The skinny jeans brigade is here.
Friday, December 11, 2020
Folks know I’ve been beating this drum for a few years now. Persecution of the faithful American Church isn’t going to look the same as in Communist China in 2020. I mean, this country is definitely doing all it can to speed things up.
In the early 2000s, when Mark Steyn wrote his book, America Alone, a group of us would always talk about America being “10 years behind Canada and 20 years behind Europe.”
Today, the “10 and 20” formula seems way too long a timetable. “Two and three” seems more accurate. Little did we know that our country would emulate China “this year.”
Persecution of the faithful American Church may look the same as in present-day Communist China and in the early Church— confiscation of Christian property, wholesale slaughter of Christian communities, offering Christians to the lions in the coliseum. Not coincidentally, this is the sort of persecution a lot of our brothers in the Global South experience. In seminary, my wife and I were good friends with a Nigerian pastor who had left his congregations (plural) to come study in our school’s Ph.D. program. He routinely told of the hardship, harassment, and beatings of the Church at the hands of the powerful and governmental entities in his country. This type of story from the Global South can be multiplied a million times over.
But, as many have pointed out, there are other factors in the U.S. that make that gruesome scenario less likely but persecution of the God’s people no less real.
Michael Hanby’s excellent essay, “A More Perfect Absolutism” in First Things many years ago was an eye-opener and identified some of the contours of the new, technocratic totalitarianism. One of many money-quotes: “If a tree falls in the forest and the New York Times doesn’t hear it, does it make a sound?”
In recent years, others have tried to give voice to the problem of the new totalitarianism from different angles. Sohrab Ahmari argues for a new re-alignment on the right on a more “illiberal conservative” line, one that questions free market assumptions that allow Big Tech to proliferate all sorts of moral perversions. Matthew Crawford has pointed out how media consumption and the plugged-in life (which Big Tech is totally cool with) will create an enslaved mind precisely because they slowly erode the capacity to think and be actively engaged in the created world. And then, lest we forget, the late, great Neil Postman was quite prescient about our new media ecology. Of course, Tucker Carlson has been sounding the alarm of how corporations in this country are basically government-owned but privately run. Or, maybe it’s the other way around?
A recent and welcomed addition to this literature is Rod Dreher’s newest work, Live Not By Lies: A Manual for Christian Dissidents. It is superb in many ways, lacking in a few areas, but on this issue of the new totalitarianism, it absolutely nails it.
The bottomline is this: you cannot resist the encroachment upon the Christian life and Church from the world and its desires if you are being conformed to world. Make no mistake about it: Big Tech (Apple, Google, Facebook, Amazon, Twitter, YouTube, Microsoft) wants precisely this conformity. But the manner of Big Tech is way more insidious than the old totalitarianism.
Dreher deftly explains the contrast between the Old Totalitarianism (e.g., Soviet Union) and the New Totalitarianism. Totalitarianism is simply any political/social/economic system that wants to control and define reality, and requires full obedience.
The Old Totalitarianism was hard. It would beat you into conformity, force you to give up civil liberties, take your Bible and books from you, and erase history. It used secret police, labor camps, prison, torture, firing squads, and mass graves to accomplish these goals.
The New, Soft (and Effeminate) Totalitarianism (sometimes called the “Pink Police State”) is different. It is technocratic and therapeutic. It entices you, wants to gives things, wants to help you, and be you friend. It seeks to solve the pressings problems of our day and “save” mankind with more information, experts, and science. The Soft Totalitarianism of our day does not force you to give up freedom. Rather, you give it up willingly. Compliance becomes internalized.
In the Old Totalitarianism, the State inflicted pain and torture (think of George Orwell’s 1984). The New Totalitarianism (the State colluding with the private sector, news media, Big Tech) inflicts pleasure and makes you addicted to it (think of Aldous Huxley’s A Brave New World). Today, the government pushes for the same freedoms you would have in a prison— pornography and masturbation, drug use, and Netflix. Cool.
In the Old Totalitarianism, you would be horrified to learn that your phone was bugged and authorities were listening in. In the New Totalitarianism, we welcome into our homes technologies that are always on and listening to our conversation. Why can’t you ever take the battery out of your phone? We willingly upload our photos and private information to Facebook and other complete strangers. “Smart phones”— what a misnomer. Smart phones make companies smart with all our data, and they make us dumb.
In the Old Totalitarianism, books were burned and the Bible was banned. The New Totalitarianism doesn’t have to burn our books because we have no books (we have “Kindle readers”) nor do we want to read books.
In the Old Totalitarianism, people were afraid of being ripped from their families and churches. In the New Totalitarianism, we voluntarily drift apart and become individualistic by design. Our habits and consumption have given us new “social networks” to replace the old bonds of kin and kith.
In the Old Totalitarianism, the State hated personal preferences and freedoms. The New Totalitarianism, however, depends on market capitalism to satisfy your every desire, however perverse. We have become worshippers of freedom of choice. In the Old, the State was considered god. In the New, you, the consumer, are considered god. You have consumer power, are entitled to make choices, and to live the life you choose. In the Soft Totalitarianism of our day, however, we have become less wise and knowledgeable, more enslaved to our self and our moment in history, and more addicted and dependent on technology, and less able to think.
Is there anything less Christian and more worldly than a Christian who does not have the capacity to think?
Rebuilding From The Ruins 