Live Not by Lies: A Manual for Christian Dissidents by Rod Dreher
Rod Dreher is an American journalist, a member of the Easter Orthodox Church, and a three-time New York Times Bestselling author. His book Live Not by Lies: A Manual for Christian Dissidents stands as a prophetic warning for believers in the West to prepare for Soft Totalitarianism that is already taking shape here in the United States. There are two parts to this book, the first explains what soft totalitarianism is and shows how it is already gaining ground in the United States. The second part is showing us how to survive in in a totalitarian state and how to overcome it by looking at the testimony of Christians who lived through communism’s totalitarianism in the Soviet Union. We can see this Soft Totalitarianism all around us in the culture. As I finished reading this book, the American Media was in a storm over the popular independent American journalist Tucker Carlson going to Russia to interview Russian President Vladimir Putin. The American thought police or “media” was trying to discredit Carlson by calling him a “rightwing conspiracy theorist” and a “Kremlin propagandist” before the interview was ever aired. The European Union even began to discuss leveraging sanctions against Carlson for daring to do what journalists have always done. A couple weeks before, MSNBC refused to show President Donald Trump’s speech following his victory in the Iowa Caucus. MSNBC anchor Rachel Maddow said “…there’s a reason we and other news organizations have stopped giving an unfiltered live platform to former President Trump. It is not out of spite, it is not a decision that we relish…it is not an easy decision. But there is a cost to us as a news organization of knowingly broadcasting untrue things.” Instead of allowing its audience to listen and make their own decision on the truthfulness of President Trump’s speech, they will tell you what is and isn’t true. They will edit out what they deem to be lies. What we know and see as cancel culture, is just the totalitarianism of the post-Christian American liberals and woke capitalism. The goal of the Western soft totalitarianism is to be “devoted to liberating the individual to seek his own pleasures and to managing emergent anxieties” (p.11). It is to get rid of anything that blocks the individual from seeking out anything he thinks will bring him pleasure and happiness. This is a “soft” totalitarianism because unlike the totalitarianism of the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany, it does not use torture, public execution, and imprisonment as its tool to bring the dissidents to heel. In soft totalitarianism “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” (p.9). Any of this sound familiar? A few months ago, US Speaker of the House Mike Johnson was bashed by the media because he and his son use an app called “Covenant Eyes” which sends an alert if one of them looks at porn. A father protecting himself and his son from the filth of porn was considered “creepy” by the mainstream media. Dreher says “In therapeutic culture, which has everywhere triumphed, the great sin is to stand in the way of the freedom of others to find happiness as they wish” (p.13). In order to get the society to buy into this and in order to get rid of those who might stand in the way of this ideology, the totalitarians must lie and lie a bunch. Dreher says, “In our time, we do not have an all-powerful state forcing this on us. This dictatorship is far more subtle. Under soft totalitarianism, the media, academia, corporate America, and other institutions are practicing Newspeak and compelling the rest of us to engage in doublethink every day. Men have periods. The woman standing in front of you is to be called ‘he.’ Diversity and inclusion means excluding those who object to ideological uniformity. Equity means treating persons unequally, regardless of their skills and achievements, to achieve an ideologically correct result.” (p.15) Although we as Christians hear these things all the time and know that they are lies, are we doing anything to combat these lies? Dreher has some thoughts about why Christians haven’t been able to stop this ideology or even slow it down. “Christian resistance on a large scale to the anti-culture has been fruitless, and is likely to be for the foreseeable future. Why? Because the spirit of the therapeutic has conquered the churches as well—even those populated by Christians who identify as conservative. Relatively few contemporary Christians are prepared to suffer for the faith, because the therapeutic society that has formed them denies the purpose of suffering in the first place, and the idea of bearing pain for the sake of truth seems ridiculous.” (p.13) Forget suffering for our faith, we won’t even be inconvenienced for our faith. The bare minimum a Christian does is go to church on Sunday, but if we can find something better to do, or if we are just “tiered” we won’t go. Another bare minimum activity of the believer is Bible reading and prayer but let’s face it, most of us spend much more time vegging out in front of our tv’s or phones. We must prepare ourselves because persecution is coming for Christians. I want to encourage you to get a copy of this book and read it. At the end of every chapter is a section marked “See, Judge, Act” pay close attention to this section. We must prepare now! Many “Christians” have already rolled over and given themselves over to the woke mob leading this soft totalitarianism. We must prepare now to be dissidents, to live not by lies, but to live for truth. Christ suffered for us, let us now prepare ourselves to suffer for Him!
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