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Live Not by Lies: A Manual for Christian Dissidents
The New York Times bestselling author of The Benedict Option draws on the wisdom of Christian survivors of Soviet persecution to warn American Christians of approaching dangers.
For years, émigrés from the former Soviet bloc have been telling Rod Dreher they see telltale signs of "soft" totalitarianism cropping up in America—something more Brave New World than Nineteen Eighty-Four. Identity politics are beginning to encroach on every aspect of life. Civil liberties are increasingly seen as a threat to "safety". Progressives marginalize conservative, traditional Christians, and other dissenters. Technology and consumerism hasten the possibility of a corporate surveillance state. And the pandemic, having put millions out of work, leaves our country especially vulnerable to demagogic manipulation.
In Live Not By Lies, Dreher amplifies the alarm sounded by the brave men and women who fought totalitarianism. He explains how the totalitarianism facing us today is based less on overt violence and more on psychological manipulation. He tells the stories of modern-day dissidents--clergy, laity, martyrs, and confessors from the Soviet Union and the captive nations of Europe--who offer practical advice for how to identify and resist totalitarianism in our time. Following the model offered by a prophetic World War II-era pastor who prepared believers in his Eastern European to endure the coming of communism, Live Not By Lies teaches American Christians a method for resistance:
- SEE: Acknowledge the reality of the situation.
- JUDGE: Assess reality in the light of what we as Christians know to be true.
- ACT: Take action to protect truth.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn famously said that one of the biggest mistakes people make is assuming totalitarianism can't happen in their country. Many American Christians are making that mistake today, sleepwalking through the erosion of our freedoms. Live Not By Lies will wake them and equip them for the long resistance.
For years, émigrés from the former Soviet bloc have been telling Rod Dreher they see telltale signs of "soft" totalitarianism cropping up in America—something more Brave New World than Nineteen Eighty-Four. Identity politics are beginning to encroach on every aspect of life. Civil liberties are increasingly seen as a threat to "safety". Progressives marginalize conservative, traditional Christians, and other dissenters. Technology and consumerism hasten the possibility of a corporate surveillance state. And the pandemic, having put millions out of work, leaves our country especially vulnerable to demagogic manipulation.
In Live Not By Lies, Dreher amplifies the alarm sounded by the brave men and women who fought totalitarianism. He explains how the totalitarianism facing us today is based less on overt violence and more on psychological manipulation. He tells the stories of modern-day dissidents--clergy, laity, martyrs, and confessors from the Soviet Union and the captive nations of Europe--who offer practical advice for how to identify and resist totalitarianism in our time. Following the model offered by a prophetic World War II-era pastor who prepared believers in his Eastern European to endure the coming of communism, Live Not By Lies teaches American Christians a method for resistance:
- SEE: Acknowledge the reality of the situation.
- JUDGE: Assess reality in the light of what we as Christians know to be true.
- ACT: Take action to protect truth.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn famously said that one of the biggest mistakes people make is assuming totalitarianism can't happen in their country. Many American Christians are making that mistake today, sleepwalking through the erosion of our freedoms. Live Not By Lies will wake them and equip them for the long resistance.
240 pages, Hardcover
First published September 29, 2020
About the author
Rod Dreher
18 books443 followersRod Dreher is a senior editor at The American Conservative. He has written and edited for the New York Post, The Dallas Morning News, National Review, the South Florida Sun-Sentinel, the Washington Times, and the Baton Rouge Advocate. Rod’s commentary has been published in The Wall Street Journal, Commentary, the Weekly Standard, Beliefnet, and Real Simple, among other publications, and he has appeared on NPR, ABC News, CNN, Fox News, MSNBC, and the BBC. He lives in St. Francisville, Louisiana, with his wife Julie and their three children. He has also written two books, The Little Way of Ruthie Leming and Crunchy Cons.
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July 18, 2020
When I first heard that Dreher's new book was about resisting soft totalitarianism I thought the idea was a little over the top, but the events of this spring and summer changed my mind and I eagerly preordered the book. I was even more excited when I was given a pre-pub ebook to read and review (and of course I was not required to provide a positive review).
The premise of the book is that we in the west can learn much from those who survived totalitarianism in the east that may help us survive and even thrive as our culture grows increasingly hostile not only to religious liberty but to liberty in general.
Dreher is careful to distinguish between the hard totalitarianism of the 20th century and the growing soft totalitarianism of the present. Even if you don't think soft totalitarianism exists, the stories of those who survived the horrors of totalitarianism are reason enough to read the book. But if you read it, I suspect that before you are more than a third of the way through the book you'll be convinced Dreher is right.
This is the third of Dreher's books that I have thoroughly enjoyed and highly recommend, not because I agree with everything he says, but because his books never leave me unchanged.
4.5 stars
The premise of the book is that we in the west can learn much from those who survived totalitarianism in the east that may help us survive and even thrive as our culture grows increasingly hostile not only to religious liberty but to liberty in general.
Dreher is careful to distinguish between the hard totalitarianism of the 20th century and the growing soft totalitarianism of the present. Even if you don't think soft totalitarianism exists, the stories of those who survived the horrors of totalitarianism are reason enough to read the book. But if you read it, I suspect that before you are more than a third of the way through the book you'll be convinced Dreher is right.
This is the third of Dreher's books that I have thoroughly enjoyed and highly recommend, not because I agree with everything he says, but because his books never leave me unchanged.
4.5 stars
July 9, 2021
Perhaps not an enjoyable read but nevertheless an important one. To add extra depth and perhaps encouragement, I suggest reading Elisabeth Elliot’s Suffering is Never for Nothing as well as The Hiding Place by Corrie Ten Boom along side Rod’s needful book. I especially liked the conclusion and Rod’s acknowledgement of the most ruthless tyrant of all: our sinful self.
“The secular liberal ideal of freedom so popular in the West, and among many in his postcommunist generation, is a lie. That is, the concept that real freedom is found by liberating the self from all binding commitments (to God, to marriage, to family), and by increasing worldly comforts—that is a road that leads to hell.”
“The secular liberal ideal of freedom so popular in the West, and among many in his postcommunist generation, is a lie. That is, the concept that real freedom is found by liberating the self from all binding commitments (to God, to marriage, to family), and by increasing worldly comforts—that is a road that leads to hell.”
October 18, 2020
Rod Dreher begins his introduction to “Live Not By Lies” by quoting Alexander Solzhenitsyn, survivor of and writer concerning the Soviet gulags. Solzhenitsyn writes, “There is always this fallacious belief: ‘It would not be the same here; here such things are impossible.’ Alas, all the evil of the twentieth century is possible everywhere on earth.” (p. ix) With this premise asserted in the very opening pages of the book, Dreher then documents three things. First, the totalitarianism of the Soviet block countries is advancing in the west—specifically in America. Second, the book spends a great deal of time recounting the lives of those that survived the communist totalitarian regimes. And finally, the book applies the knowledge and experience of the communist survivors to how Christians might survive what is coming in America.
Part One of the book is “Understanding Soft Totalitarianism.” These four chapters are meant to awaken American readers to the reality of the growing ‘soft’ totalitarianism we face, rather than the ‘hard’ that was in the Soviet Union and Eastern Bloc countries. Dreher uses Hannah Arendt when. Building his definition of totalitarianism. He writes, “a totalitarian society is one in which an ideology seeks to displace all prior traditions and institutions, with the goal of bringing all aspects of society under control of that ideology. A totalitarian state is one that aspires to nothing less than defining and controlling reality. Truth is whatever the rulers decide it is.”
The difference between ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ totalitarianism is centered upon the way it is enforced. Rather than being enforced by ‘government decree’ as in ‘hard’ totalitarianism, ‘soft’ totalitarianism is enforced by ‘the persuasiveness of consumer capitalism.’ (p. xv)
Dreher argues that “Many conservatives today fail to grasp the gravity of today’s threat, dismissing it as mere ‘political correctness’—a previous generation’s disparaging term for so-called ‘wokeness.’” (p. 8) Conservatives fail to see that this ideology has begun to establish itself in ‘corporate America’, having graduated from college campuses. Dreher writes, “Today…dissenters from the woke party line find their businesses, careers, and reputations destroyed.” (p. 8-9) This is the way ‘soft’ totalitarianism has become, and is being established into mainstream America. It “masquerades as kindness, demonizing dissenters and disfavored demographic groups to protect the feelings of ‘victims’ in order to bring about ‘social justice.’” (p. 9)
Dreher argues that “The public will support, or at least not oppose, the coming soft totalitarianism, not because it fears the imposition of cruel punishments but because it will be more or less satisfied by hedonistic comforts.” He says, “people will surrender political rights in exchange for guarantees of personal pleasure.” (p.10-11) He goes on to say that “Christian resistance…has been fruitless… Because the spirit of the therapeutic has conquered the churches as well—even those populated by Christians that identify as conservative.” (p. 13) In short, Christians are unprepared to suffer for their faith because “the idea of bearing pain for the sake of truth seems ridiculous.” (p. 13)
Throughout these arguments, Dreher brings in anecdotal evidence from those that lived under totalitarian regimes. Those that once lived under the heavy hand of totalitarian governments have been warning those willing to listen for years, that totalitarianism has come to America. Is Dreher an alarmist? Perhaps, but even those, like myself, well acquainted with the works of Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Richard Wurmbrand, Orwell, and Huxley—we see signs all around us that we’re already waist-deep in soft-totalitarianism. It has happened hard and fast—becoming especially apparent with the MeToo movement, and most of all in the horrific year that has been 2020.
I’ve spent most of this review in the relatively brief first part of “Live Not By Lies” because this is what is ncessary to grasp the importance of this book. But the true and lasting value of the book will be in the “how-to” portion that is most of the rest of the book. This truly is a “Manual for Christian Dissidents.” This book distills the best of what is most needed from the lives and legacies of those that survived the Soviet Union and Eastern Bloc countries. If you have time, read those works as well. But at least begin with this book. This will begin the process of preparing to “Live in Truth” as Dreher puts it. Christians must begin preparing now, or we will not be prepared for what is coming. We need to prepare our hearts and souls to survive what is designed to destroy us. But God reigns. He brought a remnant out of the 20th century, and he will bring a remnant out of this one.
Part One of the book is “Understanding Soft Totalitarianism.” These four chapters are meant to awaken American readers to the reality of the growing ‘soft’ totalitarianism we face, rather than the ‘hard’ that was in the Soviet Union and Eastern Bloc countries. Dreher uses Hannah Arendt when. Building his definition of totalitarianism. He writes, “a totalitarian society is one in which an ideology seeks to displace all prior traditions and institutions, with the goal of bringing all aspects of society under control of that ideology. A totalitarian state is one that aspires to nothing less than defining and controlling reality. Truth is whatever the rulers decide it is.”
The difference between ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ totalitarianism is centered upon the way it is enforced. Rather than being enforced by ‘government decree’ as in ‘hard’ totalitarianism, ‘soft’ totalitarianism is enforced by ‘the persuasiveness of consumer capitalism.’ (p. xv)
Dreher argues that “Many conservatives today fail to grasp the gravity of today’s threat, dismissing it as mere ‘political correctness’—a previous generation’s disparaging term for so-called ‘wokeness.’” (p. 8) Conservatives fail to see that this ideology has begun to establish itself in ‘corporate America’, having graduated from college campuses. Dreher writes, “Today…dissenters from the woke party line find their businesses, careers, and reputations destroyed.” (p. 8-9) This is the way ‘soft’ totalitarianism has become, and is being established into mainstream America. It “masquerades as kindness, demonizing dissenters and disfavored demographic groups to protect the feelings of ‘victims’ in order to bring about ‘social justice.’” (p. 9)
Dreher argues that “The public will support, or at least not oppose, the coming soft totalitarianism, not because it fears the imposition of cruel punishments but because it will be more or less satisfied by hedonistic comforts.” He says, “people will surrender political rights in exchange for guarantees of personal pleasure.” (p.10-11) He goes on to say that “Christian resistance…has been fruitless… Because the spirit of the therapeutic has conquered the churches as well—even those populated by Christians that identify as conservative.” (p. 13) In short, Christians are unprepared to suffer for their faith because “the idea of bearing pain for the sake of truth seems ridiculous.” (p. 13)
Throughout these arguments, Dreher brings in anecdotal evidence from those that lived under totalitarian regimes. Those that once lived under the heavy hand of totalitarian governments have been warning those willing to listen for years, that totalitarianism has come to America. Is Dreher an alarmist? Perhaps, but even those, like myself, well acquainted with the works of Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Richard Wurmbrand, Orwell, and Huxley—we see signs all around us that we’re already waist-deep in soft-totalitarianism. It has happened hard and fast—becoming especially apparent with the MeToo movement, and most of all in the horrific year that has been 2020.
I’ve spent most of this review in the relatively brief first part of “Live Not By Lies” because this is what is ncessary to grasp the importance of this book. But the true and lasting value of the book will be in the “how-to” portion that is most of the rest of the book. This truly is a “Manual for Christian Dissidents.” This book distills the best of what is most needed from the lives and legacies of those that survived the Soviet Union and Eastern Bloc countries. If you have time, read those works as well. But at least begin with this book. This will begin the process of preparing to “Live in Truth” as Dreher puts it. Christians must begin preparing now, or we will not be prepared for what is coming. We need to prepare our hearts and souls to survive what is designed to destroy us. But God reigns. He brought a remnant out of the 20th century, and he will bring a remnant out of this one.
November 20, 2020
I picked this up after noting it making its rounds in feeds of poeple who I know tend towards the far right of political and religious lines. If this was representing a manual of sorts for their cause, I felt like reading it might give me a glimpse into this way of thinking. Help me understand their fears and concerns.
This seemed especially pertinent for me because I know for a fact that although I have many of these voices in my friends lists and personal feeds (which I think is a good thing), I also know that the entire second chapter of this book, which functions as a call to response, a way of battoning of the fortress of resistence, sees me (by nature of affiliation) as a part of the lie for simple reason that I see the Gospel as a call towards social reform and social policy.
The book is divided into a very simple structure- the first half outlines the problem, the second outlines a practical call and response to resistance.
The most glaring part of this treaties on resistance of Marxism and Communism, which the author sees as creeping in through what he calls "soft totalitarianism" in America, is how much Dreher imagines a persecuted right. With the admission of the Christians losing their grip on power and losing the "culture wars", he goes out of his way to imagine the Christian right as the persecuted masses and the soon to be marginalized voices under socialist rule. What's ultimately shocking is how hard pressed one would be to find even a single space in this book where the author actually criticizes and warns about the ver real dangers of the far right. Where this side sees any socialist policy as an inevitable slippery slope into a demonized depiciton of Marxism (anchored by interviews with Christians from the former Soviet Union) and Communism, apparently the far rights marriage to fascist totalitarianism is not at all in the same category. The right is, after all, the final representation of Christian truth regardless of what someone like Trump both symbolizes and perpetuates in terms of oppressive policies.
In one of it's more decisive statments, it defines living by lies int his way. "Accepting without protest all the falsehoods and propaganda that the state compelled its citizens to affirm." The author sees the message from that clearly defined and ever so dangerous "left" as making us powerless and convincing us that we, as Christians, should not and cannot resist.
Thus where this book looks to empower is by saying the Christian right might be losing it's power and it's ability to control (oh the irony of this sentiment), but that just means Christians have an opportunity to rise up as the necessary resistance. To represent the voice of God, also ironically as the voice of reason, the very language that helped bolster the dangerous Marxism that they see happening here in the West.
Not unsurprisingly, the word "progressive" is utilized, coopted, demonized and universalized all throughout this book under a single depiction of communism.
What is wholly discouraging, and rather frightening about this book is how it caters to those who feel they are paying alleigiance to some true Gospel all while quietly stripping the Gospel of its potential force to be a source for change. Where is the call for people to be in the trenches not in response to a loss of political power, but in response to actual social change? The call in this book to see the Christian right as the very image of "suffering" for the Gospel is a huge part of the problem in isolating one side from the other and polarizing so called conservative and progressives. Christ has no place in what is a call to "true beliefs" it seems, especially when these true beliefs become synonymous with a political side and a political front.
There is actually real worth in considering the call in this book to see ouresves as Christians as standing apart from political affiliations altogether. We are called to represent a different kind of Kingdom, a different way of living in the world. The problem is that the author describes this language of living as "Christians" in the world in worldly terms. And then it sells this hook, line and sinker to the conservative Christian right who have already been handed a well defined persecution complex. It is a classic case of the once powerful front losing their ability to control responding by labeling themselves as the martyrs, the marginalized. The little guy being bullied by the big guy. That the Gospel narrative tells a completely different story seems entirely lost to this discussion.
There are real points, real stories present in this book that deserve to be heard and deserve not to be lost to the dominant rhetoric that the author is fostering. He doesn't seem to be aware of the lies he is perpetuating in the process, which only serves to make the divide worse.
There is a sense in which this book will preach incredibly well to the choir and be immediately dismissed by those it wants the choir to resist. That's what makes this so very dangerous. It is confusing and completely misplacing the call to sacrificial living in scripture. it is completely misplacing the oppressed-oppressor paradigm that is present within the Gospel framework and integral to living out it's context in the here and now. It assumes that Christians should have power and control, whereas the Gospel calls us to give up our rights for the sake of the powerless, the actual marginalized. By marrying socialist leaning policy and socialist concern to its depictions of Marxism, it forces itself to rewrite the Gospel in its own terms and according to its own merit and rights. This is antithetical to the Christian witness.
Worse so, by demonstrating this fear mongering of the left, it makes an entire facet of Christianity blind to the similar problems that come from the right. It makes the argument that the left in America is the sliippery slope to Communism, while the right cannot in any shape or form be a slippery slope to fascism. It's completely disingenous. But hey, it will also play like gangbusters to the choir.
This seemed especially pertinent for me because I know for a fact that although I have many of these voices in my friends lists and personal feeds (which I think is a good thing), I also know that the entire second chapter of this book, which functions as a call to response, a way of battoning of the fortress of resistence, sees me (by nature of affiliation) as a part of the lie for simple reason that I see the Gospel as a call towards social reform and social policy.
The book is divided into a very simple structure- the first half outlines the problem, the second outlines a practical call and response to resistance.
The most glaring part of this treaties on resistance of Marxism and Communism, which the author sees as creeping in through what he calls "soft totalitarianism" in America, is how much Dreher imagines a persecuted right. With the admission of the Christians losing their grip on power and losing the "culture wars", he goes out of his way to imagine the Christian right as the persecuted masses and the soon to be marginalized voices under socialist rule. What's ultimately shocking is how hard pressed one would be to find even a single space in this book where the author actually criticizes and warns about the ver real dangers of the far right. Where this side sees any socialist policy as an inevitable slippery slope into a demonized depiciton of Marxism (anchored by interviews with Christians from the former Soviet Union) and Communism, apparently the far rights marriage to fascist totalitarianism is not at all in the same category. The right is, after all, the final representation of Christian truth regardless of what someone like Trump both symbolizes and perpetuates in terms of oppressive policies.
In one of it's more decisive statments, it defines living by lies int his way. "Accepting without protest all the falsehoods and propaganda that the state compelled its citizens to affirm." The author sees the message from that clearly defined and ever so dangerous "left" as making us powerless and convincing us that we, as Christians, should not and cannot resist.
Thus where this book looks to empower is by saying the Christian right might be losing it's power and it's ability to control (oh the irony of this sentiment), but that just means Christians have an opportunity to rise up as the necessary resistance. To represent the voice of God, also ironically as the voice of reason, the very language that helped bolster the dangerous Marxism that they see happening here in the West.
Not unsurprisingly, the word "progressive" is utilized, coopted, demonized and universalized all throughout this book under a single depiction of communism.
What is wholly discouraging, and rather frightening about this book is how it caters to those who feel they are paying alleigiance to some true Gospel all while quietly stripping the Gospel of its potential force to be a source for change. Where is the call for people to be in the trenches not in response to a loss of political power, but in response to actual social change? The call in this book to see the Christian right as the very image of "suffering" for the Gospel is a huge part of the problem in isolating one side from the other and polarizing so called conservative and progressives. Christ has no place in what is a call to "true beliefs" it seems, especially when these true beliefs become synonymous with a political side and a political front.
There is actually real worth in considering the call in this book to see ouresves as Christians as standing apart from political affiliations altogether. We are called to represent a different kind of Kingdom, a different way of living in the world. The problem is that the author describes this language of living as "Christians" in the world in worldly terms. And then it sells this hook, line and sinker to the conservative Christian right who have already been handed a well defined persecution complex. It is a classic case of the once powerful front losing their ability to control responding by labeling themselves as the martyrs, the marginalized. The little guy being bullied by the big guy. That the Gospel narrative tells a completely different story seems entirely lost to this discussion.
There are real points, real stories present in this book that deserve to be heard and deserve not to be lost to the dominant rhetoric that the author is fostering. He doesn't seem to be aware of the lies he is perpetuating in the process, which only serves to make the divide worse.
There is a sense in which this book will preach incredibly well to the choir and be immediately dismissed by those it wants the choir to resist. That's what makes this so very dangerous. It is confusing and completely misplacing the call to sacrificial living in scripture. it is completely misplacing the oppressed-oppressor paradigm that is present within the Gospel framework and integral to living out it's context in the here and now. It assumes that Christians should have power and control, whereas the Gospel calls us to give up our rights for the sake of the powerless, the actual marginalized. By marrying socialist leaning policy and socialist concern to its depictions of Marxism, it forces itself to rewrite the Gospel in its own terms and according to its own merit and rights. This is antithetical to the Christian witness.
Worse so, by demonstrating this fear mongering of the left, it makes an entire facet of Christianity blind to the similar problems that come from the right. It makes the argument that the left in America is the sliippery slope to Communism, while the right cannot in any shape or form be a slippery slope to fascism. It's completely disingenous. But hey, it will also play like gangbusters to the choir.
Read
January 13, 2021UPDATE 3: This review by Trevin Wax is a helpful counterbalance to some parts of Dreher's narrative. It should go without saying, but still important to reiterate, that “living by lies” is not an issue of blue/red, left/right. Truth is not the exclusive province of any party or group or ideology, and everyone, whatever one's affiliation, is vulnerable to the temptation to power, vengefulness, and destruction. Hence, we ought not to live by lies, whether they come from the left, right, or wherever.
I think this point is supported by Dreher's story of Fr. Kolaković, who experienced both Nazi and Communist totalitarian regimes: left and right are meaningless terms when it comes to totalitarianism, just as it is meaningless to distinguish between innocent lives killed by leftists or rightists.
But this brings one back to Alan Jacobs's point below: We can and should interrogate Dreher's diagnoses of our times, but the need for formation in Christ and sacrificial love for others is still our task. Furthermore, Christians will always be dissidents in this now-and-not-yet period before the eschaton. Indeed, the siren song of consumerism and the deadening effects of online life are at the very least clear and present corrosives to the life of sacrifice and the work of peace to which Christ calls us.
May we all be ready to answer the call to take up our crosses and offer our lives to Christ, and to walk humbly with Him as we seek what Ivan Illich calls the way of the friend, the way of hospitality, in a world that is so spiritually hungry and homeless. May we live a eucharistic life.
Finally, a word from Rhys Laverty is, in its turn, a counterbalance to Trevin Wax:
UPDATE: A quick read, but really worth it, especially for the last half where we get the stories of survivors of several Communist regimes and discover how they withstood totalitarianism while also keeping their faith and sacrificing comfort for the sake of truth in love. We hear the stories of the Romanian Orthodox priest Fr. George Calciu, who spent over twenty years in a gulag; the Benda family in Czechoslovakia, whose home became a haven for Czech dissidents; Baptist resistors in Soviet Russia; the Croatian priest Father Tomislav Kolaković, who escaped the Nazis and came to Czechoslovakia to prepare the Slovak Catholic Church for the coming of another totalitarian regime; Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, from whose 1974 speech “Live Not by Lies!” the title is taken; and more, including appearances by Milan Kundera, Franz Jägerstätter, Czeslaw Milosz, and Hannah Arendt.
This paragraph from the Acknowledgements expresses the reason for the book:
“What is fear? Someone who is afraid is going to be made to do the most evil things. If someone is not afraid to say no, if your soul is free, there is nothing they can do to you....In the end, those who are afraid always end up worse than the courageous.” –Mária Wittner, survivor of the Soviet regime in Hungary
“The love of fathers and mothers is the seed of the church.” –R. Dreher
--
UPDATE: I also appreciated Elizabeth Corey's review in Modern Age: “Hurricanes and Soft Totalitarianism” (https://isi.org/modern-age/hurricanes...)
Alan Jacobs on “Learning from Rod Dreher” (https://blog.ayjay.org/learning-from-...
I think this point is supported by Dreher's story of Fr. Kolaković, who experienced both Nazi and Communist totalitarian regimes: left and right are meaningless terms when it comes to totalitarianism, just as it is meaningless to distinguish between innocent lives killed by leftists or rightists.
But this brings one back to Alan Jacobs's point below: We can and should interrogate Dreher's diagnoses of our times, but the need for formation in Christ and sacrificial love for others is still our task. Furthermore, Christians will always be dissidents in this now-and-not-yet period before the eschaton. Indeed, the siren song of consumerism and the deadening effects of online life are at the very least clear and present corrosives to the life of sacrifice and the work of peace to which Christ calls us.
May we all be ready to answer the call to take up our crosses and offer our lives to Christ, and to walk humbly with Him as we seek what Ivan Illich calls the way of the friend, the way of hospitality, in a world that is so spiritually hungry and homeless. May we live a eucharistic life.
Finally, a word from Rhys Laverty is, in its turn, a counterbalance to Trevin Wax:
Dreher’s reputation as a doom-monger is unfair. He is, by his own admission, a Hobbit-like creature who would like to be left alone to worship, and to enjoy good food, good drink, and good company. Live Not By Lies is therefore a basically positive and convivial book about how, in a world where Mordor is real, Christians can still carve out a scouring-proof-Shire in their homes and churches. It is animated by characters such as the Benda family – Czech Catholic dissidents whose home was always open and table always full, often with those being harried by the Stasi. I finished this book not full of despair at our pre-totalitarian society, but full of excitement and hope about the kinds of homes and churches which will be built within it.
UPDATE: A quick read, but really worth it, especially for the last half where we get the stories of survivors of several Communist regimes and discover how they withstood totalitarianism while also keeping their faith and sacrificing comfort for the sake of truth in love. We hear the stories of the Romanian Orthodox priest Fr. George Calciu, who spent over twenty years in a gulag; the Benda family in Czechoslovakia, whose home became a haven for Czech dissidents; Baptist resistors in Soviet Russia; the Croatian priest Father Tomislav Kolaković, who escaped the Nazis and came to Czechoslovakia to prepare the Slovak Catholic Church for the coming of another totalitarian regime; Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, from whose 1974 speech “Live Not by Lies!” the title is taken; and more, including appearances by Milan Kundera, Franz Jägerstätter, Czeslaw Milosz, and Hannah Arendt.
This paragraph from the Acknowledgements expresses the reason for the book:
This book exists because of Dr. John Schirger and his mother, Milada Kloubkova Schirger. It was she, a former Catholic prisoner of conscience in her native Czechoslovakia, who said to her US-born son that she was seeing things happening in America that reminded her of her own homeland under communism. Dr. Schirger passed his mother's remarks on to me in 2015, but at the time he preferred to keep their identity private. His mother's story was the genesis of Live Not by Lies. Milada Schirger died in 2019, at the age of ninety-two. In gratitude for her witness, her son gave me permission to identify them both....My friends Béla and Gabriella Bollobás, who fled Hungary for freedom in Britain in the 1960s, first confirmed to me that I should take Milada Schirger seriously.
“What is fear? Someone who is afraid is going to be made to do the most evil things. If someone is not afraid to say no, if your soul is free, there is nothing they can do to you....In the end, those who are afraid always end up worse than the courageous.” –Mária Wittner, survivor of the Soviet regime in Hungary
“The love of fathers and mothers is the seed of the church.” –R. Dreher
--
UPDATE: I also appreciated Elizabeth Corey's review in Modern Age: “Hurricanes and Soft Totalitarianism” (https://isi.org/modern-age/hurricanes...)
Alan Jacobs on “Learning from Rod Dreher” (https://blog.ayjay.org/learning-from-...
My buddy Rod Dreher has a book coming out soon called Live Not By Lies, and it’s about what American Christians can learn about living under an oppressive regime by studying what believers did under the old Soviet Union. I think this is a story that Christians ought to be interested in, whether they agree with Rod’s politics or not. Every thoughtful Christian I know thinks that the cause of Christ has powerful cultural and political enemies, that we are in various ways discouraged or impeded in our discipleship by forces external to the Church. Where we differ is in our assessment of what the chief opposing forces are.
Rod is primarily worried about the rise of a “soft totalitarianism” of the left, what James Poulos calls a “pink police state.” Other Christians I know are equally worried, but about the dangers to Christian life of white supremacy, or the international neoliberal order. For me the chief concern (I have many) is what I call “metaphysical capitalism.” But we all agree that the Church of Jesus Christ is under a kind of ongoing assault, sometimes direct and sometimes indirect, sometimes blunt and sometimes subtle, and that living faithfully under such circumstances is a constant challenge. Why wouldn’t we want to learn from people who faced even greater challenges than we do and who managed to sustain their faith through that experience? Isn’t that valuable to all of us?
I felt the same way about The Benedict Option, which was mostly not an argument but rather a job of reporting, reporting on various intentional Christian communities. I read the book with fascination, because I was and am convinced that the primary reason American Christians are so bent and broken is that we have neglected catechesis while living in a social order that catechizes us incessantly. What can I learn from those communities that would help me in my own catechesis, and that of my family, and that of my parish church? I read The Benedict Option with the same focus I brought to my reading of a marvelous book by another friend of mine, Charles Marsh’s The Beloved Community. Charles’s politics are miles away from Rod’s, but their books share an essential concern: How can the church of Jesus Christ, how can Christ’s followers, be formed in such a way that they can flourish in unpropitious conditions?
That’s exactly the right question, I think, and both The Benedict Option and Live Not By Lies introduce me to people who help me — even when I don’t agree with their strategies! — to think better about what its answers might be. (And The Beloved Community as well. Christians under Marxism and the Black church under Jim Crow offer remarkably similar kinds of help to us, a point that deserves a great deal more reflection than it is likely ever to get in our stupidly polarized time.)
Often when I make this argument people acknowledge the force of it but tell me that Rod is the “wrong messenger.” I understand what they mean. Rod is excitable, and temperamentally a catastrophist, as opposed to a declinist. (That’s Ross Douthat’s distinction.) Like the prophet of Richard Wilbur’s poem, he’s gotten himself “Mad-eyed from stating the obvious,” and I often think that if he writes the phrase “Wake up, people!” one more time I’m gonna drive to Baton Rouge and slap him upside the head.
Also, when Rod rails against “woke capitalism,” he clearly thinks that “woke” is the problem, without giving real assent to the fact that Christians are susceptible to woke capitalism because they were previously susceptible to other kinds. He perceives threats to the Church from the Right, from racism and crude nationalism and general cruelty to whoever isn’t One Of Us, and writes about them sometimes, but they don’t exercise his imagination the way that threats from the Left do. I can see why people whose politics differ from Rod’s don’t what to hear what he has to say.
But, you know, Jonah was definitely the wrong messenger for Ninevah — he even thought so himself — and yet the Ninevites did well to pay attention to him.
And if you think Rod has a potentially useful message but is the wrong conveyer of it, then get off your ass and become the messenger you want to see in the world. Lord knows we need more Christians, not fewer, paying attention to the challenges of deep Christian formation. Wake up, people!
June 25, 2021
Dreher's logic runs something like this:
1) At times love of pleasure and high surveillance precede totalitarian regimes.
2) Some people in America love pleasure and are subjects of Big Tech surveillance carried out by corporations that do not allow anti-gay rhetoric.
3) Therefore, gay activists will soon usher in a "soft totalitarianism" in the West.
Dreher's writing style is easy to read, and he records some neat interactions with individuals from post-Communist countries whom he interviewed. And I agree that we should be vigilant about our data--the only difference is that I would uncouple it from some vast, anti-religious conspiracy. I also agree with the value of suffering, but unlike Dreher I think we should suffer for the cause of humanity as a whole, not just for our own little enclaves.
And one wonders, did it not occur to him that his book is freely available in this free-speech-thwarting world that he imagines?! Two stars, because 1)he built his case entirely on anecdotes and interviews, 2)he fails to specify just what kind of pleasure is bad and what he is doing that is so much holier, and 3) most problematically, he doesn't convince readers that his "traditional Christianity" is the authentic one. For instance, Dreher's Christianity will culminate in a "violent apocalypse" (p. 51). Whatever Dreher imagines social justice to be, it is at least somewhat important to him since he wrote 2 paragraphs about it near the middle of the book (rather paltry, but hey). However, maintaining strong family values is clearly more important. Hm. How often did Jesus talk about building strong families again? And how often did he talk about feeding the poor and bringing deliverance to captives?
I say, read the book, especially if you just want to enjoy gooseflesh induced by the threat of anti-religious bogeymen.
PS I admit I was a fan of Dreher's first book, but after witnessing one too many right-wing Christians throw a hissy fit about being wished "happy holidays" at Target instead of "Merry Christmas" (or throw a hissy fit about some other, similar inanity), I have slowly come to reject his simplistic narrative of the complexities of the 21st century. But then I probably just got sucked in and became a Social Justice Warrior...
1) At times love of pleasure and high surveillance precede totalitarian regimes.
2) Some people in America love pleasure and are subjects of Big Tech surveillance carried out by corporations that do not allow anti-gay rhetoric.
3) Therefore, gay activists will soon usher in a "soft totalitarianism" in the West.
Dreher's writing style is easy to read, and he records some neat interactions with individuals from post-Communist countries whom he interviewed. And I agree that we should be vigilant about our data--the only difference is that I would uncouple it from some vast, anti-religious conspiracy. I also agree with the value of suffering, but unlike Dreher I think we should suffer for the cause of humanity as a whole, not just for our own little enclaves.
And one wonders, did it not occur to him that his book is freely available in this free-speech-thwarting world that he imagines?! Two stars, because 1)he built his case entirely on anecdotes and interviews, 2)he fails to specify just what kind of pleasure is bad and what he is doing that is so much holier, and 3) most problematically, he doesn't convince readers that his "traditional Christianity" is the authentic one. For instance, Dreher's Christianity will culminate in a "violent apocalypse" (p. 51). Whatever Dreher imagines social justice to be, it is at least somewhat important to him since he wrote 2 paragraphs about it near the middle of the book (rather paltry, but hey). However, maintaining strong family values is clearly more important. Hm. How often did Jesus talk about building strong families again? And how often did he talk about feeding the poor and bringing deliverance to captives?
I say, read the book, especially if you just want to enjoy gooseflesh induced by the threat of anti-religious bogeymen.
PS I admit I was a fan of Dreher's first book, but after witnessing one too many right-wing Christians throw a hissy fit about being wished "happy holidays" at Target instead of "Merry Christmas" (or throw a hissy fit about some other, similar inanity), I have slowly come to reject his simplistic narrative of the complexities of the 21st century. But then I probably just got sucked in and became a Social Justice Warrior...
October 19, 2020
A disease is going around. No, not the Wuhan Plague. This malady only affects the Right, and I name it Scrutonism. The symptoms of Scrutonism are a razor-sharp ability to identify one’s enemies and to understand their plans to destroy us, combined with a complete inability to imagine any way in which those enemies can be defeated. For a sufferer of this disease, his headspace is occupied by nostalgia and fear, in varying proportions—mostly the former in the late Roger Scruton’s case, mostly the latter in Rod Dreher’s case. Scrutonism’s harm is that it makes sufferers ignore the only question that matters for the Right today: what are you willing to do, given that your enemies are utterly committed to destroying you and yours?
I used to be a Dreher fanboy, until he lost the plot with the Wuhan Plague and, more generally, descended into constant unmanly maundering. I’m still a fan, however (to steal a line from Aaron Renn, though he was talking about Tim Keller, not Dreher). And Live Not by Lies has partially restored my opinion of Rod Dreher as a pillar of today’s Right. It is an outstanding book, tightly written and tightly focused. That does not mean it is complete, for reasons I will lay out today, but it is good for what it is—the sharp diagnosis of the ways, means, and ends of our enemies.
The outline of the book is simple. Dreher shows how life in America (and more broadly much of the West, though America is his focus) is swiftly becoming indistinguishable from life under totalitarian Communism, in its essence, if not yet all its externals. The Left, now as then, will do anything to impose its evil will across all society. (This is obvious on its face and established in detail in many of my other writings, and also at enormous length on Dreher’s blog at The American Conservative.) The Left’s political vision is wholly illusory while at the same time utterly destructive. A necessary part of their plan, again now as then, is suppression of all dissent, especially religious dissent, through controlling all aspects of every citizen’s life. This plan is already largely implemented for many sectors of American society, although Dreher claims this is a “soft” totalitarianism, different in degree from the “hard” totalitarianism of Communism at its height.
He talks of Czesław Miłosz and the pill of Murti-Bing, of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, of Hanna Arendt. He deftly draws parallels between the rise of Communism in Europe and our present situation. He identifies the appeal of the Left, and of its totalitarian ideology. He talks of progressivism as religion and of the cult of social justice. He talks of woke capitalism and the surveillance state built by the Lords of Tech. He talks of the oppressive social credit system in China (under the funny heading, “The Mark of the East.”) These chapters are uniformly excellent and I strongly recommend them to anyone not already familiar with these truths. But my purpose here today is not to summarize what is happening now. Many others have summarized this book well. And to be clear, as with most of my book reviews, I am not actually reviewing Dreher’s book. Rather, I am delivering my own thoughts. If you don’t like that, well, you’re in the wrong place.
A crucial internal ambiguity pervades this entire book. Dreher’s frame is totalitarianism. He channels men and women who suffered under the most evil regimes the world has ever known. He paints a picture that offers gruesome tales of torture as a regular instrument of state control. The epigraph he uses, from Solzhenitsyn, says such evil “is possible everywhere on earth,” and Solzhenitsyn was not talking about a social credit system, but real torture and death. Yet Dreher disclaims, repeatedly, that this might happen here. Instead, he suggests a Huxley-ite future, or Murti-Bing, or Shoshana Zuboff-ite/PRC-type consumerist monitoring. At the same time, though, he talks about ever-growing state and, more, private corporate actions that are not yet physical torture, yet are meant as severe punishment, such as job loss and social ostracism. The reader is confused. What, precisely, is the future Dreher is predicting, and why? The question remains unanswered.
Dreher does, however, offer a type of solution. In the face of these poisonous headwinds he prescribes spiritually-centered private organizing, in essence his famous Benedict Option. “[The Christian dissident] needs to draw close to authentic spiritual leadership—clerical, lay, or both—and form small cells of fellow believers with whom [he] can pray, sing, study Scripture, and read other books important to their mission.” He must be prepared to suffer, because in the new dispensation, he will suffer, if he refuses to worship the new gods. Dreher, in short, recommends the “parallel polis,” with a strong religious component.
He has discussed this before. I have also discussed this before, more than once, and that it will not be allowed, because our enemies have learned from their earlier defeats, and as Dreher himself repeatedly says, they have vastly more powerful tools than their Communist forbears did. Thus, for example, he is correct that families are resistance cells—but our enemies see this too, which is why families will not be allowed to be resistance cells, but will be forcibly broken up if parents dare to instruct their children aright. No, the parallel polis will be of short duration, if indeed it can be set up at all, and the Benedict Option, without an armed wing, is dead on arrival.
Dreher does not offer any non-passive mechanism for success (but I will—just wait a few minutes). Dreher recommends Christian witness such as that of Václav Benda and his family. He recommends retaining cultural memory, and accepting suffering. But nothing succeeds like success. We know about the Bendas because Communism fell. And Communism fell both because of its internal contradictions and because it faced massive external pressure put on it by the West. Dreher is unclear as to what exactly he expects the future to bring to people of today situated like the Bendas. In essence, his argument seems to be that it ultimately worked out for dissidents under Communism, so it will, someday and in a manner yet to be shown, work for us. Maybe. Or maybe not. In other words, Dreher seems to think that the parallel polis is self-executing, as long as strong religious faith is kept.
Moreover, whether Dreher sees it or not, we are indeed heading to hard totalitarianism, not merely soft totalitarianism. To our enemies, justice delayed is justice denied. That inescapable inner logic, combined with Girardian scapegoating, means soft totalitarianism will never be enough for them. We already have soft totalitarianism, for any white collar worker, and anybody can see that the demands for compliance are accelerating, not slowing down. The reader sees no reason at all we’re not heading to “prison camps and the executioner’s bullet,” because Dreher doesn’t give one, while at the same time talking a great deal about the Gulag, the Rumanian torture camp at Pitesti, and so on, continually recurring to such history. Then he says “American culture is far more individualistic than Chinese culture, so that political resistance will almost certainly prevent Chinese-style hard totalitarianism from gaining a foothold here.” This is whistling past the graveyard—how has this supposed individualism slowed down our enemies even a whit? Soft totalitarianism may lie on the far side of hard totalitarianism (as it was with late Communism), but it will get worse long before it gets better. The reader gets the impression Dreher is pulling his punches, afraid of being seen as too extreme, too “out there,” in our controlled political discourse.
Hope is not a plan. Dreher should see that; he even quotes a Slovak dissident, “If they had come at us in the seventies, they might have succeeded. But we always remembered that the goal was to turn our small numbers into a number so big they could not stop us.” Dreher doesn’t acknowledge that getting those big numbers is crucial to success, along with a will to action (used in later Communism for mass demonstrations), and he has no plan for getting them. “Only in solidarity with others can we find the spiritual and communal strength to resist.” True enough—but what is “solidarity” here? Is it meeting in the catacombs to pray for a better day? Or meeting to plan action? Apparently only the former.
Yes, Dreher offers some legislative solutions. They make sense. But, as Bismarck said, politics is the art of the possible. He meant compromise is necessary, but if your enemies have all the power and no need to compromise to get everything they want, what is possible of what you want, is nothing. Nobody with actual power will even associate his name in public with Dreher’s legislative proposals, because they are cowards, and they refuse to be seen opposing globohomo. Political proposals in the current frame will not come to fruition; they will die like the seeds in the Parable of the Sower, either among the brambles, or fallen on rocky ground. Legislative proposals are not a mechanism for success.
Scrutonism, of which as you can see Dreher has a bad case, is a call to be a beautiful loser. But you can’t inspire anyone with a program that offers being a loser. People cowering under fire want a plan; they want a leader to point not only to what Christ would do, but how that will help them, and more importantly their children, come out the other side, cleansed and victorious. What Dreher offers instead is a call to martyrdom. This is theologically sound, but not politically. And unlike Communism, the modern Left, globohomo, faces no external pressure. This is a strategic question, of passivity versus aggression. When I think of 1453, I think not only of the priest, celebrating the Divine Liturgy as the Turks tore into the Hagia Sophia, turning to the eastern wall and walking into it, from whence it is said he will return when the Turks are expelled (which will hopefully be soon). I think also of Constantine XI Palaeologus, the last Emperor, cutting off his imperial ornaments and rushing out to die with the common soldiers. How about some of that?
Dreher talks very often of the Bolsheviks. He never mentions the Whites, who after all could easily have won, or other heroes who actually did defeat Communism, such as Francisco Franco or Augusto Pinochet. My point is not that we need to encourage violence, though I am not opposed in the least to violence in the right circumstances—quite the opposite. My point is that people need positive, active heroes, not just heroic sufferers. No man is an island, in the John Donne cliché, but that means that very few have the internal resources to passively suffer. They need inspiration about how the future will be better, both in this world and the next. Dreher does not offer it. He instead offers a variation on The Imitation of Christ by Thomas à Kempis, a book I read (said to be second only in popularity to the Bible), and thought was depressingly passive and navel-gazing. People like me may go to the back of St. Peter’s line—or maybe not, since we did not take what we were given and bury it in the ground of personal introspection, but rather grew it.
So, if you do not have enough people or enough power at this moment to impose precisely your vision of the world, where do you start? You form alliances with those who have similar goals. Yet Dreher never talks about alliances, except briefly in connection with Charter 77 in Czechoslovakia. As Dreher mentions, most of Charter 77’s participants weren’t Christian, and some were radical Marxists. But he suggests no equivalent for the religious Right today, alliances with those with alien views who, together with us, oppose the totalitarianism of the Left. Why? Because he has been instructed that policing one’s rightward boundary is what he must do, before anything else. (There are no possible leftward alliances for us; what are sometimes called “good faith liberals” are merely willing dupes in the Left’s totalitarian agenda, and of no use in this fight.) This policing has, for many decades, been the original flaw of the Right, for which William F. Buckley bears most of the responsibility—hobbling ourselves by permitting our enemies to dictate with whom we may ally. Dreher may not even realize it, but his enemies have crippled him before he can leave the gate.
I’ll give Dreher a short break here, for this problem is not his alone, but general. A few months ago the generally excellent Sohrab Ahmari, who is much more aggressive than Dreher, was hyperventilating, on his own initiative, that VDARE (a racially-tinged anti-immigrant front in which John Derbyshire is prominent) was absolutely, unequivocally, beyond the pale and nobody at all should have any interaction with it. (He was complaining that Trump advisor Stephen Miller had shared VDARE links years ago while at Breitbart.) His support for this was, I kid you not, an article from the far-left Guardian newspaper, a British paper, extensively quoting the odious so-called Southern Poverty Law Center, a noted hate group. This shows that, still now, even the dissident Right of men such as Ahmari voluntarily debilitates itself by letting the Left set limits for it on what is acceptable discourse and what are acceptable alliances. This is no way to win. Utterly smashing the SPLC is the way to win. Does that mean I think we should ally with racists and the like? Yes. Yes, it does. Absolutely. Six days a week and twice on Sunday. We should ally with anyone who will help us win.
I resisted this obvious conclusion for a long time, but . . . [Review continues as first comment.]
I used to be a Dreher fanboy, until he lost the plot with the Wuhan Plague and, more generally, descended into constant unmanly maundering. I’m still a fan, however (to steal a line from Aaron Renn, though he was talking about Tim Keller, not Dreher). And Live Not by Lies has partially restored my opinion of Rod Dreher as a pillar of today’s Right. It is an outstanding book, tightly written and tightly focused. That does not mean it is complete, for reasons I will lay out today, but it is good for what it is—the sharp diagnosis of the ways, means, and ends of our enemies.
The outline of the book is simple. Dreher shows how life in America (and more broadly much of the West, though America is his focus) is swiftly becoming indistinguishable from life under totalitarian Communism, in its essence, if not yet all its externals. The Left, now as then, will do anything to impose its evil will across all society. (This is obvious on its face and established in detail in many of my other writings, and also at enormous length on Dreher’s blog at The American Conservative.) The Left’s political vision is wholly illusory while at the same time utterly destructive. A necessary part of their plan, again now as then, is suppression of all dissent, especially religious dissent, through controlling all aspects of every citizen’s life. This plan is already largely implemented for many sectors of American society, although Dreher claims this is a “soft” totalitarianism, different in degree from the “hard” totalitarianism of Communism at its height.
He talks of Czesław Miłosz and the pill of Murti-Bing, of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, of Hanna Arendt. He deftly draws parallels between the rise of Communism in Europe and our present situation. He identifies the appeal of the Left, and of its totalitarian ideology. He talks of progressivism as religion and of the cult of social justice. He talks of woke capitalism and the surveillance state built by the Lords of Tech. He talks of the oppressive social credit system in China (under the funny heading, “The Mark of the East.”) These chapters are uniformly excellent and I strongly recommend them to anyone not already familiar with these truths. But my purpose here today is not to summarize what is happening now. Many others have summarized this book well. And to be clear, as with most of my book reviews, I am not actually reviewing Dreher’s book. Rather, I am delivering my own thoughts. If you don’t like that, well, you’re in the wrong place.
A crucial internal ambiguity pervades this entire book. Dreher’s frame is totalitarianism. He channels men and women who suffered under the most evil regimes the world has ever known. He paints a picture that offers gruesome tales of torture as a regular instrument of state control. The epigraph he uses, from Solzhenitsyn, says such evil “is possible everywhere on earth,” and Solzhenitsyn was not talking about a social credit system, but real torture and death. Yet Dreher disclaims, repeatedly, that this might happen here. Instead, he suggests a Huxley-ite future, or Murti-Bing, or Shoshana Zuboff-ite/PRC-type consumerist monitoring. At the same time, though, he talks about ever-growing state and, more, private corporate actions that are not yet physical torture, yet are meant as severe punishment, such as job loss and social ostracism. The reader is confused. What, precisely, is the future Dreher is predicting, and why? The question remains unanswered.
Dreher does, however, offer a type of solution. In the face of these poisonous headwinds he prescribes spiritually-centered private organizing, in essence his famous Benedict Option. “[The Christian dissident] needs to draw close to authentic spiritual leadership—clerical, lay, or both—and form small cells of fellow believers with whom [he] can pray, sing, study Scripture, and read other books important to their mission.” He must be prepared to suffer, because in the new dispensation, he will suffer, if he refuses to worship the new gods. Dreher, in short, recommends the “parallel polis,” with a strong religious component.
He has discussed this before. I have also discussed this before, more than once, and that it will not be allowed, because our enemies have learned from their earlier defeats, and as Dreher himself repeatedly says, they have vastly more powerful tools than their Communist forbears did. Thus, for example, he is correct that families are resistance cells—but our enemies see this too, which is why families will not be allowed to be resistance cells, but will be forcibly broken up if parents dare to instruct their children aright. No, the parallel polis will be of short duration, if indeed it can be set up at all, and the Benedict Option, without an armed wing, is dead on arrival.
Dreher does not offer any non-passive mechanism for success (but I will—just wait a few minutes). Dreher recommends Christian witness such as that of Václav Benda and his family. He recommends retaining cultural memory, and accepting suffering. But nothing succeeds like success. We know about the Bendas because Communism fell. And Communism fell both because of its internal contradictions and because it faced massive external pressure put on it by the West. Dreher is unclear as to what exactly he expects the future to bring to people of today situated like the Bendas. In essence, his argument seems to be that it ultimately worked out for dissidents under Communism, so it will, someday and in a manner yet to be shown, work for us. Maybe. Or maybe not. In other words, Dreher seems to think that the parallel polis is self-executing, as long as strong religious faith is kept.
Moreover, whether Dreher sees it or not, we are indeed heading to hard totalitarianism, not merely soft totalitarianism. To our enemies, justice delayed is justice denied. That inescapable inner logic, combined with Girardian scapegoating, means soft totalitarianism will never be enough for them. We already have soft totalitarianism, for any white collar worker, and anybody can see that the demands for compliance are accelerating, not slowing down. The reader sees no reason at all we’re not heading to “prison camps and the executioner’s bullet,” because Dreher doesn’t give one, while at the same time talking a great deal about the Gulag, the Rumanian torture camp at Pitesti, and so on, continually recurring to such history. Then he says “American culture is far more individualistic than Chinese culture, so that political resistance will almost certainly prevent Chinese-style hard totalitarianism from gaining a foothold here.” This is whistling past the graveyard—how has this supposed individualism slowed down our enemies even a whit? Soft totalitarianism may lie on the far side of hard totalitarianism (as it was with late Communism), but it will get worse long before it gets better. The reader gets the impression Dreher is pulling his punches, afraid of being seen as too extreme, too “out there,” in our controlled political discourse.
Hope is not a plan. Dreher should see that; he even quotes a Slovak dissident, “If they had come at us in the seventies, they might have succeeded. But we always remembered that the goal was to turn our small numbers into a number so big they could not stop us.” Dreher doesn’t acknowledge that getting those big numbers is crucial to success, along with a will to action (used in later Communism for mass demonstrations), and he has no plan for getting them. “Only in solidarity with others can we find the spiritual and communal strength to resist.” True enough—but what is “solidarity” here? Is it meeting in the catacombs to pray for a better day? Or meeting to plan action? Apparently only the former.
Yes, Dreher offers some legislative solutions. They make sense. But, as Bismarck said, politics is the art of the possible. He meant compromise is necessary, but if your enemies have all the power and no need to compromise to get everything they want, what is possible of what you want, is nothing. Nobody with actual power will even associate his name in public with Dreher’s legislative proposals, because they are cowards, and they refuse to be seen opposing globohomo. Political proposals in the current frame will not come to fruition; they will die like the seeds in the Parable of the Sower, either among the brambles, or fallen on rocky ground. Legislative proposals are not a mechanism for success.
Scrutonism, of which as you can see Dreher has a bad case, is a call to be a beautiful loser. But you can’t inspire anyone with a program that offers being a loser. People cowering under fire want a plan; they want a leader to point not only to what Christ would do, but how that will help them, and more importantly their children, come out the other side, cleansed and victorious. What Dreher offers instead is a call to martyrdom. This is theologically sound, but not politically. And unlike Communism, the modern Left, globohomo, faces no external pressure. This is a strategic question, of passivity versus aggression. When I think of 1453, I think not only of the priest, celebrating the Divine Liturgy as the Turks tore into the Hagia Sophia, turning to the eastern wall and walking into it, from whence it is said he will return when the Turks are expelled (which will hopefully be soon). I think also of Constantine XI Palaeologus, the last Emperor, cutting off his imperial ornaments and rushing out to die with the common soldiers. How about some of that?
Dreher talks very often of the Bolsheviks. He never mentions the Whites, who after all could easily have won, or other heroes who actually did defeat Communism, such as Francisco Franco or Augusto Pinochet. My point is not that we need to encourage violence, though I am not opposed in the least to violence in the right circumstances—quite the opposite. My point is that people need positive, active heroes, not just heroic sufferers. No man is an island, in the John Donne cliché, but that means that very few have the internal resources to passively suffer. They need inspiration about how the future will be better, both in this world and the next. Dreher does not offer it. He instead offers a variation on The Imitation of Christ by Thomas à Kempis, a book I read (said to be second only in popularity to the Bible), and thought was depressingly passive and navel-gazing. People like me may go to the back of St. Peter’s line—or maybe not, since we did not take what we were given and bury it in the ground of personal introspection, but rather grew it.
So, if you do not have enough people or enough power at this moment to impose precisely your vision of the world, where do you start? You form alliances with those who have similar goals. Yet Dreher never talks about alliances, except briefly in connection with Charter 77 in Czechoslovakia. As Dreher mentions, most of Charter 77’s participants weren’t Christian, and some were radical Marxists. But he suggests no equivalent for the religious Right today, alliances with those with alien views who, together with us, oppose the totalitarianism of the Left. Why? Because he has been instructed that policing one’s rightward boundary is what he must do, before anything else. (There are no possible leftward alliances for us; what are sometimes called “good faith liberals” are merely willing dupes in the Left’s totalitarian agenda, and of no use in this fight.) This policing has, for many decades, been the original flaw of the Right, for which William F. Buckley bears most of the responsibility—hobbling ourselves by permitting our enemies to dictate with whom we may ally. Dreher may not even realize it, but his enemies have crippled him before he can leave the gate.
I’ll give Dreher a short break here, for this problem is not his alone, but general. A few months ago the generally excellent Sohrab Ahmari, who is much more aggressive than Dreher, was hyperventilating, on his own initiative, that VDARE (a racially-tinged anti-immigrant front in which John Derbyshire is prominent) was absolutely, unequivocally, beyond the pale and nobody at all should have any interaction with it. (He was complaining that Trump advisor Stephen Miller had shared VDARE links years ago while at Breitbart.) His support for this was, I kid you not, an article from the far-left Guardian newspaper, a British paper, extensively quoting the odious so-called Southern Poverty Law Center, a noted hate group. This shows that, still now, even the dissident Right of men such as Ahmari voluntarily debilitates itself by letting the Left set limits for it on what is acceptable discourse and what are acceptable alliances. This is no way to win. Utterly smashing the SPLC is the way to win. Does that mean I think we should ally with racists and the like? Yes. Yes, it does. Absolutely. Six days a week and twice on Sunday. We should ally with anyone who will help us win.
I resisted this obvious conclusion for a long time, but . . . [Review continues as first comment.]
Read
October 25, 2020I might write a longer critique later, but there are a few things to note about Rod Dreher's work here. There are two parts of this book consisting of unequal quality. The first part is an analysis of contemporary American cultural and political trends given from a Christian perspective that I consider to be an exercise in catastrophic thinking. Dreher has laid out all the reasons that he believes a historic persecution of Christians is about to happen in America, waged by liberals and using the tools of modern surveillance technology. The worst possible outcomes of progressive thought for Christians are laid out here and Dreher evidently is preparing himself for them, in line with his previous works calling for Christians to withdraw from society into monastery-like seclusion. I have as little predictive power as anyone else (including him) and cannot entirely dismiss the fact that this might happen. But it strikes me as unlikely for a number of reasons, even if, having lost the culture war, American Christians are likely to become more marginal to the country than they have been historically.
The second part of the book is more compelling, due to the fact that it has little to do with America. Dreher spends much time interviewing Christian dissidents living under the Soviet Union who really were persecuted in horrific ways. The gruesome details of these persecutions were largely unknown to me. But they remind of teachings from Islam and Stoic/Neo-Platonic thought about how to bear suffering and even appreciate it as a beautiful and necessary part of life. Against the false promises of the therapeutic state these are worthwhile reminders: life is about overcoming suffering rather than chasing the mirage of a life freed from it. Dreher seems to have taken his interviews with Soviet dissidents and projected a future America based on the Soviet model. These interviews were valuable and often moving on their own. But he fails to connect them with the eye-brow raising claim that anything like that is about to happen in the United States.
Rather than darkly ruminating over future hypothetical injustices one might be called to address the many real and existing injustices plaguing society today. These include the incarceration of millions in brutal conditions, endless wars abroad that destroy whole societies, human trafficking, environmental destruction and more. These actual bad things get literally no mention in this book, which instead is concerned with hypothetical crimes that may be inflicted by a future police state. Perhaps if we focused more on reality rather than fears of a terrible future, the future might not end up being so terrible in the first place.
The second part of the book is more compelling, due to the fact that it has little to do with America. Dreher spends much time interviewing Christian dissidents living under the Soviet Union who really were persecuted in horrific ways. The gruesome details of these persecutions were largely unknown to me. But they remind of teachings from Islam and Stoic/Neo-Platonic thought about how to bear suffering and even appreciate it as a beautiful and necessary part of life. Against the false promises of the therapeutic state these are worthwhile reminders: life is about overcoming suffering rather than chasing the mirage of a life freed from it. Dreher seems to have taken his interviews with Soviet dissidents and projected a future America based on the Soviet model. These interviews were valuable and often moving on their own. But he fails to connect them with the eye-brow raising claim that anything like that is about to happen in the United States.
Rather than darkly ruminating over future hypothetical injustices one might be called to address the many real and existing injustices plaguing society today. These include the incarceration of millions in brutal conditions, endless wars abroad that destroy whole societies, human trafficking, environmental destruction and more. These actual bad things get literally no mention in this book, which instead is concerned with hypothetical crimes that may be inflicted by a future police state. Perhaps if we focused more on reality rather than fears of a terrible future, the future might not end up being so terrible in the first place.
April 10, 2021
1.5 stars. I read this book as an exercise in listening to views that are outside of my usual sphere of influence. I believe attempting to understand multiple viewpoints is important. And had I come across this book 10-12 years ago, it may have resonated with me.
There are real and valid stories from people who lived under totalitarian regimes, and who were persecuted for religious and cultural beliefs. The accounts described in this book are eclipsed by the fear and paranoia of the author who believes, through purely anecdotal claims, that something similar is going to happen in America in the 21st century, and that Christians are going to be persecuted under some looming progressive monster known as Social Justice.
What's most disturbing, from a Christian standpoint, is that the author assumes that his version of "traditional" modern American Christianity (which must be preserved) is the "correct" version. This is problematic because 1) it puts limitations on how and through whom God can work, 2) it does not address the many problems in modern American Christianity (particularly evangelical christianity), and 3) the "circle-the-wagons" mentality is contrary to the Gospel.
This book will serve its purpose, which is to stoke fear and paranoia in readers that are already looking for validation that there is some culture war coming for them and they are going to be persecuted (more than they already think they are). The ironic part is that the author, and probably many who will agree with him, are blind to the very things they are worried about when they happen to "other" people (racial and ethnic minorities, LGBTQ+, etc.).
There were good points that were made, specifically those about Big Tech. Siri, Alexa, and all the things that we agree to terms and conditions for are problematic. We do freely give away way too much information for the sake of convenience. The leap from this brand of consumer capitalism to a totalitarian regime that will target conservative christians is a bit much though.
There are real and valid stories from people who lived under totalitarian regimes, and who were persecuted for religious and cultural beliefs. The accounts described in this book are eclipsed by the fear and paranoia of the author who believes, through purely anecdotal claims, that something similar is going to happen in America in the 21st century, and that Christians are going to be persecuted under some looming progressive monster known as Social Justice.
What's most disturbing, from a Christian standpoint, is that the author assumes that his version of "traditional" modern American Christianity (which must be preserved) is the "correct" version. This is problematic because 1) it puts limitations on how and through whom God can work, 2) it does not address the many problems in modern American Christianity (particularly evangelical christianity), and 3) the "circle-the-wagons" mentality is contrary to the Gospel.
This book will serve its purpose, which is to stoke fear and paranoia in readers that are already looking for validation that there is some culture war coming for them and they are going to be persecuted (more than they already think they are). The ironic part is that the author, and probably many who will agree with him, are blind to the very things they are worried about when they happen to "other" people (racial and ethnic minorities, LGBTQ+, etc.).
There were good points that were made, specifically those about Big Tech. Siri, Alexa, and all the things that we agree to terms and conditions for are problematic. We do freely give away way too much information for the sake of convenience. The leap from this brand of consumer capitalism to a totalitarian regime that will target conservative christians is a bit much though.
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September 4, 2023Live not by lies, at least not usually.
A Sunday School class I was in went through this book in Spring 2022.
The "more Brave New World than Nineteen Eighty-Four" line sounds similar to how Neil Postman begins his contemporary classic Amusing Ourselves to Death.
Review here. Negative review here, describing Dreher's concerns as being based on fear and anxiety; of course, what people are and are not fearful of says a lot about them. The CT review was predictably critical. TGC review. Aaron Renn interviews Dreher here. Tucker Carlson interviews Dreher here. Al Mohler interview.
Read an excerpt here.
Jordan Peterson interviews him here (July 2022).
A Sunday School class I was in went through this book in Spring 2022.
The "more Brave New World than Nineteen Eighty-Four" line sounds similar to how Neil Postman begins his contemporary classic Amusing Ourselves to Death.
Review here. Negative review here, describing Dreher's concerns as being based on fear and anxiety; of course, what people are and are not fearful of says a lot about them. The CT review was predictably critical. TGC review. Aaron Renn interviews Dreher here. Tucker Carlson interviews Dreher here. Al Mohler interview.
Read an excerpt here.
Jordan Peterson interviews him here (July 2022).
March 25, 2021
An important book, and one that deserves to be read and discussed by American Christians. A good book to start 2021.
July 14, 2020
As I finished reading this book, my mind rung with this infamous line from Cardinal Francis George: "I expect to die in bed, my successor will die in prison and his successor will die a martyr in the public square. His successor will pick up the shards of a ruined society and slowly help rebuild civilization, as the church has done so often in human history."
Live Not By Lies is a spiritual sequel to Dreher's earth shattering bestseller The Benedict Option, and as such, it illustrates the kind of cycle that George had in mind, first by pointing out the red flags in our midst (as The Benedict Option did), but then, even more powerfully, by giving us dozens of vignettes from the lives of Christian heroes who endured and even thrived under the yoke of Soviet oppression.
The first few chapters are fairly standard stuff--if you read Dreher's blog (which you should), it's the kind of reporting and commentary we're used to--and I wondered if the whole book would be like that: the kind of tome that wants to convince us that the sky is falling because it has fallen elsewhere before.
Dreher is just setting the stage, however, and I hasten to add that even in this preliminary section, there's one chapter about corporate surveillance under woke capitalism that was absolutely terrifying. Literally, I got goose bumps. Stephen King could write an effective thriller based on that chapter!
Once Dreher gets to the main event, though...this book is as powerful as anything you'll read this year, or this decade. This is one of those books that has the ability to change lives. Dreher knows that, and openly wants it to.
Generously illuminated with scores of interviews and anecdotes from the last half century, Live Not By Lies turns out to be something akin to Foxe's Book of Martyrs meets Schindler's List: a monument to those who suffered insane inhumanity in recent history, presented as a guide to enable us to continue their tradition; if we can't prevent future atrocities from repeating, then we can at least endeavor to carry on the noble example of those who have carried the fire before us.
This is an important book. I was lucky enough to be given an advance electronic copy by the publisher, but as a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, I want to buy a bunch of copies for all the leaders in my church! Dreher's focus on preserving faith traditions through generations of family life, by living our religious traditions seriously and fully, even in the face of dwindling liberty, is a theme that resonates strongly among the "Mormon" people, whose founding scripture is obsessed with remembering the past and learning from it.
On behalf of Latter-day Saints everywhere: Mr. Dreher, thank you for this added guide to joyful discipleship in a darkening age.
And it is a surprisingly hopeful book! Though Dreher tells stories of the most gruesome tortures, he always includes the light that shone from each of these heroes. They all said that is was worth it. Their legacies survive. They won.
Those of us who have read about the dissident resisters against Soviet communism know great names like Solzhenitsyn and Havel, and our various churches all have their own prophets and martyrs...but if we want our children and our civilization to make it through the 21st century, we would do well to learn other names, too, amazing and inspiring names like Calciu, Krčméry, Ogorodnikov, Benda, and Kolaković.
I have seven children, five of whom are still at home. Every Monday night, my family gathers for stories and songs and prayers and games and treats--an evening of family worship and fun. We take turns performing different roles, and in two weeks it will be my turn to give a spiritual lesson again. My next message to my family will be about Live Not By Lies--the history and the examples and the warnings and the victories, the scary and uplifting and crucial lessons it holds for us all.
I hope that mama and papa Benda would be proud.
Live Not By Lies is a spiritual sequel to Dreher's earth shattering bestseller The Benedict Option, and as such, it illustrates the kind of cycle that George had in mind, first by pointing out the red flags in our midst (as The Benedict Option did), but then, even more powerfully, by giving us dozens of vignettes from the lives of Christian heroes who endured and even thrived under the yoke of Soviet oppression.
The first few chapters are fairly standard stuff--if you read Dreher's blog (which you should), it's the kind of reporting and commentary we're used to--and I wondered if the whole book would be like that: the kind of tome that wants to convince us that the sky is falling because it has fallen elsewhere before.
Dreher is just setting the stage, however, and I hasten to add that even in this preliminary section, there's one chapter about corporate surveillance under woke capitalism that was absolutely terrifying. Literally, I got goose bumps. Stephen King could write an effective thriller based on that chapter!
Once Dreher gets to the main event, though...this book is as powerful as anything you'll read this year, or this decade. This is one of those books that has the ability to change lives. Dreher knows that, and openly wants it to.
Generously illuminated with scores of interviews and anecdotes from the last half century, Live Not By Lies turns out to be something akin to Foxe's Book of Martyrs meets Schindler's List: a monument to those who suffered insane inhumanity in recent history, presented as a guide to enable us to continue their tradition; if we can't prevent future atrocities from repeating, then we can at least endeavor to carry on the noble example of those who have carried the fire before us.
This is an important book. I was lucky enough to be given an advance electronic copy by the publisher, but as a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, I want to buy a bunch of copies for all the leaders in my church! Dreher's focus on preserving faith traditions through generations of family life, by living our religious traditions seriously and fully, even in the face of dwindling liberty, is a theme that resonates strongly among the "Mormon" people, whose founding scripture is obsessed with remembering the past and learning from it.
On behalf of Latter-day Saints everywhere: Mr. Dreher, thank you for this added guide to joyful discipleship in a darkening age.
And it is a surprisingly hopeful book! Though Dreher tells stories of the most gruesome tortures, he always includes the light that shone from each of these heroes. They all said that is was worth it. Their legacies survive. They won.
Those of us who have read about the dissident resisters against Soviet communism know great names like Solzhenitsyn and Havel, and our various churches all have their own prophets and martyrs...but if we want our children and our civilization to make it through the 21st century, we would do well to learn other names, too, amazing and inspiring names like Calciu, Krčméry, Ogorodnikov, Benda, and Kolaković.
I have seven children, five of whom are still at home. Every Monday night, my family gathers for stories and songs and prayers and games and treats--an evening of family worship and fun. We take turns performing different roles, and in two weeks it will be my turn to give a spiritual lesson again. My next message to my family will be about Live Not By Lies--the history and the examples and the warnings and the victories, the scary and uplifting and crucial lessons it holds for us all.
I hope that mama and papa Benda would be proud.
July 24, 2021
Interesting book. It may be a little more philosophic than some books along the same line so may seem a little slow to some.
I'd say as I have so often before please just try to read it with thought and an open mind.
One of the topics here is that those involved in what is generally termed "Social Justice" (social justice warriors) are so indoctrinated that a challenge to what is essentially a dogmatic belief system is to be rejected AND attacked out of hand when all that is being proposed is a challenge to their idea, their ability think logically about what they believe...what they have been told to believe.
Just think, that's all I ask. Agree with all, part, or none of what's said decide it while THINKING.
I'd say as I have so often before please just try to read it with thought and an open mind.
One of the topics here is that those involved in what is generally termed "Social Justice" (social justice warriors) are so indoctrinated that a challenge to what is essentially a dogmatic belief system is to be rejected AND attacked out of hand when all that is being proposed is a challenge to their idea, their ability think logically about what they believe...what they have been told to believe.
Just think, that's all I ask. Agree with all, part, or none of what's said decide it while THINKING.
November 6, 2020
When Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was annexed from the country he loved, he published a parting message to the Russian people. “Live Not by Lies” was a bold challenge to the brutal totalitarian system that raved countless thousands of people.
Rod Dreher picks up where Solzhenitsyn left off in his new book, Live Not By Lies: A Manual for Christian Dissidents. This riveting work helps readers discover what it means to live not by lies. The author interviews Christians who endured the days of totalitarianism behind the Iron Curtain and gains a wealth of information that both inform and inspire us today.
Part One: Understanding Soft Totalitarianism
Part one explores the underbelly of what Dreher refers to as soft totalitarianism. “A totalitarian state,” according to Hannah Arendt, “is one that aspires to nothing less than defining and controlling reality. Truth is whatever the rules decide it is.” Mussolini defined totalitarianism as, “Everything within the state, nothing outside the sate, nothing against the state.” Wherever this worldview reigns, mankind declines, and decays.
The author explains the essence of soft totalitarianism:
A cursory glance at culture reveals the rise of social justice, the “woke revolution,” radical environmentalism, acceptance of sexual deviancy, reverse racism, and identity politics. Soft totalitarianism includes educational propaganda like the “1619 Project,” an attempt to brainwash students and cause them to abandon the principles that help birth the United States of America. The list goes on and on. Yet more and more people are willing to accept this radical ideology for the sake of convenience.
Dreher adds, “And this is the thing about soft totalitarianism: It seduces those - even Christians - who have lost the capacity to love enduringly, for better or for worse. They think love, but they merely desire. They think they follow Jesus, but in fact, they merely admire him.”
The author warns that Christians who refuse to speak up and resist soft totalitarianism will pay a heavy price. Literary critic and poet, Czeslaw Milosz agrees: “Their silence will not save them and will instead corrode them.”
Part Two: How to Live in Truth
Part two helps readers respond biblically and decisively. It shows them how to “live in truth.” The principles that Dreher shares are invaluable and will be a great encouragement as Christians navigate their way through the social sludge.
Dreher encourages readers to fight for and defend free speech. “To grow indifferent, even hostile to free speech is suicidal for a free people,” writes the author. He encourages truth-telling that is wisdom-based and prudent.
Dreher admonishes readers to foster cultural memory. He says, “Everything about modern society is designed to make memory - historical, social, and cultural - hard to cultivate. Christians must understand this not only to resist soft totalitarianism but also to transmit the faith to the coming generations.”
The author urges Christians to cultivate strong family units. “Christian parents”, writes Dreher, “must be intentionally countercultural in their approach to family dynamics. The days of living like everybody else and hoping our children turn out for the best are over.” Fathers, in particular, must lead their families and help them exercise biblical discernment. They must fight for the truth.
Dreher promotes religion as the “bedrock of resistance.” He continues, “This is the uncompromising rival religion that the post-Christian world will not long tolerate. If you are not rock-solid in your commitment to traditional Christianity, then the world will break you. But if you are, then this is the solid rock in which that world will be broken. And if those solid rocks are joined together, they form a wall of solidarity that is very hard for the enemy to breach.”
We must stand in solidarity. “Only in solidarity with others can we find the spiritual and communal strength to resist,” says Dreher. He adds:
Each of us thinks we would be like that. But if we have accepted the great lie of our therapeutic culture, which tells us that personal happiness is the greatest good of all, then we will surrender at the first sign of trouble.
Conclusion
There is much more to explore in this fascinating book. I challenge readers to dig deeply into this “treasure chest.” In the end, both varieties of totalitarianism enslave people. Dreher reminds us, “Hard totalitarianism depends on terrorizing us into surrendering our free consciences; soft totalitarianism uses fear as well, but mostly it bewitches us with therapeutic promises of entertainment, pleasure, and comfort.” It is to this end that we must resist soft totalitarianism with all our might or we, along with the proverbial frog in the kettle will slowly boil in a kettle that appears safe but will, in the final analysis, result in a grizzly death.
Live Not By Lies delivers a powerful and unforgettable message. The price of liberty is costly. This much is true. “There is no escape from the struggle,” writes Dreher. “The price of liberty is eternal vigilance - first of all, over our own hearts.” Live Not By Lies is a must-read book for freedom-loving Christians. To ignore the principles that Dreher sets forth would be foolhardy at best. Heeding the warning of the author will help pave the way for fruitful discussion and greater liberty in the coming days.
Highly recommended!
Rod Dreher picks up where Solzhenitsyn left off in his new book, Live Not By Lies: A Manual for Christian Dissidents. This riveting work helps readers discover what it means to live not by lies. The author interviews Christians who endured the days of totalitarianism behind the Iron Curtain and gains a wealth of information that both inform and inspire us today.
Part One: Understanding Soft Totalitarianism
Part one explores the underbelly of what Dreher refers to as soft totalitarianism. “A totalitarian state,” according to Hannah Arendt, “is one that aspires to nothing less than defining and controlling reality. Truth is whatever the rules decide it is.” Mussolini defined totalitarianism as, “Everything within the state, nothing outside the sate, nothing against the state.” Wherever this worldview reigns, mankind declines, and decays.
The author explains the essence of soft totalitarianism:
Today’s totalitarianism demands allegiance to a set of progressive beliefs, many of which are incompatible with logic - and certainly with Christianity. Compliance is forced less by the state than by elites who form public opinion, and by private corporations that, thanks to technology, control our lives far more than we would like to admit.
A cursory glance at culture reveals the rise of social justice, the “woke revolution,” radical environmentalism, acceptance of sexual deviancy, reverse racism, and identity politics. Soft totalitarianism includes educational propaganda like the “1619 Project,” an attempt to brainwash students and cause them to abandon the principles that help birth the United States of America. The list goes on and on. Yet more and more people are willing to accept this radical ideology for the sake of convenience.
Dreher adds, “And this is the thing about soft totalitarianism: It seduces those - even Christians - who have lost the capacity to love enduringly, for better or for worse. They think love, but they merely desire. They think they follow Jesus, but in fact, they merely admire him.”
The author warns that Christians who refuse to speak up and resist soft totalitarianism will pay a heavy price. Literary critic and poet, Czeslaw Milosz agrees: “Their silence will not save them and will instead corrode them.”
Part Two: How to Live in Truth
Part two helps readers respond biblically and decisively. It shows them how to “live in truth.” The principles that Dreher shares are invaluable and will be a great encouragement as Christians navigate their way through the social sludge.
Dreher encourages readers to fight for and defend free speech. “To grow indifferent, even hostile to free speech is suicidal for a free people,” writes the author. He encourages truth-telling that is wisdom-based and prudent.
Dreher admonishes readers to foster cultural memory. He says, “Everything about modern society is designed to make memory - historical, social, and cultural - hard to cultivate. Christians must understand this not only to resist soft totalitarianism but also to transmit the faith to the coming generations.”
The author urges Christians to cultivate strong family units. “Christian parents”, writes Dreher, “must be intentionally countercultural in their approach to family dynamics. The days of living like everybody else and hoping our children turn out for the best are over.” Fathers, in particular, must lead their families and help them exercise biblical discernment. They must fight for the truth.
Dreher promotes religion as the “bedrock of resistance.” He continues, “This is the uncompromising rival religion that the post-Christian world will not long tolerate. If you are not rock-solid in your commitment to traditional Christianity, then the world will break you. But if you are, then this is the solid rock in which that world will be broken. And if those solid rocks are joined together, they form a wall of solidarity that is very hard for the enemy to breach.”
We must stand in solidarity. “Only in solidarity with others can we find the spiritual and communal strength to resist,” says Dreher. He adds:
And this is the thing about soft totalitarianism: it seduces those - even Christians - who have lost the capacity to love enduringly, for better or for worse. They think they love, but they merely desire. They think they follow Jesus, but in fact, they merely admire him.
Each of us thinks we would be like that. But if we have accepted the great lie of our therapeutic culture, which tells us that personal happiness is the greatest good of all, then we will surrender at the first sign of trouble.
Conclusion
There is much more to explore in this fascinating book. I challenge readers to dig deeply into this “treasure chest.” In the end, both varieties of totalitarianism enslave people. Dreher reminds us, “Hard totalitarianism depends on terrorizing us into surrendering our free consciences; soft totalitarianism uses fear as well, but mostly it bewitches us with therapeutic promises of entertainment, pleasure, and comfort.” It is to this end that we must resist soft totalitarianism with all our might or we, along with the proverbial frog in the kettle will slowly boil in a kettle that appears safe but will, in the final analysis, result in a grizzly death.
Live Not By Lies delivers a powerful and unforgettable message. The price of liberty is costly. This much is true. “There is no escape from the struggle,” writes Dreher. “The price of liberty is eternal vigilance - first of all, over our own hearts.” Live Not By Lies is a must-read book for freedom-loving Christians. To ignore the principles that Dreher sets forth would be foolhardy at best. Heeding the warning of the author will help pave the way for fruitful discussion and greater liberty in the coming days.
Highly recommended!
February 5, 2021
Let me start this review by saying that I am not the biggest fan of Dreher. He like to claim the conservative label, but at bottom his allegiance is to the liberal order. He rightly sees the threat radical leftism poses, and yet somehow doesn't understand that leftism is the natural outflow of the liberal ideal of complete autonomy for the individual. Worse, he looks down on those who might actually listen to his ideas because they're not sophisticated enough or they like Trump a little too much. (This is a perfect example of what I'm talking about: https://twitter.com/TheIllegit/status...). A case of trying to have your cake and eat it too.
That said, he really does see the threat of radical leftism and its similarities to last century's Communist regimes clearly, and that's the main subject of this book. The first half is spent building the argument that we live in a "soft totalitarian," anti-Christian society that is hell-bent on destroying any semblance traditional culture and religion in favor of the alternative religions of race and/or sexuality, enforced by good old-fashioned Mammon in the guise of woke capital. It wants you isolated from your ancestors, family and church in order to sell you whatever Wall Street wants you to buy and keep you dependent on their drugs of porn and the adrenaline you get from talking down your racist uncle at Thanksgiving dinner. Unlike in Communist countries in the last century, this is no government-enforced slavery; people have learned to love the chains that make their lives so convenient and pleasurable. (Oddly, Dreher never mentions how COVID has played a major role in speeding up soft totalitarianism; then again given his track record that's not completely surprising).
The second half of the book details how Christians can combat this threat. In short: live not by lies. Or to put it in the words of Václav Havel, talking about his famous greengrocer who decides to not put up a Communist poster in his shop:
Essentially, the answer is to be a real Christian who lives in the truth. Preserve cultural and religious memory. Be involved in your family and church. Do not love anything in this world so much that you are not willing to let it go for the sake of Christ. Be willing to suffer. Quite the tall order, but that is nothing new: take up your cross and die to yourself. There is no other way if you want to truly live.
And above all, cling to hope. Christ is Truth itself, the King of kings, the author and Lord of history. He will break the teeth of the wicked and redeem His people. Nothing is in vain if done for Him, and not even the most alluring lie can ever compare with that truth.
That said, he really does see the threat of radical leftism and its similarities to last century's Communist regimes clearly, and that's the main subject of this book. The first half is spent building the argument that we live in a "soft totalitarian," anti-Christian society that is hell-bent on destroying any semblance traditional culture and religion in favor of the alternative religions of race and/or sexuality, enforced by good old-fashioned Mammon in the guise of woke capital. It wants you isolated from your ancestors, family and church in order to sell you whatever Wall Street wants you to buy and keep you dependent on their drugs of porn and the adrenaline you get from talking down your racist uncle at Thanksgiving dinner. Unlike in Communist countries in the last century, this is no government-enforced slavery; people have learned to love the chains that make their lives so convenient and pleasurable. (Oddly, Dreher never mentions how COVID has played a major role in speeding up soft totalitarianism; then again given his track record that's not completely surprising).
The second half of the book details how Christians can combat this threat. In short: live not by lies. Or to put it in the words of Václav Havel, talking about his famous greengrocer who decides to not put up a Communist poster in his shop:
By breaking the rules of the game, he has disrupted the game as such. He has exposed it as a mere game. He has shattered the world of appearances, the fundamental pillar of the system. He has upset the power structure by tearing apart what holds it together. He has demonstrated that living a lie is living a lie. He has broken through the exalted facade of the system and exposed the real, base foundations of power. He has said that the emperor is naked. And because the emperor is in fact naked, something extremely dangerous has happened: by his action, the greengrocer has addressed the world. He has enabled everyone to peer behind the curtain. He has shown everyone that it is possible to live within the truth. Living within the lie can constitute the system only if it is universal. The principle must embrace and permeate everything. There are no terms whatsoever on which it can co-exist with living within the truth, and therefore everyone who steps out of line denies it in principle and threatens it in its entirety.
Essentially, the answer is to be a real Christian who lives in the truth. Preserve cultural and religious memory. Be involved in your family and church. Do not love anything in this world so much that you are not willing to let it go for the sake of Christ. Be willing to suffer. Quite the tall order, but that is nothing new: take up your cross and die to yourself. There is no other way if you want to truly live.
And above all, cling to hope. Christ is Truth itself, the King of kings, the author and Lord of history. He will break the teeth of the wicked and redeem His people. Nothing is in vain if done for Him, and not even the most alluring lie can ever compare with that truth.
March 18, 2021
Wow. This is a hard book to read, but a necessary one. Get your hands on it.
April 8, 2021
"There is always this fallacious belief: 'It would not be the same here; here such things are impossible.' Alas, all the evil of the twentieth century is possible everywhere on earth." ~Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
This book is a powerful wakeup call to Western Christians, and Americans in particular, to recognize and prepare for the dangers of the rising "soft totalitarianism". This form of totalitarianism is much more subtle than that of the Soviet Union, or Nazi Germany, but therefore can be even more dangerous. Many Americans seem oblivious to its approach, but the people that Dreher spoke with, who had lived under Communism, all agree that the signs of the times are ominous. Leftist ideology is increasingly being shoved down our throats and dissenters are mocked, silenced, and even losing their jobs (as a musician, I have been asked to perform at weddings, but have chosen not to because I could get in trouble if I was ever asked by a same-sex couple and refused). It is very telling that many of the people who assisted Dreher with this book were afraid to share their names. The first half of the book clearly outlines the threats of totalitarianism in America, and how similar the viewpoints of people like the social justice warriors are to the Bolsheviks in Prerevolutionary Russia. Once again, traditional Christianity is viewed as a threat to human progress.
The second half shows us how to resist by living our lives joyously in Truth and provides many examples from stories of martyrs and confessors under the Soviet regime. I was greatly challenged and encouraged by this part of the book. Much of what these resisters did, my family has been doing to some extent all my life, such as living a separated life from post-Christian society. The importance of the family as a "resistance cell" is strongly emphasized, as well as small communities. These people formed groups who would pray together, read the Bible, and sing. They also would do plays or lectures on literature to preserve their culture. The author encourages Americans to begin forming such "undergound" communities now, while we still have some degree of freedom.
We also need to seriously consider whether our faith makes us "followers" or mere "admirers" of Christ. Our modern society teaches us to live for comfort, and this has developed into a watered-down form of Christianity and the "prosperity Gospel". So often we hear well-meaning Christians say that everything will be OK and if you serve the Lord you will be able to fulfill all your dreams because God loves you and has a wonderful plan for your life. This is the picture that always comes into my mind when I hear that...
This kind of comfort Christianity is going to crumble before the slightest persecution. We need to be ready and willing to suffer for our faith. This is a great book and I highly recommend it to all Christians!
This book is a powerful wakeup call to Western Christians, and Americans in particular, to recognize and prepare for the dangers of the rising "soft totalitarianism". This form of totalitarianism is much more subtle than that of the Soviet Union, or Nazi Germany, but therefore can be even more dangerous. Many Americans seem oblivious to its approach, but the people that Dreher spoke with, who had lived under Communism, all agree that the signs of the times are ominous. Leftist ideology is increasingly being shoved down our throats and dissenters are mocked, silenced, and even losing their jobs (as a musician, I have been asked to perform at weddings, but have chosen not to because I could get in trouble if I was ever asked by a same-sex couple and refused). It is very telling that many of the people who assisted Dreher with this book were afraid to share their names. The first half of the book clearly outlines the threats of totalitarianism in America, and how similar the viewpoints of people like the social justice warriors are to the Bolsheviks in Prerevolutionary Russia. Once again, traditional Christianity is viewed as a threat to human progress.
The second half shows us how to resist by living our lives joyously in Truth and provides many examples from stories of martyrs and confessors under the Soviet regime. I was greatly challenged and encouraged by this part of the book. Much of what these resisters did, my family has been doing to some extent all my life, such as living a separated life from post-Christian society. The importance of the family as a "resistance cell" is strongly emphasized, as well as small communities. These people formed groups who would pray together, read the Bible, and sing. They also would do plays or lectures on literature to preserve their culture. The author encourages Americans to begin forming such "undergound" communities now, while we still have some degree of freedom.
We also need to seriously consider whether our faith makes us "followers" or mere "admirers" of Christ. Our modern society teaches us to live for comfort, and this has developed into a watered-down form of Christianity and the "prosperity Gospel". So often we hear well-meaning Christians say that everything will be OK and if you serve the Lord you will be able to fulfill all your dreams because God loves you and has a wonderful plan for your life. This is the picture that always comes into my mind when I hear that...
This kind of comfort Christianity is going to crumble before the slightest persecution. We need to be ready and willing to suffer for our faith. This is a great book and I highly recommend it to all Christians!
August 7, 2022
This was a well written book and it sucked me in. I would have liked to given it a higher rating, but the beginning was so full of rage. But the filp side to that, is if a few words were changed around it could have been written by the other side directing rage to whom they disliked.
So to clear the air before I start my review, I am descended from martyrs and persecuted people, so my perspective on this book will be a bit different from someone who doesn’t have that background.
The subtitle for this book includes the word dissidents. I think that term should have been applied to the people written about in the book. A person who picks up this book based on the tittle alone, and starts to read it will feel deceived and not want to continue. But, it is worth sticking with and continuing on.
The second part of the book gets very descriptive and sucks you in. The author focuses on the people who stood up for their faith in Eastern Europe during the Cold War. They did not compromise, no matter what physical and psychological things the regimes of their home countries threw at them.
History has a tendency to repeat itself if we try to erase it. As the old adage goes, “Learn from history, so you do not repeat the the mistakes from the past”.
This book can also pose this question, “Are you going to be a beacon to others, or turn your head”?
In my opinion, this book focused more on the current political climate, instead of being the beacon. Being the beacon does not happen overnight. And that is a discussion for another time.
So to clear the air before I start my review, I am descended from martyrs and persecuted people, so my perspective on this book will be a bit different from someone who doesn’t have that background.
The subtitle for this book includes the word dissidents. I think that term should have been applied to the people written about in the book. A person who picks up this book based on the tittle alone, and starts to read it will feel deceived and not want to continue. But, it is worth sticking with and continuing on.
The second part of the book gets very descriptive and sucks you in. The author focuses on the people who stood up for their faith in Eastern Europe during the Cold War. They did not compromise, no matter what physical and psychological things the regimes of their home countries threw at them.
History has a tendency to repeat itself if we try to erase it. As the old adage goes, “Learn from history, so you do not repeat the the mistakes from the past”.
This book can also pose this question, “Are you going to be a beacon to others, or turn your head”?
In my opinion, this book focused more on the current political climate, instead of being the beacon. Being the beacon does not happen overnight. And that is a discussion for another time.
June 16, 2021
The premise of this book is that there is a looming “soft-totalitarianism” that’s threatening to engulf America, and that Christians need to both fight against it now and a prepare themselves to resist when the worst comes. The book was an easy read and I could see it coming across as convincing if you largely agree with the positions that Dreher holds. However, he was not convincing to someone who holds different opinions. Not only that, I found it ironic that in a book dedicated to speaking the truth, he was so liberal in his use of strawmen arguments and generalizations. Either he does not have even a basic grasp of the actual arguments used by his opponents, or he is willing to lie throughout the book to keep it simple for his target audience.
One difficult part of reviewing this book was that there were several very different topics covered, and I found some sections, taken in isolation, to be pretty good. For example, the section on the dangers of big data and corporate surveillance. We have and continue to willingly trade any semblance of privacy for convenience, and I agree that as a culture at some point there will be a reckoning of some sort. Although, notably, this section was very thin on practical advice.
Another major theme in the book that that I wholeheartedly agree is material that he quotes or summarized from people who were in the midst of resisting communism in the USSR. Especially Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn from whom he quotes broadly and who inspired the title of the book. However, what I found sneaky and deceptive was how Dreher was quick and insistent in framing these quotes to only apply against the dangers posed by the American Pollical Left. One way he does this throughout the book is by talking about his many anonymous interviews with people who used to live under a communist regime. Apparently, each and every one has deep misgivings about cancel culture, political correctness, and Left-wing doxxing and not one of them was concerned by voter suppression, Alt-Right violence, or an ex-president saying he was above the law (promising to pardon himself). By proxy, Dreher is essentially claiming that were they alive today, these heroic dissenters would be squarely on his side of the modern debate.
When it came to his concrete advice of what we should be doing as Christians, his catchphrase was “see, judge, act”. He advocates brutal honesty with yourself about what’s going on, an accurate judgment of the situation based on your Christian understanding, and concrete action based on that judgment to protect truth. The problem, of course, is that while God is infallible, we as people are not! The assumption that as Christians we should be able to, somehow, accurately “Assess reality in the light of what we as Christians know to be true” is arrogant at best! Especially because there is no emphasis on listening to other opinions, humble dialogue with people who disagree, etc. While knitting together in community is one of his suggestions, the strong implication is that this should be with people one your side of the culture war (even if they don’t share precisely the same ideas in everything). As I mentioned in the first paragraph, Dreher did not present any of the best arguments from the political left. That means he is either intentionally suppressing them (lying), or it’s possible he really doesn’t engage enough with the people who hold other opinions to be able to clearly articulate their point! And it’s from this point of either ignorance or intellectual dishonesty that he’s able to assume that he knows what is true about complex modern issues? Why don’t you invite an activist over, instead of dismissing them offhandedly as another SJW?
This review (rant?) is long enough, but the last point I will make is that the more extreme your claim is, the more ironclad your evidence should be. Dreher claims that America is facing an attack from the Liberal Elite who are trying to impose a totalitarian regime on our country. That’s fine as the thesis of a book, but then you have to back that up with solid argumentation! You can’t just say that some people who lived under communism say it feels “eerily similar” that’s not an argument. You can’t just point out that a bakery shut down after backlash over not wanting to sell cake for a gay wedding, that’s not great, but that’s not totalitarianism! Insisting over and over that these incidents represent the imminent and subtle signs of the spirit of the Antichrist doesn’t make it true.
This is a time to be alert and on guard, we have a responsibility to have open eyes and speak and act out for truth and justice. That’s a Christian duty, and a human duty. But you gotta do it with humility. You gotta reach across in love to people who are different from you. This book did nothing to warn or prepare anyone to deal with the riot on January 6th of this year. That’s because this book is Conservative first and Christian second.
One difficult part of reviewing this book was that there were several very different topics covered, and I found some sections, taken in isolation, to be pretty good. For example, the section on the dangers of big data and corporate surveillance. We have and continue to willingly trade any semblance of privacy for convenience, and I agree that as a culture at some point there will be a reckoning of some sort. Although, notably, this section was very thin on practical advice.
Another major theme in the book that that I wholeheartedly agree is material that he quotes or summarized from people who were in the midst of resisting communism in the USSR. Especially Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn from whom he quotes broadly and who inspired the title of the book. However, what I found sneaky and deceptive was how Dreher was quick and insistent in framing these quotes to only apply against the dangers posed by the American Pollical Left. One way he does this throughout the book is by talking about his many anonymous interviews with people who used to live under a communist regime. Apparently, each and every one has deep misgivings about cancel culture, political correctness, and Left-wing doxxing and not one of them was concerned by voter suppression, Alt-Right violence, or an ex-president saying he was above the law (promising to pardon himself). By proxy, Dreher is essentially claiming that were they alive today, these heroic dissenters would be squarely on his side of the modern debate.
When it came to his concrete advice of what we should be doing as Christians, his catchphrase was “see, judge, act”. He advocates brutal honesty with yourself about what’s going on, an accurate judgment of the situation based on your Christian understanding, and concrete action based on that judgment to protect truth. The problem, of course, is that while God is infallible, we as people are not! The assumption that as Christians we should be able to, somehow, accurately “Assess reality in the light of what we as Christians know to be true” is arrogant at best! Especially because there is no emphasis on listening to other opinions, humble dialogue with people who disagree, etc. While knitting together in community is one of his suggestions, the strong implication is that this should be with people one your side of the culture war (even if they don’t share precisely the same ideas in everything). As I mentioned in the first paragraph, Dreher did not present any of the best arguments from the political left. That means he is either intentionally suppressing them (lying), or it’s possible he really doesn’t engage enough with the people who hold other opinions to be able to clearly articulate their point! And it’s from this point of either ignorance or intellectual dishonesty that he’s able to assume that he knows what is true about complex modern issues? Why don’t you invite an activist over, instead of dismissing them offhandedly as another SJW?
This review (rant?) is long enough, but the last point I will make is that the more extreme your claim is, the more ironclad your evidence should be. Dreher claims that America is facing an attack from the Liberal Elite who are trying to impose a totalitarian regime on our country. That’s fine as the thesis of a book, but then you have to back that up with solid argumentation! You can’t just say that some people who lived under communism say it feels “eerily similar” that’s not an argument. You can’t just point out that a bakery shut down after backlash over not wanting to sell cake for a gay wedding, that’s not great, but that’s not totalitarianism! Insisting over and over that these incidents represent the imminent and subtle signs of the spirit of the Antichrist doesn’t make it true.
This is a time to be alert and on guard, we have a responsibility to have open eyes and speak and act out for truth and justice. That’s a Christian duty, and a human duty. But you gotta do it with humility. You gotta reach across in love to people who are different from you. This book did nothing to warn or prepare anyone to deal with the riot on January 6th of this year. That’s because this book is Conservative first and Christian second.
June 7, 2021
My parents bought me this book. I didn't really want to read it. I hear that Dreher likes to find fault. A vigorous buyer into the culture wars. And I don't really like to fight.
But I think I agree with almost everything that's in this book.
His thesis is that progressivism and woke capitalism want to function like soft totalitarianism. They don't want to control your outside but to control your heart, thoughts, emotions, and convert everyone to a single ideology. They want to make the personal political so that everything is political and so that everyone is on the same political page.
I think this is right? Maybe not even controversial? Maybe all sides would agree?
And it certainly explains my psychology the last twenty years. I have some viewpoints that aren't progressive. And I've been keeping them under wraps as much as possible. Even writing this review feels risky. I know that the academy and the intelligentsia aren't places safe for me and for what and who I value and cherish. No one's persecuted me personally; I'm not carrying personal injustice. But I know what it's like to live under an ideological regime that rejects my private self--not my race, class, or sexual orientation, but my beliefs and emotional responses. It has changed me.
Under these terms, of course, Trump Christianity emerges as a harder totalitarianism, more adversarial because less culturally empowered. It just happens not to be the aspirant totalitarianism under which I've been formed.
Dreher interviews a lot of people who survived totalitarianism and gets tips from them about how we might. And that's useful. What the book seems to be missing is a philosophy for engagement with totalitarian culture. Because said culture is made up of our friends and neighbours, our family members, the people we are called to. Sometimes ideas are our enemies, but the people who hold them never are. Surely a properly evangelical, incarnational affirmation that Jesus is the Way must acknowledge, celebrate, and teach us how to live and love in difference.
But I think I agree with almost everything that's in this book.
His thesis is that progressivism and woke capitalism want to function like soft totalitarianism. They don't want to control your outside but to control your heart, thoughts, emotions, and convert everyone to a single ideology. They want to make the personal political so that everything is political and so that everyone is on the same political page.
I think this is right? Maybe not even controversial? Maybe all sides would agree?
And it certainly explains my psychology the last twenty years. I have some viewpoints that aren't progressive. And I've been keeping them under wraps as much as possible. Even writing this review feels risky. I know that the academy and the intelligentsia aren't places safe for me and for what and who I value and cherish. No one's persecuted me personally; I'm not carrying personal injustice. But I know what it's like to live under an ideological regime that rejects my private self--not my race, class, or sexual orientation, but my beliefs and emotional responses. It has changed me.
Under these terms, of course, Trump Christianity emerges as a harder totalitarianism, more adversarial because less culturally empowered. It just happens not to be the aspirant totalitarianism under which I've been formed.
Dreher interviews a lot of people who survived totalitarianism and gets tips from them about how we might. And that's useful. What the book seems to be missing is a philosophy for engagement with totalitarian culture. Because said culture is made up of our friends and neighbours, our family members, the people we are called to. Sometimes ideas are our enemies, but the people who hold them never are. Surely a properly evangelical, incarnational affirmation that Jesus is the Way must acknowledge, celebrate, and teach us how to live and love in difference.
June 23, 2024
This is the most important book I've read all year.
In it, Dreher puts the spotlight on the "soft totalitarianism" emerging in the west: the combined efforts of the government, corporations, academia, and media elites to control the thoughts and actions of the people. As in all totalitarian societies, Christianity is viewed as a force that hinders the collective pursuit of happiness, and thus it must be silenced.
To show us the way, Dreher turns to survivors of the "hard totalitarianism" of the former Soviet states. Their stories and words of wisdom demonstrate how our faith can survive--even thrive--under conditions of extreme persecution. Each story made me yearn for ten more like it.
This book is a gold mine. I devoured it and marked it up heavily. I made a mental list of people I need to give it to. If you are a Christian, Catholic, or convictional believer of any kind, buy this book. If you treasure the promise of a liberal society--that people should be free to live according to their conscience, that free speech matters, that truth exists-- buy this book. If you are a person of goodwill who simply believes that we should not punish others for their thoughts, buy this book. And then buy an extra copy for a friend.
In it, Dreher puts the spotlight on the "soft totalitarianism" emerging in the west: the combined efforts of the government, corporations, academia, and media elites to control the thoughts and actions of the people. As in all totalitarian societies, Christianity is viewed as a force that hinders the collective pursuit of happiness, and thus it must be silenced.
To show us the way, Dreher turns to survivors of the "hard totalitarianism" of the former Soviet states. Their stories and words of wisdom demonstrate how our faith can survive--even thrive--under conditions of extreme persecution. Each story made me yearn for ten more like it.
This book is a gold mine. I devoured it and marked it up heavily. I made a mental list of people I need to give it to. If you are a Christian, Catholic, or convictional believer of any kind, buy this book. If you treasure the promise of a liberal society--that people should be free to live according to their conscience, that free speech matters, that truth exists-- buy this book. If you are a person of goodwill who simply believes that we should not punish others for their thoughts, buy this book. And then buy an extra copy for a friend.
July 9, 2021
How do you write a book that expresses how dire our situation is in America and still infuse it with hope? Dreher does a masterful job.
January 20, 2021
A couple different people referred this book to me ahead of its release, so I got in line early for the library ebook and the paperback. I read it in a day or two over Christmas break.
Live Not by Lies is about the arrival of persecution against Christians in the West and how we can approach it with a Christ-like mindset. Dreher outlines what he sees as the increasing encroachment upon Christians’ lives by certain leftist ideology. He gives some concrete examples from recent events and trends, with the larger theme being “cancel culture” and a general coercion to live in a lie…that is, to say (and think) what society wants you to say regardless of what you believe. Dreher doesn’t leave the right blameless, either, pointing to the excesses of capitalism as an equally dangerous idol, which, in the form of big tech, is about to eat us whole (my words, not his).
As its basis, the book leans on the history and examples of Christians who were arrested, tortured, or even murdered during the worst of the Soviet years. Dreher includes interviews from survivors and family members, which I found especially encouraging. Solzhenitsyn’s essay "Live Not by Lies" provides the titular theme, and Havel’s story of the greengrocer features as well, so for anyone who had not come across them before, this is an excellent starting point.
The book started out slow but improved as it went on. Dreher’s advice���and the framework See, Judge, Act—is solid. He advocates for strong family, community, knowledge, and self-awareness. And last but not least, a willingness to endure. There is absolutely nothing here about use of force or race, and I applaud him for not even entertaining those kinds of ideologies. What he describes instead is a non-violent self-assurance that includes compassion for the persecutors—the only way to truly win.
On the cons: I would’ve liked to see more content on Christianity in China, since there is already massive persecution there of the underground churches. I also think the technology factor is a huge hurdle that wasn’t quite as pernicious during the 20th century. (To his credit, Dreher does reference We Have Been Harmonized , another book on my shelf waiting to be read). Lastly, this book would be kinda tough for the average teen, and I feel this is a topic that needs to be accessible to that age group. These are minor critiques, though. I would recommend the book to any Christians.
Live Not by Lies is about the arrival of persecution against Christians in the West and how we can approach it with a Christ-like mindset. Dreher outlines what he sees as the increasing encroachment upon Christians’ lives by certain leftist ideology. He gives some concrete examples from recent events and trends, with the larger theme being “cancel culture” and a general coercion to live in a lie…that is, to say (and think) what society wants you to say regardless of what you believe. Dreher doesn’t leave the right blameless, either, pointing to the excesses of capitalism as an equally dangerous idol, which, in the form of big tech, is about to eat us whole (my words, not his).
As its basis, the book leans on the history and examples of Christians who were arrested, tortured, or even murdered during the worst of the Soviet years. Dreher includes interviews from survivors and family members, which I found especially encouraging. Solzhenitsyn’s essay "Live Not by Lies" provides the titular theme, and Havel’s story of the greengrocer features as well, so for anyone who had not come across them before, this is an excellent starting point.
The book started out slow but improved as it went on. Dreher’s advice���and the framework See, Judge, Act—is solid. He advocates for strong family, community, knowledge, and self-awareness. And last but not least, a willingness to endure. There is absolutely nothing here about use of force or race, and I applaud him for not even entertaining those kinds of ideologies. What he describes instead is a non-violent self-assurance that includes compassion for the persecutors—the only way to truly win.
On the cons: I would’ve liked to see more content on Christianity in China, since there is already massive persecution there of the underground churches. I also think the technology factor is a huge hurdle that wasn’t quite as pernicious during the 20th century. (To his credit, Dreher does reference We Have Been Harmonized , another book on my shelf waiting to be read). Lastly, this book would be kinda tough for the average teen, and I feel this is a topic that needs to be accessible to that age group. These are minor critiques, though. I would recommend the book to any Christians.
June 25, 2023
Some interesting points but none of them particularly mind-blowing if you have been paying attention to the political climate in recent years. Perhaps the book did its job too well. I have heard variations of most of what he writes about. I'm not entirely convinced by the solution (or so-called manual) presented here but I'll acknowledge that listening to it on audio probably wasn't the most helpful.
Recommend by Andrew Pudewa as his favorite read of 2021
Recommend by Andrew Pudewa as his favorite read of 2021
May 11, 2022
This is definitely one of my favourite books of the year. I need to come back and add more to this review but long story short, this book is fantastic and reminds us that terrible things didn't just happen hundred of years ago in the far off past. I highlighted and underlined so much if this book.
June 16, 2021
As one review said that a better title would be “Live not by a false sense of persecution." I saw this book and picked it up because the title made me think it was the exact opposite to what it really is. It is sad and disturbing, to see Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, co-opted by the right-wing fringe because they want to argue that the US is now on the road to becoming a totalitarian Marxist state. I do not think Solzhenitsyn would be silent if he were still alive.
Live Not by Lies is a bad book. Among the worst I have ever read. The premise is that America, and Western societies either currently are or soon will be in the grip of what Dreher calls “soft totalitarianism.” The ideology of this new totalitarian order is what he calls “social justice,” which combines the racial and gender politics of "wokeness" or identity politics with a free love individualism and hedonic consumption.
And of course, the “intellectuals” are all to blame. To endure this totalitarian onslaught, Dreher turns to the example of the Christians who were persecuted under Soviet-era regimes, portraying the Bolsheviks as the social justice warriors of their day. This book is just a retread of the 1960’s John Birch Society hysteria. It never amounted to anything then and it will not now.
The second half of the book is the “manual” part of the title. It includes the moving and charismatic stories of Christians in the Soviet bloc whose forms of resistance and ordinary courage Dreher translates into obvious but mostly inoffensive advice for living under totalitarianism. Those stories, shorn of context though they are, make up the book’s most worthwhile moments.
This book is a message for people to turn on their potential allies with fear and disgust when they might link arms, across cultural and generational divides, to defend each other from the demagogic politicians who fail at the basic tasks of governing.
Do not be fooled by the title of this book. Sadly, by the number of 5 star reviews a lot of folks have been fooled or perhaps this book just confirms their own bias and Christian persecution complex.
Live Not by Lies is a bad book. Among the worst I have ever read. The premise is that America, and Western societies either currently are or soon will be in the grip of what Dreher calls “soft totalitarianism.” The ideology of this new totalitarian order is what he calls “social justice,” which combines the racial and gender politics of "wokeness" or identity politics with a free love individualism and hedonic consumption.
And of course, the “intellectuals” are all to blame. To endure this totalitarian onslaught, Dreher turns to the example of the Christians who were persecuted under Soviet-era regimes, portraying the Bolsheviks as the social justice warriors of their day. This book is just a retread of the 1960’s John Birch Society hysteria. It never amounted to anything then and it will not now.
The second half of the book is the “manual” part of the title. It includes the moving and charismatic stories of Christians in the Soviet bloc whose forms of resistance and ordinary courage Dreher translates into obvious but mostly inoffensive advice for living under totalitarianism. Those stories, shorn of context though they are, make up the book’s most worthwhile moments.
This book is a message for people to turn on their potential allies with fear and disgust when they might link arms, across cultural and generational divides, to defend each other from the demagogic politicians who fail at the basic tasks of governing.
Do not be fooled by the title of this book. Sadly, by the number of 5 star reviews a lot of folks have been fooled or perhaps this book just confirms their own bias and Christian persecution complex.
March 12, 2022
I put off reading this for a long time, in part because one of my mental survival strategies over the past years has been to put on blinders (to a degree) regarding current events.
Somehow, in my mind, I also thought the book would have the “feel” of one of those dystopian novels like 1984, which I would not re-read if paid a large sum of money.
I was wrong— this is one of the most hopeful and encouraging, but realistic and practical, books I’ve read in quite a long time.
If you haven’t yet, be sure to read this one.
Somehow, in my mind, I also thought the book would have the “feel” of one of those dystopian novels like 1984, which I would not re-read if paid a large sum of money.
I was wrong— this is one of the most hopeful and encouraging, but realistic and practical, books I’ve read in quite a long time.
If you haven’t yet, be sure to read this one.
November 23, 2020
Christian, Follower of Christ, read this now
September 5, 2020
Historians are going to have a wealth of events to study from 2020. Perhaps more than the year 1968. No doubt one thing they will analyze will be the unabashed rise of totalitarianism in the West, which is the topic of Rod Dreher’s new book Live Not By Lies. Dreher analyzes the rise of what he calls “soft totalitarianism” in the US by talking to people who lived through totalitarianism in the Soviet Bloc. As he did in his book The Benedict Option, Dreher focuses on how Christians can preserve their faith during these troubling times.
If you’re wondering what totalitarianism is—
According to Hannah Arendt, the foremost scholar of totalitarianism, a totalitarian society is one in which an ideology seeks to displace all prior traditions and institutions, with the goal of bringing all aspects of society under control of that ideology. A totalitarian state is one that aspires to nothing less than defining and controlling reality. Truth is whatever the rulers decide it is. As Arendt has written, wherever totalitarianism has ruled, “[I]t has begun to destroy the essence of man.”
I grew up in the 1980s during the Cold War. It seems bizarre to me to even need a discussion on the dangers of totalitarianism; yet, here we are. From cancel culture having people fired for differing opinions on Twitter to mobs screaming at passive diners to raise their fists in solidarity at restaurants, totalitarianism is being accepted. Let’s be honest. It’s even being celebrated by some. I realize that not everyone will agree with that statement. Many will not agree with Dreher’s conclusions in Live Not By Lies, but it’s very difficult to ignore the facts.
Dreher interviews Christians who lived through brutal totalitarianism in the Soviet Bloc, and here’s what he found:
What makes the emerging situation in the West similar to what they fled? After all, every society has rules and taboos and mechanisms to enforce them. What unnerves those who lived under Soviet communism is this similarity: Elites and elite institutions are abandoning old-fashioned liberalism, based in defending the rights of the individual, and replacing it with a progressive creed that regards justice in terms of groups. It encourages people to identify with groups—ethnic, sexual, and otherwise—and to think of Good and Evil as a matter of power dynamics among the groups. A utopian vision drives these progressives, one that compels them to seek to rewrite history and reinvent language to reflect their ideals of social justice.
These Christians survived absolutely brutal persecution. Dreher describes horrific torture methods used by the Soviets. Many of the people he interviews or their family members spent decades in prisons or gulags. As Dreher examines how they maintained their faith, it’s obvious that there are differences in the totalitarianism we face. In some ways, what we face is even scarier. Dreher writes:
To be sure, whatever this is, it is not a carbon copy of life in the Soviet Bloc nations, with their secret police, their gulags, their strict censorship, and their material deprivation. That is precisely the problem, these people warn. The fact that relative to Soviet Bloc conditions, life in the West remains so free and so prosperous is what blinds Americans to the mounting threat to our liberty. That, and the way those who take away freedom couch it in the language of liberating victims from oppression.
Live Not By Lies starts with a brief history of the rise of totalitarianism in Russia. He looks at the sources and the parallels with what is happening in the US today. Dreher analyzes what he considers the two factors driving “soft totalitarianism” today: the social justice movement and surveillance technology, which has become a huge part of our consumerist culture.
The second part of the book examines forms, methods, and sources of resistance. Dreher attempts to answer the following questions by examining exactly what the Christians in the Soviet Bloc did in order to survive:
Why is religion and the hope it gives at the core of effective resistance? What does the willingness to suffer have to do with living in truth? Why is the family the most important cell of opposition?... How did they get through it?... Why are they so anxious about the West’s future?
Obviously, this is a contentious topic. Live Not By Lies discusses some difficult topics. Dreher has already been attacked and criticized. He doesn’t seem to accept the media-driven narrative of the death of George Floyd and the social justice movement. How exactly does he describe the soft totalitarianism affecting the US? Dreher writes:
Today’s totalitarianism demands allegiance to a set of progressive beliefs, many of which are incompatible with logic—and certainly with Christianity. Compliance is forced less by the state than by elites who form public opinion, and by private corporations that, thanks to technology, control our lives far more than we would like to admit...
Today’s left-wing totalitarianism once again appeals to an internal hunger, specifically the hunger for a just society, one that vindicates and liberates the historical victims of oppression. It masquerades as kindness, demonizing dissenters and disfavored demographic groups to protect the feelings of “victims” to bring about “social justice...”
This is what the survivors of communism are saying to us: liberalism’s admirable care for the weak and marginalized is fast turning into a monstrous ideology that, if it is not stopped, will transform liberal democracy into a softer, therapeutic form of totalitarianism.
For Christians, therein lies the rub—“liberalism’s admirable care for the weak and marginalized.” Aren’t Christians supposed to care for the weak and marginalized? The answer is yes. Christians should and do care for the weak and marginalized. The problem is ideology in these movements is king, and the ideology is ultimately atheistic and therapeutic. Christianity is allowed as long as it bends to the ideology, not the other way around.
These movements are trying to use totalitarianism to create a utopia based on their ideology. As Mark Sayers says in one of my favorite quotes, “They want to create the kingdom of heaven, but without the King.” That is their end goal. Ask yourself, what is the end goal of Christianity? What happens when the goals of the ideology clash with Christianity?
Dreher writes:
In therapeutic culture, which has everywhere triumphed, the great sin is to stand in the way of the freedom of others to find happiness as they wish. This goes hand in hand with the sexual revolution, which, along with ethnic and gender identity politics, replaced the failed economic class struggle as the utopian focus of the post-1960s radical left.
It all goes back to the original sin: the individual wants to be a god. The individual wants to create his or her own brand of heaven where the only sin is anything causing unhappiness. In that kind of culture, even using the pronouns “his or her” is controversial because it could offend someone. Dreher writes:
Christian resistance on a large scale to the anti-culture has been fruitless, and is likely to be for the foreseeable future. Why? Because the spirit of the therapeutic has conquered the churches as well—even those populated by Christians who identify as conservative. Relatively few contemporary Christians are prepared to suffer for the faith, because the therapeutic society that has formed them denies the purpose of suffering in the first place, and the idea of bearing pain for the sake of truth seems ridiculous.
Honestly, the scariest part of all this is we unsuspectingly welcome totalitarianism. We live in a far more technologically advanced society than the 1980s Soviet Bloc. The opportunities and ability to surveil private life are unbelievable. As Dreher says, “There’s nowhere left to hide.” It’s almost cliche to point out anymore. We are far more similar to the society in Huxley’s Brave New World, than we are Orwell’s 1984. Why? Because we happily invite our oppressors into every aspect of our lives, as long as we’re kept happy with endless entertainment and shiny consumer goods. We don’t want to offend anyone, and we don’t want to suffer. Dreher even recounts how one Soviet Bloc survivor he talked to is horrified at the use of smartphones and Amazon Echo in US homes. They lived the nightmare described in 1984.
The subtitle to Live Not By Lies is “A Manual For Christian Dissidents.” The second part of the book specifically gives the strategies the Christians in the Soviet Bloc used to maintain their faith and survive. If you haven’t guessed it, the title of the book has a lot to do with it. The title comes from a quote by Solzhenitsyn, a Christian who survived the gulags. And yes, their Christian faith was crucial to their survival. In fact, much of what our society wants Christians to let go of turns out to be crucial for surviving totalitarianism. Let’s not fool ourselves. There will be suffering, but we must persevere.
This is a difficult topic. It’s hard to hear these comparisons and read these stories. It’s difficult to step outside the ideologies and narratives that seem to want to help people and really see what the end goal is. I think the strategies presented in the second part of the book will be essential in the coming years. Live Not By Lies is not a happy book, but it’s a necessary book. I recommend you read it and ask yourself the hard questions.
If you’re wondering what totalitarianism is—
According to Hannah Arendt, the foremost scholar of totalitarianism, a totalitarian society is one in which an ideology seeks to displace all prior traditions and institutions, with the goal of bringing all aspects of society under control of that ideology. A totalitarian state is one that aspires to nothing less than defining and controlling reality. Truth is whatever the rulers decide it is. As Arendt has written, wherever totalitarianism has ruled, “[I]t has begun to destroy the essence of man.”
I grew up in the 1980s during the Cold War. It seems bizarre to me to even need a discussion on the dangers of totalitarianism; yet, here we are. From cancel culture having people fired for differing opinions on Twitter to mobs screaming at passive diners to raise their fists in solidarity at restaurants, totalitarianism is being accepted. Let’s be honest. It’s even being celebrated by some. I realize that not everyone will agree with that statement. Many will not agree with Dreher’s conclusions in Live Not By Lies, but it’s very difficult to ignore the facts.
Dreher interviews Christians who lived through brutal totalitarianism in the Soviet Bloc, and here’s what he found:
What makes the emerging situation in the West similar to what they fled? After all, every society has rules and taboos and mechanisms to enforce them. What unnerves those who lived under Soviet communism is this similarity: Elites and elite institutions are abandoning old-fashioned liberalism, based in defending the rights of the individual, and replacing it with a progressive creed that regards justice in terms of groups. It encourages people to identify with groups—ethnic, sexual, and otherwise—and to think of Good and Evil as a matter of power dynamics among the groups. A utopian vision drives these progressives, one that compels them to seek to rewrite history and reinvent language to reflect their ideals of social justice.
These Christians survived absolutely brutal persecution. Dreher describes horrific torture methods used by the Soviets. Many of the people he interviews or their family members spent decades in prisons or gulags. As Dreher examines how they maintained their faith, it’s obvious that there are differences in the totalitarianism we face. In some ways, what we face is even scarier. Dreher writes:
To be sure, whatever this is, it is not a carbon copy of life in the Soviet Bloc nations, with their secret police, their gulags, their strict censorship, and their material deprivation. That is precisely the problem, these people warn. The fact that relative to Soviet Bloc conditions, life in the West remains so free and so prosperous is what blinds Americans to the mounting threat to our liberty. That, and the way those who take away freedom couch it in the language of liberating victims from oppression.
Live Not By Lies starts with a brief history of the rise of totalitarianism in Russia. He looks at the sources and the parallels with what is happening in the US today. Dreher analyzes what he considers the two factors driving “soft totalitarianism” today: the social justice movement and surveillance technology, which has become a huge part of our consumerist culture.
The second part of the book examines forms, methods, and sources of resistance. Dreher attempts to answer the following questions by examining exactly what the Christians in the Soviet Bloc did in order to survive:
Why is religion and the hope it gives at the core of effective resistance? What does the willingness to suffer have to do with living in truth? Why is the family the most important cell of opposition?... How did they get through it?... Why are they so anxious about the West’s future?
Obviously, this is a contentious topic. Live Not By Lies discusses some difficult topics. Dreher has already been attacked and criticized. He doesn’t seem to accept the media-driven narrative of the death of George Floyd and the social justice movement. How exactly does he describe the soft totalitarianism affecting the US? Dreher writes:
Today’s totalitarianism demands allegiance to a set of progressive beliefs, many of which are incompatible with logic—and certainly with Christianity. Compliance is forced less by the state than by elites who form public opinion, and by private corporations that, thanks to technology, control our lives far more than we would like to admit...
Today’s left-wing totalitarianism once again appeals to an internal hunger, specifically the hunger for a just society, one that vindicates and liberates the historical victims of oppression. It masquerades as kindness, demonizing dissenters and disfavored demographic groups to protect the feelings of “victims” to bring about “social justice...”
This is what the survivors of communism are saying to us: liberalism’s admirable care for the weak and marginalized is fast turning into a monstrous ideology that, if it is not stopped, will transform liberal democracy into a softer, therapeutic form of totalitarianism.
For Christians, therein lies the rub—“liberalism’s admirable care for the weak and marginalized.” Aren’t Christians supposed to care for the weak and marginalized? The answer is yes. Christians should and do care for the weak and marginalized. The problem is ideology in these movements is king, and the ideology is ultimately atheistic and therapeutic. Christianity is allowed as long as it bends to the ideology, not the other way around.
These movements are trying to use totalitarianism to create a utopia based on their ideology. As Mark Sayers says in one of my favorite quotes, “They want to create the kingdom of heaven, but without the King.” That is their end goal. Ask yourself, what is the end goal of Christianity? What happens when the goals of the ideology clash with Christianity?
Dreher writes:
In therapeutic culture, which has everywhere triumphed, the great sin is to stand in the way of the freedom of others to find happiness as they wish. This goes hand in hand with the sexual revolution, which, along with ethnic and gender identity politics, replaced the failed economic class struggle as the utopian focus of the post-1960s radical left.
It all goes back to the original sin: the individual wants to be a god. The individual wants to create his or her own brand of heaven where the only sin is anything causing unhappiness. In that kind of culture, even using the pronouns “his or her” is controversial because it could offend someone. Dreher writes:
Christian resistance on a large scale to the anti-culture has been fruitless, and is likely to be for the foreseeable future. Why? Because the spirit of the therapeutic has conquered the churches as well—even those populated by Christians who identify as conservative. Relatively few contemporary Christians are prepared to suffer for the faith, because the therapeutic society that has formed them denies the purpose of suffering in the first place, and the idea of bearing pain for the sake of truth seems ridiculous.
Honestly, the scariest part of all this is we unsuspectingly welcome totalitarianism. We live in a far more technologically advanced society than the 1980s Soviet Bloc. The opportunities and ability to surveil private life are unbelievable. As Dreher says, “There’s nowhere left to hide.” It’s almost cliche to point out anymore. We are far more similar to the society in Huxley’s Brave New World, than we are Orwell’s 1984. Why? Because we happily invite our oppressors into every aspect of our lives, as long as we’re kept happy with endless entertainment and shiny consumer goods. We don’t want to offend anyone, and we don’t want to suffer. Dreher even recounts how one Soviet Bloc survivor he talked to is horrified at the use of smartphones and Amazon Echo in US homes. They lived the nightmare described in 1984.
The subtitle to Live Not By Lies is “A Manual For Christian Dissidents.” The second part of the book specifically gives the strategies the Christians in the Soviet Bloc used to maintain their faith and survive. If you haven’t guessed it, the title of the book has a lot to do with it. The title comes from a quote by Solzhenitsyn, a Christian who survived the gulags. And yes, their Christian faith was crucial to their survival. In fact, much of what our society wants Christians to let go of turns out to be crucial for surviving totalitarianism. Let’s not fool ourselves. There will be suffering, but we must persevere.
This is a difficult topic. It’s hard to hear these comparisons and read these stories. It’s difficult to step outside the ideologies and narratives that seem to want to help people and really see what the end goal is. I think the strategies presented in the second part of the book will be essential in the coming years. Live Not By Lies is not a happy book, but it’s a necessary book. I recommend you read it and ask yourself the hard questions.
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