Live Not by Lies: A Manual for Christian Dissidents

by Rod Dreher

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 not that forgetting the evils of communism means we are in danger of re-creating precisely that form of totalitarianism. It’s that the act of forgetting itself makes us vulnerable to totalitarianism in general.

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

Why Memory ...

Everything about modern society is designed to make memory—historical, social, and cultural—hard to cultivate. Christians must understand this not only to resist soft totalitarianism but al...

Social memory is what a people choose to remember—that is, deciding collectively which facts about past events it believes to be important.

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.

“the great ambition of totalitarianism—the total possession and control of human memory.”

“People remember only what they are taught to remember today and the content of their memory changes overnight, if needed.”

It is not news to Western conservatives that ideologues in power, both in classrooms and newsrooms, manipulate collective memory to capture the future.

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. Similarly, in contemporary capitalism, cultural memory is subordinate to the logic of the free market, whose mechanisms respond to the liberation of individual desire. 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. This is what Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger meant, on the eve of his election as Pope Benedict XVI, when he condemned “the dictatorship of relativism.”6

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.

“What neither Nazism or Communism could do, victorious liberal capitalism has done,”

A person cut off from history is a person who is almost powerless against power.

Communism was a massive use of lethal state power to destroy memory.

“In the Soviet Union, they killed all the people who could remember history.” This made it easier for them to create false h...

Create Small Fortresses of Memory

Not every member of the anti-totalitarian resistance carries a rifle. Rifles would have been mostly useless against the German army. 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.

“What we see now is an attempt to destroy the last surviving communities: the family, the church, and the nation. This is one connection between liberalism and communist theory.”

We know that communists forbade people to talk about history in unapproved ways. This is a tactic today’s progressives use as well, especially within universities.

Propaganda not only changes the way we think about politics and contemporary life but it also conditions what a culture judges worth remembering.

liberals today deploy neutral-sounding, or even positive, words like dialogue and tolerance to disarm and ultimately defeat unaware conservatives. And they imbue other words and phrases—hierarchy, for example, or traditional family—with negative connotations.

How did people keep hold of reality under communist conditions?

How do they know not only what to remember but how to remember it? The answer was to create distinct small communities—especially families and religious fellowships—in which it was possible both to speak truthfully and to embody truth.

Make the Parallel Polis into Sanctuary Cities

Communists held a monopoly on politics, on the media, and on the institutions of Czech life.

A key institution of the parallel polis was the seminar held in private homes. In these events, scholars would lecture on forbidden subjects—history, literature, and other cultural topics necessary to maintaining cultural memory.

its driving purpose was first, cultural preservation in the face of annihilation, and by doing so, the cultivation of the seeds of renewal.

Czechs “were determined to cling to their cultural inheritance because they thought that it contained the truth, not just about their history, but the truth about their soul, about what they fundamentally are. That was the thing that the communists couldn’t take away.”

“Father Kirill is a historical figure in Russia,

See, Judge, Act

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 ...

To perceive the critical importance of memory and the role culture plays in preserving and transmitting it is critically imp...

We have to tell our stories—in literature, film, theater, and other media—but we must also manifest cultural memory in communal deeds—in mourning and in celebr...

Classical Christian schooling, both in institutions and in home settings, is a great way to revive and preserve cultural memory.

any kind of collective deed that connects the community with its shared sacred and secular history in a living way is an act of resistance to an ethos that says the past doesn’t matter.

simply by staying sane when everyone else is mad, we may hope to convey the human heritage.

Families Are Resistance Cells

Family is where we first learn to love others. If we are lucky, it is also where we first learn how to live in truth.

The loosening of family ties and of traditional commitments to marriage has left Americans without the kind of refuge in the home that anti-communist dissidents had. US Christians, al...

Slovaks were intensely Catholic, and as an independent nation today, still remain one of the more devout European countries.

In the past, though, the family could depend on the outside world to support its mission—and in turn, strong families produced citizens capable of building strong civil societies. Under communism, however, the family came under direct and sustained assault by the government, which saw its sovereignty as a threat to state control of all individuals.

“A left-wing intellectual terror achieved what it wanted: marriage and the family became extremely problematic institutions.”

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 ...

It continues today in the form of direct attacks by the woke Left, including law professors advocating legal structures that dismantle the traditional family as an oppressive institution. More ominously, it comes from policies, la...

Conservative parents are often quick to spot threats to their family’s values from progressive ideologues, but they can be uncritically accepting of the free market’s logic and values, to say nothing of mindlessly surrendering their children’s minds to smartphones and the internet.

families living under attack from totalitarian communism remains piercingly relevant to families today.

The modern family will not hold together if the father and mother consider divorce an easy solutio...