You know, a lot of people
hear me talk about that we're living through soft totalitarianism,
the advent of soft totalitarianism, and they don't understand what I'm saying
because when they think of totalitarianism, they think of the gulags,
they think of secret police and think of George Orwell's 1984.
We don't have any of that here.
So it sounds like I'm exaggerating, but I'm actually not.
The people in this country who emigrated here from the communist
bloc during the Cold War.
They can see what's happening now, and they're trying to warn us.
One of the things they're talking about,
one of the liberties that has been taken from us is the freedom to speak your mind.
Now we still have free speech.
We still have the first Amendment.
But when people exercise their free speech rights in certain
circumstances and certain places, they can be punished for it.
They could lose their jobs,
they can lose their friends, they can lose family members.
And the day may come when they even lose their freedom.
This is a freedom that we
have on paper, but in practice is steadily eroding.
The same is true for freedom of religion.
We live in a post-Christian country.
That doesn't mean that there are no Christians left here.
Clearly, there are plenty of us,
but we live in a country where the Christian story,
the biblical narrative, is no longer the story that we as a people,
how we understand ourselves, who we are and what we're supposed to do.
If you look at Generation Z and the younger millennials,
they're falling away from the church at an astonishing rate.
We are very quickly moving into a situation where to be
a faithful follower of our Lord Jesus Christ and any kind of traditional
small orthodox way is to put yourself at odds
with the prevailing ideology of this country.
I'm the father of three.
one is 22.
The other two are 17 and 15.
And because of the kind of work their dad does,
they have to hear about this all the time, about losing our freedoms,
about soft totalitarianism, about rising persecution.
At this point, they're like, Yeah, yeah, we get it, we get it.
But of course they don't get it because they don't see it happening
in their lives in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, where we live.
But what I try to tell them as kids,
dad has talked to people in this country
who came from a totalitarian system searching for freedom.
And these people who know what they're talking about
say they're seeing things happen in our country right now
that reminds them of what they left behind.
We've got to listen to them.
I think history is a big part of this to talk to our kids
about the history of the persecution of the church
going back to the early church, certainly, but also in the 20th century.
You know, I've talking to my own kids.
We live in the deep south and I try to tell my kids that
where their dad is from, where their grandparents are from,
within living memory, well within living memory.
Black people and the black church
were horribly persecuted by white people and by the establishment
because black folks wanted the right to vote and wanted civil rights.
This is not something from ancient history.
This is something that happened three years before their dad was born.
So a lot of young people just think that things have always been
the way they are now and that things are always going to be OK.
We are always just one generation away from losing liberty.
This is one of the lessons
I got from talking to dissidents in the former communist bloc.
one generation away.
If people do not remember or not told by their by their parents
and their grandparents what actually happened and what, what, what
the oppressors did to people.
We could go back there, we could slide back there.
And in fact, totalitarians always depend on erasing
the cultural memory of persecution in order to make people easier to control.
So, yeah, my kids, they're skeptical of it, too.
They think they think their dad is overreacting.
I just have to try to be patient with them and talk to them, tell them stories.
It's one thing if you make it abstract and just say this is what's going to happen.
That doesn't really land with them.
But if you can tell them stories about people you actually talk to,
maybe even people at their church or in their community
who lived in a communist country who are seeing these things happen now
that wakes them up.
I have found since I've been doing this work
that whenever I travel around the country talking about Live not by lies
and Christian resistance to this coming totalitarianism,
inevitably somebody comes up to me to say I came to this country, from Cuba
or from Venezuela or from the Soviet Union or even from China.
And what you say really is happening, and I always tell them,
please tell your normal American friends about it.
We need to hear it.
They need to know.
It's not just coming from the guy who wrote the book,
but it's coming from people they know. That I think is the best way to do it.
And we have to prepare our kids because if they don't hear it from us,
they're certainly not going to hear it from the media
or from the woke establishment.
So when people think a lot of normal people might think that, well,
my kids are never going to have to suffer
in the workplace for their Christian beliefs.
No, that's not true.
They're probably going to have to do this and they may not ever get hired
if they have written anywhere online that they are a Christian or that they
believe in the traditional family, things like that.
These things are being noticed.
And the fact that these things are happening now, even as our liberties
are exist on paper, is hugely significant.
What has happened is these illiberal progressives
have moved through all the institutions and of society through media,
through the universities, through major corporations,
through law, medicine, sports and even the U.S.
military.
And they're redefining language and they are becoming militantly intolerant.
The people who are going to bear
the brunt of this are going to be conservative Christians.
We have to be prepared for this.
The Lord told us these days would come.
We don't have to be scared about it, but we do have to be sober
and to understand that the days of safety, of comfort, of middle class stability
for believers, those days are rapidly coming to an end.
It is glory to suffer for Jesus, and we have to prepare ourselves for it.
one of the things that the people,
the Christians who fought communism in the communist countries told me
is that most Christians back then in those communist countries,
they conformed, they kept their heads down.
They didn't stand up for Jesus.
They didn't stand up for freedom.
And that's going to happen here too, I'm afraid.
We Christians want to be on the right side.
We want to be on the side of Christ.
We want to stand
firm in the public square for the truth and to fight for the truth.
We don't want to be cowards, but if we're not going to be cowards,
we need to right now start preparing ourselves and our families
through more dedicated reading of scripture,
through practices in our homes and our churches
and our small communities, and by forming networks of resistance.
There's no way out of this, but forward we can do this.
The people, the Christians who fought communism in the Eastern Bloc,
none of them ever thought they would live to see the end of communism.
They fought it because it was the right thing to do as followers of Jesus.
We can do the same.