by Rod Dreher
“Despite the fact that there’s so much information available, we see that so much propaganda is also available. Think of what’s happening now with Ukraine,” he says, referring to the armed conflict between Russian-backed separatists and the Kiev government.
“We have seen the way TV changed us Russians from thinking of them as our family to being our enemies,” he says. “The same methods from the communist era are being used. People today have a responsibility to search out more information than what they are offered on TV, and to know how to look critically on what they’re reading and seeing. That’s what is different now than before.”
His point was that the cultural memories Russians have of closeness with Ukrainians are being erased thanks to propaganda.
As we talk, a woman comes in from the cold and takes a seat at the table. She is Marina Nikonovna Suslova, the Moscow city official in charge of rehabilitating the names of political prisoners. She is passionate about the work of preserving the memory of what communism did to the oppressed. She grows visibly impatient with the priest’s modesty in our interview and leaps into the conversation.
“This memorial would not exist if not for your faith!” she exclaims to the priest. Then she turns to me.
“Father Kirill is a historical figure in Russia, and he will remain one, because it was his faith that allowed him to create this memorial complex,” she says. “It was inspired by his faith, specifically. This historical complex not only gives a different view of history, it gives a different feel of history. And it’s telling a truth that needs to be told.”
It is—and it is telling that truth not only in words but also embodying it in place and ritual.
See, Judge, Act
Memory, historical and otherwise, is a weapon of cultural self-defense. History is not just what is written in textbooks. History is in the stories we tell ourselves about who we were and who we are. History is embedded in the language we use, the things we make, and the rituals we observe. History is culture—and so is Christianity. To be indifferent or even hostile to tradition is to surrender to those in power who want to legitimate a new social and political order. To perceive the critical importance of memory and the role culture plays in preserving and transmitting it is critically important for Christianity’s survival.
We have to tell our stories—in literature, film, theater, and other media—but we must also manifest cultural memory in communal deeds—in mourning and in celebration, in solemn remembrance and festal joy. The crowd of Russians who stood at Butovo field in the cold, wet autumn weather to read out the names of the murdered—theirs was a poignant act of cultural memory. So were the theatrical performances of Wojtyła and his troupe behind closed doors in occupied Poland. Seminars on literature, history, philosophy, and theology that dissidents held in their apartments to help one other remember who they were—these are things Christians in our post-Christian societies should revive. Classical Christian schooling, both in institutions and in home settings, is a great way to revive and preserve cultural memory. Less academically, we can celebrate festivals, make pilgrimages, observe holy-day practices, pray litanies, perform concerts, hold dances, learn and teach traditional cooking—any kind of collective deed that connects the community with its shared sacred and secular history in a living way is an act of resistance to an ethos that says the past doesn’t matter.
Less formal, everyday acts within the home are more powerful than you might think. The way Christians talk about God and weave the stories of the Bible and church history into the fabric of domestic life is of immense significance, precisely because these things are so ordinary. This is training children and parents alike in cultural memory. The language Christians use—the words, the metaphors—matters, as does the way we pray together and the symbols we employ to embody and transmit meaning across the generations. We may not be able to communicate that meaning to a world gone insane, but as Orwell knew, simply by staying sane when everyone else is mad, we may hope to convey the human heritage.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Families Are Resistance Cells
Family is where we first learn to love others. If we are lucky, it is also where we first learn how to live in truth.
The loosening of family ties and of traditional commitments to marriage has left Americans without the kind of refuge in the home that anti-communist dissidents had. US Christians, alas, are not especially different from unbelievers.
There is a strong model of anti-totalitarian resistance based in the Christian family: the Benda clan of Prague. The Bendas are a large Catholic family who suffered greatly in 1979 when the Czechoslovak state sentenced their patriarch, Václav, to four years in prison for his activities fighting for human rights.
Václav Benda and his wife, Kamila, both academics, were among the only believing Christians working at the topmost level of the Czech dissident movement. It wasn’t easy living as Christians in Prague back then, and not only because of the atheistic regime. In those days, Czechs and Slovaks were united in one state, but culturally they were distinct. Slovaks were intensely Catholic, and as an independent nation today, still remain one of the more devout European countries. Czechs have long been far more secular, and though their country remains culturally conservative relative to Western European nations, it is second only to France as the most atheistic nation in Europe.
The Family and the Totalitarian State
“The underground Catholic church was the main source of resistance here,” a Slovak source told me. “But over there”—that is, the Czech half of the former communist state—“the Christian resistance was the Benda family.”
That’s not literally true. There were other Catholic and Protestant Czech dissidents, even within the Charter 77 movement, which the Bendas helped lead. But the Slovak’s rhetorical exaggeration nevertheless says something about the esteem in which this one Prague family is held in the hearts and minds of many who fought communism in their country.
Václav Benda, the father of six children, believed that the family is the bedrock of civilization, and must be nurtured and protected at all costs. He was acutely conscious of the threat communism posed to the family, and he thought deeply about the role the traditional family should take in building anti-communist Christian resistance. In the winter of 1987 to 1988, Benda wrote a short essay titled “The Family and the Totalitarian State,” in which he explained his core beliefs and what must be done to help the family endure in the face of a government and a social order bent on its destruction.1
In the essay, Benda said that we must throw away “the regular clichés about liberation” from the traditional obligations of marriage and family. In the Christian model, marriage and family offers three gifts that are urgently needed for believers struggling within a totalitarian order.
The first is the fruitful fellowship of love
in which we are bound together with our neighbor without pardon by virtue simply of our closeness; not on the basis of merit, rights and entitlements, but by virtue of mutual need and its affectionate reciprocation—incidentally, although completely unmotivated by notions of equality and permanent conflict between the sexes.2
The second gift is freedom
given to us so absolutely that even as finite and, in the course of the conditions of the world, seemingly rooted beings, we are able to make permanent, eternal decisions; every marriage promise that is kept, every fidelity in defiance of adversity, is a radical defiance of our finitude, something that elevates us—and with us all created corporeally—higher than the angels.3
The third gift is the dignity of the individual within family fellowship.
In practically all other social roles we are replaceable and can be relieved of them, whether rightly or wrongly. However, such a cold calculation of justice does not reign between husband and wife, between children and parents, but rather the law of love. Even where love fails completely . .
. and with all that accompanies that failure, the appeal of shared responsibility for mutual salvation remains, preventing us from giving up on unworthy sons, cheating wives, and doddering fathers.4
Benda was no utopian about the family. He acknowledged that families are all too human and filled with failure and weakness. In the past, though, the family could depend on the outside world to support its mission—and in turn, strong families produced citizens capable of building strong civil societies. Under communism, however, the family came under direct and sustained assault by the government, which saw its sovereignty as a threat to state control of all individuals. Writes Benda: “A left-wing intellectual terror achieved what it wanted: marriage and the family became extremely problematic institutions.”
Traditional families, Christian and otherwise, living in the postcommunist liberal capitalism of today know all too well that the left-wing assault on traditional marriage and family commenced in the West with the sexual revolution in the 1960s.
It continues today in the form of direct attacks by the woke Left, including law professors advocating legal structures that dismantle the traditional family as an oppressive institution. More ominously, it comes from policies, laws, and court decisions that diminish or sever parental rights in cases involving transgender minors.
But it doesn’t only come from the Left. With the advance of consumerism and individualism, we have built a social ecosystem in which the function of the family has been reduced to producing autonomous consumers, with no sense of connection or obligation to anything greater than fulfilling their own desires. Conservative parents are often quick to spot threats to their family’s values from progressive ideologues, but they can be uncritically accepting of the free market’s logic and values, to say nothing of mindlessly surrendering their children’s minds to smartphones and the internet.
That’s why Václav Benda’s advice to families living under attack from totalitarian communism remains piercingly relevant to families today.
The modern family will not hold together if the father and mother consider divorce an easy solution to marriage’s difficulties. Nor, said Benda, can a family endure if the children make a mockery of the idea of marriage. When a family’s members accept a culture of “sexual extravagance, promiscuity, relationships easily entered into and broken off, [and] disrespect for life” (that is, abortion), then they cannot expect the family to be what it is supposed to be and to do what it must do.
Sometimes these things appear in family life because of individual moral failures, and sometimes they manifest because of external conditions, both economic and social. There are some things we can control, Benda says, and some things that we cannot. We have to keep our ideals grounded in realism and in an awareness of our limits. Families must allow for “neither patriarchal tyranny nor crazy feminist excesses,” and also reject “the worshiping of children” and catering to their every desire.
And though a strong leader within his own family, Benda grasped that the Christian father must above all be a servant of Christ.
The family cannot survive as a community if the head and center is one of its own members. The Christian statement is simple; it has to be Christ who is the true center, and in His service the individual members of this community share in the work of their salvation. One hopes that the well-grounded family can exist even without this distinctively religious affiliation; however, the focus of service to something “beyond,” whether we call it love, truth or anything else, seems essential.5
Benda said that the family house must be a real home, “that is, a place which is livable and set apart, sheltered from the outer world; a place which is a starting-out point for adventures and experiences with the assurance of a safe return”—in other words, a haven in a heartless world. The loving, secure Christian home is a place that forms children who are capable of loving and serving others within the family, the church, the neighborhood, and indeed the nation. The family does not exist for itself alone, but first for God, and then for the sake of the broader community—a family of families.
When that nation and its people are held captive by a totalitarian order, then Christians and their families must push as hard against the totalitarian world as it pushes against them. That’s what the Benda patriarch taught, and that’s how he and his family lived.
Benda survived to see the fall of communism in 1989, and his friend and close collaborator Václav Havel became the first president of a free Czechoslovakia (and presided over the peaceful separation of the Czech and Slovak nations). Benda stayed active in Czech politics until his death in 1999. His widow, Kamila, still lives in the book-lined Prague apartment where, under communism, she and her husband hosted seminars for dissidents.
A Benda Guide to Child-Raising
I first visited Kamila at the family’s Prague apartment in the spring of 2018 to pay my respects to the memory of her late husband. His ideas informed my own Benedict Option project, which aims at building strong Christian communities in the West’s post-Christian culture. She invited some of her adult children, and grandchildren, for the evening. We gathered in the parlor of her flat, with bookshelves bearing thousands of volumes reaching from floor to ceiling, framed family photos scattered around, and a huge plaster crucifix hanging on the wall.
That Sunday evening, I learned that Václav and Kamila had not only raised children who kept the Christian faith under communist persecution, but also that their brood stayed faithful after communism, even though the overwhelming majority of their fellow Czechs had turned their backs on God. What’s more, all the Benda grandchildren are also practicing Catholics.
The Benda family apartment is near the former headquarters of the StB (Státní bezpečnost), the communist-era secret police. Under the dictatorship, people who had been summoned for interrogation would sometimes stop at the Bendas’ for advice about how to endure what was about to come without breaking, and to receive encouragement. Those same people would stop at the apartment for comfort after their ordeal. What the Benda family gave to the resisters was more than mere Christian hospitality.
On that first visit, and in two subsequent meetings with Benda family members, I was eager to learn how Václav and Kamila led their family to build up the inner strength of their children, not only as faithful Catholics but also as young people who understood the meaning of their parents’ mission—and the sacrifices it would necessarily entail. Here is the advice they give.
MODEL MORAL COURAGE
“Our parents were heroes for us,” says Patrik. “My father was the sheriff from the High Noon movie.”
Václav often taught his children how to read the world around them, and how to understand people and events in terms of right and wrong. He did not allow them to drift into ignorance or indifference. The battle into which all of them had been thrown by history was too important.
For example, Václav explained to his kids that there are some things more dangerous than the loss of political liberties.
“Our father told us that there is a difference between a dictatorship and totalitarianism,” says Marek. “Dictatorship can make life hard for you, but they don’t want to devour your soul. Totalitarian regimes are seeking your souls. We have to know that so we can protect what is most important as Christians.”
Watching how his brothers behaved in their adolescent years revealed to Patrik how much moral authority his father had within the family. Rebellion against authority is normal for kids that age, but the children of dissidents didn’t have that luxury.
“All the arguments within the family had to be put aside so we could stand against the outside threat from communism,” Patrik says. “When my father told my brother Martin that he couldn’t drink alcohol publicly until he turned eighteen, he explained that this rule is a way of protecting the whole family against the regime. ‘You can’t do that,’ he said to Martin, ‘because it could endanger all of us.’”
/> Rather than regarding this as a heavy yoke, the Benda kids saw it as an opportunity to serve something greater than themselves.
“Watching High Noon really formed our way of fighting against evil,” Marek Benda says. “Everyone is asking the sheriff to leave so that the town will have no problems from the bad guys. But the sheriff comes back nevertheless, because his virtue and honor can’t allow him to leave. He is looking for assistance, but no one wants to do that. But his wife helps him in the end. In some way, this was our family’s story. This is what our father and mother did.”
You shouldn’t think that their father was a natural hero, cautions Martin Benda. One evening, when Kamila was late coming home, Václav kept a nervous vigil by the window, staring at the street below, afraid that his wife had been arrested by the secret police.
“That was the moment when I started to admire my father even more,” says Martin. “That’s when I saw that he was human. He was scared, but he did not want his fear to master him.”
FILL THEIR MORAL IMAGINATIONS WITH THE GOOD
Screening High Noon and movies like it for their children wasn’t the only way Václav and Kamila Benda prepared them for Christian resistance. Despite the demands of her job teaching at the university, Kamila made time to read aloud to her children for two to three hours daily.
“Every day?” I ask, stunned.
“Every day,” she affirms.
She read them fairy tales, myths, adventure stories, and even some horror classics. More than any other novel, though, J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings was a cornerstone of her family’s collective imagination.
