Live Not by Lies: A Manual for Christian Dissidents

by Rod Dreher

Czech playwright and future postcommunist president Václav Havel’s most famous injunction to would-be dissidents was to “live in truth.”

A Russian Orthodox mystic of the nineteenth century, Saint Seraphim of Sarov, once said, “Acquire the Holy Spirit, and thousands around you will be saved.”

“One word of truth outweighs the whole world.”

It is up to us today to take up this challenge, to live not by lies and to speak the truth that defeats evil. How do we do this in a society built on lies? By accepting a life outside the mainstream, courageously defending the truth, and being willing to endure the consequences.

Under soft totalitarianism, it is more difficult to see the costs of compromising your conscience, but as Mária Wittner insists, you can’t escape the decisions. You have to live in a world of lies, but it’s your choice as to whether that world lives in you.

The dictatorship of thought and word under construction by progressives is a regime based on lies and propaganda.

Once you perceive how the system runs on lies, stand as firmly as you can on what you know to be true and real when confronted by those lies. Refuse to let the media and institutions propagandize your children. Teach them how to identify lies and to refuse them. Do your best not be party to the lie—not for the sake of professional advantage, personal status, or any other reason. Sometimes you will have to act openly to confront the lie directly. Other times you will fight it by remaining silent and withholding the approval authorities request. You might have to raise your voice to defend someone who is being slandered by propagandists.

If you cannot imagine any situation in which you would act like Havel’s fictional greengrocer, and live in truth no matter the cost or consequence, then cowardice has a greater claim on your conscience than you know.

A society’s values are carried in the stories it chooses to tell about itself and in the people it wishes to honor.

The political religion that murdered tens of millions, imprisoned and tortured countless more, and immiserated the lives of half of humanity in its time, and the defeat of which required agonizing struggle by allies across borders, oceans, political parties, and generations—this hateful ideology is romanticized by ignorant young people.

Forgetting the atrocities of communism is bad enough. What is even more dangerous is the habit of forgetting one’s past.

A collective loss of historical memory—not just memory of communism but memory of our shared cultural past—within the West is bound to have a devastating effect on our future.

It’s that the act of forgetting itself makes us vulnerable to totalitarianism in general.

Put another way, we not only have to remember totalitarianism to build a resistance to it; we have to remember how to remember, period.

Cultural memory constitutes the stories, events, people, and other phenomena that a society chooses to remember as the building blocks of its collective identity. A nation’s gods, its heroes, its villains, its landmarks, its art, its music, its holidays—all these things are part of its cultural memory.

A culture’s memory is the result of its collective sifting of facts to produce a story—a story that society tells itself to remember who it is. Without collective memory, you have no culture, and without a culture, you have no identity.

The more totalitarian a regime’s nature, the more it will try to force people to forget their cultural memories.

We know from the history of communist totalitarianism how this can be achieved through a total state monopoly on information, including ideological control of education and media.

The essence of modernity is to deny that there are any transcendent stories, structures, habits, or beliefs to which individuals must submit and that should bind our conduct. To be modern is to be free to choose.

Communism had a particular ideological vision that required it to destroy traditions, including traditional Christianity. Nothing outside the communist order could be allowed to exist.

Christians today find it difficult to pass on the faith to the young in large part because all of us have become habituated to a way of life in which there are few if any shared beliefs and customs that transcend individualism.

To those who want to keep cultural memory alive, Connerton warns that it is not enough to pass on historical information to the young. The truths carried by tradition must be lived out subjectively. That is, they must not only be studied but also embodied in shared social practices—words, certainly, but more important, deeds. Communities must have “living models”7 of men and women who enact these truths in their daily lives. Nothing else works.

This is why Hannah Arendt described the totalitarian personality as “the completely isolated human being.” A person cut off from history is a person who is almost powerless against power.

Figes’s observation points to one source of resistance: the family and the cultural memories it passes on. Paul Connerton highlights another: religion.

The persistence of cultural memory was the greatest weapon the Poles had to resist Nazi totalitarianism, and the Soviet kind, which seized the nation in the aftermath of Germany’s defeat.

To paraphrase Orwell in Nineteen Eighty-Four, it is not by winning an argument but by keeping yourself grounded in reality that you carry on the human heritage.

“The first responsibility of a Christian and a human being is therefore to oppose such an inappropriate demand of the political sphere, ergo to resist totalitarian power.”

A key institution of the parallel polis was the seminar held in private homes.

Memory, historical and otherwise, is a weapon of cultural self-defense. History is not just what is written in textbooks. History is in the stories we tell ourselves about who we were and who we are. History is embedded in the language we use, the things we make, and the rituals we observe. History is culture—and so is Christianity. To be indifferent or even hostile to tradition is to surrender to those in power who want to legitimate a new social and political order. To perceive the critical importance of memory and the role culture plays in preserving and transmitting it is critically important for Christianity’s survival.

Václav Benda, the father of six children, believed that the family is the bedrock of civilization, and must be nurtured and protected at all costs.

In the Christian model, marriage and family offers three gifts that are urgently needed for believers struggling within a totalitarian order.

The first is the fruitful fellowship of love

The second gift is freedom

The third gift is the dignity of the individual within family fellowship.

Traditional families, Christian and otherwise, living in the postcommunist liberal capitalism of today know all too well that the left-wing assault on traditional marriage and family commenced in the West with the sexual revolution in the 1960s.

But it doesn’t only come from the Left. With the advance of consumerism and individualism, we have built a social ecosystem in which the function of the family has been reduced to producing autonomous consumers, with no sense of connection or obligation to anything greater than fulfilling their own desires.

The modern family will not hold together if the father and mother consider divorce an easy solution to marriage’s difficulties. Nor, said Benda, can a family endure if the children make a mockery of the idea of marriage.

And though a strong leader within his own family, Benda grasped that the Christian father must above all be a servant of Christ.

Benda said that the family house must be a real home, “that is, a place which is livable and set apart, sheltered from the outer world; a place which is a starting-out point for adventures and experiences with the assurance of a safe return”—in other words, a haven in a heartless world.

The family does not exist for itself alone, but first for God, and then for the sake of the broader community—a family of families.

When that nation and its people are held captive by a totalitarian order, then Christians and their families must push as hard against the totalitarian world as it pushes against them.

“Our parents were heroes for us,”

Despite the demands of her job teaching at the university, Kamila made time to read aloud to her children for two to three hours daily.

“In our classes at school, where we were different, we were different through our faith but also through our clothes,” says Patrik. “We had more variety of our clothing, because something came from our aunt or someone who gave us our clothing. We were not hurt by being different because we considered this exceptionality was a value and not something bad.”

“This is something very important about my father,” says Marketa. “He believed that he was accountable before God, not before people. It didn’t matter to him when other people didn’t understand why he did the things he did. He acted in the sight of God. And you know, the Bible gave him strength, because it is full of stories of the prophets and others going beyond the border of what was comprehensible or understandable to people, for the sake of obeying the Lord.”

Though Václav and Kamila Benda held their Catholic beliefs uncompromisingly within the family, they showed their children by example the importance of working with good and decent people outside the moral and theological community of the church.

The lesson of valuing diversity within a broader unity of shared goals is something that Christians today need to embrace.

In many conversations throughout the former Soviet Bloc, I heard stories of how the Christian family was naturally the bedrock of forming faithful resistance to communism.

Over and over in my travels in the East, survivors of communism emphasized to me how much more difficult it is to identify the threats against faith and family today than it was under communism. But it is no less necessary to do so—and to do so with discipline, not relying only on sentimentality, but with a hard charity, the only kind that endures.

the love of mothers and fathers is the seed of the church.