The only way out is through

In 2017, my friend Rod Dreher published his popular book, “The Benedict Option: A Strategy for Christians in a Post-Christian Nation.”

Mr. Dreher’s basic prescription, already intimately familiar to Orthodox Jews, is a localist focus on the cohesive formation of tight-knit, virtuous, religious communities as the best way of enduring the cultural onslaught of progressivism and secularism.

There is nothing at all wrong with Tocquevillian localism, and surely it is part of the survival strategy for America’s more traditionally inclined.

But further extrapolated to its logical conclusion (something Mr. Dreher doesn’t do in his book, to be very clear), the strongestpossible version of this argument — a singular emphasis on retreat to communal redoubts at the expense of the public contestation of core issues — is self-defeating, a surefire losing strategy. It amounts to one big “LARP,” to use the common online abbreviation for “live-action role-playing” — an attempt to escape from reality and instead live in a different world than that which we actually inhabit.

To “LARP” in this manner, and to retreat from our decadent civilizational morass more generally in the hope that all can be cured by wishing it to be so, is not merely naive. It also belies an underselling of modern progressivism-secularism’s fundamentally hegemonic impulse. Much like Pac-Man, the modern Left has an insatiable appetite, attempting to gobble up ever-more cultural, political