The Family Hamlet: A Benedict Option for the Cellular Family

Between atomized individuals and contrived community

I’ve always had a sense that something was drastically wrong with our modern living arrangements. Like Pope Leo in his latest encyclical, I placed a premium on “remaining human,” and my intuition told me suburban DC was missing something vital to that end.

I saw a neighbor from two-doors down in a coffee shop recently, whose children are the same age as mine, play in the same park across the street, and even attend the same school. But when I said hello, they looked at me like I was crazy, until I introduced myself as someone who spends their life a few feet from them.

There is something off-putting about that to me — like if an anthropologist found a tribe of people who lived in villages where nobody knew each other’s names and mostly stayed to themselves in their huts.

This paradigm is the “atomization of the individual,” as recent popes have identified it and warned against, where each person is left alone to do their own thing. But as Pope Francis noted in Fratelli Tutti, the sum of these isolated individuals does not create a society if they are not connected.

So this early intuition led me to seek communal ways of living. As a punk rock revolutionary (in my own mind) as a teen, I convinced many of my friends that, at some undefined point in the future, we would leave the urban jungle of DC and set up a commune deep in the woods somewhere.

Of course, this colony of noble savages would have none of the problems of modern life, and we’d all live happily ever after in perfect harmony away from the Man. But oddly, we never got around to it.

After college, I worked at a wilderness boot camp in the mountains of North Carolina, because it was set up as a simple life in community, hiking in the woods and at base camp, helping at-risk youth find themselves. I hoped some of that self discovery would rub off on me too.

Some of it did, and I became Catholic, afterwards joining a “young adult service team” in the mountains of western Washington to serve the Archdiocese of Seattle, largely, again, because it was pitched as living in community.

When Rod Dreher’s book “The Benedict Option” came out, I was actually a little annoyed, because I had been fairly sure it was my idea for everyone to live more intentionally in community with other Christians to wait out the impending cultural collapse, and that my manifesto would be the defining word on the matter.

But regardless, I humbled myself and wrote many articles for places like Crisis Magazine and the Front Porch Republic pushing this Benedict Option. I also created a Youtube channel where I interviewed members of the Bruderhof, the People of Praise, and even the Veritatis Splendor traditionalist Catholic initiative in Texas, among others, to promote and find best-practices for intentional community.

Dwelling on Dreher’s book, I came to think of it not as one “Option” but of many models, inviting people to fill in the blanks. Dreher didn’t really lay out how. He more laid out what we should do (build thicker ties with those of like mind) and why (because the Christian identity of the culture was no longer dominant and we wouldn’t be accepted in mainstream culture).

So I thought of it more as a “call for papers,” an invitation for people to find their own ways to achieve these ends with custom Benedict “Options” rather than a singular formula. And people have taken Dreher up on this challenge. I’ve seen people present everything from young adult game night to full-on communes as “the Benedict Option,” which they are.

But having adopted a classical liberal mindset when I realized utopia is no place, I no longer entertained models where private property was shared, seeing them as doomed to failure due to lack of proper pessimism around human nature.

But later, I was happy to discover co-housing (an intentional community model where everyone owns their own home and property but agrees to a more cooperative arrangement) and New Urbanism (the attempt to apply traditional town-planning patterns to a post-car world). These seemed like practical ways to achieve my persistent dream.

I went on to get a certification in New Urbanism from the University of Miami School of Architecture (just in case) and developed a concept for combining these two movements into an “Option.”

But this decades-long mission hit some snags (not unexpectedly) after I actually tried to finally make it all a reality.

Like with my teen skater friends, when I pitched the idea to people I knew at my parish — other young families, mostly converts, passionate about their faith — they seemed intrigued, even receptive. I was even invited to present to a big group of young adults in Raleigh who heard about it and wanted in and had multiple people from a third parish who were interested.

But the problems began, of course, where the rubber hit the road, or where the pens hit the paper and the money hit the bank accounts.

People, including my wife, were not so sure it was wise to just give up the 2% interest rates we were lucky enough to have secured (and they were right). Also, people (very reasonably) wanted a lot of details about the location, the layout, the lot sizes, the amenities, the home design options, the builders, and on and on.

The problem? We’d find one lot that looked perfect, present it to the interested parties, then someone else would buy it. So we’d start over trying to imagine the community on a different property, only to have that one purchased too!

Speaking with organizers of intentional communities in the area, mostly co-housing communities for progressive retirees, they said you really have to find an “angel founder” to buy the property first. That made sense. But we didn’t have one of those.

And the local co-housing people also put me onto another issue. They said that a frequent problem for them is that someone APPEARS like a good fit for the community initially, but then when they move in, they turn out to be a huge jerk that ruins the whole thing for everybody else.

The solution? Because there was no legal remedy, apparently everyone is supposed to make life for that person unbearable by a combination of shunning and passive-aggressive micro-interactions until they choose to move. That didn’t sound like a fun living environment, especially not one that would be a model for recreating Eden.

Change must be cellular (not atomized or nuclear)

Thinking about why this life-long dream to live in more direct and authentic community hit a deadend, I absorbed the practical lessons of land acquisition and homebuilding, but also the lessons of the social building blocks.

In Pope Leo’s new encyclical, he used the analogy of building a society that either resembles the Tower of Babel (top-down control, done with hubris without God) or the New Jerusalem (organic, from the bottom up, with God at its center).

Leo had an extended section on subsidiarity, that mouthful of a word that basically means the big institutions should only step in where smaller ones (like family or community) are unable to achieve a certain end. This is vital to understand when considering the stability of a society, and whether it will more resemble a collapsing tower or an organic “civilization of love,” as the Vatican promotes.

Leo says that:

As the first natural society, endowed with foundational rights, the family is the fundamental and irreplaceable cell of every community organization. Consequently, when political projects and major economic decisions relegate the family to a marginal or secondary role, the authentic growth of the entire social body is compromised.

In his footnotes, he references Pope John Paul II’s similar language in his 1994 “Letter to Families,” which says, “The family constitutes the fundamental ‘cell’ of society,” and where he addresses “each family, as a living ‘cell’ of the great and universal ‘family’ of mankind.”

Leo’s paragraph designating the family as the cell of humanity also had a footnote to the Compendium on the Social Doctrine of the Church, which in turn had a footnote to this amazing section from the Second Vatican Council’s “Decree on the Apostolate of the Laity.”

It says, “This mission — to be the first and vital cell of society — the family has received from God.” And, of course, it notes that in order to fulfill this mission, the family must be part of the liturgical and prayer life of the Church. But it then says the family that fulfills the mission also “provides active hospitality and promotes justice and other good works for the service of all the brethren in need.”

It says to accomplish this in practice, the family should pursue ends like:

the adoption of abandoned infants, hospitality to strangers, assistance in the operation of schools, helpful advice and material assistance for adolescents, help to engaged couples in preparing themselves better for marriage, catechetical work, support of married couples and families involved in material and moral crises, help for the aged not only by providing them with the necessities of life but also by obtaining for them a fair share of the benefits of an expanding economy.

Leo again touched on this theme at a speech to Spanish parliament, where he said the family is the “primary human reality and the natural foundation of community.”

So it seems clear to me that while an “atomized” individual is not sufficient to be the building block, even the “nuclear” family may be too small a vision.

To bend this extended metaphor to the breaking point, let’s compare this organic structure to that of an animal cell. Each cell has many atoms drawn towards one nucleus, like a “cellular” family has many individuals (atoms) pulled into the orbit of a nuclear family of a married couple and their children at the center.

Here’s a corny AI image I had ChatGPT make to drive it home:

This Catholic idea of a “cellular” family (not to be confused with the modern family obsessed with their phones) is bigger than the individuals and even the nuclear family. It is where, according to Leo’s speech in Spain, “generations intertwine,” where Catholic Social Teaching’s “civilization of love” finds its foundation.

It is where radical hospitality happens: where the grandparents can find a home in their final years, where the young adults can find space when the job market is bad, where cook outs happen, where people gather to play music and tell stories, where outsiders are welcomed, where the poor may find a meal, where those experiencing tragedy can grieve, and so much more.

The Family Hamlet

I don’t believe the typical suburban home is set up for this. Often there are HOA covenants that expressly ban most of it, due to overnight parking rules, noise restrictions, limits on outbuildings, etc. But I don’t think it’s as big of a lift as creating a whole intentional community from scratch, like with communes or the co-housing communities I previously advocated.

Instead of a skipping right to the community level, it’s likely prudent to begin, and maybe stay, at this extended cellular family level. The mistake with a lot of “intentional communities” is they skip over the healthy households and jump right to planned neighborhoods of strangers, and sometimes those strangers are not as aligned as they’d hoped.

This is building a Tower of Babel on shaky ground and hoping for the best. The Church is wise to suggest that real community starts a the cellular level and grow from there.

There is, of course, the concept of the “family compound,” but, while the right size, I don’t think that model accomplishes what the Church is asking of us. A “compound” is a place designed to keep others out, not to welcome.

Instead, the “hamlet” is a better fit conceptually. A hamlet is considered the smallest organized human settlement — smaller than a village, with no public buildings (like churches or businesses), and generally occupied by an extended family. They were common in the European countryside in prior centuries.

For our purposes, I’m imagining something like a main house (maybe two), with a smaller “granny flat” (also called an accessory dwelling unit or ADU) outside. In addition, there could be amenities like a firepit area, a garden, a gazebo, a playground for kids, a basketball court, a clubhouse, a schoolhouse or library, a pool — spaces for entertaining, activity, connection, education, and filling other basic human needs.

Because most people don’t have the money to build all of this at one time, this model encourages rootedness. Maybe the first generation builds one element, and then the next adds another, and so on. Maybe the original parents start off in the main house but end up in the ADU. Maybe (if local zoning permits) a portion of the land can be subdivided for a friend or young adult child.

My current intuition (which is always subject to change), after surveying the landscape, is this Family Hamlet model has the best chance of success among Benedict Options, as a middle ground between the stripped-down nuclear family isolated in a suburban home and the Frankenstein’s monster of many intentional communities that try to leapfrog the healthy cell straight to contrived larger organisms.

This model is also satisfying in that many can start today by making their homes more inviting to extended family, friends, and guests with designated areas for shared meals, reading, discussion, music, and other pursuits. Or those home shopping can gauge this potential when weighing options.

I’m getting started in my tiny modern subdivision, making a firepit with benches around it, clearing out the insane wisteria infestation in the HOA strip behind my yard and hanging swinging seats from trees back there.

It’s one tiny corner, but we’ve already hosted two small events there, with kids roasting hot dogs and making smores while adults chatted. Nothing revolutionary, and I’m not sure this will be where the permanent Larson Hamlet will be built, but it’s a model we plan to keep developing and maybe one that others can attempt too. Like the Benedict Option, many people are already doing this, but giving something a name can give it identity and life.

My firepit corner