Full Interview With Rod Dreher on His Book ‘Live Not By Lies’ and the Growing ‘Soft Totalitarianism’ of Secular Ideology in the West

Edward Pentin talks to Rod Dreher about his recent book, Live Not By Lies, and its warnings of the rise of totalitarianism in the 'free' West.

From Edward Pentin

Bestselling author Rod Dreher offers his insights and solutions on today’s growing totalitarianism in the West, drawing on experiences of those who suffered under communism in the Soviet bloc that made up his acclaimed book Live Not By Lies — A Manual For Christian Dissidents.

Published in September 2020, Dreher explains in the book how these citizens recognized the seeds of tyranny in the West long ago and have been trying to warn Westerners ever since.

Here below is the full-length interview that Dreher gave in Rome on Aug. 31 (an abridged version was published in the National Catholic Register on Sept. 7). Dreher also shares his opinions on Hungary, its Prime Minister Viktor Orbán and the situation in Afghanistan.

The author of The Benedict Option that called on Christians to embrace exile from mainstream culture to construct a resilient counterculture, Dreher writes a regular column for the American Conservative. He left the Catholic Church to join the Orthodox Church in light of the sexual abuse crisis.

 If we start with just the timing of your book: What had you observed that prompted you to write it? What evidence did you see of this growing tyranny that prompted you to write it?

I think it was back in 2015. I received a phone call from a prominent Catholic doctor in the US, we had a mutual friend, and he said, “Listen, I just have to tell somebody this. My mother is quite old, lives with me and my wife, she was born in Czechoslovakia and spent four years in a prison camp, Communist prison camp as a Vatican spy.” That’s what they called her, she just refused to stop going to Mass after Communists took over and they put her in prison. After she was released, she came to America, but he said, “Now that she’s very old, she’s been telling my wife and me that the things she sees happening in America today remind her of what it was like in Czechoslovakia when Communism came to power.”

I thought that was alarmist. My mother’s old and she watches a lot of cable news and I thought maybe that’s what’s going on here. But just to be on the safe side, I made a habit of, whenever I would be traveling to a conference or something, and I would meet someone who grew up in the Soviet Bloc and who came to America to escape Communism, I would just ask them, “Are the things you’re seeing happen in America now with cancel culture, things like that, does it remind you of what you left behind?” Every single one of them said Yes, emphatically Yes. If you talked to them long enough, they would express deep anger that Americans don’t take them seriously. So I realized I had a book here and that’s what prompted it. The specific warnings from these people, these emigres, the consistency of what they had to say and the depth of the anger that no one was listening to them.

Who did you speak to for the book, and how did you find them?

Well, by the time I sat down to actually write the book a couple of years ago, I had already gathered enough anecdotes from emigres in America, and the analysis is in the first half of the book about how is this like Communism and Soviet Communism, and how is it unlike it, what are the parallels? But the second half of the book came from my travels. I went to Russia, Poland, Hungary, Slovakia, and the Czech Republic and interviewed Christians who had stayed behind and been dissidents and who lived with it. I asked them what do we in the West have to learn from their experience about how we can prepare for whatever it is we’re facing?

I had a few names when I started, but one always leads to another. In fact, the priest I dedicated the book to, to the memory of Father Tomislav Kolakovic, I had never heard of him until I went to Bratislava, and I was just so amazed by his story. He is one of these people nobody knows about outside of Slovakia. He was a Jesuit doing anti-Nazi work in Zagreb in 1943. He got a tip that the Nazis were coming after him, so he escaped and went to his mother’s homeland Slovakia and began teaching at the Catholic university in Bratislava. When he arrived in ‘43, he told his students, “The good news is the Germans are going to lose this war, the bad news is the Soviets are going to be running this country when it’s over. The first thing they’re going to do is come after the Church, we have to be ready.”

He knew that, and could tell instantly, the very clericalist, passive Slovak Catholicism was going to be no match for what was coming. So he began to prepare his students. He would bring together these groups of mostly students for prayer, not just prayer, but intense discussion and analysis of what was happening, and they would decide. Within two years, a network of these groups had spread all over Slovakia, and they had some priests who were going along with them too, who were attracted. The Slovak bishops chastised Father Kolakovic, they said, “Stop scaring people, it will never happen here.” But he wouldn’t listen. He had studied in Rome at the Russicum to be a missionary in Russia, and he knew the Soviet mindset. Sure enough, they expelled him in ‘46, and in ‘48 when the Iron Curtain definitively came down, the first thing the Communists did was come after the Church. The network of laypeople and sympathetic young priests that Father Kolakovic had prepared became the backbone for the underground Church. So I realized we are in a Kolakovic moment now in the West. I really believe that. We have to take advantage of the liberty we have now, the liberty of time and religious freedom such as it is to prepare.

And to create networks?

Yes, prepare ourselves and our families and our parishes spiritually, but make these networks now across confessional boundaries, across national and international boundaries. Now is the time, it’s urgent.

You talk about how the loss of organized religion and family instability has led the US and other Western countries to be vulnerable to “soft totalitarianism.” Have we now moved past that with the response to Covid, Black Lives Matter, as well as the advent of the Biden administration and its imposition of transgender rights and other secular ideologies? Are we now closer to a hard totalitarianism?

This is one thing the emigres insist on, “Oh, it’s soft now, but it’s going to be hard soon enough.” I do think that things are accelerating all the time. The way that the pandemic has been handled, people have become accustomed to being told what to do, being surveilled, have their data taken by the government. It’s hard for me, because honestly I have to be fair and think that a lot of this stuff would be understandable even by a government of good will. It’s public health, but it just so happens to have really gone hand-in-glove with the agenda of the soft totalitarians to gain control in society.

I think, however, that one of the most distinct aspects of this phenomenon is that the state is the least important part of it. In traditional political theory, totalitarianism involves an all-powerful state that infiltrates every aspect of life, and that’s not what’s happening here.  In the US at least, wokeness has conquered. It’s been the successor ideology to liberalism, and it has conquered every major institution in American life, corporations most significantly. Of course, universities and the media, that’s where it started. Also, law, medicine, sports, even most recently we see the US military and the CIA have gone rogue. It’s happened with stunning speed. You don’t have to have an all-powerful state forcing this on people when every other major institution has chosen to do it.

Why do many people not see this?

Many people can’t see what’s happening because it’s happening within the structure of liberal democracy that’s been hollowed out. I’ll give you an example: this summer when I was in Hungary I wanted to meet with people who opposed Viktor Orbán. I met with this professor, a liberal professor at a university in Budapest. He said: “The corruption’s one thing, and for another, I’m in favor of gay marriage and gay adoption, the government is not.” He said, “I don’t follow the logic of trans.” Then we moved onto something else. At the very end of our conversation, he said, “But you know at the end of the day, I can stand in my classroom here in Budapest and say anything I like about the government, no one will bother me.”

I said, “Professor, that’s really interesting, because if you were in America now and you stood in your classroom and said, ‘I don’t follow the logic of trans,’ even though you are affirmatively pro gay, your students would protest, they may call for your job. Your administration of your university probably would fire you and you would never work again simply because you didn’t fully and unapologetically affirm transgenderism. So who is more free? You here in Viktor Orbán’s Hungary, or your American colleague?” This hadn’t occurred to him because he didn’t realize how bad it had gotten in America. This is all happening without any violation of the law, but it’s happening under a liberal democratic regime, but it’s still totalitarianism.

It reminds me of Benedict’s comment about the “dictatorship of relativism,” because some people couldn’t really understand necessarily what he was meaning then, but it’s become gradually clearer.

Being in Hungary this summer, getting outside the US for a bit also helped me to see. It’s like walking out of a smokey bar room to go outside to get some fresh air. Walk back in and you’re suddenly struck by how bad it is. The way Americans now in America are all afraid to say what they think, you have to check constantly who is around you, who’s listening, what might they say, you have to weigh your words carefully. This is not the country I grew up in, it’s the country I live in now.

Regarding Covid, a friend of mine who is from a former Eastern bloc country was disturbed when police called on a party next door to her place because the neighbours had called them and said, “Why are you having a party during lockdown?” She couldn’t believe it and said, “This is Communism all over again.”

Oh, yeah. They see it, they see it.

 It’s been fascinating talking to her, because they see it all and they don’t believe the lies. The Russian author Elena Gorokhova once said of Soviet communism, “They lie to us, we know they’re lying, they know we know they’re lying, but they keep lying anyway, and we keep pretending to believe them.” Do you think we’re coming to that point where lies in everyday life, in culture in general, are becoming so prevalent people don’t know what’s true anymore?

Yes, it’s a system of lies and it depends on everyone acknowledging the lie, whether out of fear or out of real belief. This is where the title of the book came from, [Alexander] Solzhenitsyn. Just before he was expelled by the Soviets in ‘74, his final communication to his followers was called “Live Not By Lies.” In it, he said, “Listen, nobody has the courage to go stand in the middle of the street and shout out what we know to be true, but let’s at least promise that we won’t say the things we believe are not true.” So he had a list of small things we could do like, “Don’t sign anything you don’t believe. Don’t stay present at a meeting when no one can speak the truth.” That sort of thing.

Vaclav Havel said something similar three years later in his famous essay the Power of the Powerless, which he talked about the importance of living in truth. But Havel and Solzhenitsyn saw that the essence of the system was a lie or a series of lies, and the only way to defeat it, you couldn’t defeat it militarily or you couldn’t defeat it through democratic politics, there were no democratic politics, but if enough people said, “I won’t believe the lie. I will not live as if these lies are true,” then you would stand a chance. That’s what they encouraged their followers to do. We have to do the same thing, but it’s going to cost us and cost us a lot. That is the thing that so many of us aren’t prepared to pay that price. 

Who in particular do you think?

Middle class people especially are the worst, middle class Christians. They’ll find a way to collaborate and they congratulate themselves on not becoming troublemakers. When I was in Prague doing interviews, Kamila Bendová, the widow of Vaclav Benda — they were the only Christians, they were Catholics in the centre of Havel’s circles — told me, “Rod, you have to recognise that most Christians under Communism conformed, kept their head down to avoid trouble.” She told me this in the context of a question I had asked her. I said, “Kamila, you and your late husband were very strict Catholics, but Havel’s circle, they were all hippies, had very complicated sex lives. Was that difficult for you to work with them?”

She didn’t hesitate, she said, “Absolutely not.” She explained it. She said, “When you’re faced with a totalitarian situation, the rarest quality you can find in people is courage. When you find someone who is courageous, you make that person your ally no matter what your differences are, because you need them and they need you.” That’s when she said that these hippies who didn’t share any of their religious or moral beliefs were more faithful allies than most of their fellow Catholics. I think that’s true too in the US, I’ve been surprised to see that Live Not By Lies has found a real champion in Bari Weiss. She’s a secular liberal Jewish lesbian, but she’s been really brave. She voluntarily quit the New York Times. She’s young and she was at the pinnacle of American journalism, but she quit because the Times was a place where you had to lie and suppress the truth in order to thrive there. She embraced my book and she told me, “Rod, if you had told me two years ago I would be on the same side as this right-wing Christian zealot Rod Dreher, I wouldn’t have believed it. But here we are.”

You can see this dynamic taking place in resistance to Covid restrictions which are seen as tyrannical. There was a recent interview between James Delingpole of Breitbart and the radical feminist Naomi Wolf — both usually on the opposite sides of the political spectrum, but they both have similar perspectives on Covid.

We have to make these allies where we can. Another couple, prominent on the internet at least, are Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying. They’re left-wing atheists, but they have been red-pilled because they were driven out of their university. They spent an entire podcast reading from my book. I’ve been ignored by a lot of Christians, but these people have seen what the soft totalitarianism does to people straight on. They have embraced it because they know it’s true. Meanwhile, I didn’t include this in the book, but after Obergefell in the US [the 2015 Supreme Court ruling that permitted same sex “marriage”] in the state of California there was a push by the LGBT caucus and the state legislature to reform the education financing laws to keep state tax dollars from going to so-called “bigot schools,” so to say religious schools that didn’t follow the LGBT agenda.

In the state of California, there’s this program called Cal Grants where they make direct grants to impoverished students that they can use at any accredited university in California. Well, the LGBT folks wanted to change the law to push out religious schools that were not conforming with the agenda. So it was a real fight, because this would have either forced religious schools to shut down or capitulate and violate their consciences. There was a big fight on and a friend of mine, an Evangelical who worked in the administration at one of these colleges, told me that they went down to Orange County in Southern California, which is a center place or the home of conservative Evangelicals in California, they went to all these mega churches and said, “Will you help us?” Not one of those pastors would step up and do it, because they were terrified of being called bigots. They were middle class people who just wanted to protect their position. He said that if not for the Hispanic Catholic Archbishop of Los Angeles and Black Pentecostal pastors of Los Angeles, they would have lost. But this was a harbinger of what’s to come. All these middle-class people, however politically and religiously conservative they say they are, when it comes right down to it, they don’t want to stick their neck out. They want to protect their position.

How can people be convinced to resist? Did any of the survivors of Communism you spoke to give advice on how to help encourage those reluctant to stand up?

Not that per se. I hadn’t thought about it until you just asked, but my guess is that they figured that [there were] those who recognized what was happening, without needing to be convinced how bad it was. What they did do in the book is say, “This is how you have to live if you’re going to live in truth.” There are like six different things in the book, a different chapter for each, but of course the most important thing is to commit to living in the truth, to prefer nothing to the truth.

The book is written by a Christian for Christians — we know what the truth is and we have to train ourselves now while we’re living in relative peace to only put serving Christ as our most important thing, no matter what. I used a story, it’s in the book too, about Blessed Franz Jägerstätter. You know his story. We have to ask ourselves, what was it about the way Franz Jägerstätter and his family lived before the coming of the Nazis that allowed him, alone in his entire Catholic village, to recognise Hitler for the Antichrist that he was? Not only to recognise it, but to find the strength to resist even though it ultimately cost him his life. That’s what we need, and I think we would find in the story of Franz’s life that the way he and his wife lived before the coming of the Nazis prepared them for that. We have to do the same.

Secondly, and I think this is the most key, we have to embrace suffering, the value of suffering. This is in the long Church tradition going back to the early Church, but we’ve forgotten it now. That’s part of why we’re so vulnerable. This is a dictatorship. It’s not Orwellian in the sense that it’s not depending on the infliction of pain and terror to force people to conform, it’s more of an Aldous Huxley kind of totalitarianism. I realized this most acutely when I was in Budapest doing research. My translator was a young Hungarian Catholic woman, married maybe five years, one child at home, one on the way, and we were on the tram going to interview somebody and she said, “You know, Rod? I have the toughest time talking with my friends, even my Catholic friends about my life.”

I said, “What do you mean?” She said, “Well, if I sit down and talk to them and say, ‘My husband and I are struggling now, we’re arguing all the time.’ Or if I say, ‘It’s really hard being a mom, my son is going through a really bad phase,’ something like that. They cut me off and say, ‘Oh, just get a divorce or put your son in daycare, go back to work. You have to live your own truth.’”

Your own truth.

She said, “I tell them, ‘What? You don’t understand. I’m happy, I’m happy being a wife, I’m happy being a mom, but life just requires struggle sometimes.’” She said, “They can’t comprehend that.” I looked at her and said, “Hannah, it sounds like you’re fighting for your right to be unhappy.” She said, “That’s it, where did you get that?” So I went in my phone, I had on the phone Brave New World by [Aldous] Huxley. I went to chapter 17, which is where John the Savage is the dissident who lives out of society. He has this confrontation with Mustapha Mond who’s the world controller for Europe. In Orwell, the parallel is between O’Brien the torturer and Winston Smith, and O’Brien tortures him to make him conform. In this case, Mustapha Mond just says, “Why would you not want to be part of this? We’ve got all the drugs you want, all the sex, all the entertainment.” He calls it “Christianity without tears.” John the Savage says, “I don’t want that. I want God, I want beauty, I want sin, I want struggle, et cetera.” Mustapha says, “It sounds like you’re fighting for your right to be unhappy.” John says, “Okay, I am fighting for my right to be unhappy.” Mustapha Mond says, “You can have it.”

But that’s where we are today. We live in a soft totalitarianism that doesn’t want anybody to be unhappy. So you have people who are compelled to be quiet on pain of losing their job, because their opinions might make others’ sacred groups feel unsafe. So we have got to prepare ourselves to struggle, be deprived and lose status, to lose our jobs, to lose our freedom and maybe even lose our life. Unless we’re prepared to go that far, we’re not going to make it through what’s coming. This is the constant message of the dissidents.

Being prepared for the long haul.

Yeah, I should add this too, I did not recognize this, but a consistent story they all told, too, was small groups, the importance of small groups. In the book I tell the story about how this was first presented to me. I was in Bratislava and was taken through a tunnel into a hidden room, underneath a row house in suburban Bratislava, to a tiny room where the underground Catholic Church produced samizdat [the clandestine copying and distribution of literature banned by the state, especially formerly in the communist countries of eastern Europe] for 10 years in this little airless room. It was incredible, you really are back in Cold War territory, you had to duck in the tunnel and come up.

They were never discovered by the Communists, and in fact there’s a little offset printer in there that had been smuggled into Czechoslovakia by some Dutch Evangelicals to help the underground Catholics. They smuggled it in piece by piece, and another team came in and reassembled it in the room, so the Catholics could produce prayer books and catechisms. Anyway, the man who took me there was a historian, a historian of the underground Church period, and was himself involved in the underground Church as a college student in the 1980s. He told me that it was only in the small groups that they found the courage to resist, and because of the structure of the Church, he only knew three or four young Catholic men who were in his cell. They would come there to that house every week and very quietly assemble the samizdat for distribution. The man who lived there was a worker, was really a priest, that’s how it worked.

Anyway, the historian said, “It was in the small groups that we got to be free. There was nowhere else in our society that we could feel free to say what we really thought except when we were together.” He said, “We all learned how to be courageous in learning to serve the Lord and to serve the Church. Because of the courage we learned from the small group week after week, we gained the courage to do bigger things, such as turn out in the town square in 1988 for the so-called Candle Demonstration.” You can look this up online. It was the first major demonstration in that country since 1968, where 10,000 people in the underground Church turned up spontaneously with candles to sing hymns and pray. Communists were caught off guard, you can find footage of it online, on YouTube, where they attacked them with water canons.

My interlocutor said, “We found the courage to go out that night because we had been meeting in small groups.” That was the first time I heard something like that, and I heard it over and over again, and I learned on that same trip about Father Kolakovic and his groups. So I had no idea — it wouldn’t have occurred to me that’s what we needed to do, but they were emphatic, “Do that right now.”

Would you say that people need to also understand the causes of “wokeness” and the totalitarianism behind it? Would you say it’s linked primarily to a crisis of reason, which in turn is ultimately due to a crisis of faith, the loss of the supernatural, of Christianity?

Yes, I think you’ve got it. People need to understand that when we deal with wokeness, we’re not dealing with a political phenomenon primarily, we’re dealing with the religious phenomenon that manifests itself through politics. Just as the totalitarianism of the 20th century, Nazism and Communism, were political pseudo religions that moved in to fill a hole in the souls of those people, that’s what wokeness is. It’s not a coincidence that, in the US at least, it is most powerful among the least religious generations in American history, the Millennials and Gen-Z. I think they’re searching for what everyone who is susceptible to totalitarianism is searching for, searching for a sense of meaning, a sense of purpose and a sense of solidarity. I read Hannah Arendt’s 1951 book the Origins of Totalitarianism when I was working on my book, and in that book (she was a German-Jewish survivor of Nazism, a refugee), she wanted to find out what was it about the conditions in Germany and Russia that led those countries to succumb to totalitarianism. She identified some common aspects of life in pre-totalitarian societies. By far, the most important factor she said was mass loneliness and atomization. Totalitarian movements are always movements of people who were alienated and isolated and who found in these movements the thing that they were desperate for. What’s that?

A sense of belonging?

Belonging, meaning and purpose, and a sense of: “If we do this thing, then all the things that you’re desiring you will get. If we eliminate these bad people, the Jews, the bourgeoisie, whatever.” We see this in wokeness now too that, “If we only get rid of Whiteness, then all will be well.” Or transphobia, homo…

You see it also with the Covid vaccines — if you’re vaccinated or non-vaccinated. The un-vaccinated don’t belong to the right people.

Right, right, right. You’re not part of us. Another aspect that Arendt found was a collapse of faith in hierarchies and institutions, and boy, do we see that. Whether it’s Church or secular institutions, people don’t believe anymore. Right now, I think this collapse in Afghanistan of the American involvement there, the way we got out, this disgraceful way we’ve gotten out, I think it’s going to cause a lot of people to lose faith in the only institution in American life that a majority of people still had faith in, which is the military.

So all of this is really dangerous. I’m not saying that people don’t have reason to lose faith. I’ve lost faith in most institutions, too, because I think we’re led by weak and compromised people in the leadership class of all of American society. Nevertheless, this is a precursor. Arendt said, “The willingness to transgress, especially the elites in pre-totalitarian Germany, and to see all kinds of boundaries crossed was just for the fun of watching people who had been left out of society break into it.” We’re seeing that constantly with the transgression, as we were talking earlier with the gender ideology propaganda to children, all of that is going on.

Finally, one of the things she saw was the willingness of people to believe propaganda because it satisfies their own prejudices. We’re all susceptible to propaganda, but the thing that she found so particular about pre-totalitarian societies is people believed that, even though they had every reason to suspect that it wasn’t true. It felt right, therefore it must be true. So all these things are happening now and the alarm, the lights, are blinking at us, but why is it that it’s only these emigres who can read the signs of the times? The rest of us are just blindly walking on as if this is normal life.

How do you think this totalitarianism might develop, how could it worsen, what do we need to be aware of?

It could happen in any number of scenarios. One I’m particular concerned about is in the US. If there is civil disorder, whether over race or any number of ways, I think that what’s likely to happen is the elites (by which I mean the government elites working with corporate elites especially, tech elites), will implement a social credit system. That is coming. Back in the book, I think this is in the book, certainly I put it on my blog, one of my readers is involved in the tech world and he sent me an article from a trade journal in which the author was saying, he wasn’t decrying this at all, he was just saying that, “The social credit system is increasingly going to be a reality for us in business life and public life, and here’s how you can get ready for it to welcome it and be on top of business trends.”

This is coming, because I think Covid, the whole [issue of] vaccine passports is training us to accept this sort of thing. When it happens in China, if we know about it at all, people like you and me will know about it, but I think a lot of Americans or Europeans are aware that this is happening. We see it and say, “That’s terrible” but it’s coming here, too. We have the technology to do it. We just so far lack the political will, but in America with the January 6th attack earlier this year, that was the Reichstag fire of the left that they’re going to use to justify more and more restriction of more and more freedoms.

I think it was appalling what happened on January 6th, but it is being used by many on the left to justify further intrusion into people’s lives. In the US military now, they’re going after soldiers to see if you have any connection at all to Trump or anything that might be considered White supremacist. There actually are neo-Nazis in the military, find them, kick them out. I have no problem with that, but we see that the boundary of what’s considered acceptable and unacceptable is always expanding. So I think that’s what is likely to happen, because they’re going to need — the ruling class is going to need — to do this to cement their rule.

Might I just say that as a conservative, to hear myself using words like the ruling class and things like that is very weird. That’s where we are. When you see that in order to be part of the leadership class in any number of institutions in American society you have to accept this, you have to get used to giving your pronouns.

The autocratic left?

Yeah, absolutely. This might be an important distinction between authoritarianism and totalitarianism, because some people say to me, “Well, aren’t you being offensive and insulting people who suffered from real totalitarianism?” I explain why I use that term. Authoritarianism is generally a political system in which all political authority is concentrated in one leader or party, but the rest, outside of politics, people don’t really care what you do. The government doesn’t care what you do. Totalitarianism is an authoritarian system in which everything in life is politicized.

That’s exactly what we’ve got.

Of course. For example, just this summer on Pride Month, every month is Pride Month, but on a double plus special Pride Month, one of the big breakfast cereal manufacturers in the US manufactured a special gay pride cereal for children, a breakfast cereal, and on the side of the box they had for your children to read while they’re enjoying their gay pride breakfast, an exercise for kids encouraging them to think of their own pronouns.

Are you serious?

Yes, serious. This was Kellogg’s, which is the major cereal manufacturer, and even breakfast has to be made part of the revolution. This is exactly what they did in the Soviet Union. In my book I tell the story about how in 1924 the Soviet Chess Society tried to defend chess from the encroaching revolution, and they put out a statement saying, “We have to keep chess for the sake of chess.” The Commissar said, “No, no, no. After the revolution, everything must be for the revolution.” Even now, after our revolution, cultural revolution, even breakfast cereal has to be part of the revolution, even children’s programming has to be part of the revolution.

Do you think that unless the Church or Christian leaders in general really stand up to all of this in a visible, united way, we’re going to lose? And can we win this battle when we’re effectively having our weapons taken away from us, the generals are deserting us before the battle has even properly started?

Yes, this is one way that Live Not By Lies is a successor to the Benedict Option. I think that when we look at religious authorities, not just Catholic ones, but most religious authorities, Christian authorities, we’ll see the modern-day equivalent of the Slovak bishops that Father Kolakovic faced: people who either don’t think it’s a problem or maybe think even some of the things that are happening are a good thing, they’re progressives. In the US, some of the most pro-LGBT, pro-gender ideology thinkers are priests and bishops. So my general advice to Christians is don’t wait on your leaders to tell us what to do and don’t count on them. In the US, I spoke to a pastor, not a Catholic, earlier this year. I said, “Pastor, in your congregation, we have gender ideology everywhere. Are you preparing your congregation, the parents there, on how they can deal with this when it hits their kids? It’s on children’s programming, it’s in classrooms. They need help.” I hear this all the time from parents that they’re so confused, and they don’t know what’s going on, what does the Church say about this? I added, “You need to do something in your parish for them.” He said, “Oh, no, no, no. We don’t need politics to come into our parish life.”

I thought this is why we can’t rely on the clergy, because I told him, “This isn’t politics, this is a real moral crisis that’s happening now.” I felt bad for the man because in the US a lot of churches — Protestant, Catholic and even Orthodox — have been struggling under Covid and with parishioners who have been driven mad by it and attacking their priest. I know an Orthodox priest in the US who has half of his congregation that want him to give them religious exemptions from having to follow Covid restrictions, and the other half want him to kick out the people — the vaccine skeptics. So clergy are in a terrible position because of Covid.

What do you predict will happen?

We are facing a long-term grave crisis that’s going to end up with a lot of Christians going to jail and a lot of churches closed. But so many pastors and bishops don’t want to face it, so [they] don’t worry about it. If your pastor, your bishop doesn’t see the problem, won’t help you, don’t let that stop you. Get together with other like-minded faithful, and even like-minded people from other churches. One of the things I learned that was so profound from reading the literature of the Gulag is that people who are put in jail, whether they were Protestant, Catholic or Orthodox, found real brotherhood in the prisons, because they knew they hadn’t been put there because they’re Protestant, Catholic or Orthodox. They were put there because they were followers of Jesus Christ.

That ecumenism of the Gulag is something that we had better start working on right now, because we’re going to need each other. You will not be able to count on every one of your particular confession having courage. Find them wherever they are and stand by them and make these connections right now, because you never know when you’re going to need them to hide you out or you’re going to need them to help you find a job when you’ve lost yours or to stand with you in public and defend you when everybody else is against you. I do feel strongly about that: that the institutional churches, not just Church, but churches cannot be counted on as allies here.

In a recent column, you wrote about a conversation you had with a retired professor who was concerned that Orban had allowed the Chinese to build a university campus in Hungary. It was justified on the grounds that the Chinese would respect Hungarian culture and “not become a seed of totalitarian wokeness.” Are you of the view that there can be an acceptable form of totalitarianism?

No, I don’t [agree with that]. I think it’s really dangerous what the Chinese are doing, and what the Hungarians are doing with China. China is never to be trusted, that’s what I believe. I put that on my blog as a sign for how leaders in the West are pushing people like the Hungarians into the arms of the Chinese, and how a lot of it has to do with LGBT, like what’s happened with the Hungarian law this summer about how the EU leaders are trying to wreck Hungary and Mark Rutte, the Prime Minister of the Netherlands said, “There’s no place for Hungary in the EU now” [because of their policies on LGBT issues].

At an event I attended recently, I spoke to some African lawmakers, parliamentarians who said that this is happening in Africa – that the West is coming in and withholding aid unless the African countries agree to the LGBT agenda. Just this morning, I posted a letter on my blog that I got from an American missionary in Nigeria who was talking about how America is going downhill in Africa and the Chinese are rising up, not only because of the money the Chinese are pouring in, but because the Chinese will not, and do not expect the Africans to, affirm LGBT.

This American missionary was under no illusions about who the Chinese are, but he said, “This is a big deal here with the Africans. I’ve seen it change in the years I’ve been in Nigeria. They’ve gone from being very pro-American and pro-Western to being very hostile, because they’re sick and tired of this cultural imperialism and propaganda of the LGBT.” You cannot explain this at all to a liberal progressive Westerner.

It’s become an article of faith.

It is, it’s an article of faith. It’s the same people who, back in their own universities, are raising hell to decolonize the university. At the same time, they’re doing their damnedest to colonize with the cultural progressivism actually existing in African and third-world societies.

Would you say that an underlying problem is that nobody has really stood up against the LGBT agenda until it was too late, and they still haven’t? Is this because people are too afraid of them?

I can remember when all this started back in the early 2000s, in the US at least. I concluded around 2004, 2005, I knew exactly what it was when I knew that it was over for traditionalists. George W Bush was reelected and one of the reasons he was reelected was because his advisors got a lot of LGBT marriage amendments on state ballots to get the Christian turnout high. Then when he was reelected, Senator Rick Santorum, a Catholic senator and some others introduced the Federal Marriage Amendment that would have put it in the constitution, “Marriage is one man, one woman.” They couldn’t even get it off the Senate floor, even though they had a Republican majority there, even though we had a recently reelected Republican president. Bush made a tepid public statement of support and that was the end of it.

I realized then that if we can’t even get it off the Senate floor in this country where most people still oppose gay marriage, we’re done. Working in the media at the time, I was at a newspaper, I could see how the fix was in. In terms of coverage, there was never any fair coverage, it was all advocacy journalism. I was in Dallas then, a conservative part of the US and on the editorial board, and I remember asking one my colleagues, a young Catholic, a Mass-going Catholic: “Look, we’re going to have an uphill fight arguing in the editorial board for traditional marriage, but I think we should make this stand. Will you stand with me?”

He said, “No, I’m in favor of gay marriage.” I said, “But the catechism…” He goes, “The Church doesn’t have any right to tell me what to believe.” He was completely serious and saw no contradiction there, but I asked him, I said, “Don’t you think that we at this newspaper at least have an obligation to report fairly on this and repeat what the other side had to say?” He looked at me and said, “If we were reporting during the civil rights movement, do you think we would have an obligation to give the Ku Klux Klan equal standing?” That was the mentality, and then churches, traditional churches were the equivalent of the Klan, and that was the elite view at that point and then it quickly became the view of everybody.

It’s funny we’re talking about this now because the Waterloo of the social conservatives was in 2015, just before Obergefell. The State of Indiana passed a law, a state version of the Federal Religious Freedom Restoration Act. All it would have done would have been to give religious people who are sued for discrimination some affirmative defense in law. It would not guarantee that they would win, but it would even the odds. A version of this had passed in many other states, but for some reason that year, Indiana, when its Republican legislature, Republican Governor Mike Pence passed this, it energized a coalition of big business. Apple Computer, Salesforce, major corporations got together and came down on the State of Indiana like a ton of bricks and said, “If you don’t repeal this law, there will be serious economic consequences.” And they meant it. 

What then happened?

The state backed down. A week later the State of Arkansas, very conservative, was set to pass the same version, a similar bill. Walmart cleared its throat and suddenly the law went away. That was the first time big business had taken the side in the culture war in a serious way, it had never happened before because it had always been considered bad for business. Well, they proved what they could do and it was over. That was the truth birth of woke capitalism as a political force. We were done after that.

It was during that Indiana fight that there was little pizza parlor called Memories Pizza in a small town in Northwestern Indiana run by these Evangelical Christians, an Evangelical Christian family. A TV reporter went to this little town, found these people and said, “Would you serve gay customers?”

They said, “Of course, we would.” She said, “Would you cater a gay wedding?” They said, “No, we’re Evangelicals, we just don’t feel right about that.” She put that on TV knowing full well what would happen. There was a prairie fire of indignation across the country, there were people writing on social media, “We have to go there and burn that place down.” The family had to shut the doors of the pizza parlor and get out for their own safety. Watching that happen on national TV was what prompted that elderly Czech woman to say this to her son, “This is what it was like under Communism.” That’s where the book started.

What other illuminating stories did you come across when researching Live Not By Lies?

There’s a really beautiful story at the end. I can’t do justice to here. But this young Slovak Catholic photographer, Timo Krizka, who was a toddler when Communism fell, talks about how he had more privileges than his parents could have imagined. He could travel. He was able to fulfill his professional desires, et cetera. His children were all raised in freedom. But he was so empty, despite having all the things his parents’ generation lacked.

His grandfather or great-grandfather was a great Catholic priest who left the priesthood because he refused to obey the Communist government’s orders to convert to Orthodoxy because they could control the Orthodox church. So he was kicked out of the priesthood. Well, Timo Krizka, to honor the memory of his grandfather, decided to go around the country and interview elderly Slovak Catholics who had been to prison for their faith back in the day.

Many of them are still living in poverty, but he interviewed them and photographed them. He’s a beautiful photographer and published a book about it. But he said that talking to these Catholics who had lost everything for the Lord, he realized that they had a sense of peace that he did not have. And it made him realize, as he told me, that the real tyranny he was facing, even in liberty and material prosperity, was anxiety in his self, the tyranny of himself. And I didn’t expect that. I became good friends with Timo, and I didn’t expect to hear something like that.

But then he said, leaving aside whether or not we’re going into face totalitarianism, the totalitarianism of the self was something that was oppressing him, even now. And meeting these elderly people who had had everything taken from them but their faith led him to a much deeper conversion.

What about those who had suffered directly from Communist totalitarianism? Can you tell us a bit about them?

If you ever heard of Dr. Silvester Krcmery, he is one of the big influences on the book. He died in 2012. He was a young Catholic physician who was the top Lieutenant of Father Kolakovic. They put him in prison in ‘52, grabbed him off the street, and he wrote a book in ‘96 called This Saved Us, about what got him and his colleagues through 10 years in prison and torture, a spiritual program. I mean, it was just incredible. One of the things he said that really struck me because I’m prone to this weakness, he said, “I realized early on that I could never allow myself to feel self-pity, because if I did, I would be gone.” He had every right to [feel self pity]. He was unjustly deprived of his liberty, and he was tortured, et cetera. But he knew that self-pity would be his Achilles Heel, so he just chose to reframe his suffering as being… He said, “I was God’s probe.” Those are the words he used, “God’s probe. I was there in the prison to find out more about myself and my own repentance, and to help and serve others.” That’s what got him through. Nobody would have heard of this man. You know?

It sounds very much like Father Walter Ciszek’s powerful witness, the Jesuit who suffered many years in a Soviet Gulag.  

Oh, it’s very much on that line, of being in a Gulag, but not feeling self-pity, but realizing that the Lord is testing you, and that out of it, you become better. And I found out in Slovakia that there’s an entire generation or two of Slovaks who have no idea who Krcmery is. This spiritual giant, he’s been forgotten in his own country. I hope that when my book comes out in Slovak, and it soon will, that that reverses it.

But talking about the suffering, I tell the story in the book of a Russian Orthodox man named Alexander Ogorodnikov. He came from a prominent communist family and had converted in the early ‘70s and started leading a small group of prayer in Moscow. They eventually put him in prison in the late ‘70s. And even though he didn’t have a death sentence, they put him on death row to make an example of him because of his Communist background.

I interviewed him in Moscow. He’s maybe 71 now, and his face was partially paralyzed from the beatings he took in prison. But he told me that in prison, he began to witness to the hardest of the hard criminals in Russia, and all of them began to convert. So the Soviets put him in an isolation cell and in there, he began to struggle with his faith. He was really treated badly and began to wonder, “Lord, are you even there? Why am I doing this?”

He told me that one night he was awakened from his sleep by an angel who gave him a vision. In the vision, he saw a man, a prisoner being led from behind with his arms behind his back by two guards. And Ogorodnikov said, “I understood he was being led to his execution.” The next night, the same thing happened with a different prisoner, on and on. And he finally realized that, “I was being shown the men I had led to Christ being taken to their own execution. But the Lord helped me understand that these men were going to heaven or going to paradise because the Lord had had me there to share the Gospel.” Ogorodnikov started crying telling me this story, that he said, “I regained my faith, and I knew why the Lord had me there.” And I’m getting chills thinking about it now, with men who this had happened to. But he will be, when he goes to his reward, he will be reunited with these, the most wretched of the earth who will be in paradise or in paradise with our Lord because Ogorodnikov suffered and was there to witness to them. That’s the sort of spirit that all of us are going to need to get through what’s to come.

Turning to your open support for Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán. In particular about what do you say to critics who contend that you overlook what his opponents say, that he is authoritarian, given to dictatorial tendencies. Would you like to respond to that?

Sure, that’s fine. Well, you know, as I said repeatedly and in interviews I gave with the Hungarian press, I don’t think he’s a Saint. I object to some of the things he does. I mean, I really am worried about his openness to China with the Fudan University. I don’t read Hungarian, but I’m told by people who even who support him that he has a very high tolerance for corruption — which, by the way, I learned is endemic to the former Communist countries. It’s not just Hungary. They’re all this way, sadly.

But anyway, yeah, he’s not a Saint. But what I will say is this about him: he has immense courage in standing up for religious liberty at home and in Europe at a time when he’s widely hated by Europe, and he stands up to protect the family throughout, as we’ve seen this new LGBT law. I think his refugee policy in 2015, which earned him infamy in Europe, was the correct one.

When I was in France this summer promoting the French version of Live Not By Lies, I’ve never heard the French so afraid of what they believe is coming with in terms of they call it civil war with the Muslims of the banlieue and the immigrants. And I’ve been going to France for over 20 years, and I’ve never heard them like this. And I realized my God, Viktor Orbán was right. He seems to be the only major European leader who understands that we are in a civilizational struggle, and that what’s at stake here is the future, not only of Christendom, but the future of European civilization, and he’s willing to take a stand to be hated for that.

So that’s what I say to them, that whatever his imperfections, my God, who else is standing firm like him? And his ministers, Katalin Novák, the family minister. Again, these people are so brave. The Poles are doing it, but if not for Poland and Hungary, for all the problems of both governments, where would we be?

And so just this week in Rome, I had a cab driver who was a Syrian Catholic, and we got to talking, as one does with cab drivers. And he said, “Do you think that Christians of Syria loved the Assad regime? No, we don’t. We’re grateful for it, because it’s the only thing standing between us and those who would murder us.” And I think that that’s an extreme version of what we’re dealing with with Orbán.

So I have a very, very high tolerance for failing, serious failings and a government when they will do the things that they’re doing. And Orbán’s government, by the way, has reached out in a very big way to help persecuted Christians in the Middle East and elsewhere when other governments will not. 

Yes, so few governments follow Hungary’s lead in this regard.

When you have Western diplomats, NGO heads, and the leaders in the West who seem embarrassed by the fact that Christians are persecuted, and who seem to have internalised this narrative that Christians can only ever be oppressors, they can never be oppressed. When you see that attitude, that ghastly attitude endemic to Western leaders, then it puts what Orbán stands for in perspective. He doesn’t agree with that, and Hungary, the “Hungary Helps” program, has actually done concrete good.

I talked to an Orthodox bishop a couple of years ago, and he said: “We have to thank the Hungarian government. We would all be dead if not for the Hungarians.” This man was serious. And that’s what the Hungarians are to me. So yeah, I have a high tolerance for their sense in failings because of their very great virtues, virtues which are conspicuously lacking in Western governance, even in Western ecclesial leadership.

Also because as you’ve said, they’ve been through this totalitarian experience before?

Yes, they know what it is. They know what we’re dealing with. And the Poles know what we’re dealing with. But the most shocking thing I learned when I was researching this book was when I was in Poland two years ago doing interviews. I kept hearing from young Catholics in their 20s who would say, “You know? In 10 years, maybe 20, this country is going the same way as Ireland.”

And I said, “That can’t be.” I mean, I’m 54 years old. I was raised in the John Paul II era. Finally, at the end of my journey, I got to the Tyniec Abbey near Krakow, and I met this very well-respected older Polish Benedictine, Father Włodzimierz Zatorski. Sadly, he died of COVID last year. But I said, “Father, this is what I’m hearing from these young Catholics. Could it possibly be true?” He goes, “Oh, yeah, it’s true.” I’m like, “Really? Well, how do you explain that?” Of course, the influence of social media from the West is part of it. But the thing he was most upset about was what he called, well, the vainglory of the bishops. And it meant that after the fall of Communism, they thought they were riding high, and they refused to see the challenges in front of them. And they didn’t deal with abuse. They didn’t deal with any number of problems. They just thought, “It’s always going to be this way.” He was very angry about it. 

Just lastly, if we could briefly look at Afghanistan. Why do you think Christians weren’t given priority in the evacuation by Western countries?

I know from a source inside the US government a Catholic who was involved very closely with trying to get people out, especially Christians, that the situation was far more dire than most of us were told. And the reason we weren’t told was because those who knew didn’t want to put these people in even more danger. I was told that the Taliban was going door-to-door searching for Christians. Some of them were putting on stolen US Army uniforms, pretending to be US troops or US affiliated troops looking for Christians. But no one was fooled because they had beards.

But this was happening. And I believe, my theory, I don’t know this for a fact, my theory is that it’s the same thing we were talking about earlier — that leaders in the West, even in United States, just simply do not see Christians as worthy of special defense. They’re embarrassed by the fact that Christians are being persecuted. They don’t know what to do with it. They don’t want to deal with it.

Because they don’t hold to a pseudo-religion.

Exactly, exactly. And I think that this is a harsh thing to say, but I think it’s true that we had this Evangelical president, George W. Bush, whose actions in Iraq caused the destruction of ancient Christian communities who weren’t Evangelical Protestant. Now, I think it would be unfair to say that Evangelical Protestants in general don’t care about these ancient Catholic and Orthodox communities. But I do think it’s fair to say that they don’t have any sort of natural understanding about how these things were. And I think that the Ecclesiological Parochialism of American Evangelicals had a lot to do with that. But I think in this case, you have a Catholic President [Joe Biden] and he didn’t prioritize Christians there. I think it’s because they’ve just bought the liberal secularist line, that where Christians are invisible.

I think, and I’ve seen this in American journalism all my life, that when you’re dealing with Christians abroad, American liberals who are in charge of these institutions see inside every black or brown Christian a little Jerry Falwell ready to burst out, and it’s just imposing a culture war.

In fact, I was told by an American diplomat who serves in one of the Visegrád countries, “When it comes to Hungary,” he said, “the American left and the American right project our own culture war politics onto this country. And by far the most serious problem in all of the former Eastern European countries is corruption. But nobody talks about that. It’s that the left wants to see it in terms of the US culture war, and so does the right.”