Live Not by Lies: A Manual for Christian Dissidents QUOTES

1 " In Chapter 77, you had people of totally different worldviews and ideas joined together,” says Patrik. “You had, for example, democratic socialists on the one side and fervent Catholics on the other side. It was totally normal for me that as a small child, I was being raised in a community of people with very different opinions. So it shattered the bubble around me.”
The lesson of valuing diversity within a broader unity of shared goals is something that Christians today need to embrace.
“When we look at what’s happening in America today, we see that you are building walls and creating gaps between people,” he says. “For us, we are always willing to speak, to talk with the other side to avoid building walls between people. You know, it is much easier to indoctrinate someone who is enclosed within a set of walls. "

― Rod Dreher , Live Not by Lies: A Manual for Christian Dissidents

2 " And this is the thing about soft totalitarianism: It seduces those – even Christians – who have lost the capacity to love enduringly, for better or for worse. They think love, but they merely desire. They think they follow Jesus, but in fact, they merely admire him. Each of us thinks we wouldn’t be like that. But if we have accepted the lie of our therapeutic culture, which tells us that personal happiness is the greatest good of all, then we will surrender at the first sign of trouble. "

― Rod Dreher , Live Not by Lies: A Manual for Christian Dissidents

3 " They stood up for truth and justice not out of an expectation of achievable victory in their lifetimes, but because it was the right thing to do. "

― Rod Dreher , Live Not by Lies: A Manual for Christian Dissidents

4 " It masks its hatred of dissenters from its utopian ideology in the guise of helping and healing. "

― Rod Dreher , Live Not by Lies: A Manual for Christian Dissidents

5 " Not all of us are called to die a martyr’s death,” he wrote, “but all of us are called to have the same spirit of self-sacrifice and love to the very end as these martyrs had.”9 "

― Rod Dreher , Live Not by Lies: A Manual for Christian Dissidents

6 " It is up to us today to take up this challenge, to live not by lies and to speak the truth that defeats evil. How do we do this in a society built on lies? By accepting a life outside the mainstream, courageously defending the truth, and being willing to endure the consequences. "

― Rod Dreher , Live Not by Lies: A Manual for Christian Dissidents

7 " In the coming soft totalitarianism, Christians will have to regard family life in a much more focused, serious way. The traditional Christian family is not merely a good idea—it is also a survival strategy for the faith in a time of persecution. Christians should stop taking family life for granted, instead approaching it in a more thoughtful, disciplined way. We cannot simply live as all other families live, except that we go to church on Sunday. Holding the correct theological beliefs and having the right intentions will not be enough. Christian parents must be intentionally countercultural in their approach to family dynamics. The days of living like everybody else and hoping our children turn out for the best are over. "

― Rod Dreher , Live Not by Lies: A Manual for Christian Dissidents

8 " If you are not rock solid in your commitment to traditional Christianity, then the world will break you. But if you are, then this is the solid rock upon which that world will be broken. And if those solid rocks are joined together, they form a wall of solidarity that is very hard for the enemy to breach. "

― Rod Dreher , Live Not by Lies: A Manual for Christian Dissidents

9 " The longer we remain isolated in a period of liberty, the harder it will be to find one another in a time of persecution. "

― Rod Dreher , Live Not by Lies: A Manual for Christian Dissidents

10 " The Baptists stood alone, but stand they did. If you have been discipled in a faith that takes seriously the Apostle Paul’s words that to suffer for Christ is gain and are prepared, as the Orthodox Kaleda family was, to live with reduced expectations of worldly success, it becomes easier to stand for the truth. "

― Rod Dreher , Live Not by Lies: A Manual for Christian Dissidents

11 " Once you perceive how the system runs on lies, stand as firmly as you can on what you know to be true and real when confronted by those lies. Refuse to let the media and institutions propagandize your children. Teach them how to identify lies and to refuse them. Do your best not be party to the lie—not for the sake of professional advantage, personal status, or any other reason. Sometimes you will have to act openly to confront the lie directly. Other times you will fight it by remaining silent and withholding the approval authorities request. You might have to raise your voice to defend someone who is being slandered by propagandists. "

― Rod Dreher , Live Not by Lies: A Manual for Christian Dissidents

12 " It’s no accident that every dictatorship always tries to break down the family, because it’s in the family that you get the strength to be able to fight, "

― Rod Dreher , Live Not by Lies: A Manual for Christian Dissidents

13 " The Benda family model requires parents to exercise discernment. For example, the Bendas didn’t opt out of popular culture but rather chose intelligently which parts of it they wanted their children to absorb. To visit the Benda family home is not to step into a Spartan barracks but rather into a place filled with books and art and life. The Benda family judged that they could be open to the good things in the world around them because of the disciplined moral, intellectual, and spiritual lives they lived within the family. "

― Rod Dreher , Live Not by Lies: A Manual for Christian Dissidents

14 " We cannot hope to resist the coming soft totalitarianism if we do not have our spiritual lives in order. This is the message of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, the great anti-communist dissident, Nobel laureate, and Orthodox Christian. He believed the core of the crisis that created and sustained communism was not political but spiritual. "

― Rod Dreher , Live Not by Lies: A Manual for Christian Dissidents

15 " Propaganda helps change the world by creating a false impression of the way the world is. "

― Rod Dreher , Live Not by Lies: A Manual for Christian Dissidents

16 " Relatively few contemporary Christians are prepared to suffer for the faith, because the therapeutic society that has formed them denies the purpose of suffering in the first place, and the idea of bearing pain for the sake of truth seems ridiculous. "

― Rod Dreher , Live Not by Lies: A Manual for Christian Dissidents

17 " Nineteen Eighty-Four is not the novel that previews what’s coming; it’s rather Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. The contemporary social critic James Poulos calls this the “Pink Police State”: an informal arrangement in which people will surrender political rights in exchange for guarantees of personal pleasure. "

― Rod Dreher , Live Not by Lies: A Manual for Christian Dissidents

18 " Faithful Christians must work for social justice, but can only do so in the context of fidelity to the full Christian moral and theological vision through which we understand the meaning of justice. Any social justice campaign that implies that the God of the Bible is an enemy of man and his happiness is fraudulent and must be rejected. "

― Rod Dreher , Live Not by Lies: A Manual for Christian Dissidents

19 " What did it mean to live by lies? It meant, Solzhenitsyn writes, accepting without protest all the falsehoods and propaganda that the state compelled its citizens to affirm—or at least not to oppose—to get along peaceably under totalitarianism. Everybody says that they have no choice but to conform, says Solzhenitsyn, and to accept powerlessness. But that is the lie that gives all the other lies their malign force. The ordinary man may not be able to overturn the kingdom of lies, but he can at least say that he is not going to be its loyal subject. "

― Rod Dreher , Live Not by Lies: A Manual for Christian Dissidents

20 " This is why Christians today must understand that, fundamentally, they aren’t resisting a different politics but rather what is effectively a rival religion. "

― Rod Dreher , Live Not by Lies: A Manual for Christian Dissidents