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To grasp the threat of totalitarianism, it’s important to understand the difference between it and simple authoritarianism.
Excellent review, SkipSul: thank you.
Yes. And this isn’t that. Instructions from Soviet believers and dissidents are useless in the long run because they come to nothing without Ronald Reagan’s United States. There is and will be no such counterpart if we let the darkness overtake us in this election. Dreher’s Benedict Option not only suffers from this basic defect but also failed to learn from the inward turning of what became labeled “Fundamentalists” under the twin pronged assault of supposedly scientific secularism and the German born Higher Criticism. Walking away lost us moral and cultural ground for the better part of a century, until Reagan managed to get these citizens to assert their rights as U.S. citizens, as Paul once did with his Roman citizenship.
Three counter points:
Praise the Lord.
Praise the Lord, my soul.
I will praise the Lord all my life;
I will sing praise to my God as long as I live.
Do not put your trust in princes,
in human beings, who cannot save.
When their spirit departs, they return to the ground;
on that very day their plans come to nothing.
Blessed are those whose help is the God of Jacob,
whose hope is in the Lord their God.
He is the Maker of heaven and earth,
the sea, and everything in them—
he remains faithful forever.
He upholds the cause of the oppressed
and gives food to the hungry.
The Lord sets prisoners free,
the Lord gives sight to the blind,
the Lord lifts up those who are bowed down,
the Lord loves the righteous.
The Lord watches over the foreigner
and sustains the fatherless and the widow,
but he frustrates the ways of the wicked.
The Lord reigns forever,
your God, O Zion, for all generations.
Praise the Lord.
Psalm 146
On an irrelevant note, I do not understand the early Soviet book-jacket design.
There was an absolutely electric and fierce debate between the author Rod Dreher, and woke Princeton Professor Eddie Glaude on Morning Joe on October 16, 2020. David French also participated. Both Dreher and Glaude were sharply critical of each other to the point that it almost went off of the rails like the first debate with Trump and Biden, moderated by Chris Wallace.
Dreher gave as good as he got. He stood his ground against the woke Glaude who was not used to being challenged. I highly recommend the debate.
I just hope Rod Dreher’s option works better than the Russian Orthodox
To be fair to them, they did manage to survive one of history’s meanest cleansing campaigns and paid a massive price in blood for their resistance. We can debate the tactics of the Soviet-era Russian Orthodox Church, but it has to be said that when Communism ended, they had an important role in giving some sense of morals and hope to a new society that had to re-learn so much of what they once knew.
Dreher’s option amounts to not giving up hope. I’d buy that. Beyond that he doesn’t seem to have a lot of quick cures for what ails us.
What’s frightening there is that Glaude absolutely believes that he is morally in the right, and that “hate” should be silenced, with the added bonus that he is authoritative on defining “hate”.
What was thrilling is that Dreher did not flinch.
There are two books I would recommend here: Everyday Saints, by Archimandrite Tikhon, and Saint John of Kronstadt, by I.K. Surksy.
The book on Saint John is hagiography, so be forewarned that it makes no pretense at objectivity, but what makes it valuable is that the book is written by a survivor of the Revolution, and based on interviews with other survivors. One of the threads you pick up in the accounts of St. John is his battle with church hierarchy under the Tsar, and his near constant warnings that Russia was in very sorry spiritual shape. St. John and others were very busy mentoring up and coming priests to prepare for a great crisis. St. John died in 1907, but he is widely credited with having been gifted a prophetic vision of what was to come, and giving aid.
One of the first things the Church would do after the Tsar’s abdication was to convene a church council to begin to reclaim their independence, which had been subverted ever since the days of Tsar Peter the Great. That did help even during the worst of the persecutions.
Everyday Saints, by contrast, is one priest’s look at the everyday church during Communism’s waning days, and the decade immediately following. The absolute spiritual vacuum of Communism was obvious to many by the end, and this opened many eyes and ears, even if in secret, to the possibility that there was more to this world.
Well, are there quick cures? And if there are not, should we waste time and energy chasing them? Dreher doesn’t think so.
Another way to think about what he is saying is this:
Dreher has written a manual on how to keep a clapped out old car running. Would it be fair to criticize it for not including a section on the merits of buying a new car, and how to negotiate with new care salesmen? No, that would be beyond the scope, and missing the point – such a book would be for people who cannot afford new cars, or are physically cut off from sources of new cars – like the Cubans who have to improvise and work with what they can make or scrounge.
When the guns are turned against you, what can you ultimately do to resist? Our Christian forebears in ancient Rome willingly faced martyrdom so as to witness to others, enduring scandal and humiliation all the while. Devout Russians did the same by the millions – the accounts of survivors are numerous, as are the revealed accounts and records of the Bolsheviks themselves.
Alexander Ogorodnikov was one of the last significant Christian Soviet dissidents, and what he endured was horrific. And Yet… in the gulags he witnessed to other prisoners, and even to the guards, preaching the Gospel. Through his witness, others were saved who had nobody else to witness to them, or stand with them.
Father George Calciu endured the worst of the Romanian “re-education” attempts. But he too, in prison and afterwards, bore a salvific witness to others. One of the key things revealed to him through the tortures he endured was that the guards and torturers themselves were victims just as he was, and just as in need of healing and forgiveness.
This too was the witness of Corrie Ten Boom.
If we are looking for earthly or societal triumph as some sign of success, we will find only disappointment in the end of things. It is one of the mistaken arrogances of much of modern Christianity to have thought its work somehow “done” because we had a very Christian society. This was one of the mistakes of the Russian Orthodox hierarchy pre WWI. It is also a mistake to think that society was at all normative, inevitable, or self-evidently right. We are paying for that complacency now.
Dreher is warning that we need to be prepared to endure and suffer as they did. He is warning that what the Russian Orthodox had to endure is coming, in some form, to us as well.
Is it recorded and on line somewhere?
This–
and this–
Excellent review, and as you say, skip, ideas for all of us to contemplate. On one side, there will be those who will give up just about anything to fit on. On the other side, there are those who will stand for Truth. No matter what happens next week, we must remember who we are and what we stand for.
Natan Sharansky:
The most important thing for Christians is have a line on culture/politics and stick to it.
Dreher links to it here:
https://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/soft-totalitarianism-morning-joe-glaude-have-mercy-live-not-by-lies/
How possible is that though? Culture shifts, as do politics. Better, I would say, that we have a line on Christ and stick to Him.
I probably disagree. Christians should stick to their Christianity, but how that will apply to politics will vary. It’s even worse if they hitch their wagon to a politician or a political program, because those can change where we should not. As to culture, one of the 17th century Jesuits in Canada found it necessary to remind his brothers that not every cultural difference between the Indigenous people and the French Catholics was the work of the devil.
Did you see the one Dreher tweeted that has the guy middle-aged with a paunch?
I don’t think there are quick cures, no, so I’m not disappointed the Dreher doesn’t try to invent any. This BTW is my main gripe with Sohrab Ahmari.
Definitely with Ahmari. He’s practically wishcasting.
I’m not on Twitter, but I would love to see that one.
Found it:
I’d like to read this but I’m still reading the book from your last review.
This subject matter is close to my own heart. Raising children that have to tools to maintain faith in the face of oppression, build community with those close by, worship and play together, work together. These are important things to me and I saw Covid threaten all of it – not the disease itself, but the fear response. It closed people off from their communities, isolated them, broken from play, worship, and work. It truly felt designed to attack the Body of Christ rather than our own human bodies.
1 Corinthians, imo, is a great compendium on how to build a community in the midst of persecution – from hierarchy to internal conflict, Paul lays out a blueprint for counter-cultural communities in hostile territory. I highly recommend it for anyone, christian or not.
He’s almost captured my profile perfectly!
You write this in the past tense, as if it isn’t happening as we speak . . .
As my kids are older (high school and college for all but one) I’m hoping at this point I laid the groundwork right with them. Time will tell.
Me too, only he’s too young.
Excellent review, SkipSul: thank you.