Live Not by Lies: A Conversation with Author Rod Dreher about Moral Resistance in a Secular Age

[Music] this is thinking in public a program dedicated to intelligent conversation about frontline cultural and theological issues with the people who are shaping them i'm albert mower your host and president of the southern baptist theological seminary in louisville kentucky you know rod drear is a new york times bestselling author his 2017 book the benedict option became one of the most discussed volumes in recent christian history you can also find a thinking a public conversation with him about that book but today we're going to be talking about his latest book live not by lies and i think it's if anything an even more important book than the benedict option you also know rod dreir as a very influential writer online and in print for the american conservative he has a long career in journalism and as a public intellectual he is right now known as an author who is raising some of the most important issues for intelligent christians in the world today he's made many media appearances across the waterfront to the mainstream media and it is my great privilege to welcome to thinking in public rod drear roger welcome to thinking in public it's great to be back you know the last time you were on the program you're here on the campus discussing your book the benedict option and uh you know that was a book that created just about as much conversation as any book written by a christian can uh in today's moment in society i can only hope that the same thing is true of live not by lies your your new book a manual for christian dissidents and so i want to start out by telling you that uh we had a fascinating conversation about the benedict option and some of that just has to come up in this conversation but uh i actually think this is a far more important book and i mean no no slight to the benedict option but i think in the course of uh the benedict option was most important for its powerful argument i think this book is not only an argument it's it's very emotionally moving and i think you probably intended to be so i did this is really more a book of storytelling lived not by lies than the benedict option and there is the theoretical cultural analysis in the front part of the book but the heart of the book is my it's made of my interviews with christians in the former sylvia block and in russia who came through the communist yoke and who have stories about that that they want american christians to know so we can prepare ourselves for what they see correctly i think as a different kind of totalitarianism that's coming up on us now we're going to get into this in some detail and texture but you discuss the distinction between a hard totalitarianism and we're going to talk about just how hard for example a soviet totalitarianism was as compared to a soft totalitarianism and and that's not unique to you that kind of language has been used before but uh i i i have to wonder if between the time you set out this argument and when we're having this conversation you've had further thoughts about the distinction between hard and soft totalitarianism play that out a bit for us well you know i um i conceived the idea of the book back in 2015 under circumstances we might talk about later after an elderly czech woman made the remark that the things she's seeing happening in this country now remind her of what she left behind in czechoslovakia but i've been thinking about it for a while and i finally sold the book proposal in early 2019 turned the manuscript in at the end of february and thought you know how am i going to sell this book to my fellow christians i believe the argument is solid that we're on the verge of a soft totalitarianism but i remember with the benedict option i got a lot of christians saying you're being alarmist things really aren't that bad well then since i turned the final manuscript in here comes covet and here comes george floyd and race riots and the the uh militant wokeness now within institutions within uh college campuses within journalism uh within big business that's really transforming uh these environments i don't think now that i have nearly as much of a challenge uh selling the argument to christians who are the least bit observant as i would have just six seven months ago yeah well let's kind of trace this through an intellectual history for just a bit and the history of the 20th century uh the marxists were very frustrated and marx himself as well as engels very frustrated that the uh the bolshevik revolution of course they they didn't see it but the the revolution that became known in russia as a bolshevik revolution uh they thought it would happen in a city like london or or berlin and especially the the more industrialized the more class dominated and all the rest it didn't happen and by the time you get to the the period between the two wars in the 20th century and then especially afterwards you've got uh people on the left making the the judgment that there's no way people are just too far along in a consumer society uh it's just too far along in this uh this idea of representative democracy that uh there's going to be anything like a bolshevik revolution in london or washington or you know chicago and and so instead the european marxist said we've got to do the long march through the institutions as you as you use the language um but it seems to me that uh when you're talking about this soft totalitarianism it's actually kind of the backside of that so if if the the bolshevik revolution didn't happen in london and in washington or for that matter in rome and in paris uh because we're kind of far along in a consumer society and all the rest one of the interesting points you make and we're reading the same stuff is that it's that very consumer society that that becomes the engines of the soft totalitarianism right right the bolsheviks sought to and the orthodox marxist sought to capture the means of economic production what these neo-marxists have done and they did this in the 1960s there was an interesting flip when everybody lost faith in the bolshevik of the communist economic model they decided to make the capturing the means of cultural production their goal and that's what happened this is when identity politics in the late 60s early 70s began to supplant class politics in the marxist mind and it turns out that this goes quite well with advanced capitalism you know when you what you can tell people that who they are is what they what they will what they desire well you can sell them a lot of products that way and uh so this is why one of the reasons i think that we've we've lived long enough to see big business big capitalism uh become uh watch hand in hand with the woke revolution because it's all about constructing an identity out of your own desires but unfortunately i believe that capitalism is going to see it has created the grounds for its own dissolution because of this and and uh the totalitarianism is there and americans know it but uh are just kind of apparently okay with it yeah uh so you shoshanna zuboff in her book you know the uh age of surveillance capitalism i pointed many people to that book saying look they're not going to come and take your freedom you're giving it away we are by the way i mean even to have this conversation absolutely i uh when i was in prague interviewing this woman camilla vendeva for the book she and her late husband botswana bender they were the only christians in the inner circle around barcelona uh in the dissidence there in charter 77. i was sitting in her apartment talking to her and i noticed that she had a dumb phone on the table next door not a smartphone and i asked her about that and she said you know in my family meaning her adult children and their children we don't use smartphones and we're very careful about the internet because if you've been through what we've been through you know that there's no such thing as the innocent gathering of personal data by outside agencies now in their case it was the state but in our case it's private corporations google amazon facebook and so on and so forth she looked at me and said you know americans are so naive you think that as long as you're doing nothing wrong you have nothing to hide and that nobody's going to hurt you gathering the information gives power to those who have the information she said and they will find a way to use it against you one day and uh and i thought later about this about how you know if somebody from the government came to our front doors here in america and said we would like to install this speaker it's going to make your life your consumer life so much easier it's called alexa make your life easier it'll also be listen to what you say and transmitting it back to a company we would know right away what that was and we would tell them no but if a big big business can come to us and tell us it can make our lives easier we'll pay them money to put it in our house this is the way that they're doing this right under our nose completely legally with our consent yeah absolutely i in 2017 i was in berlin uh it was uh a series of uh meetings for the 500th anniversary of the reformation and i was in cadave the uh the famous department store and it's a great symbol of berlin by the way an amazing place to visit and i was in there and i picked up a necktie and i got a text and so i put the necktie down and picked up the text and it was about the necktie wow and uh it was an alert on the phone and i thought you know i i wanted to run out right you know what but but how many of us especially young people would have gotten that and said oh cool look at this this might be a deal for me i mean and this is how we become groomed by technology by the uncritical acceptance of technology which is really a collective myth in our in our culture that technology is always good it's always bringing making things better for us we become groomed to accept uh the conditions of our own captivity yeah well let's stipulate some terms here we are now living in a post-christian condition in the west uh we're living in a situation in which there's a new moral regime in power gaining influence and frankly in motion continually in what they would characterize as a progressivist arc we have i mean the hegelians are basically in control and uh this is the unfolding of history and what they see as inevitable we're obstacles to that christianity is a patriarchal and oppressive remnant of uh of old western man as c.s lewis said that uh that is is has to be removed literally toppled off of a statue plinths and pictures taken down and names taken off and but in this in this condition the powers of cultural persuasion and formation are so unbelievably strong that uh it's going to take everything in us to prevent christianity simply being co-opted into perhaps begrudging part of the system yeah and it's already happening everywhere we look so many churches catholic protestant otherwise are surrendering to this uh wokeness as as we call it it's left-wing social ideology because they're desperate to be relevant right and there's nothing more quickly dated than relevance as you well know but i i i think about the stories that i got from these people in the soviet bloc about the way the the communist totalitarians controlled people by controlling their cultural memory that's one man tomas shy in budapest i quote him in the book he said that when he was growing up under communism the government was constantly hitting them with propaganda trashing the past anything traditional religion folkways farmers farm like that sort of thing it was condemned as useless and old and what they were doing they were trying to condition these young people to to accept anything that the government said to them as as as part of progress right the grand march of progress he said that imagine how it is to get to my age he's in his 60s now and to have lived through the last 30 years of capitalism and freedom here in my country and to realize that uh capitalism and liberal democracy has done more to effectively erase the cultural memory in my country and its people than even communism did yeah you know your book is very eurocentric you're looking basically at western civilization as the backdrop of conversation we'll get more to that specific context in a moment but at several points in thinking about your book i was reminded of what's going on in the ultimate surveillance state right now in china and it was interesting the financial times and the new york times both ran just massive articles in the last year or so on the fact that uh the chinese people by and large are accepting a new social contract in which that surveillance date is just a fact and there was a a a chinese student studying in the united states and was communicating with her mother back in china and her mother said yes but our our condition meaning material condition is so much better than it was and i thought you know americans reading the financial times in new york times are gonna look at that and say we never make that trade and i'm thinking yes what you're making right now exactly i think china is the future uh i and i hate to say that but when i i began looking into china and its so-called social credit system yeah uh i did this in context of reading shashana zubov's age of surveillance capitalism i thought my god this is how they're going to do it here in china we are doing it here are doing it here yeah in china the the state maintains this constant surveillance through everything is integrated with the the what the work you do on your smartphone on your computer what you do on the street because of the cameras everywhere facial recognition software they know what you're doing all the time and they feed it into a central bank and this is oversimplified but it's basically true and so each citizen has a profile a social credit score if you do socially positive things according to the government like downloading the speeches of xi jinping well then you get a higher score and you have more privileges if you do socially negative things like go to church or hang out with people who do and who have low social credit scores yours goes down and you lose consumer privileges and so this is how they can control people without the secret police ever having to show up at your front door well guess what as you said we're doing this here the same data the same data are being gathered right now by the free market by google amazon facebook and so on and it's not going to take much to operationalize that to cause an american social credit system that will and as everybody around us wants to have a higher standard of living we will be willing to give up these fundamental political freedoms for the sake of comfort you know i i saw something and i didn't intend to talk about this but i'm going to i saw something uh just the other day um and let me just pause it i am not a pandemic denier i am not a covid 19 denier uh we follow on this campus all the social distancing mask wearing and all the other things that are quite rational responses to a pandemic much as would have been called for in the 1918 flu if we had understood better than how it worked so in other words i i am i am i am uh i'm doing my best as an institutional president as a christian leader and just as an individual husband and father grandfather to try to act responsibly in this but but i look at that social credit system and i realize that the way it works in china is that they have the perfect contact tracing system so even if nothing is ever brought to your attention and in that giant set of algorithms in the chinese cloud they know everyone who's been in proximity to anyone else anyone who's been seen routinely talking to someone else and and so if there then ends up being a problem uh not only do you use lose your social credit score but those with whom you associate are warned and i look at that contact tracing system and i tell you what if if it does appear that in the middle of covid19 there are governments and others who are all of a sudden saying there are real opportunities here for an awful lot of control and the question is do they have any intention of giving that up post coveted no they won't and in fact i think excuse me i think that you know as if we see political violence and unrest sustained political violence and unrest in this country after the fall election or over the next two or three years i think that that will be the excuse too that liberal elites use to bring about a social credit system just to create make the whole country a safe space and i think the whole covet experience i'm like you i'm not a cova denier at all in fact i've been kind of irritated with a lot of my fellow conservative christians for for getting their backs up about this nevertheless it is a grooming opportunity for the the surveillance state and if we are all told you know what if you want to get your economy back then submit to this system china its economy is roaring back right now if we're told that that is the deal we need to make and people are sick and tired of having to sit at home having to see their businesses collapse and so on and so forth a lot of us will make that deal because we have forgotten as a people how to suffer and that was one of the most important lessons of my entire journey in writing this book so uh several things come to mind i mean uh honestly a part of the power of this newest of your books lived not by lies is not just the narratives that it tells and and the social analysis and the thesis of your book but the opportunities to connect dots so uh one of the things i thought of when i just began the the first few pages of your book was uh neil postman's amusing ourselves to death now you know several decades old uh and the interesting thing is he begins by saying that you know people in the west were concerned about an orwellian dystopia 1984. and he says but we now know that that's not what we really should have been fearing we should have been fearing aldous huxley's brave new world you know it's it's it's it's not the the the boot and fist of 1984 we have to fear it's the uh it's the therapeutic placebo you know uh right right you know narcotized uh uh culture but now i have a feeling that uh you know when i read your book i thought you know i'd love to bring neil postman into this discussion and say it turned out it was or well after all well you know i had to think about huxley and you you know the story from the book i when i was in budapest doing some interviews i was riding through the city on a tram with my young translator she's a married four years small child at home a catholic and she was telling me how frustrating she finds it in among her friends there in the city because she can't talk to any of them about the struggles she has as a young wife and mother because as soon as she begins to say you know this is really hard because of this out of the other they immediately jump in and say oh just leave your husband you know put your child put your son in daycare and uh and go back into the workplace you'll be happier that way and she said to me that um i want to tell them like no i like being a wife i love my husband i love being a a stay-at-home mom but it's just hard this is human life help me deal with this and i looked at her and said anna it sounds like you're fighting for your right to be unhappy she said that's it where did you get that so i pull out my smartphone of course and go to chapter 17 of huxley's brave new world where huxley where the mustafa man the world controller has the showdown with john the savage who lives on the outskirts of society now compare that to in orwell's 1984 when winston smith the protagonist meets the torturer o'brien o'brien tries to grind him down physically to get him to conform but mustafa mod when he confronts a savage and huxley he said why wouldn't you want to join our world this is christianity without tears and uh so uh john the savage says i'm fighting for my right to be unhappy and that's a hard sell to young people and any people today in our civilization but that's what we have to fight for right you speak of young people you know another work i thought of was arthur kessler's darkness at noon one of the most tragically prophetic works of the 20th century and uh one of the aspects of that work is how uh kessler shows that the retreat into the mind you know that eventually the only the only safe place was in your own mind and it strikes me that given the ubiquity of digital and social media young people in our world today don't have that uh or very few of them do and so you know uh the the the powers of social coercion moral coercion uh especially amplified through social media and and digital media it's such that if an 18 year old dares to think a thought contrary to the regime uh if they'll just be savaged you know canceled um this is how they have that whole technology has whether intentional or not has conditioned an entire generation to be terrified of of anxiety and of non-conformity you know i a couple years ago i was up at harvard in boston and i i ended up having lunch with a friend of mine who was finishing graduate work at harvard he was european we had lunch and i said so what is the most important thing you've learned about in your time here at the world's greatest university and he said how fragile the american leadership elite are i said really what do you mean he said this is so shocking to us europeans we would go into classes this was at the kennedy school of government and professors would start the classes by saying okay we're not going to talk about this this and the other thing today because some of you have come to me ahead of time and said that it would be too triggering for you so we'll leave that off the discussion and this italian he was my italian friend he said the rest of us europeans looked at each other like wait what is happening here is this a university but that happened in every class and uh you and i were talking before we started recording i'm scheduled to go speak at a small university here in louisiana later tonight and i have been warned by the professor there hey you might need to be just be aware that there are some professors here who don't want you here because they they're afraid that your words talking about my book will cause young people to feel unsafe i mean it's just it's incredible how this has happened and again it has not been enforced on us by the government this has come to us through consumer capitalism and our own free choice yes but uh to force a bit of a point with you uh i think my first thought in reading your book is the distinction between hard and soft totalitarianism is actually a tautology uh i know what you're doing with it and i'm agreeing with i'm in agreement with your analysis but here's here's my point totalitarianism is totalitarianism and the distinction between hard and soft is going to be hard to maintain so for instance let's say that you're talking about the united states there is no communist party to exercise discipline there is no secret police that is uh you know dragging us out of our homes at night but uh i think we're looking at a future in which uh conservative evangelical traditionalist roman catholics orthodox christians uh hasidic jewish citizens and others they're gonna be in a position which their kids are not gonna be able to go to law school yeah absolutely that's so is but that's not soft that's hard you know they're not going to be able to uh enter into certain professions and other things they don't have access to professions and uh funding and admissions and things and so i i just want to i want to say that uh one of my thoughts was what's called soft totalitarianism becomes pretty hard pretty fast i see what you mean yeah and i think one of the reasons i draw the distinction is because i want to anticipate the charge that i'm an alarmist you know they're not building gulags out in the desert uh no they're not not here not here no they're doing it in china but uh they have um they have softer ways more therapeutic ways of implementing the totalitarianism and so that's why we don't see it coming we americans because it's all happening under the guise of helping and you know and of social justice and so forth but these people who saw the same sort of thing happen in the in the soviet bloc that's why they're trying to warn us and ultimately it will turn hard and i'll tell you one thing too that worries me in the soviet bloc at least if you lost your job within a university or any good job uh because you are a political dissident there was always something you could do it maybe it was sweeping a street but there was something you could do but in the chinese social credit system because it's a cashless society and everything is done it's almost completely cashless now everything is done with your smartphone if the government wants to it can make it impossible for you to buy or sell you become a non-person what's that you become what the soviets called a non-person right and so what if that happens here you know for the first time in doing this project i got in touch with my inner hal lindsey and thought my god we they really can make it to where we can't buy or sell and that is something new yeah it is something new and and look we're seeing it and i i don't think i have an inner hell lindsey but uh but nonetheless uh i believe that every word of scripture is true and every word of prophecy will take place exactly as foretold and the mechanisms that were not imaginable 20 years ago are now quite before us to such an extent that nothing actually needs to happen now for that prophecy to be fulfilled nothing technological is now necessary everything technological is now in hand that's right and you know i i've noticed too in this cova thing i bet you have as well that when i go out into the world to shop for groceries or get fast food i don't have cash in my wallet anymore some of my uh the places i shop like starbucks they won't even accept cash right and so this again is a matter of grooming us to live in a cashless world now let's let's just have fun theologically here for just a moment uh a part of uh a biblical affirmation and what we would call a christian worldview a christian world view of of life and meaning and morality uh one of the goods is materiality uh you know you and i've had conversations about uh music streaming versus even cds at least you own a cd it's a material thing you know you can lose it you can file it you can put it in a machine and listen to it uh you don't have to have you know you don't have to you don't have to announce the entire world what you're listening to on a cd player but you do announce to the whole world what you're streaming and uh so you know i i look at that and i think um that materiality is something that we're we're losing so you know in the roman empire uh for instance and throughout most of i mean until bretton woods in one sense yeah richard nixon uh a coin actually had real material value and and even a bill had real material value behind it in fort knox but now we're in a world of lacking on materiality and i just want to say i think as a christian theologian that's a dangerous world you know there is a book that just came out this week as we're talking a new novel called alexandria by an english writer paul kingsnorth and it's one of the most important books i've read in a while he's not a christian though he's interested in christianity we've talked about it but it's a set in the future it's a dystopia set a thousand years into the future after an ecological catastrophe and what the the point of the book is is about the body the importance of regaining materiality in the body the people who are holding out for the human or those who are trying to resist the techno totalitarians that promise if we can just get rid of this body then we will know everything and be able to live in peace and harmony this is a lesson for us today not in the in the tradition of the best dystopian fiction it's a lesson about what we're facing today i want to take us back into the book and uh i really want uh listeners to this conversation to to read your book i say that about just about every uh conversation i have because i only have conversations i want to have for this program so that that's a that's the filter right there but there are certain books that i think at a certain moment are really really helpful to the church and i really believe that your book live not by lies is one of those i didn't have to be told where the title came from uh a part of my intellectual adventure in life is that uh through being a 16 year old reading national review magazine and the university bookman and things like that i came to know of solzhenitsyn and then of course he won the nobel prize for literature and was very much a part of international conversation but then uh through being active in politics i came to know you know of uh even the situation when uh gerald ford refused to meet with solzhenitsyn you know one of the great presidential errors of modern american history but uh solzhenitsyn was just a part of how i learned to think and what i would say are profoundly more augustinian terms and and it wasn't so it's a young evangelical protestant kind of comes to terms with evil by reading solzhenitsyn so so this was his final address to the to the russian people where the soviet people tell us what's going on when sultanate says live not by lies yeah that well the soviets were on the verge of kicking him out of the country exiling him to the west last thing he wrote uh in 1974 he sent a communique to them through samusdot with under the title live not by lies it's a short little essay in which he told them look people may say that we can do nothing as ordinary people against this kingdom of lies as totalitarian tyranny but that's not really true we can always refuse to offer our consent and our affirmation that what they're saying is true he said i'm going to read this from the book we are not called upon to step out onto the square and shout out the truth to say out loud what we think this is scary we're not ready he writes but let us at least refuse to say what we do not think and uh that was the power of the powerless to use a phrase that was used three years later by botslav hovel in a famous essay he wrote to the eastern european dissidents that made the same basic point of silence and that you know when we are powerless to change the system we at least can refuse to say what we do not think now i think we're somewhere near the same age uh and i i want to ask you but i'm i'm 61. so uh the great fact of the soviet union the massive fact of the soviet union framed so much of my childhood and uh and adolescence and uh you know i i wanted to understand it wanted to understand ideas so i would read the communist manifesto i i i actually got a hold of you know other soviet propaganda and just read it and by the way none of it none of it made sense including the fact that it even a 15 year old in the united states could figure out the only thing that was true with their five year plans is that they never were successful at all but uh but it just became the the whole the whole soviet experiment of horrifying repression and and yet i just think most people who are half my age might as well be hearing about the holy roman empire in other words they they just don't know and that worries me because it's it's it i i think it worries me the way that uh uh so many of our jewish friends in their 90s are worried that this far from the holocaust people think of it like mesopotamia right right well this is why uh the importance or they stress the importance of cultural memory maintaining historical and cultural memory as a means of resistance in the book i quote a passage from the czech dissident novelist milan kundera who is quoting putting words in the mouth of gustav hushak who is one of the communist dictators in in czechoslovakia and he's addressing the youth saying children don't look back keep going into the progressive future because the memory of history is uh is a weight on them and allows them to have the the people who remember history it gives them something uh a perspective by which to judge the present and so in in my book live not by lies i had this amazing conversation with a young woman from california 26 years old college graduate who happened to mention to me that she thought communism was a great idea the brotherhood of man what what could be better than that i looked at her and said well what about the gulags she said what she honestly did not know about the gulags did not know about the soviet union somebody had told her about communism had given her the song and dance but here she was a college graduate in the united states of america no idea you know that's part of the reason why so many college students and others even high school students and how they're being polled on this i'm not even sure but uh you know you see credible research saying that they're so much more open to socialism and so i uh i found myself in conversation with a 20 year old about this just recently and uh he did not condemn socialism the way i thought he would and i thought well okay you know lacking the experience and the entire experience of the 20th century let's just have this conversation so i said so let's forget we're talking about a massive society like the united states let's just forget that for a moment let's forget we're talking about the common about the kentucky or the city of louisville let's just say we're talking about you and your three best friends how was it how'd it work to have central planning in terms of what all four of you would own and what you would drive and how much you could make and on what you could spend and all this and he said well that's that's that's something you know none of us would put up with i said well that is the smallest unit of socialism i can imagine so you now you're saying let's have that controlled by people in the state you know this is you just need to bring back someone like margaret thatcher who just pointed out says you know her most famous line was socialism you know eventually runs out of someone else's money to spend but the other thing she said was that when it comes to socialism you know she says it again it doesn't work in your family how is it going to work at the scale of a nation extended family she met extended family well you know your story reminds me of something that happened to me in moscow last year when i was over there interviewing people i talked about this in the book i had spent three the pre three previous days interviewing people who had come through the gulag and seen all kinds of horrible things i was having dinner at the home of a russian family christians and i blurted out at the beginning i don't understand how anybody ever could have taken what the bolshevik said seriously the father looked at me and said you don't understand it and he goes back 300 years and he takes me through a tour of russian history for 300 years about how the the rich had oppressed the poor and the church had collaborated with this by the time we get to the late 19th century he said look i'm not saying the bolsheviks are right they were wrong and they were evil but you see where they came from because people so many poor people had been so beaten down and had so little hope for anything that uh when the bullshits came along preaching utopia they believed it now i think that is something we have to think about today too um uh cheswold mewalsh one of the great anti-soviet dissidents a poll said that people in the west uh this is during the cold war you know they don't really get communism why people would would pay attention to it and embrace it in the first place it's because it doesn't just talk about materiality it offers people a sense of hope it's a false hope but when people are hopeless this is something they can grab onto and seize but i just want to really come back at you on that because i think that's true but irrelevant um i can say that to a friend yeah you know i'm saying that just to get your attention the problem is that the advocates of socialism right now are not the disadvantaged they are upper middle class americans on university campuses so in other words yes i i understand i can go back with you you know to the uh to the massive massive poverty that was such a fact and by the way that that i mentioned the chinese daughter and and relating to her chinese mother who is still in china and was making an apology for the you know current social capital and credit system by saying you know things were so bad we had so little before i i understand that and that's why i'd understand it if i were hearing this and i wouldn't agree with it but i'd understand it if i were hearing this from someone in that context but we're hearing it it's kind of like occupy wall street right right but but the the whether it's a material fact or not the sense of anxiety that people have over that maybe they will lose what what what gains they've made that's what the socialists speak to i mean you have to keep in mind that in russia the the marxist never really got anywhere until the middle classes or what counted for the middle classes back then started listening to them it came in 1891-92 there was a terrible famine in russia the government failed miserably to handle it and that was the first time that the middle classes began to think well maybe these marxists have something to offer of course they didn't but that sense of uh that we can no longer believe in the hierarchies and institutions that were here uh that people opened themselves up to something new and i think that's what's happening here with socialism and even communism in this country these aren't the poor that are reaching out for it these are dissatisfied middle-class intellectuals and they think that when they hear socialism they don't hear uh redistribution of resources in the way you or i would hear it i think what they hear is we're going to have permanent security yeah well uh good luck with that yeah well they're wrong clearly they're wrong but i'm saying that we i think we have to take and i'm dealing with with my own son who's in college now and he's not a socialist at all but he was really interested in bernie sanders and i'm trying to understand why i mean you were raised in a conservative home and he said it's all about insecurity because and i have to admit that the world that faces him going when he graduates it's not nearly as solid as it was economically for his father yeah no i i get that entirely but then we have to ask the question why and what will be the conditions of some recovered stability so just in the last three days i've been in sustained conversation with a young man who's uh who's basically from silicon valley and if you want to see social inequality go to san francisco if you want to see the haves and the have-nots you want to see a housing crisis you know go to san francisco the closer you actually get to the new technological world the more ruthless it gets so you talk about insecurity well one of the greatest issues of insecurity is you you can be in at google today and out tomorrow and i mean out permanently um and by the way it can happen any number of ways but one thing is you know uh they they put a premium on youth to such a point that being 40 means you're kind of already out of date in silicon valley so you look at that and i'm thinking well you know here's the thing many of you are complaining about insecurity you're actually demanding the conditions that lead to insecurity and forfeiting the conditions that lead to any kind of real security yeah i think you're right about that but this is a hard argument to make it's one we have to figure out how to make to the these young people but i i believe just from the the work i've done that we have to narrow in on that sense that they have that all the institutions of society have failed them david brooks has this really interesting article in the atlantic this month about the collapse of social trust especially among the young in this country and uh i think that they're seeking out a false economic solution for something that's really deep down a spiritual and a moral problem yeah and that means what and this is my great frustration with david brooks uh that means it requires more than a little conservative turn it requires more than slowing down the progressivist train and making some kind of peace with it requires some kind of transcendent truth uh for human dignity and and and human rights and human liberty that uh yeah i just don't i just don't see coming from the squishy conservative whatever the new york times might consider to be a conservative it's just not there so yes i will look at that same thing i'll say you're absolutely right and uh robert putnam at harvard has uh done he's got another you know bowling alone and american grace he's got another very important book just coming out it's going to be fascinating it's going to be important and we'll be talking about it but how in the world do you reclaim social trust or rebuild social trust when you've destroyed the conditions that could produce that trust um that's why i think that's a failed experiment yeah i think you're right too and we think about technology what we're dealing with now when people can have their entire livelihoods destroyed by someone secretly recording them on a smartphone and using that technology to to it's spreading it to the world sir roger scrutin the late sir roger scrutin and the last year before he died i went to see him at his at his house to interview him for live not by lies and he had just come out of an attempt to destroy his reputation by a left-wing journalist who interviewed him and roger took him in on good faith and then smeared him by distorting his words thanks be to god roger had a recording of what he had actually said and that got out and discredited the journalists but if roger hadn't recorded that this journalist would have taken him down and uh it's people are willing to do that now in this age of ideology they're willing to people aren't just wrong they're evil and they're willing to tell any amount of lies to destroy their ideological enemies and this by the way is one of the things that made me realize i had a book here back in 2015 when i first heard from this czech woman we talked about i contacted this couple this hungarian couple i know in the uk in cambridge they defected from hungary the 1960s and i said baylor gabby this is what this old czech woman says is there anything to it they said absolutely we're seeing this play out here in england every day and the main thing they said was the way ideological actors on the left were willing to destroy people professionally and personally for not adhering to left-wing ideology they say it's madness my wife and i said baylor are looking at each other every day saying this was how it was when we were young back home so i want to turn to mechanisms for [Music] recovery um you know oasis of truth chapter seven of your book families are resistant cells and uh boy again given someone my age that title that that chapter title really gets my attention because i know what a resistant cell was i even know about uh you know the italian cell theory that uh became a part of european marxism and even so conservative christian dissidents uh created their own cells talk about that yeah i i dedicate the book to a man named uh thomas love kolakovic he was a croatian jesuit doing anti-nazi work in zagreb in 1943. he got a tip that the nazis the gestapo was coming for him so he escaped the country went to his mother's homeland slovakia and lived under her name kolakovic and taught in the catholic university there in bratislava he told the students he said the good news is the germans are going to lose this war the bad news is the communists are going to take this country over when it's done and the first thing they're going to do is come after the churches we've got to be ready for them so what father kolakovic did was put together small cells of really committed young catholics who had come together for prayer for scripture study but they also came together to talk about what was happening in the society around them and how they as christians were going to react to it they also learned the arts of uh resistance like how to resist an interrogation the bishops in slovakia told father kolakovic said you're being alarmist don't scare people like that but kolakovic had studied the soviet mindset because he wanted to do missionary work there and he didn't listen to the bishops he spread these cells all throughout his country sure enough when the iron curtain fell the first thing the communists did they came after the churches and father kolakovich's resistance cells became the background the backbone of the underground church for the next 40 years so what i think we need to do now in this country is figure out what that means for us if they were if we are in a 1943 kolakovich moment here what kind of cells should we be putting together to understand together as faithful christians what's coming and to figure out how to prepare for it and in a similar way you brought up the family chapter the benda family in prague faithful christian family they raised six kids as christians under communism and not only under communism but under uh in freedom in the most atheist country in europe and they're all practicing christians now i asked them how they did it and a lot of it had to do with the example the parents gave with the parents teaching them how to spot evil in the world but not only that of filling those kids their moral imaginations with goodness truth and with beauty through the reading of literature and discussing it within the family well the family is not just a resistant cell by sociological and moral fact it is so by ontology uh you would agree uh this is part of the order of creation this is a part of what god has done and uh to the extent that without the family as a resistant cell there's no resistance left and uh so i think of the documentation that you give uh in this book and the narratives are absolutely powerful and frankly i think to christian parents or i'm a christian grandfather uh it's just very encouraging sobering it's the kind of things that uh that we've all been thinking about back in 1993 uh i spoke at a a big private university not a christian university a big private university by invitation and it was shortly before i came here as president and i was asked in a press conference you know what is it you're trying to do i said i've got to go raise the resistance and uh and and they said to what you know what what does that mean and i said well and i i didn't give as extensive a list then as i would now but i said look that the for one thing the resistance to the protestant mainline powers that be resistance to the cultural left which was already then very very far along by 1993 uh and that was shortly after the casey decision you know in which you know people active in the pro-life movement as i was were devastated by the casey decision when it came down because this is all this effort to try to uh to reverse roe just for example you know and so it's resistance against now a regime that with everything we just talked about with social media you know surveillance capitalism uh the neo-marxism the critical theory and and all the rest uh the resistance is gonna have to be massively powerful right it has to be and i don't see where we get that power right now um just a minute and you're answering the question about the culture which is i can i can see why let's get to that but i mean the family is going to have to have an incredibly powerful convictional center absolutely absolutely we have to start there on the in the areas of life where we do have control which is over the family and we're going to have to be very intentional because if we're not we're going to be blown away as you'll remember from our discussion of the benedict option this monk he was the prior of the monastery in norcha in italy where saint benedict was born and i told him about the benedict option idea back when i made my first visit there he said uh listening to me he said i can tell you that any christian family who doesn't have that sort of some version of this that is to say sees itself as with intentionality is counter-cultural they're not going to make it over through what's coming no but now let's go back to what you were answering in the larger culture the i agree with you by the way uh but i want to come back after you say what you say and press the point go ahead yeah well i i think the the left has all the cultural high ground now make no mistake about it they are controlling all the institutions and uh it frustrates me to know when that conservative christian friends of mine think that if we can only get the politics right even at this late date they think if we can only get the politics right politics can turn it around look it's important to vote i mean i you look at the future of christianity i see the federal judiciary as being the last line of defense for christian schools and institutions in the future to come nevertheless politics and law cannot save us if the culture is rotten from within and right now i see so many christian families who are looking for their for there to be a political solution or they they blame their pastors for not doing enough when in fact they ought to be looking we ought to be looking in interiorly and seeing what can we do in our families and our churches and communities right now to build that resilience yeah we know here we are uh we're having this conversation shortly before a general election in the united states and i do not want in any way for christians to think there is any less urgency in voting than then when they began thinking about these issues i want them to see the stakes are even higher but politics is not only as daniel patrick moynihan said you know downstream from culture uh it's kind of the last line of slowing down uh a political movement which which by the way it gets me back to the very essence of american and english-speaking conservatism i mean going all the way back to burke and i am a burkian going all the way back to burke there was an open admission that conservatism is seeking to slow something down you don't need conservatism when you have a stable culture you need conservatives when people are trying to drive it in a leftist direction away from its its roots and and foundations and then you can fast forward to national review magazine you know what the william buckley jr saying it was his purpose to stand to thwart history and cry halt um but you know the the fact is that uh that if you do an honest historical analysis the problems just been around for a much longer period i mentioned buckley so uh i went back and reread something that i've read probably five times in my lifetime i went back and read buckley's book god and man yale in so many ways it was a seminal text for awakening a conservative movement in the united states and what reminded me is that you know basically right after world war ii before 1960 wave at buckley jr said yale's already lost and to the very same forces that we would now describe in other words it was uh it was the the the political progressivism that was and frankly a a very ardent secularism uh that was in control and so i realized this one other thing i want to throw out is that uh i think francis fukuyama is right in his foreign affairs article several several years ago when he said that the only conservative grounding of any society in the modern age is a middle class and if you eliminate the middle class or you gain the influence of the middle class you eventually will determine the the future of the society and the reason i raise that is because you mentioned the middle class in russia but it was very small very very small and uh but you look at the middle class now in the english-speaking world and uh it's basically giving up all the i mean you've the left say bourgeois values well but the middle class values of marriage fidelity investing in children uh thrift hard work labor all those things are just being dissipated before our eyes they were destroyed in the soviet union but they're being eliminated here right right you know you're saying that reminds me of going i hadn't gone a few years ago to a conservative evangelical college uh to give a speech this was made seven years ago and uh just having dinner with some of the professors before the speech and i was asking them what are you seeing among the students on campus and one of the professors said my greatest worry for them is that none of them will be able to form stable families i looked at him astonished i said but this is a conservative evangelical midwestern college how is this possible he looked at me with tears in his eyes and said because most of these kids have never seen a stable family i looked around the table and all the other professors were nodding and that really kind of red killed me because i i had this romantic idea that this conservative evangelical school this was going to be a bastion but this man was telling me that no the culture has degraded so much the culture of family that these kids don't even it doesn't even make sense to them and i i think that we are we're if we are going to have any hope at all of preserving christianity or even a memory of christianity it has to begin by rebuilding the family and that begins by making choices ourselves and reinforcing those choices and helping young people to to uh know to value marriage and and having children and helping them do so i cannot recommend this book with more enthusiasm live not by lies by rodrigo emmanuel for christian dissidents uh rod you're a friend i'm very thankful for you as a co-laborer in this great task of building the resistance and and you've done really good job now with uh with this book joining the benedict option and raising a lot of these issues and you know as a baptist talking to uh an eastern orthodox uh believer uh i'm in the position of saying i can go with you all the way on this book in a way that i actually couldn't with the benediction right you know what i'm saying that and you know one thing that i i learned from this research and the travels in the eastern bloc is that when these christians were thrown into prison the denominational lines collapsed it wasn't that they gave up denominational distinctives at all but it's that the real the deep brotherhood they had in jesus christ came forth and they helped each other and they prayed with each other and it made me realize that when the secret police came for them it didn't come because they were protestant didn't come because they were catholic or orthodox the secret beliefs came because they were followers of jesus christ i think the same thing is going to happen in its own way here in this society and that's why all of us who follow christ in any sort of tradition need to build these bonds and networks right now because we are going to need each other that is the kind of ecumenism that i can get behind and i bet you agree yeah in the sense that i would have to say that kind of ecumenism actually requires baptist to be more baptists and catholics to be truly catholic and the orthodox to be truly orthodox in the deepest resources uh we still have very important theological arguments to have but we're going to argue for each other's religious liberty and uh and freedom and dignity and the rights of each of us to raise our children as we see fit in the nurture and admonition of the lord and the right to defy the regime amen you know a christian federal judge friend of mine told me and this is a man who cares deeply about religious liberty he said that that christians have got to fight for the religious liberty of people who aren't christians because we are already a minority in this post-christian society and we either stick together we will hang separately and that's that's always stayed with me because whenever i say this is a point of agreement and where we can find common ground with people of other religion or even people of no religion at all when it comes to political rights the right of free speech and i'm really encouraged frankly by the the number of people who people like barry white's the journalist barry weiss a secular jew uh secular atheists like brett weinstein and his wife heather heing at evergreen state they're not believers they're not even conservatives but they have seen this soft totalitarianism with their own eyes and they are looking for allies to stand by them and fighting it and i'm proud to be with them yeah i think as in closing here of uh the speech given by emmanuel macron the president of france in recent days about creating a french islam and only relatedly did the christians figure out that if he's shutting down homeschooling for muslims he's also shutting down homeschooling for christians and jews that's right that's right that's the way it works this is this is one of the reasons why in the benedict option i i think i've found so much a much greater audience appreciation in europe it's been translated into 11 languages because these people know what it's like to live in a de-christianized society and they know how isolated they are and they know how badly they need each other rodriguez thank you again for joining me for thinking in public it was a pleasure thanks for having me many thanks to my guest rodriguez for thinking with me today if you enjoyed today's episode of thinking in public you will find more than a hundred of these conversations at albertmower.com under the tab thinking in public for information about the southern baptist theological seminary go to sbts.edu for information on boyce college go to boycecollege.com thank you for joining me today for thinking in public and until next time keep thinking i'm albert mohler [Music]

Channel: Albert Mohler

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Length: 61min 34sec (3694 seconds)

Published: Wed Oct 28 2020