{"id":50200,"date":"2025-04-30T17:03:04","date_gmt":"2025-04-30T21:03:04","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/faithmediaandculture\/?p=50200"},"modified":"2025-04-30T17:03:04","modified_gmt":"2025-04-30T21:03:04","slug":"writer-rod-dreher-on-giving-voice-to-christian-survivors-of-the-soviet-union-and-their-warnings-for-this-generation-president-trumps-next-100-days","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/faithmediaandculture\/2025\/04\/writer-rod-dreher-on-giving-voice-to-christian-survivors-of-the-soviet-union-and-their-warnings-for-this-generation-president-trumps-next-100-days.html","title":{"rendered":"Writer Rod Dreher on giving voice to Christian survivors of the Soviet Union and their warnings for this generation + President Trump’s next 100 days"},"content":{"rendered":"

Here’s the latest from the crossroads of faith, media & culture: 04\/30\/25<\/strong><\/h3>\n

“Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction” – Ronald Reagan.<\/strong><\/a> In Part One of my conversation with Christian writer and social commentator Rod Dreher<\/strong><\/a>, we focused on the legacy of Pope Francis<\/strong> and the future of the Catholic Church<\/strong>. Here we turn our attention to the future of the world at large. L<\/em><\/strong>ive Live Not by Lies<\/em><\/strong>, the four-part documentary series based on his bestselling book<\/a> that is currently streaming on the Angel platform<\/a><\/strong> offers this generation of Americans warnings about the fragility of freedom from Christian survivors of the old Soviet Union.
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

JWK: Turning back to your Live Not by Lies<\/i>\u00a0documentary series currently streaming on the Angel platform, your book upon which it is based has sold over 200,000 copies and been translated into ten languages. Why do you think it resonated with readers and what inspired you t take its message from the page to the screen?<\/strong><\/p>\n

\n
\n
Rod Dreher: <\/b>The book was published in September 2020, seven months into the Covid pandemic, and after the George Floyd<\/strong> summer, and the woke overreaction that corporations and other institutions undertook in its aftermath. Ordinary people knew that something deeply wrong was going on, something that they had never seen. Live Not By Lies<\/em> gave them a framework for understanding it. Though the book was completely ignored by the mainstream media, it sold like crazy. When a documentary filmmaking team approached me about doing the series, I was eager to get that project going, because the people who most need to hear these warnings from those who lived under communism — young people — are not likely to pick up the book. But they will watch a film.<\/div>\n
<\/div>\n
JWK:<\/strong> The series highlights the stories of religious dissidents under Soviet totalitarianism. What parallels do you see between what happened then and what’s going on in the contemporary West today?<\/strong><\/div>\n
<\/div>\n
RD:<\/b> It’s hard for us to see totalitarianism in wokeness and other aspects of contemporary American life. We think of totalitarianism according to the Soviet model: a police state that tortured and imprisoned its dissenters. We don’t have that, obviously. But what the people who came to America from communist countries understood is that it is possible to have a form of totalitarianism that is softer — but still totalitarian. The point of totalitarianism is to insist on a single ideological way of thinking about politics — and to turn every aspect of life political. We can see that with DEI programs, for example, and how until very recently, criticizing DEI was a sure way to get yourself called a bigot, and ruin your career. We saw that with the way the transgender agenda was imposed on Americans through lies, coercion, and bullying. Totalitarianism seeks to force an entire society to conform to its ideological program — and that is what the left did, or tried to do, especially because it captured nearly all major institutions of American life.<\/div>\n
\u00a0<\/b><\/div>\n
Some of that is ending now with the Trump<\/strong> administration, but we shouldn’t think that it’s over. For one, the woke ideologues are not going to give up easily. For another, the conditions in broader society that allowed these soft-totalitarian policies to arise are still present. And that could also lead to a right-wing form of soft totalitarianism. Any time you have a large number of people, or at least a large number of institutional elites, who hate their perceived enemies more than they love liberty, you are in danger of accepting totalitarianism as a way to compel them to obey.<\/div>\n
<\/div>\n
JWK: You\u2019ve described \u201ccomfort as the new gulag.\u201d Can you elaborate on how modern conveniences and societal pressures may be subtly coercing people into silence or conformity?<\/strong><\/div>\n
<\/div>\n
RD:<\/b> The “hard totalitarianism” of the Soviet Union was like George Orwell’s novel Nineteen Eighty-Four<\/i><\/strong>: imposed by fear, pain, and violence. Our soft form is more like the model in Aldous Huxley’s novel <\/strong>Brave New World<\/strong>. <\/i>In that book, the masses accept totalitarianism and the loss of their humanity as the price for having total comfort, pleasure, and constant entertainment. For them, the ultimate goal is to avoid pain and suffering — even suffering as mild as anxiety. In Huxley’s novel, the totalitarian governor of Europe questions the lone dissident about why he doesn’t want to join their hedonistic society, saying to the man, “It sounds like you’re fighting for your right to be unhappy.” He is! The core message I heard over and over from the Christian dissidents in the former communist countries was this: if you are not prepared to suffer for your faith, then you are not going to make it. Holding on to our faith, and holding on the the plain truth, requires a willingness and a capacity to endure suffering.<\/div>\n
<\/div>\n
JWK: What is “soft totalitarianism,” why is it so dangerous and how can it be resisted?<\/strong><\/div>\n
<\/div>\n
RD: <\/b>It’s a way of achieving totalitarian goals in a much more pleasant way — in part by convincing people to voluntarily submit to their own captivity. And when they don’t, it’s a form of punishing them without resorting to harsh methods like imprisonment. There is also a therapeutic element to soft totalitarianism. For example, the soft totalitarians take away one’s free speech rights out of concern for not hurting the feelings of sacred victim groups. This kind of totalitarianism is confusing, because it is often built on things we as Christians value, like fighting racism. A Slovak Catholic priest said, “In some ways, this is harder to resist than communism was. Under communism, the light of the Gospel<\/strong> shone clearly through the darkness. With this, it hits only fog.”<\/div>\n
<\/div>\n
JWK:\u00a0 As you mentioned, you’re a visiting fellow at the Danube Institute in Budapest. From your experience, how to the people of Eastern Europe view these issues in comparison with many of us in the West?<\/strong><\/div>\n
<\/div>\n
RD:\u00a0 <\/b>Those old enough to remember communism understand well what this is all about. But their children and grandchildren are just as confused as their own generations are in the West. They get a lot of the same media and pop culture that Westerners do. And they want to be free to be hedonists, just like people in the West. Plus, with the exception of Poland, and to some extent Romania, religion is very weak in Eastern Europe, so that bulwark against soft totalitarianism barely exists. And even Poland and Romania are rapidly secularizing among the young, post-communist generations.<\/div>\n

JWK:<\/strong>\u00a0Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn who of course, wrote The Gulag\u00a0<\/em>Archipelago<\/i>\u00a0once warned the West that Ideology “gives evildoing its long-sought justification and gives the evildoer the necessary steadfastness and determination”\u2026On the surface,communism and socialism and sound noble but their unforgiving of pursuit of perfection ends up justifying massive evil. Is that what we’re dealing with now in the form of wokism, the weaponization of cultural guilt, repackaging censorship as “misinformation,” control of the language,\u00a0 cultural division through group identity and government and corporations uniting around globalism?<\/strong><\/div>\n
<\/div>\n
RD:\u00a0 <\/b>Well … yes! These are all ways that the totalitarian spirit is at work in our world.<\/div>\n
<\/div>\n
JWK:<\/strong> In your series, Douglas Murray<\/a> reassuringly says that “There will always be people who will say what they see in spite of being told not to.” Do you believe that’s so – and, if so, will there be enough to make a difference?<\/strong><\/div>\n
<\/div>\n
RD: <\/b>Yes, this is true. But will there be enough to make a difference? It’s hard to say. Vaclav Havel<\/strong>, the leader of the Czech dissidents, once wrote that bringing down a system built on lies required a critical mass of people who refused to live by lies, and who were willing to suffer for their convictions. Havel believed that there was enough goodness inside most people to be moved by the moral sacrifice of those willing to suffer for truth — and eventually, they would join the cause. But there are no guarantees. That said, not a single one of the dissidents I interviewed thought they would live to see communism fall. Not one. They stood up because it was the right thing to do, period.<\/div>\n

JWK:<\/strong> What’s next for you?<\/strong><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
<\/div>\n
RD: <\/b>I don’t know. Right now I’m just keeping my eyes open and praying for God<\/strong>‘s will for my life. I write a daily Substack<\/strong> newsletter<\/a>, as well as columns for The European Conservative<\/strong>, and sometimes for The Free Press. I’m in preliminary talks now with the makers of the Live Not By Lies<\/em> film to make a film version of my latest book, Living In Wonder<\/strong><\/em><\/a>. That would be sheer joy, traveling around to beautiful, sacred places, and interviewing people who have experienced miracles. I hope it happens.
\n_____<\/div>\n
Now what? As President Trump begins the second hundred days of his second term, a new Fox News poll<\/a> suggests that he has lost some support.<\/strong> It is kind of easy to see why. His frantic pace, while welcomed regarding the closure of the border, has a lot of Americans (hoping to begin breathing a little easier after years of crisis after crisis) feeling a bit edgy – particularly regarding the possible economic impact of tariffs. According to the poll, Trump’s approval rating is underwater 55% to 44%. That’s not great news. If things don’t start moving in his direction, it’s not impossible that, as unpopular as they too are, Democrats<\/strong> could take control of Congress next year. If that were to happen, I suspect it wouldn’t just put Trump’s governing agenda in jeopardy. We’d be back to impeachment circuses with an overall plan to put him, and probably Elon Musk<\/strong> and members of his administration, in prison.<\/div>\n
<\/div>\n
I do have my problems with President Trump. I really don’t like the way he has treated some of our allies, most notably our friends in Canada who he has needlessly and foolishly disrepected with his 51st state talk. He is probably most responsible for this week’s Conservative Party<\/strong> loss in Canada<\/a>. Likewise, it’s clear that neither Denmark nor Greenlanders\u00a0 have any desire to see the Danish territory<\/a> become part of the United States. We should be respectfully cooperating with both countries to achieve better trade and security arrangements. The bullying is unacceptable.<\/div>\n
<\/div>\n
Rather than picking fights with our allies, President Trump needs to turn his attention\u00a0 (as do the Democrats) to the real enemies of freedom which are the governments of China, Iran and Russia. Regarding Russia, while I agree that the Biden Administration<\/strong> played a key role in tempting Putin<\/strong> to invade Ukraine, Russia is the aggressor and the US should honor the security assurances it provided Ukraine in 1994 when the former SSR agreed to transfer its Cold War-era nuclear warheads to Russia for elimination<\/a>.<\/div>\n
<\/div>\n
My hope is that President Trump gets some quick wins on the tariff issues (many of which are legit) and that his “Big Beautiful” tax bill passes. I also give him a lot of credit to getting control of the US border, reversing Biden policies which seemed either insane or, pardon the pun, borderline treasonous. Trump should cooperate with the courts but also push back and quickly appeal the rulings of activist judges who lack the humility to constitutionally restrict their own power.<\/div>\n
<\/div>\n
Overall, I think the Trump is on firm ground when it comes to fighting illegal immigration, waste, fraud and abuse in government, antisemitism and DEI on college campuses and elsewhere as well as protecting parental rights and the rights of children, women and girls from an extreme trans agenda that goes far beyond tolerance into the realm of bullying. I don’t like it when any group – left or right – bullies other people. Frankly, I think that’s where most people stand.<\/div>\n
<\/div>\n
While I have some qualms about President Trump, I don’t see a Democratic Party that appears blinded by hatred for him and his supporters as a viable alternative. What America wants – and deserves – are opposing political parties that are less interested is annihilating<\/span><\/span><\/span> each other and more interested in working toward common sense solutions that benefit everyone. In America, with God<\/strong>‘s help, we can find the equilibrium between forced conformity and utter disunity. It’s called mutual respect. We’re not put on this Earth to destroy each other but to balance each other.<\/div>\n

John W. Kennedy is a writer, producer and media development consultant specializing in television and movie projects that uphold positive timeless values, including trust in God. <\/em><\/p>\n

\n

Encourage one another and build each other up – <\/span><\/em>1 Thessalonians 5:11<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Here’s the latest from the crossroads of faith, media & culture: 04\/30\/25 “Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction” – Ronald Reagan. In Part One of my conversation with Christian writer and social commentator Rod Dreher, we focused on the legacy of Pope Francis and the future of the Catholic Church. 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