The Promise of Marxism and Other Convenient Lies
When Rod Dreher’s The Benedict Option was published in 2017 a friend of mine laughed at Dreher’s dire view of the devolving compatibility between American culture and Christianity, referring to Dreher as a kind of prophetic weatherman with a report of eternally falling skies. Although I was less skeptical of Dreher’s predictions, having opted to homeschool my own kids in 2016 after increased concerns with curriculum philosophies, I understood my friend’s response. It’s easy to interpret Dreher’s urgency as being driven by fear, although this elicits the question: fear of what? He opens The Benedict Option with the assessment that Christians have already lost the culture wars even within their own territory, the Church. Surely his point can’t simply be that “the sky is falling.” Rather, he seems to be saying, the sky has fallen and there will be consequences— how do we respond as faithful Christians?
Dreher’s latest offering, Live Not By Lies: A Manual For Christian Dissidents, reads like a companion volume to The Benedict Option. Dreher was inspired to write the book after being contacted by a prominent American physician whose now elderly mother survived six years as a political prisoner under communist rule in her homeland, Czechoslovakia. She warned that she recognized the early signs of communism taking root in American culture. Initially skeptical of the woman’s Cassandra-esque claims, over the next few years Dreher began reaching out to other men and women who previously lived under communism asking if they had similar concerns. Without exception, they did. Dreher began asking the question: What do they see that we, who blessedly have no knowledge of what it means to live under Marxist rule, miss?
What follows is an unsettling exploration of parallels between the defining characteristics of communism and current cultural movements in America, and prescriptive guidance for the Christians living therein.
Dreher uses the work of one of the preeminent scholars of totalitarianism, Hanna Arendt, to frame the topic. As Dreher paraphrases her description, “a totalitarian society is one in which an ideology seeks to displace all prior traditions and institutions, with the goal of bringing all aspects of society under control of that ideology. A totalitarian state is one that aspires to nothing less than defining and controlling reality.” What makes a culture vulnerable to totalitarianism? According to Arendt: widespread loneliness and alienation; decaying trust in institutions and hierarchies; engaging in the transgression and destruction of property, as well as moral and institutional convention; and finally the willingness to believe useful lies and embrace propaganda. While Dreher is not proposing the emergence of a hard totalitarian state where communist policies are enforced by government might as Europe saw during the interwar era, it’s not difficult to see our tenuous state of susceptibility to manipulation. A cursory search of news headlines demonstrates the extent of our societal disarray.
Rather, Dreher proposes a soft-totalitarianism whereby the technology we consume for convenience and entertainment via big tech companies like Amazon, Google, Facebook, and the like facilitate the “informal surrender [of] political rights in exchange for guarantees of personal pleasure.” Warnings against the dangers of indulgence are as old as recorded history. From Scripture to Aristotle to C.S. Lewis to Aldous Huxley’s prescient Brave New World, the danger is clearly drawn: a person’s ability to engage that which gives pleasure in an ordered and healthy manner can be the difference between freedom and bondage. Terrifyingly, as we are seeing, this is as much a social and political truth as it is a spiritual one.
The British dystopian sci-fi television show Black Mirror debuted its 2016 season with an episode called “Nose Dive,” set in a world where individuals rate one another based on a 5-star system in the midst of both incidental and intentional interactions. A person’s cumulative star average affects his or her socio-economic status and acceptance in culture. Perhaps this fictional premise seems farfetched, but we currently live in an evolving economic culture in which both companies and consumers can be publicly excoriated by thousands of strangers, and suffer serious consequences as a result, for running afoul the increasingly narrow strictures of political correctness. Add to that the number of apps that track and disseminate our consuming habits to tech companies, who then design ad content to influence our known preferences. The possibility of ideologically motivated consumer manipulation seems inevitable, if not a shark-already-jumped. This is what Dreher postulates could happen if tech companies were officially in the business of influencing consumer behaviors according to ideological platforms, rather than profit margins. This, leveraged against our addiction to unbounded pleasure and convenience, ultimately leads to our undoing.
Discussing American sociologist Philip Rieff’s 1966 book, The Triumph of the Therapeutic, Dreher identifies the nascent root of what ultimately becomes soft-totalitarianism:
[T]he death of God in the West had given birth to a new civilization devoted to liberating the individual to seek his own pleasures…. Religious Man, who lived according to belief in transcendent principles…[gave] way to Psychological Man, who believed that there was no transcendent order…. Man no longer understood himself to be a pilgrim on a meaningful journey with others, but as a tourist who traveled through life according to his own self-designed itinerary, with personal happiness his ultimate goal.
It’s worth noting that Rieff was not a religious man, but he foresaw the consequences for a culture that abandons ethical principles rooted in universal understandings of Good and Evil: In soft-totalitarianism a sense of well-being, pleasure, and safety are the highest goods. Truth does not rank among them.
A recent poll exploring American views on cancel-culture conducted by Politico shows a majority of those polled support censored speech, rather than free speech. The poll states a plurality of Americans, (46%) think cancel culture has gone too far in its reaches to correct perceived offenses. The same article also states,
53% agreed with the statement that “even though free speech is protected, people should expect social consequences for expressing unpopular opinions in public…” while only 31% said their view was closer to the following: “There should not be social consequences for expressing unpopular opinions in public, even those that are deeply offensive to other people because free speech is protected.”
The current state of linguistic deconstruction is one of the most tragic and frightening goals of current emerging totalizing ideologies. Those who seek to censor and manipulate how individuals use and relate to words seek the power to define reality. Language is the foundation of human consciousness. It is the framework by which we form and order thought. It is our primary vehicle for forming relationships and communication. It’s how we understand shared history and create cultural narrative. Without commonly accepted and understood language we cannot understand others or ourselves. This can only lead to the abolition of how we understand and value personhood. Without a high value for personhood, we cannot have a just society.
So what does this mean for Christians? Dreher spends almost the entire first half of the book unpacking the grim vision of creeping soft-totalitarianism. The degree to which it has or will come to fruition remains to be seen, though his advice to Christians is timeless. Dreher dedicates this book to the memory of a priest named Tomislav Kolaković. Fr. Kolaković escaped Croatia just before Nazi occupation. Settling in Czechoslovakia, Fr. Kolaković correctly predicted the rise of the Red State and set to the task of preparing Czech Catholics for the inevitable persecution. “The charismatic pastor preached that only a total life commitment to Christ would enable them to withstand the coming trial.” As Dreher points out, this fine religious sentiment needed to be more than pious words. The second half of the book is a moving witness to the spiritual grit of people who, in ways practical and spiritual, lived authentically faithful Christian lives at the risk of torture and death.
Kolaković implemented a network of Christian cells who came together for prayer, study and fellowship. He called this network his “Family.” Adopting the motto of the Jocists, a lay-Catholic movement, Fr. Kolaković taught his “family” members to See. Judge. Act. “See meant to be awake to realities around you. Judge was a command to discern soberly the meaning of those realities in light of what you know to be true, especially from the teachings of the Christian faith. After you reach a conclusion, then you are to act to resist evil.”
Wesleyans should find these practices and principles familiar as they resemble those of the class and band meetings organized by John Wesley during the First Great Awakening in the 1700s. In particular the questions posed within the Wesleyan confessional band meeting can function in the same manner as Kolaković’s tool: see reality; judge what is true; act to resist evil.
The five questions of the Wesleyan band meeting are instruments of spiritual excavation and reflection by which members confess known sins, discuss encountered temptations and the means by which they were delivered, clarify possible sins, and acknowledge the presence of any kept secrets. Class meetings ask the broader question, “How is it with your soul,” and participants testify to God’s work in their lives to encourage and watch over one another in love. Wesley was adamant that these meetings were essential to the life and formation of a Christian and should never be missed: “Never omit your Class or Band…. [W]hatever weakens…our regard for these, or our exactness in attending them, strikes at the very root of our community.” Every moment is the right moment for a church to reclaim its ecclesial distinctives, but delaying in this moment may have consequences beyond what Christians in America ever thought possible. For those in the Wesleyan connection and for all we can pull into our circle— now is the time to restore class and band meetings. We may need them more now than ever before.
Dreher borrows the title of his book from an essay written by author Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who was arrested in the midst of active military service to the Red Army during World War II. His crime, for which he served eight years in a Soviet gulag, was writing statements critical of Josef Stalin in a private letter. Solzhenitsyn details the horrors of his internment and the inhumane logic of Marxist power structures in The Gulag Archipelago. Publication of Gulag in Paris in 1973 was the final straw in mounting tensions between Soviet authorities and the increasingly outspoken Solzhenitsyn. On February 12, 1974, the same day he completed his essay, “Live Not By Lies,” Solzhenitsyn was arrested by Soviet secret police, charged with treason, stripped of his Russian citizenship and exiled to West Germany. The essay, circulated among Russian elites and intellectuals, is a call to moral courage, integrity, and brazen hope despite the spiritual and cultural ruin resulting from years of communist rule. Solzhenitsyn writes that each person must choose whether to be a servant of the lie or of the truth. Serving the truth is not without cost, he cautions. It means actively resisting the temptation to speak or disseminate lies to curry social favor for protection and privileges. It means living with the possibility of being ostracized, publicly shamed, and more. This is what Solzhenitsyn has to say for those who refuse to engage the cost: “And he who is not sufficiently courageous even to defend his soul—don't let him be proud of his ‘progressive’ views, don't let him boast that he is an academician or a people's artist, a merited figure, or a general—let him say to himself: I am in the herd, and a coward. It's all the same to me as long as I'm fed and warm.”
In Paul’s letter to the Galatians he begins chapter 5 by saying that we are set free for freedom--freedom from something, the bondage of sin, and set free for new life in Christ. “You, my brothers and sisters, were called to be free. But do not use your freedom to indulge the flesh; rather, serve one another humbly in love. For the entire law is fulfilled in keeping this one command: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself’” (NIV Gal. 5:13-14).
The freedom Christ endows us with is not the false promise of total unfettered liberation, which leads to wickedness and dehumanization, but rather freedom to pursue the greatest and most innately human pleasure of all: to know God and know his goodness in all seasons.
Maggie Ulmer is Managing Editor of Firebrand and one of the hosts of “Plain Truth: A Holy-Spirited Podcast.”