The Boniface Option: A Strategy For Christian Counteroffensive in a Post-Christian Nation

This book is a rebuttal (?) to a prior book called The Benedict Option. I haven’t read that book yet.

Apparently, The Benedict Option claimed that the world was so fundamentally broken that Christians should just retreat to our own spaces and wait for the end of the world (I assume – that’s the gist I got from Boniface, but I haven’t read Benedict).

This book rejects that. It says that Christians need to stand and fight.

The book is named for Saint Boniface who went to Germany in the 700s and cut down a tree that was sacred to the pagans. When he was somehow not subsequently killed by their gods, they converted to Christianity.

And that’s the gist of the book – Christians need to actively fight for their faith in a world gone completely insane.

Understand that this is a very angry book. The author – a Minnesota pastor named Andrew Isker – lays things on very thick. He has a lot of pejorative names:

• “Trashworld”
• “Bugmen”
• “Fake and gay” (he goes to lengths to explain what he means by this – he has a logic to it)

And there are so many adjectives and descriptive phrases: “repulsive,” “repugnant,” “wretched,” “filthy,” etc. He constantly hammers on the point that the world has gone crazy and isn’t even remotely related to how humans were meant to live.

I’m not going to fault Isker for his anger. It gets a little annoying and tiring, but everyone has a right to be angry.

And I absolutely agree with him on one point in particular: the social fabric of the country (the world?) is broken. People (especially men) have few friends (I’ve written about this at length before). Isker talks about how humans are isolated from each other because of the way the world has evolved, and we’re starved for real relationships. Every word of this rang true with me.

But he then heads into some really sketchy territory, particular around women’s rights. He believes that feminism is fundamentally responsible for the world’s decline – to the point where he doesn’t believe women should have been given the right to vote. He very starkly believes that women belong in the home, making babies, home-schooling the children, and men should provide for their families. To him, the Western world’s move away from this mode of living was the turning point of history.

Additionally, Isker feels that men have lost their manliness. He feels that we’re physically weak and defeated because of the lack of manual labor and the current American diet. He implies that seed oils are causing testosterone levels to fall, and this might be a conspiracy to weaken and control men. He says we need to lose weight and exercise more (total agreement from me on that point too).

He uses the word “they” a lot, like: “That what they want you to think!” He never quite explains who “they” is. I get the feeling that he believes there’s a coordinated conspiracy going on, with some kind of centralized control.

Sexuality and gender roles are all throughout the book. It seems that feminism, homosexuality, and transgenderism are the biggest problems Isker has with the world. He never mentions things like domestic violence, tax evasion, gossip, shoplifting, or any other sin. You come away with the feeling that the sexual revolution is the biggest and only issue in the entire world.

I said before that I wasn’t going to fault his anger, but I read a long review of the book by the guy who wrote The Benedict Option, and he said this:

What happens when all the bugmen have been exterminated, so to speak? Should Trashworld be consigned to the ash heap of history, what then? What will Iskerworld be like? What kind of peace will it impose? What happens to its dissidents, Christian and otherwise? What happens to the women? To the Catholics, the Orthodox, and the non-believers? How about to the fake, the gay, the fetid and the corpulent? Is there a place for them at all?

I can’t stop thinking about that. Let’s say that we did “take the world back for Christ” the way Isker promotes, and we implemented legislation outlawing homosexuality and transgenderism and everything Isker hates.

…then what?

Are people just not going to be gay? Are they not going to suffer from gender dysphoria? Can we just be angry enough and enforce our will and make all that magically go away?

Of course not. It’s all still going to exist, just underground. Trans people have been around forever, they just killed themselves or self-medicated to survive in a world where they weren’t accepted.

It reminds me of the NFL players taking a knee during the anthem. If a team owner forced them to stand up, did that magically resolve their issues with America? Nope. They still disrespected the flag in their minds – that mind was now just about two feet further away from the ground. It proved absolutely nothing except to make some people feel like they were in control.

My point is that anger isn’t enough. If you want to resolve what you see as the problems of the world, you need to have a plan, and I don’t think Isker really has one. He just wants us to be very angry and confrontational, and he’s convinced that’s the solution.