Live Not by Lies: A Manual for Christian Dissidents - Hardcover

Dreher, Rod

 
9780593087398: Live Not by Lies: A Manual for Christian Dissidents
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 0593087399 ISBN 13: 9780593087398
Verlag: Sentinel, 2020

Inhaltsangabe

The New York Times bestselling author of The Benedict Option draws on the wisdom of Christian survivors of Soviet persecution to warn American Christians of approaching dangers.

For years, émigrés from the former Soviet bloc have been telling Rod Dreher they see telltale signs of "soft" totalitarianism cropping up in America--something more Brave New World than Nineteen Eighty-Four. Identity politics are beginning to encroach on every aspect of life. Civil liberties are increasingly seen as a threat to "safety". Progressives marginalize conservative, traditional Christians, and other dissenters. Technology and consumerism hasten the possibility of a corporate surveillance state. And the pandemic, having put millions out of work, leaves our country especially vulnerable to demagogic manipulation.

In Live Not By Lies, Dreher amplifies the alarm sounded by the brave men and women who fought totalitarianism. He explains how the totalitarianism facing us today is based less on overt violence and more on psychological manipulation. He tells the stories of modern-day dissidents--clergy, laity, martyrs, and confessors from the Soviet Union and the captive nations of Europe--who offer practical advice for how to identify and resist totalitarianism in our time. Following the model offered by a prophetic World War II-era pastor who prepared believers in his Eastern European to endure the coming of communism, Live Not By Lies teaches American Christians a method for resistance:
  •  SEE: Acknowledge the reality of the situation.
  •  JUDGE: Assess reality in the light of what we as Christians know to be true.
  •  ACT: Take action to protect truth.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn famously said that one of the biggest mistakes people make is assuming totalitarianism can't happen in their country. Many American Christians are making that mistake today, sleepwalking through the erosion of our freedoms. Live Not By Lies will wake them and equip them for the long resistance.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Rod Dreher is a senior editor at The American Conservative. He has written and edited for the New York Post, The Dallas Morning News, and National Review, and his commentary has been published in The Wall Street Journal and the Weekly Standard. He is the bestselling author of The Benedict Option, The Little Way of Ruthie Leming, Crunchy Cons, and How Dante Can Save Your Life.

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Chapter One

Kolakovi the Prophet

Sometimes, a stranger who sees deeper and farther than the crowd appears to warn of trouble coming. These stories often end with people disbelieving the prophet and suffering for their blindness. Here, though, is a tale about a people who heard the prophet's warnings, did as he advised, and were ready when the crisis struck.

In 1943, a Jesuit priest and anti-fascist activist named Tomislav Poglajen fled his native Croatia one step ahead of the Gestapo and settled in Czechoslovakia. To conceal himself from the Nazis, he assumed his Slovak mother's name-Kolakovic-and took up a teaching position in Bratislava, the capital of the Slovak region, which had become an independent vassal state of Hitler. The priest, thirty-seven years old and with a thick shock of prematurely white hair, had spent some his priestly training studying the Soviet Union. He believed that the defeat of Nazi totalitarianism would occasion a great conflict between Soviet totalitarianism and the liberal democratic West. Though Father Kolakovic worried about the threats to Christian life and witness from the rich, materialistic West, he was far more concerned about the dangers of communism, which he correctly saw as an imperialistic ideology.

By the time Father Kolakovic reached Bratislava, it was clear that the Red Army would defeat the Germans in the East. In fact, in 1944, the Czech government in exile-which also represented Slovaks who refused to accept the nominally independent Slovak state-made a formal agreement with Stalin, guaranteeing that after driving the Nazis out, the Soviets would give the reunited nation its freedom.

Because he knew how the Soviets thought, Father Kolakovic knew this was a lie. He warned Slovak Catholics that when the war ended, Czechoslovakia would fall to the rule of a Soviet puppet government. He dedicated himself to preparing them for persecution.

The Unready Christians of Slovakia

Father Kolakovic knew that the clericalism and passivity of traditional Slovak Catholicism would be no match for communism. For one thing, he correctly foresaw that the communists would try to control the Church by subduing the clergy. For another, he understood that the spiritual trials awaiting believers under communism would put them to an extreme test. The charismatic pastor preached that only a total life commitment to Christ would enable them to withstand the coming trial.

"Give yourself totally to Christ, throw all your worries and desires on him, for he has a wide back, and you will witness miracles," the priest said, in the recollection of one disciple.

Giving oneself totally to Christ was not an abstraction or a pious thought. It needed to be concrete, and it needed to be communal. The total destruction of the First World War opened the eyes of younger Catholics to the need for a new evangelization. A Belgian priest named Joseph Cardijn, whose father had been killed in a mining accident, started a lay movement to do this among the working class. These were the Young Christian Workers, called "Jocists" after the initials of their name in French. Inspired by the Jocist example, Father Kolakovic adapted it to the needs of the Catholic Church in German-occupied Slovakia. He established cells of faithful young Catholics who came together for prayer, study, and fellowship.

The refugee priest taught the young Slovak believers that every person must be accountable to God for his actions. Freedom is responsibility, he stressed; it is a means to live within the truth. The motto of the Jocists became the motto for what Father Kolakovic called his "Family": "See. Judge. Act." See meant to be awake to realities around you. Judge was a command to discern soberly the meaning of those realities in light of what you know to be true, especially from the teachings of the Christian faith. After you reach a conclusion, then you are to act to resist evil.

V‡clav Vako, a Kolakovic follower, recalled late in his life that Father Kolakovic's ministry excited so many young Catholics because it energized the laity and gave them a sense of leadership responsibility.

"It is remarkable how Kolakovic almost instantly succeeded in creating a community of trust and mutual friendship from a diverse grouping of people (priests, religious and lay people of different ages, education, or spiritual maturity)," Vako wrote.

The Family groups came together at first for Bible study and prayer, but soon began listening to Father Kolakovic lecture on philosophy, sociology, and intellectual topics. Father Kolakovic also trained his young followers in how to work secretly, and to withstand the interrogation that he said would surely come.

The Family expanded its small groups quickly across the nation. "By the end of the school year 1944," Vako said, "it would have been difficult to find a faculty or secondary school in Bratislava or larger cities where our circles did not operate."

In 1946, Czech authorities deported the activist priest. Two years later, communists seized total power, just as Father Kolakovic had predicted. Within several years, almost all of the Family had been imprisoned and the Czechoslovak institutional church brutalized into submission. But when the Family members emerged from prison in the 1960s, they began to do as their spiritual father had taught them. Father Kolakovic's top two lieutenants-physician Silvester KrcÿmŽry and priest Vladim’r Jukl-quietly set up Christian circles around the country and began to build the underground church.

The underground church, led by the visionary cleric's spiritual children and grandchildren, became the principle means of anti-communist dissent for the next forty years. It was they who organized a mass 1988 public demonstration in Bratislava, the Slovak capital, demanding religious liberty. The Candle Demonstration was the first major protest against the state. It kicked off the Velvet Revolution, which brought down the communist regime a year later. Though Slovak Christians were among the most persecuted in the Soviet Bloc, the Catholic Church there thrived in resistance because one man saw what was coming and prepared his people.

The New Totalitarianism

Why did Father Kolakovic know what was coming to the people of Central Europe? He was not supernaturally gifted, at least not that we know. Rather, he had studied Soviet communism intensely to prepare for missionary work in Russia and understood how the Soviets thought and behaved. He could read the geopolitical signs of the times. And as a priest who had been organizing Catholic resistance to the Nazi version of totalitarianism, he had on-the-ground experience with clandestine combat against monstrous ideology.

Today's survivors of Soviet communism are, in their way, our own Kolakovices, warning us of a coming totalitarianism-a form of government that combines political authoritarianism with an ideology that seeks to control all aspects of life. This totalitarianism won't look like the USSR's. It's not establishing itself through "hard" means like armed revolution, or enforcing itself with gulags. Rather, it exercises control, at least initially, in soft forms. This totalitarianism is therapeutic. It masks its hatred of dissenters from its utopian ideology in the guise of helping and healing.

To grasp the threat of totalitarianism, it's important to understand the difference between it and simple authoritarianism. Authoritarianism is what you have when the state monopolizes political control. That is mere dictatorship-bad, certainly, but totalitarianism is much worse. According to Hannah Arendt, the foremost scholar of totalitarianism, a totalitarian society is one in which an ideology seeks to displace all prior traditions and institutions, with the goal of bringing all aspects of society under...

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Verlag
Sentinel
Erscheinungsdatum
2020
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0593087399
ISBN 13 
9780593087398
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Anzahl der Seiten
256
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
gpsr@phaidon.com
gpsr@phaidon.com

Zähringerstraße 24
Berlin
10707
Deutschland

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