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.