There is a strong model of anti-totalitarian resistance based in the Christian family: the Benda clan of Prague. The Bendas are a large Catholic family who suffered greatly in 1979 when the Czechoslovak state sentenced their patriarch, Václav, to four years in prison for his activities fighting for human rights.
Václav Benda and his wife, Kamila, both academics, were among the only believing Christians working at the topmost level of the Czech dissident movement. It wasn’t easy living as Christians in Prague back then, and not only because of the atheistic regime. In those days, Czechs and Slovaks were united in one state, but culturally they were distinct. Slovaks were intensely Catholic, and as an independent nation today, still remain one of the more devout European countries. Czechs have long been far more secular, and though their country remains culturally conservative relative to Western European nations, it is second only to France as the most atheistic nation in Europe.
The Family and the Totalitarian State
“The underground Catholic church was the main source of resistance here,” a Slovak source told me. “But over there”—that is, the Czech half of the former communist state—“the Christian resistance was the Benda family.”
That’s not literally true. There were other Catholic and Protestant Czech dissidents, even within the Charter 77 movement, which the Bendas helped lead. But the Slovak’s rhetorical exaggeration nevertheless says something about the esteem in which this one Prague family is held in the hearts and minds of many who fought communism in their country.
Václav Benda, the father of six children, believed that the family is the bedrock of civilization, and must be nurtured and protected at all costs. He was acutely conscious of the threat communism posed to the family, and he thought deeply about the role the traditional family should take in building anti-communist Christian resistance. In the winter of 1987 to 1988, Benda wrote a short essay titled “The Family and the Totalitarian State,” in which he explained his core beliefs and what must be done to help the family endure in the face of a government and a social order bent on its destruction.1
In the essay, Benda said that we must throw away “the regular clichés about liberation” from the traditional obligations of marriage and family. In the Christian model, marriage and family offers three gifts that are urgently needed for believers struggling within a totalitarian order.
The first is the fruitful fellowship of love
in which we are bound together with our neighbor without pardon by virtue simply of our closeness; not on the basis of merit, rights and entitlements, but by virtue of mutual need and its affectionate reciprocation—incidentally, although completely unmotivated by notions of equality and permanent conflict between the sexes.2
The second gift is freedom
given to us so absolutely that even as finite and, in the course of the conditions of the world, seemingly rooted beings, we are able to make permanent, eternal decisions; every marriage promise that is kept, every fidelity in defiance of adversity, is a radical defiance of our finitude, something that elevates us—and with us all created corporeally—higher than the angels.3
The third gift is the dignity of the individual within family fellowship.
In practically all other social roles we are replaceable and can be relieved of them, whether rightly or wrongly. However, such a cold calculation of justice does not reign between husband and wife, between children and parents, but rather the law of love. Even where love fails completely . . . and with all that accompanies that failure, the appeal of shared responsibility for mutual salvation remains, preventing us from giving up on unworthy sons, cheating wives, and doddering fathers.4
Benda was no utopian about the family. He acknowledged that families are all too human and filled with failure and weakness. In the past, though, the family could depend on the outside world to support its mission—and in turn, strong families produced citizens capable of building strong civil societies. Under communism, however, the family came under direct and sustained assault by the government, which saw its sovereignty as a threat to state control of all individuals. Writes Benda: “A left-wing intellectual terror achieved what it wanted: marriage and the family became extremely problematic institutions.”
Traditional families, Christian and otherwise, living in the postcommunist liberal capitalism of today know all too well that the left-wing assault on traditional marriage and family commenced in the West with the sexual revolution in the 1960s.
It continues today in the form of direct attacks by the woke Left, including law professors advocating legal structures that dismantle the traditional family as an oppressive institution. More ominously, it comes from policies, laws, and court decisions that diminish or sever parental rights in cases involving transgender minors.
But it doesn’t only come from the Left. With the advance of consumerism and individualism, we have built a social ecosystem in which the function of the family has been reduced to producing autonomous consumers, with no sense of connection or obligation to anything greater than fulfilling their own desires. Conservative parents are often quick to spot threats to their family’s values from progressive ideologues, but they can be uncritically accepting of the free market’s logic and values, to say nothing of mindlessly surrendering their children’s minds to smartphones and the internet.
That’s why Václav Benda’s advice to families living under attack from totalitarian communism remains piercingly relevant to families today.
The modern family will not hold together if the father and mother consider divorce an easy solution to marriage’s difficulties. Nor, said Benda, 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.
Sometimes these things
