Growing up in Texas, Brother Francis Davoren assumed he was going to be a man who labored primarily with his mind. He was a good student, intellectually inclined, and gifted in math and science. In college, he studied physics but switched to theology when he began to wonder if God was calling him to live as a priest or a monk. He didn’t realize it until later in life, but for much of his life, Brother Francis thought those who did intellectual work were better than those who worked with their hands.
Today, at forty-three, Brother Francis has a new respect for physical labor, thanks to the hard work he has to do at the monastery, such as lugging heavy sacks of grain and maintaining plumbing. “It has been great for me, because it helps me remember that the human person is body and spirit, not just a spirit,” he says. “There needs to be an integration of body and soul. You can use that body to be sanctified through work. It’s great to learn that you don’t have to just think about things, but actually do them.”
Brother Francis also takes satisfaction knowing that his labor is vital to the overall success of the monastery and its mission. Says the monk, “That’s my little part in the Church. Each person has a role to hold the whole thing up.”
In the age now falling upon us, Brother Francis and the Benedictine model of sanctifying ordinary labor will be a model to traditional Christians in our professional lives, in important ways. First of all, the Benedictine model reminds us that work and worship are integrated and that our careers are not separate from our faith. Second, it reminds us that manual labor is a gift—a gift that Christians may have to rediscover if post-Christianity squeezes us out of the professions. Finally, we see work as a gift given back to God and to the community. If Benedict Option communities are to survive, they’re going to have to recover this kind of solidarity, not only on a “merely spiritual” level but on a practical one as well.
Most Christians still use the word calling to refer to a conviction that God is inviting a man or a woman to full-time ministry. Roman Catholics tend to use the word vocation—from the Latin word vocare, “to call”—to refer to a calling to the priesthood or to monastic life. In the secular world, the word vocation has fallen out of common use, except as a synonym for job.
It wasn’t always like this. In 1603, the early English Puritan theologian William Perkins delivered a sermon in which he defined vocation as “a certain kind of life ordained and imposed on man by God for the common good.”1 Perkins explained that every man—king, pastor, soldier, husband, father, and so on—has a God-given vocation. He likened the symphony of vocations in society to the working of a clock, each gear turning in harmony for the common purpose of keeping time.
In this older understanding, says political theorist Patrick Deneen, we see one’s work not as chosen as much as received from God, for the benefit of all. A person’s labor is, in ways sometimes mysterious, part of a greater undertaking, in the economy both secular and divine.
“In spite of the contemporary usage of the word ‘vocational’ to mean narrow training in a job choice,” writes Deneen, “the origin of the term points to the way that one’s work connected not only to other activities in one’s life paths—one’s ‘career’—but, more comprehensively, how one’s work related to a larger whole outside and beyond one’s own life.”2
This is a profoundly Benedictine insight. A monk learns to do the task given to him for the greater glory of God and for the support of the community of believers. In the Benedictine tradition, our labor is one way we participate in God’s creative work of ordering Creation and bringing forth good fruit from it. When undertaken in the right spirit, our labor is also a means God uses to order us inwardly.
Balance is key. There’s a reason why the Rule prescribes labor for only certain hours of the day. Work is a good thing, even a holy thing, but it must not be allowed to dominate one’s life. If it does, our vocation could become an idol. Recall that if an abbot sees that a monk craftsman is taking undue pride in his work, the Rule requires the abbot to reassign him. It’s a harsh penalty, but one that reminds all Christians that our labor derives its ultimate value only from the role it plays in God’s economy.
Work is good, but it is only good relative to its participation in the unfolding of God’s will and for the benefit of others. In workaholic modern America, we have lost this sense of vocational meaning. Ironically, it is still practiced, if only by custom, in secularized Europe.
Deneen’s father-in-law is a small-town butcher in southern Germany and a believing Catholic. He told his American son-in-law that he thanks God for Germany’s strict laws mandating shop closing times. These laws make life less convenient for consumers, the butcher conceded, but without them he would never have been able to run his mom-and-pop business while raising a family. Without the protection of that regulation, only big stores with a large number of employees could thrive. In this sense, Germany’s consumer culture manages to cultivate more balanced, integrated lives for the German people.
The most important labor lesson of the Rule, though, is that a Christian must carry out work, and all other things he does, as a gift to God—as participation in His ordering of Creation. This is as true of the carpenter and the accountant as it is of the minister and the schoolteacher. If we think of work as its own end, disconnected from God’s purposes, or as merely something we do to pay the bills, we put ourselves at risk of rationalizing anything to keep our jobs.
The temptation to sell out the faith for the sake of self-protection is by no means an abstract threat. We may not (yet) be at the point where Christians are forbidden to buy and sell in general without state approval, but we are on the brink of entire areas of commercial and professional life being off-limits to believers whose consciences will not allow them to burn incense to the gods of our age.
The workplace is getting tougher for orthodox believers as America’s commitment to religious liberty weakens. Progressives sneer at claims of anti-Christian discrimination or persecution. Don’t you believe them. Most of the experts I talked to on this topic spoke openly only after I promised to withhold their identities. They’re frightened that their words today might cost them their careers tomorrow.
They’re not paranoid. While Christians may not be persecuted for their faith per se, they are already being targeted when they stand for what their faith entails, especially in matters of sexuality. As the LGBT agenda advances, broad interpretations of antidiscrimination laws are going to push traditional Christians increasingly out of the marketplace, and the corporate world will become hostile toward Christian bigots, considering them a danger to the working environment.
The Human Rights Campaign Foundation, a powerful LGBT pressure group, publishes an annual Corporate Equality Index. In its 2016 report, over half of the top twenty U.S. companies have a perfect score. To fail to score high is considered a serious problem within leading corporations.
Among the criteria the foundation used in its 2016 evaluations was that “senior management/executive performance measures include LGBT diversity metrics.” A company that wants to win the foundation’s seal of approval will have to show concrete proof that it is advancing the LGBT agenda in the workplace. The “ally” phenomenon—straight people publicly declaring themselves to be supporters of the LGBT agenda—is one way companies can both demonstrate progress to gay rights campaigners, as well as identify dissenters who may stand in the way of progress.
I have talked to a number of Christians, in fields as diverse as law, banking, and education, who face increasing pressure within their corporations and institutions to publicly declare themselves “allies” of LGBT colleagues. In some instances, employees are given the opportunity to wear special badges advertising their allyship. Naturally if one doesn’t wear the badge, she is likely to face questions from co-workers and even shunning.
These workers fear that this is soon going to serve as a de facto loyalty oath for Christian employees—and if they don’t sign it, so to speak, it will mean the end of their jobs and possibly even their careers. To sign the oath, they believe, would be the modern equivalent of burning a pinch of incense before a statue of Caesar.
It will be impossible in most places to get licenses to work without affirming sexual diversity dogma. For example, in 2016 the American Bar Association voted to add an “anti-harassment” rule to its Model Code of Conduct, one that if adopted by state bars would make simply discussing issues having to do with homosexuality (among other things) impossible without risking professional sanction—unless one takes the progressive side of the argument.
Along those lines, it will be very difficult to have open dialogue in many workplaces without putting oneself in danger. One Christian professor on a secular university’s science faculty declined to answer a question I had about the biology of homosexuality, out of fear that anything he said, no matter how innocuous and fact-based, could get him brought up on charges within his university, as well as attacked by social media mobs. Everyone working for a major corporation will be frog-marched through “diversity and inclusion” training and will face pressure not simply to tolerate LGBT co-workers but to affirm their sexuality and gender identity.
Plus, companies that don’t abide by state and federal antidiscrimination statutes covering LGBTs will not be able to receive government contracts. In fact, according to one religious liberty litigator who has had to defend clients against an exasperating array of antidiscrimination lawsuits, the only thing standing between an employer or employee and a court action is the imagination of LGBT plaintiffs and their lawyers.
“We are all vulnerable to such targeting,” he said.
Says a religious liberty lawyer, “There is no looming resolution to these conflicts; no plateau that we’re about to reach. Only intensification. It’s a train that won’t stop so long as there is momentum and track.”
David Gushee, a well-known Evangelical ethicist who holds an aggressively progressive stance on gay issues, published a column in 2016 noting that the middle ground is fast disappearing on the question of whether discrimination against gays and lesbians for religious reasons should be tolerated.
“Neutrality is not an option,” he wrote. “Neither is polite half-acceptance. Nor is avoiding the subject. Hide as you might, the issue will come and find you.”3
Public school teachers, college professors, doctors, and lawyers will all face tremendous pressure to capitulate to this ideology as a condition of employment. So will psychologists, social workers, and all in the helping professions; and of course, florists, photographers, bakers, and all businesses that are subject to public accommodation laws.
Christian students and their parents must take this into careful consideration when deciding on a field of study in college and professional school. A nationally prominent physician who is also a devout Christian tells me he discourages his children from following in his footsteps. Doctors now and in the near future will be dealing with issues related to sex, sexuality, and gender identity but also to abortion and euthanasia. “Patient autonomy” and nondiscrimination are the principles that trump all conscience considerations, and physicians are expected to fall in line.
“If they make compliance a matter of licensure, there will be nowhere to hide,” said this physician. “And then what do you do if you’re three hundred thousand dollars in debt from medical school, and have a family with three kids and a sick parent? Tough call, because there aren’t too many parishes or church communities who would jump in and help.”
In past eras, religious minorities found themselves locked out of certain professions. In medieval times, for example, anti-Semitic bigotry in Europe prevented Jews from participating in many trades and professions, shunting them off to do marginal work that Christians did not want to do. Jews entered banking, for example, because usury was considered sinful by medieval Christianity and was kept off-limits to Christians.
Similarly, orthodox Christians in the emerging era will need to adapt to an era of hostility. Blacklisting will be real. In Canada, the legal profession is trying to forbid law graduates of Trinity Western University, a private Christian liberal arts college, from practicing law—this, to punish the school for being insufficiently progressive on LGBT issues. Similarly, an LGBT activist group called Campus Pride has put more than one hundred Christian colleges on a “shame list” and called on business and industry not to hire their graduates. It is unwise to discount the influence of groups like this on corporate culture—and that, in turn, will have a devastating effect on Christian colleges.
“The challenges to Christian education—especially higher education—are about to be aggressive,” one legal scholar said. “Degrees from unaccredited universities, or universities that can’t place graduates or receive federal research dollars, are of very low value.”
Does this mean that no Christian should go to medical school or law school or enroll in professional training to enter other fields? Not necessarily. It does mean, however, that Christians must not take for granted that within a given field, there will be no challenges to their faith so great that they will have to choose between their Christianity and their careers. Many Christians will be compelled to make their living in ways that do not compromise their religious consciences. This calls for prudence, boldness, vocational creativity, and social solidarity among believers.
Not every challenge in the workplace is a hill worth dying on. Not every office is the Roman Colosseum.
David Hall, a federal employee in Illinois, put his job in danger by repeatedly refusing his employer’s request to watch an LGBT diversity training video. Hall, a Christian, told his agency that signing a statement acknowledging that he had viewed the clip would be “an abomination.”
Though Hall must ultimately obey his own conscience, it’s hard to sympathize with someone willing to sacrifice his job over something so trivial. Signing a statement affirming one has seen a training video is not the same thing as signing a statement affirming homosexuality.
Christians must exercise wisdom in these cases. Life is full of compromises, and not every one turns a believer into Judas. Claiming religious persecution unnecessarily will not help the cause. Instead, it will provide the secular left with grounds for claiming that all concern for religious liberty is a sham.
“If possible, so far as it depends on you, be at peace with all men,” instructed Saint Paul (Romans 12:18). Christians should not seek conflict and instead should submit to their workplace and legal authorities as much as possible. The lesson for believers today? Silence does not always mean acquiescence, and in some cases it may be a wiser and more loving approach. In the end, we may be required to lose our jobs and even, alas, more. But aggressive workplace challenges to our faith can sometimes be deflected or stalled by a saintly exercise in prudence. Silence can be a shield.
Christians should never deny their faith, but that doesn’t mean they are obliged to be in-your-face about it either. “I do think one can be a Christian and avoid falling into traps, as long as we have the right to remain silent and exercise it prudently,” says a law professor. A Catholic doctor advises Christian physicians not to go out of their way to provoke confrontation.
“If someone voices an opinion contrary to your beliefs, including a patient, but you’re not actually being asked to violate your conscience, let it go,” he says. “Build for the future. Develop alliances, garner goodwill, quietly educate, seek out offices, practices, and systems that you can work in without controversy.”
Maintaining a Christian witness with your colleagues while avoiding religious conflict wherever possible can also be an act of love. “The more scared and paranoid we are, the harder it is to make connections and relationships with people who need Jesus,” says one Christian who works in human resources at a Fortune 500 company. “If we’re always on war footing, they’re going to sense that.”
This HR facilitator, who asked to remain anonymous, counsels Christians to lead with compassion and empathy, erring on the side of nonjudgment. He has developed friendships with LGBT colleagues, who know he’s an orthodox Christian but who also understand that he doesn’t wish to demonize them. This kind of friendship can give a believer valuable insights into the real-life struggles these colleagues face and let them know that they are loved by their Christian co-workers.
“What excites me about the Benedict Option is that we’re maintaining a culture, so that when this social experiment in sexuality we have going on fails—and it will—these people are going to have to have someplace to go,” he says. “We can’t have people thinking that they shouldn’t go talk to the Christians. There can’t be any positive ending in that.”
Of course, there’s a time where prudence must end and boldness begin. In some situations, if Christians are courageous enough to speak up they may be able to gain time for religious liberty. “I am a sinner who is far from perfect, but I refused to be a closeted sinner,” says Stephen Bainbridge, a UCLA law professor and Catholic. “I am going to go on having a picture of Saint Thomas More in my office. And I’m going to go on pushing back when people infringe on freedom of speech and religion, especially on campuses.
“And if my colleagues don’t like that, all I can say is, ‘Come and have a go if you think you’re hard enough,’” Bainbridge continues. “After all, if I may be forgiven for quoting the great reformer, ‘Here I stand; I can do no other.’”
What are some workplace issues on which a believer cannot compromise? On which “personally opposed, but” is no excuse? A Christian doctor must always and everywhere refuse to take innocent life; abortion and euthanasia are forbidden. Christian teachers in public and private schools must not acquiesce to teaching as normative the new gender ideology, as some school systems are beginning to mandate. Participating in the direct making and distribution of pornography is yet another. And any job, no matter how benign, that compels one to affirm (as distinct from withholding approval of) something un-Christian and untrue is not worth keeping, no matter what the cost.
Recognizing these challenges, Christians need to ask themselves some tough questions: Am I called to work in this industry? If so, how do I live faithfully within it? If not, can I find a safer line of work?
A young friend of mine, a brilliant medical student in her mid-twenties, was well on her way to becoming a research scientist. She was working on her medical degree and interning at one of the nation’s top laboratories. She is also a believing Christian, but the kind of behavior she observed in the lab, as well as the research projects she expected to have to work on in the future, made her doubt her career prospects.
My friend had long wanted to be a medical scientist, but having been raised in a devoutly orthodox Christian home, and certain of her own faith convictions, she discerned that she could not in good conscience continue down this path. She changed tracks to study hospital administration instead.
“It just wasn’t worth it to me,” she told me at the time. “I didn’t want to get far down that road, then be faced with a choice that could blow up my career or violate my conscience. And seeing how cutthroat scientists were in the lab, only to get ahead in their careers, made me afraid that if I stayed in that culture, I might become the kind of person who does the same thing and doesn’t even notice a problem.”
Now is the time for Christians whose livelihoods may be endangered to start thinking and acting creatively in professional fields still open to us without risk of compromise. The goal is to create business and career opportunities for Christians who have been driven out of other industries and professions.
“Our churches need more entrepreneurs, and we need to teach our children how to think entrepreneurially about their futures,” says Calee Lee, an Eastern Orthodox Christian in Irvine, California.
“The key to work life under the Benedict Option is no different than today: identify a need in your community, develop an excellent product or service that fills that need, and then ‘work at it with your whole heart, as working for the Lord, not for men,’” Lee says, quoting Colossians. “We need to develop good business sense, not be afraid of profit, and understand that by building something valuable, whether it is a gasket or a gardening service, we are bringing a good thing to the world.”
Lee started her digital children’s book company, Xist Publishing, because she saw a need. Xist pairs authors with illustrators to produce the kinds of books Lee wanted her children to read. Today Xist has more than two hundred books in its online catalog and provides income to writers and visual artists—all working outside traditional publishing.
Though she did not start her company because of anti-Christian persecution or harassment in the workplace, Lee cites it as an example of how believers driven out of certain professions can take advantage of the Internet economy to support themselves in ways that are not morally compromising.
She points to the success of companies like LuLaRoe, a clothing manufacturer started in 2012 by DeAnne Stidham, a Mormon stay-at-home mom who saw a need for modest yet attractive fashions for women like her. By selling through a nationwide network of over twelve thousand consultants—usually stay-at-home moms—LuLaRoe turned itself into a niche powerhouse.
“I could decry big publishers for not putting out books I write or things I want for my children to read, or I could do it myself,” Lee says. “You can be frustrated with the fashion industry, or you can be the fashion industry. That’s the approach Christians are going to need to take when things get tough in the workplace. For example, teachers who don’t want to teach in the public school system can start their own tutoring companies.”
The times are going to be more difficult for orthodox Christians in the workplace, Lee acknowledges, but it’s not the end of the world. It means they have to become more commercially innovative and independent-minded.
They are also going to have to start building the Christian community’s businesses through disciplined shopping—that is, by choosing to direct their patronage to Christian-owned enterprises.
Richard Starr has been a member of Grace Bible Chapel, a large Evangelical church in the northern corner of Maryland, for the past decade. The church publishes a directory of its members and their businesses, in case others in the congregation care to patronize them.
“When my water pump went out one year, and I didn’t have the two thousand dollars handy to fix it, McDowell’s Plumbing let me pay over two months. When I needed two new tires, I went to Steve Foster, who put on four, called me, and said ‘Your girls drive this car, and I think you need them for safety. Pay me when you can,’” Starr says.
“And yeah, Foster’s Auto costs a little more money than other shops, but in the long run it’s worth it, not just economically, but to support a business that treats folks that way.”
Nevertheless, says Starr, as a general rule, “We should commit ourselves to finding out about what good businesses are owned by our brothers and sisters in Christ, and then patronizing them.” Everyday commerce conducted within the community builds social capital.
Christians also have to become far more intentional about hiring workers from within their own church community. Many churches already have informal internal networks that help members find jobs with employers that are within the community or are known to other members. For the Benedict Option to work, this approach is going to have to become more formal and sustained.
Andrew Pudewa, the homeschooling instructional guru who runs the successful Institute for Excellence in Writing (IEW), employs members of his traditionalist Catholic agrarian community in Oklahoma. Not only does IEW publish highly regarded educational material for homeschoolers nationwide, but the rapid, Internet-driven growth of IEW’s publishing business provides a livelihood for a number of families in Pudewa’s church circles.
Similarly, Reba Place Fellowship in suburban Chicago, a Mennonite intentional community active since the 1950s, has spun off several businesses that began as church ministries, including a bicycle shop and an Amish furniture store.
“I’ve patronized or known of these businesses and the real impact they provide for the community,” says Chad Comello, who lives in a Reba-owned apartment. “They employ a lot of Reba’s covenant members and other Reba-adjacent young people like me, for small jobs but also steady employment. Those jobs kept me afloat when unemployed and gave me some purpose during some aimless times.”
Were Starr to lose his job, he is certain that he could count on the Grace Bible congregation for support until he could find another one, and that they would all help on the job search. That’s the kind of Christians they are: believers who live in such close community that when one falls on hard times, the others take up the slack as much as they can.
In Italy, the Tipi Loschi created three business cooperatives to provide employment both for its members and for rehabilitated drug addicts and former prisoners. As enthusiastic supporters of Distributism, an economic model based on Catholic social teaching and favoring small cooperatives and family businesses, the Tipi Loschi hope to create more local co-ops as they grow.
Reba Place, the Tipi Loschi, and similar initiatives offer examples of how churches and other Christian associations can build economic enterprises to sustain their own communities—just as Benedictine monks have been doing for centuries. Today the changing cultural and legal climate means all Christian communities of any size must start thinking of these initiatives as central to their mission.
Beyond the local level, Communion and Liberation (CL), a global Catholic movement based in Italy, manages the Company of Works, a nationwide Italian network of small and medium-size business, charities, and nonprofit organizations. They are all run by CL members and dedicated to cooperation for the sake of living out Catholic principles in economic life. Leaders in orthodox Christian life in the United States should consider forming a similar association of businesses, for the sake of mutual support and collaboration.
For some Christians, the transition will be as radical as the one Brother Francis made: shifting from working with one’s mind to working with one’s hands. And it might be more spiritually profitable too.
Sam MacDonald is a Catholic who oversees the parochial school system in rural Elk County, Pennsylvania, two hours northeast of Pittsburgh. Though the county is not the industrial powerhouse it once was, there are still significant manufacturers there.
Elk County (population 31,479) is heavily Catholic and culturally conservative. MacDonald, a son of Elk County, was one of the good students encouraged by the culture to leave and make his way in the outside world. After earning a Yale degree in the mid-1990s and working as a journalist in Washington, D.C., he eventually returned with his wife and kids. Today he is an education innovator, working to introduce some of the county’s Catholic schools to the classical model.
“I’m going to have a classical academy that builds die-setters. That’s where we’re headed,” he says. “If you go back fifty years, the Catholic kids around here were all taught by the nuns. They were all die-setters who learned Latin and who could do trigonometry like nobody’s business.”
If you have a strong work ethic, can pass a drug test, and can be trusted to show up on time, Elk County has a job for you. Its local manufacturers know that within ten years, they will need ten thousand workers to replace the skilled laborers who are retiring. Too many of the current county residents who would normally fill those jobs are too dysfunctional to do them or have moved away. Rather than look at relocating the factories a decade from now, the Elk County industrialists are considering a campaign to draw good workers to the area.
“They want to hire and build up a workforce of citizen-workers,” says MacDonald, “people who are not only going to be reliable employees, but who are also going to be good citizens, who go to church, and who get involved with the community.”
MacDonald says there’s already a good basis for a Catholic Benedict Option community there. There are plenty of churches, a great Catholic school system that’s improving, and a culturally conservative ethos that’s family-friendly. Plus, it’s affordable: you can get a good house for around sixty thousand dollars, which is not much more than many skilled laborers make in a year.
The catch is that you have to work in a factory, though that’s a much more appealing alternative these days than in decades past, when factory floors were grimy. And you have to live in a place MacDonald describes as “in the middle of nowhere.”
It’s a matter of priorities.
“If you’re in a place in your life where you decide that you can’t work for your company because you can’t be an ally, Elk County might make sense,” he says. “Nobody’s going to ask a die-setter to be an ally. They don’t care.”
Tradition-minded Christians who have immersed themselves in the writings of Wendell Berry should understand that agrarianism is no panacea. “You can’t make a living as a farmer, but you can make a living as a die-setter,” says MacDonald. “Industrialism is the new agrarianism. It’s not back to the land, but back to the trades.”
The challenge for some Benedict Option Christians will be to find and relocate to the Elk Counties all over America—faraway places on the margins of the Empire. Funny thing is, the “margins of the Empire” could be as near as the boundaries of what is acceptable employment in one’s social class. Faithful Christians who foresaw a professional career for themselves or their children will need to give the trades a second look. Better to be a plumber with a clean conscience than a corporate lawyer with a compromised one.
In the end, it comes down to what believers are willing to suffer for the faith. Are we ready to have our social capital devalued and lose professional status, including the possibility of accumulating wealth? Are we prepared to relocate to places far from the wealth and power of the cities of the Empire, in search of a more religiously free way of life? It’s going to come to that for more and more of us. The time of testing is at hand.
“A lot of Christians see no difference between being faithfully Christian and being professionally and socially ambitious,” says a religious liberty activist. “That is ending.”
True story: a couple in suburban Washington, D.C., approached their pastor asking him to help their college student daughter, who felt a calling to be an overseas missionary.
“That’s wonderful!” said the pastor.
“Oh no, you misunderstand,” said the parents. “We want you to help us talk her out of ruining her life.”
Christians like that couple won’t make it through what’s to come. Christians with sacrificial hearts like their daughter’s will. But it’s going to cost them plenty.
A young Christian who dreams of being a lawyer or doctor might have to abandon that hope and enter a career in which she makes far less money than a lawyer or doctor would. An aspiring Christian academic might have to be happy with the smaller salary and lower prestige of teaching at a classical Christian high school.
A Christian family might be forced to sell or close a business rather than submit to state dictates. The Stormans family of Washington state faced this decision after the U.S. Supreme Court upheld a state law requiring its pharmacy to sell pills the family considers abortifacient. Depending on the ultimate outcome of her legal fight, florist Barronelle Stutzman, who declined for conscience reasons to arrange flowers for a gay wedding, faces the same choice.
When that price needs to be paid, Benedict Option Christians should be ready to support one another economically—through offering jobs, patronizing businesses, professional networking, and so forth. This will not be a cure-all; the conversion of the public square into a politicized zone will be too far-reaching for orthodox Christian networks to employ or otherwise financially support all their economic refugees. But we will be able to help some.
Given how much Americans have come to rely on middle-class comfort, freedom, and stability, Christians will be sorely tempted to say or do anything asked of us to hold on to what we have. That is the way of spiritual death. When the Roman proconsul told Polycarp he would burn him at the stake if he didn’t worship the emperor, the elderly second-century bishop retorted that the proconsul threatened temporary fire, which was nothing compared with the fire of judgment that awaited the ungodly.
If Polycarp was willing to lose his life rather than deny his faith, how can we Christians today be unwilling to lose our jobs if put to the test? If Barronelle Stutzman is prepared to lose her business as the cost of Christian discipleship, how can we do anything less?
We will be able to choose courageously and correctly in the moment of trial only if we have prepared ourselves in every possible way. We can start by thinking of our work as a calling, as a vocation in the older sense: a way of life given to us by God for His own glory and for the common good. There is no reason why we can’t serve the community and our own desire for professional excellence as doctors, lawyers, teachers, or almost anything else—as long as we know in our hearts that we are the Lord’s good servants first.
We have talked so far in this book about what it means to create the structures and take on the practices that train our hearts to be the Lord’s good servants first, even to the point of sacrifice. This is what the Benedict Option is supposed to do: help us to order all parts of our lives around Him. None of these strategies will work, however, unless Christians think radically different about the two most powerful forces shaping and driving modern life: sex and technology.