They represent a growing force in the conservative intellectual movement. You could even say they constitute a new literary genre. A slew of books have recently been published by Christians concerned about the future of their religious communities in America, a country increasingly hostile to all people of faith. (How hostile? See, for instance, Obergefell v. Hodges, Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission, President Obama's Executive Order 13672, and corporate America's crusade against Indiana's Religious Freedom Restoration Act.) To name but a few books in the genre: Strangers in a Strange Land: Living the Catholic Faith in a Post-Christian World by Charles J. Chaput, archbishop of Philadelphia; The Marian Option: God's Solution to a Civilization in Crisis by Carrie Gress, professor at Pontifex University; and Out of the Ashes: Rebuilding American Culture by Anthony Esolen, professor at Thomas More College of Liberal Arts.
The main column of this cloudburst, however, has been The Benedict Option: A Strategy for Christians in a Post-Christian Nation by American Conservative senior editor Rod Dreher. It was a New York Times bestseller and hailed by David Brooks as the “most important religious book of the decade.” Dreher's forecast is unapologetically gloomy. “There are people alive today,” he asserts, “who may live to see the effective death of Christianity within our civilization.”
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