Live Not By Lies Documentary & the Rod Dreher Book Stack

As a kid growing up in Chicago, communism was a boogeyman far away as well as a reality that far too many people in the city had suffered under. Back in the ’80s, there certainly was a feeling that the USSR was a rival, but perhaps one that was slowly ossifying. President Reagan certainly made anti-communism a priority, and the church people I was around certainly were disturbed by the religious persecution going on in Communist countries, but to a kid like me, it seemed like communism was an ideology whose heyday had passed and could never strike in the United States.

The flip side to this was the stories of people who were just around. Chicago has a huge population of Eastern Europeans; many claim that Chicago has more Poles than any city besides Warsaw (this claim has always been somewhat dubious), but besides that, there certainly were others. There was a girl I went to school with who was born in Ukraine in the 1940s, fled when he was three, then spent a couple of years in Germany before making it to the United States. When we were in elementary school, probably about 1990, her dad got the chance to visit family in Ukraine – if I remember correctly, it might have been the second opportunity he’d gotten since leaving forty years prior. He was really excited, I think, because he’d be able to bring a Bible with him this time, and he showed us the pages of this Bible in a language with strange characters.

So many of these people were doing the best that they could to be “good” Americans, and were incredibly thankful to be in the United States. That being said, there was a certain sadness to be perceived, a love and longing for home, but knowing that to live under communism was often a fate worse than death. As I got older and heard more of these stories, both from people who had left and people who didn’t, more and more of a picture of what communism does to people and to society filled out in my head.

One of the things that is absolutely not tolerated under communism is free speech. This is also true under fascism. If the state is the highest good and final arbiter of what is good and evil, of course it follows that to speak up against this is treason, and traitors are dealt with incredibly harshly, as this is no longer a matter of a difference of philosophy, but a heresy to the religion of the state. I certainly became interested in this phenomenon, really becoming interested in Cold War Studies, but also getting very interested in the motivations of people who dared to stand up against this, such as the White Rose group in Nazi Germany. As much as many of the people around me hardly considered the Orthodox to be Christians under normal circumstances, when it came to talking about the horrendous persecutions of Christians in the Soviet Union and in Eastern Europe, they could be acknowledged then.

But the thing is, the type of philosophy that led to communism in many places didn’t just appear – its roots go much further back, and much of it is based in “logical” beliefs. All it takes is reading Dostoyevsky to understand that he – in the 19th century – is writing about these same types of thought patterns that come into vogue becoming dangerous and weaponized.

Far from being alarmist, it’s certainly fair to be worried that many of these patterns are becoming more and more dominant in places like the United States today, and the people who are most sensitive to that and recognize it first are generally those who suffered because of it in another place. This is the premise of Rod Dreher’s book, “Live Not By Lies”, which was originally published in 2020 (impeccable timing there!). In any case, Angel Studios chose to take a chance on doing a documentary based on the book featuring Dreher. They gauged interest, crowdfunded, worked for quite some time on the film’s production, and today, the first of four episodes premiered on the Angel Studios website (https://www.angel.com/watch/live-not-by-lies). I was planning on seeing it tonight, but things kind of got crazy, but I hope to be able to watch it in the next day or so. So far, I have heard nothing but excellent things about it, so I encourage everyone to check it out!

The next thing I want to mention is, perhaps, a silly thing, but it may be of interest to some. Back when I had my full website about the White Rose, I had a list of books that I had noted that they had read, knowing that reading really influenced the way they thought and what they believed as well as what they believed in. All of them read voraciously! Hans and Sophie Scholl often read books in French to get around the Nazi publishing bans – Hans’ French was so good, he’d been offered a book translation job at one point, and while Sophie’s French wasn’t anywhere near that level, her French was decent enough to be able to read fairly difficult books in the language. There’s a lot that could be said on that subject, and it might make for a good post someday. *L* However, because they all had this sort of relationship with books, I started putting together a list of books that got mentioned that they had read, and I posted it because, even as it was incomplete, it was a phenomenal collection.

One of the things I really enjoy about Rod Dreher’s Substack is that there is such good conversation that comes about between people who have read a lot and who have considered a lot due to books. Dreher himself talks a lot about books he’s read, but the comments are full of discussions of books and recommendations, both personal and general. So… What did I do? I created a page, named it “The Rod Dreher Book Stack”, and posted it up over here: https://breathofhallelujah.com/books/the-rod-dreher-book-stack/ . Mind you, Rod Dreher has nothing to do with this in any way, shape, or form, but I think it may be helpful for people like me who hear many of these titles, especially in the comments, but then might want to come back to looking at a particular title later. I’m not promising anything here, that it’s going to be complete or anything (and for the most part, I probably won’t be looking back for things), but we’ll see how this goes, I guess. At this point, I’m still fiddling with some finicky formatting issues, but come on over if you want to take a look.

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