“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 they 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.”
Over and over in my travels in the East, survivors of communism emphasized to me how much more difficult it is to identify the threats against faith and family today than it was under communism. But it is no less necessary to do so—and to do so with discipline, not relying only on sentimentality, but with a hard charity, the only kind that endures.
Tertullian, an early Church Father who wrote under Roman persecution, famously said that the willingness of martyrs to suffer—even unto death—is what plants love of God into the hearts of men. That may be true, but as the stories of the families Benda, Sipko, Popiełuszko, and so many other conquerors of communism show, the love of mothers and fathers is the seed of the church.
See, Judge, Act
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.
The Benda family model requires parents to exercise discernment. For example, the Bendas didn’t opt out of popular culture but rather chose intelligently which parts of it they wanted their children to absorb. To visit the Benda family home is not to step into a Spartan barracks but rather into a place filled with books and art and life. The Benda family judged that they could be open to the good things in the world around them because of the disciplined moral, intellectual, and spiritual lives they lived within the family.
And they acted with openness to the world. Václav Benda taught that the family does not exist for its own purpose but for the service of something beyond itself. When you pay a call on Kamila, you sit on chairs and sofas that are well worn from years of hosting guests invited to share in the joy of her clan’s Christian lives. True, they had to judge carefully who to let into their home and what to say around them, but there was no doubt in the minds of Václav and Kamila Benda that their role as Christians was not to draw the shutters and hide, as so many Czech Christians did, but to be of active service to the church and the world. For those who survive Václav—Kamila, her children, and grandchildren—it still is.
As we will learn in an upcoming chapter, small-group fellowship was critical to building effective Christian resistance to totalitarianism. A truth to which the Benda family, and other families that formed the consciences of other anti-communist dissidents, testify to is this: if you want to love and serve the church, the community, and the nation, you must first learn to love and serve your family.
CHAPTER EIGHT Religion, the Bedrock of Resistance
Not every anti-communist dissident was a Christian, and not every Christian living under communist totalitarianism resisted. But here’s an interesting thing: 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.
They had every right to be permanently angry over what had been done to them, to their families, their churches, and their countries. If they were, it didn’t show. A former prisoner of conscience in Russia told me that Christians need to have “a golden dream—something to live for, a conception of hope. You can’t simply be against everything bad. You have to be for something good. Otherwise, you can get really dark and crazy.”
This is the core of what religion brings to anti-totalitarian resistance: a reason to die—which is to say, a reason to live with whatever suffering the regime throws at you, and not only to live, but to thrive.
This is not to say that Christianity’s only value is in its usefulness to anti-communists. Any contrary belief held with the passionate inwardness of religious faith could serve that purpose. To give the devil his due, the tsarist-era young Bolsheviks endured their miserable Siberian exile like champions because they held their principles with religious fervor. The important lesson to draw is that a creed one holds as statement not of one’s subjective feelings, but as a description of objective reality, is a priceless possession. It tells you how to discern truth from lies. And for those whose creed is Christianity, then in the face of ubiquitous hatred and cruelty, faith is evidence that the true Truth, the real Reality, is the eternal love of God.
The Spiritual Exercises of the Prisoner Krčméry
In totalitarian Czechoslovakia, Kolaković follower Silvester Krčméry (pronounced “kirch-MERRY”) emerged as one of the priest’s most important disciples and organizers. Years of Bible study, worship, and personal spiritual practice under the guidance of Father Kolaković prepared the young physician for a long prison term, which began with his arrest in 1951.
The basis for his resistance was the firm conviction that
