A review of Rod Dreher s “Live Not By Lies”
The Soviet Union of Solzhenitsyn s day is no more, but the title of Live Not Lies and its exhortations inspired Rod Dreher s 2020 book Live Not By Lies: A Manual for Christian Dissidents. In it Dreher posits that American culture increasingly resembles that of a totalitarian society and calls on Christians to recognize this growing threat and to resist it. Drawing on Hannah Arendt s The Origins of Totalitarianism, Dreher shows how the traits she identified in societies in a pre-totalitarian stage of development also obtain in the United States: loneliness and social atomization; decreasing trust in hierarchies and institutions; a widespread desire to transgress and destroy; pervasive propaganda; willingness to believe and propagate lies; a mania for ideology; and a valuing of loyalty over expertise (pp. 30-39). Dreher argues that unlike the Nazi and Soviet forms of totalitarianism, which he terms hard totalitarianism, what is now on the ascendance is soft totalitarianism, which is characterized not by brutal exercise of state power but by appeals to the hunger for a just society, a form of totalitarianism that masquerades as kindness while demonizing dissenters and disfavored demographic groups to protect the feelings of victims in order to bring about social justice (p. 9). Although today s cancelation mobs and convoluted DEI/gender jargon differ in appearance from the parades and one-party ballots of Stalinism, an intolerant desire for absolute conformity and its perpetual drive for total ideological purity underlies both soft and hard totalitarianism.
Those who wish to resist should, Dreher writes, remember how Father Tomislav Kolakovi prepared Czechoslovakian Catholics for Soviet rule. In the last years of the Second World War, Kolakovi predicted that the Nazis would lose the war but that the Soviets would soon rule. His warnings to Church leaders about the danger and mendacity of the Soviets went unheeded, so Father Kolakovi , predicting (accurately, as it turned out) that open religious practice would effectively be quashed, began organizing small groups of laypeople who would gather in secret for prayer, study, and fellowship. He taught his followers that every person must be accountable to God for his actions and urged them to live within the truth, to abide by a guiding motto: See. Judge. Act (p. 5). He also instructed the groups in how to evade detection by the secret police and, when arrest inevitably came, how to withstand interrogation and torture. By the time the Soviets solidified their rule of Czechoslovakia and severely constrained official Church activity, Kolakovi s cells were ready. These formed the basis of Czechoslovakia s Christian anti-communist dissidence that weathered the Soviet period.
Rod Dreher’s book is good.
Review is by Eric Vanderwall.