In an indoctrination camp set up for reeducating China’s Uyghur Muslim minority toward Marxist conformity, instructors command prisoners to acknowledge their errors of conduct and repeat again and again, “We have done illegal things, but we now know better.” So reported the Associated Press in 2018.

One by one, internees abase themselves before 60 of their fellow prisoners, repenting of their errors in thinking and their nonprogressive religious practices. “The detainees would also have to criticize and be criticized by their peers,” confided an eyewitness to these struggle sessions. “Those who parroted official lines particularly well or lashed into their fellow internees viciously were awarded points and could be transferred to more comfortable surroundings in other buildings.”

That was two years ago — and little has changed there between then and today. While there are no Red Dawn–style concentration camps in the United States, many militant progressives are mirroring other police-state tactics practiced overseas. Numerous figures within the worlds of American politics, media, academia, and in the street stand “ready and eager to straighten out the crooked timber of humanity by collective condemnation, public humiliation, and professional ruin,” according to Rod Dreher, author of Live Not by Lies.

In this work, Dreher, a writer for The American Conservative and a former editor and writer for National Review, emphasizes that a special target of these would-be cultural conditioners is Christianity in America — though within church walls there are numerous clergy and laity who respond with little but smiles and endless concessions to calls for overthrowing the faith’s founding doctrines, for loosening what should not be loosened in matters related to the nature of God, the nature of humanity, to the permanence of the mores by which humankind has struggled to live for thousands of years, and to what it means to practice one’s faith. This state of affairs does not bode well for the future of American Christianity, and the author seeks to provide a bracing corrective.

He succeeds. Live Not by Lies is a companion piece to Dreher’s previous work, The Benedict Option, in which he encourages Christians across the orthodox spectrum to live with a redoubled, sharply focused emphasis on intentional holiness and serious discipleship in a world of increasing spiritual darkness.

As with The Benedict Option, the point of Live Not by Lies is not for Christian believers to head for the hills, cower, and retreat from everyday life but rather to seriously recommit to sound doctrine, develop the practices of effective discipleship, and reassess (and then act on) how fellowship and worship are conducted. Dreher offers concrete suggestions on how to strengthen what remains and on how to cope amid a boobytrapped culture, heeding advice from men and women who endured persecution during the hard totalitarianism of the Soviet era — many of whom were interviewed by Dreher as background for this book.

The new volume’s title is a salute to the final essay Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn wrote before being arrested by the KGB and deported from the Soviet Union in 1974. Being well familiar with the Soviet penchant for blandly lying, rewriting history, and gaslighting while demanding rigid obedience to the regime’s preferred narrative, Solzhenitsyn called on his countrymen to “make a choice: Whether consciously, to remain a servant of falsehood . . . or to shrug off the lies and become an honest man worthy of respect from one’s children and one’s contemporaries.”

The underlying and unwelcome message of Live Not by Lies is that fast approaching the doctrinally flabby, enervated Western church is a time of great trouble of a kind not seen in American history and that orthodox Christians should recognize the fact, prepare responsibly, and live out their faith boldly (if shrewdly): They should live their lives worthily of the calling they have received. “You may not have the strength to stand up in public and say what you really believe,” Dreher writes, “but you can at least refuse to affirm what you do not believe. You may not be able to overthrow totalitarianism, but you can find within yourself and your community the means to live in the dignity of truth. If we must live under the dictatorship of lies, . . . then our response must be: ‘Let their rule hold not through me!’”

Did he say “totalitarianism”? Indeed so. In Live Not by Lies, Dreher asserts that the Christian Church in the West, along with Western culture in general, is increasingly under the dominion of “soft totalitarianism.” This is not to imply the introduction of prison camps, executions, or the midnight knock on the door. Instead it is the now-familiar movement in which progressive-minded men and women — rootless, self-righteous, violently intolerant of viewpoints other than their own, tediously foul-mouthed, and wondrously ignorant — endeavor to use the levers of corporate and political power to control the way people think, speak, and act at the most granular level.

In his blog, Dreher warns of what Whittaker Chambers described as “that morganatic bond between the forces of the left and the forces of the right,” a bond that supports and advances the spirit of Wokedom. Soft totalitarianism will not emanate from the government, pace George Orwell. Rather, it will be largely directed and enforced by what Dreher terms “woke capitalism”: corporate entities that punish (or even terminate) employees guilty of Wrongthink or withhold or withdraw funding from unenlightened recipients.

In the first part of this book, Dreher notes that despite its façade of live-and-let-live permissiveness, modern American progressivism has sharpened and hardened into a ruthlessly intolerant system, with an increasing number of viewpoints considered beyond the pale. He traces convincingly the parallels between contemporary society and the seedbeds of totalitarianism on the left and on the right during the last century.

Dreher also examines two key factors that have fueled the rise of soft totalitarianism: public embrace of the ideology of “social justice” and the growth of surveillance technology, which has come into being not because of Big Brother but largely through popular demand. Dreher concludes his first section by describing the important role played by intellectuals in fomenting the Bolshevik Revolution. “Most of the revolutionaries came from the privileged classes,” notes Dreher. “Their parents ought to have known that this new political faith their children preached would, if realized, mean the collapse of the social order. Still, they did not reject their children. . . . Perhaps the mothers and fathers didn’t want to alienate their sons and daughters. Perhaps they too . . . had lost faith in the system.” Dreher warns that it is shortsighted to simply ignore or dismiss lightly the ideological excesses of America’s politically correct intelligentsia. (The pathetic, seemingly unemployable grievance-studies major of today is the regulatory-guidelines czar of tomorrow: unelected, unaccountable, and drunk with a sense of power and entitlement.)

To find clues to the most effective methods for resisting the siren song of soft totalitarianism’s lies, Dreher in part two of Live Not by Lies delves into the first-person witness of individuals who lived through the hell of totalitarianism during the 20th century. Here is richness worth savoring, for the people to whom Dreher has spoken share their insights from firsthand experience, not from think-tank theorizing, and they bear the scars to prove it. “Are we capable of hearing them,” he asks, “or will we continue to rest easy in the delusion that it can’t happen here?”

Is the author being alarmist or hyperbolic? Perhaps not: not in a world in which people of faith often go about their lives at work with heads down and mouths shut, hoping not to run afoul of the thought police and so face loss of livelihood. Dreher recounts the testimony of immigrants from Eastern Europe who are of one mind that American culture is increasingly accepting the restrictive practices that led their home countries to abruptly fall to dictatorship: a willingness to allow the very words of the nation’s language to be changed and manipulated into the service of falsehood, the acceptance of a growing surveillance state as the price of safety, and an overall spirit of go-along-to-get-along progressive coercion in the church and in the workplace — just to avoid conflict and protect one’s livelihood. That and acquiescence to the rule of bullies and self-appointed enforcers.

In a nation of snitches, it begins with little things. One errant tweet, one mistimed joke, one honest opinion overheard by an oversensitive busybody with the shrunken soul of a schoolyard tattletale, and a person’s job can be lost and his reputation destroyed. Sadly, Mr. Smith’s remarks do not reflect the unbelievably open, welcoming, safe environment we proudly embrace here at Acme Corporation, where hate has no home.

A key point made in Live Not by Lies is this: Within today’s climate of Woke McCarthyism, your silence will not save you. “Insufficient revolutionary zeal,” as the Soviets used to call it, will be duly noted. Attention will be paid, and no honest doubt or dissent will be tolerated within the Church of the Perpetually Offended. For modern progressivism is a form of secular puritanism: dour, joyless, haunted to sleeplessness by the prospect that somebody, somewhere might be thinking unsanctioned thoughts or acting in unapproved ways.

It is in fact a nightmarishly inverted form of Christianity in which a spirit of unforgiving, cocksure self-righteousness is deemed a stellar virtue and boundless envy (once considered a deadly sin) is actively encouraged in the name of social justice. Today’s commissars of Acceptable Thought are the sort of people once described by Russell Kirk as “men like ghouls, subsisting on the flesh of a civilization that has forgotten its own ends, protected by the laws that once were made to restrain them.” Behold, they make all things new — and in the image of the spirit of the age: secular, contemptuous of the past, and eager to take captive every thought to make it obedient to the latest trends in matters of race, class, and gender.

Resistance to encroachment on one’s religious conscience may require that believers learn to come together in small groups for mutual support, in resistance cells modeled after Father Kolakovič’s “Family” groups in Serbia during the great darkness of the Soviet era. (Dreher dedicates Live Not by Lies to Kolakovič.) “The Family groups came together at first for Bible study and prayer, but soon began listening to Father Kolakovič lecture on philosophy, sociology, and intellectual topics,” Dreher writes. “Father Kolakovič also trained his young followers in how to work secretly, and to withstand the interrogation that he said would surely come.” If that sounds melodramatic to American ears, it is because, again, we have seen nothing like it in terms of nationwide religious persecution.

Dreher offers many other suggestions for persevering, practical because they have been forged in the fires of post-war Eastern Europe. He notes that, to date, the culture wars have taken the form of a long-running rearguard action on the part of conservatives but that hope arises for the overthrow of culture’s would-be transformers whenever men and women of faith firmly say, “This far and no further” — and then stand their ground.

As Solzhenitsyn concluded in his essay “Live Not by Lies,” the consequences of standing up to the spirit of the age “will not be the same for everybody at first. Some, at first, will lose their jobs. For young people who want to live with truth, this will, in the beginning, complicate their young lives very much, because the required recitations are stuffed with lies, and it is necessary to make a choice.”

“This planet is largely inhabited by parrots, and it is easy to disguise folly by giving it a fine name,” wrote A. E. Housman over a century ago. Today that endlessly repeated fine name is social justice. To point the way toward living not as a parrot or a pseudointellectual barbarian but as an honest human being “worthy of respect from one’s children and one’s contemporaries” is the goal of Dreher’s book.

For its author realizes — and here the reviewer must acknowledge Ronald Reagan — that a life of faith must be proclaimed, taught, and defended, or else one day we will spend our sunset years telling our children and our grandchildren what will seem to them a half-forgotten dream of what it was to live in a land where men and women openly held to a living faith in a living God.