Rod Dreher Lives Not by Lies

Despite its cultural ascendancy, the American Right has long lacked its own Chistopher Hitchens–an elder polymath whose contrarian philosophical approach broaches questions that even the most daring of pundits wouldn’t touch. However, since his breakout book, The Benedict Option, in 2018, Rod Dreher appears primed to take up that mantle. 

A former columnist for The American Conservative and “The Man Who Made JD Vance” in the natal days of Hillbilly Elegy struck a chord with American readers in 2020 when Live Not By Lies, his investigation into the roots of Soviet totalitarianism, captured COVID tyranny in a way no one else could. Now, Angel Studios has turned Dreher’s bestseller into a four-part docu-series featuring interviews with the everyday people who stood up to the Soviet Union and, against all odds, ushered in its demise. 

Before the Nashville premiere on Monday of the series’s season finale, Dreher talked to The Pamphleteer about the state of American Christianity, Gen Z’s rightward shift, and the lessons survivors of the Iron Curtain have for Trump’s second term.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

It feels like a decade has passed since Vice President Vance introduced the first episode of Live Not By Lies in New York at the beginning of April. Pope Francis is dead, and the tariffs you’ve been critical of have dominated the news cycle. Did you expect this kind of tumult to happen, and how do you think audiences are going to view the series in light of these current events?

No, I didn’t anticipate this, though I guess I should have because Donald Trump is a very chaotic figure. My great fear about this as someone who supported Trump, not because I particularly believed in Trump, but because I was so sick of the wokeness, is that Trump will fail economically, and that will bring the Democrats back, and wokeness will come back in full force. So many people think it’s over, but it’s not over. I talk to friends of mine who work at universities, and the so-called vibe shift has not happened there.

I think that sense of chaos, generally speaking, is conducive to totalitarianism. It could come from the Right or the Left. I wrote the book about managerial liberalism veering into totalitarianism. But the basic conditions that need to be present for totalitarianism to take root are still here, namely, radical atomization of people, people feeling like they're not connected to anything, people having the sense that truth is whatever makes us feel good or what coincides with our feelings. That's not a Left or Right thing. 

I mean, I'm still a supporter of this administration. I like what they're doing with dismantling DEI, but in the end, the economy is so overwhelming that if they end up impoverishing a lot of Americans, we're in real trouble. 

I live in Europe. One thing that's not really reported in the American media, nor in the European media, to be fair, is the rising discontent and the possibility of civil war. There's a man named David Betz. He's a professor at King’s College London in the War Studies department, and he studies civil wars. That's his academic specialty. He gave a podcast interview to Lee Perry back in February that went viral, in which he talks about the likelihood, as he sees it, of civil war coming to the UK. And he says all of Western Europe is in the same boat. It's mostly about mass migration, but it’s also about widespread loss of faith in governments to police things fairly, and just a sense of deracination of the native populace. That’s everywhere, and it doesn’t get reported.

I was in France recently on a book tour. The Betz thing had come out about a month earlier, and I started asking ordinary French people I talked to, “What do you think about the possibility of civil war?”  Every one of them said, “Oh yeah, it's coming. No doubt about it.” I even talked to a retired general who said the same thing. So, I bring all this up in context of Live Not By Lies, to say that, yes, I think that the totalitarian push has been mostly coming from the Left, but I don’t want to live in a Right-wing totalitarian state either, and I think that is a potential.

I’m guessing that you didn’t know COVID was coming when you wrote Live Not By Lies, but I can’t think of a more prescient book to come out at that time. Do you think that those COVID-era totalitarian tendencies have gotten better? Do you think we learned anything from the COVID years as a society?

I had finished the manuscript just as COVID was getting started, so it had zero impact on the writing of the book. By the time the book came out in September of 2020, we’d had COVID for five or six months, and it made a massive difference in the book sales. This book got zero attention from the mainstream media. It ended up selling over 200,000 copies, which just doesn't happen. It was all word of mouth and a few podcasts. And I think that’s because of not only COVID, but the Summer of Floyd, when everybody saw how institutions, businesses, colleges, etc., had suddenly shifted over rapidly and radically to a DEI agenda. 

Ordinary people were wondering, “What the hell is happening?” And this book explained it. That's what accounted for the book’s popularity. The main thing the American people have learned from COVID is you can't trust the authorities. And in one sense, that can be good, because of who these authorities are–not just the health authorities. I lost faith in the military after Iraq, and in the judgment of our leaders on matters of war and peace. It makes sense that people wouldn’t trust them. 

On the other hand, as Hannah Arendt said, that is a precursor for totalitarianism, and people have lost trust in the basic institutions of their society. We’re there when you look at the polls. It was trending this way even before COVID. But, the one thing people said they trusted was the science, and when people are told you can’t leave your house unless you’re going to an anti-racism rally, what does that say to people? You know, it’s all a sham.

What would you say to somebody who went through COVID and was a devout churchgoer, but no longer has trust in their church as an institution because of it? I'm Episcopalian. I've had a lot of issues since the COVID years with the Church’s policies and haven’t gone back nearly as much as I did in the past even though I was, at one time, a vestry board member. Do you think that lack of faith in Christian institutions is something that will lead to a reckoning? Should those with faith be considering an alternative to church at this point?

That’s a complicated question. Yes, a lot of religious leadership showed cowardice during that time, but you can see that a lot of people who had just been going to church out of habit, when that habit got broken, they never went back. I'm not sure we could draw any ideological lessons from that, but I do strongly believe that whatever one’s religious background and religious convictions, you need to find a church that is serious and deep and is able to form you into the sort of person who can suffer. 

That is the main story I got from interviewing all these people in the post-communist world who stayed behind and who lived through it. Most of the people we interviewed for the documentary were Christians of one kind or another: Protestant, Catholic, or Orthodox. The common message they had was the utter necessity of being willing to suffer for the truth and for your faith. 

We couldn't go to Russia for the documentary, but this fellow, Yuri Sipko, was a retired leader of the Russian Baptists. His father had been hauled away by Stalin, like all the Baptist men were, and put into a Gulag. Here he is an old man. I interviewed him for two hours in Moscow. As we were saying goodbye, we were on the street just off of Red Square, early November of 2019. The snow is falling, he looked me in the eye and said, “Go back to America and tell the Christians that if you’re not prepared to suffer for your faith, you’re not going to make it.” That really stuck with me. 

Terrence Malick made this film a few years ago called A Hidden Life, the true story of Franz Jägerstätter, who was murdered by Hitler. There’s a scene in that movie when Franz goes into the church in his Alpine village in Austria, and there’s an artist there painting pictures on the wall of biblical scenes. And the old artist tells Franz, “People come here. They admire the art. People admired Jesus, but Jesus didn’t call admirers. He called disciples.” You can tell the difference between an admirer and a disciple by their willingness to suffer. 

That’s the test during COVID. I was living in Baton Rouge and Eastern Orthodox. We have a small Orthodox mission there. We saw a number of young people, usually mega-church evangelicals, come into the Orthodox Church during COVID. We asked them, “Why are you here? We’re glad to see you, but why are you here?” And, inevitably, they would say some version of how COVID has scared them so much because of what it revealed about how fragile the institutions and our lives are. That they know we need a form of Christianity that is deeper and can give us resilience. And I’m not saying that to convince people to become Orthodox, but I am saying that to tell them to get to a church that understands the importance of asceticism and suffering for the truth. Because if you’re going to a church that is merely the middle class at prayer, you're not going to make it.

We’ve heard that those young people are shifting Right. What are your thoughts about the accuracy of that conclusion and how do you see a project like Live Not By Lies relating to those under 30?

I’m heartened by the news of the shift to the Right, but here’s the caveat. Ross Douthat at the New York Times once said addressing people on the Left, if you don’t like the Religious Right, wait till you see the Post-Religious Right. I think we're starting to see what he means. 

When I talk to friends who are college professors, they bring up a stunning rise in Anti-Semitism among their male students. Truly radical Right-Wing ideology is becoming much more mainstreamed, and a form of ideology that is not Christian. It’s more Nietzschean, and they regard basic Christianity as weak. That really concerns me.

This is why I keep going back to trying to warn people about totalitarianism. You're used to it coming from the Left, but we could see it on the Right too if people have no regard for basic principles of fairness…of justice. Alexander Solzhenitsyn said that the thing he learned in the Gulag was that the line between good and evil doesn’t pass between social classes or any group like that, but right down the middle of every human heart. That is a profoundly Christian statement about human fallibility. If we lose sight of that, if we replace wokeness and its categories with a Right-Wing version of that, we are just as lost. 

In my new book, Living in Wonder, I talk about how a lot of post-boomers–millennials, Gen Z– are moving towards the occult, or towards a bespoke form of spirituality that suits their felt needs, and away from traditional religion. This is really worrisome. I grew up in the Deep South, and one of the reasons I left Christianity for a while as a teenager was when I came to understand the history of the Civil Rights Movement and realized that the white churches in my town, of which my family was a part, did nothing to speak out against the injustice of racism, and, in fact, upheld it. 

Now I learned later that you can’t blame all of Christianity. But they were willing to live with and uphold serious injustice. And I think that we could see that happen again. I don’t have a high view of human nature. While Live Not By Lies is a polemic against Left Wing, managerial liberalism turning into totalitarianism, human nature is human nature. Arendt wrote about this in her book The Origins of Totalitarianism. The Left-Wing version in Russia and the Right Wing version in Germany are antithetical to Christianity. 

There's a new book by Christian Smith called Why Religion Went Obsolete. He’s a sociologist of religion at Notre Dame. I just finished it last week. It’s a blockbuster. He’s Catholic and writes about how the culture that has formed people after around 1991 has severed them from any sense of transcendent, permanent norms and belief in institutions. They haven't become atheist, but they become completely fluid in their spirituality. Many of them are drifting towards the occult, but mostly they’re just spiritual, but not religious. 

This is the perfect breeding ground for totalitarianism, because that’s what Marx’s version of communism was. What Nazism was. It was an ersatz fake spirituality that ultimately appealed to people who couldn’t believe in traditional religion and had lost their faith in institutions, but still needed and craved that sense of meaning–of purpose and of social solidarity. So this is what I fear.

In Live Not By Lies, I have a quote from a 26-year-old woman. She was raised in a politically and religiously conservative, churchgoing family whom I knew. She told me once, “I’m a communist…I really think that the whole vision of universal brotherhood and equality is just beautiful.” I said, “Okay, well, what about the Gulags?” What? She had no idea.

I emphasize–she grew up in a conservative family, but she had not been taught it in school, not been taught it by her family. This is something that I knew about because I was born in 1967, so I remember the end of the Cold War. These kids don’t know anything about history and don’t understand why they should know. If they can watch this film and hear the voices of real people, flesh and blood, people talking about what it was like, that might wake them up and help them to learn to love liberty and basic human decency more. That is something so needed, because there’s so much in this culture that pushes people towards ideological extremism. And when you see this movie, you realize that there’s danger on all sides.

Live Not By Lies is available to stream on Angel Studios’ website.