Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World by Tom Holland. Book Review

 

If you don't have time to read my review of Tom Holland's "Dominion," here it is in three words: Read this book. A few more words: Buy this book, give this book to friends, and encourage them to read it. "Dominion" is not only rich, seductive, eye-opening, conversation-sparking, and occasionally surprisingly witty, it is urgently necessary. Read this book – before it's too late.

 

Why do I endorse "Dominion" so zealously? Let me tell you a few stories.

 

I was a schoolgirl in New Jersey. I sat next to "Aisha." She moved like a butterfly and, quiet and shy, she talked to no one in class except me. She was a constant doodler, and the margins of her notebook blossomed under her pen with imaginary arabesques every bit as lovely as she.

 

One spring day, as we strolled side by side, this gentle young lady said to me, "When the time for jihad comes, if you don't convert to Islam, I will have to kill you."

 

In years to come, Muslim students, again, out of the blue, would say things like "Jews cause all the problems in the world;" "Jews are not human like the rest of us;" "We need to kill all the Jews;" "If a woman cheats on her husband, it is his duty to kill her;" "Men must get a new, younger wife once they grow bored with their aging first wife;" and, "I'm an atheist and no longer believe in Allah. If my parents found out, they'd kill me. They have no choice. It's their duty."

 

A friend was madly in love with her Christian boyfriend. Her family discovered their relationship, threatened to kill her, and demanded that she marry a stranger imported from the Middle East. She hated them, she hated leaving her boyfriend, and she hated the man she married. But she obeyed, and remained married to the man, though he beat her, till the day he died from what she hoped everyone would believe was a natural death.

 

When I mention these matters to others, I always emphasize how nice these people were. My interlocutors explode. "How can you call them 'nice'? Are you crazy?"

 

My interlocutors just don't get it. Yes, every last one of the above-mentioned friends, students, and colleagues, were nice people. The kind of charitable, reliable, hard-working people who contribute to society in difficult, demanding jobs. Three have become teachers, one is a prize-winning and published writer, and one is a soldier in the US army. One is a doctor. Why, then, do nice people say these things? They have been socialized by their culture and beliefs to say them.

 

"But, but, but," my interlocutors insist. "Their consciences should have told them that they were believing bad things! Why didn't they question?"

 

These folks think that they are operating from objective truth. "Everybody knows" that your conscience is primary, that anti-Semitism and placing men above women and Muslim lives above kuffar lives are "bad things," and that questioning assertions is a necessary step in making decisions.

 

In fact, none of these are objective truths. They are cultural inheritances from the Judeo-Christian tradition. My Muslim friends grew up in a different tradition, where unquestioning submission to authority is valued. This tradition told them that, for example, male needs are to be placed before females at every turn. Displayed prominently in the lovely, suburban living room of one friend was a life-size headshot, in an elaborate golden frame, of the family's youngest child, a boy. Around him, like satellites, were tiny photos in more modest frames. These were his older sisters. That wall display was just one of a thousand reinforcements of male supremacy – a male supremacy and female inferiority that are backed up by the Koran and the hadith.

 

When I urged Aisha critically to examine what she'd been told, to, as a thought experiment, let herself think for just a few moments that maybe Allah was not really god, and that jihad was not a moral pursuit, she immediately told me that she had been taught that even a moment's doubt would condemn her, as a kuffar, to eternal damnation. She cited Koran 49:15. So, no, Aisha, as a nice person, could not even privately, silently, momentarily doubt what she had been taught. Her job, as a good Muslima, was to submit unquestioningly to what she was told.

 

Living and working overseas, I confronted equally nice people repeatedly. Nepalis I came to love dearly supported the caste system and did not intervene when a low-caste, orphan boy slowly starved to death in their village, in full view. A woman was bleeding to death after childbirth. The touch of her female blood was spiritually polluting. Spiritual pollution causes a Hindu to be reborn into an inferior lifeform, as a loathsome animal, or, even worse, an Untouchable. A Westerner tried to elicit help in transporting the dying woman to a roadhead and a life-saving Jeep ride to a Western-run hospital. No one would help the American carry her "filthy" body. Because the American had touched her, he was now spiritually polluted and his service in that village was over forever. In Africa, loving parents handed their daughters over to old women, their fingernails black with grime, armed with filthy shards of glass or even just sharpened stones. The old women would gouge out the daughters' clitorises.

 

Later, in grad school, I took a course on Ancient Greek novels. These novels were utterly superficial. Pretty women, valiant men, all upper class, won victories. Slaves were there to be raped, humiliated, mocked, dehumanized, and killed without compunction. The authors of these novels lived their intellectual and imaginative lives inside a box as restrictive as Gitmo. It never occurred to any of them that an ugly person could be wise or good, that a pretty person could be shallow and boring, that a victory was no real measure of human worth, and that slaves were every bit as human as their masters.

 

After these novels, our class read "The Acts of Paul and Thecla." Though contemporaneous with the Ancient Greek novels, this two-thousand-year-old-document, like a mustang broken free from the corral, galloped into an entirely different mental and spiritual horizon. Thecla, a young girl, overturns her entire surround: her parents, her arranged fiancé, the entire Greco-Roman Pagan world. She hears the Christian Gospel, and explodes: I am a human being, because God made me so, and no mortal bosses me around! My life has meaning that transcends physical reality. You can kill me for my beliefs; I will go to Heaven. Thecla concludes this at a time when the paterfamilias had every right to declare that a female infant could be exposed at birth. 

 

I bubbled over, trying to share with my professor and fellow students my excitement. Didn't everyone see the contrast from the Pagan novels, with their shallow concerns and contempt for the mass of humanity, for anyone who wasn't a high-born Greco-Roman, and Thecla, who had discovered the value of her own, individual life, and was determined to celebrate that life, even if she were immediately, as her society decreed, publicly eaten by a lion for her defiance?

 

My professor and fellow students, rather than celebrating with me, looked at me as if I'd brought bubonic plague into class. Christianity was the bane of mankind, they insisted. Pagan women were happy and free, they insisted – contrary to the evidence of the texts we had all just read. Christianity imprisoned women, they insisted. When Greco-Roman Paganism died, it set humanity back a thousand years, they insisted. Why didn't I realize that? I was punished with a final grade of "B," the lowest grade I ever got in grad school.

 

One last example of nice people doing abominable things. When working on my book "Bieganski," I read the thinkers who inspired Nazism, including Madison Grant, Alfred Rosenberg, and Heinrich Himmler. Looking through their eyes, applying their facts gleaned from Social Darwinism, Neo-Paganism, and Romantic Nationalism, one could see Himmler's "logic" when he argued, "Whether ten thousand Russian females fall down from exhaustion while digging an anti-tank ditch interests me only in so far as the anti-tank ditch for Germany is finished." That the life of a woman who is not a member of your tribe has any value at all is simply not a Nazi concept.

 

We hold these truths to be so self-evident that we don't even bother to contemplate where we got them: that all men are created equal. And note the word "created," there. A single, loving, creator God made all of us in God's own divine image, thus, our lives matter. Individual conscience is primary. Assertions should be examined critically before being accepted. Parents do not have the right to kill their children. What we touch cannot damage our spiritual state.

 

Poorly educated Westerners think that "everybody" believes these "self-evident truths." This foolish assumption is demonstrated by a popular social media meme that states, "Buddha was not a Buddhist. Jesus was not a Christian. Mohammed was not a Muslim. They all taught love. Love was their religion." In some iterations, the meme features images associated with Taoism, Hinduism, and Judaism. In other words, all religions are one. They're all about love.

 

Not everyone is so blind. China is notorious for both historic and contemporary female infanticide. Even so, the 2011 death of Wang Yue shocked the nation and the world. "Little Yue Yue" was two years old. She wandered into the street, was immediately hit by two vehicles, and lay bleeding as at least eighteen adults stepped around her body. Video of her fatal accident went viral.

 

China asked, "How could this happen? And how can we prevent it from happening again?" Chinese people themselves offered an interesting reply, a reply that called on traditions from both the West and the East. "We don't have a Good Samaritan tradition, and we need one to prevent events like this in the future," some Chinese people said. "What we do have is shao guan xian shi, that is, don't get involved if it's not your business, and guanxi, that is, the network of people who are important to you." These Chinese concepts inevitably call to mind Confucianism, a tradition that emphasizes family and a social order built on rigid hierarchies and each person assuming his or her superior or inferior place, as assigned at birth.

 

In contrast, Jesus tells the Good Samaritan story in the New Testament. It's not just one parable among many. Jesus tells it in answer to the question, "What must I do to inherit eternal life?" The Good Samaritan ethic is central to Christianity. Jesus was, of course, a Jew. Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks said that "The one command reiterated more than any other … thirty-six times said the rabbis, is love the stranger for you were once strangers in the land of Egypt." In most cultures, there is a morality for those close to oneself, and another morality for outsiders. Jesus was preaching an exceptional morality that transcended tribal boundaries.

 

In recent years, woke culture has denigrated Western Civilization as racist, sexist, homophobic, Islamophobic, imperialist, Orientalist, etc. One university professor told me that the very words "Western Civilization" are racist and should be uttered only in condemnation.

 

At the same time, prominent New Atheists including Steven Pinker and Michael Shermer have aggressively peddled the fiction that anything they like that has arisen from the Judeo-Christian tradition is merely the result of the unseen hand of "progress." Martin Luther King's famous quote, "The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice" encapsulates this myth. There is some force out there, some unseen hand, maybe it's "the universe," that makes everything, including people, improve as time passes. Other New Atheists, including James Lindsay and Helen Pluckrose, with a religious fervor, depict anything they like about life today as a generous gift from a handful of French and English Enlightenment-era atheists.

 

That these New Atheists are wrong is readily apparent. Ancient Egypt lasted about three thousand years. The Palette of Narmer is an artwork frequently cited as evidence of Egyptian stability, if not stasis. It was created c. 3200 BC and its aesthetics would work in Egypt three thousand years later. Australian Aboriginal culture lasted for tens of thousands of years, and might have continued unchanged for tens of thousands of more years had Europeans not arrived. The posited unseen hand of progress, that somehow magically arrives with the passage of time, would never have brought modern medicine, electricity, universities, Andy Warhol, Suffragettes, Abolitionists, Shakespeare or the "Me, Too" movement to Egypt or Aboriginal Australia.

 

Something happened that made the West different. What was that something? Christianity, or, perhaps more accurately, the Judeo-Christian tradition, is Tom Holland's unambiguous and richly supported reply. In offering this reply, Holland marks himself with the scarlet letter of heretic. Cultural relativism? No, he insists, not all cultures are the same. If you share Western values, you will inevitably identify some cultures as better than others. Are you a hip, wokester globalist, and do you believe yourself to be beyond Christian ethics? Get over yourself, Holland insists. If you are a cutting-edge, atheist multiculturalist, you have still been formed by the Judeo-Christian tradition.

 

But wait – Holland is not offering any consolation or reason to hope to those still clinging to the "old time religion." Institutional Christianity is "cratering," he acknowledges, Pew Research shows that the "religiously unaffiliated" are perhaps the world's fastest growing religious identity group. Holland is not sanguine about this; in fact, his prognostication is as grim as that offered by Dostoyevsky, "Without God, everything is permitted." Holland's prediction is as terrifying as that in William Butler Yeats' 1919 poem, "The Second Coming." "Things fall apart; the center cannot hold … what rough beast slouches toward Bethlehem to be born?" The rough beast in question is a Pagan one, reborn after the marginalization of the savior born in Bethlehem. Maybe Nietzsche was correct, Holland has said in recent interviews. The Nazis showed us what a Western power that completely overturned its Christian inheritance could be like. Maybe things will go very bad very quickly once the religiously unaffiliated dominate culture. Or maybe not. It may take centuries to see.

 

No, Holland is not a grand inquisitor brandishing a cross and wearing a scarlet Monty Python costume. In fact, Holland, an atheist, is neither a Christian nor a believer. He grew up infatuated with the Ancient world and dinosaurs, not angels or saints. His study of the Ancient World brought home to him how alien the pre-Christian and post-Christian populations were to each other. Romans thought and did things that would be unthinkable to us, he realized. He had the same epiphany that I had when I read "The Acts of Paul and Thecla."

 

Nor does Holland attribute Christianity to any supernatural power. Holland presents a Christianity that is stitched together of pre-existing parts, including Roman emperor worship, Greek philosophy, Zoroastrian concepts of good and evil and European Paganism. In Holland's view, it is Christianity's innovative use of those pre-existing parts that changed the world. Throughout his book, Holland eschews any supernatural influence. Groundbreaking, history-changing saints, conquerors and popes respond to material conditions in pragmatic ways, given what they have to work with. What they have to work with is a remarkable tradition that elevates a crucified savior. This is the process that changes the world: influential people, for thousands of years, at all levels of society, struggling to conform, or at least appearing to conform, their behavior to Christian teaching.

 

Christians will like some of the movements and attitudes Holland associates with Christianity. These include the scientific revolution, the concept of the individual, freedom of choice, a "rare dignity" and security accorded to women, the weakening of the patriarchy and tribalism, the elevation of romantic love, the suppression of incest, the strengthening of the nuclear family and the weakening of extended families, separation of church and state, hospitals, universities, the ideal of equal justice under the law, the question mark, education of the masses, innovation, linear time, freedom of conscience, the abolition of slavery, the elevation of reason, and human rights. Christians may like some others less: secularism, gay rights, Richard Dawkins, John Lennon's "Imagine." Holland commands a massive library of material, and when he argues for Christianity's influence on Dawkins' evangelical atheism and Lennon's egomaniacal messiah complex, one must treat his arguments with respect, a respect he earns.

 

This reader was genuinely touched by Holland's compassionate approach. Holland works to see the world through the eyes of the people about whom he is writing, including people, like the Marquis de Sade and Konrad von Marburg, whom the reader will easily loathe. Yes, it makes sense for Ancient Persians, Greeks, and Romans, who do not share the "man is made in the image of God" concept, to torture and crucify their enemies. Yes, it made sense for Catholic Cardinal Thomas Cajetan to struggle, but gently, to rein in Martin Luther. And, yes, it made sense for Luther, given his personality, agenda, and beliefs to resist the Catholic Church. This is the first time I've read about the Reformation in a book that sees, not bad guys versus good guys, just human beings acting on their limited perceptions.

 

No, Holland does not present a whitewashed version of Christianity. I found utterly fascinating how he identifies the tremendous challenges Christianity presents believers, and how those challenges were handled by believers over the course of two thousand years. Love your neighbor as yourself. The Samaritan, that is, the despised, is your neighbor. In Christ there is no male nor female, no Jew nor Greek. It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of the needle than for a rich man to enter heaven. There is only one God; when horrors occur, that one good, loving God was in charge. The first shall be last and the last shall be first. How did believers handle these explosive teachings? How did they affect the status of women, homosexuals, and Jews?

 

Holland uses larger-than-life figures to show how Christians have lived their interpretation of these teachings. He revivifies Boniface, a seventh-century missionary who brought Christianity to Pagan Germanic tribes. Boniface was attacked by armed men during his final mission. He told his Christian companions to lay down their arms and accept death without resistance, as per Christ's words to overcome evil with good. Holland also presents Christian warriors like Charles Martel, the Hammer, who defeated invading Muslims at Tours in 732. We read of Princess Elizabeth of Hungary, who gave away her wealth to the poor, who built a hospital and worked in it daily, who put a leper in her own bed, and who refused to eat anything "that might have derived from exploitation of the poor." We also read of a succession of popes who heeded the temptations of worldly power, including private steam rooms. We read of Pope Innocent III, who green lit the Albigensian Crusade, a shameful episode and low point of Catholicism, but who also made it a point to extend charity to prostitutes. Innocent endowed a hospital and specified that it "offer refuge to sex workers." Innocent also offered remission of sins to any man so charitable as to marry a prostitute so that she could escape sex work. We read of a Catholic Church, that, for centuries, dismissed as ignorant fantasies any talk of Satan-worshipping witches, and we read of that same church succumbing to hysteria and the burnings of alleged heretics. And even then, in the allegedly "dark" twelfth century, Peter the Venerable traveled to Muslim lands to work on a translation of the Koran. Peter would, he said, address Muslims "not with arms, but with words; not with violence; but reason; not with hate, but with love." In the eleventh century, Saint Anselm referred to Jesus, Saint Paul, and himself as a "mother," and he invited Queen Matilda to take on the role of Christ. Matilda was "a woman as indomitable as she was pious." In spite of institutional misogyny, priests "knew that their Lord, risen from the dead, had first revealed himself, not to his disciples, but to a woman." "This weak woman," Pope Urban said of Catherine of Siena, "puts us all to shame." He invited Catherine to lecture his cardinals. The contradictions, complexities, richness, are all dizzying. The reader is grateful to Holland for his guidance through this garden, bursting with flowers, thorns, bugs, exotic and yet familiar life.

 

And that's just the Middle Ages. With the Reformation come men like Jan Zizka, a one-eyed, Czech Hussite general who commanded that a drum to frighten his Catholic enemies be made of his corpse's skin. "Christian teachings, far from blunting hatreds, seemed a whetstone" in the subsequent two hundred years of religious wars between Catholics and Protestants. "Men who come after us will never believe what miseries we have suffered," wrote one survivor of countless atrocities committed in the name of Christ. Jesuit astronomers bringing advanced science to Chinese royal courts; conquistadors in the New World confronting horrific human sacrifice and committing atrocities of their own; Puritans forbidding the celebration of Christmas and befriending, and then making war on Indians; the life cycle of parasitic wasps; the anarchist Diggers; the Bone Wars of competing paleontologists; "Lord of the Rings," and Jewish atheist Spinoza's respect for Christ, a Quaker woman, crossing borders alone and on foot, and walking into the Turkish Sultan's presence and sharing with him the Good News: Holland juggles it all with the grace of a ballet dancer. He finds the common threads that unite these events and render them, as distant as they are from each other, into integral chapters of the same long book that began with our dating system: anno domini, the year of Christ's birth.

 

"Dominion" is 611 pages long, notes and index inclusive, and it covers 2,500 years of history. Holland commands the legerdemain necessary to conjure a page-turner out of material that might be lugubrious in other hands. Holland's style is always "in media res;" that is, he begins each passage right in the middle of some key historical event, without, initially, providing the reader with exhaustive orientation.

The reader has just gotten comfortable reading about American Quaker, vegetarian, and abolitionist Benjamin Lay, a four-foot-tall hunchback. Turn the page, and suddenly you are reading about Jean Calas, an eighteenth-century French cloth merchant, who has been accused of murdering his own son. Then, like Paul Harvey, Holland sketches in "the rest of the story." In fact Calas' grisly execution for a murder he probably didn't commit became a cause célèbre for Voltaire. Holland thus creates an impressionistic view of his material. Like Monet, Holland doesn't draw every vein on every leaf in the garden; rather, he sketches major scenes in ways that suggest the larger landscape. Holland doesn't outline every skirmish between every Enlightenment figure and Catholicism; rather, he focuses on gripping stories, like Calas', and big name celebrities, like Voltaire. I found Wikipedia to be my constant companion in reading Holland's book, because I craved more of the "who, what, when, where, why, how" background than Holland provides.

I absolve Holland of any failing. Had he provided those details for every person or event he mentions, his book would grow to encyclopedia length. I am entirely confident that Holland could write the encyclopedia; he is a one-man library. Just the tower of bookcases rising behind him in a recent YouTube video is intimidating.

 

"It will vanish and shrink. I needn't argue about that; I know I'm right, and will be proved right." The speaker predicting Christianity's demise could have been Pontius Pilate, Robespierre, or Himmler. In fact it was John Lennon, who was, in his own estimation, "more popular than Jesus." In recent interviews, Holland has been asked what will happen to Western Civilization once the religiously unaffiliated outnumber believers. Holland, along with Douglas Murray, has toyed with the concept of atheist Christian, that is, someone who doesn't believe, but clings to the best of the tradition. I, for one, don't think this will work. I am a person of faith, and Christ's sacrifice informs my behavior. I'm very aware of my own inner Marquis de Sade, my own inner Himmler, and, no, I wouldn't be the same person without the example of the creator of the universe undergoing horrific torture for my account, and saying, from his cross, "Father, forgive them." Holland can't predict the future and neither can I, but his book is a priceless introduction to a past too precious for us to let go.

 

Danusha Goska is the author of God through Binoculars: A Hitchhiker at a Monastery

This review first appeared at Front Page Magazine here

Facebook Censored a Post Protesting ISIS Destruction of Artwork

 Just got a stunning message from Facebook. They sent the message this morning, November 12, 2020. They, just now, censored a 2015 post by me protesting ISIS destruction of artwork. I made screencaps of the post and their warning. You can see them, below. 

Live Not by Lies: A Manual for Christian Dissidents by Rod Dreher Book Review

 

"Live Not By Lies: A Manual for Christian Dissidents"
Bestselling Conservative Rod Dreher Offers a Prescription for Culture War Combatants

On October 16, 2020, in a Parisian suburb, a Muslim refugee decapitated 47-year-old schoolteacher Samuel Paty. Previously, during a lesson devoted to freedom of expression, Paty had shown a Charlie Hebdo cartoon depicting Islam's founder, Mohammed, to his students.

 

On October 17, at nine a.m., I posted Paty's photo on Facebook with a salute to his courage. Within minutes, I received notification from Facebook that my salute to Samuel Paty "goes against our Community Standards on hate speech." Note the capitalization of "Community Standards." This document, crafted by self-appointed Facebook thought police, is a new scripture, worthy of capital letters. I would not be able to post for a week. I contested the ruling, and by 10:47 a.m., I received an apology. In spite of this, I still could not post for the next twenty-four hours.

 

At the same time that Facebook removed a salute to Paty, social media was flooded with bigoted images of Trump Supreme Court nominee, Amy Coney Barrett, a Catholic. Marc Murphy, editorial cartoonist at the Louisville, Kentucky, Courier Journal, alleged that Barrett, during her confirmation hearing, dressed in such a manner so as to send coded messages that she supports the misogynist agenda depicted in Margaret Atwood's novel and TV series, "The Handmaid's Tale." "The Handmaid's Tale" is a Christophobe's "Protocols of the Elders of Zion." Like that notorious forgery, "The Handmaid's Tale" depicts scary religious people trying to take over the world. "The Family Values party nominated a member of a sex cult," read one of many hysterical replies to Murphy's paranoid conspiracy theory, which was shared hundreds of times.

 

"Soon, with all the Catholics on the court, will they mandate the only religion allowed in this country is Catholicism? And of course declare this to be a Christian nation and abolish the constitution for their bible," wrote a reader at Slate, responding to Slate's article arguing that Barrett was about to single-handedly take over America.

 

The New York Times went so far as to conduct an in-depth investigation of Barrett's adoption of Haitian children. The most popular reader comments castigated Barrett as a white supremacist; her adoption of black children just proved it. Ibram X. Kendi is a high priest of the new woke church of perpetual racism. Kendi tweeted that Amy Coney Barrett is "a White colonizer" who uses her black children as "props" to disguise her white supremacy.

 

What exactly is happening here? In saluting Paty and naming his killer's ideology, I violated a new religion. In demonizing Christianity, others also followed the dogma of the new religion. What to call this new religion? In the past, we used terms like "Political Correctness," "cultural Marxism," "social justice warrior," "woke," "liberal," "progressive," and "leftist." I use the term "Team Anti-Western-Civilization," but this is clearly too awkward. We need a handy new term for a new, powerful religion that is now affecting all of us.

 

Marxism purports to champion the poor. In this new religion's rigid caste system, a rich black man has higher status than a poor white woman. Rationality provides no workable strategy to map out the new wasteland we all traverse. It is not "hateful" to call someone with double x chromosomes "she," but Twitter will ban you for doing so. But one can find, on Twitter, tweets alleging that "a cabal of Jews control world governments, the banking system, the media and entertainment industry to keep people poor, ignorant and enslaved." "Anti-Semitism and hate speech are rampant on Twitter."

 

Several recent books have addressed the new religion underlying the above phenomena. Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay gave us "Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything about Race, Gender, and Identity – and Why This Harms Everybody." British author Douglas Murray dissected "The Madness of Crowds: Gender, Race, and Identity." Gad Saad, a Lebanese-born, Canadian evolutionary psychologist and secular Jew, has just published "The Parasitic Mind: How Infectious Ideas Are Killing Common Sense."

 

Tom Holland's 2019 book "Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World" proclaims the obvious truth: the West is inescapably Christian. Atheists can mock and rebel but they cling to Christian concepts of morality. As Douglas Murray put it, atheists "Dream Christian dreams. They still have Christian thoughts and impulses."

 

But Christianity as a religious practice is losing adherents. The "Decline of Christianity Continues at Rapid Pace," reports the Pew Research Center. What morality will arise once Christian-influenced morality finally disappears? Holland's musings on this question call to mind Dostoyevsky's famous quote. "Without God, everything is permitted." Once Christianity's influence disappears humanity will, as Nietzsche predicted, live by power as the only good.

 

Rod Dreher's September, 2020, Sentinel book "Live Not By Lies: A Manual for Christian Dissidents" takes up the same tasks previously tackled by the above authors, who are all atheists. Dreher attempts to define the murky new religion now controlling our lives, and to offer an action plan for Christians and others who would resist it. Dreher is the senior editor at The American Conservative.

 

Dreher was raised Methodist, converted to Catholicism in 1993, and then to Eastern Orthodoxy in 2006. He is the bestselling author of 2017's "The Benedict Option: A Strategy for Christians in a Post-Christian Nation." New York Times columnist David Brooks called that bestseller "The most important religious book of the decade." In that book, Dreher says that Christians have "lost on every front." Our current society is barbaric. Our barbarian rulers are "governed only by their will to power." They "neither know nor care a thing about what they are annihilating." "Our scientists, our judges, our princes, our scholars, and our scribes are at work demolishing the faith, the family, gender, even what it means to be human."

 

Christians, Dreher argues, quoting Scottish philosopher Alasdair Macintyre, must emulate medieval monastic life. "A crucial turning point … occurred when men and women … turned aside from the task of shoring up the Roman imperium." Instead, they set about constructing "new forms of community within which the moral life could be sustained so that both morality and civility might survive the coming ages of barbarism and darkness."

 

"Live Not By Lies" offers a sequel to "The Benedict Option." The opening hundred or so pages, that is roughly half the book, offer Dreher's take on the enemy our culture has become. Dreher says he was alerted to this enemy by a phone call from an American whose mother had lived in Soviet-era Czechoslovakia. This survivor saw in modern American life reminders of life under Soviet communism.

 

Virtue is no longer about individual rights, but about rights assigned to privileged groups. A utopian vision demands the denunciation and punishment of transgressors, like the Indiana pizza parlor forced to close down by violent threats. A reporter broadcast a ridiculous story about the pizza parlor not hosting gay weddings; the restaurant owners paid the price.

 

In this new religion, what was acceptable yesterday is heresy today. "It masquerades as kindness." Dogma is expressed in constantly evolving jargon like "diversity" and "inclusivity" and has no real meaning: if you are Catholic and you are pro-life, you are excluded from "diversity," "tolerance," and "inclusion." Pope Benedict called this new religion "a worldwide dictatorship of seemingly humanistic ideologies." Dreher calls it "soft totalitarianism" and, after sociologists Christian Smith and Melinda Lundquist Denton, "Moralistic Therapeutic Deism." Its dogma consists of lies; its power lies in terrorizing the population with show trials, often conducted on social media.

 

Dreher bemoans the "almost incalculable influence over public and private life" exercised by Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, and Google. These companies can and do tell states what legislation to accept or reject. Dreher cites Indiana's 2015 Religious Freedom Restoration Act, a law meant to protect small business owners like Colorado cake decorator Jack Phillips. The law was opposed by Apple, Eli Lilly, the NBA, and the Islamic Society of North America. "Equity, diversity, and inclusion" offices are found in 90% of Fortune 500 companies.

 

This new religion's reach is also described in a recent Gad Saad YouTube interview. Most of the granting agencies that fund research in the natural sciences, Saad reported, that is physics, chemistry and biology, demand from applicants a "DIE religion statement." DIE stands for diversity, inclusion and equity. Funding applicants must state what they have done to promote DIE principals and how their work will promote DIE. Right now the world faces a pandemic. Imagine being a vaccine researcher seeking funding, and being forced to announce how your vaccine will promote DIE.

 

Roughly the second half of "Live Not by Lies" offers examples of Christian dissidents who resisted Soviet domination. Dreher writes about famous figures like Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Vaclav Havel, Karol Wojtyla, and Milan Kundera, but also figures lesser known in the West including Stjepan Tomislav Kolakovic, Kirill Kaleda, Maria Wittner, Vaclav Benda, Silvester Krcmery, Richard Wurmbrand, and Jerzy Popieluszko. Dreher also mentions Catholic anti-Nazi resister and martyr, Franz Jagerstatter. These resisters lived in Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Russia, Romania, Austria and Croatia.

 

From their lives and examples, Dreher draws the following lessons. Those who would refuse to bow to our as-yet-unnamed new religion, and those who choose to remain faithful to Christianity or even just the Constitution, should consider doing some or all of the following. Accept a life outside the mainstream. Form small, supportive communities of fellow believers. Maintain memories of the best in Western civilization. Host and attend lectures in private homes. Send children to Catholic school. Accept suffering as part of life.

 

I'm glad a bestselling author is bringing new attention to Eastern European dissidents and communist persecution of Christians. "Live Not by Lies" is a quicker and easier read than the above-mentioned books that also address the new religion we all confront. I had a few issues with the book, and on the off chance that Dreher would ever read this review, I would be remiss if I did not mention them.

 

My mother was born in a village in what is today Slovakia. My father was Polish. I traveled to what was then Czechoslovakia in the early 1970s, just after Soviet-bloc tanks crushed the Prague Spring. I've been to Eastern Europe several times since, and spent 1988-89 in Krakow, Poland.

 

I don't often try to explain to Americans how wretched Soviet communism was. We have been conditioned by Hollywood to regard anyone who condemns communism as a McCarthyite. Even popular romance films like Barbara Streisand's The Way We Were send that message.

 

Too few know that Communism murdered 100 million people. Even those who know this may think that those killings were merely the initial price paid to overturn corrupt, moribund monarchies and establish the worker's paradise, after which life settled down to free health care and concerts. Michael Ignatieff confronted this attitude in a conversation with communist and influential scholar Eric Hobsbawm. "Had the radiant tomorrow actually been created, the loss of fifteen, twenty million people might have been justified?" Ignatieff asked Hobsbawm. "Yes," Hobsbawm replied.

 

The wretchedness of communism was about so much more than massacres and gulags. By the time I spent a year in Poland, I had lived and worked in the Central African Republic, one of the poorest and most dangerous countries on earth, and also in very poor Nepal. In C.A.R., life expectancy was 49 years. Low-level warfare was constant. Slavery was still a problem. But in people's day-to-day lives, Africans had hope. The Africans I knew, though living in absolute poverty, expressed the conviction that tomorrow would be better than today, and that their effort would make it so. Africans' irrepressible vitality is reflected in Pew polls that describe Africans, no matter how poor, as among the most hopeful people on earth.

 

Yes, in Poland and Slovakia material conditions were magnitudes better than in Africa. It's hard, then, to communicate this simple fact: daily life in communist Poland felt worse to me than daily life in C.A.R. Communism isn't just a bad model for economics. It is a straightjacket and a gag that asphyxiates the human spirit and inevitably results in mass, petty pathology.

 

How to say this without sounding absurd – one of my worst days involved an attempt to get bedsheets for my dorm room. The woman in control of the sheets conspired to make my day miserable, for no discernable reason, except that she could. It was the twisted, sadistic pettiness of it all that confounded me. Franz Kafka, who died before communism arrived in his native Prague, knew how to describe the ugly absurdity of arbitrary power. Read Kafka's "The Trial," to get a sense of what I mean.

 

Daily life under Soviet communism was not romantic resistance. It was going for a walk in a park, struggling for air through steel mill exhaust, and a man in a pathetically shabby suit jumping out of the shrubbery and masturbating in front of you. It was days when you went to the shops to confront empty shelves. On one day, you could buy cabbages, on another, blueberries. One day bread, another day yogurt. Food, but never all you wanted, never all at once.

 

Daily life under Soviet communism was people shoving you on the sidewalk. We foreign students discussed this. Are they doing it on purpose? Consciously? A friend was pregnant. She said once she started showing, no one pushed her any more. Life under Soviet communism was small town streets paved with the supine bodies of inebriated men on Sundays. Their wives would come and try to shovel them up and get them home, and they'd rouse themselves enough only to wrestle with and yell at their wives.

 

One day I went to a bar mleczny in Krakow, that is, a cheap eatery that served basics like fermented rye soup, borscht, and sliced cucumbers with sour cream and dill. An old man in worn clothes, his sagging cheeks prickly and unshaven, picked up his potato pierogi and smashed it against his cheeks, smearing it into his stubble, as if it were shaving cream. He just sat there, his face besmeared with the basic starches and grease – flour, butter, and potatoes – that made up much of our daily calorie intake. That was communism. Ugly irrational, soul-crushing. Thirty years later, some of those souls have yet to bounce back. Life expectancy in the former Soviet sphere remains lower than one would expect for developed, European nations. Interestingly, Poland defies this trend. Its citizens gained in life expectancy after communism's fall, in spite of its rapid "shock" transition to capitalism, possibly because of "the country's strong social institutions." For that clinical phrase, think "The Catholic Church."

 

During that first trip in the early 70s, when I was a naïve girl visiting relatives in my mother's hometown, I met a priest who had been tortured, and who lost his mind. There was a blank-faced, stumbling body; there was no discernable functioning inside that body. A girl my age lead the priest by the hand. My mother said he was kept in the village as a warning. My Uncle Jan was a woodsman who guided others through the mountains, often hunters, but also a dissident scientist who had been made a non-person. This scientist lived in a primitive dwelling in the middle of nowhere, unable to communicate with his peers, cut off from intellectual life. No, he wasn't being tortured, he wasn't in prison, and they didn't kill him. His fate would appear on no list of the victims of communism. Our visit with this brilliant, isolated, effectively paralyzed scientist broke my heart.

 

I'm walking myself and you, dear reader, down this sooty memory lane, reeking of vodka and inhabited by sad perverts, for a reason. Dreher is asking his readers to be ready to suffer and sacrifice. That is right; that's what Christians do; that's what atheist dissidents do. But there's a phrase I heard in Poland during the 1989 uprisings. "Everyone is ready to die for Poland. But how many are ready to live for Poland?"

 

The suffering Dreher's American disciples will undergo will not necessarily be cinematic, accompanied by a poignant, rousing soundtrack. Once the street demonstrations in 1989 Poland reached fever pitch, once I was running for my life, stampeding, with thousands of others, from the ZOMO, paramilitary thugs who landed many of us in the hospital, life was thrilling. But outside of those demonstrations, life felt infinitely petty and pointless. The devil who will attempt to seduce Dreher's dissidents may not be a clear-cut demand to sign a document or lose a job. The demonic siren call may be boredom, friendlessness, loss of respect or income, and a sense of meaninglessness.

 

And, yes, this anonymous, isolating, devil of boring meaninglessness operates in lives of American dissidents, too, just as it did in those interminable bread lines and the constant breakdowns of that miracle of Soviet engineering, the Trabant automobile.

 

I never wanted to be a dissident in American academia. I wanted to get a PhD and tell my people's story through my work and help my students. I was told I was the "wrong ethnicity" and "too right-wing." I was told, to my face, that my being Catholic was a problem. In spite of publications and some excellent reviews from peers and students, I never got that tenure-track job. As a semester-by-semester hire, an adjunct, I was given to impolitic statements, for example, "I love my country;" immediately after that, I lost my job. My life lacks the thrill I felt when I was running from the ZOMO. I live in a garbage-strewn, high crime, low-rent neighborhood, and wonder about paying for groceries. Again, no swelling anthem on my soundtrack, no martyr's flameout. Just day to day drear. Surviving that, alone and silently, is my discipline. I know I'm not alone.

 

Dreher's followers need to know this. The price one pays for dissidence will not always look, to the outside world, like heroism. Witold Pilecki and Emil August Fieldorf, two men Dreher does not mention, were courageous anti-Nazi resisters. Soviet communists captured them, tortured them, and buried them in unmarked mass graves. Before erasing their physical existences, the communists defamed them with false accusations. These men were part of the Armia Krajowa or Home Army. Soviets labeled them "anti-Semitic," and, thus, an ally to the very Nazis Pilecki and Fieldorf risked and suffered to resist. That charge, that Poland's anti-Semitism made the Nazis' job easier, was convenient to the Soviets overrunning Eastern Europe. It was also convenient to Roosevelt and Churchill, who agreed, at Yalta, to betray Poland, their former ally, and the first nation to fight against the Nazis. During the war, Western media might portray Poland as a courageous victim. After Yalta, Poland became a despicable villain. World politics write history and play a role in your not knowing the names of Witold Pilecki and Emil August Fieldorf.

 

The microcosm is like the macrocosm. Express a pro-life position on Facebook and be called a "misogynist." Express support for traditional marriage and be called a "homophobe." Express support for children being able to live out their childhoods without life-altering, sterility-inducing drugs and surgeries, and be called a "transphobe." Link to accurate statistics on police shootings and be called a "racist." Mention the centrality of freedom of speech to Western Civilization and be called an "Islamophobe." Talk about a tortured priest you met behind the Iron Curtain and be called a "paranoid McCarthyite cold warrior." Acknowledge that "free college" actually does cost a great deal, and be called a "capitalist tool who votes against her own best interests." A Facebook friend who is a child of Holocaust survivors, and relative of Holocaust victims, is regularly called a "Nazi" because she supports Israel's right to exist.

 

Sometimes, to observers, heroes will look like the scum of the earth, before they are disappeared forever, without ever having had the chance to tell their story. Many of the dissidents Dreher describes survived torture in prison, but then went on to rehabilitation. Some joined post-Communists governments. Some wrote memoirs that are cherished by believers worldwide. These happy endings are granted to very few. For many of us, being a dissident means, simply, wondering how you will pay rent.

 

In "Live Not by Lies," Dreher quotes Maria Wittner about her experience of arrest and imprisonment after the 1956 Hungarian uprising. Wittner mentions a friend, Catherine. Communists hanged Catherine. Before dying, Catherine "straightened herself up and went with her back ramrod straight." There is no further mention of Catherine in Dreher's book. I am most touched by Catherine, and I know virtually nothing about her, including her last name. I admire the superstars, Lech Walesa, Karol Wojtyla, and Vaclav Havel, who passed through a period of anonymous suffering but emerged, respectively, as TIME man-of-the-year and a Nobel Prize winner, a pope and a canonized saint, and a friend of Frank Zappa. Catherine is like most dissidents. Her courage will never be known to the wider world, and no one can visit her tomb, because it's probably an unmarked, mass grave. The Catherines deserve to inhabit our consciences, instruct our concerns for our own futures, and educate us about our judgments of others as much as do the superstars.

 

Dreher and his disciples need to know this. By dissenting, they may be inviting the kind of exhilaration that we enjoyed when taunting the ZOMO, and then running for our lives. They may even win Nobel prizes. Or they may disappoint their loved ones by becoming "losers," and their kids may have to go a week eating not much more than potatoes. The temptation the devil sends them may not be anything as exotic as the fleshpots of Egypt; it may be something as simple as adjusting one's speech to gain access to a Twitter account.

 

Even bestselling Christians are not above judging their poor fellow Christians as "losers." "You don't want the destructive culture of the poor imported into your neighborhood. Drive over to the poor part of town, and see what a shithole it is. Do you want the people who turned their neighborhood a shithole to bring the shithole to your street? No, you don't. Be honest, you don't." The bestselling Christian who wrote these words about the poor is Rod Dreher.

 

What I want to shout to Dreher's readers is this: please don't think that you doing Christianity wrong if you practice all the courage of the Eastern European dissidents Dreher describes and you do not attain a halo, your loved ones express contempt for you, and your prayer life feels like a monologue to no one, spoken in the desert.

 

I've got a second issue with Dreher's book, and this one is difficult to talk about. I've been insisting in my own published writing for years (see here and here) what Tom Holland seems to have just realized. Western Civilization is Judeo-Christian. That many Westerners are not religious is not the point. Rather, our concepts of right and wrong, our insistence that "All men are created equal," are inheritances from the Judeo-Christian tradition. In Western history, there have been attempts completely to root out Christianity's influence, and those attempts have often ended very badly (see here and here). New Atheist authors like Steven Pinker and Michael Shermer, James Lindsay and Helen Pluckrose insist that humans are rational. Human reason, stripped of any religious underpinning, can and will result in moral societies. I see more support for Tom Holland's fear that Nietzschean struggle for power will dominate.

 

So, yes, along with Dreher, I vote for institutional Christianity, even in so simple a form as a house church, as a good.

 

But. I think Dreher has gotten a couple of things wrong here. America today is significantly different from Soviet-era Eastern Europe, and Soviet-era Eastern Europe is not exactly as Dreher implies.

 

"Religion is at the core of effective resistance," Dreher writes. "The underground church became the principal means of anti-communist dissent for the next forty years." Yes, the overall message of Christianity was a driving force for dissident movements. Yes, the institutional church offered support. Yes, totalitarians singled out the church for persecution. The "priest's barracks" at Dachau was "the largest monastery in Germany." Yes, Catholic, Protestant, and Orthodox religious leaders were imprisoned, tortured, and murdered by Soviets and Nazis alike.

 

This is all true. It's also true that not all Christians in Eastern Europe were dissidents, and not all dissidents were Christians. Lech Walesa was obviously, devoutly, Catholic, and close to the pope. Adam Michnik, no less an important figure in Solidarity and the downfall of communism, was a secular Jew. His parents and brother were leading communists. Jacek Kuron, "the godfather of the Polish opposition" self-identified as a "non-believing Christian" who followed Christian teachings but did not believe in God. When asked who ended Soviet domination of Eastern Europe, Lech Walesa included American journalists. Yes, the very same New York Times that so mishandled the Holodomor, the Holocaust, and the 1619 Project published John Darnton's Pulitzer-Prize-winning coverage of martial law in Poland.

 

I met a Pagan dissident who worshipped the ancient Slavic god Swiatowid. I participated in actions by the Orange Alternative, a surrealist dissident group without religious identity. In those protests, we used humor, for example by chanting the slogan, "Citizen, help the militia! Beat yourself up!"

 

During one Krakow dusk thirty-one years ago, hundreds of us were gathered in the Rynek, the thirteenth-century square. I couldn't make out the words of the speeches. I was, like a nostril-quivering gazelle on the Serengeti, balanced on the balls of my feet, ready to spring. The ZOMO could start a baton charge at any moment, from any direction. My body bore technicolor bruises from previous encounters.

 

A young Punk stood in front of me. He was about 17 years old. Skinny, small, tattooed, with spiked hair, ripped clothes, and safety pins in his multiply-pierced earlobes. He was carrying a khaki green backpack.

 

Somewhere in the dusk, it began with one voice. "Jeszcze Polska nie zginęła." "Poland is not yet lost while we remain alive." The national anthem. Others picked it up. I began to sing.

 

The anonymous young Punk standing in front of me let his backpack slide down off of his shoulders onto the ancient cobblestones. His shoulders pressed back. He stood  straight as an uhlan, those legendary Polish cavalrymen. His whole affect changed; suddenly, he was no longer a slack-spined, ironic-lipped, lounging Punk, disciple of Johnny Rotten. He was a Polish patriot, ready to give his all for his homeland. He belted out the national anthem with earnest conviction. That kid, that moment, was one of the lightning bolts illuminating the no-exit drear that was Soviet-era Poland.

 

I mention these atheists, communists, Jews, Pagans, Punks, surrealist pranksters and the New York Times for this reason. Dreher's approach strikes me as a tad smug. "We're the Christians; we've got it right; the rest of you are doing it wrong; we will retreat from you and will associate only with the right people. We'll emerge periodically to broadcast our correctness via bullhorns."

 

It didn't work that way in Eastern Europe. Non-Christians were essential participants in bringing down Communism. "Divide and conquer" was a tried-and-true tactic of Poland's totalitarian invaders. Nazis and communists worked hard to sow animosity between Christians and Jews, workers and intellectuals, urbanites and farmers. "Solidarity" referred to the miraculous union of religious workers, embodied by Walesa, and secular, even leftist, intelligentsia, epitomized by Michnik.

 

There are many articulate, empowered atheists tilting at the exact same dragons that Dreher is taking on. I've listed many of them here: Pinker, Lindsay, Pluckrose, Holland, Murray, Saad. Not a few of the folks taking on the new religion are gay: Dave Rubin, Douglas Murray, Bruce Bawer, Andrew Sullivan. Christians should be forging strategic alliances with these courageous figures.

 

Dreher wants Christians who resist the new religion to form small groups of mutual support. As I've described in detail in my other writing, I embarked on the quest for a PhD as a wide-eyed, first generation, working class, Polish-Slovak-American Catholic. My collision with academia almost killed me, and that's not a metaphor. After a particularly unfortunate encounter with a very powerful professor, my inner ear burst and I spent the next six years functionally blinded and paralyzed much of the time, and unable to stop vomiting. I could not work; I lost my life savings. After a pro bono surgery, I hit the job market, and was repeatedly told I was the "wrong ethnicity" and that I was "too right-wing" to be on a university campus.

 

As Dreher prescribes, I have a support network, and that support network has held my hand and pushed me forward. There's been Don Friedkin, Stuart Vail, Laurie Skopitz, Roman Solecki, Nachman, Morton, Robin, Alex, Sue, Paul Kujawsky, Karen, Otto Gross, Simon, John, Sandy, Danuta, and others. A few of these folks have stuck with me for decades. I can have serious conversations with all of them about what's happening in our culture. They educate me, and they are willing to learn from me. Not a single one of these people is a practicing Catholic. Most are secular Jews. A couple are former Christians and current atheists. 

 

I am still Catholic, but all too often, when I knock on my church door, I hear a hollow sound. When I was diagnosed with cancer and told I would probably die, I asked for a visit with a priest. I couldn't get one. Instead, a New Age priestess who volunteers at the hospital rubbed my feet and talked to me soothingly about death. Liron, an Israeli I've never met, reads everything I write and offers insight from her considerable knowledge. You are reading this thanks to David Horowitz, a secular Jew.

 

When I try to give as well as take, the door still remains closed. I asked a priest at a campus Catholic center if I could, for free, offer talks on Islam. Students were convinced that Islam emerged before Judaism and Christianity, that it is a "religion of peace," and that the Crusades were all about Christians marching to Jerusalem to force Muslims to convert. I wanted to provide the students with the basic facts: who, what, when, where, why, how. The priest said no; he was afraid such talks might cause a stir. I've had too many similarly disappointing encounters with institutional Protestantism. I was being considered for a tenure-track position at a Protestant college. I was hopeful. Suddenly, the hammer came down. The college does not hire Catholics. Is such internecine sectarianism a worthy focus at this time of crisis?

 

On social media, I've encountered Catholics who are more woke than Antifa; on their Facebook pages, one proves one's virtue by bashing white people incessantly. On the page of a mild-mannered liberal priest, a Catholic who questioned the insertion of BLM dogma into Catholic practice was immediately labeled a "racist." I've visited the Facebook pages of conservative Catholics, where conservatives dismiss their fellow Catholics as "Bolsheviks," "fools," and "stupid."

 

Dreher is wrong about this: we American Christians are not analogous to Christians persecuted under communism. We are the ones closing Catholic schools, by not sending our kids to them. We are the ones sentencing young people to lies, because we aren't addressing what's happening in education. We are the ones dividing and conquering. We are the ones who have lost the commission to be the salt of the earth, the light of the world, and to announce our identity with the love we show each other.

 

Dreher says we need support groups to aid us through trials. He's right. We need Christians who emulate Jesus in such groups. Jesus made people feel that they could go on through anything. How? Jesus made people feel that their most private, pressing sleepless nights mattered to the God of the universe. A lonely and poor woman had a wound that wouldn't heal. A smart-mouthed woman was in a series of bad relationships with men who wouldn't commit to marriage. Newlyweds ran out of wine. Those listening to Jesus preach got hungry. A shepherd lost a lamb. A father's son went astray. Jesus focused on the individual and cared about what he or she cared about. That's why we are still caring about Jesus 2,000 years after his ignominious, prisoner's death.

 

Maybe, in his next book, Dreher could talk to lapsed Christians who need and want supportive fellowship and haven't been able to find such fellowship in the church, but have found it elsewhere – among Jews and atheists, lapsed Christians and gay people, in Twelve Step groups and on private Facebook pages. Such accounts could help Christians to understand how better to nurture the kind of groups Dreher envisions.

 

Danusha Goska is the author of God through Binoculars: A Hitchhiker at a Monastery

You can find this review at Front Page Magazine here