Good morning. More interviews today for Live Not By Lies. Before I get started, I’d like to thank Fran Maier for his review, which runs today in Catholic World Report. Excerpts:

As events would have it, we don’t need an American Caesar or the theatrics of a Rubicon crossing. Our political institutions and public consciousness can be, and are being, transformed from the inside out, without any melodrama. The result, says Dreher, will be a comfortable servitude, a “soft totalitarianism,” run by a technocratic, progressive elite, and supported by Big Data and a compliant capitalism. Everyday life will be far closer to the sunny brain-scrub of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World than the shabbiness and goon-squad brutality of Orwell’s Airstrip One.

More:

Dreher has a simple, vigorous, engaging style, backed up by exhaustive research and numerous interviews with survivors of Soviet era repression. His book’s title — “Live Not By Lies” — is taken from a 1974 essay by the great Russian dissident, Alexander Solzhenitsyn. And logically so. A survivor of the gulag, Solzhenitsyn committed his life to attacking the mendacity and murderous delusions of Marxist-Leninist ideology. Stalin and his millions of victims were not an “aberration” of the socialist system. They were the inevitable fruit of deceits congenital to Marxist and progressive thought. For Solzhenitsyn, the label “progressive” itself was a misnomer, an example of overweening conceit and skillful self-deception. The materialist view of man was not simply wrong, but a poisonous lie.

Dreher borrows this basic insight and applies it to the smiley-face atheism at the heart of modern technocratic thought. The lie that infects the DNA of atheism kills. Whether the killing is quick and brutal, or a slow, soft strangulation of the spirit, the result is the same.

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The chapters in Part One on “Progressivism as Religion” and “Capitalism, Woke and Watchful,” are especially strong. Anyone imagining big business as instinctively conservative need only remember the speed with which corporations jumped on the same-sex marriage and “gay rights” bandwagon. The lavish business support showered on the “Black Lives Matter” (BLM) movement is also revealing, since — beneath its calls for racial justice — the BLM agenda is toxic to what most Americans believe. The lesson here is simple: Absent a grounding in broadly biblical principles, corporations follow profits, wherever they lead. In Part Two, the chapters on cultural memory, families as resistance cells, and “the gift of suffering,” make for essential reading.

The excellence of this text flows not just from the richness of its content, or the clarity and passion of its presentation, but also from the providential nature of its timing. We live in a uniquely weird moment of uncertainty: a time of peril from a changing culture, but also of opportunity to witness, with our lives, the power of what we believe. It demands a new kind of missionary work, done family to family, friend to friend, local church to local church. It’s a moment when many of our Christian leaders, including Catholic leaders, seem too weak, or confused, or coopted — or dealing with regimes like China, too deluded — to inspire trust.

Read it all. 

Until his recent retirement, Fran was the longtime chancellor for Archbishop Charles Chaput, both in Philadelphia and in Denver. Chaput was the most culturally far-seeing prelate in the US Catholic hierarchy, and a lot of that was due to his collaboration with Fran. It’s an honor to receive his praise for the book.

And he’s right about the “new kind of missionary work” needed. I believe that in the years to come — sooner rather than later — among the most effective forms of evangelism available to Christians will be simple, steadfast endurance. It will be the kind that tells other people you don’t have to live this lie, and that encourages those who already know this, but are too timid to say so, to find their voice.

From Live Not By Lies, a story that the Slovak historian Jan Simulcik, who was part of a cell of activists in the underground church, told me as we stood inside a secret sub-basement chamber where the church printed illegal Gospels, prayer books and catechisms in the 1980s. The man Simulcik thought was an “elevator repairman” from his university would secretly go down into that hidden chamber, accessible only through a clandestine tunnel, for years, and spend hours in that cramped room printing these precious books that helped the church stay alive. More:

As a student, Šimulčik knew that the elevator repairman had something to do with the Christian underground, but he wasn’t sure what. That was by design. The underground only shared information like that on a need-to-know basis, so those arrested by the secret police couldn’t compromise the operations if they broke under interrogation. What Šimulčik did not learn until communism fell was that for all those years he was upstairs in that house compiling samizdat, that elevator repairman was down below, spending hours in the tomblike room, printing the words of life at great risk to his own liberty.

In fact, everyone involved with the Christian samizdat project would have been sent to prison had the secret police ever discovered the network. As Šimulčik breaks down for me the complex moving parts of the operation, he emphasizes the extraordinary risks the underground Christians took for the sake of publishing these documents.

Why did you get involved? I ask. You could have lost everything.

“When you ask that question, you are really asking about where we find the meaning of the underground church,” Šimulčik replies. “It was in small community. Only in small communities could people feel free.”

He goes on:

When you were with your friends in these communities, you had freedom. You knew that when you went outside, there was totalitarianism. It controlled everything and oppressed you. People like me who wanted knowledge and freedom, and wanted to know more about our faith, depended on these small communities. They were well organized, and we had strong leaders. This was the only place to find that.

First, I did it because I wanted to experience personal freedom, but this was connected to Christ. After we tasted freedom in these communities, we gradually came to want to fight for freedom for everyone.

Šimulčik tells me that he and his cell of several other young Catholic men were all afraid. You would have been crazy not to have fear.

“The question is, which is going to win: fear, or courage?” he says. “In the beginning, it was mostly a matter of fear. But once you started experiencing freedom—and you felt it, you felt freedom through the things you did— your courage grew. We experienced all this together. We helped one another to gradually build up the courage to do bigger things, like join the Candle Demonstration,” the 1988 mass Christian manifestation that was a precursor to the revolution a year later that peacefully brought down communism.

“With this courage also developed our sense of duty, and our need to be of service to other people,” the historian continues. “We could see the products of our work. We could hold these samizdat books in our hands, and we could see that people really read them and learned from them. We saw what we did as service to God and service to people. But it took years for us to see the fruit of our labor and to see our communities grow.”

Underground or above ground, Christians will be called on simply to be strong, and not deterred by fear of the world’s hatred. That is a form of evangelizing. Churches right now that find their voice, and do not waver from the truth, are going to be attractive to those men and women with stout hearts who want to prepare themselves for the long night ahead. Those churches that prefer not to face reality, or worse, wish to collaborate with the regime (I don’t mean just the state here, but the emerging social order) for the sake of keeping the world’s respectability, or remaining “relevant” to this increasingly anti-Christian order — well, no Christian who can read the signs of the times and wants to be ready will want to be with that lot.

When you spend time with Christians like Jan Simulcik, who as a young man staked his liberty on serving Christ in the underground church, you know exactly the kind of believer you want to be. When I went down into that hidden samizdat room with Jan, and heard his story, he didn’t have to evangelize me, because I was already a Christian. But he did evangelize me, in a way that he didn’t know: he helped me to resolve to be braver than I am.

That’s the kind of book Live Not By Lies is.

By the way, here’s a link to a podcast interview I did about the book with Mark Bauerlein of First Things. And here’s a link to an interview I did with Rob Bluey at the Daily Signal.

UPDATE: A reader writes:

I just finished the audiobook of Live Not by Lies and I just wanted to pass along how much I enjoyed it!

Personally I don’t understand why so many people were calling this a “dark” or “depressing” book. I found incredible hope in it! I mean, yes you’re clear about what is facing orthodox Christians in the modern west, and this can sound grim at times. But sometimes the truth is grim. The stories about those saintly Christian dissidents gave me incredible hope for the future, though!

There were several points where I was in tears listening to the stories about how God used people in the most miserable conditions imaginable to show his love and mercy. And how happy and full of God’s love those people were! I second what others have said about this book being almost like a Part 2 of the Benedict Option. To me it seems like Benedict Option explains about how things are turning for the worse so here is what you, your family and community can do to strengthen yourself for the coming adversity. Live Not by Lies witnesses the actions of the confessors and martyrs who should be our muses for when things get really bad.

An interesting dynamic that I experienced while listening to this audiobook was that at the same time I was reading a book you have suggested several times in your blog: The Lost City by Alan Ehrenhalt. While listening to your book throughout my workday and then reading Ehrenhalt’s book after the kids went to bed I saw the incredible comparison with how Christians lived in the same time period but in vastly different conditions.

Reading about the St. Nick’s parish – the working class white parish in southwest Chicago – I was moved by the thought of a neighborhood united in worship and belief, which is something that so very few of our large cities have nowadays. But I was also struck by how incredibly easy it was to be a practicing Christian in that time. It was almost a cultural afterthought, where it was just easier and more fruitful to everyday social life to be active in the local parish than not. The lack of participation would have probably raised more questions than just participating for ease’s sake.

Nobody can accuse those eastern European dissidents with just following a cultural norm, or just swimming with the neighborhood current. I kind of realized that many of us have been looking to that type of 1950’s Christianity for guidance of how we should handle the world as it currently exists for Christians, not realizing that that world no longer exists and will not be coming back. As noble as these pursuits are, being politically active, sending your kids to Catholic schools, and being active in groups like the Knights of Columbus will not lead to a rebirth of public Christianity or cause an end to the Church’s lack of influence in most Americans’ lives (nor will it put a stop to the seeming unravelling of our country). We need to look to a different continent in that time period for our models for behavior, not 1950’s Chicago but the 1950’s Warsaw Pact.