Live Not by Lies: A Manual for Christian Dissidents

by Rod Dreher

Young people today are living in illusions, perhaps none greater than that they are part of a real social network. In fact, this technology and the culture that has emerged from it is reproducing the atomization and radical loneliness that totalitarian communist governments used to impose on their captive peoples to make them easier to control.

To put it bluntly, we are being conditioned to accept a Westernized version of China’s social credit system, which will enforce the tenets of the political cult of social justice. If this ever takes root here, there will be no place to hide. Christians and others who refuse to conform will be forced to pioneer a way to live in truth, despite it all. This is why the testimonies of those who lived in truth under hard totalitarianism are so urgently needed.

In the West today, we are living under decadent, pre-totalitarian conditions. Social atomization, widespread loneliness, the rise of ideology, widespread loss of faith in institutions, and other factors leave society vulnerable to the totalitarian temptation to which both Russia and Germany succumbed in the previous century.

Big Business’s embrace and promotion of progressive social values and the emergence of “surveillance capitalism”—the sales-directed mining of individual data gathered by electronic devices—is preparing the West to accept a version of China’s social credit system. We are being conditioned to surrender privacy and political liberties for the sake of comfort, convenience, and an artificially imposed social harmony.

Value Nothing More Than Truth

Václav Havel’s

“the power of the powerless,”

His revolt is an attempt to live within the truth.

living a lie is living a lie.

Living within the lie can constitute the system only if it is universal. The principle must embrace and permeate everything. There are no terms whatsoever on which it can co-exist with living within the truth, and therefore everyone who steps out of line denies it in principle and threatens it in its entirety.

Saint Seraphim

“Acquire the Holy Spirit, and thousands around you will be saved.”

“Living within the truth, as humanity’s revolt against an enforced position, is, on the contrary, an attempt to regain control over one’s own sense of responsibility.”

“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. These challenges are daunting, but we a...

Choose a Life Apart from...

Father Kirill...

Lots of anti-Bolshevik families sent their kids to study the natural sciences to avoid contamination with the ideology as much as possible.”

For the Baptists, to compromise with lies for the sake of a peaceful life is to bend at the knee to death.

Just because they were Baptists, the state was willing to take away their kids and send them to orphanages. These believers were unable to find jobs. Their children were not able to enter universities. And still, they believed.”

If you have been discipled in a faith that takes seriously the Apostle Paul’s words that to suffer for Christ is gain and are prepared, as the Orthodox Kaleda family was, to live with reduced expectations of worldly success, it becomes easier to stand for the truth.

Reject Doublethink and Fight for...

Americans’ support for the First Amendment—which guarantees the constitutional right to free expression—is waning, especially among younger Americans, who are increasingly intolerant of dissenting opinion.

a sign that society prefers the false peace of conformity to the tensions of liberty. To grow indifferent, even hostile, to free speech is suicidal for a free people.

We don’t need to invent anything new—we just need to have the courage to protect what we have.”

Defending the right to speak and write freely, even when it costs you something, is the duty of every free person.

“We live in a world of lies, whether we want it or not. That’s just the case. But you shouldn’t accommodate to it,”

“You will be surrounded by lies—you don’t have a choice. Don’t assimilate to it. It’s an individual decision for each person. If you want to live in fear, or if you want to live in the freedom of the soul. If your soul is free, then your thoughts are free, and then your words are going to be free.”

Under soft totalitarianism, it is more difficult to see the costs of compromising your conscience,

You have to live in a world of lies, but it’s your choice as to whether that world lives in you.

Cherish Truth-Telling but...

“We have so many problems today because fathers never talked to their sons as my father did to me in 1963.”

“Whether you live under oppression or not, it’s an ongoing and constant struggle for truth.”

“Sometimes silence is an act of resistance. Not just standing up for the truth by communicating loudly—keeping silent when you aren’t expected to be silent. That, too, is telling the truth.”

See, Judge, Act

The dictatorship of thought and word under construction by progressives is a regime bas...

“Political correctness” is an annoyance; these lies corrupt one’s ability to think clearly about reality.

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.

Your consent to the system’s lies might buy you safety, but at an unbearable cost.

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.

Who controls the past, controls the future: who controls the present controls the past. THE PARTY SLOGAN, NINETEEN EIGHTY-FOUR

In 2019, the survey found that a startling number of Americans of the post–Cold War generations have favorable views of left-wing radicalism, and only 57 percent of millennials believe that the Declaration of Independence offers a better guarantee of “freedom and equality” than the Communist Manifesto.

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.1

“Depictions of communism on campus paint the ideology as revolutionary or idealistic, overlooking its authoritarian violence,”

“Instead of deepening our understanding of the world, the college experience teaches us to reduce one of the most destructive ideologies in human history to a one-dimensional, sanitized narrative.”

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

nobody today will defend gulags, but the world remains full of suckers for the false utopian promises that bring gulags into existence.

“Not to know what happened before you were born is to remai...