I think he gave a good answer but that he was foolish in what he chose to call it; because rather than people actually engaging in what he proposed, which I have indicated is just a common sense response to the prevailing culture and also probably something we should have been doing all along, he’s instead had to write a dozen or more blog posts defending the idea on the basis of people mischaracterizing it or dismissing it out of hand because they couldn’t get past the name of it.
You might be able to rightly argue that calling it what he did was, in fact, a savvy marketing move because two years after the fact we are still talking about a small book written by a conservative blogger, but Dreher is popular enough that I suspect if he’d written the same book and called it the “Ecclesia Option,” or something, we’d have a cultural touchstone that was regarded more for its substance than for its status as a giant misnomer.
If we could get this Ecclesia Option paired up with Pastor Tim’s Josiah Option (which, again, I’d like to point to Moscow for this), I think you’d have an American church poised to prevail against the gates of hell erected in Washington, D.C.