Live Not by Lies: A Manual for Christian Dissidents

by Rod Dreher

What separates classical liberals (of both the Left and the Right) from socialists and communists is the ultimate goal toward which we are progressing, and the degree to which they believe the ...

Classical liberals are more concerned with individual freedom, while leftists embrace equality of outcome. And classical liberals favor a more or less limited role for the government, while leftists believe that achieving thei...

Today’s progressivism dates back to the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, when its more radical Continental exponents secularized Christian hope by replacing faith in God with faith in man—particularly science and technology.

The original American dream—the one held by the seventeenth-century Puritan settlers—was religious: to establish liberty as the condition that allowed them to worship and to serve God as dictated by their consciences.

In our time, the American dream is not a religious ideal but rather one informed more by positivism than Christianity. For most people, the term means wealth and material stability and the freedom to create the life that one desires. The Puritan ideal was to use freedom to live by virtue, as defined by Christian Scripture; the modern American ideal is to use freedom to achieve well-being, as defined by the sacred individual—that is, a Self that is fully the product of choice and consent. The Myth of Progress teaches that science and technology will empower individuals, unencumbered by limits imposed by religion and tradition, to realize their desires.

In modern politics, anyone who can be portrayed as an opponent of progress is often at a disadvantage. To oppose progress, to be against change, is to ...

In liberal democracies, the struggle between the Right and the Left is really a contest between conservative progressives and radical progressi...

What is not in dispute is the shared belief that the good society is one in which individuals have enough money and personal...

For classical liberal devotees of the Myth of Progress, the ideal society is one in which everyone has equal freedom of choice. For radicals, it is one in which everyone is living with equality of outcome.

Marx and his fellow radicals promised that radical politics, harnessing the power of science and technology, really could establish heaven on earth. They were atheists who believed that man could become like a god.

To be a revolutionary in those days was to share a sense of purpose, of community, of hope—and an electrifying bond of contempt, a contempt we see in the social justice movement today toward anyone who differs from its religious claims.

both the Christian faith and totalitarianism share an ultimate concern with the inner man.

the emerging soft totalitarianism, any thought or behavior that can be identified as excluding members of groups favored by the Left is subject to harsh condemnation.

The reach of contemporary thoughtcrime expands constantly—homophobia, Islamophobia, transphobia, bi-phobia, fat-phobia, racism, ableism, and on and on—making it difficult to know when one is treading on safe ground or about to step on a land mine.

an American academic who has studied Russian communism told me about being present at the meeting in which his humanities department decided to require from job applicants a formal statement of loyalty to the ideology of diversity—even though this has nothing to do with teaching ability or scholarship.

Communists justified the imprisonment, ruin, and even the execution of people who stood in the way of Progress as necessary to achieve historical justice over alleged exploiters of privilege.

Social justice progressives advance their malignant concept of justice in part by terrorizing dissenters as thoroughly as any inquisitor on the hunt for enemies of religious orthodoxy.

Understanding the Cult of Social Justice

For the social justice inquisitors, “dialogue” is the process by which opponents confess their sins and submit in fear and trembling to the social justice creed.

Social justice warriors are members of what Lindsay calls an “ideologically motivated moral community.” Far from being moral relativists, SJWs truly are rigorists with a deep and abiding concern for purity, and they do not hesitate to enforce their sacrosanct beliefs. Those beliefs give meaning and direction to their lives and provide a sense of shared mission.

THE CENTRAL FACT OF HUMAN EXISTENCE IS POWER AND HOW IT IS USED

For SJWs, everything in life is understood through relationships of power. Social justice is the mission of reordering society to create more equitable (just) power relationships. Those who resist social justice are practicing “hate,” and cannot be reasoned with or in any way tolerated, only conquered.

THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS OBJECTIVE TRUTH; THERE IS ONLY POWER

IDENTITY POLITICS SORTS OPPRESSED FROM OPPRESSORS

In the cult of social justice, the oppressors are generally white, male, heterosexual, and Christian. The oppressed are racial minorities, women, sexual minorities, and religious minorities. (Curiously, the poor are relatively low on the hierarchy of oppression. For example, a white Pentecostal man living on disability in a trailer park is an oppressor; a black lesbian Ivy League professor is oppressed.) Justice is not a matter of working out what is rightly due to an individual per se, but what is due to an individual as the bearer of a group identity.

INTERSECTIONALITY IS SOCIAL JUSTICE ECUMENISM

SJWs tightly police the spoken and written word, condemning speech that offends them as a form of violence.

Some conservatives think that SJWs should be countered with superior arguments and if conservatives stick with liberal proceduralism they will prevail. This is a fundamental error that blinds conservatives to the radical nature of the threat. You cannot know how to judge and act in the face of these challenges if you cannot see the social justice warriors for what they truly are—and where they do their work. It is easy to identify the shrieking student on the university quad, but it is more important to be able to spot the subversive presence of older SJWs and fellow travelers throughout institutional bureaucracies, where they exercise immense power.

SOCIAL JUSTICE AND CHRISTIANITY

In Catholic social teaching, “social justice” is the idea that individuals have a responsibility to work for the common good, so that all can live up to their dignity as creatures fashioned in God’s image. In the traditional view, social justice is about addressing structural barriers to fairness among groups in a given society. It is based in large part on Christ’s teachings about the importance of mercy and compassion to the poor and the outcast.

Christian social justice is difficult to reconcile with secular ideals of social justice. One reason is that the former depends on the biblical concept of what a human being is—including the purpose for which all people were created. This presumes a transcendent moral order, proclaimed in Scripture and, depending on one’s confession, the authoritative teachings of the church.

For Marxists, social justice meant an equal distribution of society’s material goods. By contrast, Christian social justice sought to create conditions of unity that enabled all people—rich and poor alike—to live in solidarity and mutual charity as pilgrims on the road to unity with Christ.

In our time, secular social justice has been shorn of its Christian dimension. Because they defend a particular code of sexual morality and gender categories, Christians are seen by progressives as the enemies of social justice.

“Social justice” that projects unrighteousness solely onto particular groups is a perversion of Christian teaching. Reducing the individual to her economic status or her racial, sexual, or gender identity is an anthropological error. It is untrue, and therefore unjust.

for Christians, no social order that denies sin, erecting structures or approving practices that alienate man from his Creator, can ever be just.

Contrary to secular social justice activists, protecting the right to abortion is always unjust. So is any proposal—like same-sex marriage—that ratif...

Christians cannot endorse any form of social justice that denies biblical teaching.

Faithful Christians must work for social justice, but can only do so in the context of fidelity to the full Christian moral and theological vision through which we understand the meaning of justice.

Any social justice campaign that implies that the God of the Bible is an enemy of man and his happiness is fraudulent and must be rejected.

We have to throw away this crippling nostalgia for the future, especially the habit we Americans, a naturally optimistic people, have of assuming that everything will ultimately work out for the best.

The truth has power to end every tyranny.”

They stood up for truth and justice not out of an expectation of achievable victory in their lifetimes, but because it was the right thing to do.

You don’t have to be a grizzled Cold Warrior to see that a notion of progress that depends on labor camps, police informers, and making everybody equally poor to achieve justice and equality is phony.

tens of millions of Americans have installed in their houses so-called “smart speakers” that monitor conversations for the sake of making domestic life more convenient.

The idea that anybody would welcome into their home a commercial device that records conversations and transmits them to a third party is horrifying

No consumer convenience is worth that risk.

Should totalitarianism, hard or soft, come to America, the police state would not have to establish a web of informants to keep tabs on the private lives of the people. The system we have now already does this—and most Americans are scarcely aware of its thoroughness and ubiquity.

The rapidly growing power of information technology and its ubiquitous presence in daily life immensely magnifies the ability of those who control institutions to shape society according to their ideals.

Throughout the past two decades, economic and technological changes—changes that occurred under liberal democratic capitalism—have given both the state and corporations surveillance capabilitie...

In East Germany, the populace accustomed itself to total surveillance and made snitching normal behavior—this, as part of the development of what the state called the “socialist per...