"Live Not by Lies" by Rod Dreher

In February of 1974, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn published an open letter to the Russian people, one that has come to be known by its core message: “Live not by lies.” That same day, he was arrested; shortly thereafter, because of his international reputation, he was exiled from the Soviet Union, not to return until almost 20 years later with the fall of the communist government. 

Conservative writer and columnist Rod Dreher, in homage to Solzhenitsyn, has used the message for the title of his latest book, Live Not by Lies: A Manual for Christian Dissidents. The difference is that Dreher’s book is not aimed at the Soviet Union; instead, it is aimed at what he sees as a growing “soft totalitarianism” in the United States among the political, media, entertainment, academic, and corporate elites. His primary concern is Christians in the United States, the people who cannot accept the madness engulfing American elites but are largely unprepared for the consequences that will inevitably follow.

 

For guidance, he turns to the Christian community of Eastern Europe that survived communist rule and helped to bring it down, but which also paid an often terrible price for following their conscience and their faith. He asks if Western and particularly American Christians are prepared for that sacrifice. And he believes that much can be learned from the dissidents of Eastern Europe and Russia because what is happening in the United States mirrors the Bolshevik / Marxist takeover of Russia; it’s only happening here in slow motion and in a “softer” way. But the end result threatens to be the same – a society that brooks no dissent and one that will eradicate dissent wherever it might emerge. 

 

Rod Dreher

Live Not by Lies is divided into two parts. The first part concerns understanding what soft totalitarianism is all about: a developing totalitarian culture, how progressivism has taken on all the trappings of a religion, and how these ideas and trends have been facilitated by capitalism, and especially the largest corporations. The second part is the manual for Christians: how it is possible to live in truth, how to cultivate cultural memory, the importance of the family (the institution that has been under siege since at least the 1960s), how faith forms the basis for resistance, how Christians can support one another, and how to understand and accept the suffering that is to come.

 

The book is highly readable and accessible; Dreher has a compelling writing style that keeps the reader engaged. Unlike his previous book, The Benedict Option, this one has been largely ignored by all the major new and literary media other than those that are conservative. This, too, one might argue, is a form of soft totalitarianism – ignore what makes you uncomfortable and points out your less-than-democratic leanings. 

 

Dreher, who writes for American Conservative, is the author of Crunchy Cons (2006); The Little Way of Ruthie Leming (2013); How Dante Can Save Your Life (2015), and The Benedict Option (2017). He is a Greek Orthodox, and lives in Baton Rouge, Louisiana.

 

Some might say that Dreher can often be borderline hysterical, exaggerating or overstating his case. That might be, but recall Flannery O’Connor, who once explained her stories by saying you write large for the nearly blind and shout for the nearly deaf. The future may not unfold exactly as Dreher is predicting, but the evidence is all around us that it’s unfolding closely enough to what’s presented in Live Not by Lies.

 

Related:

 

My review of How Dante Can Save Your Life.

 

My review of The Benedict Option by Rod Dreher.

 

"The Benedict Option" by Rod Dreher

Rod Dreher’s new book, The Benedict Option: A Strategy for Christians in a Post-Christian Nation, debuted at No. 7 on The New York Times Bestseller List his past weekend; it was already a bestseller on Amazon. Not bad for a book addressed to conservative Christians.

Numerous reviews have been published, with praise, objections, and a combination of both. As author and professor Karen Swallow Prior has pointed out (in what I think is the best review so far) is that The Benedict Option has already become a kind of Rorschach test for how anyone who reads it views American culture. If you think the culture is in serious decay, this book will make more sense than if you think absolute freedom of the individual is a positive thing.

I’ve gone back and looked at a number of reviews, including one by David Brooks in The New York Times and one at the conservative Christian online blog The Institute for Faith, Work, & Economics. It’s clear to me that a lot of people are reading into the book things that simply aren’t there, although I do agree with Brook that the book may be the most important religious book of the year. Dreher isn’t arguing that Christians abandon the culture and seal themselves up in conservative Amish-type communities, or build a Christian ark to escape the coming deluge. He’s not even saying that the culture is beyond redemption.

What I keep coming back to is who he wrote this book for – traditional, orthodox Christians. People like me. People who have watched a sea change in American culture over the past 50 years, have sought all kinds of ways of dealing with that change, and are now seeing a rising tide of attitudes, anger, prejudice, and dismissal aimed at religious freedom, traditional Christian belief, and even what was the law a scant three years ago or less. People like me who see crudeness, viciousness, and incivility becoming a commonplace across society, to the point where the political chasm separating the right and left (the center is long gone) may be unbridgeable.

Dreher considers where this sea change has come from; it’s not something that happened overnight or in the last five years. It’s been brewing since the 1960s and the sexual revolution, the technological revolution, and the revolution that has enthroned absolute individual freedom as society’s hallmark. These changes permeate our schools and universities, our mainstream and social media, our corporate boardrooms, and our politics. The culture war is over, he argues (and I would agree), no matter who sits in the White House. “Conventional American politics cannot fix what is wrong in our society and culture,” he writes. “The disorder in American public life derives from disorder within the American soul.”

Traditional Christians will find themselves increasingly isolated and disparaged. He suggests that discrimination is going to come, particularly in those professions that will require acceptance of beliefs that Christians will not be able to accept (comparable to what the early Christians faced with burning incense to Caesar).

He points to the Rule of St. Benedict, promulgated some 1,500 years ago, as a directional pointer for Christians, not to withdraw from society but to train themselves and their children to deal with society with the Christian faith permeating their lives. If we don’t know how to be a light in the darkness, the darkness is going to be overwhelming.

And so Dreher looks at education, work, technology, politics, the church, and more. He talks to people who have been implementing the Benedict Option, from monks and families in Italy to schools in Maryland and Texas. He doesn’t recommend some idealistic philosophy or program, but things that are already underway and working.

Rod Dreher

Dreher, who writes for American Conservative, is the author of Crunchy Cons (2006); The Little Way of Ruthie Leming (2013); and How Dante Can Save Your Life (2015). He is a Greek Orthodox, and lives in Baton Rouge, Louisiana.

I can note that we both attended the same university, LSU, about 15 years apart. He describes what he didn’t get in college – the classical education of Western civilization – which is what I did get 15 years before. Those intervening years – 1973 to 1988 – were a crucial time for change in education, and not for the better.

The Benefit Option is a kind of epistle to orthodox Christians. It is written with care and concern. It’s written with understanding and love. And it’s written with keen insight into what is tearing the culture apart and the forces behind it.

I wish I found it to be exaggerated, untrue, and off-the-mark. Instead I found it to be like looking in a mirror, and realizing that I have to be part of the change. It’s a daunting task.

Related:

My review of How Dante Can Save Your Life.

Rod Dreher’s “How Dante Can Save Your Life”

You’re standing in the poetry section of a Barnes & Noble bookstore. You don’t usually read poetry, or fiction either, for that matter. But a book caught your eye; you pull it from the shelf, open it and begin to read.

Without realizing it, a random act of browsing in a bookstore leads to you changing your life.

The “you’ in question here was writer Rod Dreher, author of The Little Way of Ruthie Leming and Crunchy Cons and a writer for The American Conservative. The Barnes & Noble was in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. And the book was Dante’s The Divine Comedy.

Dreher describes what happened in How Dante Can Save Your Life: The Life-Changing Wisdom of History’s Greatest Poem.

And what a story it is.

What a fascinating story it is. If you love poetry, and even if you don’t, this is a remarkable book.

It’s a story about how Dreher worked through serious physical illness brought on by his family, himself, his and his family’s history, and the sense of place. He tells it so well that the reader beings to see in Dante what Dreher found, and more – the reader begins to recognize himself in the journey.

Of all the things I expected from this book, that turned out to be the most surprising, although in retrospect, it shouldn’t have been. That’s what good writing does. And it says something about both Dante and Dreher, and Dreher’s candor, openness and vulnerability in telling a story that is often painful.

With Dreher and reader for the journey is Dante, himself guided by the Roman poet Virgil.

Dreher takes the scenes and lines that connected most with himself and the situation he was trying, and largely failing, to deal with. Along with his Orthodox priest and his therapist, he works his way through his own personal Inferno and Purgatorio. He doesn’t necessarily reach Paradiso (Dante does, however), but he does find healing.

How Dante Can Save Your Life is a much larger story than one man’s journey. Dante is one of those writers not studied much any more – a dead, white, European male. While he often criticizes the church and the popes, he is very much in the Roman Catholic tradition. The Divine Comedy is a profoundly religious book – and that alone might be sufficient eliminate it from the curriculum.

Rod Dreher

That is criminal. It’s one of the great works of Western literature. It will still be read and treasured long after the more contemporary and trendy stuff is forgotten. What Dreher does in his book is to explain how meaningful and important Dante is for many of the same things that bedeviled us in late medieval and early Renaissance times that still bedevil us today. For that is the genius of Dante and The Divine Comedy – the poet and his great work still speak to the human condition.

The Divine Comedy has been translated by numerous authors and writers over the years, including Dorothy Sayers, Clive James, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and many others (and that’s just a few of the English translations; there are many others in other languages). Dreher prefers the translations by Robert and Jean Hollander and Mark Musa; the only translation I’ve read myself is by John Ciardi.

Read How Dante Can Save Your Life, and you will read of how a great work literature helped guide one man on what was at times a harrowing, life-threatening journey.

Painting: Dante Illuminating Florence with His Poem, fresco by Domenico de Michelino; circa 1465.