(Rod Dreher) Live Not By Lies - Keynote Address

the fact that we think it can't happen here in america provides us to the fact that a different kind of totalitarianism is emerging in our country right now really excited for this keynote with rod dreyer uh obviously today we are going to be discussing and debating rod's best-selling book lived not by lies as i was thinking about my own preparatory remarks for this conversation and event i was reminded of a piece written by kim barrett a 2018 graduate of smith college which i understand is a liberal arts school in the northeast [Laughter] kim wrote a piece for the campus newspaper as she was just about a month away from graduating this is how she described her experience of four years at smith quote i witnessed countless conversations that consisted of one person telling the other person that their opinion was wrong the word offensive was almost always included in the reasoning shortly after these incidents and over the course of her four years as smith barrett describes quote i learned along with every other student to walk on eggshells for fear that i may say something offensive that is the social norm here this climate of fear as we now understand may have begun on college campuses but it did not stay there andrew sullivan writing a piece around the same time as kim in new york magazine titled an essay we all live on campus now and was one of the first to see the shift of this environment from the campus into the broader society in the essay he notes this essential quality now pervading america's public square andrew wrote this back in 2018 what we have now is far more than the liberal project of integrating minorities it comes close to an attack on the liberal project itself marxism with a patina of liberalism on top is still marxism and it's as hostile to the ideal of a free society as white nationalism is so if you wonder why our discourse is now so freighted with fear why so many choose silence as the path of least resistance or why the core concepts of a liberal society the individual's uniqueness the primary primacy of reason the protection of due process and objective truth are so deceived this is one of the reasons now why would a graduate policy school care about any of this you know debates over homelessness policy minimum wage foreign aid education policy are all important but they happen within a public square that either encourages or prevents the free exchange of ideas 2022 will mark the 25th anniversary of the school of public policy and as i'm preparing a series of events to mark the 25th anniversary i've been going back to the program's founding documents those meeting memos and strategic plans that were written back in the mid 90s in preparation for launching this unique program led by the great social scientist dr james q wilson a committee was formed in 1995 which helped to design our school's unique curriculum the statement of strategic intent which came out of those deliberations noted and i quote among other things the committee urged the university to proceed with its plans with a special emphasis on the founding mission and enduring philosophy of pepperdine their belief was that the existing schools of public policy do not place enough emphasis on the context of the moral ethical and spiritual paradigm which pepperdine encourages to further undergird pepperdine's unique legacy the committee recommended that effective public policy solutions should be rooted in the classic literature of history political philosophy economics and should be deeply immersed in concerns for moral and ethical principles that friends is who we are of course it's one thing to say you stand for something as an institution it's another thing to be supported in doing so and for this conference we are again grateful to howard amundsen and his fieldsted foundation for making today's event possible i'm so excited to note that we're already planning with fieldstead two more conferences next year in collaboration with them along many of these same things joining us here today is howard and his son david please join me in thanking them [Applause] so friends this is why we welcome rod dreyer and a number of terrific panelists here to malibu to discuss and debate rod's best-selling book live not by lies deriving the title from the charge given by the soviets dissident alexander sultanates into his countrymen and women living under totalitarianism rod argues in this book that a growing soft totalitarianism in america and across the west is growing which is squelching free expression and religious liberty rod is the senior editor of the american conservative and is the author of five books including two other new york times bestsellers the benedict option and the little way of ruthie lenny you have the programs i believe you should have received that when you came in you'll note that today we'll begin with a keynote from rod we'll begin here in the dining room and then we'll move outside back around into the wilburn auditorium for three response panels without any further ado please join me in welcoming back to the school of public policy thank you for your hospitality for that kind of introduction and thanks so much howard for your generosity uh if not for uh generosity of howard and roberta ahmedson i wouldn't have a career they've been such good supporters for so long so thank you again and i have to say though did we have to live in campus in america well um to the forward to the 1983 edition of the dulac archipelago the great anti-communist dissident and exile alexander solzanitsa criticized the complacency he saw in the west people here want to believe that what happened in russia that captured an enslavement of the country by totalitarians could not happen here in fact since solzhenitsan what happened in russia can happen in any country on earth under the right circumstances so he's right about that the fact that we think it can't happen here in america allows us to the fact that a different kind of totalitarianism is emerging in our country right now who says so none other than immigrants from soviet bloc countries who fled to the west to escape communist totalitarianism during the cold war and who now see a persian aversion of the same thing coming to be and what they thought was the land of the free i first began hearing from these people in the spring of 2015 when a doctor from the midwest told me about his elderly mother who in the 1950s had spent four years in a czech prison camp after being convicted of being a vatican spy she was about to conspire because she refused to stop going to church according to government his mother who immigrated to america after she was released from prison started telling him that the things she sees happening in her adopted country today again this back in 2015 reminds her of what she left behind well when i heard that i thought this was alarmist you know my mom is old too and watches a lot of cable news and gets easily alarmed and frightened by what she sees so in my travels whenever i would meet someone who had come to this country from this country i would just tell them the story of the old czech woman and ask them if they thought she was onto something every single one of them said yes and if you talk to them long enough you would hear the deep anger they have that their fellow americans don't believe them so what are they seeing they're seeing people afraid to speak their minds for fear of losing their jobs they're seeing ideologically motivated mobs terrifying people into silence they're seeing people judged not on the basis of their deeds or their ideas but on the basis of whether or not they are thought to be ideologically correct they're seeing people turned into instant pariahs for dissenting on the progressive party line they're seeing fear take over as this leftist ideology that we colloquially call wokeness takes over the ruling class and few people dare to challenge it because they have been bullied and decided they have internalized the code what they are witnessing is the emergence of a new form of totalitarianism a softer form but one that is totalitarian all the same why don't we see it it's not just because we don't think it can happen in america it's also because we have no gulags we have no secret police we have no red lines and all the other familiar aspects of cold war life behind the iron curtain besides we live in a liberal democracy not a one-party state so how can you call this totalitarianism well let's first ask what is totalitarianism it is an extreme form of authoritarianism one that came into existence in the early 20th century the term in fact was invented by the fascist dictator benito mussolini an authoritarian state is one in which a single party or ruler monopolizes political power this is also true in a totalitarian state but it goes much further under totalitarianism everything is political there is no aspect of life that is held to be outside the parameters of the ruling ideology authoritarians only demand your obedience totalitarians demand your soul we also miss the totalitarian aspects of wilderness because our idea of totalitarianism comes from george orwell's 1984. in that novel you'll recall the state uses pain and terror to compel people to love big brother well that's not happening here 1984 is much better known here in america than the other great english language dystopian novel of the 20th century ultasleep's brave new world the totalitarianism now arising is more like huxley's version than like orwell's huxley's totalitarianism was soft it was based not on manipulating pain and terror but rather on manipulating pleasure and comfort in huxley's world if you surrendered your freedom to the state you would be cared for in comfort and keeping kept entertained by sex and drugs this is more or less what today's panelist james polos has memorably called the pink police state iris is a soft totalitarianism as well because it is based on compassion for victims masquerading as social justice we are told that we must not say certain words for fear of hurting the feelings of certain sacred victim classes we're also told that not saying certain words is also intolerable because silence is violence another curious aspect of this new totalitarianism is that it's not coming primarily from the state oh the government certainly has its hand in it but the leading forces are non-governmental institutions that is schools and universities news and entertainment media big business law medicine sports and even the us military and the cia the woke have marched through nearly all of the institutions in american life and are using them to create an illiberal left-leaning regime this is not liberalism this is an illiberal left-wing machine well here's an example of how the left today uses liberal freedoms to create an illiberal regime earlier this year the catholic public intellectual ryan t anderson one of the most ironic people you'll ever meet he discovered that amazon had quietly stopped selling his book when harry became selling a critique of the ideology behind transgenderism now ryan is a careful thinker and writer trained under uh robbie george at princeton and ron goes out of his way not to be cruel or cheap in his criticism that book is sober clear logically argued and not at all sensationalistic in fact ryan openly in that book urges compassion for those suffering from gender dysphoria well when asked why they had stopped selling the book amazon replied that it made a policy decision it will no longer sell books that construe transgenderism as a mental illness well i would point out to you that you can still right now purchase mind comp on amazon i think that construes judaism as a parasitic curse and we know without all that all led to amazon has no trouble selling minecraft but you can't buy ryan t anderson's book now in our liberal democracy amazon is perfectly within its rights to refuse to sell any kind of book but amazon controls between 50 and 80 of the retail book market in our country if it refuses to sell a certain private book then very few publishers can afford to take a chance on publishing that kind of book so with a single decision like this one that it is perfectly free to make amazon can all guarantee that no books critical transgender ideology will be published no laws were passed banning these books but if amazon given its power sticks by this liberal policy these books will have been effectively banned it has the courage to speak out against this stuff relatively few people within the system i'm afraid because the enforcers and positions of institutional power can make you pay dearly for questioning what they call diversity equity and inclusion and other forms under which book has uh manifest in today's america to be accused of bigotry is as good as being convicted of it within professional new york and as in the soviet world very few people will take the risk of defending you publicly because they too will be at risk they don't want to be punished either we see this most acutely on university campuses we have with us today donald cat sorry joshua katz a widely respected princeton classics professor who has been tarred and feathered by the wolf mob on his campus including a number of his fellow professors for daring to speak out against a wildly illiberal racial scheme that would have badly compromised academic intelligence in fact the universities are where all of this began tesla b walsh the great polish poet and dissident warned after his affection to the west in the 1950s the people had better listen closely to what academics and intellectuals are saying in eastern europe he said people woke up one day to discover that radical ideas that had once been confined solely to intellectual and academic circles were suddenly ruling their lives but the same is true in our country today as critical race theory and the various permutations of gender ideology and critical studies control professional and institutional life and increasingly the life of our government across our country old-fashioned liberals in charge of universities have advocated their responsibilities to defend liberal values and instead have yielded to woke mobs this continues it will have severe consequences not least of which is the death of real scholarship of actual knowledge and the inability of universities to solve real-world problems because too many people within them are afraid to challenge authority well universities train the ruling class if we lose the universities we will probably lose the country have we lost them universities definitively if not how can they be saved if they can't be saved then what i expect our panel today will have some answers what's happening on campus though will have broader political consequences no doubt last week i was at the national conservatism conference in orlando and heard senate candidate jd vance a graduate of yale law school give a speech in which he declared quote universities are the enemy i can't imagine that an audience at pepperdine will be pleased to hear that but consider this as jd spoke the ballroom audience all had their head bowed as if in prayer but they weren't brave they were all looking at their smartphones for news about the virginia government as you know the republican glenn young can upset the democrats very goal education was a key issue in the gop victory as a number of parents got fed up with their kids being a force-fed wokeness in public schools hallelujah cnn's exit polling showed that among white voters the college educated broke 52-47 for the democrat but those whites without a college degree wrote 76-24 with a republican in his speech that night j.d vance said that the left is waging class warfare disguised as culture war exit polling in virginia shows that he has a point well in the aftermath of the big republican when the educated educating class in the media went off on white voters repeating the stock phrases you hear on campus white privilege white supremacy and so forth georgetown professor michael eric dyson who is black went on msnbc and said that the black republican woman winston sears who was elected gov lieutenant governor of virginia it's not really black because he's a republican he said this you can't find this online reach of course this is deranged this is so racist and disrespectful to winston sears but this is how many educated liberals think just the other night democratic influencer amy siskind tweeted out to her 523 000 twitter followers quote college-educated white women voted for mcauliffe by a bigger margin than five non-college white women gave it to young cat and the reason is simple racism they don't want progress i joined others of being dismayed and disgusted by these women i don't know how to reach non-college-educated white women the women i can connect with and influence are college-educated white learners well to what extent is this race in class-based resentment commonly held by university graduates it doesn't take a political genius to see big problems ahead in our fractious and divided nation if universities turn out a ruling class that despises those they aspire to govern both public and private institutions wesley yang has called wokeness the successor ideology to liberalism in the sense that it is now wokeness is now the ideology of the ruling class and we have all seen surveys revealing a shocking decline among millennials and generation c of support for fundamental liberties like free speech right freedom of religion in a democracy this is bound to have an effect further down the line as pluralities and possibly even majorities one day elect leaders who believe that aberdeen a commitment to those fundamental rights is a socially just thing to do back in 2014 a law professor closeted as a christian in an ivy league law school told me that the day is coming when religious believers and their institutions will not be able to count on a judiciary that understands why religious liberty matters this man who teaches at a law school that produces a great many federal judges told me that almost nobody in his professional media is religious and they don't even understand the importance of protecting the exercise of religious belief it doesn't even uh connect to them on their it's not even on their radar screen observing the radical secularization of the ruling class this uh professor told me that religious believers whose faith convictions clash with the successor ideology are inevitable inevitably going to face hostility from the state right the very best indifference to their interest you don't have to believe in god to believe in protecting the liberties of those who do but locust itself operates as a kind of religion in fact the best way to understand both this assaultarianism is not in terms of normal politics but in terms of a secular faith the world generally believes that the kinds of rights that liberal societies classical liberal societies proclaim are in fact hostile to the cause of social justice and they do not have any hesitation about using the power of the state to get what they want well here's an example the black columbia university linguist john mcquarter has labeled racial identity politics neo-racism neo-racist thinking has marched through the institutions and is now manifesting government policy and more progressive polities the activist christopher ruffo collects examples of this kind of thing he has whistleblowers leaking him documents all from all over the country well last year a whistleblower in seattle leaked to him documents from a diversity equity and inclusion training session that the city of seattle imposed on its employees this session openly encouraged white employees to hate themselves for being white it encourages them to embrace the work of undoing your own white explosive he went on to suggest specific ways why people should surrender for the sake of social justice including quote relationships with some other white people and quote at times guarantee physical safety with this we are waiting as diversity training as a means to implicate sensitivity to and respect for others in the workplace this is six stuff this is openly racist they are training people to be pushed around on the basis of race and to allow themselves to be even in emotional and physical danger and not to resist or fight back because they are bad by nature of the color of their skin now it's worth substituting in those words from the city of seattle the word jewishness or whiteness not document choose or instructed by their employer the city government to engage in the work of undoing your own jewishness to become a more morally responsible person but if jews were told that in order to conform to the new order they should give up expectations of physical and emotional safety and that they should be wary of jewish people who try to tell them that they're not guilty of sin for being jewish if that were the case i think we would know exactly what was going on and not just substitute the word jewish substitute black or hispanic or asian anything like that we would know exactly what was going on wokeness within the government is using the power of the state to vilify a class of people again not because of their deeds but simply because of who they are here is an example of how that worked in the soviet union in 1918 lenin unleashed the red terror a campaign of annihilation against those who resisted culture to power martin lazis the head of the secret police in ukraine instructed his agents as followers quote do not look in the file of incriminating evidence to see whether or not the accused rose up against the soviets with arms or words ask him instead to which pulaski belongs what is his background his education his profession these are the questions that will determine the fate of the accused that is the meaning and essence of the red terror now know well that an individual's words and deeds had nothing at all to determine one's guilt or innocence one is presumed guilty solely on the basis of one's class and social status communists justify the imprisonment ruin and even the execution of people who stood in the way of capital p progress as necessary to achieve historical justice over alleged exploiters of privilege and create an equitable society we want this kind of government in america well we're going to get it if we're not careful this is where the logic of abandoning the bedrock liberal principle of the sanctity of the individual in favor of collective guilt takes us the totalitarians of nazi germany did it totalitarians of soviet russia did it our own soft totalitarians are laying the groundwork for it and we are sleepwalking into their track how can we stop it well we'll look to our panel today about government for wisdom now i mentioned a moment ago that wokeness is better understood as a kind of religion i believe it is no coincidence that wokeness has spiked among younger generations the millennials in generation c while their identification with organized religion has collapsed wokeness gives them a sense of meaning of purpose and of solidarity back in the 1950s cheswold meews wrote in his great book the captive mind that western people misunderstand the nature and the appeal of communism westerners think that communism is something that has to be forced on people well that is true it's only a partial truth must said quote there is an eternal longing for harmony and happiness that lies deeper than ordinary fear or the desire to escape misery or physical destruction in other words a number of people turned to communism not because they believed in marxist political economy but because they had stopped believing in god and were desperate to fill that internal void with something well woke this operates the same way it is a dogmatic political religion what makes it so dangerous to the church is that in many ways it mimics christianity now christianity really is concerned with social justice christianity really does stand with the weak and the marginalized thank god for that contemporary christians are therefore though sitting nuts for woke activists we're seeing woke identity politics taken up by many churches and the result is a corruption of the gospel 20 years ago the christian intellectual rene gerard who taught at stanford saw all of this coming he said that christianity's admirable concern for victims had taken a sinister turn in our secularized country of the victor-based identity politics ideology then starting to emerge from academia gerard said quote the current process of spiritual demagoguery and rhetorical overkill has transformed the concern for victims into a totalitarian command and permanent inquisition he wrote this 20 years ago gerard was a catholic went on to say that when the antichrist comes he will deceive christians by trying to be more christian than christ now i certainly don't take a position on whether or not we're in the end times but gerard's point is highly relevant to considerations of why soft totalitarianism is being embraced by so many in the church churches should always and everywhere beware of attempts to compromise the gospel through politics whether on the left or of the right but there's something particularly insidious about the threat of wokeness to the church it has to do with the fact that the term social justice was coined by a 19th century jesuit priest catholic social teaching social justice is the idea that all individuals have a responsibility to work to create a society in which all persons especially the poor and the marginalized can live up to their dignity as creatures made in god's energy but christian social justice is difficult to reconcile with secular ideals of social justice one reason is that the former christian social justice depends on the biblical concept of what a human being is including purpose for which all human beings are created this presumes a transcendent moral order proclaimed in scripture and depending on one's confession the authoritative teachings of the church a just social order is one that makes it easier for people to be good peter morin the co-founder of the catholic worker movement was a truly christian social justice warrior mara distinguished christian social justice from the marxist view for marxist social justice meant an equal distribution of society's material goods by contrast christian social justice sought to create conditions of unity that enabled all people rich and poor alike to live in solidarity and mutual charity as pilgrims on the road to unity with christ in our time secular social justice has been short of its christian dimension it no longer holds to the humane holistic vision of peter marin but instead substitutes a marxist scheme separating sheep and goats by race sex and class without christianity and its belief in the fallibility of human nature secular progressives tend to rearrange their bigotries and call it righteousness christianity teaches that all men and women not just the wealthy the powerful the straight blank and other so-called oppressors all of us are sinners in need of a redeemer any form of social justice that projects unrighteousness solely on to particular groups is a perversion of christian teaching now faithful christians hear me out faithful christians have to work for social justice including fighting racism and poverty but we can only do so in context of fidelity to the full christian moral and theological vision through which we understand the meaning of justice of rank of a rightly ordered society any social justice campaign that implies or states that the bible's teachings are an enemy of man and his happiness and flourishing is fraudulent and has to be rejected by christians i worry about wokeness tearing the church apart primarily because it denies the truth that alexander sultanates and learned from his many years of suffering the gulag the truth is this that the line between good and evil runs not between races between social classes or any other human division but rather right down the middle of every human heart how can christians continue to fight for authentic social justice while protecting the church from its corrupted form i suspect we'll hear some answers today from the past let me close today by reminding you that none of these are abstract concerns just concerns for people who are interested to hear an intellectual discussion about these ideas live not by lies has become a best seller in the u.s in spite of having no coverage of the mainstream media because more and more americans sense that something is very wrong in our country today that's what that what's happening now is not a normal wax again waving between left and right liberals and conservatives that something more fundamental is going on they're right about that and there's this in 1951 the political theorist hannah ahrens published her blockbuster book titled the origins of totalitarianism in it she investigated by both germany and russia succumbed to totalitarianism she discerned that there were a number of characteristics that both crisis-ridden societies shared that left him susceptible to the totalitarian appeal the most important of these by far was mass loneliness and social atomization now people couldn't bear this and they gave themselves over to totalitarian ideologies that they can feel that they were part of something greater than themselves it's not a coincidence that the generation and our country today that is most embracing of wokeness those under 40 are also the generation that tells pollsters it is the loneliest other important factors include a loss of faith in institutions and hierarchies a desire to transgress boundaries for the sake of transgression and a willingness to believe things that aren't true but that are constant with what one wishes were true this is also by the way something something you see on the right but all of these factors aren't identified are markedly present and contemporary america plus they exist in a time and place where technology has given powerful societal actors the state and major corporations unprecedented powers of surveillance and control over populations the future of freedom really is in danger the future of freedom is in danger because the future of the truth is in peril i called my book not by lies because that was the title of the final communique that sultan easton delivered to his russian followers before the soviets deported him in 1974. in it he told them that the entire totalitarian system was a cathedral of lies built on a foundation of lies it depended for its survival on everybody pretending that its claims were true nobody believed they were true but everyone was too afraid to say so they were too afraid to speak out against it because anyone who's publicly descended uh suffered terribly you could suffer loss of job uh you could suffer persecution you could be put in jail and you could even have your own life taken from you but the way to bring it down said sultanism was to speak the truth but if you couldn't speak the truth openly which was hard enough then you could at least begin by refusing to speak or to otherwise affirm lies if only a relatively small number of russians refuse to affirm lies then the change that they all wanted might begin with them so tanisu said and if thousands of people joined the movement and refused to live by lies then they would no longer recognize their own country but if not said the great russian prophet if people are content to live by lies because it's easier than the russian people will have earned their enslavement those who won't fight for their freedoms that sold to nation do not deserve it what was true in soviet russia back then is true for the united states of america today thank you very much [Applause] we've got about 10 minutes for questions in this session i know it's exciting that there will be time afterwards to speak with rod so a couple questions i want to make sure we get at least one of our grasses yes you mentioned a recent event that you attended with the senate the candidate for the ohio senate jd vance um he seems to be of an emerging group of republicans and christians who are more comfortable with a self-conscious wielding of power and you've moaned the exercise of the power that the left has succeeded in disseminating every note of cultural power and political power in the country what do you make of the the prospect of conservatives republicans and christians acquainting themselves self-consciously with the wielding of power that's a great question and i'll repeat it for people who couldn't hear uh a policy student by the way it said that he's talking about how jd vance is now leading a cohort of younger conservative christians who are uh talking about being more bold in the exercise of power to defend the things we believe in and uh he asked you know how do i if i get it this correctly how do i reconcile that with my criticism of the left for going too far using government power um and i i think the the answer there is that we have to be prepared to use government power to defend liberties i don't want the government to tell people what they must do i don't i would no more want to live in a a liberal conservative government than i do under a liberal liberal government but i think that we have we have to recognize we on the right have to recognize that the left has gone so far it is not liberal anymore and they do hold power that if we are going to defend uh um standard american liberties the sort of things that most people left and wright agreed on only it seems like the day before yesterday we're going to have to use power if when it's given to us to do it because that is the government is the only institution left that anti-work conservatives have any access to and uh we i think i'm worried about though is the whole token point of grabbing the ring you know that to think that if we only elect the right people that's going to solve everything it's not true politics i strongly believe is downstream from culture and uh even as conservatives and christians uh take the reigns of power when voters given to us and um and come into government that we we have to realize that the only way we can ever get any real lasting change in this country is through cultural change so uh the victor orban the prime minister of hungary once gave a talk in which he said he was asked about this religion and meaning politics he said look i'm a politician i can't i can only give you things i can't give you meaning what he was trying to say is government leaders can protect the institutions universities churches schools things like that institutions that lead people to discover meaning or proclaim meaning but politicians can't do that that's the worry i have and it's something we've seen over the course of my generation i came of age in the reagan years um so many christians thought that if we the problem with with the state with our situation was that we didn't have the power to just get hold of the power that's going to fix everything in the meantime my generation and the baby boomers ahead of me we let the actual uh institutions die or at least be hollowed out by liberalism that's why we're in the condition that we're in now so um that's what that's i guess the sort of scattered answer uh we have to be unafraid to use power but we can use power illiterately i don't want to do that a couple more questions yes well don't you think that people like rand paul and desantis are using their power which is who we need to call out the way they're trying to mandate cultural change or fake legislation i mean that's what we have to do is use those tools or those words that are available to us in the politicians to make it known right i'm not sure i understand no it's true no no i'm sorry i just that's okay so rand paul is calling out let's say whether it's vaccine mandates or what the passport or whatever that they are having an overreach of government arm to uh mandate things or demand them of us where it's not really their uh it's not within their purview to do it and this is what's happening so these are politicians that are standing up for rights so far yeah i'm glad they are i'm glad they are the government back in its place but um i i think that we on the right are so often uh satisfied with owning the libs instead of actually governing and uh this is what i think is one of the great lessons of the trump years you know he only lives but when he left office the democrats have the white house in both houses of congress and we need audacity in governing and we need people willing to to uh take chances that we didn't do in the past but we also need people who are intelligent and dedicated to governing and that is i think the great weakness on our side i think that um if we if we can do that if we you know not yet but when we get power again we can't make those mistakes uh of just thinking that rhetorical victories are sufficient right okay a couple more yes david um um isn't like a commitment or interest or interest in governing the dedication to governing like a precondition for like a precondition for a vision for and for a to make the everything right isn't that like once you go down that once you step down that path it it's very easy to end up as a as a a control freak of either left wing or right wing that's something we always have to have to keep in mind you know and this is one of the things that makes me a little anxious about people on my own side who say that we need to come up with a politics that's based on the substantive account of the good because neutral liberalism enough is not sufficient i think they're definitely on to something but my only concern there is what what happens in in a country where there's so much pluralism there's so many people who are so divided on so many things that uh it seems that the only way that if we if we push liberty out and make the pursuit of the good the uh the solemn bonum then we run the risk of exactly becoming despotic and i think that's what we're seeing on the left now it's like they they don't have any room for liberty they don't believe that people have the right to be wrong i think as fallible human beings we have to allow people the right to be wrong all right two more yes go back to that okay hi i would like to know since you've studied this for quite some time what would be your suggestion to keep christians strong on the path and focus on doing good as best they can but not falling short to go back to liberalism well i would say that this is something i talked about more in my book the benedict option i say that we are living now in a post-christian era it's not i'm a christian myself and i wish it weren't the case but when i say post-christian era i mean that we're the sort of society now that no longer looks to the christian story as the narrative that tells us who we are the biblical account to be as broad as i can be um that requires we who are believers to double down on deep and putting our roots down more deeply in our traditions in scripture in um in worship in building strong communities within which we can uh educate ourselves and raise our kids to be good disciples one of the things i learned in living out my lives is that um people people are not prepared in this country to suffer for their faith and suffering is at the center of resistance the most important chapter in the book is about suffering and again this is something i learned from talking to christians protestants catholics and orthodox russia and the other countries some of them went to jail and were beaten for their faith this one russian baptist pastor yuri simcoe stood on a street corner in moscow with the snow falling around it and told me go back to your country and tell the church that if you're not prepared to suffer for christ your faith means nothing you said you have to ask yourself but make three things that you would be willing to uh to go to jail for and if you can't come up with any then you're not a christian you're just not and this is something so deep in our christian tradition going back to the earliest days of the martyrs and the confessors but we have forgotten it in our current age with all the comfort and all the religious liberty we've had these have been blessings from god but guess what those days are over and they're gonna they're coming to a close very quickly if we are not prepared to stand on the outside of society if we're not prepared to sacrifice middle class respectability for the sake of the gospel then we're not going to make it because if if we have a religion that that is sort of a baptized form of middle class respectability we're done finally there's a uh i heard this in some form from several of these people jesus called disciples not admirers and you don't can only really tell the difference between the admirers and disciples and persecution starts most people in society the dissidents told me those people who are christians are going to prove to be admirers they're going to keep their head down when the persecution comes whether or not you are going to be an admirer or a disciple when the persecution comes depends on how we live today depends on how we're preparing ourselves today i uh and i know we're running out of time so i'll close on this i dedicated this with my lives to the memory of a man named father thomas love kolakovic father kolacovich was a croatian jesuit who was doing work against the nazis in zagreb in 1943 when he got a tip that the gestapo was coming to arrest him he slipped out of the country and went to slovakia his mother's homeland adopted the last name kolakovic and began teaching in the catholic university there he told his students the good news and the the good news is the germans are going to lose this war i'm telling you it's going to happen don't be afraid the bad news is the soviets going to be ruling this country when it's over and the first thing they're going to do is persecute the church we've got to get ready for it now so what he began to do was put together small groups of mostly students christian students would come together to pray and to discuss what was happening in their society around it and to make firm concrete plans for how they could build the underground church for the day when it would be necessary but in two years of arriving in that country every town of any size in slovakia had one of these groups the catholic bishops of slovakia chastised father collocates they told them father you're staring people that's not going to happen here but father kolakovic had studied in seminary to be a missionary to the soviet union he knew the communist mindset he knew exactly what would happen so he kept working sure enough 1948 there's a push the iron curtain falls over czechoslovakia the first thing they did was come after the churches the the network the father kolakovic had prepared when they had liberty to do so became the backbone for the underground church that kept the faith alive for the next 40 years i firmly believe that we are in a collocate moment here in america today and that we american christians whatever our confession have got to start coming together to form these small groups and networks of small groups to talk about what can we do right now what practical things can we do to get ready for the time when we're not going to have the freedom to worship anymore and on that gloomy note [Applause] uh christian hope says that we hope everything will turn out okay but even if it doesn't we know that our suffering has meaning if we unite it to christ and that if we suffer faithfully god can use our suffering for the conversion of the world the redemption of the world that is my hope as a christian not to avoid suffering though i would like to do that but rather i would be more afraid of losing my ability to suffer and capitulating to avoid suffering and thereby compromising my soul [Applause] well i say the table is set uh this is just the beginning uh ron thanks so much for that challenge and uh again as you look at your agenda we are now going to move outside and around probably would be a good idea given rod's closing just to take a look out and take a deep breath of air uh and uh and get ready for these next three panels we will begin the first to look at live not by lives and education that as rod said the second we'll look at loop not by lies in government and public policy and then we will close with a panel that i've uh dubbed how now shall we live a challenge for christians in the public square we will then finally conclude fighting these challenges of loneliness throughout to gather together down uh pacific coast highways russo so i hope you're leaving time at the end of this event uh to gather together with panelists and new friends so thanks so much for coming we continue on [Applause]

Channel: Pepperdine School of Public Policy

Views: 1,392

Keywords: Live Not By Lies, Rod Dreher, civil liberties, free speech, soft totalitarianism, identity politics, speech codes, political culture, alienation, loneliness, public trust, faith and public policy, secularization, Pepperdine University, Pepperdine School of Public Polcy, Master of Public Policy, MPP, MPA, Cancel culture, Communism, Benedict option, polarization

Id: CrEf_M7qRLM

Length: 52min 34sec (3154 seconds)

Published: Thu Jul 14 2022