The Eric Metaxas Show - Rod Dreher

Episode Date: September 29, 2020

Rod Dreher brings a wake up call, sharing stories from his new book, "Live Not by Lies," where Soviet-era Christians relate how to stand up to "soft totalitarianism," something we see accelerating here in America today.

It's the show you've all been waiting for. Until now, until literally right now. Now, literally right now. Literally right now. Literally. Now your host, Eric Mataxis. Hey there, folks. Welcome to the Eric Metaxis show.

Do I look like I'm in my home office? Well, guess what? I'm not in my home office. I'm at an undisclosed location, which technically I can't tell you about. It doesn't matter because I'm here to do my radio program, TV program, whatever you call it and to talk to my friend Rod Dreher about the new book he's written, which I consider not only very good, but actually very important. Rod Dreher, in case you're not familiar with him, is a senior editor at the American Conservative. He has done so many things that he's written

a number of books, which I also recommend. But right now, he is, it looks like he's in his home. Rod Dreher, welcome the program. Great to be here, Eric. I am indeed in my home. I own monastery. You're in your own private monastery. That's right. And thank you for not letting your success go to your hair. I just want to say that how clear you show up on this program without even any hair product at all? Or should I assume that is that is hair product that it's making it look like that? I have to carry my brokenness. I have to make it public. It's an hour of a sign of

and which state. You know what? I totally get it. And your author photo, since we're old friends, I can make fun of your author photo. You look 40 years older in the author photo. I know that's intentional. You want to give yourself moral gravitas. You said, make me look like a combination of Sart, Camus, and Solzhenitsyn. They've succeeded marvelously. So let's get to the serious subject of your book. Live, the title is Live Not by Lies. A Manual for Christian Dissot. students. Let's start at the beginning, Rod. I found the book moving, important. What made you, of all the things you've written about? What led you to this book? You know, Eric, about five years ago, I got a phone call from a physician at the Mayo Clinic who said, listen, I have to tell somebody

this. My elderly mother lives with my wife and me. She is an immigrant from Czechoslovakia. earlier in her life, she spent six years in a Czech prison for her Christian faith under communism. And she's now saying, son, the things that I'm seeing happen in America now remind me of what happened when communism first came to my country. Now, Eric, when I heard that, I thought, okay, maybe this little old lady watches too much TV news. She's probably a little bit alarmist. But I started checking with people I knew who had grown up under communism in Eastern Europe or the Soviet Union. and said, hey, so what are you seeing? And does this sound real to you?

Every single one of them said, yes, absolutely. We're seeing the same thing, too. And you Americans can't see it. So what I did for this book was I began to listen to them and talk to them and find out, what is it that you're seeing? What are we Americans blind to? And moreover, I traveled to Russia and the former Eastern Europe to talk to Christians who had stood up to communism and who kept.

their faith under persecution so I could find out from them what do we Americans need to do to prepare for this soft totalitarianism that they think is coming and that they convinced me is coming to this country. Well, you know, it's always hard for me when I read something or talk to someone that I agree with so strongly because I'm tempted just to do all the talking. I mean, everything you wrote in this book, you know, unfortunately, isn't a surprise to me. You have written a lot, and we've talked over the years, about the politically correct culture, the cancel culture, particularly among the overeducated elites, and how it has become increasingly, I can't think of another word, fascistic, forceful,

illiberal in this sense of traditional American liberalism, where we respect different ideas and where we can all talk because we believe there's this thing called the truth and we all maybe have different parts of it and we can have a productive dialogue. That seems to be gone that has gone ever since effectively. I was in college in the 80s. So we've talked about this a lot, but you and I have seen it accelerate. And so, but for you to say that, you know, you talk to Eastern block, former Eastern block people who remember the reality of the horrors of communist camps for dissidents, for people who don't tow the party line and that they said that this reminded them of that. I mean, that is, that's kind of big news.

And I guess it does make sense that it led you to write this book. Let's talk, you know, for people, because I'm not. a lot of people out there, they know they don't like the cancel culture. They don't like these kind of sneering elites to tell them what to say and how to think. What do you say? I mean, we're not being thrown in camps yet. No. But what can we do now, before we get into the substance of the book, just in case people are just tuning in?

What are you proposing? Well, one thing that I really want to get across. to my readers. And I've written this book for fellow conservative Christians, but also anybody who is a social conservative or a person of faith, because we're going to be the ones with the targets on our backs. I think one of the most difficult things, Eric, for Christians to understand is that this is not, at least not at first, going to be a hard totalitarianism like Orwell 2.0 or Stalinism 2.0. And that's what a lot of us, you know, we've read 1984 in school. and our idea of totalitarianism is the gulag, the KGB, secret police.

That's not what's coming. I think it's going to be a lot more like the Chinese social credit system, which you may know about. In China, they have the communist government there is using artificial intelligence and the fact that the whole country is so wired to the Internet to manipulate and mold people's behavior by governing their, their privileges. So in China, everybody has a social credit rating, like a credit score. If you do

positive things from the government's point of view, like download the speeches of Xi Jinping, then you'll get a higher score. If you do antisocial things, like go to church, you'll get a lower score. And the lower your score, the less freedom you have to get jobs, to travel, and so on and so forth, I think we're going to get something like that here. And rather than something like Orwell where they get obedience by inflicting pain and terror on people, it's going to be more like Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, where they compel obedience by controlling the liberties of people to participate in the economy. And we can do that right now.

I mean, we know we all grew up on apocalyptic literature saying that, you know, in the end times, you won't be able to buy or sell if you don't have. of the mark of the beast. Well, guess what? Right now, we have the capability, in China, they have the capability to cut people out completely for participating in the economy if they have a low social credit score. I think we have to watch out for that coming here. And it's going to be the kind of thing that comes so soft and so gradually that people don't really notice it. They think things are going to be okay until the point where suddenly they can't get a job. Well, let's be honest, isn't this basically already happening?

In other words, if I say, oh, I want to go into psychiatry, right? But I am a Bible-believing Christian, whether Catholic, Orthodox, or evangelical. And I believe that marriage has to be between a man and a woman. I believe that the only sex that is within bounds is between husband and wife. and I want to be a psychiatrist or a psychologist or I want to become a counselor, it already, it is virtually impossible for me to enter that profession. Now, I know that under the Nazis, that's exactly what they did to the Jews. They began pushing them out of certain professions.

So it wasn't, you know, go to the box car and to your death. No, no, no. In the early 30s, it was, in the mid-30s, it was that kind of thing. but that is in fact happening to Bible believing Christians now. Sure. It is. In the book, I interview a Soviet-born physician who's very high up in an American hospital system. He's an emigrant. He became a Christian after he came to America. He would not let me use his name. He said that it is a policy of their giant hospital system where nobody can ever criticize transgender. Forgive me. We're a hard break. I want to pick this up with Roder. Folks, do not go away. Folks, I'm talking to my friend Rod Dreher. He has a brand new book out. It's very good, but it's also very important. It's called Live Not by Lies, a manual for Christian dissidents.

Live not by lies. So, Rod, you were just telling the story of somebody in America. Go ahead. I'm sorry. It's a Soviet-born physician who is high up in a hospital system in America. He said that it is a policy of the hospital where if anyone shows up wanting cross-sex hormones, things to transition to another gender. They have to give it to them. No questions asked. Even if the doctor in his or her professional judgment, this person is not suited for them, it is across the board. And this guy said he won't even keep a social media account because he knows of human resources at the hospital searches them. He said, this is what we had in the Soviet Union. It's already happening here. Over and over and over, I hear these kind of stories.

And I got to tell you, Eric, a lot of us conservatives think that, well, if we just vote the right way, it's going to stop. Not true. We should vote the right way to vote for candidates who oppose this sort of thing. But there's no president. Even the best president could not go into these corporations, major corporations, and tell them you have to stop with forcing your employees to go to LGBT pride celebrations. You have to stop with critical race theory. this is something that's happening within freedom and capitalism, but it's still totalitarian. Yeah, see, this is what is so chilling to me because, I mean, the other day the president

had an executive order where actually some time ago where he said critical race theory could not be taught in the government. Huge that this nonsense, it's not just nonsense, it's subversive, it's anti-American and on every level is being, you know, our tax dollars at work in the government. You're right. What really frightens me is the cravenness, the cowardice of corporations to do almost anything, not even to blink at any of these new ideologies. And it makes me think of, as I say, because I'm familiar with the period, you know, Germany in the 30s. If you want to get by, you would just, you would just kind of move along and you'd say, well, this is just a season we're going

through and we're just going to go along. We're just going to do what we need to do, say what we need to say. Corporations today, I don't think that the founders, I guess is my point, foresaw the kind of power that all of these corporations, much less the Google and other tech giants have. How, is there a way to deal with that? Well, there's no clear formula for like, we must do A, B, and C to resist. it's going to be the sort of thing that individuals have to work out within themselves and their families and their communities for when do we draw the line because it's going to cost us things. The thing that I learned most of all, Eric, from these people is the importance of suffering. The last chapter of my book is, I think, the most important chapter where these Christians who bore witness under

intense persecution talk about how if you as a believer are not willing to suffer for your faith, then you're not going to make it. That's something that we American Christians who have been so coddled for so long. We've been blessed by freedom, but we've become very, very soft. I mean, I talked to a man in Moscow. He's interviewed in the book, Alexander Ogarodnikov. He came to Christ in his early 20s from a very prominent communist family and began evangelizing in Moscow in the 1970s. They put him on death row, even though he didn't have a death sentence, just to make an example of him. When I interviewed this, man in a hotel in Moscow, half of his face was paralyzed from the beatings he took. He told me very simply about how the ability to suffer for the faith, whether it suffer physical pain, suffer

loss of status, loss of job. That is the only thing that will get Christians through to be willing to carry that cross of Christ. And we Americans desperately need to hear that. Well, it's funny because that's exactly what Bonhofer said. He was trying different things. got to a point in resisting Nazis where he thought it seems possible that now my role will simply be to suffer for Christ, which is something that makes zero sense to the practically minded Western or American. We don't get that. But it really forces us to ask the question, do I really believe what the Bible says and what the faith has taught for 2,000 years about the risen God.

In other words, if I really believe that, I can understand this, and I can understand that there's meaning in my suffering, which you write about in your book. Otherwise, it makes no sense, and all you can do is try to escape pain by selling your soul, in a sense. Exactly. That's exactly what the message I heard over and over from Christians, Catholics, Orthodox, Protestants.

One of the best interviews I had was with an elderly Russian Baptist pastor in Moscow, who told me about as a child under Stalin, all the men in their Baptist fellowship were sent off to the Gulag. And it was the women who kept the faith and raised their children in the faith and raised them to bear suffering with gladness. I mean, this is so radical to us as Americans. But every single one of these people told me in the same way that Alexander Solzhenitsyn said, Baslav Havel said, other dissidents have said, you Americans are making a mistake if you think it can't happen to you. It can come to you if you're not watchful. Well, and look, as I say, it is coming already. I mean, you have been insanely attacked in print.

I have been attacked. And the funny thing is, it's one thing if people attack you for what you actually believe, calling you a name or a racist or a bigot or whatever it is, if it will work to hurt you, they don't care that it's true. They don't care that you're on the record as being against racism or whatever. Many of us are facing that now. Now, it's nothing compared to the descriptions of suffering in your book. But the point is that today, if people are looking for a price to pay, you can pay a price. And I say that as a positive thing. In other words, if you speak the truth, if you live not by lies to quote your book title, now, you can be part of the solution. Yeah. And in fact, the title of the book comes from the final communique that Alexander

Alexander Solchernitz and sent to the Russian people on the eve of his 1974 forced exile. He told them that, look, we don't have power. We ordinary people against this totalitarian regime. But the one thing we can do is withhold our consent from these lies. And he said, if you refuse to live by the lie, whatever it costs you, then you will gain a victory, a spiritual victory and a moral victory. And so what he did was something simple. He said, look, whenever you're in a place where you hear something, hear a lie told, stand up and walk out.

You don't even have to say anything, but just do not be parted to it. And in this small way of being a dissident, you gain a moral victory. And it was men and women like that who did small sacrifices. They didn't have to go out on the square and hold up a sign and get thrown to the gulag. They just had to refuse in their daily lives to consent to the lie. This is the, we see this happening in our own lives. Right now in middle class American life, if you want to be part of it, if you don't want to be exiled, you have to accept gender ideology and everything on LGBT theory.

Increasingly, we're having to accept what I believe is racism, frankly, from the progressive left. One thing we can all do is just refuse to do it, refuse to say, yes, I believe this thing that I don't really believe. But the thing too is, Eric, and I dedicate this book to a man named father, Tomislav Kolokovic. He was a Croatian Jesuit who was doing anti-Nazi work with the underground church in Croatia during the Second World War. He got a tip that the Gestapo was coming for him, so he escaped and went to hide out in Slovakia, his mother's country, under a false name, Kolokovych. He began to teach the Catholic students in Bratislava, the capital,

said, look, the good news is the Germans are going to lose this war. The bad news is we're going to all be ruled by the communists. We have to get ready for it because they're coming after the church. So what he did was he put together small groups of believers, students, all of them, who would come together for prayer, for study, but also to study the arts of resistance. He spread this network all around Slovakia, a network of prayer. The Catholic bishops thought he was being alarmist. they said, you know, things are never going to get that bad.

Kola Kovit said, look, I studied the Soviets because he wanted to be a missionary to communist Russia. This is how they behave. Well, when the iron curtain finally came down, they kicked him out and they went after the church, just like he said it would do. But those underground church that he founded became the backbone of resistance in that country for 40 years. We have to do the same thing here.

That's amazing. We're going to go to another break. This is the Erkman Taxi Show. we'll be right back. Hello, folks. This is Albin Seder, the producer of the Eric Metaxis show. Now that the nomination of Amy Coney Barrett has propelled the Supreme Court back into center stage, President Trump has promised to fight for her confirmation. But when she reaches the court, what kind of cases will Justice Barrett help decide? That's where you and I and Eric and the Alliance Defending Freedom come in. Will you fight for your freedom? Just go to Metaxistocot.com and click on the

banner at the very top of the homepage and join us in supporting Alliance Defending Freedom. It's the nonprofit legal organization that fights for all of us. Your single gift of just $100 or more will support Alliance Defending Freedom and help immensely to preserve our rights to live out our beliefs without fear of any form of government punishment. ADF, listen to this, has litigated and won 11 victories at the U.S. Supreme Court since 2011. Please donate today at Metaxistock.com, or you can call 855-5-4-7-53333. That's 855-5-4-7-53333. Folks, welcome back. I'm talking to my friend Rod Dreher about his brand new book, Live Not By Lies, a manual for Christian dissidents. You know, Rod, part of what I find interesting here is that we're already living in the beginnings of this.

knows, we don't need to wait until it's impossible to buy or sell, right? Like right now, in corporate America, people are being asked to do idiotic, absurd, offensive things, things that are at least violations of their conscience, you know, to take a knee, to go to a seminar in which somebody excoriates you for being white, things that certainly in America we ought not to tolerate. The question is, do Americans have the gut? to stand up to it, even at the cost maybe of losing their job. And I always ask the question, do you really believe in God?

Do you really believe God has your back? Because I think most Christians don't. And they act in the way that they don't. And God sees that and the devil sees that. The fact of the matter is, if you really trust God, when these moments come, you have to say, this is an opportunity to stand for my faith. And there are people watching me. They will be encouraged by my small courage.

I keep thinking that there are tons of opportunities before us right now. Even us having this conversation is an example of that. We could choose not to talk about this. That's right. I tell a story in the book about Alexander Ogarodnikov, the Russian I was just mentioning. He talked about how in the depths of the Gulag once his faith was really tried. And he said, Lord, I'm suffering so much. What do you want for me?

Why did you bring me here? He told me that an angel woke him up at night. showed him a vision, a vision of two prison guards taking a prisoner from the rear. They had his handcuffs taking him to his execution. Ogaradnikov couldn't figure out why he was shown this vision. But it kept happening night after night. Finally, the Lord let him see that all the men who were going to their deaths were men to whom he had witnessed on death row. And they were all going to be with the Lord because Ogaradnikov had been there to share Christ with them. that gave him the answer from the Lord, that God had put him there to suffer so these men

can live eternally and know the Lord. This is an extreme example, but this is something that all of us are going to have to go through, one way or the other. And if we can't suffer the scorn of our friends, of our employers for the sake of Christ, how will we be able to stand up like Ogarodnikov, and these others did? And how will we reach people in a time of persecution, if we're not willing to share their suffering. Well, that's very well said. And I've always felt that when we really spend time studying the persecuted church and the saints that have gone before us,

it really does strengthen our faith because it's, you want to be like that. When you're reading, you say, that's so beautiful. I didn't even realize life could be so beautiful, that life could have such meaning. And obviously, you know, Bonhofer is my North Star with that. you think this beautiful young man who was so brilliant and so brave. And we were talking about him decades and decades later because he knew that God was real.

It wasn't kind of like, gee, I hope this works out. And I think Western Christians, and that's kind of a big part of your book, is you need to be encouraged to understand this is real. And you need to choose and understand this is real. Visions of angels and these kinds of things. That is the greater reality. And I wonder whether Americans can be awakened to face these things now. Because of books like yours, frankly, I have hope, Rod.

You know, I don't take the view that it's impossible. But people have to be willing to fight now. This is not just someday in the future, I will be brave. But there are infinite moments in our lives now when you can do this. I mean, you're the father of three kids. You've got to see this in schools and social interactions. There are many moments when you stand out. Absolutely.

And you have to do it now. Lay that groundwork now within yourself and within your family. So your kids will be ready for what's coming. One of the things that really got to me doing research for this book was something I've read in a great book from the early 50s called The Captive Mind by a Polish dissident intellectual named Cheswav Niewicz. And Miwalsh was once a communist and defected to the West and wrote this book about why it is that intellectuals fall for communism. One thing he said at the beginning of one of the chapters is that the people of Eastern Europe found out the hard way that the sort of conversations that were just happening in coffee shops and among obscure intellectuals in the past could one day come to rule their lives.

When I read that, I thought, this is us. when you and I were in college, Eric, a lot of the critical race theory stuff and a lot of what we now call political correctness was just getting started. And it was the kind of thing that most ordinary people looked at and said, yeah, crazy intellectuals, wait until they get out into the real world, that'll fix them. Well, guess what? A generation got out into the real world, marched through the institutions of our society through corporate human resources departments, to universities, media, and so on and so forth. And now they are putting this totalitarianism into action in the same way that Miwalsh was talking about how the ordinary people of Eastern Europe woke up and saw, oh my God, we're living under this now. It's happening here too. But again, because it's so soft, people are sort of like the frog in the proverbial frog in the pot. You know, it's been slowly boiling.

And now you wake up and realize, my God, what are we living in? It's never too late to wake up, though, and to start building resistance. Yes, and that's, again, one of the reasons I'm excited about the book, your book, Live Not by lies, that we need now to face this and to understand that almost every day you have opportunities to cheerfully and lovingly stand for what is true and not look the other way when somebody speaks a lie. We'll be right back. I'm talking to Rod Greer. Don't go away. Hi, folks. These uncertain times can cause uncertain gut slowdown. Worrying fear can wreak havoc on our digestion, making it hard to feel optimum. Bloading, less energy, and occasional constipation

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willing to lay my heart, you know, on the line. Here's the issue. Mike Lindell with my pillow, you may, you may notice that I have a bobble hell of head of him near me. He's here to remind all of us that when you go to mypillow.com, you get whopping discounts if you use the code Eric, okay? Now, there are a lot of people who haven't done that and we have your names here. and Chris Himes and Albin pointed out to me that there's like three pages of you whose first name is Eric. You yourself, I mean, that's humiliating for me that even though your name is Eric, you're still not willing to use the code Eric. I mean, if you don't want to use it because it's my name, use it because it's your name. But the point is that I see who you are and I just feel humiliated by this.

Please go to mypillar.com. It's okay, Mike. It's going to be okay. Go to mypillar.com. Use the code, Eric. You're going to get whopping savings and really high quality products. Did I mention that? Thank you. I'm talking to my friend Rod Dreher.

His new book is Live Not By Lies. I recommend it highly. It's very important. Rod, you talk to people who had suffered horrors. I once met Richard Wormbrandt. who wrote a book, Tortured for Christ. I mean, when you imagine what some people went through for their faith, it's hard for us to believe in this day and age,

but you only get there by being silent now. Chuck Holson called it the spiral of silence. It happened in Germany. If enough people just don't speak up and let things go, it becomes harder and harder to speak up. We've noticed this with regard to the transgender situation or same-sex marriage. I mean, I just say, hey, I'm a Christian.

These are my views. But it's a lot harder today than it was 10 years ago. Much harder, but much more necessary, too. And I think that in my experience, talking to other Christians, there's this great temptation among Christians to bargain, to say that, well, you know, it's not as bad as all that. And this is just something that's going to pass. Guess what?

It's not going to pass. And it's, again, it's not the sort of thing that you can deal with by casting a vote. Absolutely vote your conscience and vote on these issues, but understand this is a deep cultural thing that has been going on for decades, mounting for decades, and now it's being revealed. One thing Eric got really shocked me in doing research for this book was the extent of which major corporations like Google, Amazon, Facebook have so much of our personal data. I was sitting in an apartment in Prague a couple of years ago interviewing a woman named Camilla Bendeva. She had her family where strong Christian dissidents against communism, her husband,

Votslav, was sent to prison for four years for his faith. And I asked her, I said, why don't you have a smartphone? She had a dumb phone. She said, look, if you had lived as we did when your entire house was bugged, where every bit of information the state could get for you, they would use against you, you would never give any of that information unnecessarily to anybody. She said, so many young people today in her own country, and in the United States just feel that the Alexis and the smartphones said,

nobody, I have nothing to hide. They will never use that against me. Everything is recorded and saved. And at some point, I believe it will be used against us. We're so naive about technology that way. Well, I mean, look, this brings us to China. One of the things that I have really seriously admired about this president is his willingness to see China for what it is.

we've had both parties for 25, 30 years play patty cake with this totalitarian communist atheist dictatorship and allow them to acquire technology, which they are using to horrifically oppress their own people along genuinely racist lines with the Uighur Muslims. And it is so wicked. And we act as though, well, it's not really happening or we look the other way. and we're perfectly willing, you know, folks like the NBA or Nike are willing to make billions in Hollywood, to make many, many billions off of that market. And I think, how is this different than working with the Nazis to create ovens?

How is it different? I mean, morally, I don't see how it's any different, but nobody is talking about working with evil, profiting from evil. If we don't take a stand on that kind of thing, even in what we buy, I won't buy Nike shoes because of this. I mean, these are the kind of things we can do every day because even if it doesn't come to us tomorrow, it has already come to our brothers and sisters made an image of God in places like China. Well, and speaking of China, I think that that is the model for the soft totalitarianism that we're going to get here. It's rather harder in China, but the same sort of methods of using people's involvement,

online to know what they do, who they're with, and to suppress them. Right now, we're seeing in this country the Discover Card, just the other day as we're talking. Discover Card cut its own customers off from giving donations to the Legal Defense Fund of Kyle Rittenhouse in Kenosha. Cut them off. Banks are refusing to do business with people who are involved on the Southern Poverty Law Center's list of hate groups, which include people, good guys, like the Family Research Council, like Alliance Defending Freedom, this is what they have the power to do right here under a capitalist liberal democracy. And we can look at China and say, shame on them, and we should, but it's happening right here

in our own backyard. And one other thing about China, in the book I talk about how a whole generation of young Chinese, the post-Tienneman Square massacre generation, they've never been told about any of this. the Chinese, about the massacre, the Chinese government has effectively erased the history in the minds of this generation about what happened. That's happening here too. I talked to a 26-year-old young woman who told me she was a communist, an American woman, just ordinary, sunny-faced. I said, a communist, what do you know about the Gulaq? She knew nothing about the Gulaq.

She was born after the Cold War. She thought communism was just a good idea, the brotherhood of men. I'm telling you, if we lose cultural memory, we are going to be sitting ducks for totalitarianism. Well, there are a couple of lines in your book that I underlined. Amazingly, it was Cicero a couple of thousand years ago. He wrote, not to know what happened before you were born is to remain a child forever. Now, you get that from Milan Kunder's book. But what a concept, not to know our.

history that's very important to me. There's another quote on the next page of the book, no culture and no person can remember everything. A culture's memory is the result of its collective sifting of facts to produce a story, a story that society tells itself to remember who it is. Without collective memory, you have no culture. Without a culture, you have no identity. I talk about this in my book, if you can keep it. We have lost that. I mean, you and I grew up at a time when the counter-narrative, the America is bad narrative, was really, the only one, the anti-heroic narrative that every, you know, sprinter is using steroids, this kind of corrosive narrative. And of course, like any lie, there's truth to it. But it's been,

it's been so harmful. And we've lost the beautiful stories of, you know, Paul Revere or Nathan Hale or whoever it is, people who made sacrifices for freedom. And so it is happening here. Well, yeah, and this is the power of how they, they're able to control. our cultural memory, the 1619 project from the New York Times that says slavery is the basis of America. Well, guess what? Oprah Winfrey is now, has made this huge deal with the Cole Hannah Jones of the 1619 project to make movies and TV shows with this false, malicious history of America. I want to cut you off. I want to pick up right there when we come back. Folks, I'm talking to Rod Dreher. The book is Live Not by Lies.

Cheers standing right in front of me. Speaking words of wisdom, let it be. Let it be. Hey it, folks. Final few minutes with my friend Rod Dreher. The new book is Live Not by Lies. Get a copy. Rod, you just shocked me because you referred to this absurd 1619 project.

We've had Bob Woodson and others on this program saying how completely ridiculous and very harmful it is. But you said Oprah Winfrey is on board. The Pulitzer Prize committee, they have awarded the woman who wrote this, the Pulitzer Prize. I mean, we're living in truly strange times. They are. And this is what happens when the left captures institutions. And this 1619 project is going to be taught in over 5,000 schools. And it's going, this story, this fake story, this malicious story about America is going to become the history of America in the minds of a new generation. And when I go back to listen to the teachings of the people I talk to, they said what you have to do is preserve the truth, preserve true history, true literature. And you can only do it in small groups. You can't trust the institutions to do it.

So that's why we have to get the classical Christian schools and things like that. They are so important as a form of resistance. Well, there's no question about that. And, you know, when I think of books like your book here, my book, if you can keep it, or Bonhoffer, I mean, I interview so many people on this program, I think I wish I could get every American to read that book because it will strengthen them. It will help them understand what is happening. I mean, your book by comparing what is happening today to what happened, you know, under the Soviets, it's so key, Rod. I mean, this is, you know, this. this is, it's true, but nobody else has really done this or has anybody done this before because we're living in such a strange cultural moment. It seems just perfectly timed. I don't think so, Eric, but I think I see it as a calling, you know, to try to shout to those who have ears to hear that this is happening. And my book is not an optimistic book. I don't believe a lot of this can be stopped, but it can be endured with faith. You know, the book's not optimistic, but it's hopeful. All

these people I talked to, Eric, these Christians who stood up, none of them thought they would ever live to see the end of communism, but they did. They only stood up because it was the right thing to do and the Lord called them to do it. The Lord is calling us to do the same thing now. And I hope I, through the example of these stories that real live, flesh and blood people told me that we Americans can be inspired to do the right thing too. Well, it's interesting. I am mostly hopeful because of books like yours, and I mean that very sincerely. In other words, I think that God in his infinite graciousness is giving his church as people an opportunity. We might not take it, but I believe we might. In other words, I think books like yours are helping people to understand the severity of the

situation. So it's one of the reasons that I'm so excited that you wrote it. And I know you'll be doing a lot of traveling and speaking on it. I hope so. We don't know. I would think so. I would think so. But I do believe that all the issues, even stuff we haven't touched on, religious liberty, we're at a special moment right now. And I think that this book is made for that moment. Do you, I guess I should ask, do you suppose that folks like NPR and company will be willing to talk to you about this thing? No. You know, I got a lot of mainstream press for my last book, The Benedict Option, because it was interesting.

This book, however, threatens them because it says, you're part of this emerging totalitarian structure, and you people are going to persecute me. They love to think of themselves as liberals and tolerant and all that, but we are seeing the skull beneath the skin of a lot of these so-called tolerant liberals in the media and elsewhere. I mean, you've seen it. I've seen it.

A lot of believers have seen it, and it's going to get even worse. The Lord told us this would happen. we just have to make sure that we ourselves have built up the sort of spiritual and moral resilience that allows us not only to endure it, but to endure it and carry that cross with joy on our countenance. Amen. Well, my friend, my brother, Rod Rear, thank you so much for your time, for your effort, and for this wonderful book. I hope people get a copy, Live Not by Lies. Thanks, Rod. Thank you, Eric.