Rod Dreher: I think that the people who don’t have a deep spiritual life are not going to make it. They just aren’t. I mean, everybody I talked to for Live Not by Lies from the Soviet bloc, these are people who were prepared anyway. And they just had to figure out ways to hold on in the face of oppression and the face of all kinds of cross-pressures that came at them, that caused most of the Christians in those societies to conform.

This is one thing that several of them told me at some point and they were really humble about it. But they said that you shouldn’t assume that all the Christians were like them. Very few were. In fact, most everybody wanted to go along to get along. In Czechoslovakia, for example, most of the Catholics there took the government’s informal offer, which is to say that you stay in your house, you’re quiet, you don’t make a big racket about your faith, and we’ll leave you alone.

But Václav Benda and his wife Camilla, they believed as Catholics that they had an obligation to be public in their faith and to share it with other people and to seek the common good, even though their church is being suppressed. And so he tried to do that with his so-called Parallel Polis, which I talked about the Benedict Option.

Benda believed that anytime Christians can make a human connection just to reestablish that contact with your neighbors, even if for just one evening, that you are striking a blow against totalitarianism because the system itself is lying. Oppressive systems depend on making everybody afraid and making people forget that we are all part of a community. So, for the Benda family, this is not only a fight against totalitarianism, but it was obeying Christ and building up the community. But again, they were outliers."