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61 " The current process of spiritual demagoguery and rhetorical overkill has transformed the concern for victims into a totalitarian command and a permanent inquisition. "
― Rod Dreher , Live Not by Lies: A Manual for Christian Dissidents
62 " Who controls the past, controls the future: who controls the present controls the past. THE PARTY SLOGAN, NINETEEN EIGHTY-FOUR "
63 " golden age of community "
64 " Soft totalitarianism exploits decadent modern man’s preference for personal pleasure over principles, including political liberties. The public will support, or at least not oppose, the coming soft totalitarianism, not because it fears the imposition of cruel punishments but because it will be more or less satisfied by hedonistic comforts. 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. "
65 " They think they love, but they merely desire. They think they follow Jesus, but in fact, they merely admire him. "
66 " She worries that her friends don’t grasp that suffering is a normal part of life—even of part of a good life, in that suffering teaches us how to be patient, kind, and loving. She doesn’t want them to give her advice about how to escape her problems; she just wants them to help her live through them. "
67 " They had social spaces where the real meaning of words was preserved,” he says. “For me, it’s less important to argue with such a view of the world”—progressivism, he means—“than to describe reality as it is. For example, our task is to show people what a normal, monogamous family looks like. "
68 " Religious Man, who lived according to belief in transcendent principles that ordered human life around communal purposes, had given way to Psychological Man, who believed that there was no transcendent order and that life’s purpose was to find one’s own way experimentally. "
69 " In Bowling Alone, Putnam documented the unraveling of civic bonds since the 1950s. Americans attend fewer club meetings, have fewer dinner parties, eat dinner together as a family less, and are much less connected to their neighbors. They are disconnected from political parties and more skeptical of institutions. They spend much more time alone watching television or cocooning on the internet. The result is that ordinary people feel more anxious, isolated, and vulnerable. "
70 " Man no longer understood himself to be a pilgrim on a meaningful journey with others, but as a tourist who traveled through life according to his own self-designed itinerary, with personal happiness his ultimate goal. "
71 " If there is no sacred order, then the original promise of the serpent in the Garden of Eden—“[Y]e shall be as gods”—is the foundational principle of the new culture. "
72 " An anti-culture is inherently unstable, said Rieff, but he doubted that people brought up in this social order would ever be willing to return to the old ways. "
73 " History is in the stories we tell ourselves about who we were and who we are. History is embedded in the language we use, the things we make, and the rituals we observe. History is culture—and so is Christianity. "
74 " Less formal, everyday acts within the home are more powerful than you might think. The way Christians talk about God and weave the stories of the Bible and church history into the fabric of domestic life is of immense significance, precisely because these things are so ordinary. This is training children and parents alike in cultural memory. The language Christians use—the words, the metaphors—matters, as does the way we pray together and the symbols we employ to embody and transmit meaning across the generations. We may not be able to communicate that meaning to a world gone insane, but as Orwell knew, simply by staying sane when everyone else is mad, we may hope to convey the human heritage. "
75 " In an America that now runs on the internet, five companies—Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, Google—have an almost incalculable influence over public and private life. "
76 " Since then, lobbyists for national and international corporations have leaned heavily on state governments to pass pro-LGBT legislation and to resist religious liberty laws. "
77 " We will know when we act—or fail to act—as Christians when to be faithful costs us something. It may be a small thing at first—a place on a sports team because we won’t play on Sunday mornings, or the respect of our peers when we will not march in a parade for a political cause. But the demands made on us will grow greater, and the consequences for failing to submit to the world’s demands will grow more severe. "
78 " Perhaps no public intellectual has thought so deeply about the fundamentally religious nature of these progressive militants than James A. Lindsay, an atheist and university mathematician. "
79 " Woke capitalist branding harnesses the unmatched propaganda resources of the advertising industry to send the message, both explicitly and implicitly: the beliefs of social conservatives and religious traditionalists are obstacles to the social good. "
80 " Lindsay contends that social justice fulfills the same psychological and social needs that religion once filled but no longer can. And like conventional religions, it depends on axiomatic claims that cannot be falsified but only accepted as revealed truths. This is why arguments with these zealots are about as productive as theological disputation with a synod of Taliban divines. For the social justice inquisitors, “dialogue” is the process by which opponents confess their sins and submit in fear and trembling to the social justice creed. "