The Benedict Option: A Strategy for Christians in a Post-Christian Nation by Rod Dreher

Is the answer retreat? Is today’s modern liberal culture too far gone to save? Have we invested “our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor” in a project that is not worth the former two, much less the first? Perhaps this is not the exact, word-for-word argument that columnist Rod Dreher makes, but it certainly appears to be something close to it. In The Benedict Option, Dreher takes us back in time to examine the life and example of St. Benedict and his band of reclusive followers, arguing that the community they formed is exactly the kind of community in which we should participate—and the kind of life for which we should be willing to die.

Dreher begins his argument with intellectual history, describing the twin forces of reason and faith—represented by Athens and Jerusalem—as guiding the Church and society through the Middle Ages. It is within this context that the life of Benedict and his monks, living for Christ as a community rather than merely as individuals, takes place. Dreher continues his intellectual chronology with the thought and life of St. Thomas Aquinas. Coming from a Protestant background, I am compelled to concede the greatness and intellectual seriousness of the man who is likely the premier theologian and philosopher not only of his period but extending into the present day. One of Dreher’s most important strengths is his ability to appeal to authorities such as Aquinas when making the case for Christian philosophical realism. Nor does Dreher resort to blaming the typical villain of anti-Enlightenment Christian critiques, René Descartes. Although he mentions Descartes, Dreher critiques not his methodology but the thinkers who followed him. Rather than blaming Enlightenment figures directly for current skepticism, Dreher instead points to William of Ockham, the father of nominalism, as the source of the problem. Let me explain.

Dreher posits that two rival worldviews were at work during the High Middle Ages, which have since split philosophical discourse into two nearly unbridgeable camps. The first, Christian realism, is associated with Thomas Aquinas and, earlier, Aristotle. This view holds that real, discoverable truths exist and are grounded in God. In other words, a tree is genuinely real, present, and accessible to the senses, but ultimately ordered within a meaningful and purposeful reality. This was the dominant view for centuries following Aquinas’s death. In contrast, William of Ockham proposed nominalism—the view that things do not possess inherent reality, causality, or necessity. Reality becomes fragmented into isolated parts, and meaning is no longer embedded in the world but is instead fluid. While nominalism leaves room for God, it undermines the idea of God’s unchanging nature. For Ockham and his intellectual descendants, the qualities of nature are not necessary but contingent. God could have just as easily commanded Moses, “Thou shalt kill,” if He had so chosen. The key difference lies in the nature of meaning: for realists, meaning exists independently and is discovered; for nominalists, meaning is constructed. Dreher sees this shift as the catalyst for the modern struggle between objective meaning and subjective self. His argument is that once society rejected realism and embraced nominalism, the checks and balances that governed both society and meaning itself began to unravel, piece by piece.

The solution, Dreher proposes, is not political engagement. He argues that such efforts have failed. In a sense, he calls for retreat—perhaps into local communities, perhaps even into something resembling monastic life. However it is framed, engagement with an increasingly counter-Christian culture is not, in his view, the answer. The problem with this is that Christians are called to be the “salt and the light” of the earth. Classical teachings hold that Christians remain in the world as a counterbalance to evil. It is through engagement with a fallen world that redemption is pursued. Dreher overlooks this in his advocacy for intentional Christian communities. While such communities are not inherently wrong, his emphasis neglects a significant part of the broader picture.

Secondly, Dreher significantly overestimates the ability of community to preserve truth. While he is correct to reject the nominalism of William of Ockham, he veers toward the opposite extreme, failing to adequately account for the free will of individuals to accept or reject biblical mandates. Community, though valuable, cannot guarantee faithfulness. Because of human fallenness, no structure—no matter how well-ordered—can serve as a safeguard against error. Dreher himself concedes that community is not salvific. Yet by placing such weight on retreat and communal life, he effectively elevates it beyond its proper role, risking a subtle shift away from personal responsibility and active witness in the world.

The final problem with Dreher’s argument is that, although he is overly optimistic about humanity’s ability to achieve harmony within community, he simultaneously underestimates humanity’s capacity to act in accordance with natural law—especially when the survival of culture itself is at stake. His claim that the answer no longer lies in voting for political candidates risks creating a false dichotomy. The truth is that the answer never lay solely in political engagement. Both Christian theologians and the American founders understood that political involvement, while necessary, is not sufficient. We can agree with Dreher that “politics is not the solution,” but we must also insist that “retreat into community is not the solution either.” In avoiding one ditch, Dreher has driven into another. There have always been those who spread fear and predict impending collapse. Perhaps such collapse is near. But even if our systems are irredeemable, our institutions corrupt, and our world deeply fallen, the answer is not withdrawal. It is to stand and act—even if such action appears futile—so that we cannot be said to have remained silent.

It is important to avoid misrepresenting Dreher’s argument. He does not advocate burying our heads in the sand or withdrawing entirely from political life. In fact, he encourages continued support for causes such as the right to life, traditional marriage, and core tenets of Christian conservatism. Dreher is not unpatriotic, despite how his argument may sound. He clearly loves America and its people; more broadly, he values Western civilization and seeks to protect it from forces he believes are eroding it from within. The issue lies less in what Dreher explicitly argues and more in how his argument may be interpreted. He is correct to point out that many of our current solutions are ineffective. However, where he errs is not in diagnosing the problem, but in his response. Like others in the post-liberal movement, he risks rejecting the very system that allowed the problem to emerge—and that may still contain the means for its resolution. The problem is not classical liberalism or our system of government. Nor is it that we mistakenly believe politics alone is the solution. Rather, the problem lies in expecting too much from imperfect systems and people. It lies in demanding perfection from a fallen world and then abandoning it when that expectation is not met.

What, then, is the verdict? Is The Benedict Option worth reading? Yes—with important caveats. The book succeeds not so much in accomplishing its stated aim, where it ultimately falls short, but in establishing the necessary groundwork for a broader discussion. Dreher’s real contribution is that he forces readers to confront where things may have gone wrong and to consider possible solutions together. This conversation, as Dreher himself suggests, should take place within communities—but without idolizing community, dismissing political structures, or denying individual responsibility. The Church was not called to survive history by retreating from it, but by confronting it—generation after generation—not with certainty of victory, but with certainty of truth. That is where we must stand. 

Review Written by C. A. Gerber

April 24th, 2026

The Absurdity of Unbelief by Jeffrey D. Johnson

Secularists are prone to portray the battle over worldview as a conflict between the outdatedness of religious belief and the science of progress, but what if this dichotomy is not only false, but completely reverses the reality of reality itself? Jeffrey D. Johnson sets out to prove in his book, The Absurdity of Unbelief, not only that Christianity is a viable alternative to the worldviews and religious dogmas of our world today, but that it is the only comprehensive system of thought that accurately relies upon the use of reason as proof, and not an obstacle to the radical claims made by the Biblical account.

To read this book does not require a degree in advanced philosophy or theological thought, though it does require a clear head, a concentrated mind, and a willing spirit, as well as a healthy dose of caffeine. Jeffrey Johnson does a masterful job not only at defending his central thesis, but at anticipating objections to it, and addressing them properly.

Beginning, in part one with a critique of the significant worldview of today, including those which would seem to the naked eye to not conflict with the truth claims of Christianity -such as Pascalian existentialism-, but which in reality are a substantive threat to the progress of the gospel.

As Johnson writes in the introduction to the book: “Because all non-Christian worldviews are indefensible, it is not sufficient for skeptics to attack Christianity without also defending the foundation for their own unbelief. Everyone has a worldview, even atheists and skeptics, but only the Christian worldview is not self-contradictory.” The author digs into the premises upon which the rival religions that threaten Christianity are based, and with Schaefferian rigor exposes them as frauds, self-contradictory theses which are indefensible from the start when we clearly identify what they state and why they state it. From naturalism to existentialism, to Nietzschean nihilism, Johnson progressively shows the decline, or devolution of these worldviews, not as coherent systems of truth, but as intellectual cul-de-sacs that collapse under the weight of their own presuppositions. When followed to their logical conclusions, Johnson argues, these systems ultimately undermine the very tools they depend upon. Naturalism erodes the basis for reason itself by its denial of a designer or law-giver; existentialism dissolves truth into subjective preference; nihilism, as articulated by figures like Friedrich Nietzsche, leaves humanity stranded in a universe devoid of meaning or moral grounding which calls into question the very reason for which they proposed their system of thought in the first place.

In part two, Johnson illuminates the truth on some of the greatest objections to systemic Christian theology; from the Trinity to the reliability of Scripture, and the bogeyman called Evil. Destroying both the dualistic Christianity which sees evil as an equal force with good -in a very Thomist way, though the author, an avowed anti-Thomist would reject the label-, and the existentialist experience-based faith that treats reality as that which is true for the inner self and ultimately leads to the Christian nihilism of figures like Paul Tillich and Rudolf Bultmann, Johnson instead proposes the central thesis of Christianity as a revelation of reality, and reason as an instrument, and not a master of the created order. Using the presuppositional apologetics approach of Francis Schaeffer and Cornelius Van Til -a system, which, as a classical theistic apologist, I find problematic but still useful-, Johnson sheds light on the fact that the doctrines of Christianity are not simply doctrines, but facts. The Trinity, as an example, is, by necessity present, for, if God is love, and to love implies a lover and one who is loved, then it is necessary that God should have loved prior to creating us; yet who else could He love if he was not the trinitarian God presented in Scripture?

What appears mysterious, he argues, is not therefore contradictory; rather, the difficulty often lies in humanity’s limited understanding of divine realities. The doctrines critics most often dismiss as absurd, are the doctrines which provide the basis for a coherent worldview and systematic form of belief. Unbelief, and not belief, is absurd, irrational and self-destructive. The choice, argues Johnson, is not between faith and reason, not between religion and science, but between rationality and irrationality, truth and falsehood, light and darkness.

Review Written by C. A. Gerber

March 15th, 2026

The War for Middle Earth by Joseph Loconte

Two great men. Two classics. And a war that brought it all about. 

In The War for Middle Earth, Tolkien scholar Joseph Loconte takes a deep look into the defining conflict of the twentieth century and how it shaped the lives, the works, and the ideas of C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien. One, a Catholic philologist; the other, an atheist turned Christian apologist, both realizing that the Second World War was not simply a conflict between two entities seeking territorial domination. Rather, it was a conflict between the forces of good, of Western civilization, of honor and of virtue, facing off against the forces of evil represented by totalitarian Germany and, later, Soviet Russia.

Interviewing noted historians of this period, including Sir Niall Ferguson, Loconte looks not only at how the war shaped their perceptions of the world, but how the perceptions of the pre–WWII world shaped the war. Following the killing fields of the Great War, in which both men lost friends, the entire world seemed to reel. Why was war even necessary? Thus, pacifist groups and anti-war advocates began their slow climb to the zenith of their power, to utterly disastrous consequences. Unnerved by his experience in the Battle of the Somme, Tolkien nonetheless realized that sticking his head in the sand would not take away the threat from totalitarian states. To blind oneself to the truth of evil would not make evil blind itself to the truth of good and to its attempt to conquer it.

Loconte does a good job of portraying the grueling reality of war, not as a glorious conflict in itself, but as one which, though bloody, has the potential for glory. He shows how the prevailing narrative of the day, that war was something evil which must be avoided at all costs, ultimately did nothing to prevent the arrival of the bloodiest conflict of the twentieth century, but also the clearest example of a moral war; a war waged by the defenders of Western culture against the wielders of totalitarian evil.

Both intellectual history and historical biography, Loconte treats not only Lewis and Tolkien and their works as directly influenced by the conflict of their age, but he also shows us the presuppositions and ideologies of the day, from Freudian psychoanalysis to the despair of T. S. Eliot, and the works of pessimistic anti-war writers such as Erich Maria Remarque and Ernest Hemingway. Furthermore, he deals with the political machinations of those who desired to avoid war at all costs, such as Neville Chamberlain and Franklin D. Roosevelt before Pearl Harbor, as well as those who sensed the danger coming and spoke about it, Winston Churchill being foremost among them.

The War for Middle Earth should be a book that you read, reread, and read again. It should be a book whose thesis you think about every time you read one of Tolkien’s poems or Lewis’s literary critiques. It should be a book that you place on your bookshelf and show off to your friends. It is a treasure. It will remain such.

The author exposes the heart of the totalitarian state in all its manifestations. It is, he argues, the logical step on the ladder that leads to Nietzsche’s superman; it is, in its basest form, the will to power. The only answer, for Lewis and for Tolkien, and for us today, is the will to fight. We may wish, like Frodo, that we had been born in a different time, in a different place; we may wish that this responsibility had not been assigned to us. “So do all who live to see such times,” as Gandalf states, “but that is not for them to decide.” All that we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us. The War for Middle Earth did not end at the Gates of Mordor, nor with the surrender of Germany; the war rages on, and we, as in the days of Tolkien and Lewis, are called to fight.

Review written by C. A. Gerber

February 28th, 2026

The Swastika in the Sanctuary by Jarod Murphey

Our country is in danger, argues author Jarod Murphey, and the danger lies not in the traditional bogeyman we have become so used to seeing on the left. 

Rather, the enemy lies to our right, in the increasingly antisemitic rhetoric of individuals christening themselves “conservatives” but who, as Christ warned us, are in reality wolves in sheep’s clothing.

Taking a deep dive into what is wrong with the conservative movement and how a group of neo-Nazi propagandists have hijacked it, Murphey digs up quotes, speeches, and claims made by these individuals and shows clearly and precisely the danger of these baseless accusations, which are, at their root, nothing short of a betrayal of Christian principles and the foundational principles of Judeo-Christian morality. Murphey supports his argument with extensive citations from speeches, podcasts, and social media posts, though at times the volume of quotations risks overwhelming the narrative flow.

For the first time, we have someone who is both a conservative in his own right and a dedicated Christian, as well as someone who sees the danger, diagnoses the problem, and proposes the solution without fear of attacking those “on our side.” The solution proposed by many who claim there are “no enemies to the right,” though perhaps noble-hearted, is insufficient, argues Murphey, for when you declare that to the right there is no wrong, the devil will make sure to whisper lies in your ear from the right.

This is a heavy book, a short read that feels much longer because of the heavy, nauseating material Murphey exposes. The Swastika in the Sanctuary remains, nonetheless, a necessary read for all of us who intend to engage our culture with a Christ-like response and stand firm even when faced with threats from both sides. We must follow the straight path and remain faithful in the face of withering fire, falling into the arms of neither enemy, but remaining, as always, with our eyes fixed on the eternal hope.

Review Written by C. A. Gerber

February 27th, 2026