Fourteen Christian thinkers have responded to Rod Dreher’s recently published The Benedict Option in an online symposium at BreakPoint today. Contributors include Mollie Ziegler Hemingway, Peter Leithart, John Mark N. Reynolds, Roberto Rivera and more.

Here’s a sample in the form of three of those responses. Space was limited; I’ll have more to add to my own thoughts here in a short while.

Karen Swallow Prior

“The Benedict Option’s” vision is not to make nuns and monks of modern Christians. Nor does it propose a bunker (whether literal or figurative) from which to establish merely an updated version of the fundamentalist separatism of yore. Nor is the turn to Benedict a quixotic attempt to recapture a romanticized past.

To the contrary, “The Benedict Option”calls Christians wherever they live and work to “form a vibrant counterculture” by cultivating practices and communities that reflect the understanding that Christians, who are not citizens of this world, need not “prop up the current order.” While the monastery that birthed the Benedict Rule was literal, the monastery invoked in “The Benedict Option” is metaphorical. It is not a place, but a way.

Karen Swallow Prior is an author, professor of English at Liberty University, and research fellow at The Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission. This piece is excerpted (with permission) from her article “The Benedict Option: What it is and isn’t” at the ERLC website.

Tom Gilson

The most brilliant thing in Rod Dreher’s “Benedict Option” book is what isn’t there: a one-size-fits-all definition of what he means by this Option. He tells stories instead, illustrating multiple ways Christians can step up our commitment to faith and community.

I wish, however, he hadn’t kept describing Christians as “exiles in place.” “Exiles” is the wrong word, the wrong identity for us to adopt. We’re much more like expatriates. Exiles’ eyes remain turned toward their homelands, where they hope to return as quickly as possible. Often they make it their mission from a distance to accomplish social and political reform back home.

We have no such distant home in need of reforming. Our mission is right where we are. Indeed, there’s another word for Christian expatriate: missionary. Missionaries go out on purpose, sent by God to love the people of their new homelands, and to discover how best to live and share the way of Christ in that cultural context.

We don’t need to adopt the self-pitying language of exile. Instead we can embrace the joyful privilege of being missionaries in place. It isn’t just a more positive approach — it’s why God has us here.

The Benedict Option needs an Expatriate Alternative.

Tom Gilson  is senior editor and ministry coordinator at The Stream.

John Stonestreet

Rod Dreher insists his Benedict Option’s call for a “strategic withdrawal” isn’t the same sort of post-Scopes fundamentalist abandonment of the public square we’ve seen in the past. I hope not. We shouldn’t retreat into our institutions to seek safety. We should (and this is what I think Dreher is saying) strengthen them out of loyalty to each other and to the true, the good and beautiful — preserving the best of Christian culture so that we can, at some point, gift it back to the world in acts of grace.

The most important contribution of the Benedict Option is clearly articulating the powerful ability of culture to shape our hearts and minds. Too many of us are like the fish who don’t know they are wet. And so, Rod rightly says, we need “thick ties” to our fellow Christians and institutions, and especially to our churches.

This seemingly obvious point is, in my view, Dreher’s other very important contribution. If Christians are truly to be the church in this cultural moment, churches must become institutions that shape both who and whose we are. Pastors, parents, mentors and educators must see education and discipleship as more than instructive. They must commit to establishing identity and loyalty.

John Stonestreet is president of the Colson Center and co-host of BreakPoint Radio.

Read further at Breakpoint.