Kerby Anderson

A new book (Live Not by Lies) by Rod Dreher warns Christians about the coming “soft totalitarianism.” He explains that this is different from what we read in novels like Brave New World or in Nineteen Eighty-Four. The old, hard totalitarianism came from the state (Germany, Russia) and was dedicated to the eradication of Christianity. This new totalitarianism usually comes from the left in society but is also dedicated to the eradication of Christianity.

The soft totalitarianism of today demands allegiance to a set of progressive beliefs. Compliance is forced less by the state than by elites who form public opinion and by private corporations that control our lives through technology. Citizens won’t be taken away in handcuffs by the state, but their lives will be devastated by leftist elites that will do what they can to destroy their lives.

He admits that it was easy to dismiss what was happening on campus and think, “wait until those kids get into the real world and have to find a job.” They graduated and brought their “wokeness” on the campus to the corporate world, to the legal world, to the media, and to the schools.

Today, dissenters from the woke party line find their businesses, careers, and reputations destroyed. They are pushed out of the public square, stigmatized, canceled, and demonized as racists, sexists, and homophobes. In his chapter about woke capitalism, he details how the corporate threat to Indiana, when the state passed a “religious freedom restoration” bill, set the stage for the current trend of business and media forcing their leftist agenda on the American people.

His book is full of stories from Christians who endured hard totalitarianism and provide us with models for how to address this more insidious form of soft totalitarianism. We are seeing more examples each week of how leftist elites are changing American society.