Rod Dreher is a columnist and editor at The American Conservative, a journal I had not heard of until recently. This book, the most significant to be published in years, grew out of conversations with immigrants from eastern Europe, people who have lived behind the iron curtain, and know what totalitarianism looks like. They see it here, now. Those discussions eventually led him to Eastern Europe, primarily the Czech Republic and Slovakia, where he interviewed surviving dissidents from the communist era to see what motivated them, what worked, and what did not work in their struggle against tyranny.
The book’s title was inspired by the most famous Soviet dissident, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. On the day of his arrest in 1974, Solzhenitsyn published his final message to the Russian people before exile to the West. It was entitled “Live Not by Lies!”
“We are not called upon to step out onto the square and shout out the truth, to say out loud what we think—this is scary, we are not ready. But let us at least refuse to say what we do not think!”
The totalitarianism we are seeing in America is different from Soviet Russia and Eastern Europe, because it is not strictly about socialism—common ownership of the means of production—but about identity politics, green energy, and the farthest reaches of the sexual revolution.
But those who have lived under communism recognize the adamant refusal to tolerate those who disagree, the furious will to persecute and snuff out dissent, the zeal to reach out and destroy the most common, average man should he dissent from the dominant ideology. They have seen all that before.
Dreher writes of receiving a telephone call from someone he did not even know:
“The caller was an eminent American physician. He told me that his elderly mother, a Czechoslovak immigrant to the United States, had spent six years of her youth as a political prisoner in her homeland. She had been part of the Catholic anti-communist resistance. Now in her nineties and living with her son and his family, the old woman had recently told her American son that events in the United States today reminded her of when communism first came to Czechoslovakia.
“What prompted her concern? News reports about the social-media mob frenzy against a small-town Indiana pizzeria whose Evangelical Christian owners told a reporter they would not cater a same-sex wedding. [Part of this incident] So overwhelming were the threats against their lives and property, including a user on the Twitter social media platform who tweeted a call for people to burn down the pizzeria, that the restaurant owners closed their doors for a time. Meanwhile, liberal elites, especially in the media, normally so watchful against the danger of mobs threatening the lives and livelihoods of minorities, were untroubled by the assault on the pizzeria, which occurred in the context of the broader debate about the clash between gay rights and religious liberty.
Remarkably, the physician would not give Dreher permission to use his or his mother’s real name in any story about her warning. He felt it would be too dangerous. This is common; the times are dangerous. On the blog sites I read, very few commenters use a real name, and increasingly the article authors don’t either.
The same holds true on this site: many of our commenters do not use a full real name, and some of our authors, especially those writing on hot-button topics like female ordination, the sharp end of the Leftist wedge into Seventh-day Adventism, also prefer to write pseudonymously. They are too frightened—even those I would not imagine needed to be frightened: those long retired from the church, or who never worked for it in the first place.
Dreher spoke with numerous refugees from communism, and they all said the same thing: This is it; this is totalitarianism:
“During the next few years, I spoke with many men and women who had once lived under communism. I asked them what they thought of the old woman’s declaration. Did they also think that life in America is drifting toward some sort of totalitarianism? They all said yes—often emphatically. They were usually surprised by my question because they consider Americans to be hopelessly naive on the subject. In talking at length to some of the emigrants who found refuge in America, I discovered that they are genuinely angry that their fellow Americans don’t recognize what is happening.”
The New “Soft” Totalitarianism
The current communist revolution does not look much like 1789, or 1917, or 1959 in Cuba. And yet, the new Woke ideology seeks to control all aspects of life. In the year that transpired after Dreher finished writing and before publication, the following passage became literally true, far more than Dreher could have anticipated:
“This totalitarianism is therapeutic. It masks its hatred of dissenters from its utopian ideology in the guise of helping and healing.”
The Covid power grab was both totalitarian and “therapeutic”; it shut down physical movement, imprisoning people within their houses. It destroyed small businesses, closed churches, even forbade small group gatherings—house churches—an alternative to worship in formal church buildings. Yet because it was “therapeutic,” purportedly done to ward off the specter of disease, it was not seen to be totalitarian even after it became apparent that (1) the death rate did not remotely justify the draconian measures taken by Western governments, and (2) the death rate was highly stratified by age and pre-existing health issues, such that there was no risk in keeping schools open, and very manageable risk for people of working age (under 65). Ninety-five percent of the deaths from Covid are of people over the age of 50, and seventy-five percent (75%) are over age 65. The median age of those succumbing to Covid-19 is 78, which is also the life expectancy in the United States, so even though 600,000 people have (supposedly) died from (or with) the Wuhan Flu it is not lowering life expectancy.
Throughout his book, Dreher uses the term “soft totalitarianism,” but during the year after he finished writing his book, the Left has been dispensing with the “soft” part. The appalling events of the last year include (1) complete loss of freedom in the name of “slowing the spread,” restrictions that turned out not to apply to (2) rioters supposedly “protesting” a non-problem of police killing blacks, but really carrying out a slow-motion Marxist revolution promoting lawlessness and murder, destroying private and public property, and tearing down the monuments of America’s history, (3) a stolen presidential election, (4) a “Biden Administration” (the cognitively impaired Biden is a figurehead for his handlers) that is already the most radical and destructive presidential administration in American history, (5) the sudden emergence of Marxist Critical Race Theory—“wokism”—as the official ideology of every significant American institution and corporation, public or private, including the United States Military, (5) 50,000 national guard troops and a razor-wire fence surrounding the U.S. capitol, clearly demonstrating consciousness of an illegitimate regime, and (6) in an abuse of prosecutorial discretion without precedent in American history, hundreds of Americans are held without bond for months, often in solitary confinement, for misdemeanor trespassing in the capitol building. Ask those hundreds of political prisoners and their families if this is “soft” totalitarianism.
The American republic, a glittering 245-year experiment in freedom and democratic self-government, lies in a coma on life-support.
There are many reasons for this, including the collapse of mainline American Protestantism and the rapid increase in the unchurched. Another is the Marxist control of academia. Dreher notes that for decades conservatives did not take seriously the Left’s long march through the institutions, particularly higher education. They were in denial that Marxism would eventually escape the confines of the academy and come to dominate other aspects of American life:
“Back then, the standard conservative response was dismissive. “Wait till those kids get out into the real world and have to find a job.” Well, they did—and they brought the campus to corporate America, to the legal and medical professions, to media, to elementary and secondary schools, and to other institutions of American life. In this cultural revolution, which intensified in the spring and summer of 2020, they are attempting to turn the entire country into a “woke” college campus.”
Those former college students are now running everything, and running it into the ground. The rest of us are learning to our dismay that traditional “liberal” values like toleration, live-and-let-live, freedom of speech and religion—any kind of freedom other than sexual license—were never part of their value system:
“Today in our societies, dissenters from the woke party line find their businesses, careers, and reputations destroyed. They are pushed out of the public square, stigmatized, canceled, and demonized as racists, sexists, homophobes, and the like. And they are afraid to resist, because they are confident that no one will join them or defend them.”
While the coming totalitarianism is becoming less and less “soft” all the time, it is worth exploring Dreher’s thoughts about “soft totalitarianism.” He notes that it relies less on brutal physical repression and more on subtle psychological manipulation combined with the increasing decadence of our wealthy society. It is less like George Orwell’s “Nineteen Eighty-Four” (written in 1948) and more like Aldous Huxley’s 1932 dystopian novel “Brave New World,” in which everyone took a happy drug called “soma” and compensated for their lack of freedom to think non-approved thoughts by indulging in sexual excess:
“Soft totalitarianism exploits decadent modern man’s preference for personal pleasure over principles, including political liberties. 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. Nineteen Eighty-Four is not the novel that previews what’s coming; it’s rather Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. The contemporary social critic James Poulos calls this the “Pink Police State”: an informal arrangement in which people will surrender political rights in exchange for guarantees of personal pleasure.”
“In our time, we do not have an all-powerful state forcing this on us. This dictatorship is far more subtle. Under soft totalitarianism, the media, academia, corporate America, and other institutions are practicing Newspeak and compelling the rest of us to engage in doublethink every day. 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.”
Again, it does not seem so “soft” that you can be fired from 80 percent of the available jobs in America for refusing to call a man a woman, for refusing to participate in insanity.
“And the number of sins that can make you a non-person is growing all the time: “The reach of contemporary thoughtcrime expands constantly—homophobia, Islamophobia, transphobia, bi-phobia, fat-phobia, racism, ableism, and on and on—making it difficult to know when one is treading on safe ground or about to step on a land mine.”
Progressivism as religion
Much as with the old Bolshevism of Soviet Russia, the new Marxist revolutionaries are filled with righteous fervor. Leftist enthusiasm substitutes for conventional religious belief in this most secular generation. The need to be doing good, and their moral certainty that they are doing the right thing is what gives their politics such an aggressive edge:
“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” in order to bring about “social justice.” The contemporary cult of social justice identifies members of certain social groups as victimizers, as scapegoats, and calls for their suppression as a matter of righteousness. In this way, the so-called social justice warriors (aka SJWs), who started out as liberals animated by an urgent compassion, end by abandoning authentic liberalism and embracing an aggressive and punitive politics that resembles Bolshevism, as the Soviet style of communism was first called.”
Like conventional religions, wokism and social justice depend on unfalsifiable axioms that must be accepted as revealed truth. Argument is pointless; for social justice acolytes, “dialogue” is merely the process by which you confess your sins and submit in fear and trembling to the social justice creed.
The social justice creed is that, (1) the central fact of human existence is power and how it is used, (2) There is no such thing as objective truth; truth claims are merely attempts to wield power, (3) Whether one is an oppressor or an oppressed depends only on race or other identity marker, not on intent or actions, (4) being a member of two or more “oppressed” groups (intersectionality) multiplies one’s credibility and status, and (5) there is no external reality, only what words and language create.
Dreher is frank enough to admit that the term “social justice” was coined by a 19th century Jesuit priest (Luigi Taparelli, 1793-1862), and has long been associated with Roman Catholicism. Taparelli founded the journal Civilta Catholica (“Catholic Civilization”) which is still going strong; he conceived of “social justice” as a Catholic middle way between Protestant free enterprise and atheistic socialism. In Catholic social teaching, “social justice” holds that individuals have a responsibility to work for the common good, to cooperate rather than compete, so that all who are created in the image of God may flourish. (This Catholic “social justice” contrasts with Protestant free enterprise, which unsentimentally forces entrepreneurs to compete with each other, both in hiring factors of production—e.g., labor—and in terms of the price and quality of the goods they sell, which benefits workers with higher wages and consumers with better and less expensive products.)
Notwithstanding the term’s origin, today’s social justice warriors could scarcely be more hostile to Christianity. They regard Christianity as the most significant remaining obstacle on the Grand March, the source of retrograde beliefs that keep the people from being free and happy. Wherever we Christians hide, the social justice warriors will track us, find us, and try to punish us, because they believe that is necessary to make this world perfect.
“Furthermore, intellectual, cultural, academic, and corporate elites are under the sway of a left-wing political cult built around social justice. It is a militantly illiberal ideology that shares alarming commonalities with Bolshevism, including dividing humanity between the Good and the Evil. This pseudoreligion appears to meet a need for meaning and moral purpose in a post-Christian society and seeks to build a just society by demonizing, excluding, and even persecuting all who resist its harsh dogmas.”
Capitalism Woke and Watchful
A supreme irony is that capitalism and the technological changes it fostered in the developed world have created a means of surveillance and control that 20th totalitarians like Stalin, Hitler, Mussolini and Mao could not have dreamed of. Now, both the state and large tech corporations have astonishing surveillance capabilities.
Big tech has hooked us with convenience and connectivity—we have free use of social media and the convenience of a world of products a mouse-click away, usually with 1 to 3-day delivery. But nothing is free. We are the products; they are selling us. The tech companies collect enormous amounts of data on us, on what we do, where we go, what we buy, etc. The smart phones we carry facilitate this data-harvesting operation. Some of us even pay companies like Amazon and Google to place dedicated surveillance equipment—Alexa—right in our own homes. Dreher visited with a Czech couple who joyfully tore the surveillance wires out of the walls of their apartment after the fall of the communist government in 1989; they are astonished at Westerners who willingly submit to be spied upon.
Before you brush this off by demurring that the tech lords only want to make money, consider the recently college-educated, woke millennials who staff these companies:
“Social justice warriors are known for the spiteful disdain they hold for classically liberal values like free speech, freedom of association, and religious liberty. These are the kinds of people who will be making decisions about access to digital life and to commerce. The rising generation of corporate leaders takes pride in their progressive awareness and activism. Twenty-first-century capitalism is not only all in for surveillance, it is also very woke.”
And what do we think is going to happen when the social Justice totalitarians who run big tech turn their wrath against Christians? We are already getting a taste of it. Dreher notes that PayPal consults the far-left Southern Poverty Law Center, and will not extend its services to some Christian groups, individuals, and organizations—including the mainstream religious liberty law firm, “Alliance Defending Freedom.”
Once again, just in the few months since Dreher’s book was written, big tech has let its totalitarian mask slip much lower: de-platforming the president of the United States from social media, and censoring all speech that does not toe the “official” party line on the stolen election and the Wuhan flu (which, ironically, has just changed: mere weeks ago, anyone who said Covid escaped from the Wuhan virology lab was canceled, deleted, and derided as a conspiracy-monger; now, even liberal rags like “Vanity Fair” are acknowledging that the virus might have come out of a Chinese lab partially funded by Anthony Fauci’s NIH). Who knows what other things the tech lords will decide they don’t want us to know about?
Part II: How to Live in Truth
How do Christians live in truth and not by lies?
First, value nothing more than truth. Truth must be our north star, our guiding light. That might mean choosing a life apart from the crowd. It certainly means rejecting doublethink and political correctness. It means telling truth wherever we can. Not that we are bound to tell the truth in a way certain to bring down persecution on ourselves; we must be prudent, and not invite persecution. But sometimes persecution cannot be avoided if you are committed to walking in truth and eschewing lies.
Second, cultivate cultural memory. Many of the Eastern Europeans Dreher visited with said that one of the easiest ways to resist the communists was to keep non-communist history and culture alive. Teach it to your children; pass it down from generation to generation, make sure your children know that it is important to keep alive memories, facts, culture that have not been politicized, not been corrupted by totalitarian ideology.
For Christians, this means primarily our sacred writings and religion, but it need not be limited to that. One Czech mother told of reading classics to her children, and even fantasy like Tolkien’s “The Hobbit,” and “The Lord of the Rings” trilogy.
Families are Key Resistance Cells
One of the reasons the social justice warriors attack the created sexual order with such satanic zeal is that the family is a bulwark against totalitarian ideology.
“It’s no accident that every dictatorship always tries to break down the family, because it’s in the family that you get the strength to be able to fight,” says Mária Komáromi, a Catholic teacher in Budapest. “You have the feeling that [your family] have your back, so you can go out into the world and face anything. It’s just as true today as it was under communism.”
But not just any family can resist the totalitarians. It takes a certain type of family, a family where Christ is worshiped as the ultimate head of the family. The biblical pattern must be followed, which means no unfaithfulness or divorce. The children must buy into this and reject countervailing models:
“The modern family will not hold together if the father and mother consider divorce an easy solution to marriage’s difficulties. Nor, said Benda [an anti-communist dissident], can a family endure if the children make a mockery of the idea of marriage. When a family’s members accept a culture of “sexual extravagance, promiscuity, relationships easily entered into and broken off, [and] disrespect for life” (that is, abortion), then they cannot expect the family to be what it is supposed to be and to do what it must do.”
Parents must have unshakable moral courage, and model that courage to their children. This way of life requires sacrifices, as both parents and children are called upon to forgo the social and economic advancement that is contingent on supporting the prevailing ideology. In a system built on lies, choosing not to live by lies can be costly.
But such families must not be insular. The children are to understand that they are part of a wider movement. The parents are to practice hospitality whenever possible.
“In the coming soft totalitarianism, Christians will have to regard family life in a much more focused, serious way. The traditional Christian family is not merely a good idea—it is also a survival strategy for the faith in a time of persecution. Christians should stop taking family life for granted, instead approaching it in a more thoughtful, disciplined way. We cannot simply live as all other families live, except that we go to church on Sunday. Holding the correct theological beliefs and having the right intentions will not be enough. Christian parents 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.”
Religion, the Bedrock of Resistance
Here is an interesting quote:
“Though it’s unlikely that American Christians will be threatened for going to church, it is not only possible, but quite likely, that institutional churches and their ministers will continue to be inadequate to the challenge of forming their congregations for effective resistance. This is where intense, committed small groups styled after those of the Soviet era could be indispensable.”
The first clause of the first sentence, “it’s unlikely that American Christians will be threatened for going to Church,” has already proven too optimistic. We have seen how the Leftists have been willing to imprison men like James Coates and fine and/or arrest others, like John MacArthur and Artur Pawlowski, for holding worship services.
The second clause is spot-on: the denominational bureaucracies have proven unequal to the challenge of shepherding their flocks in the face of totalitarian oppression. They immediately closed shop and started streaming their “church services.” Small groups? Not the answer in places like California, where the blue power structure proscribed even small gatherings in private homes.
Dreher makes a distinction between “admirers” of Christ and “followers” of Christ, i.e., those who are willing to take up the cross of Christ and follow Him to Golgotha.
“We serve a God who created all things for a purpose. He has shown us in the Bible, especially the Gospels, who we are and how we are to live to be in harmony with the sacred order he created. He does not want admirers; he wants followers. As Jesus Christ, the Second Person of the Holy Trinity, God suffered with humanity to redeem humanity. He calls us to share in his Passion, for our sake and the sake of the world. He promises us nothing but the cross. Not happiness but the joy of blessedness. Not material wealth but richness of spirit. Not sexual freedom as erotic abandon but sexual freedom within loving, mutually sacrificial commitment. Not power but love; not self-sovereignty but obedience. 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 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.”
Dreher sees persecution coming. Of course, it has already started for people like Dr. Eric Walsh, who lost his position as Director of Public Health for the City of Pasadena, CA, then lost a similar position in rural Georgia; he was denied his profession of choice that he had trained for because he once preached a sermon that related the biblical teaching on homosexuality.
But it is going to get worse. The social justice warriors will not always be content with cancel culture and economic sanctions:
“A time of painful testing, even persecution, is coming. Lukewarm or shallow Christians will not come through with their faith intact. Christians today must dig deep into the Bible and church tradition and teach themselves how and why today’s post-Christian world, with its self-centeredness, its quest for happiness and rejection of sacred order and transcendent values, is a rival religion to authentic Christianity.”
We might soon experience real persecution, in which case we will have to live by faith and not by sight. One Czech dissident tells of his persecution under communism:
“In his memoir, This Saved Us, Krčméry recalls that after repeated beatings, torture, and interrogations, he realized that the only way he would make it through the ordeal ahead was to rely entirely on faith, not reason. He says he decided to be “like Peter, to close my eyes and throw myself into the sea. In my case, it truly was to plunge into physical and spiritual uncertainty, an abyss, where only faith in God could guarantee safety. Material things which mankind regarded as certainties were fleeting and illusory, while faith, which the world considered to be ephemeral, was the most reliable and the most powerful of foundations. The more I depended on faith, the stronger I became.” His personal routine included memorizing passages from a New Testament a new prisoner had smuggled into the jail.
Krčméry’s testimony about the need to memorize Scripture while we can closely parallels Ellen White:
“Put away the foolish reading matter and study the Word of God. Commit its precious promises to memory so that when we shall be deprived of our Bibles we may still be in possession of the Word of God.”–Ms 85, 1909, p. 10.
The central message of the book is, “some have been here before, and we must learn from them”:
“With our eyes fixed intently on the West, we could see how it was beginning to experience the same things we knew from the time of totalitarianism. Once again, we are all being told that Christian values stand in the way of the people having a better life. History has already shown us how far this kind of thing can go. We also know what to do now, in terms of making life decisions.”
It is time to resolve to walk in truth, and live not by lies, no matter the cost.