Conquered Without a Shot

When the Ottoman Empire collapsed in the WWI era, the Balkan Peninsula, previously unified, fragmented into numerous smaller, less-stable states and the term “balkanize” entered our vocabulary as a way of describing any process by which a bigger unit breaks down into smaller units or factions.

It’s not a verb I use a whole lot, but it showed up last week in a text from my good friend and occasional commenter WiC. He asked, “Should Christians balkanize to strengthen in dark days? The West has been conquered without a shot.”

Ah yes. The Benedict Option, or something like it. Hmm, let’s consider that a bit.

Islam Rising

Writer Rod Dreher — once Protestant, then Catholic, now Eastern Orthodox — coined the phrase in his 2017 bestseller of the same name. Its subtitle was “A Strategy for Christians in a Post-Christian Nation”, which gives you some idea where Dreher was going. He drew loosely on the writings of Benedict of Nursia, an early Christian monk. His idea was for Christians to “embrace exile from the mainstream culture and construct a resilient counterculture”, a sort of modern monasticism. As WiC observed, Christians have lost the culture war in the West, and need to figure out how to respond to that reality. Dreher believes that too.

Having lived for 25 years in a major Canadian city within walking distance of two mosques, I really can’t argue with either man. Islam has conquered the West without a shot, establishing a solid population base in every country throughout the Western world and intimidating its governments into submission. With lower-than-replacement birthrates in all legacy Western populations, all Muslims need to become the dominant culture in a feminized multicultural landscape is sufficient breeding time. In some respects they are already there.

Woke Madness

While we wait for Islam to consolidate its gains, the West remains at least temporarily under a very different species of ruler. Social justice indoctrination has ruined its education systems and infected generations of Western children. The head of the branch of the Canadian government I currently work for follows his name in every email with “(he/him)”, signaling his pronouns of choice and the right of all his employees to enforce their personal denial of reality on their co-workers if they so choose. Meanwhile, the growing homosexual and sexually confused contingent of the population has increased its single Saturday of celebrating sin into an entire Pride Season. All major corporations genuflect to the rainbow.

Christians find themselves on the one hand shortly to be outnumbered by practitioners of a rabidly hostile foreign religion, and on the other outflanked and outmuscled by several generations of their own morally crazed progressivist peers. Our twin would-be conquerors seem to have reached some kind of temporary accommodation, but it’s evident they are ideologically at odds. The truce is sure to fail at some point, and it remains to be seen which will eventually come out on top. (My money’s on the faction that reproduces itself fastest.)

Either way, Western culture loses. In the meantime, the detente between the two factions has bought Christians a short reprieve.

What Has Been Lost

That said, other than the unearned comfort zone a few of his followers experienced while growing up among large numbers of people culturally disposed to behave like Christians when they never knew Jesus personally at all, we must ask what exactly Christ has lost in all this. After all, I stop well short of equating the West with Christendom, let alone with the Church that the Lord Jesus promised he would build.

Historically speaking, the West is an anomaly. The present status of faithful Christians as a frowned-upon minority within largely hostile multicultural societies has more in common with the early Church than did the outwardly-Christianized-but-inwardly-bankrupt America of the Founding Fathers. Any manifestation of Christendom untethered to a living, personal faith in Jesus Christ is ill equipped to survive the centuries in anything like its original form. Institutional Christendom has not met that challenge effectively. Its millions have no true connection to the Head of the Church. In a future day, he will surprise long lines of self-confident churchgoing unbelievers from prior generations with the daunting news that “I never knew you.”

A Resilient Counterculture

How about it then? Is there some value in strategic cultural retreat? Should we sell off our buildings and disappear from the public square?

Personally, I’m not seeing it. At least not yet. For one thing, Christians outside the institutional church have no urgent necessity to construct the resilient counterculture Dreher is looking for. At our best, we are already countercultural and always have been. Followers of Christ in the first few centuries of our present era were almost invariably a persecuted minority, whether it was Judaism or Rome chasing them hither and yon. It was only in the fourth century that an anemic, severely contaminated form of the Christian faith became Rome’s state religion. The institutionalization of the Church took the vast majority of professing Christians far, far away from their original mandate, which was radically countercultural, replacing the vitality of a gospel- and discipleship-based imperative with a stolid, mechanical religious routine modeled largely on the tropes of heathens.

Why React Until You Have To?

Today, under its current pope, Roman Catholicism stands for mass immigration, climate change initiatives, social justice, diversity, equity, inclusion and same-sex marriage. It’s difficult to see what’s countercultural about any of that. With such an agenda, the chances of Roman Catholics of the Leo XIV school encountering persecution for their faith in the near term are slim and none. Benedict of Nursia offers them nothing for which they have any pressing need. The same is true of so-called Christians in institutional Protestant churches that have corporately apostatized.

In fact, though the media regularly calls evangelicals and fundamentalists nasty names, particularly when we are alleged to be getting too political, we too have been insufficiently countercultural to provoke any concentrated bouts of serious persecution. As society deteriorates it will surely come, but at present widespread persecution of believers in the West remains no more than a looming threat. Our buildings have yet to burn in large numbers, and our congregants have yet to be herded en masse into the arena.

In short, retreat from the public square has yet to become a necessity even for committed believers. It would certainly be prudent to talk about these things and to have a strategy in place should events take a sudden turn for the worse, as they eventually must. However, at present it seems to me that faithful churches are wise to redeem every opportunity to reach out to the unsaved in their local communities while a strong corporate testimony is still tolerated.

Turning to the Scripture

How does the Bible depict the latter days of our present era? That’s worth considering. We are frequently told the church today is metaphorically living in Laodicea. Here’s what Laodicea looks like:

“I know your works: you are neither cold nor hot. Would that you were either cold or hot! So, because you are lukewarm, and neither hot nor cold, I will spit you out of my mouth. For you say, ‘I am rich, I have prospered, and I need nothing,’ not realizing that you are wretched, pitiable, poor, blind, and naked. I counsel you to buy from me gold refined by fire, so that you may be rich, and white garments so that you may clothe yourself and the shame of your nakedness may not be seen, and salve to anoint your eyes, so that you may see. Those whom I love, I reprove and discipline, so be zealous and repent. Behold, I stand at the door and knock. If anyone hears my voice and opens the door, I will come in to him and eat with him, and he with me.”

If our object is to avoid a Laodicean lack of self-awareness, it will not do for us to shrug off such a scathing bit of correction with “Well, that’s just the institutional Church.” If the spirit of Laodicea existed at the end of the first century, barely sixty years after Christ rose from the dead, every group of believers in our present era is wise to keep a sharp lookout for overconfidence in our own hearts and congregations. We should not miss that at this level of spiritual decline, the Head of the Church is actually depicted outside it, knocking on the door and prepared to enjoy fellowship only with the few who hear his voice and invite him inside. Yet note that he does not say, “Come out to me”, but rather, “I will come in and eat with him.”

With that in mind, I’m not sure we should be looking to make our exit any earlier than absolutely necessary.

When Persecution Comes

Don’t get me wrong. I believe persecution will come to the Western churches, as it has to our brothers and sisters in other parts of the world and in other centuries. When it comes, we won’t be meeting in big, public, mortgaged buildings. We’ll be meeting in private homes, as many early New Testament churches did, and sometimes we may have to do it secretly. Inevitably, large numbers of the less committed will leave us. Those who refuse to give up gathering to the name of the Lord Jesus may well pay a serious price for being faithful.

I do not believe the institutional churches will suffer persecution until the very end, at least not if Revelation’s “Babylon the great” was intended to depict the public face of professing Christendom in the end times. Far from being widely persecuted, Babylon prospers until the final moments of this age, and the Lord’s message to any of his own in Babylon is “Come out of her, my people, lest you take part in her sins.”

In summary, I guess what I would say about balkanizing in the here and now is this: If your local church is Babylon the great in miniature, the need to come out of it is urgent. If it’s not, and if the Lord is still using not just individuals in your church but also its corporate testimony to bring blessing to others, then breaking up the larger gathering prematurely serves no useful purpose.

Still, having a balkanization plan in place is never a bad idea. Discernment and foresight are not bad things.