A Great Apostasy
We’re getting preliminary sales numbers in from launch week of Live Not By Lies, and they’re amazing — by far the best launch I’ve ever had. One reviewer said that this is “the right book at the right time,” and I think the numbers bear that out. People sense that this time is different, that there’s some revolutionary in the air — that for once, Dreher’s alarmism is justified.
It has been gratifying to see that the wild success of Live Not By Lies has also goosed sales of The Benedict Option. According to the same preliminary sales numbers, there was a 400 percent increase in Ben Op sales on the opening week of Live Not; we haven’t sold as many copies of Ben Op in a single week for over two years (and it has continued to sell decently well every week since it was first published in March 2017).
I’ve been asked by several interviewers over the past week what the connection is between The Benedict Option and Live Not By Lies.
What the two books have in common is that they attempt to address believing traditional (small-o orthodox) Christians in a post-Christian, indeed increasingly anti-Christian, world. I analyze the condition that we are in, and offer prescriptions for how Christians who want to hold on to their faith should act in the face of these challenges. Both books assume that we are well into what Aaron Renn, in his well-regarded 2017 essay “The Lost World Of American Evangelicalism,” called “Negative World.” Excerpt:
1. Positive World (Pre-1994). To be seen as a religious person and one who exemplifies traditional Christian norms is a social positive. Christianity is a status enhancer. In some cases failure to embrace those norms hurt you.
2. Neutral World (1994-2014). Christianity is seen as a socially neutral attribute. It no longer had dominant status in society, but to be seen as a religious person is not a knock either. It’s more like a personal affectation or hobby. Traditional norms of behavior retain residual force.
3. Negative World (2014-). In this world, being a Christian is a social negative, especially in high status positions. Christianity in many ways as seen as undermining the social good. Traditional norms are expressly repudiated.
I take for granted that most of us who are under the age of 80 who don’t live in a rural town understand that Positive World disappeared a long time ago. I believe that the great majority of American Christians still think that we are in Neutral World. For these people, The Benedict Option was too negative and despairing. These Pollyannas — many of whom lead churches and influential ministries — are not going to like Live Not By Lies, because it starts from the premise that Negative World is accelerating away from Neutral World at increasing velocity. It assumes that Christians who believe in a negotiated peace with Negative World are deluding themselves about what the future holds. In Live Not By Lies, I make the case that the world we are moving into is going to be a soft totalitarianism, and that Christians who lived through Soviet-style totalitarianism have good advice for us on how to prepare ourselves spiritually, morally, and communally for living out the faith in a time of persecution.
Live Not By Lies focuses on active hostility to faithful traditional Christian disciples (as opposed to admirers of Christ who have completely conformed to the post/anti-Christian modern ideology). There’s some of that in The Benedict Option, but mostly the Ben Op is about holding on to the faith as the modern world becomes not so much hostile to Christianity, but indifferent to it. Let me put it like this: for a true Christian, apostasy is a worse fate than martyrdom. In fact, though you would never know it from the teachings of the bourgeois self-help Christianity that dominates America, martyrdom is traditionally seen by the Church as the highest of honors. To die for having given witness to Christ is glory.
Here, from Live Not By Lies, is a story that testifies to that reality. It’s going to sound like madness to non-Christians. If you are a Christian and you don’t find this tale riveting and inspiring, then you need to re-think your faith. The storyteller is Alexander Ogorodnikov, a prominent Russian Christian who was imprisoned and tortured in the late Soviet period. Here he tells me about the time the state relocated him to a rural jailhouse:
In that small prison, Ogorodnikov was the only captive, and he was looked after by a single guard. He was clearly a pensioner who was allowed to work the night shift because he was lonely.
One night, he entered Ogorodnikov’s cell with a wild look on his face. “They come at night,” said the old man to the prisoner. Ogorodnikov understood that the old man was being driven to the brink of insanity by something and that he needed to confess. Ogorodnikov urged him to speak. This is what the haunted prison guard said:
“When I was a young guard in a different prison, they would gather twenty or thirty priests who had been behind bars, and took them outside. They rigged them up to a sled, so that they were pulling the sled. They had them pull the sled out into the forest. They made them run all day, until they brought them to a swamp. And then they put them into two rows, one behind the other. I was one of the guards who stood in the perimeter around the prisoners.
“One of the KGB guys walked up to the first priest. He asked him very calmly and quietly, ’Is there a God?’ The priest said yes. They shot him in the forehead in such a way that his brains covered the priest standing behind him. He calmly loaded his pistol, went to next priest, and asked, ‘Does God exist?’
“‘Yes, he exists.’ The KGB man shot this priest in the same way. We didn’t blindfold them. They saw everything that was about to happen to them.”
Ogorodnikov fights back tears as he comes to the end of his story. In a voice cracking with emotion, the old prisoner says, “Not one of those priests denied Christ.”
This is why the old man volunteered to keep Ogorodnikov company after sundown: memories of the priests’ faces in the moments before their execution haunted him at night.
Were those priests heroes, or fools? The way you answer that question, Christian, probably forecasts your future. You might be the sort of Christian who says, “They should have lied, and denied Christ outwardly, knowing that a confession made under duress is not real. Then they could have gone back into the world and done some good ministering to people.” If that’s who you are, then you are nothing but a rationalizer. Or, as the Russian Baptist pastor Yuri Sipko told me in Live Not By Lies:
“Without being willing to suffer, even die for Christ, it’s just hypocrisy. It’s just a search for comfort,” says Yuri Sipko, the Russian Baptist pastor. “When I meet with brothers in faith, especially young people, I ask them: name three values as Christians that you are ready to die for. This is where you see the border between those who are serious about their faith and those who aren’t.”
When he thinks of the communist past, about Christians who were sent to prison camps and never returned, of those who were ridiculed in the world, who lost their jobs, who even in some cases had their children taken from them because of their faith, Sipko knows what gave them the strength to endure. Their ability to suffer all of this for the sake of Christ is what testified to the reality of their unseen God.
“You need to confess him and worship him in such a way that people can see that this world is a lie,” says the old pastor. “This is hard, but this is what reveals man as an image of God.”
We may all face a similar situation one day, where the choice between death and apostasy is stark. But I doubt it. This is why I call what’s coming soft totalitarianism. The regime — and by “regime” I mean the state, big business, schools, universities, the media, and other key social institutions — won’t need to have its agents take us out to the woods and threaten to blow our brains out if we don’t apostatize. It has much more sophisticated ways of getting to us. I’ll talk about that when I do my piece on my first somewhat negative review — I’ll share it with you later, in a separate post — in which the neoreactionary reviewer makes the case that Dreher is not being alarmist enough.
For right now, this morning, in this post, I want to focus on the passive persecution that is the very water in which we swim. I say “passive” because it doesn’t require active agents of the state or institutions identifying and acting negatively against Christians. This is rather the kind of thing that I focus more on in The Benedict Option: the passing of Christianity out of our world in a way analogous to how classical paganism passed out of the Roman world in the fourth century, giving way to a successor religion, Christianity. It becomes easier to actively persecute Christians (in the way I anticipate in Live Not By Lies) once Christianity has become a marginal force in the culture (which is the condition that The Benedict Option addresses).
The choice faced by those Russian Orthodox priests in the forest clearing that night was a choice akin to what Winston Smith faced in his clash with the torturer O’Brien in Nineteen Eighty-Four. In our time, the apostasy is more like what the Savage faces in his showdown with Mustapha Mond in Brave New World. As I recall in Live Not By Lies:
Hard totalitarianism depends on terrorizing us into surrendering our free consciences; soft totalitarianism uses fear as well, but mostly it bewitches us with therapeutic promises of entertainment, pleasure, and comfort—including, in the phrase of Mustapha Mond, Huxley’s great dictator, “Christianity without tears.”
But truth cannot be separated from tears. To live in truth requires accepting suffering. In Brave New World, Mond appeals to John the Savage to leave his wild life in the woods and return to the comforts of civilization. The prophetic savage refuses the temptation.
“But I don’t want comfort. I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness. I want sin.”
“In fact,” said Mustapha Mond, “you’re claiming the right to be unhappy.”
“All right then,” said the Savage defiantly, “I’m claiming the right to be unhappy.”
Mond doesn’t torture the Savage. He let’s him go, saying something like, “You’re welcome to it.” Mond knows that the Savage is no threat to the totalitarianism of comfort that the World Controllers have established. Few people are going to choose anything over comfort. Fighting this threat to Christianity from within the hearts and minds of Christians raised in late modern culture is what both The Benedict Option and Live Not By Lies have in common — and why they really should be read together (though not necessarily in chronological order).
Here’s something that should be a stark wake-up call to all religious believers, not just Christians. It’s a new piece from Foreign Affairs, by Ronald Inglehart. It’s not behind a paywall, but you have to register to see it. It’s about the collapse of religion globally in economically advanced countries. Here’s the gist:
A dozen years ago, my colleague Pippa Norris and I analyzed data on religious trends in 49 countries, including a few subnational territories such as Northern Ireland, from which survey evidence was available from 1981 to 2007 (these countries contained 60 percent of the world’s population). We did not find a universal resurgence of religion, despite claims to that effect—most high-income countries became less religious—but we did find that in 33 of the 49 countries we studied, people became more religious during those years. This was true in most former communist countries, in most developing countries, and even in a number of high-income countries. Our findings made it clear that industrialization and the spread of scientific knowledge were not causing religion to disappear, as some scholars had once assumed.
But since 2007, things have changed with surprising speed. From about 2007 to 2019, the overwhelming majority of the countries we studied—43 out of 49—became less religious. The decline in belief was not confined to high-income countries and appeared across most of the world.
Growing numbers of people no longer find religion a necessary source of support and meaning in their lives. Even the United States—long cited as proof that an economically advanced society can be strongly religious—has now joined other wealthy countries in moving away from religion. Several forces are driving this trend, but the most powerful one is the waning hold of a set of beliefs closely linked to the imperative of maintaining high birthrates. Modern societies have become less religious in part because they no longer need to uphold the kinds of gender and sexual norms that the major world religions have instilled for centuries.
Although some religious conservatives warn that the retreat from faith will lead to a collapse of social cohesion and public morality, the evidence doesn’t support this claim. As unexpected as it may seem, countries that are less religious actually tend to be less corrupt and have lower murder rates than more religious ones. Needless to say, religion itself doesn’t encourage corruption and crime. This phenomenon reflects the fact that as societies develop, survival becomes more secure: starvation, once pervasive, becomes uncommon; life expectancy increases; murder and other forms of violence diminish. And as this level of security rises, people tend to become less religious.
This should surprise no one who reads the Bible. The Bible talks about how the wealthy are in the most danger of losing their faith. In fact, in Revelation 3, an angel has this message to the church of Laodicea:
I know your works, that you are neither cold nor hot; I would that you be either cold or hot. So then, because you are lukewarm, and are neither cold nor hot, I will spew you out of My mouth.
For you say, ‘I am rich, and have become wealthy, and have need of nothing’; and you do not understand that you are wretched, and miserable, and poor, and blind, and naked. I counsel you to buy from Me gold purified by fire so that you may be rich; and white garments so that you may be clothed, and the shame of your nakedness may not be revealed; and to anoint your eyes with eye salve, so that you may see.
The churches in America are the Church in Laodicea. Sometimes I hear from non-religious readers who think that the fact that America has not become a sinkhole of poverty and crime as it has cast aside religion means that prophesies of calamity if the nation forgets God are empty. This is wrong for two reasons. First, nobody should become a Christian because they believe that it will bring prosperity. This is the false idol promoted by the prosperity gospel. It may be the case that committing to live by the teachings of Christ brings a certain stability to one’s life, such that one is better able to grow prosperous. For example, we know that the most important factor in predicting whether an adult will be poor, or at least will struggle economically, is whether or not one grew up in a home with two parents. Christianity’s sexual and family ethic, therefore, makes practical sense.
But one should by no means think that prosperity is the proof of the Gospel! St. Peter and St. Paul died as martyrs, as did many early Christians. Were they living their best life then? Yes, absolutely — martyrdom was a crown of glory. But by Joel Osteen’s measure, they were failures. Similarly with us: what good does it to a man to win the whole world, but to lose his soul?
And, Solzhenitsyn said, in his 1983 Templeton Prize address:
More than half a century ago, while I was still a child, I recall hearing a number of older people offer the following explanation for the great disasters that had befallen Russia: “Men have forgotten God; that’s why all this has happened.”
Since then I have spent well-nigh 50 years working on the history of our Revolution; in the process I have read hundreds of books, collected hundreds of personal testimonies, and have already contributed eight volumes of my own toward the effort of clearing away the rubble left by that upheaval. But if I were asked today to formulate as concisely as possible the main cause of the ruinous Revolution that swallowed up some 60 million of our people, I could not put it more accurately than to repeat: “Men have forgotten God; that’s why all this has happened.”
The most dramatic shift away from religion has taken place among the American public. From 1981 to 2007, the United States ranked as one of the world’s more religious countries, with religiosity levels changing very little. Since then, the United States has shown the largest move away from religion of any country for which we have data. Near the end of the initial period studied, Americans’ mean rating of the importance of God in their lives was 8.2 on a ten-point scale. In the most recent U.S. survey, from 2017, the figure had dropped to 4.6, an astonishingly sharp decline. For years, the United States had been the key case demonstrating that economic modernization need not produce secularization. By this measure, the United States now ranks as the 11th least religious country for which we have data.
During the twentieth century, a growing number of countries attained drastically reduced infant mortality rates and higher life expectancies, making these traditional cultural norms no longer necessary. This process didn’t happen overnight. The major world religions had presented pro-fertility norms as absolute moral rules and stoutly resisted change. People only slowly gave up the familiar beliefs and societal roles they had known since childhood concerning gender and sexual behavior. But when a society reached a sufficiently high level of economic and physical security, younger generations grew up taking that security for granted, and the norms around fertility receded. Ideas, practices, and laws concerning gender equality, divorce, abortion, and homosexuality are now changing rapidly.
This shift is quantifiable. Data collected in the World Values Survey over the years offer a glimpse of a deep transformation. The survey uses a ten-point scale based on each country’s acceptance of divorce, abortion, and homosexuality.
In The Benedict Option, I wrote about how the Sexual Revolution was the tipping point for us in the West:
When people decide that historically normative Christianity is wrong about sex, they typically don’t find a church that endorses their liberal views. They quit going to church altogether.
This raises a critically important question: Is sex the linchpin of Christian cultural order? Is it really the case that to cast off Christian teaching on sex and sexuality is to remove the factor that gives—or gave—Christianity its power as a social force?
Though he might not have put it quite that way, the eminent sociologist Philip Rieff would probably have said yes. Rieff’s landmark 1966 book The Triumph of the Therapeutic analyzes what he calls the “deconversion” of the West from Christianity. Nearly everyone recognizes that this process has been under way since the Enlightenment, but Rieff showed that it had reached a more advanced stage than most people—least of all Christians—recognized.
Rieff, writing in the 1960s, identified the Sexual Revolution—though he did not use that term—as a leading indicator of Christianity’s demise. In classical Christian culture, he wrote, “the rejection of sexual individualism” was “very near the center of the symbolic that has not held.” He meant that renouncing the sexual autonomy and sensuality of pagan culture and redirecting the erotic instinct was intrinsic to Christian culture. Without Christianity, the West was reverting to its former state.
It is nearly impossible for contemporary Americans to grasp why sex was a central concern of early Christianity. Sarah Ruden, the Yale-trained classics translator, explains the culture into which Christianity appeared in her 2010 book Paul Among the People. Ruden contends that it’s profoundly ignorant to think of the Apostle Paul as a dour proto-Puritan descending upon happy-go-lucky pagan hippies, ordering them to stop having fun.
In fact, Paul’s teachings on sexual purity and marriage were adopted as liberating in the pornographic, sexually exploitive Greco-Roman culture of the time—exploitive especially of slaves and women, whose value to pagan males lay chiefly in their ability to produce children and provide sexual pleasure. Christianity, as articulated by Paul, worked a cultural revolution, restraining and channeling male eros, elevating the status of both women and of the human body, and infusing marriage—and marital sexuality—with love.
Christian marriage, Ruden writes, was “as different from anything before or since as the command to turn the other cheek.” Chastity—the rightly ordered use of the gift of sexuality—was the greatest distinction setting Christians of the early church apart from the pagan world.
The point is not that Christianity was only, or primarily, about redefining and revaluing sexuality, but that within a Christian anthropology sex takes on a new and different meaning, one that mandated a radical change of behavior and cultural norms. In Christianity, what a person does with their sexuality cannot be separated from what a person is. In a sense, moderns believe the same thing, but from a perspective entirely different from the early church’s.
In speaking of how men and women of the early Christian era saw their bodies, historian Peter Brown says the body
was embedded in a cosmic matrix in ways that made its perception of itself profoundly unlike our own. Ultimately, sex was not the expression of inner needs, lodged in the isolated body. Instead, it was seen as the pulsing, through the body, of the same energies as kept the stars alive. Whether this pulse of energy came from benevolent gods or from malevolent demons (as many radical Christians believed) sex could never be seen as a thing for the isolated human body alone.
Early Christianity’s sexual teaching does not only come from the words of Christ and the Apostle Paul; more broadly, it emerges from the Bible’s anthropology. The human being bears the image of God, however tarnished by sin, and is the pinnacle of an order created and imbued with meaning by God.
In that order, man has a purpose. He is meant for something, to achieve certain ends. When Paul warned the Christians of Corinth that having sex with a prostitute meant that they were joining Jesus Christ to that prostitute, he was not speaking metaphorically. Because we belong to Christ as a unity of body, mind, and soul, how we use the body and the mind sexually is a very big deal.
Anything we do that falls short of perfect harmony with the will of God is sin. Sin is not merely rule breaking but failing to live in accord with the structure of reality itself.
You can have the modern view of sex, sexual identity, and family — or you can have Christ. You cannot have both. You may be able to reconcile these in your mind, but your children (all 1.7 of them) will not. Look at the numbers. The collapse of Christianity in the US is happening primarily in the Millennial generation, and Generation Z.
Inglehart says:
The evidence suggests that modern societies will not descend into nihilistic chaos without religious faith to bind them… .
He’s right about that — for now. But what happens if the money goes away? Or what happens if there is a slow-motion dying-out of a civilization, as is happening in Europe? Ever read the novels of Michel Houellebecq? He is no Christian, but he knows what’s happening. When I was in Russia last year, a man told me about his immigrant friend living in Finland. The immigrant said that Finland is a very strange place: everybody is well cared for materially by the advanced welfare state, and it is a peaceful, prosperous, post-Christian society. But there is a bizarre loss of spirit there (he said), something he can’t understand. This brought to mind a painful conversation I had back in the early 1990s with an older Dutch man, who lived in a small town in beautiful, pastoral eastern Holland (which is one of the world’s least religious societies). The man could not grasp why there were so many suicides in his tranquil village. None of it made sense to him. Men, having forgotten God, were losing their will to carry on, despite the peace and widely shared prosperity.
And don’t forget that for a truly believing Christian, there is a worse fate than poverty and suffering: the poverty of alienation from God. It is better to die for Christ than to live — even to live in great comfort — without Him. Our eternal destinies are at stake! This makes no sense to the world, but it had better make sense to Christians, or they will soon be ex-Christians when it suddenly costs something to keep the faith.
This is where Live Not By Lies comes in. The soft totalitarianism of which I write is one designed to choke the Christianity out of us with velvet gloves. We really are living through a great apostasy, and an apocalypse. I don’t know if it is the Great Apostasy prophesied in Christian Scripture — that is, the mass abandonment of the faith before the Second Coming — and I don’t know if it is the Apocalypse either. No man knows the hour or the day. But I do know that the Christian world is living through a catastrophe the likes of which it has never seen. As a Slovak Catholic priest put it (I’m paraphrasing), “It was easier, in a way, under communism. The light of the Gospel shone clearly through the darkness to light the way. But now when it shines, it only strikes fog.”
Yuri Sipko again, from Live Not By Lies:
“When I meet with brothers in faith, especially young people, I ask them: name three values as Christians that you are ready to die for. This is where you see the border between those who are serious about their faith and those who aren’t.”
You’d better believe it. I’m serious. The purpose of anti-Christian is ultimately to cause believers to give up their faith. The Enemy does not care if he accomplishes this task through pain, terror, and execution; if he can get what he wants by giving us wealth, comfort, and status, he will. And he is. What are you, Christian, going to do about it?
UPDATE: I forgot to say: a democratic nation that is irreligious is not likely to be a nation that respects religious liberty, because its people will not understand why religious liberty matters.
UPDATE.2: Hey everybody, just got the news that Live Not By Lies made the New York Times bestseller list this week:
I was surprised that it was so far down the list, for one reason alone: we have sold about twice as many copies of LNBL than we did of The Benedict Option on its first week, and TBO debuted at No. 7 on the Times list. But you have to remember that it’s all relative. The list was super-competitive last week. I’m just grateful to be on the list at all. This means that I have written my third NYT Bestseller (The Little Way of Ruthie Leming was my other one). Glory to God!
