Solzhenitsyn

A Perplexing Silence – part 3

/ Peter Mead / 8 Comments

We are living in momentous times when the ethical foundations and nature of western society is being radically reshaped.  In part one, I briefly surveyed the situation.  In part two, I offered three possible reasons for our relative silence as Christians – some are unaware, some are strangely unconcerned, and some are understandably overwhelmed. 

Let’s continue that list with two very important additions:

4.  Some are afraid.  There is a lot of fear in Christian ministry.  Let me put it out on the table.  It is probably better to discuss it rather than pretend it is not there:

  1. Fear of upsetting people in our church.  Every church will have people across a spectrum of political or cultural views.  Our society controls contrarian perspectives by its reaction. This mechanism is evident with gender, sexuality, race, public health, climate crisis, military conflict, etc.  Some people sit primed to be upset if we touch the wrong nerve.  It always feels safer to play it safe.
  2. Fear of upsetting Christians beyond our church.  Maybe your local church is not as diverse as the wider church.  Perhaps you can speak freely in your local pulpit without concern.  But we live in an age of online recordings.  Spurgeon used to have his sermons typed and published in newspapers. At the same time, thousands of other pastors could preach anything, and only their smaller congregation would hear them.  Today the pastor of an obscure church can be heard by someone on the other side of the world. That person might disagree vehemently and take to their keyboard.
  3. Fear of upsetting people in our society.  A decade ago, church leaders were concerned about being forced into a complicated legal situation. “What if someone asks me to perform a wedding I can’t offer in good conscience?  If that happens, then I could get in trouble.” Today, we are already in trouble with many people because of our beliefs.  We don’t have to do anything wrong; we are already wrong.  We are already guilty of wrong-think.  We hold dangerous views.  When some agent in society requires us to affirm certain things, we will already be in trouble.  This dynamic can lead not only to silence but also to participation so as not to stand out.  When Daniel’s three friends did not bow down, they stood out.  They were heroes then, but it is genuinely challenging to know when to stand out in the complexities of today. 
  4. Fear of the backlash.  Nobody wants to be in the sights of the mob.  The destruction meted out by today’s cancel culture can be ruthless and unforgiving.  The antagonistic othering of people who do not conform to society’s expectations has already become quite sinister.  In the last couple of years, I’ve seen people wishing on me imprisonment, the withholding of medical treatment, the restriction of movement, and even death.  Thankfully they did not name me specifically, but I happened to be in a class of people that were overtly “othered.” Nobody wants to face the force of that anger on any of the triggering issues.

Solzhenitsyn’s stunning warning in 1978 at the Commencement of Harvard University still rings out today.  Does it apply to us? “A decline in courage may be the most striking feature that an outside observer notices in the West today.  The Western world has lost its civic courage, both as a whole and separately, in each country, in each government, in each political party, and, of course, in the United Nations.  Such a decline in courage is particularly noticeable among the ruling and intellectual elites, causing an impression of a loss of courage by the entire society.  There are many courageous individuals, but they have no determining influence on public life.”

5.  The category I have not mentioned.  You may have read through these points and said, “yes, but there is another perspective.” I know.  Let me raise the common one that I anticipate.  I agree that the hope of society, indeed the hope of humanity, is the gospel.  Absolutely.  Signing petitions, participating in protests, writing to our representatives, voting one way or another, or any other political action are not the ultimate answer.  I agree.  The gospel is the answer, and we must rest in it ourselves.  Then we must also broadcast it and share it from person to person.  

But can I be candid?  I feel like sometimes we might be hiding behind a gospel-only approach.  To do so allows us to say nothing about what is going on, human rights, moral evils, etc., and thereby not face much in the way of antagonistic response.  I know exactly how to say the right Christian things to avoid criticism or backlash. I’m sure you do too.  We still have the freedom to speak Christian truths to each other, so long as we do not trip the growing number of hyper-sensitivities in our culture.  Gradually the freedom to quote Bible verses will grow ever more restrictive.  When referencing the Bible at all becomes culturally unacceptable, will we then quietly comply with that expectation too?

As Solzhenitsyn provocatively wrote in Live Not By Lies, “And as for him who lacks the courage to defend even his own soul: Let him not brag of his progressive views, boast of his status as an academician or a recognized artist, a distinguished citizen or general. Let him say to himself plainly: I am cattle, I am a coward, I seek only warmth and to eat my fill.”

I do not quote that to point only at others.  I fear that I can too quickly be part of the herd too.

In closing, my mind goes to two scenes:

  1. The best burger I can remember.  I sat with another pastor enjoying both the burger and the conversation.  We were both expressing the same thought.  It isn’t easy to prepare people for what seems to be coming in our society when we are not allowed to mention what is coming.  In my preaching and social media, I can make every public statement both gospel-centred and relatively safe.  But the gospel has always been radically counter-cultural. And as culture pivots away from a Judeo-Christian ethical basis, the gospel will only become more radical. Many people in the church are not prepared for a world that is overtly antagonistic and institutionally persecuting them for their beliefs.
  2. That congress.  The film, Tortured for Christ, begins with the “Congress of Cults” that brought together religious leaders in Romania in 1945.  Richard Wurmbrand, a Lutheran pastor, sits with his wife listening to the leaders praising the “progress” brought by the new Stalinist regime. Then he spoke out. We could just as easily go back to the example of Dietrich Bonhoeffer in Germany a few years earlier. It is hard to speak out when almost nobody else does. I know some Christian leaders are taking a stand today and speaking out on various issues. I am thankful for them. But I also see that many are already choosing to play it safe. We aren’t in the 1930s or 1940s, but we are in the 2020s. How can we be so sure this decade will not prove equally significant?

As we come to the end of the year, we also may be coming to the end of an era.  One last quote from Solzhenitsyn, “If the world has not approached its end, it has reached a major watershed in history, equal in importance to the turn from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance. It will demand from us a spiritual blaze; we shall have to rise to a new height of vision, to a new level of life, where our physical nature will not be cursed, as in the Middle Ages, but even more importantly, our spiritual being will not be trampled upon, as in the Modern Era.” If we were not at a major historic watershed in his day, it feels like we are now.  So, let’s all pray for wisdom, insight, courage, and strength as we head into 2023. Let’s not take part in the lie. We need a spiritual blaze.  God has put us all here for such a time as this.

A Perplexing Silence – part 2

/ Peter Mead / 2 Comments

In part one of this post, I considered how we seem to be living in momentous times.  The very foundations of western society are facing an all-out attack that threatens to completely transform the world as we know it.  Solzhenitsyn famously wrote, “The simple step of a courageous individual is not to take part in the lie.  One word of truth outweighs the world.”  He released Live Not By Lies on the day he was arrested and then exiled to the West.  It was written to a people worn down by decades of Communist rule who felt so helpless and lacking the strength to stand and fight the system. 

Today we are not decades into a totalitarian regime, but we may be on the front porch.  Too many are already silently complying with the moral demands of the mob that seeks to rule and transform our society.  There are voices who are speaking truth, fighting evil, and taking unpopular stands.  But as we come to the end of 2022, I am wondering why there are not as many Christian voices as we might expect.

So why are we often so silent?  Here are some possible reasons:

1. Some are unaware. We live in an age with more information available than ever before. Still, it seems easier than ever to switch off current news or at least to switch off some perspectives on current news. It is emotionally draining to try and take in all that is going on. There is wisdom in choosing how much we expose our hearts to difficult news. Deliberately or accidentally, some of us are unaware of the seismic shift occurring under and in western society.

In his Warning to the West, Solzhenitsyn wrote provocatively about the ignorance he saw in that era, “It is astonishing that Communism has been writing about itself in the most open way, in black and white, for 125 years, and even more openly, more candidly in the beginning.  The book [The Communist Manifesto], for instance, which everyone knows by name and which almost no one takes the trouble to read, contains even more terrible things than what has actually been done.  It is perfectly amazing.  The whole world can read, everyone is literate, yet somehow no one wants to understand.  Humanity acts as if it does not understand what Communism is, as if it does not want to understand, is not capable of understanding.” 

The kind of societal transformation agendas I am concerned about today are published online and in print.  They do not get called out for what they are by the media, but they do not hide.  And yet, so many remain unaware.

Furthermore, as Solzhenitsyn wrote, “All Communist Parties, upon attaining power, have become completely merciless.  But at the stage before they achieve power, it is necessary to use disguises.” Some thinly disguised versions of communist-like totalitarianism still fool many these days.

2.  Some are unconcerned.  Most Christians are worried about specific issues when mentioned in conversation.  However, many seem unconcerned that the news and social media keep them in the dark about such matters.  It is genuinely bizarre that people seem content to have information proactively silenced, suppressed, or hidden.  I can only hope they are unaware of the extent of the narrative control rather than truly satisfied with it.

I remember hearing about a Christian ministry seeking permission to sell books in a one-religion country some years ago.  They were given permission but told not to sell Bibles to people of that religion.  When they asked how to know whether someone was from that religion or not, they received simple instructions.  They had to put the Bibles behind a curtain with a sign that read, “Not for people of religion X.” They readily agreed, and the Bible was the bestseller, of course!  We all know human nature causes us to ask questions when we are not allowed to see something.  But human nature seems to have morphed in the last few years.  Now it seems that people are happy to have everything pre-filtered by unknown ideologues with undisclosed guidelines sitting at a keyboard somewhere. 

Underneath a relaxed attitude to censorship, there lies complacency.  Since we cannot imagine foreign troops marching on our streets, we believe our society is immune to any takeover.  Solzhenitsyn wrote in The Gulag Archipelago, “There is always this fallacious belief: ‘It would not be the same here; here such things are impossible.’ Alas, all the evil of the twentieth century is possible everywhere on earth.”

Perhaps we should be more concerned about living in a controlled and crafted narrative.

3.  Some are overwhelmed.  It does not take long to find enough information to overwhelm your heart.  There is a heaviness to living through history.  As I read the Gulag Archipelago, my heart breaks for what so many suffered while the West remained unaware.  That weight only increases when you think of the people who have experienced Communism and are now issuing warnings to us in the West.  History is heavy.  History being repackaged and repeated is heavier still.

Solzhenitsyn in his commencement address to Harvard: “Humanism which has lost its Christian heritage cannot prevail in this competition.  Thus during the past centuries and especially in recent decades, as the process became more acute, the alignment of forces was as follows: Liberalism was inevitably pushed aside by radicalism, radicalism had to surrender to socialism, and socialism could not stand up to Communism.”

In Part three I will conclude this list with two more, perhaps the two most important, reasons for this relative and frankly, perplexing, silence.

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I would recommend reading Live Not By Lies, by Solzhenitsyn.  It is a quick read, but it is gold.  https://www.solzhenitsyncenter.org/live-not-by-lies

A Perplexing Silence

/ Peter Mead / 5 Comments

As we come to the end of 2022, I want to share a series of three posts with you.  Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s writings have been swirling in my mind, as has a single tweet from a few weeks ago.  A massive body of work and a lengthy sentence separated by a few decades yet resonating together.

As you may have noticed, there is always something going on in the news.  Of course, not every story is genuinely momentous.  Perhaps you can remember the end of 1989? The Tiananmen Square protest and massacre had happened earlier in the year.  As the end of the year approached, Hungary proclaimed the end of communist rule, the Berlin Wall came down, and Bulgaria’s long-serving leader resigned.  Apartheid rules were changing in South Africa.  Student demonstrations in Prague started the velvet revolution.  President Bush (senior) and Gorbachev declared the cold war over. Romanian dictator Ceausescu was ousted and then executed on Christmas Day.  The news was fascinating, and everyone knew we were watching history unfold.

How will we look back on our current time?  There have always been news stories, but some news cycles feel more significant. We live in a season of swirling stories – some are featured and polished for maximum coverage.  In contrast, others seem to be painstakingly discounted, twisted or buried.  For instance, and in no particular order:

  • The Ukraine war is stirring the threatening language of Armageddon from global leaders.  At the same time, celebrities fly into Kyiv for photoshoots with the president.
  • Many social media platforms restrict free speech.  However, the media dismiss new revelations of illegal government influence on Twitter as irrelevant.
  • Critical Race Theory is fundamentally shifting every academic discipline, business practice and even whole Christian denominations.
  • Excess deaths remain way above the pre-covid five-year average, or even the pandemic year, when daily and total death counts were constantly before our eyes.  And yet, asking why this is happening seems to be socially unacceptable.
  • Protests and legal wrangling over possible election fraud rumble away in various countries.  Reporting suspicious behaviour results in being labelled an election denier and a threat to democracy.
  • “Fourth Industrial Revolution” ideas derided as conspiracy theories only two years ago are explicitly promoted by proponents today.
  • One western government is confiscating thousands of farms because of the climate crisis.  And we are all required to pay the bill for Net Zero plans that may or may not make any difference to the projected catastrophe.  Again, don’t question it, or you will be labelled a denier!
  • There is a push for digital id and digital currency, a checkpoint society with a Chinese-style social credit system that will replace fundamental freedoms with earned privileges.
  • In another western country, Euthanasia is being promoted, celebrated and normalised with increasingly ineffective controls.
  • Children are being sexualised and offered life-changing surgery and puberty blockers. At the same time, parents are increasingly pushed out of the conversation.
  • And in the last few days, a woman was arrested and questioned by police about whether she was silently praying in a particular location here in England.  

There are many swirling issues, but we must step back and ask about underlying issues. We are living through a fundamental reshaping of the ethical foundations and the nature of the society built on them.  In the past, there was rebellion against the generally accepted Judeo-Christian ethic underlying western civilisation (e.g. think of the sexual liberation movement of the 60s/70s).  Today we see the replacement of that ethic with an entirely new moral code.  We also observe the culture militantly enforcing compliance so that everyone is required to not only tolerate but also proactively participate in and promote the new moral order.  A dictator enforces their will by sheer power, but a totalitarian tyranny seeks to control everything, even what subjects think.

Solzhenitsyn is both enlightening and provocative.  He warned the students of Harvard in 1978: “There are telltale symptoms by which history gives warning to a threatened or perishing society.  Such are, for instance, a decline of the arts or a lack of great statesmen.” I am no art critic, but I suspect many would agree that we are experiencing something of a decline.  And when did we last see a political leader in that category?  We live in a threatened, perhaps even perishing society.

I mentioned a tweet at the start of this post.  On November 18th, Owen Strachan wrote, “Christian men: it’s not Tucker Carlson, Jordan Peterson, Ben Shapiro, Joe Rogan, Elon Musk or other conservative (or just not super-left) voices who should be known for speaking the hard truths, fighting what is evil, taking unpopular stands, and promoting what is good. It’s us.” (We might add a few more names in the UK, like Calvin Robinson, Neil Oliver, Douglas Murray, etc.)

I’ve been pondering that tweet.  I know one of these men I added is a clergyman, but the point is well made.  I also know that merely stating any of these names will cause some to react negatively to this post.  That shows society’s shift from yesteryear, when people used to think and discuss provocative ideas, to today’s hair-trigger dismissal and antagonism.  I might disagree with soundbites from all of these people because of their content or tone. Still, I must be willing actually to hear the points they are making and engage thoughtfully. 

Honestly, I find myself regularly prompted to think, investigate, pray and take action based on monologues by Neil Oliver, interviews by Joe Rogan, books by Douglas Murray, and tweets from Jordan Peterson.  But then, when I look at my feed of Christian leaders?  Honestly, with some exceptions, it can often feel disengaged, out of touch and sometimes eerily silent on contemporary concerns.  It makes me think of that famous quote from Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, “The simple step of a courageous individual is not to take part in the lie.  One word of truth outweighs the world.”  Yes, there is plenty of biblical truth in the social media voices of Christian leaders that I follow.  But I fear our silence on some matters might mean we are inadvertently starting to take part in the lie.

In part two I will share some reasons for this perplexing silence.