Truth Really Matters

In my lifetime (1952 – present) I have been dismayed to observe the decline and degradation of American Christianity.  In the February 2022 issue of the conservative journal, First Things, Aaron Renn suggests three distinct stages to summarize American secularization, in his essay “The Three Worlds of Evangelicalism”:

• Positive World (Pre-1994): Society maintains mostly a positive view of Christianity.  An individual’s Christian faith is correlated with good citizenship and moral character.
• Neutral World (1994-2014): Christianity is no longer privileged, but is seen rather neutrally, one among many of life’s options.
• Negative World (2014-Present): Christians are viewed negatively and their worldview is rejected and seen as a threat to the public good.

Renn cites Rod Dreher’s 2017 book, The Benedict Option:  A Strategy for Christians in a Post-Christian Nation, for challenging evangelicals to face reality, that we have lost the culture war and must develop strategies accordingly.  (I reviewed The Benedict Option in my essay of June 1, 2022.)  Renn notes that evangelicals have not responded well to Dreher’s call, in part due to his framing the issue around the life of a Benedictine monk, a picture that might resonate with Dreher’s Orthodox compatriots, but with Catholic overtones that are anathema to many evangelicals, not to mention fundamental Baptists.

But Renn suggests the more significant reason for antipathy to Dreher’s thesis is that evangelicals deny reality, the reality of the ‘Negative World’ they live in.  And so the evangelical megachurch culture plods along with its seeker-sensitive programs and naïve Republican activism, as I see it, instead of focusing on the Great Commission and begging God for a true spiritual revival.

I won’t unpack here the rest of Renn’s argument; rather I will comment on Dreher’s latest shot at the subject in his 2020 book Live Not by Lies:  A Manual for Christian Dissidents.

What we see in America today has parallels to every move over the last two centuries to establish a socialist utopia, especially in the Bolshevik revolution.  The Bolsheviks and other socialists of early 20^th century Russia included young artists, intellectuals, and other cultural elites, who dreamed of the end of autocracy, class division, and religion – especially Christianity – and anticipated a new world of liberalism, equality, and secular enlightenment.

Dreher:  “What they got instead was dictatorship, gulags, and the extermination of free speech and expression.  Communists had sold their ideology to gullible optimists as the fullest version of the thing every modern person wanted:  Progress.”  Dreher sees modernity as built on the Myth of Progress:  the present is better than the past, and the future will inevitably be better than the present.  Totalitarians love this myth.  They even call themselves progressives.

Nadine Gordimer:  “All the young are candidates for the solutions of communism or fascism when there are no alternatives to despair or dissipation.”  Despair and dissipation are perfect descriptors of the experiences of young people coming out of the disastrous public health policies in response to COVID.

Czech dissident Vaclav Benda taught his kids that there are things more dangerous than the loss of political liberties.  His son Marek explained, “Our father told us that there is a difference between a dictatorship and totalitarianism.  Dictatorship can make life hard for you, but they don’t want to devour your soul.  Totalitarian regimes are seeking your souls.”  Clearly, there are degrees of success enjoyed by Satan and his forces.  Satan’s mission is to maximize the number of souls that will join him in the Lake of Fire.  Should not our mission, as Christians, be the preaching of the Gospel to maximize the number of souls who will populate the New Heaven and New Earth?

Dreher cites the 1966 book of sociologist Philip Rieff, The Triumph of the Therapeutic, who suggested that the death of God in the West had enabled a new civilization centered on liberating the individual to seek pleasures and manage his anxieties.  Religious Man had lived by transcendent principles and a communal lifestyle, but now Psychological Man had to find his own way experimentally, without the benefits of history and tradition.

If God exists for Psychological Man, he’s a nice guy and just wants us to be happy.  He’s certainly not judgmental.  Ergo, he tolerates evil without limit, but nobody thinks it through to that level.

Without God, the biblical, Christian worldview God, what we have is not culture, but anti-culture.  Dreher notes that the anti-culture has permeated the churches as the spirit of the therapeutic works to make everyone as comfortable as possible.  There is no talk of suffering for the sake of truth.  That’s ridiculous!

Dreher warns that we are already experiencing soft totalitarianism, in which the media, corporations, academia, and other institutions compel doublethink:  “Men have periods.  The woman standing in front of you is to be called ‘he.’  Diversity and inclusion means excluding those who object to ideological uniformity.  Equity means treating persons unequally, regardless of their skills and achievement, to achieve an ideologically correct result.”

The title of the book derives from Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s final message before his exile to the West, when he was arrested on February 12, 1974.  He urged the Russian people to “live not by lies!”  For example, such a man Nguékhokh will not . . .

• Say or write anything that distorts the truth
• Go to a demonstration unless he truly believes in the cause
• Take part in a meeting in which no one can speak the truth
• Vote for an unworthy candidate
• Support journalism that distorts or hides the facts

The Christian must go beyond this standard, of course, and actively speak up for Biblical truth.  Furthermore, we are commanded to share the Gospel with the lost, and not just ‘wait for the right opportunity.’  Dreher recommends finding like-minded believers to form small cells “with whom she can pray, sing, study Scripture, and read other books important to their mission.”  If you can’t find Christians bold and faithful enough to start a house church, find a few within your church who will meet together weekly for mutual, spiritual encouragement.  And exhort each other to get the Gospel out 1-2-1 in your community.

How do people get sucked into falling for a totalitarian takeover?  In 1951 Hannah Arendt published The Origins of Totalitarianism.  Arendt identified several conditions:

• The isolation of individuals – loneliness. The 1950s may have been a golden age of community cohesion, but now millennials and Generation Z register much higher levels of loneliness than older Americans.  They also tend to favor socialism as if politics can replace community.  The Soviet state worked to turn the Russian people against each other so that it could maximize control.  Identity politics serves this goal in America.
• Destruction of confidence in institutions. Polls indicate historic lows in Americans’ confidence in political, media, religious, legal, medical, and corporate institutions.  The exceptions are the military, the police, and small businesses.  Accordingly, wokists work hard to destroy the military, the dominant political party works to destroy the police, and leftist economic policies are destroying small businesses.
• Promotion of sexual immorality. Late imperial Russia became obsessed with illicit sex.  Historian James Billington writes, “The sensualism of the age was in a very intimate sense demonic.”  Satan became a Romantic hero for artists and musicians.  Consider how deviant sex has become today.
• Proliferation of propaganda – fake news. Hating and destroying your enemies overrides any love for truth.  Example for today:  The “1619 Project” is a massive attempt to reinvent American history by discrediting the Declaration of Independence and insisting that America was founded to establish slavery.  Intended result:  fostering race hatred.
• A mania for ideology. Every aspect of life is infused with politics.  I used to watch some NFL and NBA games.  No more.  The leftist politics is pervasive and insufferable in pro sports.
• Loyalty supersedes expertise. Example:  At universities within the U of California system, tenure track applicants must affirm their commitment to “equity, diversity, and inclusion” and have demonstrated such commitment.  Other public and private schools are also demanding loyalty oaths.  One of Lenin’s secret police chiefs instructed his agents to ask an accused rebel to what class he belongs.  Words and deeds had nothing to do with guilt or innocence.  “One was presumed guilty based entirely on one’s class and social status.”

Dreher:  “A revolution that began as an attempt to right historical injustices quickly became an exterminationist exercise of raw power.”  Anyone in opposition could be destroyed, cancelled, imprisoned, even executed for the cause of “achieving historical justice over alleged exploiters of privilege.”

So-called conservatives don’t realize they are part of the problem, because they are not fighting against the real problems, which are spiritual.  The American dream, after all, is about wealth creation and the freedom to create whatever life you desire.  In contrast, the Puritan ideal was to use freedom to live a virtuous life as defined by Scripture.  A Christian worldview will not lead to libertarian politics . . . Do what thou wilt . . . is Satan’s message.

Social justice is today’s national religion since Christianity has been marginalized.  The SJW (Social Justice Warrior) zealots are intensely dogmatic, forgetting that dogmatism was a favorite criticism aimed at Christians a generation ago.  “For the social justice inquisitors, ‘dialogue’ is the process by which opponents confess their sins and submit in fear and trembling to the social justice creed.”  There are no debates to be had.  Mao, of course, perfected this approach when he subjugated 550 million Chinese in the 1950s.

Secular conservatives do not have a “religion” that competes in fervor or doctrine with the SJW crowd.  Materialism and “do what thou wilt” is a pitiful worldview.  Truly biblical Christians do have the right message, but are too timid to proclaim it.

Recognize the true enemy of the SJW.  In order of increasing despicability, the oppressors are white, male, heterosexual, and Christian.  The oppressed include skin-color minorities, women, those who love a diversity of sexual sins, and religious minorities.  The “poor” are of little significance.  “A white Pentecostal man living on disability in a trailer park is an oppressor; a black lesbian Ivy League professor is oppressed.”

Let’s talk about how to “live not by lies.”

Dreher spent time with Yuri Sipko, a retired Baptist pastor who, when he was 11 years old, was the only youth in his village who refused to wear the red scarf and pin (with Lenin’s image) of the Young Pioneers, a communist version of the Boy Scouts.  He and his teachers were pressured relentlessly to coerce him to submit.  But young Yuri knew that to be a Baptist, a follower of Jesus Christ, was to live apart, to be the permanent outsider.

Yuri recounts how other Baptists in Russia suffered worse.  “They lost any kind of status.  They were mocked and ridiculed in society.  Sometimes they even lost their children.  Just because they were Baptists, the state was willing to take away their kids and send them to orphanages.  These believers were unable to find jobs.  Their children were not able to enter universities.  And still, they believed.”

They stood alone, but they did stand.

Vladimir Grygorenko and Olga Rusanova immigrated to the U.S. from Ukraine in 2000 and now live in Texas.  They are disturbed by Americans’ waning support for the First Amendment, a sign that society “prefers the false peace of conformity to the tensions of liberty,” as Dreher puts it.  “To grow indifferent, even hostile to free speech is suicidal for a free people.”  Grygorenko:  “We don’t need to invent anything new – we just need to have the courage to protect what we have.”

We must teach history to our children.  Dreher tells of a cheerful 26-year-old California woman who told him she thinks of herself as a communist.  “It’s just so beautiful, this dream of everybody being equal,” she gushed.  She asked Dreher what he was working on.  He told her about Alexander Ogorodnikov, whom he had recently interviewed in Moscow, a Christian dissident imprisoned and tortured by the Soviets.

She fell silent.  “Don’t you know about the gulag?” he asked.  Of course she didn’t.  Nobody ever told her.  It certainly was not covered in her schooling.

A Budapest teacher, Tamas Salyi, noted that the Hungarians survived German and Soviet occupation, but thirty years of freedom has destroyed their cultural memory.  “What neither Nazism nor Communism could do, victorious liberal capitalism has done.”  He observes Progressives trying to erase all memory of the past so they can write whatever they want on that blank slate.  Cut off the people’s traditions, destroy their history, and you create completely isolated human beings . . . perfect drones for the totalitarian state.

Olga Rusanova commented, “In the Soviet Union, they killed all the people who could remember history.”

Czech mathematician and dissident Vaclav Benda knew there was no place in the public square for noncommunists, and so he worked to create a parallel polis – an alternative, grassroots set of social structures to preserve culture and history and free thought.

Sir Roger Scruton worked with Benda to establish an underground university that granted degrees secretly.  Other Western academics joined in, too.  Of course, the New Testament church was designed by God to fulfill just this function throughout history, from its roots under Roman persecution.  The Christian faith would not have survived for 2,000 years except for this design.  Modern churches know nothing of this, however.  (See my “church” essays in the Discipleship section of this site.)  Yet any particular family can raise its children to know truth, to understand the Bible, to become lights shining in darkness.  In this, homeschooling is essential.

Families have been under vicious assault throughout the last century, within the communist states who will tolerate no loyalty to anything other than the state, but now, in the West, by leftists and wokists who work to redefine and destroy the family structure designed by God for human fulfillment and prosperity – both spiritual and material.

Sexual immorality and sanctioned perversions certainly work to destroy the family, but so does greed, workaholism, the lust to acquire stuff.  Dreher:  “The loving, secure Christian home is a place that forms children who are capable of loving and serving others within the family, the church, the neighborhood, and indeed the nation.  The family does not exist for itself alone, but first for God, and then for the sake of the broader community – a family of families.”

It’s up to the family and groups of families to preserve truth and reach out to others with it.  Yuri Sipko explains what began under Stalin and lasted for sixty years.  “They took the preachers and pastors to prison.  Other men stood up and filled their shoes.  Then they took their houses of prayer.  Then at that point began the practice of small groups – people who lived close to one another would gather in small groups.  There was no formal structure of pastors or deacons.  There were just brothers and sisters who read the Bible together, prayed together and sang.”

And so they rediscovered God’s original design for the local church.  “Sixty years of terror, they were unable to get rid of the faith.  It was saved specifically in small groups.  There was no literature, no organizations for teaching, and even movement was forbidden.  Believers wrote biblical texts by hand . . . they preserved the true faith.”

Sipko goes on:  “Christianity has become a secondary foundation in people’s lives, not the main foundation.  Now it’s all about career, material success, and one’s standing in society.  In these small groups, the center was Christ, and his word that was being read, and being interpreted as applicable to your own life.”

Sipko reports that even with greatly increased freedom in Russia today, some evangelicals have returned to these simple structures that communism once forced upon them.  “They have a very clear understanding that their faith in Christ means they are going to have to reject this secular world.”

Some Christians look back on their days in Moscow in the 1970s as the happiest in their lives, worshipping and praying and building each other up.  “They bent under the weight of the Soviet state, but they did not break, because God was with them – and so were their brothers and sisters in Christ.”

The greatest challenge in these scenarios is one that Dreher says very little about, perhaps because of his Orthodox background.  That is, the obligation of the follower of Jesus to reach out with the Gospel to those around us.  Even if one establishes and takes part in an alternate Christian community, with supportive small groups, the temptation will be to hunker down and hide.  But our life’s purpose is to be about what Jesus was about, to preach the Gospel of salvation to the lost, even with great risk.  Care, caution, with much prayer and wisdom are certainly required, but the Gospel must be preached, even if whispered, even if by ‘subversive’ literature, namely Gospel tracts.  With Christians in the West timid and neglectful to their responsibility with the freedom they enjoy today, how likely is it that they will grow bolder under blatant persecution?

Dreher writes a poignant chapter entitled, “The Gift of Suffering,” a Christian principle that is both foreign and anathema to Western evangelicals.  We ought not to go out looking for it, of course, but if it comes due to our obedience, then we must be ready to bear it by God’s grace.

In Dreher’s conclusion, he notes that the great lie of this generation is the secular liberal ideal of freedom, that it comes “by liberating the self from all binding commitments (to God, to marriage, to family), and by increasing worldly comforts – that is a road that leads to hell.”

Timo Krizka, a Czech filmmaker who has documented still-living Slovak survivors of communist persecution, sees that the West is experiencing the beginning of old-fashioned totalitarianism.  “Once again, we are all being told that Christian values stand in the way of the people having a better life.  History has already shown us how far this kind of thing can go.”

C.S. Lewis put it that the world is “enemy-occupied territory” for the Christian.  “Christianity is the story of how the rightful king has landed, you might say landed in disguise, and is calling us all to take part in a great campaign of sabotage.”  Dreher again asserts that the culture war is over – and we lost.  Now, trapped behind enemy lines, the fight is still on.

The Biblically-prescribed method of sabotage is, of course, the Great Commission.  That’s always been the true quest.  Souls hang in the balance between eternal life and death every moment!  What are you doing about it?  At least hand someone a Gospel tract . . . and then someone else, and then another, and another.  Visit ThinkTracts.com – if you can’t afford to buy Gospel tracts, just ask me for some.

• drdave@truthreallymatters.com