Rod Dreher’s 'Live Not by Lies' (Book Review)
Soft totalitarianism is both similar to and different than the hard totalitarianism of countries like the Soviet Union and China. The West's coming "soft" version of totalitarianism isn't enforced with hard measures like torture, it's enforced with soft measures like pleasure and dialogue. The US government isn't going to smash our doors down for condemning homosexual marriage, but we might lose our jobs and face difficult living conditions, and why would we want to face such difficulties just to continue "hating" gay people? The insidiousness of this woke totalitarian religion is in the way it's cloaked itself in "love" and "freedom."
According to Dreher, Western society is in decline, and this decline is opening room for totalitarianism. He cites various experts who link loneliness and isolation to the rise of technology and social media. People today are far less likely than their grandparents to get married, have kids, or be part of a social club or church. Modern humans are deracinated and have little experience living in community. Falling fertility rates and the rise of single parenthood have produced a situation in which over half our kids grow up without a sibling or two parents in the home. Falling church attendance means fewer kids experience religious community. This atomized environment opens the door for totalitarianism because lonely individuals often turn to politics and ideology to compensate for their lack of real-life community. The woke religion gives lonely people a feeling that they can contribute to something bigger than themselves. In a society without traditional religion, woke totalitarianism is the only thing many people can imagine.
Dreher believes technology constitutes a big part of the totalitarian threat. The studies are now coming in after a decade of ubiquitous social media use, and they confirm that more social media means more loneliness and mental problems, but another aspect of the technological threat is mass surveillance. Dreher points to the totalitarian "techno-dystopia" of modern China as an extreme example of what we could become. The Chinese Communist Party monitors its citizens' movements, purchases, communications, and thoughts. Anything that remotely contradicts the Party line is erased from existence. Behind China's "great internet firewall" the only ideas that exist are the ideas the Party approves. Among the most glaring examples of this is the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre in which thousands of student protesters were murdered by government forces. This event had a huge impact on every Chinese now under the age of 35. The education system was reinvented for "patriotic" purposes and began a campaign of national brainwashing. Despite its influence, however, the Tiananmen massacre is completely unknown in modern China. The event has been erased from history and the internet. There's no way to learn anything about it unless a Chinese person meets a foreigner or can secure a non-Chinese VPN. Even Dreher, well known for his pessimism, can't imagine America ever becoming as bad as China, China is the embodiment of an atheistic totalitarian state. However, he does warn that Westerners could fall victim to something like Chinese censorship when we freely give our data to big tech. Increasingly, these huge tech companies are using their power to shut down free speech and disrupt our daily lives. Some activists have recently had their bank accounts canceled for alleged "bigotry." Traditional Christians could be next.
Dreher's solution to the rise of soft totalitarianism is Christians forming cells of resistance in the form of family and small groups. Cells, and networks of cells, should resist the encroachment of the totalitarian woke religion by protecting their members from spiritual infection. They should work to be "communities of memory" dedicated to remembering history as it really was, just as survivors fight to keep the public from forgetting the Tiananmen massacre. Worship, Bible study, and book and film analysis can help form the Christian worldview of the cells members. Dreher returns repeatedly to the importance of religion, history, and literature in shaping our worldview. These are the primary battlegrounds against soft totalitarianism, and we need to educate our kids in real-life communities rather than allowing them to passively imbibe the dominant trendy social media narratives.
Why does Dreher think it's important for us to fight against woke totalitarianism? Because it's based on lies that we can't accept. As Christians, we need to live within the truth to remain pleasing to God. Living within truth is hard, and there are numerous complications involved. Dreher provides us with some advice. Firstly, living within truth means not saying things we know to be false. This sounds easy, but it can be difficult in a society where everyone is listening carefully for signs of dissent. I've personally experienced social groups in which followers of wokeness were able to detect that I disagreed with them simply by the things I didn't say. Dreher writes: "silence can be an act of resistance." However, Christians are not required or advised to go out looking for persecution or martyrdom. Living not by lies doesn't require a bullhorn on the street corner. Some will be called to loud prophetic witness, but most of us will be called to quiet steady counter cultural living. Dreher also advises us to lower our expectations for worldly success. Many job opportunities and promotions will be closed to Christians who refuse to affirm lies. We should prepare ourselves and children for this.
How long will we have to wait for truth to re-emerge? When can Christians expect to get out from under the coming totalitarianism and enjoy mainstream life again? Dreher has no answers, but he points out that Soviet totalitarianism was shattered by its own lies within a single lifetime (70 years). Although many of the persecuted Christians expected communism to last 500 years, it collapsed rapidly and unexpectedly. On the other hand, Chinese Christians have been suffering under communism for more than 70 years, and persecution is now getting worse. We don't know how long we'll have to wait, but we can be sure that even hard totalitarianism will eventually be shattered against the much harder truth. No matter what, Christians have a God given obligation to fight evil and retain our faith and integrity. The coming soft totalitarianism of wokeness is already testing the faith of millions, and now is the time to form cells of resistance and start taking seriously Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's original moral call to live not by lies.