Honoring the Christians persecuted under Bolshevik rule requires knowing their stories
How Rod Dreher gets Russian history—and the American present—wrong
Many American Christians are familiar with the story of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the German Christian who heroically resisted Nazism—and paid the ultimate price. Yet how many are aware of the Christians who suffered and died in Central and Eastern Europe under Bolshevik rule? This persecution claimed far more lives than the Roman persecution of Christians in the first centuries—and it happened in our own era. Surely these Christians’ experiences and witness deserve to be better known.
In Live Not by Lies, Rod Dreher sets out to look at their example as lessons for Christians living in the West. He raises some deeply important questions about tensions between Christian and modern understandings of the human person. But his discussion of the experiences of Christians who suffered under communism fails to reckon with the profundity or complexity of that situation.
As Benjamin Dueholm has pointed out, Dreher is interested in the suffering of Christians under communism not for their own sake, but rather to weaponize them for the American culture wars. Dreher does this by identifying the contemporary American Left with the Bolsheviks, caricaturing progressive identity politics as a new “soft totalitarianism” that’s as intolerant of Christianity as their communist predecessors.
