The Maxim Gun And The Benedict Option

This is almost to the payoff to the series of posts I've been doing responding to Rod Dreher's The Benedict Option wherein Rod lays out a plan for remaining faithful to orthodoxy in a culture increasingly hostile to religion. So far, we have:

• Things were more morally confused for the Church in Antebellum America 
• Gay marriage is not the crisis some are making it out to be
• Doom will come from forces outside of faith

Today we ask the question, "Why surrender?"

At the Battle of Omdurman, a British force armed with Maxim guns defeated a larger force of Islamic rebels armed with some rifles and lots of pointy things. Hilaire Belloc wrote a poem about it with this snippet.

Whatever happens we have got
The Maxim Gun, and they have not.

That is absolutely the way things are with Christians today. Check out this bit from an old post here on the blog.

Dig this.

For sexual abuse the rates are even higher. Compared to the always intact married family:

• The rate of sexual abuse is 5 times higher in the single parent family and when both biological parents are cohabiting (i.e. unmarried).
• The rate of sexual abuse is 8.6 times higher if the child is living in a married step family.
• The rate of sexual abuse is 20 times higher if the mother is cohabiting with a boyfriend.

If we acknowledged these facts, we'd have to re-examine our take on subjective morality and all-families-are-equal. We're not yet prepared to do that. Reality is a funny thing, though. You can only ignore it for so long.

So Christians espouse a way of life that results in, at worst, 5x fewer incidents of sexual abuse and we're losing the culture war?

All kinds of stats show the same thing. Try this quote on porn usage, something our faith tells us is wrong: "As many British men in their teens and twenties have erectile dysfunction as men in their fifties and sixties." Wow.

In those two tidbits alone, we can kick the secular world's butt on child abuse and sex. That's a couple of Maxim guns right there.

The Benedict Option? Retreating into enclaves when you have overwhelming superiority of firepower?

Why?