Rod Dreher. Live Not by Lies. Sentinel, 2020.

I have mentioned before that I had a friend who used yellow highlighter to highlight clever sayings and important ideas in books and articles he would read and share. Sometimes he would say that the article or book should just be dipped into a bucket of yellow ink. Live Not by Lies is like that.

Live Not by Lies gets its title from an esssay by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, arguably the greatest writer of the Twentieth Century. It is a miracle that any of Solzhenitsyn’s work ever saw the light of day, but once One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich was authorized by the Soviet government, he had an audience. Eventually, that same government would send him into exile, only because by then he had become too prominent to kill.

Solzhenitsyn wrote his article “Live Not by Lies” to his fellow Russians as he departed his homeland. In it he emphasizes that totalitarian governments survive because they force people to either believe or at least stay silent about lies. The way for the individual to survive is to hold on to the truth, and share it when able.

Dreher’s book Live Not by Lies is written for Americans and other Westerners who have been witnessing Political Correctness and now the Cancel Culture. In the nineties P.C. was merely one voice among a number. Twenty-five years later it has morphed into an industrial censorship that is itself totalitarian in nature. We read, for example, that a majority of college students do not talk about certain subjects because they know they would be accused of some kind of egregious fault. Ironically, often the accusation lodged against them is intolerance, yet they are “de-platformed” if not flunked for expressing a legitimate opinion.

Dreher takes a realistic approach. First, importantly, he defines his terms. Totalitarian is not the same as dictatorship or monarchy. A dictatorship may be a tyrannical rule, but if people are careful not to criticize the dictator too much, they can get along. Yes, Saddam Hussein was a tyrant. He won his election eleven million to zero. But he tolerated different religions and different Muslim and non-Muslim sects. He was like Burke’s Turkish Sultan, “who governs with a loose reign that he govern at all.”

A totalitarian system requires conformity, especially conformity in belief. Of course, the two totalitarian movements from the Twentieth Century were Fascism and Communism. It was not enough that one believed in nationalism or in redistribution, one had to believe and act a certain way all the time. Any deviation was, to use Orwell’s term, thought-crime.

So Dreher interviews people who managed to survive under Communism in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe without compromising their beliefs. Some were killed. Many were imprisoned, but Dreher shows us what they did. While he does mention a few people like Corrie ten Boom who were activists against the Nazis, he focuses on Communism because that lasted a lot longer and its thinking has influenced multiple generations.

While Live Not by Lies was written specifically for Christians, it notes that the “underground” or “resistance” or “samizdat” or whatever you wanted to call it was not limited to those believers. Czech dissidents often were secular or atheists, but they had much humanity in common with Christian believers. In Poland and Slovakia, they were mostly Catholic since that was the dominant religion in those countries.

They commonly met in small groups, often beginning with the family. Communism has always tried to replace the family with government. Parents learned to speak the truth to their children to counter the propaganda and lies they were taught in school. Such parents or their adult children would join with others who had similar outlooks on truth and freedom.

One Polish priest, for example, was willing to share his beliefs with anyone. He knew that at least one priest he worked with was a government informer, but he believed it was right to share the truth with him. That priest would become a martyr and has been beatified by the Catholic Church. Others were more careful and suspicious.

One building in Slovakia that housed some dissidents had a very carefully hidden printing press which was never discovered. Many others copied down notes and words of the Bible and other forbidden books to read and pass along. One Slovak family said their favorite was the work of Tolkien. They said they could relate to the tales because they knew Mordor was real.

Dreher is not optimistic about the West. He sees too much conformity. People who believe in a variety of things are no longer tolerated. They have been silenced. In America, it is not yet the government doing this, but publishers, academia, social media all seem to conform to a kind of elitism which believes more government and more sexual immorality are good for people. He sees a “capitalist conformity.”

The Western future may not be like the Soviet Union. Indeed, while he does quote from Orwell, he sees Huxley’s Brave New World as a closer model than 1984. In the Soviet style or under Big Brother, people accepted lies to avoid torture and death. Under Mustapha Mond, people accepted lies and a caste system for comfort, including “pneumatic” sex and interactive movies. That seems to be our direction.

Dreher mostly illustrates from example. Here is what people did under great oppression. One former Soviet prison guard tells how he was haunted most of his life when he and his fellow officials lined up thirty Orthodox priests and asked them one by one if they believed in God. Each said he did and each was immediately shot in the head. He can still see all the bloody faces. Those men did not live by a lie. Yes, they were killed, but their Savior told them “the truth shall set you free.” (John 8:32) If they submitted to the lie, they would not be free.

Dreher also authored a very different book reviewed earlier on these pages, How Dante Can Save Your Life. Live Not by Lies sounds political. In many ways, so was The Divine Comedy with all its political and ecclesiastical types in all three regions of the afterlife. The Divine Comedy gave the author hope when he was going through a kind of identity crisis.

Live Not by Lies, though serious and even ominous, can give its readers hope. Not that they will survive comfortably or unscathed, but that they can learn the love of God and the love of truth through the Gift of Suffering (Dreher uses this as a chapter title). As the Lord Jesus Himself said:

Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness’ sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Blessed are you when they revile and persecute you, and say all kinds of evil against you falsely for My sake. Rejoice and be exceedingly glad, for great is your reward in heaven, so so they persecuted the prophets who were before you. (Matthew 5:10-12)

Amen.

N.B.: For the original “Live Not by Lies” by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, see https://www.solzhenitsyncenter.org/live-not-by-lies. His list of commitments to truth sound very applicable to today’s Western world, let alone contemproary, post-Soviet Russia.