Live Not by Lies: A Manual for Christian Dissidents

by Rod Dreher

Russia’s intellectual and creative classes fell under the sway of Prometheanism, the belief that man has unlimited godlike powers to make the world to suit his desires.

We are being conditioned to accept as true whatever feels right to us.

As Russia’s Marxist revolutionaries did, our own SJWs believe that science is on their side, even when their claims are unscientific.

Christianity teaches that all men and women—not just the wealthy, the powerful, the straight, the white, and all other so-called oppressors—are sinners in need of the Redeemer. All men and women are called to confession and repentance. “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.

Think of what’s happening now with Ukraine,” he says, referring to the armed conflict between Russian-backed separatists and the Kiev government. “We have seen the way TV changed us Russians from thinking of them as our family to being our enemies,” he says. “The same methods from the communist era are being used. People today have a responsibility to search out more information than what they are offered on TV, and to know how to look critically on what they’re reading and seeing. That’s what is different now than before.”

Families must allow for “neither patriarchal tyranny nor crazy feminist excesses,” and also reject “the worshiping of children” and catering to their every desire. And though a strong leader within his own family, Benda grasped that the Christian father must above all be a servant of Christ. The family cannot survive as a community if the head and center is one of its own members. The Christian statement is simple; it has to be Christ who is the true center, and in His service the individual members of this community share in the work of their salvation. One hopes that the well-grounded family can exist even without this distinctively religious affiliation; however, the focus of service to something “beyond,” whether we call it love, truth or anything else, seems essential.

“Mom read The Lord of the Rings to us maybe six times,” recalls Philip Benda. “It’s about the East versus the West. The elves on one side and the goblins on the other. And when you know the book, you see that you first need to fight the evil empire, but that’s not the end of the war. Afterward, you have to solve the problems at home, within the Shire.” This is how Tolkien prepared the Benda children to resist communism, and also to resist the idea that the fall of communism was the end of their quest for the Good and the True. After communism’s collapse, they found ways to contribute to the moral reconstruction of their nation.

In that communist prison, the biblical command to bear one another’s burdens became intensely real. “A brother who helped in hard times was closer in suffering than the closest relatives and friends, outside, often on a permanent basis,”