Cancel culture. Transgender ideology. Antifa protests. Internet surveillance. Is an anti-religious totalitarian regime like the former Soviet Union coming soon to the United States?
According to Rod Dreher, the best-selling author of The Benedict Option and senior editor at The American Conservative, the answer is yes and churches must be prepared for it.
Dreher documents the evidence for what he labels “soft totalitarianism” and how U.S. Christians should respond in his soon-to-be released book Live Not by Lies: A Manual for Christian Dissidents.
Dreher looks at cancel culture, the advance of socially liberal ideas on mainstream society, and the intrusion of information technology into private lives as evidence of this possible future.
“Back in the Soviet era, totalitarianism demanded love for the Party, and compliance with the Party’s demands was enforced by the state,” he wrote in the book’s introduction.
“Today’s totalitarianism demands allegiance to a set of progressive beliefs, many of which are incapable with logic—and certainly with Christianity.”
The title is derived from a quote from famed Russian anti-Communist intellectual Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, who uttered the phrase not long before being exiled from the Soviet Union.
Dreher explained to The Christian Post that the inspiration came after he spoke to a friend’s mother, who had lived in Soviet-era Czechoslovakia.
The woman, who had been imprisoned for her dissident political views, claimed that the social and political changes in the U.S. mirrored those of the rise of Communism in Eastern Europe.
“That struck me as really alarming. I didn’t know if I believed it, but once I started talking to other people here in the U.S. and in Europe who had lived under Communism and they said, ‘Yeah, this is a real thing,’ it suddenly became real for me,” explained Dreher.
“Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, one of the things he’s most known for is saying that people in the West, they make a big mistake if they think it can’t happen here, because it can.”
The Christian Post talked with Dreher on Thursday about his upcoming book. Below are excerpts from that interview.
CP: How would you say this book compares and contrasts to your best-selling earlier work, The Benedict Option?
Dreher: It is, really, a continuation of The Benedict Option.
The Benedict Option I talk about very generally the de-Christianization in the West and how Christians should respond to it in our daily lives. What Live Not by Lies does is it focuses much more intensely on one aspect of that, which is the arising of systematic oppression and marginalization and oppression of traditional Christian believers.”
This is much more focused … It’s more specific. It identifies much more particularly the problem and gives much more concrete ways of dealing with it, but it’s all part of the same crisis.
There are people who don’t think at all that we’re moving towards a sort of totalitarianism because they think that the sort of things that Christians believe are just wrong and weird. But I didn’t write the book for them, I wrote it for Christians.”
CP: In chapter four, you focused a lot of attention on “surveillance capitalism” and how modern information technology, including social media, are being used to control people’s behaviors. Do you believe that recent efforts to curb this influence, both in Congress and elsewhere, are helping to combat this trend?
Dreher: It’s hard to say now. I’m really happy to see the congressional hearings and they ought to be bipartisan because we are all threatened by surveillance capitalism, left and right. But my fear is that the public is going to see this as being completely politicized from the right.
That’s no reason for conservatives like Senator Josh Hawley not to do them and I am grateful that they’re doing it. But we need to really be careful about this and make sure that people on the left who value free speech and who value privacy are equally concerned and are equally involved in the fight to preserve that privacy.
In Europe, this is a very bipartisan concern they have there. European privacy laws are much stronger, especially on electronic privacy, and I think that we Americans really need to learn from them.
CP: On the issue of bipartisanship, in chapter nine, “Standing in Solidarity,” you wrote about how Christians can benefit from having secular liberal allies. You cited examples of this in the former Soviet Union. In the United States today, what groups or individuals considered secular liberal would you say are sympathetic to conservative Christians resisting soft totalitarianism?
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SOURCE: Christian Post, Michael Gryboski
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