10.08.2020

What Families Need to Know about the Coming Soft Totalitarianism


This guest post is by Joseph A. Kohm, Jr., the Vice President for Development of the C.S. Lewis Institute, a global Christian discipleship ministry, headquartered in Washington, D.C. with the family discipleship ministry "Keeping the Faith."

 


At some point in the not too terribly distant future, every faithful Christian will have wished they had read Live Not by Lies: A Manual for Christian Dissidents, by Rod Dreher.  The safer bet is to just go ahead and read it now.  A few years ago, Dreher, an author, blogger, and social commentator, began being contacted by individuals who had lived through Communism in the Soviet Union before the fall of the Berlin Wall to tell him they were seeing similar trends between the rise of Communist totalitarianism in Soviet Russia and the rise of a different type of totalitarianism in America.  A first he was skeptical, but when the Christian owners of a small-town pizzeria in Indiana in 2015 told a local reporter they would not cater a same-sex marriage if asked, the online backlash against them, including death threats and a warning that their business would be burned down, caused him to reconsider. 


Dreher distinguishes the totalitarianism in the Soviet Union, which had the force of the state behind it, from the soft totalitarianism in America where compliance is forced by elites with powerful social media platforms, and private corporations, who have access to the technology that controls our lives. 


But what is it that this new totalitarianism is enforcing?  It is not a different politics.  Rather, Dreher assets it is a different religion.  “Far from being moral relativists,” the new totalitarians “are rigorists with a deep and abiding concern for purity and they do not hesitate to enforce their sacrosanct beliefs.” This new religion has its own canon – gender and identity studies, its own telos – John Lennon’s Imagine, its own soteriology – Allyship, and its own sacraments – abortion. Transcendence is found in the creed that the arc of the universe bends towards justice, providing the comforting belief that ideological progress has some sort of moral force.  Dreher writes, “Intersectionality is social justice ecumenism.” Those that dare stand for or preach the heresies of orthodox Christianity will have to be prepared perhaps to lose their jobs, lose access to professional designations, or lose access to educational opportunities, all of which are similar to what we see happening with China’s social credit system for their citizens.


Dreher does not just give us a diagnosis, but he provides the prescription too.  Consistent with the purposes of this blog, Dreher strongly recommends that parents value nothing more than the truth, teaching “your children to identify lies and refuse them.”  Do not let the media and educational institutions propagandize your children.  Instead, preserve the real meaning of words with small fortresses of memory, as, “Memory is a weapon of cultural self-defense.”


Parents can accomplish this by creating a “parallel polis,” which is an alternative set of social structures where social, intellectual, and religious life can be lived outside of official approval. Other ways parents can insulate their families from the coming soft totalitarianism is by memorizing Scripture, celebrating Feast Days, forming small groups, learning and teaching traditional cooking, among other things. These undertakings work to restore families and strengthen them.


Dreher’s critics, and there are many of them since he wrote The Benedict Option: A Strategy for Christians in a Post-Christian Nation a few years ago, dismiss him as an alarmist. Perhaps with those critics in mind, the first words in Live Not by Lies are the words of Soviet dissident Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn – “There always is this fallacious belief: ‘It would not be the same here; such things are impossible.’ Alas, all the evil of the twentieth century is possible everywhere on earth.” 


Instead of dismissing Dreher as an alarmist, an honest assessment of the cultural barometers around us indicate that it is getting more difficult for faithful Christians to live out the mandate to be salt and light.  Live Not by Lies is an important roadmap for how to carry out this mandate in the future.    

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