Christians and the New “Soft Totalitarianism” in the West
Live Not by Lies: A Manual For Christian Dissidents, by Rod Dreher
(New York: Sentinel: 2020), 240 pp.
Reviewed by Paul Cooke, December 22, 2020
As a young Christian I was introduced to Richard Wurmbrand’s Tortured for Christ and to the reality that suffering for Christ at the hands of those who regard his followers as the enemy isn’t just a subject of history but a present reality. Wurmbrand was a Jew who converted to Christianity as a young man and became a Lutheran pastor. He was then imprisoned for fourteen years for teaching and spreading his faith. My friends and I were so impressed by Wurmbrand that we put on skits for gatherings of other young Christian friends, and these were set in an imagined prison—and always set to music we wrote ourselves. In our skits the jailed and tortured believers we portrayed were always glad they’d memorized lots of Scripture. Such little dramas challenged us to take our Christian faith with utmost seriousness and inspired us all to memorize Bible passages. I can still quote Psalms 34, 37 and 46 by heart—and lots of other passages besides. And I still remember the tune and some of the lyrics of one of our songs, sung to illustrate more than one of our inspirational mini-dramas:
As I wait patiently for Him,
His grace is poured out on me
And though you may say I’m bound by these walls
In my heart I’m free.
And I’ll stay faithful to Him,
No matter what men may do or say,
As I lift up my eyes upward,
Looking for that perfect day.
I can hardly wait for the day,
I know it’s not far away.
I can hardly wait for the day
I see Him coming in the clouds
To take me way from this place.
That was in the spring of 1971.[1] Now, just fifty years later, Rod Dreher, a thoughtful and respected American public intellectual and himself a serious Christian, has discovered this same Richard Wurmbrand, the Rumanian Lutheran pastor to whom I was introduced half a century ago. Dreher writes of Wurmbrand along with a number of others—Roman Catholics, Eastern Orthodox, Baptists, and a variety of other Protestants—whom he says testify similarly that suffering for Christ at the hands of Communist atheists was a reality under the Soviet empire that fell just thirty years ago.
But the central message of Dreher’s new book, Live Not By Lies, is not to warn of the threat of the kind of brutal totalitarian repression practiced against believers in the God of the Bible behind the Iron Curtain from 1945-1989, or in Soviet Russia from the days of the Communist Revolution’s earliest days. No, Dreher’s message is of something just as powerful, but more insidious: a new “soft totalitarianism” growing today in the increasingly progressive liberal West. Dreher writes, “Watch out—for this is what’s coming—and it’s already here!”
He defines it superbly in the simplest way by borrowing from Hannah Arendt, whose major work on totalitarianism well-qualified her to describe it. She wrote, “a totalitarian society is one in which an ideology seeks to displace all prior traditions and institutions, with the goal of bringing all aspects of society under control of that ideology.” Dreher, who has also written for The New York Post, The Dallas Morning News, The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times, then argues in this, his newest book, that a new “soft totalitarianism,” though it’s not ultimately different from the older, “hard” type of the species, has a different or, at least, disguised face. He writes that this new “soft totalitarianism” tries to control thought and redefine reality not by means of an all-powerful party in whose hands resides all police power. Instead, “compliance is forced by elites who form public opinion, and by private corporations that, thanks to technology, control our lives far more than we would like to admit.”
This is the insidious power of progressive ideology building on the notion of political correctness. This new “soft totalitarianism” is a cultural revolution that is “attempting to turn the entire country into a `woke’ college campus.”
As Dreher puts it, “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.”
The principal force that stands in the way of the triumph of this progressive ideology of social justice is Christianity, which, because of biblical strictures regarding sex, gender and marriage, is seen as oppressive. The ideology of “social justice” understands life as a struggle of a wide variety of oppressed groups built around the notion of “identities.” Each of these seeks freedom from the social oppression of others. As chief offender in the social justice world view, Christians are regarded as victimizers, “and calls for their suppression are seen as a matter of righteousness.”
Social justice warriors—in the name of liberating the oppressed—are, in righteous indignation, prompted to seize upon an aggressive politics that aims to punish Christian “oppressors” who will not give up their repressive doctrines regarding homosexuality and gay marriage and the whole gamut of issues to do with sexual liberty. Regarding this, Dreher cites the late French historian and cultural critic, Rene Girard, who wrote prophetically twenty years ago: “The current process of spiritual demagoguery and rhetorical overkill has transformed the concern for victims into totalitarian command and a permanent inquisition.”
The pressure on Christians is thus increasingly strong today to compromise their views in order to appease the champions of the cause of social justice. But Dreher suspects no amount of appeasement will finally satisfy them—for they firmly believe that authentic Christianity cannot be trusted; their convictions are that such belief must be totally vanquished.
Dreher’s concern is that this “soft totalitarianism”—that is, not a state-sponsored and police-enforced variety of total social control—comes on as soft, gentle, reasonable, compassionate and therapeutic, but in the end promises to become hard, once it has accrued sufficient power.
He writes that currently the Aldous Huxley novel, Brave New World, which portrays totalitarian power working by means of persuading people to surrender their rights in exchange for personal pleasure—is what characterizes the soft totalitarianism which is growing increasingly strong in the progressive West.
Dreher writes with the assumption that the culture war is now almost over and that Christians have lost. Therefore, before too long, the harder methods on display in George Orwell’s 1984—using fear, force, utterly ubiquitous police surveillance, and torture to gain compliance—while not yet evident, will become much more marked.
In light of this, Dreher calls as his witnesses the now-elderly Christians who lived through the Communist persecution that dominated Eastern Europe and Soviet Russia in the twentieth century. They testify that they see in the new soft totalitarianism all the early hallmarks of what they went through. They see a profoundly anti-Christian militancy steadily overtaking society. They understand that if, as the progressive ideologues see it, “man no longer under[stands] himself to be a pilgrim on a meaningful journey with others, but as a tourist who travel[s] through life according to his own self-designed itinerary, with personal happiness his ultimate goal,” then any forces opposing such a view must be discredited and then stopped. This, they realize, is why they were jailed and tortured and harassed and denied their right to exercise their Christian faith under the old hard totalitarianism of the Communists.
They testify now to the West that this new “soft totalitarianism” will soon become hard in the name of ridding society of the Christian reactionaries who oppose the revolution to bring the happiness of self-realization fully to fruition. These aging Christian men and women, veterans of the anti-Christian persecution in the East in the twentieth century, thus urge Christians in the West not to be blind to what’s coming—and to prepare.
In the Introduction to his book which is aptly subtitled, “A Manual for Christian Dissidents,” Dreher puts it this way: “The old, hard totalitarianism had a vision for the world that required the eradication of Christianity. The new, soft totalitarianism does, too, and we are not equipped to resist its sneakier attack.” The question the second half of his book addresses is how believers, if they wish to be true to their faith, can get ready for what lies ahead.
In Part II of the book, Dreher marshals testimonies from those believers who stayed true to Christ under the severest trials and suffering—people like Richard Wurmbrand. They argue—and Dreher quotes them plentifully—that now is the time to prepare for the coming pressure and persecution. He says the family is the chief resistance cell, along with small groups of believers who meet to study the Bible, encourage one another to testify of the truth, and to “live not by lies,” such as will increasingly beset those who would follow Christ. Dreher’s title—Live Not By Lies—is taken from Alexandr Solzhenitsyn’s own title for his final essay published in Russia immediately before his exile to the West in 1974. In that essay Solzhenitsyn had admonished his countrymen to make this imperative—“Live not by lies!”—the starting point for a life of resistance to totalitarianism.
Dreher writes that Christians must live by their Bibles, not merely as admirers of Jesus, but as his true followers. He quotes Dr. Silvester Krcmery, “one of the most important figures in the Slovak Catholic anti-Communist resistance” who, as a young physician gave up his career and was jailed for his Christian activities. He was imprisoned from 1951 to 1964 by the Czechoslovakian Communist regime, suffering great abuse and torture. Dreher quotes him—this survivor of all that: “Jesus is not satisfied with mere churchgoing, but wants believers to live for Christ in all times and places.” Krcmery’s attitude, Dreher says, “is what first brought him to the attention of the secret police.”
In prison, like Richard Wurmbrand in Rumania, Krcmery was not allowed to have a Bible and so found himself grateful that he had spent the most recent years of freedom before his arrest memorizing passages of Scripture. Dreher writes that in the end, Dr. Krcmery relied on faith alone to guide his path. He writes of him, “The more he surrendered in his weakness, the greater his spiritual strength.”
Live Not by Lies argues persuasively that in the days to come, all believers will be tested. The author urges Christians not to fear suffering, but to know that Christ will be with them in all these things.
In the second part of his book he writes of another, and younger Slovak Christian, Timo Krizka, who, Dreher explains, knows better than most about the sufferings of Christians under totalitarian regimes because of a project he undertook after the fall of the communist regimes in Eastern Europe to interview and photograph still-living survivors of the anti-Christian persecution of the 1950s, 60s and 70s. Dreher, who also serves as a senior editor at The American Conservative, writes of Krizka, “As he made his rounds around his country, [he] was shaken up not by the stories of suffering he heard—these he expected—but by the intense inner peace radiating from these elderly believers.”
From his interviews, Dreher says, Krizka also learned something important about himself. “He had always thought that suffering was something to be escaped. Yet he never understood why the easier and freer his professional and personal life became, his happiness did not commensurately increase. His generation was the first one since the Second World War to know liberty—so why did he feel so anxious and never satisfied? These meetings with elderly dissidents revealed a life-giving truth to the seeker.”
Krizka thus wrote, “Accepting suffering is the beginning of our liberation. Suffering can be the source of great strength….For me, the oppressor was no longer the totalitarian communist regime. It’s not even the progressive liberal state. Meeting these hidden heroes started a revolution against the greatest totalitarian ruler of all: myself.”
The author of this book believes—and this is based on many stories he tells from those he has interviewed—that true freedom only comes from following Christ and trusting Him, come what may. Rod Dreher’s fine and very timely book has been written to help Christians begin to prepare for what lies ahead—and he writes to argue that if one is living for Christ no persecution can take away a Christian’s truest freedom. There’s no more important book published this year for the Christian communities in the West; I want to take its message to heart.
[1] At the time of the writing and performing of these small dramas this reviewer was associated with a group of believers called “The Children of God,” who were briefly seen as leaders of the new Jesus People movement. This was before the group became widely regarded as a cult—an appellation it ultimately very much deserved. But early-on, before its descent into unbiblical and very destructive immorality, there was a proper understanding that real Christian life involved a costliness that included persecution. Richard Wurmbrand’s Tortured for Christ was actually given to some one hundred of us associated with the Los Angeles branch of the group by the head of that branch. Shortly thereafter the group’s top leader wrote from Europe to chasten us for reading Wurmbrand and advising us to stop reading anything but his own writings, a declaration that presaged the wrong direction of much else he would write us in the future. I left the Children of God in January of 1979, but the early lesson—and a good one—learned from Wurmbrand, has remained with me over the ensuing forty-plus years.