Sentinel
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Copyright © 2020 by Rod Dreher
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Dreher, Rod, author.
Title: Live not by lies : a manual for Christian dissidents / Rod Dreher.
Description: New York City : Sentinel, 2020. | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2020022423 (print) | LCCN 2020022424 (ebook) | ISBN 9780593087398 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780593087404 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Christians—Political activity. | Christianity and politics—United States. | Liberalism—United States. | Truthfulness and falsehood—United States. | Christianity and culture—United States.
Classification: LCC BR516 .D695 2020 (print) | LCC BR516 (ebook) | DDC 277.308/3—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020022423
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020022424
pid_prh_5.6.0_c0_r0
To the memory of
Father Tomislav Kolaković
(1906–1990)
CONTENTS
Introduction
Part One: Understanding Soft Totalitarianism
CHAPTER ONE
Kolaković the Prophet
CHAPTER TWO
Our Pre-Totalitarian Culture
CHAPTER THREE
Progressivism as Religion
CHAPTER FOUR
Capitalism, Woke and Watchful
Part Two: How to Live in Truth
CHAPTER FIVE
Value Nothing More Than Truth
CHAPTER SIX
Cultivate Cultural Memory
CHAPTER SEVEN
Families Are Resistance Cells
CHAPTER EIGHT
Religion, the Bedrock of Resistance
CHAPTER NINE
Standing in Solidarity
CHAPTER TEN
The Gift of Suffering
CONCLUSION
Live Not by Lies
Acknowledgments
Notes
Index
INTRODUCTION
There always is 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 SOLZHENITSYN1
In 1989, the Berlin Wall fell, and with it Soviet totalitarianism. Gone was the communist police state that had enslaved Russia and half of Europe. The Cold War that had dominated the second half of the twentieth century came to a close. Democracy and capitalism bloomed in the formerly captive nations. The age of totalitarianism passed into oblivion, never again to menace humanity.
Or so the story goes. I, along with most Americans, believed that the menace of totalitarianism had passed. Then, in the spring of 2015, I received a phone call from an anxious stranger.
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. 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.
The US-born doctor said he had heard his immigrant parents warn him about the dangers of totalitarianism all his life. He hadn’t worried—after all, this is America, the land of liberty, of individual rights, one nation under God and the rule of law. America was born out of a quest for religious liberty, and had always been proud of the First Amendment to the US Constitution that guaranteed it. But now there was something about what was happening in Indiana that made him think: What if they were right?
It’s easy to laugh this kind of thing off. Many of us with aging parents are accustomed to having to talk them down from the ledge, so to speak, after a cable news program stoked their fear and anxiety about the world outside their front door. I assumed that this was probably the case with the elderly Czech woman.
But there was something about the tension in the doctor’s voice, and the fact that he felt compelled to reach out to a journalist he didn’t even know, telling me that it would be too dangerous for me to use his name if I wrote about him, that rattled me. His question became my question: What if the old Czech woman sees something the rest of us do not? What if we really are witnessing a turn toward totalitarianism in the Western liberal democracies, and can’t see it because it takes a form different from the old kind?
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.
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
