Are Western Christians Facing a Totalitarian Threat from the Left?

Reading Rod Dreher’s newest book, Live Not By Lies: A Manual for Christian Dissidents, brought to mind a song from Christian contemporary singer Carman in my early youth-group days: “America Again.” The song praises the founding fathers and the early American story before shifting to a litany of sins engulfing the nation in the mid-1990s (pornography, abortion, homosexuality, and so on). The problem, Carman says, is that America has set aside its faith in God, and the subsequent moral decline portends a disastrous future. “The only way this nation can even hope to last this decade,” he declares, “is to put God in America again.”

“America Again” sounded different when I heard it in the 2000s as a college student in Romania. Had America really been on the verge of collapse in the mid-1990s when the song was so popular? Do those who still sing the song just update the “decade” we can’t hope to last?

Dreher, senior editor at The American Conservative, is an insightful and interesting writer, one whom I’ve appreciated reading over the years. But if I have any criticism of Dreher’s enormous output—which applies as much to Live Not By Lies as to the personality of his blog—it’s that fear seems too often to drive his analysis. I realize that I’m just one of his many readers, but in contrast to some of his earlier books and my personal and beneficial interactions with him over the years, his more recent writing strikes me as joyless. He comes across as a breathless messenger sounding an alarm (“the culture is lost, so run for the hills!”) that strikes me as not just pessimistic, but overly so, resembling the kind of Carman declaration that the country won’t last the decade.

It’s not the pessimism I have a problem with. In fact, some of the writers I’ve read in depth (MacIntyre, Rieff, Lasch) can be categorized as pessimistic in their overall outlook. It’s the sense of hopelessness that suffuses Dreher’s pessimistic take, something that at times feels at odds with the fine principles and wise practices he recommends.

Soft Totalitarianism

Here is the concern that most animates Dreher in this book:

A progressive—and profoundly anti-Christian militancy—is steadily overtaking society; one described by Pope Benedict XVI as a “worldwide dictatorship of seemingly humanistic ideologies” that pushes dissenters to the margins. Benedict called this a manifestation of “the spiritual power of the Antichrist.” This spiritual power takes material form in government and private institutions, in corporations, in academia and media, and in the changing practices of everyday American life. It is empowered by unprecedented technological capabilities to surveil private life. There is virtually nowhere to hide.

This progressive militancy, Dreher writes, is most evident in the rise of identity politics, a worldview steeped in a Marxist understanding of oppressed/oppressor groups and the reduction of potential solutions to the redistribution of power.

Dreher believes we’re careening toward a totalitarian future in which “nothing can be permitted to exist that contradicts a society’s ruling ideology.” Already, the totalitarian spirit (expressed in the idea that “the personal is political”) seeks “to infuse all aspects of life with political consciousness. Indeed, the Left pushes its ideology ever deeper into the personal realm, leaving fewer and fewer areas of daily life uncontested.”

Live Not By Lies is Dreher’s attempt to show us the similarities between communist totalitarianism and our current situation. At times, he succeeds. At other times, he overplays his hand. For rhetorical purposes, his warnings depend on a situation in which contemporary life in the West bears startling resemblances to communism in the Soviet era. But in his exploration of these cultures, he’s forced to acknowledge the glaring differences.

Some of the similarities make sense. Dreher’s conversations with men and women who once lived under communism and now worry similar events could happen even in the United States ring true to me. I’ve heard stories and warnings like these for years—in books, from family members, and from evangelical church leaders in Romania. A few years ago, documents released from the Romanian Securitate showed how even some of the country’s evangelical and Orthodox religious leaders who had been known for their resistance to communism were, in some way or another, compromised by the system and had informed on others. Lest we be quick to judge, imagine life driven by a totalizing system where truth and falsehood are so interchangeable that even the most ardent defender of freedom can fall to the fog of propaganda. One can’t underestimate the long-term effects of living in a society where freedom has been lost.

Live Not By Lies is Dreher’s attempt to show us the similarities between communist totalitarianism and our current situation. At times, he succeeds. At other times, he overplays his hand.

I also recognize what I’ve always called the “go along to get along” mentality of ordinary citizens, described by Dreher with the illustration of the grocer who “posts a sign in his shop bearing the well-known slogan from the Communist manifesto, ‘Workers of the world, unite!’ He doesn’t believe it,” Dreher writes. “He hangs it in his shop as a signal of his own conformity. He just wants to be left alone.” One doesn’t have to squint in order to see similar pressures already at work in our country today, especially in regard to publicly affirming or signaling one’s support of causes or theories about which many citizens, deep down, entertain serious doubts. (Recent gender theories behind the transgender movement represent one example, but consider also the corporate pressure to demonstrate solidarity every Pride Month, where brands, social-media platforms, and even children’s games fly rainbow colors).

At the same time, Dreher recognizes that not all of his parallels between our country and communist Russia work:

Whatever this is, it is not a carbon copy of life in the Soviet Bloc nations, with their secret police, their gulags, their strict censorship, and their material deprivation. . . . The fact that relative to Soviet Bloc conditions, life in the West remains so free and so prosperous is what blinds Americans to the mounting threat to our liberty. That, and the way those who take away freedom couch it in the language of liberating victims from oppression.

So, on the one hand, Dreher worries we’re moving quickly toward totalitarianism like that of the Soviets, but on the other hand, it must be a soft totalitarianism, because the signs are all different, and the trajectory doesn’t follow. Are we ripe for revolution or not? “The parallels between a declining United States and prerevolutionary Russia are not exact, but they are unnervingly close,” he writes. Close in a few key ways, but radically different in others, as he himself must admit.

Manual for Christians

Dreher’s primary aim is to prepare Christians to endure a period of profound cultural pressure, social ostracism, and personal suffering. As he writes, “We cannot hope to resist the coming soft totalitarianism if we do not have our spiritual lives in order.”

Relying on Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s essay “Live Not By Lies,” Dreher wants to fortify Christians in the truth:

Everybody says that they have no choice but to conform, says Solzhenitsyn, and to accept powerlessness. But that is the lie that gives all the other lies their malign force. The ordinary man may not be able to overturn the kingdom of lies, but he can at least say that he is not going to be its loyal subject.

In the second part of the book, Dreher “examines in greater detail forms, methods, and sources of resistance to soft totalitarianism’s lies.” He places hope in religion, advocates a willingness to suffer, recasts the family as the core cell of opposition, recommends fellowship in the church and in small groups, and urges a clear battle against false messaging.

Dreher rightly recognizes threats to freedom coming from both big government and also big business, when conservatives generally remain more opposed to big government and liberals focus their critique on big business. Still, it’s clear that Dreher remains most concerned about leftward trajectories, since the political and cultural left appear ascendant in both of these areas. Because of the influence of elites in major corporations as well as influential institutions, Dreher sees the left as a much clearer and more present danger than the corresponding surge of populism and nationalism we see around the world from the right. Dreher may be correct, but it would’ve been worth exploring how fascism and communism can feed off each other, so that opposition to the one can harden into support for the other. It was the fear and despising of communism that made fascism an appealing bulwark to many people in Western Europe during the 1930s, while the revulsion toward fascism (linked by communist dictators to capitalism) became one of the rallying cries of the countries that fell under the shadow of the Iron Curtain in the 1940s and ’50s.

My point isn’t that Dreher is wrong to warn against cultural currents that may sweep us into soft totalitarianism. I only wish he had explored how this tendency toward soft totalitarianism could wind up being as much a feature of a nationalist surge from the far right as it could the elitist “top down” from the far left. I understand why Dreher prioritizes the threat from the far left more than the far right—the left is embedded in various institutions that have traditionally wielded enormous power. But as Yuval Levin and other cultural observers have pointed out, these institutions have lost much of their power and credibility, which may leave us vulnerable to surges of revolutionary fervor from surprisingly unexpected directions. 

Dreher wants to build an underground resistance of true Christianity that will withstand whatever cultural pressures and suffering may arrive.

Dreher understands how communist revolutionaries needed to rewrite history in order to achieve their objectives. “Propaganda helps change the world by creating a false impression of the way the world is,” he writes, implicating The 1619 Project as a recent example. Dreher is right to point out the ideologically driven histories proliferating in our day. But surely much of what passed for “American history” in previous decades delivered up its own “false impression of the way the world is,” failing to grapple with some of the more profound injustices in our history and founding.

The latter parts of the book feature Dreher interviewing religious dissidents from the Soviet Bloc. He captures in print some of the lessons I took away from spending years in Eastern Europe. The Baptists there (he focuses on Baptists in Russia, who endured similar trials) were in some cases more equipped than the Russian Orthodox to withstand the pressures of communism because, religiously, they’d already taught their kids that they would be seen as “a permanent outsider.”

Underground Resistance

In the end, Dreher’s overarching concern is one that I share: “Relatively few contemporary Christians are prepared to suffer for the faith, because the therapeutic society that has formed them denies the purpose of suffering in the first place, and the idea of bearing pain for the sake of truth seems ridiculous.”

Dreher wants to build an underground resistance of true Christianity that will withstand whatever cultural pressures and suffering may arrive.

I’m not as sure as Dreher that these days are just around the corner for us; neither am I as confident that they’ll necessarily come from the socialist left rather than the populist right, since history is full of surprises, and future trends can be upended in cataclysmic events that almost no one foresees. I also believe that such resistance can be only marshaled and sustained if accompanied by a deep and abiding sense of joy. Most of my family members and friends who persevered as dissidents under communism were marked by a profound joyfulness. The joy of the Lord (even if not evident in this book) must mark any successful resistance.

But I do applaud Dreher’s desire to form the faith and fortify the conviction of Christians today, not only because we may be heading into a season of darkness, but because cultivating and strengthening genuine faith should be part of our mission in every generation—no matter what form “this present darkness” takes.