Hey, guys, happy Monday.

Oh, my gosh, it's the last Monday before the election, tomorrow's the election. Are you guys nervous? I'm nervous. I'm not nervous about who's going to win. Not that I know who's going to win, because I.

I really don't. I really don't. But I'm just I just have some nervous butterflies going into the day because there's so much on the line. And I'm just thinking about the reactions to it in all the craziness that's going to ensue in the next few days no matter what the results are tomorrow night. My one prediction is that we're not actually going to know who wins tomorrow.

And I hope that that's not the case. I really do. But let's pray for our nation. Let's be in prayer. Let's be in prayer for the pundits. Let's be in prayer for the journalists. Let's be in prayer for both campaigns. Let's be in prayer for both candidates. Let's be in prayer for the church. Let's pray for peace. Let's pray for unity. I know that seems almost laughable right now, but we have a God that can do absolutely anything.

Let's pray for calls to repentance. Let's pray for softened hearts to believe in the gospel and to follow Christ. And let's pray that Christians would come together and seek the welfare of our country. And so I am even though I have nervous butterflies, I am also assured, knowing that God is completely in control, as we talked about on Friday, this conversation that I'm about to have with author Rod Dreher, amazing person.

Like, I'm just so glad that he exists. I am so glad for the wisdom and the encouragement that he shares through all of his writing. And I am so excited for you to listen to this conversation. I think it's actually the perfect conversation for you to listen to before the election. I think it just gets our perspective where it needs to be. So without further ado, here is Rod Dreher.

Mr. Dreer, thank you so much for joining me. It's a pleasure to be here.

Can you tell everyone who may not know who you are and what you do? All right, well, I'm a writer, senior editor at the American Conservative magazine, but I'm also the writer of several books. My latest one is called Live Not By Lies A Manual for Christian Dissidents.

But previously I wrote The Benedict Option. I wrote a book called How Dante Can Save Your Life and a book called The Little Way of Ruthie Living. I live in south Louisiana, in Baton Rouge with my wife and kids.

That is awesome. Can you tell everyone why you decided to write your most recent book, Live Not By Lies?

Well, about five years ago, I received a phone call from a physician whose elderly mother was living with him and his wife. And she had grown up in Czechoslovakia under communism and had spent four years in a communist prison for practicing her Christian faith when she was young.

And she said, some of the things I see happening in America today remind me of what happened back in my country when communism came. And I thought that was pretty alarmist.

You know, I have an old mom who watches a lot of cable news and gets really anxious about the world, but only when I started talking to other people in this country who had escaped communism. And I would ask them, are you seeing things that trouble you? Every one of them said absolutely, yes. This left wing social justice ideology that's rising reminds us exactly of what we left behind.

And they get so angry that Americans, especially American Christians, aren't taking them seriously.

Can you talk about some of those examples specifically? What are they seeing that remind them of the rise of communism and their former countries? Right.

Well, the main thing they're seeing is a rise in the institutions of this country, of a militant left wing ideology that will complete. It is completely intolerant, that will not allow you to dissent in any way, that seeks to cost you your job and your reputation if you don't toe the line. One man told me that the way things happen and how fast the line moves when something you say one day could be acceptable and tomorrow, then they want to fire you for it, he said.

That's exactly what happened under communism, where you had to live in fear constantly that you were going to say the wrong thing and that would be the end of you. You wouldn't simply be told, well, you're wrong. We can disagree peacefully.

You would lose your job and communism, you could lose your freedom and even your life. That's not here yet. But they say the signs are really clear that that the left is moving this country into a very dangerous and illiberal position.

Right. And how how do you explain to someone who says, OK, how is that possible when we've got a Republican president, we've got a Republican Senate, we've got now a majority of conservatives on the Supreme Court. What are you talking about that this leftist social justice ideology is taking over? You've got conservatives in power. What do you say to that? Well, that's a great question.

And that, I think, is the reason or the prime reason that so many conservatives don't recognize the totalitarian nature of what's happening. It's because the left controls all the institutions of American society except the political ones. The left controls universities, the mass media, major corporations. That's a big one. What capitalism? The way that's social justice, so-called social justice ideology has taken over big corporations.

These are the things that set the tone for America. And we can have a Republican president and a Republican Senate and they can only affect the politics.

But we have to understand that politics is downstream from culture and and doing my book and doing the research on how totalitarian movements start, I learned that you have to pay attention to what the elites in a society are saying and doing right now in this country.

The elites are all on board with Black Lives Matter, with LGBT and all the so-called social justice intersectional movements.

And they are controlling the gates.

To join that, you would have to go through to join the professional class.

So you're going to get to a situation where you can't be a teacher or psychologist or a lawyer or a doctor unless you tick off all the left wing boxes.

I had a man tell me he's a senior physician at a major American hospital who he grew up in the Soviet Union.

And he told me that at this hospital, it's policy that if somebody shows up wanting transgender surgery across sex hormones, we have to give it to them. Even if we as physicians believe that is bad for them. You're not given the choice. He said they didn't even do that in the Soviet Union.

Right.

How did we decide or how did the the left decide which ideological tenets would. Be necessary and must be forced upon the nation, obviously, the LGBTQ black lives matter, like those parts of the leftist ideology, aren't reflected in what the Soviet Union believed. So how did these kinds of new cultural trends become so dominating in part of this totalitarian world that we now live in?

That's a fascinating question. When I studied the Russian Revolution, the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, it was fascinating to go back and read about the early Bolsheviks and how they were essentially a pseudo religious movement.

This one Russian American historian calls them an apocalyptic millenarian political cult. They believed that they could usher in utopia through revolutionary violence and they decided that the good people were the workers and the peasants. The bad people who deserve to be killed were the capitalists and the bourgeoisie. And they had an essentially religious, fanatical view of the world. But it was just their God was Marx. Well, flash forward to what we have. In the 1960s, our left wing radicals stopped seeing the world in terms of class division and started seeing it in terms of identity politics.

So in my book, Live Not By Lies, I quote something that one of the secret police heads in 1918, Russia said when he was instructing Bolsheviks to go out and do mass murders of people who are opponents of the communists.

He said don't look at them individually and see what their guilt is. So rather look and see what social class they belong to and punish them on the basis of that. That, he said, is the essence of red terror. Well, now in our society, we have the left, not the old fashioned liberal left. They have been defeated by these militants.

We have the militant left dividing people in terms of their sex, in terms of their race and their gender preference and so on and so forth.

But it's the same mentality, the idea that guilt is inherent in your identity, not individual, in terms of your individual character or the actions you make as an individual. And this is what's so dangerous about this sort of thing that we we don't understand that what is happening now in this mentality that's taking over our schools, our corporations and our media is profoundly un-American and profoundly illiberal because it's profoundly against what Dr. Martin Luther King said, to be honest, because he said we should judge people on the content of your character.

That man was a Christian pastor. He knew his Bible. What we have now is something very different. How did this become so popular, it seems, especially in the past five to 10 years, we hear a lot from the left that conservatives have become radical, that we've moved far to the right. But actually, we talked about on this podcast several studies by Pew Research that look at how the left has very tangibly quantifiably moved to the left on several issues, especially when it comes to race, especially in how they see victimization of certain groups in this country.

How did that happen and become so popular in just the last decade alone? Yeah, it was the last decade.

In fact, in my book, I talk about some research done by a grad student at Georgia Tech, I believe Zach Goldberg, in which he went back and looked at all the the the Nexus Lexus research database of all the words published in the American media in any given year.

And he found that around 2013, at the beginning of the first Obama term, that's when suddenly all this left wing social justice jargon just went through the roof.

I think the Trayvon Martin killing had a lot to do with it.

And, of course, Black Lives Matter arising out of Ferguson. But I think also a different generation coming into the universities had a lot to do with it. You know, smartphones debuted in this country in 2007. And one thing I learned in researching this book is the way that technology, that particular technology formats are neurologically and formats us to be very, very anxious about the world, always seeking those new dopamine hits of likes on social media and so forth.

So I think what you have what we've seen is a new generation that has come of age in their their adolescent teenage years on social media, and they've become incredibly fragile and sensitive to anything that they consider to be harm.

You know, I'll tell you an interesting story I learned when I was working on the book.

I went to Boston on business and met with a friend of mine who was finishing grad graduate work at Harvard. And this guy is a European. And I said, so what did what did you learn here at the greatest university in the world? What's the most important lesson you learned?

He said how fragile the American elites are. I said, well, what do you mean by that? He said, it's unbelievable to watch.

Europeans were sitting in these classes and professors at Harvard would say, we're not going to talk about this topic, this topic and this topic in this class, because some of you have come to me ahead of time and said it would trigger you, it would be too difficult emotionally to talk about it.

The European guy said, this is unbelievable to me because these people, these elites, these American elites have no doubt that they're they are born to lead the world, but they cannot handle reality. They have been rendered so fragile by American culture. And he said, I'm really I'm worried about the kind of future we're going to see in this world.

The the Europeans, though, have also experienced a rise of leftism.

Why is it that the American brand of leftism has left its adherents seemingly more fragile than its left the adherents elsewhere?

Hmm, that is a really good question. And I think it's probably because in Europe, they have a long tradition of leftism that is based in class conflict and a class analysis they had until fairly recent times. They had a strong socialist movement in Western Europe. We've never had that here in America. We have never really thought about our own divisions in class terms in this country. So when the left looks for something to to worry about, some way to to bring the revolution, they naturally go towards identity politics and have since the 1970s, as we were talking about earlier.

But it is really amazing. Some of the leftists in this country, I think Bernie Sanders is one of them. He gets really frustrated with the way so much popular leftism is so focused on identity politics, because Sanders believes it is blinding people to the fact that we have a lot in common economically and we should build these bonds, these political bonds and alliances economically.

But I don't think Bernie is going to get very far when you have such hysteria on the left over matters of race and gender and identity.

And I think we're kind of seeing a convergence, too, between those two views, that there's a lot of class conflict, but there's also a lot of racial conflict and gender conflict. We're seeing that convergence and people like Bernie Sanders, who does talk in the language of identity politics and so does AOC and Omar, the self-proclaimed democratic socialist. And so what we're seeing is just a complete deconstruction and division of every segment of society to try to convince us that we have more that divides us than actually unites us.

What is it what is the end goal of that, though? Because the same people that divide people by their demographics and socio economic status and all of that say that they want unity, say that they want peace. Is that just a common communist trope throughout history or are American communists different?

Like what's the aim there? Well, it actually is.

This is the way all totalitarian governments come to power. They divide people and then offer themselves and their ideology as the only thing that can unite us, can get us back to back together and find purpose. You know, in the book I write about Hannah Arendt, the great political theorist of the 20th century, who did a study in nineteen fifty one called The Origins of Totalitarianism.

And she herself was a refugee from Nazi Germany, a German Jew.

And she wanted to find out what it was about Germany and Russia that made both of those countries open themselves up to totalitarianism in the 20th century because she wanted to understand how this happens in any society and to read the origins of totalitarianism today and to think about where we are in America is really frightening.

And help me to understand why so many of these people who escaped communism are worried today. The main thing Arendt found that pre totalitarian society has is mass loneliness and social atomization. When people feel disconnected from each other, disconnected from their institutions, their traditional ways of life, they are sitting ducks.

We have that in spades in this country.

I was doing some research in some social science research, frankly, and looking up the the statistics and polls and so forth. American people have never felt so lonely and covid has just sent that through the roof.

So what we're going to have, I believe, is a totalitarian movement of the left move in very softly and say, look, let's come together. We can bring us together if we just get rid of these bad people, these deplorable people who are dividing us.

And I think, too, it's not going to come alive by gulags, secret police coming to our doors. It's going to be much softer.

It's going to be something more like the Chinese social credit system, which works by they take all the data that everybody generates from their smartphones, from their laptops and so on, and they use it to rate people.

And if you have a higher social credit rating, that is if the government approves of what you're doing, you have more privileges. If you have a lower social credit rating for doing things like going to church, the Chinese Communist Party gives you a lower rating and you suddenly find you can't travel, your kids can't get into college, things like that. We have all the all the things in place now in this country to make that a reality here.

The government's not collecting this data. Major corporations are. And whenever I see corporations declining to do business with people, with conservatives on some ground, we're not going to going to able to do business with hater's.

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Do you think that you talked about someone coming in and saying, look, we're so divided and we're in a bad economic spot, we're in a bad public health spot? My ideology is what is going to bring us together? Well, that sounds to me like Joe Biden's pitch. Are you making the case that that is what the Democratic Party is already doing, that they are trying to bring in that soft totalitarianism by taking advantage of our vulnerable position right now?

I don't think they're aware that they're doing it, but they're doing it. I mean, look, we all want to be united as a country. You know, many of us have lived through the time of 9/11 and how great it felt to be one country then all united with love and brotherhood for each other. That was a wonderful moment and we all wish for that.

But what Biden and the Democrats are doing, in my view, is trying to unite us by by stigmatizing and demonizing traditional people and conservatives and the so-called deplorable, I think there with the with the collaboration of the media, they are going to try to achieve unity by saying the only thing that stands between us and unity and justice in this country are conservatives, in particular conservative Christians.

I can remember a few years ago when David Gushee, he is a Baptist ethicist, he used to be a conservative. He became a liberal.

He wrote a column back in 2016, I think it was when he came out in favor of LGBT marriage. And he said openly that conservative Christians are the only thing standing in the way of full LGBT equality and acceptance in this country.

I think after this election, however it goes, we're going to see the major media. We're going to see universities and even corporations ramping up the demonization of conservatives, especially conservative Christians.

And I wrote this book to get advice from people who lived under hard totalitarianism in the Soviet bloc, Christians who stood up to it to get them to tell us what can we do to get ready for it because it is coming.

And if we sit back and pretend it's not happening, then we're just going to be that much more vulnerable when they come for our jobs. They come for our churches and Christian schools.

And I want to talk about specifically what some of those tips are and what we can do, because I know people are listening to this right now, and that's what they're thinking. They're like, oh, my gosh, OK, I get it. This is bad. Now, what do I do? But before I ask that question, there are a couple of questions I want to ask specifically in relation to how the church is reacting to this social justice movement.

I think a portion of the church is reacting very badly by accepting it, by accepting the idea of what you said earlier, that, OK, social justice ideology is the only thing that's going to bring us together. And I see that most specifically when we're talking about something like white privilege or systemic racism or critical race theory, there are some even evangelicals who have bought into the idea that. The gospel biblical unity is not actually enough to bring Christians together.

We also need critical race theory. We also need to be reading Robin D'Angelo and Max Candy and the the white evangelical church is just going to continue to be racist and prejudiced until they adopt this kind of critical race theory, social justice, intersectionality, ideology. How do you think? And obviously I totally disagree with that. And I think that you do, too. How do you think that has happened, that an ideology that is obviously so hostile to biblical Christianity, so hostile to the gospel, so hostile to the church, has been accepted by Christians who say that they they care about living biblically and doing justice and loving mercy?

Well, it's it's genius, frankly, the way the devil has worked here.

There's a really great thinker named Rene Girard, a Frenchman, one of the most brilliant minds of the 20th century, who died a few years ago. And he was a Christian.

He wrote a book called I Saw Satan Fall Like Lightning. And it sounds like maybe a book you would find in the Cheap Rock at a Christian bookstore. But in fact, he was a scholar at Stanford who was a member of the Academy Francaise. And Gerard said this.

He wrote back in 2000 that the Antichrist will come by pretending to be more more Christian than Christ. And Gerard identified this again. This was 20 years ago.

He identified this rise on the left of of sacred victimization of people on the left saying that, you know, we're taking the Christian concern for victims, which is proper and thoroughly Christian and concerned for those who have been treated unjustly and marginalized. And we will make them into the gods as opposed to Christ himself.

So Jarraud said what was happening is we were this was turning into a totalitarian cult, the cult of the victim, but it was using Christian language and it was using Christian concepts. And I think that the church was a sitting duck when this thing came into in the past couple of years, came knocking at the door of the church and insisting that we all have to accept this because all Christians, all decent Christians are against racism. We don't want to see anybody mistreated on the basis of race.

But that does not mean that we have to accept this lie, this flat out lie of critical race theory. But so many white Christians are completely susceptible to it because they don't they can't think their way through it and they don't want to be thought ill of.

I think that that is one of the biggest ways that soft totalitarianism is going to take over in this country because so many middle class people, nice, sweet middle class people who have been raised and a Christianity that says all God wants you to do is to be nice and to be happy and to get along with people. They're not going to have any defense. When these people come to them and say, if you don't, then they need to this theory, then you're a bad person who's going to be cast out.

Yeah, they seem to have more hostility towards people who say that some things are biblical than someone actually saying or doing something that is unbiblical.

They are more concerned with someone like me calling out something that I believe is wrong than someone actually doing or saying something that is wrong for the very reason that you just articulated. I think that's so fascinating what you said about the Antichrist pretending to be more like Christ than Christ himself. That's exactly what I'm seeing. You are seeing people who, according to the Bible, who are enemies of God, they're not Christians, they're dead. And they're saying they're apart from Christ, trying to preach to Christians what human dignity actually looks like, what the sanctity of life really looks like, what justice really is, what morality really is.

And so they're using our language and I think well-meaning but not well versed Christians are falling into it and saying, well, you know, I'm called to be just I'm called to love.

I'm called to have empathy and compassion. I guess I'm going to let the world define those terms for me. And I do think I think it's dangerous. And my question for you is, do you think that the Christians that are kind of buying into this, do you think eventually what we're going to see is a large chunk of those Christians just say, you know what, I'm not a Christian anymore. This doesn't serve me anything? Or do you think hopefully at some point you'll see a lot of those Christians realizing, oh, what did I what did I get myself into?

This ideology is completely hostile to my faith. Right?

I mean, we're in a great sorting right now, a time of testing. I mean, it's something that you and I probably grew up with hearing that was going to come one day. Well, guess what? We're here. And those Christians who want the respect of the world, we want to be liked by the world, who want to have this in our sense of.

Calm and serenity, when they're called racist or bigoted or whatever, those Christians are going to fall and they're going to fall into this trap, they're going to replace the gospel with social justice, politics and their faith will not withstand it. And certainly they won't be able to pass it on to their children. I think the trick is going to be for those Christians who can see this alive, for what it is and how and see it for the destructiveness within this ideology.

The trick for us is going to be how to hold on to what we know to be true without hating our enemies. This is one of the things I talked to the people in Eastern Europe about the Christians who came through communism. They not only had to stand on the gospel even when some of those around them were capitulating and surrendering to the state. But they also had to be willing to accept imprisonment and even torture without allowing hate to consume their hearts.

I mean, that's an incredible thing. It's sainthood, you know, but this is what God calls us to do.

This is what Christ calls us to do. And you don't just cultivate these qualities in your heart overnight. You've got to start doing it right now before the persecution starts.

Why does it seem like the rise of totalitarianism and the shrinkage of the influence of Christianity have a direct relationship and always have? It seems like leftism communism increases in influence and popularity when there is a larger number of people who no longer identify as Christians. It seems like that has happened at the same time over the past 10 years in America. Would you agree?

Completely. And in fact, if you look at the statistics, your generation, Ali, is the first generation in American history in which a majority are not going to be affiliated with any church.

And it's no surprise then that your generation is also by far the most left leaning socially left wing generation and the most militantly secular. As you say, it's no coincidence, Nazism and communism both came to Germany and Russia in countries where the church was really weak.

I mean, we think of Russia, for example, as being it's been Orthodox. It's been Christian science for over a thousand years. But by the time the Bolsheviks came to power, the church was very weak. I remember last year I was sitting at dinner just about a year ago, precisely in Moscow at the home of a Christian family. And I'd spent the previous three days interviewing people, some of whom had been into prison under communism for their faith.

And I blurted out at dinner, I said, I don't understand how anybody in Russia could ever have believed what the Bolsheviks were saying. The father looked at me and said, you don't understand.

Then he went back three hundred years in history and started telling stories about how the rich oppress the poor in that country and how the church itself was part of that.

And by the time it got to the late 19th century, he said, yeah, when the Bolsheviks came along, you know, of course they were telling us lies, but our people had been oppressed and put down for so long and the church had not spoken out for them that people were ready to believe anything that gave them hope, give us a false hope what the Bolsheviks said. But if the church had been better, had had dealt with the decadence, the spiritual decadence within its own ranks, perhaps they could have stopped the Bolshevik revolution.

And I think that's something that we in the American church have to think about now. If we're losing so many of our young people, why is that?

Is it now, some people have said that, but I think they like someone like Tomatis, would say that that reason is because the church didn't adopt critical race theory earlier, or he would say, you know, the church didn't deal with racism and Jim Crow like they should have. And that's why we're having this great reckoning now in the white evangelical church needs to be called out. Obviously, your position is different than that. So can you distinguish between the critics who say, yeah, you're absolutely right, the church has always been racist.

We're just trying to make the church not racist. And in your critique of where the church has failed.

Thank you for the question in my book, The Benedict Option, which came out twenty seventeen, I trace what happened in the 20th century to not only to our civilization, but to the church.

Around the 1960s, there was a really important thinker named Philip Rieff, who was a secular Jew, but he said that the greatest revolution of the 20th century was not the Bolshevik Revolution, but rather the therapeutic revolution. What he meant by that was here in the West. We have come we ceased to believe in religion. And the idea that there are transcendent values are transcendent God to which we should look to for ultimate value and to tell us what to do.

And instead, we we treated religious man for psychological man and for psychological man. The the way we deal with our anxiety is just to do anything that we have to do to make it go away. So making ourselves happy became the ultimate God became our God. Well, this really took over in the 1960s, became big in popular culture. Reef writing in 1966 said this is already of the churches, but pastors don't know it. Well, over the next 50 years, what we saw is the rise of in the church, the rise of what the sociologist Christian Smith calls moralistic therapeutic D.M. It is an abandonment of the Gospel with its strict standards and with its deep teaching, its prophetic teaching, and rather the substitution of middle class comfort.

Under the MTD, as Smith calls it, all people really are called to believe is that God wants us to be happy, he wants us to be nice, and he's there to help us achieve the things we want to achieve. Other than that, we don't really have to call on him.

This has something this is a parasitic form of Christianity that has taken over almost every denomination, according to Christian Smith's work. I think this is what has left us so vulnerable. I remember a few years ago I was giving a Benedict optional lecture at a conservative evangelical college and I talked about the importance of spiritual disciplines and discipleship.

And at the end of my talk, a young lady stood up, a student at the back, raised her hand and said, Sir, I don't understand why these spiritual disciplines are important. Why? Why isn't it enough just to love Jesus with all our heart, the way our parents taught us?

And I explained to her that we have to start with the love of Jesus. But if we don't have disciplines, which is what we're discipleship comes from, then we will be blown away by the winds of the world. When the hurricane comes, we're not going to be built on firm ground. She couldn't tell what I was talking about. I could see she was confused. A professor came to me afterwards and said the way that young lady spoke as how ninety nine percent of our students here think they were brought up in youth group culture, which said Jesus was only relational.

Jesus was my best friend. And when they get off this campus and get into a world where more people are hostile to their Christianity, they completely collapse because they don't want to be seen as mean. That, Ali, that's a log roundabout answer.

But I think that is the way the church has failed is we have failed to make disciples of Christ. We have made instead friends of Jesus, admirers of Jesus, instead of disciples of our Lord.

And I think that people outside of Christianity, they would say the opposite. I've heard people on the left say, oh, that's the reason why people are leaving the church, is because you all are to you all or you all are to stand on your stance on marriage or sexuality or morality or whatever it is.

And I always say, no, no, no, I don't think that's the case at all. I think it's because a large portion of the church is not offering really anything different than the secular self love. Just be happy world is is offering. And if that's the case, you know, you can go to brunch on Sunday. You don't need to spend time in the pews. You don't need to waste your time if you are getting the same thing that the world is offering you.

But what I started realizing as you were talking is that now we have this social justice religion that is actually giving the spiritual dis the spiritual disciplines that, as you have stated, the church has not taught its its adherents for so long now in social justice, Christian or social justice ideology, we're hearing. OK, like these are the books that you have to read. This is the work of anti-racism. This is. How you show empathy, that is like the fruit of the spirit for social justice ideology, here are the things that you have to do and the work that you have to do in order to be sanctified, in order to be holy.

And it just makes me wonder if people are clinging to that, because when they looked at Christianity, a large portion of it is just fluff.

And it doesn't mean there's no there there. You're exactly right about that. This is a substitute religion and it is a disciplined moral community, the social justice warriors.

We believe that they're wrong, but they really take seriously what they believe in. You know, when I was researching my book and reading about the history of the Bolshevik Party, the tsar in Russia, the leader of Russia, set so many of them into exile in Siberia in the late 19th century, what did they do in exile? They got together and they studied the tomes of Marxism. They talked with each other about what they were going to do and they were willing to offer their suffering for the sake of the revolution.

And I think this was satanic, but we have to at least give them this much. They were willing to suffer for their cause, like the people who are trying to defend the society were not in the same way when, again, when I'm talking to all these Christians who suffered under communism, they all told me that go home and tell Americans, if you are not willing to suffer for the faith, then you're going to lose. They're going to roll right over you.

Rediscovering the ability to suffer and join that suffering to Christ is the key to resisting soft totalitarianism. It doesn't mean that we're going to win in the short term. It might mean that we get sent to prison. It might mean that our schools are shut down and it might mean that we're we're even made martyrs, but that it's not the first time that's happened in Christian history. But we will have shown by our ability to suffer that it is possible to live not by lives, to live in truth, to live in the truth of Jesus Christ, and to not bend the knee at what the world is demanding of us.

I have two more quick questions for you. And the last one is going to build build up that I probably have a million more questions for you, but one that I keep thinking is the difference between fascism and communism, because the communists that are in the streets right now, I think most of them probably identify as communists or socialists. They say that they're a.. Fascist in that you and I are fascists and all conservatives are fascists. Why is that wrong?

And our fascism and communism really that different, right?

I don't think that that different, frankly. The one difference I would say is communist at least try to say that they're doing what they're doing to help the poor. And fascists don't even make that pretense. But I think that this is a distinction without a practical difference. They call us fascist, but that is a complete misuse of the term. The term totalitarianism, in fact, was invented in the 20th century by Benito Mussolini, the founder of the Italian fascist party.

And by totalitarianism, he meant that the entire all of life must be politicized.

He said the state exists and there's nothing that exist outside the state. Well, the communists were the same way. And this is one big difference between authoritarianism and totalitarianism and authoritarianism. You have all the political power concentrated in one leader of one party, but outside of politics itself, they don't care what a society does. A totalitarian society has the same belief, but they believe there's no escaping politics. So you see now in our country, I mean, it's almost a joke, but it's not really funny.

Oreo cookies has come forward with a gay pride Oreo, and it's just things like that, the cultural politics of the social justice movement there, even in cookies.

So again, we laugh at that, but they there's nothing that they can't and won't politicize sports, Girl Scout cookies, all of it.

And so that is if we stand up to that, it doesn't make us fascist.

It just makes us sane. And it makes us actually probably classical liberals who want to live in a society where people are free to believe what they want within within reason and to say what they want without being punished for it.

And I do agree with the importance of standing up, what I what I see, though, with these organizations and corporations is that they don't tend to kowtow to conservative resistance and conservative pushback. I just saw Girl Scouts, for example, they tweeted, you know, congratulations to Amy CONI Barett, the fifth woman to be on the Supreme Court. Nothing partisan about it. Well, the left wing mob came after them and they ended up taking the tweet down and apologizing.

While you can go back through their timeline and see that they've got lots of tweets that are praising, complimenting Sotomayor or Kagan or R.G. or RBG. And so it seems like it seems like even if we do stand up, that the corporations and the people in power really don't care. It seems like the influence that conservatives have. I mean, there are a lot of conservatives that had a problem with Cutie's on Netflix. It's still on Netflix, and so do the Christians who are discouraged.

You want to stand up and want to have a voice. What is your what is your advice to them when it seems useless?

Well, I would say two things. First of all, we're not going to win this in the short term because the cultural left controls all the cultural high ground in the corporate suites it has taken over.

In fact, the thing that sparked this book live not by lies. The thing that caused the old Czech woman's son to come to call me up was seeing the way big business came down. One hundred percent, like a ton of bricks on the state of Indiana. We're trying to pass a state version of the federal Religious Freedom Restoration Act. That was the first time that had ever happened in this country. That big business sided so clearly and so heavily with any side in the culture war.

This is what we're going to have to live with. But I would say to ordinary Christians is to understand that the culture is against us, the mainstream culture, whether it's universities, corporations, whatever it it is against us, it hates us. And we have to be serene about that. We have to figure out how to resist knowing that we're not going to turn it back and no politician we elect can turn it back. What I've done in my family, what I encourage people to do is control the areas of your life that you can control.

Get rid of Netflix, for example, or make sure your kids don't have smartphones. You have to talk to your kids about the way things really are in this world. You have to prepare them to be to suffer for Christ if it means they have to change their career path because Christians are not going to be allowed to work in good faith in major corporations or in medicine or whatever, so be it.

We have to learn from people, from Christians who've grown up in cultures where they were persecuted for their beliefs. And we're going to have to learn how to imitate them. It's just there's no way out of that. But one thing we have to learn to do is to find joy with each other. Ali, you know, when I was in Bratislava, the capital of Slovakia, a Christian there, a church historian, took me into a room that was under the ground.

We had to go into a secret tunnel to get there. In the nineteen eighties, the underground church in Slovakia printed samizdat, that is to say, illegal prayer books, catechisms, handbooks, things like that, to serve the underground church at the communists had found them out. They would have all gone to jail. The man who took me down there to show me that was himself as a college student, part of the underground church, doing this work again, knowing that he would go to prison at any moment.

He told me that just doing that kind of risky work for the church as a college student with a small cell of other college students gave him so much of a sense of hope and a sense of mission. He said, being with my my brothers in Christ, taking this risk to serve God and to serve the church gave me courage and built me up. So years, years later, when the underground church called for the first mass demonstration in communist Czechoslovakia since nineteen sixty eight, he said, I had the courage to go out on the square and protest.

And that was a protest that began the process that led to the fall of communism.

So be of good cheer that we know how this is going to end. And the and the this is going to end. Ultimately, the Lord will be victorious. But in the meantime, we have to come together in small groups to pray and to to strategize together and to control the things that we can control and to build a resistance because it's going to get a lot worse before it gets better and any more.

Any more advice that you got from Christian dissidents for how we in America can push back on this in a way that I mean is loving, is kind, is glorifying to God is not the same as the left wing so-called resistance that we see. And how do how do we do that?

Well. Two things, first, I want to talk a very short bit about Camilla Bendavid, she is she's a grandmother now in Prague. She and her late husband, Vaslav, were the only Christians in the inner circle of Vaclav Havel, who was leading the anti-communist opposition there.

And she and Vaslav raised six children who all grew up to be adults and kept their Christian faith and their grant. Her grandchildren are also Christians, which is really unusual because the Czech Republic is the most atheist country in Europe. But I asked her what are some of the things they did? She said not only did they talk about the bad things of the world, the things that their kids had to avoid. But she said, I read to them two hours every day.

So what did you read to them?

She said, I would read to them the classics. I agreed to the myths and good stories, things that are good, true and beautiful. I poured that into their moral imaginations so they would have not just something bad to be against, something to be to be good for. She even said to me, I read a lot of talking to them, said Tolkan. Why Tolkan? She looked at me and said, Because we knew that Mordor was real.

So I would say that that is one important strategy for Christians to do is to not just talk about the bad things in the world, but feed your kids with things that feed their imaginations, with things that are good, true and beautiful. Secondly, one of the heroes of my book is a man I was not able to meet. He died in twenty thirteen. Dr. Sylvester crookery. He was a Catholic, a young man when he was thrown into prison in nineteen fifty one for his faith and he was brutally tortured.

But he said in his prison memoir that as soon as he got into prison he knew that he could never feel sorry for himself and he could never allow himself to hate his captors, he said, because to do that would give Satan the victory. He said, rather, he he thought of himself in his suffering as God's probe, as someone who is there to serve the Lord and to find out what God wanted him to know about himself and about the world.

So even under his his brutal persecution and beatings and interrogation, he witnessed other people. He prayed with them and he went deep inside himself to find out exactly who what God wanted him to do. There's another man in the book who had it was in the Soviet prison who was so despairing, an angel came to him one night and over a succession of nights gave him a vision where the Lord showed him that the people, the men in that prison, the hardened criminals to whom he had witnessed and brought the gospel, went to heaven after they were executed because he was there to witness to them.

So and the was crying when he told me this in Russia last year. So all of that is simply to say that we have to try to find joy and meaning in our sufferings, not despair, because Christian hope is not the same as optimism. An optimist thinks that everything is going to work out for the best. Well, that might not happen. We might even be called to be martyrs.

But Christian Hope believes that even if we are called to give the ultimate sacrifice for our Lord, that it has ultimate meaning and the Lord can use it to bring about the redemption of the world. Amen.

Thank you so much.

Can you tell everyone where they can purchase your book and anywhere else that you want to send them to make sure the book is called Live Not By Lies a manual for Christian Dissidents. You can get it at Amazon.com, Barnes Noble, or you can even buy a copy at eigth. They books, eighth grade books, dot com. It's a little Christian bookstore in Wichita, Kansas. And there are the exclusive vendor of signed copies at the bookstore. Come and I blog all the time at the American Conservative Dotcom.

Awesome. Well, thank you so much for taking the time to talk to me. I could ask you a million more questions because we were just you're such a great resource and I know people are going to love to follow you and are going to love this book. So thank you again.

Well, thanks, Ali. And you know what? We're going to probably be talking a lot more over the years to come, because, like I said, it's not going to get better any time soon. But that's no reason to be despairing. The Lord gives us hope and we need to find hope and finding the Lord in each other.

Amen. Amen. Thank you so much. Thank you.