Children Of The Bubble – The American Conservative

Reader Dave Kuntz gives me permission to share this letter he sent me:

I just finished The Idea of a Christian Village in The Benedict Option. I commend you for steering your readers away from Utopianism, and including the tale of Ellen whose totalitarian parents drove her to atheism.

That being said, I think that your views are still too Utopian, and that Ellens experience is likely to be the norm for a child raised in a Benedict Community. Heres why: Making a conscious decision the leave mainstream society requires huge commitment. While many parents may make the choice for the right reasons of preserving their faith, I would gamble that a large portion of potential Benedictines would do because they crave a strong sense of control. This isnt the fault of the Benedict Option, but rather, the consequence of it self-selecting the exact types of people it wouldnt work for.

Let me elaborate from my upbringing. I am a 28 year-old male who was homeschooled. My parents are both college-educated, and I grew up near a large city. We joined several communities that were similar to how you describe the Benedict Option, including a large homeschool group, conservative church, and Christian debate club. Like your book describes, we had daily Bible readings, prayer, and theological discussions.

My parents did not start out extreme, but a large faction of our Benedictine peers were. As time went on and not all the promises of our community were fulfilled, my mother especially dove deeper into system, thinking we were not committed enough. Here is a list of things that were common in those circles. According to my fiance who was raised in Austin, Texas, these traits are ubiquitous in homeschooler Benedictine-like communities across the country as well:

Chaste Daughter Fetish: I was forced to interact with many families whose daughters were not allowed to talk to boys. This made playing Monopoly almost impossible. You wouldnt want to risk giving your heart away and becoming chewed gum over a property trade, would you?

Militant Fecundity Fetish: This is the flip side of the Chaste Daughter Fetish. Once you get married, you got to have as many kids as physically possible. Im not talking about just liking big families. Im talking about the homeschool patriarchs who described their family size the way my gym buddies described their you know what. I never saw much difference between the two forms of masculinity.

Scandals: The homeschool leadership never could quite keep their hands to themselves, despite all the chastity talks. Two of the three most influential homeschool leaders who are still alive (Bill Gothard and Doug Phillips) turned out to be predators, as youve written about. On the local level, literally all my parents churches broke up.

No Real Vocation for Next Generation: Before its leader went Militant Fecund on his Chaste Daughters babysitter, Vision Forum was one of the biggest homeschool textbook/activist organizations out there. One of its core positions was that higher education was bad, all while the Inner Party and doctorate-laden board of directors touted their own expertise. Vision Forum romanticized the working-class lifestyle while selling their prole followers $400 conferences and $200 pioneer toys. I am one of the few to have a real career, although the homeschoolers from the debate club did better than average.

No Marriages: Ironic, considering how much focus was put on it. But perhaps when you can lose your innocence by just talking to people of the opposite sex, you dont. I more or less tried six different courtships and always got rejected by the parents, despite (or perhaps because of) making more money and being more educated than the father in almost every case.

Conspiracy theories: It is not merely enough to believe that the onslaught of secularism is pushing Christianity out of the West. Rather, many of my conservative friends feel the great need to identify large, secretive organizations, satanists at home and abroad, and weirdly specific plots that were ripped off from 24 as the real reason Christianity is dying.

Weird eschatology: I literally had just walked into a conservative church, and when people learned by profession (artificial intelligence in the natural scientists) I was asked if I thought that the anti-Christ was a computer.

Ive come to believe that a lot of this group-think was inevitable, and would occur in any close-knit community. We are herd animals, and the people trying to make intentional Christian communities simply switched their peer-orientation from the culture toward themselves, where everything became an obsession toward godliness. I call them BJWs, with Biblical instead of Social. Many young people in these communities ended up more apostate than their worldly peers. How would a potential Benedict Community possibly hope to avoid these pitfalls?

Thanks, Dave, for your provocative letter. I have not encountered any of this personally. I invite readers who have to share their strategies for dealing with it.

I think Daves experience which I believe is real, let me be clear is what a lot of Christians tell themselves that homeschooling and other forms of Ben Opping are going to be, as a way of relieving themselves from the responsibilities of raising faithful, morally sane children in this culture. Matt Walsh writes about that here. Excerpts:

Granted, there are still some parents who are utterly determined to guard their childrens hearts and protect their innocence at all costs. But I fear that this is a rather small group, and getting smaller. Every day, more and more of us put up the white flag. There is no use in fighting it, we say. Especially if it means our kids cant watch much TV (meaning, horrifically, that we have to spend time with them). We bow our heads submissively and hand over our children. Well, I tried, we say. But we didnt really try. We didnt even try turning the TV off.

I hear from these surrendered parents all the time. They behave much like the apostate priests in the book Silence, trying to convince those whove retained their faith and their dignity to stop resisting and join them in their treason. These parents, looking at the children whose moral formation they have not concerned themselves with, rationalize their failures by declaring that it would be unrealistic and harmful to even attempt to raise their kids in a way that diverges from the mainstream. You cant keep your kids in a bubble, they explain.

Ah, yes, the mythical Bubble. I encounter this supposedly pejorative phrase every day. Indeed, Ive been told of the Bubble ever since my kids were born, and all I know about it for sure is that, according to most people, I must not let my children enter it. Christian parents are warned constantly that they cant raise their kids in the Bubble. The Bubble is bad. The Bubble is scary. Children of the Bubble are weird and different, and they dont get invited to sleepover parties.

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At any rate, whenever I am accused of keeping my kids in a Bubble, it is always because I have taken some step to preserve their innocence. That is the one thing we absolutely must not do, according to society. Let the TV and the school system decide when its time for your child to stop being a child. That time, by the way, is right around their second birthday and getting younger.

Well, no thanks. I will proudly house my children in this kind of Bubble for as long as I can. They may have fewer friends and a less expansive knowledge of the most popular cartoon shows and sex acts when they emerge from it, but at least they will have their souls. Thats a pretty good trade, as far as Im concerned.

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Children Of The Bubble - The American Conservative