Rod Dreher wrote Live Not By Lies: A Manual for Christian Dissidents to equip people to face “soft totalitarianism” that is coming. The title, “Live Not By Lies,” comes from the title of a speech that Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn gave just before he was exiled from Russia. The speech was an effort to help ordinary Russians understand that communism wasn’t too powerful for them to make an impact. They just needed to live in the truth because “the foundation of totalitarianism is an ideology made of lies. The system depends for its existence on a people’s fear of challenging the lies” (xiv).
Dreher’s book comes out of conversations that he had with people who lived under totalitarian states. Often times, these individuals lived in countries where, to the surprise of most of the people in those countries, they became totalitarian states. These “survivors” believe America is in a similar situation without realizing it. “It only takes a catalyst like war, economic depression, plague, or some other severe and prolonged crisis that brings the legitimacy of the liberal democratic system into question” (45).
No, Dreher doesn’t think what happened in Russia, starting in the early 1900’s, Germany in the 1930’s and 1940’s, to name a few examples, will happen in America in exactly the same way. But those he interviewed for the book see a number of striking similarities:
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 uptopian vision drives these progressives, one that compels them to seek to rewrite history and reinvent language to reflect their ideals of social justice. Further, these utopian progressives are constantly changing standards of thought, speech, and behavior. You can never be sure when those in power will come after you as a villain for having said or done something that was perfectly fine the day before. And the consequences for violating the new taboos are extreme, including losing your livelihood and having your reputation ruined forever (xi-xii).
These characteristics were the starting points that led to the horrific, totalitarian regimes of the 20th century where tens of millions of people were tortured and murdered in the name of godless progress.
While terms like authoritarianism, totalitarianism, get thrown around often without a proper understanding, Dreher notes, while “authoritarianism is what you have when the state monopolizes political control,” 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” (7-8). Dreher claims that soft totalitarianism is therapeutic, exercises control in “soft” ways, and “masks its hatred for dissenters from its utopian ideology in the guise of helping and healing” (7).
In part one, the first four chapters, he outlines in greater detail what he sees as “soft totalitarianism.” He looks at its sources and two key factors that help advance it today: versions of the “ideology of social justice” and surveillance technology (Big Business tracking you and collecting your data). This section ends by looking at the roles that key intellectuals can play in leading a country towards a horrible future.
In short, Dreher argues that there is growing pressure to affirm lies in our culture. We are living, he argues, what Orwell talked about in his famous political dystopia, Nineteen Eighty-Four, which said, “The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command” (14).
This reality is shown today, Dreher continues, by the fact that there can be severe consequences if someone doesn’t affirm:
Men have periods. The woman standing in front of you is to be called “he.” Diversity and inclusion means excluding those who object to ideological uniformity. Equity means treating persons unequally, regardless of their skills and achievements, to achieve an ideologically correct result (15).
How should Christians respond to this? In part two, he offers the following summarized guidance.
Value nothing more than the truth because there are many who will tempt you to turn from the truth to preserve other things you might value more – Dreher argues that soft totalitarianism is built on lies and attacks people who live lies built on the truth. That’s one of the reasons that soft totalitarianism hates free speech and promotes doublethink. What’s this look like? Rusanova, someone who has lived through communism, writes, “In high school and middle school, we had to write essays, like normal school kids do. But you never could write what you think about the subject. Never, ever” (103). That’s why Christians have to be committed to the truth, more than they are committed to comfort, a standard of living, a profession, or anything else. If Christians are going to be committed to the truth, they will have to be content with living lives outside of the mainstream. But remember, “One word of truth outweighs the whole world” (100). Dreher does argue that prudence is needed in how best to speak and live by the truth in this culture, but be careful cowardice isn’t advanced in the name of prudence.
Cultivate cultural memory because there are many who want to revise the past in a way that will ruin the future – In 2019 a survey found that 57 percent of millennials believe that the Declaration of Independence does a better job of offering freedom and equality than the Communist Manifesto (112). That’s why novelist Milan Kundera said that while “nobody will defend gulags” today, “the world remains full of suckers for the false utopian promises that bring gulags into existence” (113). Ex-communist, Polish intellectual Leszek Kolakowski observed, “the great ambition of totalitarianism is the total possession and control of human memory” (114). That’s why it’s so important, Dreher writes, that families, churches, and christian schools come together to cultivate an accurate cultural memory, which is made up of the “stories, events, people, and other phenomena that a society chooses to remember as the building blocks of its collective identity” (114). But it won’t be easy. One survivor noted that “thirty years of freedom has destroyed more cultural memory than the previous era” (116). Everything, Dreher writes, “about modern society is designed to make memory–historical, social, and cultural–hard to cultivate” (113). Be careful, therefore, to understand as much of the past as you can so that you can learn from their mistakes, not repeat them.
Create Christian families because families are one of the greatest threats to oppressive governments – “Under communism the family came under direct and sustained assault by the government, which saw its sovereignty as a threat to state control of all individuals” (132). Dreher argues that the attacks on the family are growing more today. People are using legal means to attack the family, new policies, and more to attack the Christian family structure. Divorce and consumerism impact people’s views on the family in more subtle, but no less significant, ways. Dreher argues that “families must allow for neither patriarchal tyranny nor crazy feminist excesses and also reject the worshiping of children and catering to their every desire” (133). Instead, families should model moral courage, fill children’s moral imaginations with the good, be courageous enough to be weird in society’s eyes, prepare to make great sacrifices for the greater good, teach kids that they are a part of a wider movement, and practice hospitality and serve others (136-143).
Cultivate a real relationship with Christ because he alone provides the power to persevere through persecution with peace – Dreher observes, “every single Christian I interviewed for this book, in every ex-communist country, conveyed a sense of deep inner peace–a peace that they credit to their faith, which gave them ground on which to stand firm” (151). After sharing several inspiring stories (one of which I shared in another post), Dreher concludes, “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 upon 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” (163).
Stand in solidarity with others, especially in small groups, because the coming culture wants to divide and conquer – Some of the survivors that Dreher interviewed said that the way that they endured the religious persecution was through small groups. The pastors were arrested and houses of worship destroyed, so believers met in small groups, sometimes hidden in the walls of homes, to care and encourage one another in the faith. They even locked arms with those outside of their faith traditions, carefully. Dreher challenges his readers to step into this kind of community today, even you aren’t already. Individualistic Christianity makes a person more vulnerable than they realize.
Suffer with faith in God’s mysterious purposes because the wrong view of suffering can crush you – Jesus taught his disciples that they would suffer. The reason that they can suffer without losing hope or hardening with hatred is because they have a God who works all things for their good (Rom. 8:28). When you understand this, you see that you don’t have to fear potential or actual suffering, because God will use it to grow you. That’s why Alexsandr Solzhenitsyn, who was imprisoned and tortured for years, could write, “I turn back to the years of my imprisonment and say, sometimes to the astonishment of those about me: Bless you, prison! . . . Bless you, prison, for having been in my life” (194)! How could he say that? Well, he believed that God used that horrible time to teach him to truly love. Jesus says that his followers will face resistance and persecution. Let’s make sure that we have a high enough view of Jesus that we believe he can even use it for our good.
Dreher’s book is sobering, challenging, and provocative, to say the least. Most of the people he interviewed who experienced totalitarianism never thought something like totalitarianism would happen to their cultures. Regardless of where our current culture goes in the days ahead, let’s walk in faith, not fear, love, not hate, trusting in our heavenly Father who works all things for our good.
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