T.'s Reviews > Live Not by Lies: A Manual for Christian Dissidents

UPDATE 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:

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

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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!