Swarming the Pub(l)ic Square:

A continuing survey of the farce; or, where the folks are given the last word; or, a pointed laugh, page 5

by Gassalasca Jape, S. J.

Many people–Evangelicals in particular–seem to have difficulty grasping that this is the point of MacIntyre’s oft-quoted passage from After Virtue in which he concludes that a new St. Benedict is needed to build a community of traditional moral discourse grounded in practice, discipline, and ritual. So strong is the Christian intellectuals’ taste for brilliant abstract formulations, helpfully prescriptive manifestoes (have you seen ours?), and a perpetual outpouring of books from InterVarsity Press, Baker, and Eerdmans (all summarily reviewed in First Things, Touchstone, and Books & Culture) that they fail to note what is the single most significant difference between, say, real oddities like Thomas More College (in Merrimack, NH) and the relatively mainstream Baylor and Wheaton. At Thomas More, like at a Benedictine monastery, students and faculty live, work, prepare meals, and eat together. Thomas More students are also responsible for housekeeping. This strikes me as a radical idea, a truly countercultural strategy that unfortunately stands little chance for enthusiastic approval in CCCU institutions. It is badly needed. At a certain Calvinist college proud of its commitment to Christian identity and cultural engagement, I have been told that the student dorms once became too filthy by the end of the term for staff to handle. The problem was resolved in the typically modern way: hire the Merry Maids! Is cleanliness next to godliness if you outsource for it?

The St. Benedict Option – Remix

Unfortunately, there are numerous examples in the movement literature of a stubborn adherence to the Fisher/Stout method of cultural engagement. Even worse, however, is the tendency to assimilate into the preferred matrix any truly threatening alternative so as to dissipate its potency. That is the unstated, and perhaps unconscious, goal of John Owen as he takes up MacIntyre in the April issue of First Things.

Owen’s thesis begins reasonably enough with a recognition that the ancient dialectic between freedom and moral restraint is particularly acute in the contemporary Christian’s relationship to a culture dominated by Liberalism. For Owen, it is this situation which has “prodded us to look for another St. Benedict.” But Owen’s proposed way of resolving this tension is a warmed over and sentimental version of Stout’s argument from Democracy and Tradition. In Owen’s thesis, monolithic symbolic constructions–“the America we have” and “the Church to which we belong”–must be defended simultaneously. (“The Church” is apparently an Evangelicals and Catholics Together kind of pragmatic fiction without the friction.) The social order Owen imagines–symbolized by “the Church” and “our secular fellow citizens” who together compose “America”–must be preserved because of its “continuing toleration of institutions that mediate between the individual and the state, institutions such as the Church itself.”

Which brings us full circle back to Wolfe–what kind of Church is America’s “civil society” willing to tolerate? Rick Warren’s Saddleback megachurch? Probably. A church operating on a Benedictine model? I have my doubts. Owen is likewise daunted by the image of ascesis that the “St. Benedict Option” conjures up. Fortunately for Owen and for the dual loyalty he imagines, his solution does not require us to follow the saint “all the way into the cloisters … . Our love for the Church, our families, and other communities” will suffice.

Cakes and Ale

Owen’s piece makes a striking contrast with another essay in the same issue of First Things, “The Church as Culture,” by Robert Louis Wilken. Wilken responds to secularization and the question of Christian renewal with a poem by Dana Gioia that is an implicit critique of the historical trajectory of Protestantism and “culture as choice.” (Gioia’s poem, “Autumn Inaugural,” is well-worth reading in full.) Given the spiritual weakness of a church within this trajectory, Wilken argues that it is now “less urgent to convince the … culture in which we live of the truth of Christ than it is for the Church to tell itself its own story and to nurture its own life, the culture of the city of God, the Christian republic.” In other words, the Church must relearn how to be a community of practice rather than an interest group marketing its wares along the road to “Yes!” Wilken concludes: “If Christ is culture, let the sidewalks be lit with fire on Easter Eve, let traffic stop for a column of Christians waving palm branches on a spring morning, let streets be blocked off as the faithful gather for a Corpus Christi procession. Then will others know that there is another city in their midst, another commonwealth, one that has its face, like the faces of angels, turned toward the face of God.”

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