Page 1 Page 2 Page 3 Page 4 Page 5 Page 6 Page 7 Page 8 Page 9 Page 10 Page 11 Page 12 Page 13 Page 14 Page 15 Page 16 Page 17 Page 18 Page 19 Page 20 Page 21 Page 22 Page 23 Page 24 Page 25 Page 26 Page 27 Page 28 Page 29 Page 30 Page 31 Page 32 Page 33 Page 34 Page 35 Page 36 Page 37 Page 38 Page 39 Page 40 Page 41 Page 42 Page 43 Page 44 Page 45 Page 46 Page 47 Page 48 Page 49 Page 50 Page 51 Page 52 Page 53 Page 54 Page 55 Page 56 Page 57 Page 58 Page 59 Page 60 Page 61 Page 62 Page 63 Page 64 Page 65 Page 66 Page 67 Page 68 Page 69 Page 70 Page 71 Page 72 Page 73 Page 74 Page 75 Page 76 Page 77 Page 78 Page 79 Page 80 Page 81 Page 82 Page 83 Page 8410 Plough Quarterly • Winter 2017 How should Christians live as the society around us grows increasingly hostile to faith? Plough’s Peter Mommsen visited the New York Times–bestselling author Rod Dreher in his Louisiana home for a wide-ranging conversation about Donald Trump, religious liberty, American empire, persecution  –  and why Christian community is a big part of the answer. Peter Mommsen: In recent months, you’ve created a stir by blogging about what you call the Benedict Option, and you have a forth- coming book by that title. What is the Benedict Option, and why do you think we need it? Rod Dreher: The name comes from Alasdair MacIntyre’s 1981 book After Virtue, which compares our society’s situation with the time after the fall of the Roman Empire. MacIntyre writes that we are waiting for a new and quite different Saint Benedict to teach us how to live in community again because we’ve become so fragmented. Benedict of Nursia was a young Christian born shortly after the fall of the Roman Empire who went to Rome to study. He became disgusted with the chaos and the decadence he saw in the city, and went out to the woods to pray and to ask God what he should do with his life. For three years he lived in a cave. When he came down, he founded a community of men to live together in what he called a school for the service of the Lord. This became the Benedictine order. Benedict wrote his Rule as a constitution for these men to live together. That little document and Benedict’s little Rod Dreher is a senior editor at The American Conservative and the author of several books including the forthcoming title The Benedict Option: A Strategy for Christians in a Post-Christian Nation, to be released by Penguin in March 2017. mustard-seed community of monks ended up becoming enormously influential in the life of the West. They held Christianity together during the so-called Dark Ages. The monks went into barbarian areas to evangelize, and if the barbarians killed them off, the mother house would send more brothers out. Slowly, these men laid the ground for the rebirth of Christian civilization in the West. What does this have to do with us today? Although MacIntyre wasn’t a Christian when he wrote his book, what I take from him is that we need small communities of committed believers who are willing to live countercultur- ally and bear witness. Christians today need to take stock of where we are as a culture and where we are likely to go. If our faith is going to make it over the generations, we are going to have to change our way of living dramatically. We’re going to have to be much more inten- tional and much more communal. Critics of the Benedict Option say that it’s a form of retreat – of abandoning society in order to live a purer, holier life. Are they right to see a kind of selfishness in withdrawing? Previous spread: photograph by Pino D’Amico