Time for the David Option?

Some Christian writers, reeling under the shifts in the culture and legal system that have only accelerated under the Obama administration, have been advocating a strategic withdrawal by Christians from the overall culture and public square. This proposal has come to be known as "the Benedict Option," a phrase coined by Rod Dreher, one of the preeminent Christian bloggers currently writing. Dreher's conception of the Benedict Option can be found here, and some critique of that concept by yours truly can be found here. Today, Rod Dreher issued a rousing call for the embrace of the Benedict Option, declaring it to be the only path forward.

Over at Crux, Fr. Jeffery F. Kirby has proposed an alternative to the Benedict Option that takes its inspiration from the story about the young David from the Hebrew Bible. Fr. Kirby's point is that rather than withdrawing from the culture & from engagement in the public square, Christians need to engage more powerfully with the strongest tools they have: the moral witness to justice grounded in the dignity of the human person made in the image of God. Rather than secluding themselves as a remnant, Christians should reach out in witness. As Fr. Kirby writes:

The young King David did not succumb to fear and did not seclude himself in the Israelite camp. He engaged the Philistine. David was dressed simply, without armor or regular weaponry. He was empowered by a sense of righteousness and justice, and artfully struck the head of Goliath with simple stones from the earth claiming victory over the giant. 

This example is applied to the modern context by calling the Christian Church to engage not with the weapons of the world but the tools of argument & moral persuasion:

Drawing from this example of the Israelite leader, the David Option is a challenge and opportunity for the Church in the contemporary world. In imitation of the shepherd-king, it calls the Church to simplicity, having neither ornate, royal attire or defensive armor. 

It summons the Church to stay focused on holiness and to engage the world with a genuine spirit of justice and goodness, not ideology, power lust, or political agenda.  

Symbolically, the David Option compels the Church to use “stones” in the “head” of the goliaths of our age; namely, to use reason and respectful arguments as a means for the intellectual conversion of culture. 

As they say, read the whole thing. Fr. Kirby isn't proposing the David Option as the only viable path forward for Christians to take in the face of an increasingly hostile culture & legal order, but an additional strategy to consider. As the Christian Church faces a situation where it is increasingly marginalized from elite public opinion, it is a good idea to look at a strategy where the Church embraces that marginalization & builds off its relative powerlessness in a worldly sense to remain engaged in the political and social issues of the day. As Fr. Kirby puts it in another piece over at Crux:

The David Option is a willful, spiritual removal of power and prestige, so that the Church is unencumbered, gains some moral credibility by its authentic simplicity, and seeks to argue and fight for justice and goodness in the world today.

One thing about changing conditions is that a variety of approaches are needed to deal with a variety of circumstances. Different problems require different tools to reach a solution. The David Option, along with other approaches, is a worthwhile addition to the tool box for Christians to consider.

Ancient Hebrew text puts religious liberty in proper perspective

In this post-Easter, post-Purim season, it it helpful to remember that politics is downstream of culture, as Russell Kirk used to observe, and culture is downstream of cult (in the classical sense of religious observance). With that in mind, here's an interesting story about a Hebrew text discovered a few years years ago: Bible Possibly Written Centuries Earlier, Text Suggests. The image at left is a copy of that text.

The text is written on a pottery shard and dates to the reign of King David in the 10th century B.C. It is identifiable as Hebrew, and contains a series of religious injunctions about caring for the poor and the marginalized: windows, orphans and even slaves. The text on the shard does not directly come from an existing biblical book, but it definitely puts forward a set of biblical themes, starting with worship of the Lord and then moving on to talk about what flows from that worship in our interactions with each other, particularly those without standing in society. As the article linked above translates the text:

1' you shall not do [it], but worship the [Lord].
2' Judge the sla[ve] and the wid[ow] / Judge the orph[an]
3' [and] the stranger. [Pl]ead for the infant / plead for the po[or and]
4' the widow. Rehabilitate [the poor] at the hands of the king.
5' Protect the po[or and] the slave / [supp]ort the stranger.

Why is this important? Many modern scholars thought that Hebrew writing didn't originate until sometime after the 6th century B.C. This discovery indicates that written Hebrew is several hundred years older at least than was previously assumed. And it shows the link between worship of the God of Israel and the need to strive to care for the weakest among us.

The biblical mandate for people to reach out to care for their neighbors is not something bolted on to the Bible's message. It was there from the beginning in Israelite society, the society from which the language of the Hebrew scriptures originated. From the beginning, the call to faith in Israel was not just a call to worship God, but to serve him by serving the poor, the orphans & the strangers in our midst. Religious liberty is not just the freedom to worship God, it is the freedom to serve him with all our heart & mind.

Christianity, social activism and the civil rights movement

John Fea explains the links between those three topics:  The "Christian America" of Martin Luther King, Jr.  As Fea explains:

King's fight for a Christian America was not over amending the Constitution to make it more Christian or promoting crusades to insert "under God" in the Pledge of Allegiance (June 14, 1954). It was instead a battle against injustice and an attempt to forge a national community defined by Christian ideals of equality and respect for human dignity. Most historians now agree that the Civil Rights movement was driven by the Christian faith of its proponents. As David Chappell argued in his landmark book, Stone of Hope: Prophetic Religion and the Death of Jim Crow, the story of the Civil Rights movement is less about the triumph of progressive and liberal ideals and more about the revival of an Old Testament prophetic tradition that led African-Americans to hold their nation accountable for the decidedly unchristian behavior it showed many of its citizens.

I have read Stone of Hope & it is an insightful interpretation of the civil rights movement in the 1950s & 1960s.  Of course, by the late 60s, after the assassinations of both Malcom X & MLK, the civil rights movement largely took a turn away from its religious roots and towards "new left" secularism, a turn that left much of the movement without a spiritual core.  That in turn created one of the central tragedies of the civil rights movement -- just when its greatest victories were at hand, many of its leaders & activists abandoned a key component of what had been the movement's identity, the integration of faith & public policy when it came to questions of human rights & dignity.

In the increasingly secular environment in the United States it can never be said enough that the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s vision was a profoundly religious one -- and not just religious but Christian. His activism was grounded not in ideology but in faith, not in a secularism devoid of moral intuition but in a Christianity that inspired moral imagination.  King dreamed of world where the dignity of each person was respected because he believed in a God of love who had suffered, died & rose again so that each human being might have life, and have it more abundantly.  For those of us who are people of faith, we should never forget or be silent about that vision.