To Be a Monkish Man: Medievalism, Monasticism, Education, and Gender in the United States’ Culture Wars

Summary

On Christmas Day in 2018, the Washington Post ran a feature on Benjamin Harnwell, one of the “closest associates in Europe” of the right-wing commentator and political advisor Steve Bannon. In the piece Harnwell expressed his desire to turn the Trisulti monastery in Italy into a “gladiator school for culture warriors.” “As they [Bannon and Harnwell] see it,” reporter Chico Harlan recounted, “the monastery is a fitting setting for their plans: situated far from the mainstream, studded with reminders of history.” By using the former Carthusian monastery as an ideal setting for educating political activists, they hoped to mobilize medieval Western history as an antidote to what they understood to be the decay of Western values, and, in so doing, they tapped into an often-unrealized source of inspiration for Culture War concepts.

Since the rise of a conservative Christian voting bloc in the United States in the 1970s and 1980s, a diverse set of conservative Christians have at times turned to medieval monasticism as a model for everything from political engagement to masculinity. In such books as Rod Dreher’s Benedict Option, Brad Miner’s The Compleat Gentleman, and Leon Podles’s The Church Impotent, conservative Christian commentators have invoked monks on such medieval topics as heroic masculinism, preserving religious orthodoxy, and bridal mysticism. Medieval monasticism has become one of their models for navigating, critiquing, and engaging what they understand to be a morally deficient postmodern and post-Christian world while keeping their masculinity and supposed orthodoxy intact, as this way of living has come to represent for them moral education, discipline, chastity, and personal sacrifice that dovetails with conservative concerns about gender, sexual mores, and the place of men in society, specifically in the family.

This builds on the mainstream Right’s tendency to link, on the one hand, lament about the supposed rise of moral relativism with, on the other, grievance about changing norms of gender and sexuality. Since at least the early 2000s, conservatives have increasingly attacked the scholarship, ideas, and rights of the feminist and LGBTQ+ movements as the encroachment of “gender ideology” into public discourse and policy. Indeed, “gender ideology” has become one of the conservative movement’s shorthand phrases for many issues they see as part of the “moral relativism” they loathe in postmodern society.