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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Rod Dreher
Read between
March 29 - April 6, 2021
In the coming soft totalitarianism, Christians will have to regard family life in a much more focused, serious way.
The Benda family model requires parents to exercise discernment.
And they acted with openness to the world. Václav Benda taught that the family does not exist for its own purpose but for the service of something beyond itself.
A truth to which the Benda family, and other families that formed the consciences of other anti-communist dissidents, testify to is this: if you want to love and serve the church, the community, and the nation, you must first learn to love and serve your family.
every single Christian I interviewed for this book, in every ex-communist country, conveyed a sense of deep inner peace—a peace that they credit to their faith, which gave them ground on which to stand firm.
This is the core of what religion brings to anti-totalitarian resistance: a reason to die—which is to say, a reason to live with whatever suffering the regime throws at you, and not only to live, but to thrive.
The important lesson to draw is that a creed one holds as statement not of one’s subjective feelings, but as a description of objective reality, is a priceless possession.
The basis for his resistance was the firm conviction that “there could not be anything more beautiful than to lay down my life for God.”
Behind bars, and subject to all manner of torture and humiliation, Krčméry kept himself sane and hopeful through cultivating and practicing his faith in a disciplined way and by evangelizing others.
Committing Scripture to memory formed a strong basis for prison life, the doctor found.
Krčméry structured his days and weeks to pray the Catholic mass, and sometimes the Orthodox Divine Liturgy.
The prisoner did periods of deep, sustained meditation, in which he thought deeply about his own life and his own sins, and he embraced a spirit of repentance.
In a world of despair, these believers provided something rare and precious: real hope, the living out of which risked their lives and freedom.
“There was a hunger for God when I was there, which I attributed in no small part to the enormous disillusionment with communism,”
When it comes, Christians who proclaimed with their words and deeds a real alternative to hedonistic materialism will be beacons guiding the lost and tempest-tossed.
“You can’t really prepare for it,” he went on. “To have a living connection to Christ, it’s like falling in love. You suddenly feel something you haven’t felt before, and you’re ready to do something you’ve never done before.”
“Maybe this will sound strong,” he says, “but the principles and the things that you confess, you need to be ready to die for them—and only then will you have the strength to resist. I don’t see any other way.”
A time of painful testing, even persecution, is coming. Lukewarm or shallow Christians will not come through with their faith intact. Christians today must dig deep into the Bible and church tradition and teach themselves how and why today’s post-Christian world, with its self-centeredness, its quest for happiness and rejection of sacred order and transcendent values, is a rival religion to authentic Christianity.
This is the uncompromising rival religion that the post-Christian world will not long tolerate. If you are not rock solid in your commitment to traditional Christianity, then the world will break you. But if you are, then this is the solid rock upon which that world will be broken. And if those solid rocks are joined together, they form a wall of solidarity that is very hard for the enemy to breach.
“When you ask that question, you are really asking about where we find the meaning of the underground church,” Šimulčik replies. “It was in small community. Only in small communities could people feel free.”
Though it’s unlikely that American Christians will be threatened for going to church, it is not only possible, but quite likely, that institutional churches and their ministers will continue to be inadequate to the challenge of forming their congregations for effective resistance. This is where intense, committed small groups styled after those of the Soviet era could be indispensable.
What the experience of the church under communism, and a discerning read of the signs of the times today, tells us is that all Christians of every church should start forming these cells—not simply to deepen its members’ spiritual lives, but to train them in active resistance.
The Christian activist’s point: be kind to others, for you never know when you will need them, or they will need you.
We desperately need to throw off the chains of solitude and find the freedom that awaits us in fellowship.
Only in solidarity with others can we find the spiritual and communal strength to resist.
Finally, small-group fellowship keeps morale high when the contempt and torment of the world lashes hard the backs of believers.
yet the prevailing attitude among her generation is that life’s difficulties are a threat to one’s well-being, and should be refused.
Now, in liberty and relative prosperity, the children of the last communist generation have fallen to a more subtle, sophisticated tyranny: one that tells them that anything they find difficult is a form of oppression.
the old totalitarianism conquered societies through fear of pain; the new one will conquer primarily through manipulating people’s love of pleasure and fear of discomfort.
if we latter-day believers are not able and willing to be faithful in the relatively small trials we face now, there is no reason to think we will have what it takes to endure serious persecution in the future.
“Without being willing to suffer, even die for Christ, it’s just hypocrisy.
“You need to confess him and worship him in such a way that people can see that this world is a lie,” says the old pastor. “This is hard, but this is what reveals man as an image of God.”
“You have to suffer for the truth because that’s what makes you authentic. That’s what makes that truth credible. If I’m not willing to suffer, my truth might as well be nothing more than an ideology,” she tells me.
Christians must embrace suffering because that’s what Jesus did, and because they have the promise, on faith, that to share in his suffering will bring glory in the next life. But sometimes, she adds, we can see results in this life.
The old woman looks at me across her kitchen table with piercing eyes. “In the end, those who are afraid always end up worse than the courageous.”
For this reason, he could never be satisfied with adherents who accepted his teaching—especially with those who in their lives ignored it or let things take their usual course. His whole life on earth, from beginning to end, was destined solely to have followers and to make admirers impossible.
The admirer wants the comfort and advantage that comes with being a Christian, but when times change and Jesus becomes a scandal or worse, the admirer folds.
The follower aspires with all his strength to be what he admires. And then, remarkably enough, even though he is living amongst a “Christian people,” he incurs the same peril as he did when it was dangerous to openly confess Christ.3
The follower recognizes the cost of discipleship and is willing to pay it.
Krčméry threw the accusation back in their faces. He said Jesus is not satisfied with mere churchgoing, but wants believers to live for Christ in all times and places.
The man who said that refusing hatred was the strength of persecuted Christians did not seek vengeance, even after communism’s fall.
But if a person finds himself in a situation where he’s suffering, then he should bear it with courage.”
“Not all of us are called to die a martyr’s death,” he wrote, “but all of us are called to have the same spirit of self-sacrifice and love to the very end as these martyrs had.”9
In terms of sacramental theology, a mystery is a truth that cannot be explained, only accepted.
The faith of martyrs, and confessors like those who survived to bear witness, is a far cry from the therapeutic religion of the middle-class suburbs, the sermonizing of politicized congregations of the Left and the Right, and the health-and-wealth message of “prosperity gospel” churches. These and other feeble forms of the faith will be quickly burned away in the face of the slightest persecution. Pastor Wurmbrand once wrote that there were two kinds of Christians: “those who sincerely believe in God and those who, just as sincerely, believe that they believe. You can tell them apart by their
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To recognize the value in suffering is to rediscover a core teaching of historical Christianity, and to see clearly the pilgrim path walked by every generation of Christians since the Twelve Apostles. There is nothing more important than this when building up Christian resistance to the coming totalitarianism.
We will not know how to behave when that time arrives if we have not prepared ourselves to accept pain and loss for the sake of God’s kingdom.
When we act—either to embrace suffering on our own or to share in the suffering of others—we have to let it change us, as it changed these confessors of the communist yoke.
The secular liberal ideal of freedom so popular in the West, and among many in his postcommunist generation, is a lie.
Križka discovered a subtle but immensely important truth: We ourselves are the ultimate rulers of our consciences.
