Living In Truth, TogetherThe joy, the consolation, and the urgent necessity of small groups
Rod Dreher
Nov 17, 2022
Brace yourselves, here's an optimistic post from me.
I've been in Vienna this week for meetings. I've met some Christian leaders and activists from all over the continent who are engaged in various kinds of work -- pro-life, religious liberty, that sort of thing. The news is uniformly bad, and getting worse. Over the past few years, I've found more satisfaction doing Benedict Option/Live Not By Lies work in Europe than in my own country, simply because the engaged small-o orthodox Christians here are under no illusions that we live in what Aaron Renn calls Negative World. Nobody here noodles on about winsomeness, or "kingdom hospitality," or all the other honeyed strategies that many American Christians seem to think is the key to staying relevant and effective in a world in which more and more people think Christians are evil people who need to be taken down. It's not that they're unkind people -- in fact, I was struck by the sweetness of spirit of everyone I met -- but rather that they know this is pointless. Man, the stories I heard. This really is war.
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The days are darkening. Everybody sees that, and everybody is trying to figure out what to do. Nobody has the answer, but everybody understands that we have to work together towards whatever answers there are. I was invited to talk about Live Not By Lies, and the lessons that the Christians who resisted Soviet communism have for us today. It is always an honor and even a pleasure to talk about Father Tomislav Kolakovic, Kamila Bendova, and all the rest. A number of people who had not heard about the book told me they are eager to read it, and invited me to come to their countries to talk about its message. A couple of those I met came from former Communist countries, and had lived through Communism. They emphatically affirmed the things I was saying, which was simply repeating the message I had been given by the dissidents. They too see a new form of totalitarianism rising today. They too are having trouble defining it: they know -- they know -- that it's like what they endured before, but it's also different in ways they can't really identify. I told the people from western Europe to go home and seek out people in their lives who lived under Communist totalitarianism, and ask them if what we're dealing with today reminds them of what they left behind. You'll hear it for yourself. (I urge you American readers to do the same.)
So, why is this an optimistic post? Well, maybe I shouldn't say "optimistic," but rather "hopeful." The thing I took away most from these meetings was a sense of brotherhood. For me personally, the most underappreciated message of the dissidents I spoke to in Live Not By Lies is the power of small groups. Here is just one passage from the book:
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We small-o orthodox Christians have not been sent to Siberia, or anything like that. But we are in exile from post-Christian society, in a meaningful sense (and if you doubt it, spend a morning talking with Protestants, Catholics, and Orthodox from around Europe, especially about the jaw-dropping hostility they face in their own countries -- things most of us in the USA don't yet deal with, but will soon). Yet we still have a lot of liberty. What are we going to do with it? Father Kolakovic read the signs of the times, and spent the three years God gave him before his expulsion from Czechoslovakia training young Christians, spiritually and otherwise, for resistance, and establishing a network of small groups of dedicated believers who would be capable of continuing the life of the Catholic Church underground, when the time came. There are so many things that can be done right now, if only we Christians will first grasp the seriousness of the times, and second embrace our vocation to be "creative minorities," meeting the challenges of the moment with hope, vision, and intelligence.
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If you are a Christian, and the things I write about here make sense to you, I urge you to start forming small groups, and networks of small groups, now. You -- we -- are going to need them. We already do. Here's a link to a free Live Not By Lies study guide I wrote, that you can download. (And also, Muslim and Jewish readers for whom my stories of coming persecution of traditional religious believers resonate, I urge you to do the same thing.) You never know from where allies might come. One activist told me she was recently approached by a lesbian feminist with whom she had bitterly clashed in the past. The feminist apologized to her, and said that she (the lesbian) had not realized how wicked her own side was, until they turned on her over her refusal to endorse maximalist transgender activist demands -- demands that she believed were erasing women. I met a Muslim woman on this trip, strongly dedicated to her faith, but fiercely pro-life and pro-family, courageous, and eager to collaborate with like-minded Christians. This is a point I tried to convey to the audience when I spoke: that the most important quality the dissidents sought in allies was COURAGE. I quoted Kamila Bendova explaining to me why it was easy for her and her late husband Vaclav to work with all the dissident hippies around Vaclav Havel, even though she and her husband were conservative Catholics. It was because these hippies -- unlike most Czech Christians -- were brave. In America, we saw the same thing recently in Dearborn, Michigan, where Muslim parents took the lead in publicly fighting the corruption of their children by LGBT activists who have captured public schools.
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Source:
https://www.theamericanconservative.com/living-in-truth-together/
