Yuval Levin spends the first chunk of The Fractured Republic noting trends and making connections in American life over the 20th and 21st centuries.  In the last chunk of the book, Levin attempts to articulate some way forward from our decentralized-yet-concentrated culture.  A good part of that involves a discussion of subsidiarity (which involves giving decision-making power on levels that are literally closer to home).  In the chapter “Subculture Wars,” Levin discusses how church and religious communities (or any group outside of the mainstream) can navigate things, particularly in the areas of fight or flight.

A few cultural critics have been pointing in the first, darker, direction for decades.  Especially notable among them has been the Scottish philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre.  At the end of his groundbreaking 1981 book After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory, MacIntyre drew some parallels between the contemporary West and the Roman world as it declined into the dark ages.  “A cultural turning point in that earlier history,” he wrote, “occurred when men and women of good will turned aside from the task of shoring up the Roman imperium and ceased to identify with the continuation of civility and moral community with the maintenance of that imperium.”  Instead, the sought to build around themselves the kinds of human communities they believed essential to the survival of their way of life, and used those to escape a collapsing civilization.

And if you’re going to bring up MacIntyre, you’re going to bring up Benedict.

Something of the same spirit is necessary for traditionalists to confront the challenges of our time, he argued.  “This time however the barbarians are not waiting beyond the frontiers,” MacIntyre warned.  “They have already been governing for quite some time.  And it is our lack of consciousness of this that constitutes part of our predicament.  We are waiting not for a Godot, but for another—doubtless very different—St. Benedict.”

Rod Dreher over at The American Conservative has been talking about Benedict for a few years now (and I’ve mentioned his thinking a few times here).  Levin seems to get a good sense about Dreher’s argument (most recently articulate here).  “The Benedict Option” has often been maligned as escapist, when really it’s an opportunity invented to reconnoiter and strengthen what little culture particular communities might have left.  From Levin:

A resurgence of orthodoxy in our time will not involve a recovery of the old mainline churches or a reclaiming of the mainstream, but an evolution of the paraphernalia of persuasion and conversion of our traditional religions and moral communities.  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, but by dispersing themselves to the peripheries as small outposts.

I don’t think many conservative Christians in America see this yet (partly because such a “reality” has been a way Christians have articulate their place in the world for centuries).  And it may never come to the point that Dreher (or Levin) ultimately argue.  But it is a word of wisdom to those who would listen.

(image from the remains of a monastic community in York)