A review of Rod Dreher’s "Live Not By Lies"

In February 1974, as the Soviet Union moved to arrest and expel him, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn published the essay “Live Not By Lies.” In it he argued that the Soviet state depended upon the citizenry’s assent to its lies, so that each individual was complicit in his own oppression. Solzhenitsyn called on each reader, not necessarily to become a dissident, but to refuse to affirm the myriad falsehoods that made up Soviet life. “We are not called upon to step out onto the square and shout out the truth, to say what we really think—this is scary, we are not ready. But let us at least refuse to say what we do not think!” The essay lists several ways to deny lies their power, from refusing to sign petitions in support of lies to walking out of “a session, meeting, lecture, play, or film as soon as [one] hears the speaker utter a lie, ideological drivel, or shameless propaganda.”

The Soviet Union of Solzhenitsyn’s day is no more, but the title of “Live Not Lies” and its exhortations inspired Rod Dreher’s 2020 book Live Not By Lies: A Manual for Christian Dissidents. In it Dreher posits that American culture increasingly resembles that of a totalitarian society and calls on Christians to recognize this growing threat and to resist it. Drawing on Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism, Dreher shows how the traits she identified in societies in a pre-totalitarian stage of development also obtain in the United States: loneliness and social atomization; decreasing trust in hierarchies and institutions; a widespread desire to transgress and destroy; pervasive propaganda; willingness to believe and propagate lies; a mania for ideology; and a valuing of loyalty over expertise (pp. 30-39). Dreher argues that unlike the Nazi and Soviet forms of totalitarianism, which he terms hard totalitarianism, what is now on the ascendance is soft totalitarianism, which is characterized not by brutal exercise of state power but by appeals to “the hunger for a just society,” a form of totalitarianism that “masquerades as kindness” while “demonizing dissenters and disfavored demographic groups to protect the feelings of ‘victims’ in order to bring about ‘social justice’” (p. 9). Although today’s cancelation mobs and convoluted DEI/gender jargon differ in appearance from the parades and one-party ballots of Stalinism, an intolerant desire for absolute conformity and its perpetual drive for total ideological purity underlies both soft and hard totalitarianism.

Those who wish to resist should, Dreher writes, remember how Father Tomislav Kolaković prepared Czechoslovakian Catholics for Soviet rule. In the last years of the Second World War, Kolaković predicted that the Nazis would lose the war but that the Soviets would soon rule. His warnings to Church leaders about the danger and mendacity of the Soviets went unheeded, so Father Kolaković, predicting (accurately, as it turned out) that open religious practice would effectively be quashed, began organizing small groups of laypeople who would gather in secret for prayer, study, and fellowship. He taught his followers that “every person must be accountable to God for his actions” and urged them to “live within the truth,” to abide by a guiding motto: “See. Judge. Act” (p. 5). He also instructed the groups in how to evade detection by the secret police and, when arrest inevitably came, how to withstand interrogation and torture. By the time the Soviets solidified their rule of Czechoslovakia and severely constrained official Church activity, Kolaković’s cells were ready. These formed the basis of Czechoslovakia’s Christian anti-communist dissidence that weathered the Soviet period.

Such self-contained groups, Dreher posits, can form a similar resistance to current totalitarian trends. For Dreher, writing as a Christian to other Christians, the life of Czech Catholic activist Václav Benda presents a model of the importance of the family in a totalitarian society as the basis of cultural preservation and moral and spiritual development, which, being counter to the cultural erasure and moral and spiritual denuding of totalitarianism, are ultimately an effective resistance. Dreher argues that the current threat to family life comes not from the state but from “a social ecosystem in which the function of the family has been reduced to producing autonomous consumers, with no sense of connection or obligation to anything greater than fulfilling their own desires” (p. 133). Interviews with Václav Benda’s children, extensively quoted in the book, describe a family with firm, clear moral values, one devoted to learning and cultivating the imagination through reading real literature rather than propaganda, and, importantly, one willing to make great sacrifices: there was never much money because the refusal of parents Václav Benda and Kamila Bendová to join the Communist Party curtailed their career opportunities, and Benda’s involvement with the dissident movement led to his arrest and imprisonment. Dreher also profiles a number of other Christian families who resisted communism, including Baptist families in Russia, and everywhere the lessons are the same: the family is the best means of preserving cultural memory and a sense of humanity free of the reigning ideology; its obligations and trials are, counter to dominant notions of avoidance of all bonds being the highest goal, a source of fulfilment; and, when there are inevitably dire consequences for failure to submit to ideological demands, a refuge and source of moral courage, which, along with faith, gives suffering a meaning.

Dreher subtitled his book A Manual for Christian Dissidents, and his interpretations, especially of the importance of suffering with grace as part of a profound Christian experience of the faith, are unequivocally Christian. Many non-Christians, seeing the subtitle or the many references to Christ, may ignore the book. This would be a mistake. It is not necessary to agree with all of Dreher’s political or religious views to benefit from his analysis of totalitarian trends and how best to respond. One need not become a Christian to recognize that some sense of greater purpose, some notion of a higher power, separate from the dominant ideology, will sustain dissenters in times of trial. All of the Christian dissidents Dreher interviews agree that their faith—whether Catholic, Protestant, or Russian Orthodox—gave them the strength to survive. For Solzhenitsyn, the book’s inspiration and a source for many quoted passages, Christianity was central to his understanding of the Soviet state as evil, an offense against humanity. Secular people can remain secular, but the lesson of the Christian dissidents as it applies to them is the necessity of seeing oneself in service to a higher power. That higher power might be science; it might be one’s artistic vocation or the arts in general; it could be many things. That Soviet dissident communities included both Christians (such as the Benda family) and secularists (such as Václav Havel) demonstrates that it is not a theistic creed that is necessary but an unwavering devotion to a genuine calling. A life in service to something bigger than oneself is what makes one human, especially in defiance of the dehumanization of totalitarianism.

But soft totalitarianism does not necessarily manifest in expected ways. It sometimes appears as convenience, as entertainment, as fun, and it’s all for sale. “Big Brother’s primary occupation is capitalist,” Dreher writes of the rise of surveillance capitalism (p. 76). The “foundation of soft totalitarianism” is being laid “both in terms of creating and implementing” sophisticated tracking and monitoring technologies (such as those in so-called smart devices) “for political and social control and by grooming the population to accept it as normal” (p. 76). Many of Dreher’s interviewees, survivors of communism, are aghast at Americans’ willingness to give up their privacy in exchange for supposed convenience (and to pay to do so) and at their deluded sense of safety. Kamila Bendová, of the Benda family, who even now refuses to use email or smartphones, remarks scathingly: “People think that they are safe because they haven’t said anything controversial. That is very naïve” (p. 70). In addition to the threat of surveillance from convenience devices, there are also the deleterious effects of popular culture. The endless morass of so-called content, a barrage of frivolities and time-wasting distractions, displace worthier concerns and thwart memory. “Everything about modern society is designed to make memory—historical, social, and cultural—hard to cultivate,” Dreher writes (p. 113). Tamás Sályi, a teacher in Budapest who grew up under Soviet rule, remarks thus on the dangers of vapid consumer culture: “What neither Nazism or Communism could do, victorious liberal capitalism has done” (p. 116). Dreher urges people, as individuals and as families, to “create small fortresses of memory” (p. 117). Authentic, truthful use of language should be preserved in the face of “ideological abuse of language” perpetrated by those who “[hollow] out familiar words” (such as dialogue, tolerance, diversity, and acceptance) and “[replace] them with new, highly ideological meaning” (p. 119). Building fortresses of memory can also consist of communing with worthy, sustaining art of the past. The Benda family of Prague, for example, read, in secret, “fairy tales, myths, adventure stories, and even some horror classics” in addition to their study of the Bible as Christians (p. 138). The Lord of the Rings, more than any other literature, was the foundation of the family’s collective imagination because, as Kamila Bendová recalls, “we knew that Mordor was real” (p. 138). As totalitarianism attempts to displace all ideas with its own ideology, it is crucial that people—as individuals, as groups of friends, as families—preserve imagination and thought, even if only clandestinely.

And that support of family and friends is necessary because speaking truthfully under totalitarianism comes at a price. Consider Václav Havel’s parable of the greengrocer, which Dreher quotes at length in the book. Imagine a greengrocer, a family man with a small shop. Every shop is asked—that is, ordered—to put up posters with slogans supporting the official ideology. Nobody really believes the posters accomplish anything, nor do they think the trite slogans themselves carry any substantive meaning; one puts up the poster to escape notice and continue getting by. One day the greengrocer, having become fed up with accommodating himself to lies, decides not to put up the poster. He is ostracized. The business suffers; perhaps it even closes. The family falls on hard times. They lose friends. Privileges, such as travel abroad, are revoked. The children are unable to enter elite schools because of their father’s political record. The whole family suffers for the greengrocer’s small defiance, but “in his attempt to live within the truth” he “has upset the power structure by tearing apart what holds it together” (pp. 98-99). By refusing to perpetuate the lie, the greengrocer “has shattered the world of appearances, the fundamental pillar of the system” and “broken through the exalted façade of the system and exposed the real, base foundations of power” (pp. 98-99). Although the greengrocer and his family will never regain their material comforts or social standing, they have revealed the lies for what they are, enabling others to follow.

When and how much does one resist? As Solzhenitsyn suggested in Live Not By Lies, even small acts of resistance are worthwhile: refusing to repeat falsehoods in conversation and not purchasing “a newspaper or journal that distorts or hides the underlying facts.” The more open the action, though, the greater the risk and the more complicated the decision. It is easy to find the parable of the greengrocer inspiring. It is hard for an adjunct faculty member hoping to land a steady teaching appointment or a college student in need of positive letters of recommendation to openly refuse to submit diversity statements, to attend mandatory diversity training sessions, to publish or even speak without reference to the latest slogans; even to comply with perceived reluctance jeopardizes current employment and future opportunities. Does the call to live not by lies demand more of some than others? Those born too late to have attained professional security before the advent of soft totalitarianism have less and stand to lose more of it than those of earlier generations. Does this obligate elders to stand up on behalf of the young? Or is this disparity in position an accident of history irrelevant to living in the truth? Taking the lives of Solzhenitsyn and Dreher’s interviewees as models, community makes possible resistance and survival. Dissidents risked much to write and publish, but they did so with the cooperation of many others less widely known, less publicly defiant. In the current day, those more secure in their professional standing may go further in their public defiance while doing what they can to support those trying to make their way; conversely, those not yet ready to risk as much openly may, like the many printers and disseminators and readers of samizdat, support the unconcealed dissent of others.

Questions of how to resist a culture of lies in and live in truth lead in turn to deeper questions about how to determine what is true. Dreher, as a Christian, believes Christ to be the source of truth. That belief is not passive. Quoting Kierkegaard, Dreher distinguishes between the belief of the admirer of Christ and the follower. An admirer “never makes any true sacrifices,” “renounces nothing,” is unwilling to “reconstruct his life;” the follower “aspires with all his strength” to live like Christ, no matter the peril (p. 190). In her interview with Dreher, Mária Komáromi, who teaches at a Catholic school in Budapest, says, “You have to suffer for the truth because that’s what makes you authentic. That’s what makes the truth credible. If I’m not willing to suffer, my truth might as well be nothing more than an ideology” (p. 186). One must be prepared for, and accept, sacrifice and hardship in order to live in truth, to live with an orientation toward a higher power. Such acceptance of personal moral responsibility and suffering is at the core of many world religions, Christianity among them, and that orientation, setting aside theological trappings, seems to distinguish morally sound beliefs that allow people to live in truth from ideologies, which place the burden of responsibility and sacrifice on groups identified as enemies. Conveniently for ideologues, those groups are always defined so as to not include themselves. An orientation toward personal responsibility, regardless of the origins for that orientation, differentiates beliefs that can guide one to live in truth from an ideology that does not. The difficulty therefore lies in maintaining that orientation and not perverting beliefs with a morally sound basis into an ideology, a means of oppressing others.

Live Not By Lies only briefly addresses this problem of living by one’s values without distorting those values into an ideology. Dreher exhorts Christians of all denominations to set aside differences and make common cause as followers of Christ. Communities of dissent need not be limited to Christians. Recalling members of Czechoslovakia’s Charter 77 community, Patrik Benda, son of Václav Benda and Kamila Bendová, recalls the Charter 77 community including “people of totally different worldviews and ideas joined together…You had for example, democratic socialists on the one side and fervent Catholics on the other side” (p. 143). Dreher describes this as a lesson in “valuing diversity within a broader unity of shared goals” (p. 143). The challenge, then, one that neither Dreher nor the Bendas nor Solzhenitsyn nor any person or book can answer with finality, is discerning whether dissimilar beliefs aspire toward shared goals or not. Perhaps a willingness to doubt, to discuss, and to consider dissimilar views as valid are the crucial elements that distinguish beliefs from ideology; what Charter 77 and other dissident communities did— and that totalitarian systems do not do—is allow room for disagreement by valuing pursuit of truth higher than conformity and purity. That search for truth, more than the particular beliefs it yields, is what is important. In the words of Judit Pastor, Tamás Sályi’s wife and a teacher of literature: “Whether you live under oppression or not, it’s an ongoing and constant struggle for truth” (p. 107).