call it something different. It’s just the church being what the church is supposed to be, but if you give it a name, that makes people care.”
Relearning the lost art of community is something Christians should do in obedience to the Apostle Paul, who counseled the faithful to do their parts to grow the Body of Christ “for the building up of itself in love” (Ephesians 4:15). But there are also practical reasons for doing so.
Building communities of believers will be necessary as the number of Christians becomes thinner on the ground. Communities with a strong, shared mission will be necessary to start and to sustain authentically Christian, authentically countercultural schools.
In the years to come, Christians will face mounting pressure to withdraw their children from public schools. Secular private schools may offer a better education, but their moral and spiritual ethos will likely be scarcely better. And established Christian schools may not be sufficiently orthodox, academically challenging, or morally sound. A tight communal network generates the social capital needed to launch a school, or to reform and revive an existing one.
It’s hard to overstate the importance of the Christian educational mission. Aside from building up the assembly of believers in the church, there is no more important institutional work to be done in the Benedict Option.