The Boniface Option is a book by Andrew Isker, a pastor I had never heard of until I saw him interviewed by Tucker Carlson. Isker is currently senior pastor of Fourth Street Evangelical Church in Waseca, Minnesota. The book is on the Kindle Unlimited plan, so I had no reason not to read it.
The title, “The Boniface Option,” is a reference to Rod Dreher’s 2017 book, “The Benedict Option.” A few years ago, I read and reviewed Dreher’s excellent later work, “Live Not By Lies,” which discusses how Dreher kept running across people who lived under communism in Eastern Europe and were now seeing Marxist political tactics in the United States identical to what they witnessed in the bad old days.
In “The Benedict Option,” Dreher argues that Christians should pull back into monastic communities where they can control their immediate work, school, and housing environment. The “Benedict” in Dreher’s title refers to St. Benedict of Nursia, a Sixth Century monk who, troubled by the chaos of Rome’s disintegration, retreated to the woods and built Christian communities; Benedict is known as the father of Western monasticism. Dreher believes that Benedict’s monastic communities “were strongholds of light throughout the Dark Ages, and saved not just Christianity but Western civilization.”
Boniface was a missionary to Germany during the early 8th Century. He traveled to the shrine at Geismar, in Hesse, where, under a large oak tree, pagan priests offered sacrifices to Donar, the Norse/Germanic god more commonly called Thor. It was believed that if you touched this sacred tree, Thor would crush you with his famous hammer. So Boniface spread the word that he would not only touch the tree at Geismar, he would chop it down. In front of a large crowd, Boniface had scarcely begun to lay on the axe when a mighty wind came and blew the tree down, proving that a greater God than Thor was present. Many were converted to Christianity that day. Isker’s thesis is that we need to chop down the tree of modern paganism in America.
Isker seems to agree with Dreher that the culture wars have been finally, irretrievably lost:
“In 2017, in the wake of the Obergefell decision codifying sodomites as a protected class in the United States, Rod Dreher published The Benedict Option. . . . Most of the Christian world had not yet reconciled that the culture war had been lost; Christian civilization had finally been repudiated in the public square, a secular, liberal, democratic morality had emerged triumphant, and Dreher was among the first with a large audience to declare what we should do next. His book plotted a course for what had been done previously, when Rome had fallen, the remnants of civilization were held together by intentional Christian communities dedicated to preserving Christian civilization, a movement begun by St. Benedict in the sixth century. It was a helpful analogy, tactical withdrawal to refuges of strength to rebuild Christian civilization.”
But Dreher’s analogy breaks down because it was clear in the 6th Century that the (western) Roman Empire was truly dead, incapable of ever being reconstituted or resuscitated, whereas the United States of today (and other Western countries) still has a functioning Leftist government that has been made all the more confident and oppressive by the triumph of its value system. Isker argues that we cannot retreat to monastic communities, but must fight the rotten institutions of Trashworld:
“As the West very slowly descends into the maelstrom, the power of the ruling regime has not lessened at all, and worse, their willingness to wield this power against their enemies has increased. Withdrawal to rebuild in places of strength works in a post-Roman, medieval Mad Max scenario, but it does not work when the dying empire is still intact and ruled by the kind of people who make Nero seem responsible and judicious.”
“In a world such as this, a world that is a blend of America, Ancient Rome, the Soviet Union, and the worst parts of the Blade Runner dystopia, we will not be allowed to withdraw to the monasteries. We instead must actively and boldly oppose the apostasy of the West. Nothing short of courageous opposition to the Trashworld of the apostate West will do.”
Alas, Trashworld is not a term I invented; I wish it were. It is Isker’s term for contemporary America, and spot on accurate. I’m sure I disagree with Isker on a host of issues, but, man, can this guy write! Trashworld is the world of feminism, no-fault divorce, abortion on demand, ubiquitous pornography on all devices, sodomy written into the constitution through the atrocious Obergefell decision, and millions of public school bureaucrats organized to talk your children in cutting off their breasts and penises. And that’s just the aspects of Trashworld that pertain to sex.
Isker argues, per Ecclesiastes 3:8, that there is a time to love and a time to hate, and most Christians do not hate Trashworld nearly enough. We need to hate harder and better. He introduces us to “bugman,” the chief human product of Trashworld, which is itself a product of “globohomo”, the globalist ideology celebrated annually at the World Economic Forum at Davos, Switzerland.
The bugman is the isolated, atomized worker, a cog in the machine, preferred by today’s economic and political elites:
“The individual, who was once part of an organic whole, part of a family, a people, and a place, is now separated and stripped bare of all other loyalties and loves and made a tabula rasa, a willing vessel for the religion and culture of the globohomo world order. From here, he is released into the wild. He takes a job filling a space in a cubicle, filling a spreadsheet and sending emails until he drives home, in a sea of cars full of lonely people just like him on the freeway, until he gets to his home, fills his belly with industrial slop delivered by Door Dash, watches porn, browses social media (especially Reddit), plays Xbox, or binges a show until he goes to sleep to repeat the process all over again. This man has been reduced to a bug in a hive. He is something less than a human being. He is a drone, waiting in his pod until it is time to fulfill his duties as a member of the hive.
The things that give his life meaning are all products for him to consume, products that give him a temporary dopamine rush, that sustains the meaninglessness of what his life has become. He is divorced from all other meaning, he is isolated from meaningful human relationships, and his moral formation has been shaped by pop culture. Such a person can be easily manipulated, reduced to his baser appetites. Whatever he must do or believe to preserve his comforts he will do.
Which is why it was so easy to manipulate and control the bug people during the Covid lockdowns. If your life has been reduced to working in one cell and living in another cell, and having your appetites supplied by Door Dash and porn world, being locked into your cell is no great change of habit. And if you happen to be of a religious bent, instead of watching your church’s service live, you can watch the livestream at your convenience. All part of being a bugman in Trashworld.
The problem with traditional apologetics, Isker argues, is that it was organized around convincing potential converts that the doctrines of Christianity were consistent with the reality they experienced every day. But the modern bugman lives in a false reality created by controlled media and entertainment propagandists, who constantly gaslight us with the idea that men and women are interchangeable, that women will usually beat up on men in fights, that women are just as capable soldiers, police officers, and outer space explorers as men, that women do not have a unique role in creating, birthing, nurturing, and rearing the next generation, a role that men cannot fill, and likewise that men do not have a unique role as husbands, fathers, providers, disciplinarians, and rule-makers in the home that women cannot fill. Christians are called upon to oppose this false reality:
“Therefore, the globohomo cinematic universe that the modern bugman lives in must be chopped down. All of it is a seamless garment. Trannies, open borders, acceptance and promotion of sodomy and other sexual perversion, feminism, abortion and antinatalism, anti-white race hate (so-called Critical Race Theory), pornography, and the entire consumerist lifestyle are a single Donar’s Oak that must be sent through a woodchipper.”
Isker urges Christians to reject the consumerist, two-income model of the family, and return to a household model in which the husband is the breadwinner and wife works in the home, raising the children. He notes that modern economic life isolates workers, separating them from family, community, friends, and extended family, leading to lives of intense loneliness and meaninglessness.
One of the most interesting passages in the book is Isker’s discussion of guns, and the fact that we still have them, whereas most Western democracies have confiscated them. In right wing circles, conservative men sometimes console themselves with the idea that “we still have our guns.” But the notion of armed resistance is illusory. Thanks to mass transformative immigration, and complex modern economy that sends people all over the country in pursuit of gainful employment, we have lost the high trust society that comes from shared history, language, ancestry, and religion, the kind of culturally and religiously homogenous society that might allow us to come together in militias to effectively use our firearms. Isker writes:
“It is always at this point that the well-meaning Boomer will say, “Well, if things get bad enough, we still have the guns.” . . . I don’t know how much worse it would [need to] get to reach “if things get bad enough” territory, [but] there is nowhere near the kind of social cohesion in America to do anything about it when things get bad enough. . . . This idea persists among the generation that has living memory of the kind of social cohesion that existed when America was still a functioning country, but that world is dead and buried.
“The story of the Battle of Athens, Tennessee, is well-known and widely celebrated in right-leaning corners of the internet. Shortly after the Second World War, GIs returned home to a rigged local election and used their recently gained combat skills to successfully lead a violent revolt against their corrupt municipal leaders. The kind of high social trust, high social capital that existed in America in that generation is something that no longer exists. That kind of thing could never happen today under our current social conditions.
“This is the reason they have not tried to confiscate firearms in the United States like they did in Australia and other countries. They don’t need to. If you hand every slave a rifle it will make him feel more free while simultaneously allowing you more control over him—and both of you know it will never be used. Firearms in America act as an ice cube the frog will cling to as the pot continues to boil hotter and hotter. The average person who believes “If it gets bad enough we still have the guns” has almost no one who would fight and kill and die for them. Yet they seriously think the silent majority of the country would take to the hills to fight a brutal, grueling, decades-long guerrilla war like the characters from “Red Dawn.” If mutilating the genitals of children isn’t enough to motivate the conservative masses into violent revolt, nothing is going to cause that.
Isker also has a health message, preserving plenty of ire for the food supply that is making Americans obese in record numbers. He is light on specifics, but he believes that there is a food conspiracy that is closely related to the Sexual Revolution, the rebellion against the created sexual order:
“And while all that [the Sexual Revolution] took place, in a completely different sphere of the human experience, the medical, pharmaceutical, and agricultural complex inverted the reality of human nutrition. This is no coincidence. No sooner than the plague of no-fault divorce, abortion, and feminism began to be visited upon us that a plague of obesity and androgyny appeared as well. They demonized the nutritional wisdom filtered through millennia of trial and error in favor of technocratic, scientistic superstition—and the result has been the eradication of men.
“The environment we live in has been designed to emasculate men. Not just the social and cultural environment, which is self-evidently true, but nearly everything we eat, drink, breathe, and touch has been tainted, made to make you fat and program your hormones to emasculate you. This is something that many people, even those aware of many of the other destructive features of Trashworld, sometimes have a hard time with.”
Isker notes that conservatives traditionally have abandoned concerns about food safety, nutrition, chemicals, and the environment to the Left:
“Many conservatives will act as though your only two options are either being a granola-crunching, quinoa-devouring, white person in dreads and Birkenstocks, or a four-hundred-pound human slug with Mountain Dew on an IV drip, absolutely sedentary if not for motorized carts. You can avoid becoming the latter without becoming a crunchy, granola lib. There are other options. But the other options must be conscious. If you take the path of least resistance, you will end up a doughy, androgynous humanoid like so many others. You must consciously choose a path of difficulty to simply have what has been considered normal physique for most of human history.”
Obviously, it was a mistake for conservatives to abandon issues like food safety and toxic chemicals to the Left, and I think this is changing. The Make America Healthy Again movement, led by a Kennedy Democrat in a Republican administration, is getting a hearing from conservatives as well as liberals.
As you would anticipate, Isker has a chapter on feminism, which is a foundational ideology of Trashworld. He makes an argument for why the franchise should never have been extended to women: that men fight the wars, and, just as Clausewitz said that, “war is politics by other means,” so also politics is war by peaceful means. Instead of lining up and shooting at each other, we line up and vote. So politics is man’s business, just as war is man’s business. Another rationale would be Paul’s in 1 Timothy: “Adam was not the one deceived; it was the woman who was deceived.”
But Isker is sober enough to recognize that the 19th Amendment will never be repealed:
“The Nineteenth Amendment isn’t going away. . . . Even hinting at the suggestion that it should be reversed will have you officially labeled a disturber of the peace. . . . But if you are going to fell the impotent idols of this detestable, putrid age of filth, you are going to have to ask uncomfortable questions about topics that everyone thinks of as unqualified, universal goods. You will need the faint-hearted, conflict-averse conservatives who are ostensibly on your side to say yes when asked, “If the only way to prevent the mainstreaming of gender mutilation of kindergarten children were to go back and prevent the enactment of the Nineteenth Amendment, would you do it?” I have often . . . observed that much force is needed to get conservatives to see that the idols that they rightly detest are downstream from the idols they are comfortable with.”
He concludes by arguing that the whole feminist project needs to be re-examined, even the parts of it that Christians have not opposed, or even enthusiastically supported, in the past:
“Until we are willing to admit that feminism, even (especially!) the feminism accepted by conservatives, is a demon goddess responsible for our enslavement, we will remain under the shade of the oaken shrines of Trashworld. You must summon the courage to confront and tear down these idols, or you will ever remain a slave.
The second part of the book is entitled “Transforming the Felled Trees of Trashworld into a New Christendom.” There is a chapter on worship in which he is rightly critical of “consumerist” church services:
“The reality is modern worship is just as divorced from God’s order as anything else in globohomo Trashworld. If liberal, consumerist society is defined by an individualism that reduces all of life to products to be consumed, American evangelical worship is absolutely a part of this system.”
And yet, after ripping into consumerist worship services, he doesn’t have any concrete suggestions as to a replacement. He admits that high church liturgies can themselves be marketed as “trad” and “authentic,” so the solution is not simply to go back in time and try to find the authentic 1830s liturgy.
He has much to say about “masculine” economics, which centers on traditional households in which men are the breadwinners and women are the homemakers. He notes that this type of households have been made very difficult by a housing market that assumes two incomes:
“The entire economic system is set up with the assumption of dual incomes. They have intentionally made providing for a household on a single income extremely difficult. They want households with moms staying with the children to be an upper-middle class luxury lifestyle, totally inaccessible to the majority of the population in the middle and working class.”
He is highly critical of wage-slavery, especially for women. He acknowledges that it is much more difficult to support a family and have a home on a single income, but that it is worth the struggle. He also admits that there are fewer women willing to accept that type of household, but they do exist, and young men should work hard to find such a woman.
There is whole chapter on male fitness, on working out and getting some muscle tone and definition.
For all his talk about muscular, masculine Christianity, Isker does not recommend a political program at all. He does not believe politics can save us. It is really all about building better Christian households and churches:
“We cannot expect the orange billionaire to appear and to descend on his escalator to restore Christian civilization. His tumultuous term as president showed just how entrenched the regime is and how even the most modest attempt at reform, setting the clock back to merely mid-’90s-era liberalism, was resisted with ferocious religious zeal. Electing the right president is not going to fix things. Appointing the right Supreme Court justices is not going to fix things. Electing the right Congressmen and Senators is not going to fix things. The only thing that will transform the United States of America and pull it out of its death spiral is continual reformation of the church and revival of the Christian religion in our country and the West as a whole. And this starts with you, in your home, with your family, and extends upward from there.”
If you do some Internet research on Isker, you will find that he is associated with a real estate development in Tennessee called “RidgeRunner” which hopes to build “aligned” religious communities in Tennessee and Kentucky. Ironically, that sounds more like the “Benedict option” than the “Boniface option.” But this is what Isker would call a warrior’s tactical retreat. He states that a few hundred people concentrated in one place will be able to do more practical good than the same number widely dispersed across the country. So perhaps he is thinking Benedict option followed by the Boniface option.