From Break Point.org (Oct. 21):
Bari Weiss, who recently resigned in protest from The New York Times, has just published a shocking piece in Tablet, warning of a “danger, this one from the left… one that has attained cultural dominance, capturing America’s elites and our most powerful institutions.”
“I am here to ring the alarm,” writes Weiss. “I’m here to say: Do not be shocked anymore… It’s time to accept reality, if we want to have any hope of fixing it.” Weiss describes a growing and institutionally enforced anti-Semitism, and proceeds to list a series of incidents that she says cannot be accurately understood as isolated, but instead as an essential and insidious component of the new liberalism, a “mixture of postmodernism, postcolonialism, identity politics, neo-Marxism, critical race theory, intersectionality, and the therapeutic mentality.”
Writing from the left, Weiss’ diagnosis is not exactly a Christian one. Yet, what she describes is a powerful cultural undercurrent already felt by Christians such as Jack Phillips and Baronelle Stutzman and will most likely face Christians and Christian institutions in the near future. It’s one thing when our most deeply held beliefs are thought to be wrong and antiquated. It’s another when they are seen as evil, with no place in modern society.
It’s a pessimistic view, to be sure, but we are not powerless.
In his final essay to the Russian people before his exile from his home nation, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn offered a way forward. The essay is titled “Live Not By Lies,” and I am indebted to my friend Rod Dreher for pointing me to this essay in his new book by the same title.
According to Solzhenitsyn, we must, at the very least, commit ourselves to “personal non-participation in lies.”
Though lies may conceal everything, though lies may control everything, we should be obstinate about this one small point: let them be in control but without any help from any of us… It is the easiest thing for us to do and the most destructive for the lies. Because when people renounce lies, it cuts short their existence.
Even if, Solzhenitsyn continued, “we do not march into the squares and shout the truth out loud… let us refuse to say what we do not think…let us each make a choice: whether to remain consciously a servant of falsehood…or to shrug off the lies and become an honest man worthy of respect from one’s children and contemporaries.” [read more]
Good advice. After all it does say in the Bible: “And you shall not bear false witness against your neighbor.”
The Left and its lies:
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