‘The Right Book At The Right Time’
Thanks to Daniel Flynn at The American Spectator for his generous review of Live Not By Lies. Excerpts:
Live Not by Lies: A Manual for Christian Dissidents reads as a peculiar book in that its most important line occurs in the acknowledgments. “I am not at liberty to thank some of those who helped me research this book, because it would put them at risk of retaliation in the workplace,” author Rod Dreher writes. “None of these anonymous helpers live in the former Soviet bloc; all are Americans.”
This illustrates the theme of the book in two lines. Many Americans cannot live out loud, as the culture urges so many pursuing unusual lifestyles to do, because revealing oneself comes at great expense. If the firing of JavaScript creator Brendan Eich from Mozilla, the humiliation of hockey broadcasting legend Don Cherry, and the pulling of A&E’s top-rated Live PD from the air could occur despite their enormous contributions and popularity, then certainly anonymous Christians not generating millions of dollars for powerful people could also find themselves canceled for impolitic beliefs. This pressure — call it cancel culture or political correctness or social totalitarianism — results in a disconnect between private thoughts and public utterances. Live Not by Lies seeks for its readers to, well, live not by lies. It offers guidance on how to navigate the modern minefield while maintaining integrity.
That lede is magnificent. I hadn’t thought of that line in the acknowledgements (who reads acknowledgements?) as so significant, but Flynn is right. And note well that this totalitarian condition has accelerated under Donald Trump. I don’t at all say that it’s Trump’s fault, but only to point out that having a president who is no fan of wokeness has made very little difference, aside from possibly slowing down the inevitable.
More from Flynn’s review:
Rod Dreher writes the right book at the right time. And its appearance in non-samizdat form suggests that time remains to change the European past from becoming the American future. Live Not by Lies is an easy read about hard issues.
Chick-fil-A rather suddenly becoming the most popular fast food restaurant in America not named McDonald’s, Fox News beating traditional broadcast networks to strangely reign atop the Nielsen ratings in 2020, the mere fact of Donald Trump’s presidency, and the wild popularity among viewers (but not critics) of Dave Chappelle mocking wokery in his “Sticks and Stones” comedy special all serve to show that that the emperor, though wielding hairshirts, has no clothes. The success of Live Not by Lies, which occupied the top-seller spot on Amazon.com during the composition of this review, demonstrates this, too.
Flynn is right: all is not lost (yet, anyway). We still have the freedom to push back — and we should use it. But as I have been stressing in interviews about the book, we had also better use our freedom to form groups and networks that will be able to survive when soft totalitarianism turns harder. This is the message I take from the story of Father Tomislav Kolakovic, to whom I dedicated this book. As regular readers of this blog know, in 1943, Father Kolakovic escaped the Gestapo in his native Croatia, headed for Slovakia, his mother’s homeland. From Live Not By Lies:
By the time Father Kolaković reached Bratislava, it was clear that Czechoslovakia would eventually be liberated by the Red Army. In fact, in 1944, the Czech government in exile made a formal agreement with Stalin, guaranteeing that after driving the Nazis out, the Soviets would give the nation its freedom.
Because he knows how the Soviets thought, Father Kolaković knew this was a lie. He warned Slovak
Catholics that when the war ended, Czechoslovakia would fall to the rule of a Soviet puppet government. He dedicated himself to preparing them for persecution.
Some Slovak bishops criticized the refugee priest for being too alarmist. He ignored them. More:
Father Kolaković knew that the clericalism and passivity of traditional Slovak Catholicism would be no match for communism. For one thing, he correctly foresaw that the communists would try to control the church by subduing the clergy. For another, he understood that the spiritual trials awaiting believers under communism would put them to an extreme test. The charismatic pastor preached that only a total life commitment to Christ would enable them to withstand the coming trial.
“Give yourself totally to Christ, throw all your worries and desires on him, for he has a wide back, and you will witness miracles,” the priest said, in the recollection of one disciple.
Giving oneself totally to Christ was not an abstraction or a pious thought. It needed to be concrete, and it needed to be communal. The total destruction of the First World War opened the eyes of younger Catholics to the need for a new evangelization. A Belgian priest named Joseph Cardijn, whose father had been killed in a mining accident, started a lay movement to do this among the working class. These were the Young Christian Workers, called “Jocists” after the initials of their name in French. Inspired by the Jocist example, Father Kolaković adapted it to the needs of the Catholic Church in German-occupied Slovakia. He established cells of faithful young Catholics who came together for prayer, study, and fellowship.
The refugee priest taught the young Slovak believers that every person must be accountable to God for his actions. Freedom is responsibility, he stressed; it is a means to live within the truth. The motto of the Jocists became the motto for what Father Kolaković called his “Family”: “See. Judge. Act.” See meant to be awake to realities around you. Judge was a command to discern soberly the meaning of those realities in light of what you know to be true, especially from the teachings of the Christian faith. After you reach a conclusion, then you are to act to resist evil.
Václav Vaško, a Kolaković follower, recalled late in his life that Father Kolaković’s ministry excited so many young Catholics because it energized the laity and gave them a sense of leadership responsibility.
“It is remarkable how Kolaković almost instantly succeeded in creating a community of trust and mutual friendship from a diverse grouping of people (priests, religious and lay people of different ages, education, or spiritual maturity),” Vaško wrote.
The Family groups came together at first for Bible study and prayer, but soon began listening to Father Kolaković lecture on philosophy, sociology, and intellectual topics. Father Kolaković also trained his young followers in how to work secretly, and to withstand the interrogation that he said would surely come.
The Family expanded its small groups quickly across the nation. “By the end of the school year 1944,” Vaško said, “it would have been difficult to find a faculty or secondary school in Bratislava or larger cities where our circles did not operate.”
In 1946, Czech authorities deported the activist priest. Two years later, communists seized total power, just as Father Kolaković had predicted. Within several years, almost all of the Family had been imprisoned and the Czechoslovak institutional church brutalized into submission. But when the Family members emerged from prison in the 1960s, they began to do as their spiritual father had taught them. Father Kolaković’s top two lieutenants— physician Silvester Krčméry and priest Vladimír Jukl — quietly set up Christian circles around the country and began to build the underground church.
The underground church, led by the visionary cleric’s spiritual children and grandchildren, became the principle means of anti-communist dissent for the next forty years. It was they who organized a mass 1988 public demonstration in Bratislava, the Slovak capital, demanding religious liberty. The Candle Demonstration was the first major protest against the state. It kicked off the Velvet Revolution, which brought down the communist regime a year later. Though Slovak Christians were among the most persecuted in the Soviet Bloc, the Catholic Church there thrived in resistance because one man saw what was coming and prepared his people.
See, this is why Live Not By Lies is not just doom-and-gloom stuff, but is full of information — stories from and about people like Father Kolakovic and his followers — about practical things that Christians can and must do to endure what is coming. Young Christians, like those in Father K’s Family, are going to have to lead the charge.
I have written here before that the West is on its way to another Dark Age. Ours is no longer a Christian society, but a pagan one. Our liberal democracies are now succumbing to the same twin errors—decadence and gnosticism—that destroyed the Roman Empire. Within a few centuries, nothing of the old order will remain. We Christians will have to rebuild civilization from its ruins. It’s only natural, then, that we should look to the Middle Ages for guidance.
Rod Dreher has been thinking along these lines for years. His book The Benedict Option urged us to look to the example of another great Medieval saint, Benedict of Norcia, for inspiration on how to build strong “intentional communities”: bastions of Christendom, safe-havens for the faithful, which can withstand the terror that will inevitably follow when our own Empire collapses. I agree with him wholeheartedly.
Yet it won’t be enough to build intentional Christian communities. We must also build intentional Christian men. Those men must be capable of building those communities and, when the time comes, defending them against the barbarian hordes—winning new souls for God all the while. To this end, I propose that we also follow the example of Saint Francis of Assisi. Call it the Francis Option.
The fact of the matter is that we Christians, as much as our neo-pagan countrymen, are decadent. We’re dangerously unprepared for the coming Dark Age. Mr. Dreher touched on this point during his recent appearance on Tucker Carlson Tonight. He said that, in writing his new book Live Not By Lies, which recounts the persecution of Christians by the Soviet Empire, he learned a powerful lesson:
It taught me about how much we Americans need to learn how to suffer better…. We have got to be a lot more patient with our suffering so we can endure what is to come. Because this is what the soft totalitarians are going to do: they’re going to use our addiction to comfort to control us.
Mr. Dreher is right: we don’t know how to suffer. We train a small number of men to fight in our armed forces, and only a small number of men work in hands-on industries like construction or mining. Technology and outsourcing have rendered most blue-collar work obsolete; others, like corporate farmers, are only there to direct the machines until Silicon Valley can produce a microchip to automatically steer tractors and drive trucks.
Similarly, I end Live Not By Lies like this, by quoting Solzhenitsyn’s eponymous essay:
The Marxist Mordor was real, but the faith of those who resisted outlasted it, because hard totalitarianism met something harder: the truth. In our time, the emerging totalitarianism is softer, smarter, and more sophisticated—but is no less totalitarian for it. Lubomir Gleiman, who listened to Father Kolaković’s Bratislava lectures in 1943, wrote in his 2006 memoir that Kolaković believed communism “was more ruthless than the Western secularized ‘soft’ totalitarianism,” and therefore the greater threat to Christianity at the time. But as Timo Križka, a son of the first generation of post-Soviet freedom, discovered, the totalitarianism that Father Kolaković identified as soft really exists. Like its more brutal older brother, it is built on the oldest lie of all, the one the serpent whispered in the Garden, the father of every other lie: “Ye shall be as gods.”
Our cause appears lost . . . but we are still here! Now our mission is to build the underground resistance to the occupation to keep alive the memory of who we were and who we are, and to stoke the fires of desire for the true God. Where there is memory and desire, there is hope. Let all saboteurs for the Kingdom of God heed the stirring conclusion of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s 1974 essay, “Live Not by Lies!,” which gives this book its title. It was his valedictory to the Soviet people:
And so: We need not be the first to set out on this path, Ours is but to join! The more of us set out together, the thicker our ranks, the easier and shorter will this path be for us all! If we become thousands—they will not cope, they will be unable to touch us. If we will grow to tens of thousands— we will not recognize our country!
But if we shrink away, then let us cease complaining that someone does not let us draw breath—
we do it to ourselves! Let us then cower and hunker down, while our comrades the biologists bring
closer the day when our thoughts can be read and our genes altered.
And if from this also we shrink away, then we are worthless, hopeless, and it is of us that Pushkin
asks with scorn:
‘Why should cattle have the gifts of freedom?
Their heritage from generation to generation is the belled yoke and the lash.
The right book at the right time. Yes, I believe it is. I would also point you to what my TAC colleague Helen Andrews says in her important essay about the parallels between the Russian Revolution and contemporary America. Excerpts:
But are we really so safe? In June, the great Russian literature professor Gary Saul Morson told The Wall Street Journal that America was starting to feel eerily familiar. “It’s astonishingly like late 19th-, early 20th-century Russia, when basically the entire educated class felt you simply had to be against the regime or some sort of revolutionary,” he said. Even the moderate Kadet Party could not bring itself to condemn terrorism against the czar, any more than a modern Democrat could condemn Black Lives Matter: “A famous line from one of the liberal leaders put it this way: ‘Condemn terrorism? That would be the moral death of the party.’”
Today, the Resistance is already signaling that they won’t accept a Trump victory in November any more than they accepted one in 2016. After the last election, they attempted a soft coup by means of the Russiagate scandal and impeachment. What kind of coup will come next? By looking at the Russian precedent, we can evaluate the risk that this country might enact our own distinctively American version of 1917—and how close we have come to it already.
More:
That all changed around the time of Nicholas II’s coronation in 1896. Suddenly the terrorists had the moral high ground, and it seemed as if nothing they could do would forfeit it, even cold-blooded murder of women and children. “It was common talk in the best families, in the homes of generals et al., that the Empress should be killed and gotten out of the way,” one St. Petersburg professor wrote to an American friend. Wealthy merchants and industrialists like Savva Morozov and Mikhail Gotz—men you might expect to be grateful to the existing order for making their prosperity possible—gave fringe groups like the Bolsheviks the money to publish their newspapers and support their leaders in exile. Every time Nicholas lost a minister to assassination, his security bureau would show him private letters between prominent people applauding the assassins.
A very important point I bring out in Live Not By Lies: what the elites believe and do is critically important. In the US, Trump may be the president, but the people who support the cultural revolution control the universities, the media, Hollywood, major corporations, and are the gatekeepers in the professions (e.g., medicine and law). Whether Trump wins or loses, they are going to accelerate the revolution. Kolakovic knew how the communists thought, and knew what they were after. After this past decade — and especially these past six months — we know what our opponents are like, and what they are going to do.
To my fellow social and religious conservatives: can you afford not to buy Live Not By Lies, and start facing these hard truths about where our country is headed? You may not be a Christian, or even much of a right-winger, but if you oppose wokeness in power, you need to read this and take what you can from it. If you buy the book, please download this free study guide.
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