THE BENEDICT OPTION AT MY SYNAGOGUE
A year and a half ago or so, Messianic Rabbi Russ Resnik visited my synagogue, Beth Immanuel Messianic Synagogue in Hudson, Wisconsin, to conduct a wedding. Rabbi Resnik is the former secretary of the Union of Messianic Jewish Congregations, a pioneer in modern Messianic Judaism, a member of the Messianic Jewish Rabbinical Council, a contributor to the Hashivenu Messianic think tank, and probably many other things besides. If anyone should know Messianic (Jesus-believing) Judaism, I figure it’s this guy.
So I was curious about his impressions. I didn’t have to ask—he volunteered them. He said to me, “This is an amazing community you all have built here.” He added some other kind words as well. But then he asked me, “Have you read The Benedict Option?”
I said, “No, I have not. What is it?”
He said, “You should read it. Your community reminds me of a Benedict community.”
I said, “I’ll give it a read.” End of conversation. And then I forgot the title of the book—until more recently, when one of the Drinklings recommended that I read Rod Dreher’s 2020 book Live Not by Lies: A Manual for Christian Dissidents.
Two or three times a year, I go out for beer with two friends, and we spend the evening talking about the Inklings and related literature—C. S. Lewis, Tolkien, Charles Williams, and some of their influences, like William Morris, E. R. Eddison, and other writers nobody has ever heard of. That’s why we call ourselves the Drinkinlings. On this particular night, my friend Paul, who is Russian Orthodox, recommended Live Not by Lies. He explained that the book is about how Christians in the Soviet bloc resisted totalitarianism in order to survive communism.
I was interested in the subject because it reminds me of some of the most important books I have ever read: the story of Richard and Sabina Wurmbrand, founders of Voice of the Martyrs; the Brother Andrew stories, especially God’s Smuggler; Brother Yun’s The Heavenly Man; and similar titles including several books about Russian Orthodox dissidents. These are the kinds of Christian stories our children need to be reading—and that we need to be reading as well. Not to mention the shelves of books and stories about Jewish heroism under communism, behind the Iron Curtain, where Jews struggled to keep Judaism alive; or under Hitler; or under church persecution; and before that under Roman persecution … all the way back to Egypt.
Such stories matter because they remind us who we are: people of faith, people of the Book, and a people who know that friendship with the world is enmity with God. We lose our way when we fail to distinguish ourselves from the world—that is, from the broader culture. That is how you lose your identity, your faith, and ultimately how we lose our children to secularism and godlessness.
So I thought, “Sure, I’ll give it a read.” Moreover, I was already reading articles by the same author in The Free Press, where Rod Dreher—a Christian conservative and a fierce critic of American Leftism—was also warning about the rise of neo-Nazism within segments of the American right. The articles had titles like:
The Radical Right Is Coming for Your Sons
The Threat of the Radical Right
The Intersectionality of Nick Fuentes
J. D. Vance vs. the Groypers
Dreher has been sounding the alarm about the groundswell of Nazism and antisemitism, and about the descent toward madness that some young conservatives are pursuing. He is saying the things our elected officials will not dare to say. They do not dare call out anti-Semistism and anti-Zionism as the cancer it is, rotting away the center that has traditionally stood for family values.
Dreher is a convert from Catholicism to Eastern Orthodoxy, and he is deeply concerned with the survival of the Christian faith. He believes a time of persecution is coming—indeed, that it is already here—through cancel culture, political correctness, and a growing rush toward collectivism.
In Live not by Lies, he writes about the cultural amnesia that has brought us to this moment, and his message is simple: get ready to resist. Not through insurrection, but through sacrifice. Even if that resistance means being canceled, marginalized, or arrested. Do not capitulate to totalitarianism, political correctness, “wokeism,” or groupthink, because if you do, you will sacrifice your faith. To remain a people of faith, he argues, we need to begin now—to build an underground. This is entirely in keeping with the teaching of Yeshua in Matthew 10, “be innocent as doves, but wise as serpents.”
It’s a great book. So I thought, “Let’s see what else he’s written.” That is when I noticed the title The Benedict Option: A Strategy for Christians in a Post-Christian Nation, a book from 2017—the very title Rabbi Resnik had recommended to me a year and a half earlier.
Rod Dreher’s The Benedict Option argues that we are witnessing the unraveling of Western civilization. Classical liberalism, he suggests, has turned in on itself, and the world as we have known it is rapidly reordering.
Christians in the contemporary United States now live within a culture indifferent (if not openly hostile) to traditional Christian beliefs and moral commitments. Western society has shifted from a broadly Christian moral consensus to a post-Christian reality in which secularism predominates and religious norms no longer shape public life. In this new world, there will be little room for people of faith and religious conviction.
But Dreher has a plan. He reminds the reader, “This isn’t the first time this has happened.” He points us back to the fall of the Christian Roman Empire, when something very similar unfolded. As barbarian invasions overran the Western world, civilization descended into what we now call the Dark Ages.
Yet Christianity—and Western literacy with it—survived, largely due to the monastic example of St. Benedict of Nursia, whose communities helped preserve the Christian faith, learning, and literature amid the collapse of the Roman world.
The monks withdrew from the mainstream and sequestered themselves in small, tight-knit communities dedicated to practicing their faith through prayer, discipline, and learning. They hand-copied the texts: the Scriptures, theological works, and the broader literature of the Western world, preserving far more than they could have known at the time.
In a nutshell, Dreher’s The Benedict Option proposes that modern believers cultivate intentional, countercultural small communities that embody and faithfully transmit the Christian faith.
He advocates that believers build small, robust, localized communities. Neighborhood-based communities of faith rooted in liturgical prayer, ancient religious traditions, and mutual accountability that are capable of sustaining faith and preserving religious identity amid cultural pressure, secularism, and, ultimately, social collapse. He argues that, if we are to survive, we must form intentionally countercultural communities or risk losing all of our children to assimilation. In Dreher’s assessment, evangelicalism and seeker-sensitive churches are utterly incapable of meeting this challenge.
Dreher wants to see Christian communities that practice traditions handed down from earlier generations. Such traditions often make little sense except as acts of discipline. This is simply what we do here. And we do it because discipline forms us.
He wants to see Christian communities that prioritize liturgical prayer over emotionalism and pop-culture worship music, because liturgy creates a legacy that is enduring, reinforcing, and unifying.
He wants to see Christian communities that teach their children about heroes of the faith—scholars and inspirational figures from previous generations—the kind of formation he observed modeled so effectively in Orthodox Jewish communities.
And he wants to see these communities develop at the neighborhood level, with real human interconnectedness—strengthening families, cultivating deep local involvement, and establishing separate schools and special educational initiatives. That means pulling out of public schools shaped by progressive sexual values and agendas, replacing them with schools that are robust in religious and classical education—schools that teach literacy, Scripture, and disciplined thinking. He also emphasizes breaking with a culture of immodesty by unashamedly dressing differently than the surrounding world.
It quickly became clear to me what Rabbi Resnik meant when he said that Beth Immanuel Messianic Synagogue reminded him of a Benedict Option community. As he makes his case, Dreher repeatedly points to the Orthodox Jewish community as the model of what this kind of life looks like when it is actually lived in the modern world.
Both of Dreher’s books address the cultural conflict between Judeo-Christian values and the progressive values of the Left, which have now been institutionalized at nearly every level of society. Benedict Option recommends building synagogue–style communities. Live Not by Lies urges us to prepare to resist. But now I think he is working toward a new title. In a recent comment in The Free Press, when asked what he learned in 2025, he said:
I learned that my side—the political right—could become as crazy as the woke left, especially on the matter of the Jews. Yeah, I knew that there were antisemites on the right, and other radicals, including conspiracy nuts, but I thought they were pretty much contained on the fringes. Nope. Shame on me for being surprised: As I’ve been saying for years, all the basic conditions Hannah Arendt said are present in a pre-totalitarian society are with us in America. A kind of totalitarian thinking long ago conquered the left and its institutions with wokeness. I thought all we on the right had to do was defeat wokeness, and we’d be okay. I was wrong. For the last six weeks, I’ve been devouring books about 1920s Germany. People like to joke darkly about “Weimar America,” but the more I learn from history, the less amusing it seems. (Rod Dreher, The Free Press)
DISCUSSION QUESTIONS
1. Who are some of the heroes of the faith that you know of, or could you stand to learn about a few more?
2. Examine your own beliefs. Are there ways in which you or your faith community have allowed modern “social norms” to creep into your doctrine?
3. What might it look like in practice to think, speak, act, or even dress differently than the world around you?