In all of these three works you can see arguments for what you might call “the necessity of community” – the necessity of new or rediscovered forms of Christian community in the late-modern world. (Technically it could still be early, but we’ll call it the late-modern world because we have a sense that time might be running out.) I want to draw out four points that run through all these writers that get at that necessity – for not only Christians but certainly Christians in particular – to think about community anew.

The first point comes across strongest in Eberhard Arnold and Rod Dreher. It is the sense of institutional indifference, or even hostility, to religious questions in the modern West.

Arnold was writing in 1925, when Europe was heading into the peak of both Marxism and fascism as totalizing ideologies that sought to replace Christianity.

Arnold was writing in 1925, when Europe was heading into the peak years of both Marxism and fascism, two totalizing ideologies that sought to replace Christianity or any other view of the transcendent as the organizing principle behind society. He was writing in a climate where the idea that the institutions, political powers, and dominant ideologies of the world could provide support for Christian faith – something that Christians in the West have been able to take for granted for the almost sixteen hundred years since Constantine – suddenly seemed like it might be all gone. In this climate, it’s not just that you can’t take for granted that the politics and institutions of your world are going to support your faith; under totalitarianism you have to assume that they are going to be hostile to it.

Dreher is not writing in a landscape of ascendant fascism and communism, but in a landscape of ascendant liberal secularism. But that same idea – that your government, your nation-state, and your society are not going to be a friend to your beliefs – is perhaps the strongest theme in The Benedict Option. If you allow yourself or your family or your children to be educated into the liberal society’s dominant community, you will lose what is most important in life, which is the pull of the transcendent, the truth of Christian faith.

So that’s the first reason for the necessity of thinking about community anew: in the modern era, the era of Arnold and now in our own moment, the larger community will not help and may only seek to harm what you believe to be the truth about human existence.

The second point – and it’s related – comes more from Thomas Merton and Joseph Ratzinger, who were writing in a moment immediately after the Second Vatican Council. They are both Roman Catholics, and were writing about their own institution. Both of them are saying that the institutions that Christians have built up are not necessarily going to save them in this era, either. You cannot rely on the old institutions, because the old institutions were built in a time when the dominant culture worked for those institutions and favored and protected them. Ratzinger more or less says that Christianity won’t be able to inhabit the buildings or the spaces that it built in its time of greater power. This was a widespread assumption for Catholics after the Second Vatican Council, and was interpreted as part of what the Council was trying to do: preparing the church for an age in which it was not going to be an established church. It was not going to have special relationships with the governments of Europe. Archbishops and bishops and pastors and ministers weren’t going to be important figures any longer, equivalent in social ranks to government officials and influential businessmen. Christianity was not going to have a place at the Aspen Ideas Festival along with every other globalist institution and power. All of that was going away, and with it, to some extent, the actual Christian institutions were going away as well – those churches and bureaucracies that had been built for an age of church-state-society synchronicity.