It was disorienting to read [Rod Dreher’s Benedict Option] as a Black American Christian. My people had never been at the centre of power. The Republican Party had not felt like home to most of us since the middle of the twentieth century. And the arc of the arrow of Dreher’s argument, of being pushed from cultural dominance into marginalization and defensiveness, was foreign to me. It was hard not to sniff some deeper insecurity at play in this paradigm that resonated with many white Christians while overlooking a vast swath of American Christian experience. Was Dreher really motivated by a concern for holiness, or was he peddling nostalgia for what looked like the good old days from his limited vantage point?
It was fascinating to see Dreher lift up faraway models of Christians coping amid intensifying hostility—Václav Havel in Czechoslovakia, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn in Russia—while jumping right over his American neighbours in the Black Church. I deeply admire the Christian witness as it has found (and continues to find) its shape and subversive power in communist and post-communist contexts. But it felt as though Dreher (and the subsequent proliferation of hand-wringers like him) was keen on stripping all American believers of an inheritance of Christian integrity under hostile circumstances. This is not just bad history; it betrays a culturally selective understanding of gospel power.