A Christian Culture of Hidden Readers Faces the Cancel Culture of a Woke Kampf

Christianity does indeed have its own culture, its own intellectual tradition, its own liturgy and songs, its own moral teachings and distinctive ways of life, both personal and communal. The Church must carefully cultivate that culture and, in times of severe persecution, cultivate it, if need be, in the catacombs. We are, after all, in Babylonian exile from our true home in the New Jerusalem. But in America today, there is ample opportunity to follow the admonition of the prophet Jeremiah to seek the peace and well-being of the earthly city. Christians who, embracing the model of “Christ against culture,” invite us to take refuge in the catacombs of their own imagining are not helpful in that task.

A rich ecclesial culture, a distinctively Christian way of being in the world, sometimes finds itself positioned against the world as the world is defined by those who are hostile to the influence of the Church. This should never surprise. The Church is a contrast society, exemplifying what St. Paul in 1 Corinthians 12 calls a more excellent way. Even when the Church is against the world, she is against the world for the world. As John Paul the Great put it, “The Church imposes nothing; she only proposes.”

The more excellent way proposed is a message, but above all a person, the One who is the way, the truth, and the life. The Second Vatican Council says that Jesus Christ is not only the revelation of God to man but the revelation of man to himself. 

induces contentment with being a subculture. But Christianity that is indifferent to its cultural context is captive to its cultural context. Indeed, it reinforces the cultural definitions to which it is captive. Nowhere is this so evident as in the ready Christian acceptance of the cultural dogma that religion is essentially a private matter of spiritual experience, that religion is a matter of consumption rather than obligation. Against that assumption, we must insist that Christian faith is intensely personal but never private. The Christian gospel is an emphatically public proposal about the nature of the world and our place in it. It is a public way of life obliged to the truth.

Malick is asking the audience (and himself) if they would capitulate in the face of tyranny or make Jägerstätter’s sacrifice. It’s a decision Malick memorializes beautifully, in a film that is his most affecting effort in almost a decade.

Diehl [the German actor who plays Jägerstätter] says it offers an antidote to our current political culture. "I have the feeling that we live in a world which is getting louder and louder," Diehl says. "And so it is very, very hard to find a silent place in ourselves where we can still see which is right and which is wrong. Therefore our movie is so relevant right now—it's not only politics; it's in a very simple way, a silent resistance of somebody who is hidden. Like, we all are actually hidden lives. Everybody lives a hidden life.”

As Kierkegaard rightly observes, if a strong-willed, virtuous congregant were to approach a pastor to declare his intention to take a stand that would lead to his martyrdom, the pastor would reply, "Oh, God help us! How does such a thing occur to you! Travel, find some diversion, take a laxative."

Kierkegaard claims that while Christ redeemed the entire world with his martyrdom, no other man can hope to achieve anything close to that, nor can he exert such a claim on the truth. In fact, he will only cause others to sin as they execute him. Instead, he should be “lovingly concerned for others, for those who, if one is put to death, must become guilty of putting one to death.” That answer may work in Copenhagen in 1847, but it’s less convincing in 1940 Austria.

Set amidst a beautiful Alpine backdrop, we see Franz’s loving relationship with his wife Franzsiska, three young daughters, and aged mother. His days are quite ordinary-billing hay, building barns, and milking cows. Yet, we also see him grapple with the decision to sign the oath of allegiance to Hitler. And, after he decides to refrain from doing so, we witness the Nazis imprisoning him and eventually killing him. Franz’s village ostracizes his family and we realize that the social cost of his decision. At the end of the film, my female friend turned to her husband and whispered, “If you were in that position, I want you to know that you should sign the oath!” 

Given the central role faith plays in the film, one might expect it to be a bit more preachy. In fact, there’s very little dialogue, preaching or otherwise, in the whole three-hour film. While we hear the words of faith in Franz’s letters to Fani and in Fani’s prayers for Franz, it’s almost as if the sign on the prison wall, “speaking prohibited,” is the film’s central theme. Thus, in this film, the gospel’s power and Franz’s faith is mostly shown, not spoken.

Perhaps that’s why certain secular critics missed the obvious. Franz doesn’t give a theological lecture on the historicity of the resurrection or virtue signal via rousing testimony about his own moral courage. His is a quiet faithfulness, first shown by how he works his farm, trusting God for harvest, and eventually shown as he follows his conscience, which for some reason, just won’t allow him to say the words of the oath that’s required.

It’s without question a masterpiece, one of the greatest films I’ve ever seen, and to my mind, the best evocation of the Gospel ever committed to film. Nothing else even comes close—not The Passion of the Christ, nor The Gospel according to St. Matthew, nor Of Gods and Men. All of them are great films, and great Christian films, but this one is in a class of its own.

I would say to people who have decided that they know all they need to know about Christianity, and have rejected it: see this movie. It is a perfect example of what Cardinal Ratzinger meant when he said that the greatest arguments for the Christian faith are the art that comes out of it, and the saints. In this case, it’s art about a saint.

Is the reading of good books and journals unconditionally necessary for attaining eternal blessedness? The answer to this question is yes and also no. If the answer were only yes, then we would be [wrongly] saying that it is pointless for nonreaders to seek eternal life.

However, it is difficult for those who do not use this wonderful, God-given gift of reading to move toward eternal life. I’ll explain my point with the following example.

The typical college graduate reads little or nothing except ephemera and the selections of one of the gigantic book clubs. Popular fiction reeks of the brothel or of Psychopathia Sexualis; some publishers’ editors seem bent on pandering to that poor wretch the literary voyeur. Vicarious violence for the sake of violence becomes the literary ration of children. Will the normative function of literature survive at all?

In 1984, Winston can find only rubbish on what few shelves of second-hand books he encounters in obscure shops; nearly everything published before the Revolution has been burned or pulped. The “democratic despotism” dreaded by Tocqueville might accomplish, without formal political repression, the same result. The content of “basic readers” in American public schools, for instance, has become thinner and thinner during recent decades: the great authors are supplanted by trivia. Or pompous and unread librarian-bureaucrats may eliminate many good books without resorting to the techniques of Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451. When, one year, I donated several hundred books to a public library, I discovered soon that nearly half of them had been burnt by order of a district librarian-functionary. This censorship by fire had nothing to do with pornography, and only incidentally was concerned with politics; the librarian in question merely felt that most books written before he was born, or books dealing with nearly anything serious, ought not to clutter library shelves. “We find that the public is not interested in such books.” This guardian of our literary patrimony burned, among many other volumes, a set of Macaulay’s History of England and a set of O. Henry’s short stories.

The dwindling of second-hand bookshops is at once symptom and consequence of this decline in true literacy. Once upon a time I was a second-hand-book dealer myself, and I could cite perhaps a hundred instances of the extinction, over fifteen years, of long-established old-book shops that had endured for decades or generations—unto our era of swaggering prosperity and urban disintegration.

And yet the books will be there on the shelves, separate beings,

That appeared once, still wet

As shining chestnuts under a tree in autumn,

And, touched, coddled, began to live

In spite of fires on the horizon, castles blown up,

Tribes on the march, planets in motion.

“We are,” they said, even as their pages

Were being torn out, or a buzzing flame

Licked away their letters. So much more durable...

They say that many persons, including Christians, were laid low by the protracted famine. This also, however, the good and faithful turned to right use by bearing it with godliness. For those whom the famine slew it rescued from the ills of this life, as does bodily sickness, and those whom it did not slay it taught to live more moderately; it taught them to fast more diligently.

The privileged people here are the Sacred Victims, Smiley and Turner, who have the power to destroy a two-decade old business that seemed to do a lot of good, and to be a model of progressive social-justice virtue. Harrington’s convictions are not mine, but I bet you’d have to look hard in Denver to find a small business owner who had done more right by the local community, in terms of progressive values, than him. None of that saved him when the tumbrils came. René Girard once wrote: “The current process of spiritual demagoguery and rhetorical overkill has transformed the concern for victims into a totalitarian command and a permanent inquisition.”

You can never do enough to pacify woke activists. They are totalitarians. They will not be happy until you entirely submit.

If the university implements even half of these demands, it would turn campus into a grievance-centered ideological hothouse. … 

What happens at America’s Ivy League schools eventually works its way across academia. We had better all hope that the president and administration of Princeton turn back this radical putsch, firmly.

A network of small groups of Catholic students, who would gather for Sunday mass, prayer, and discussion. Their discussions weren’t only spiritual. They talked about the political and social situation in their country, and what living as faithful Christians there required them to do.

František Mikloško, now in his seventies, was a central leader of the second wave of the Slovak underground church. When we meet for lunch in a Bratislava restaurant, he is quick to offer advice to the current generation of Christians, who, in his view, are facing a very different kind of challenge than he did at their age.

“When I talk to young people today, I tell them that they have it harder than we did in one way: it is harder to tell who is the enemy. I tell them that what is crucial is to stay true to yourself, true to your conscience, and also to be in community with other like-minded people who share the faith. We were saved by small communities.”

Mikloško, in his youth a close aide to the underground Catholic bishop Ján Chryzostom Korec, credits the clandestine bishop—made a cardinal by Pope John Paul II after communism’s fall—with emphasizing the importance of small communities.

“He told us that they”—the communists—“could take everything from us. They could take samizdat from us. They can take our opportunity to speak out publicly from us. But we can’t let them take away our small communities.”

Mikloško started university in Bratislava in 1966, and met the recently released prisoners Krčméry and Jukl. He was in the first small community the two Kolaković disciples founded at the university.

Christians like Krčméry and Jukl brought not only their expertise in Christian resistance to a new generation but also the testimony of their character. They were like electromagnets with a powerful draw to young idealists.

“It’s like in the Bible, the parable of ten righteous people,” says Mikloško. “True, in Slovakia, there were many more than ten righteous people. But ten would have been enough. You can build a whole country on ten righteous people who are like pillars, like monuments.”

These early converts spread the word about the community to other towns in Slovakia, just as the Kolaković generation had done. Soon there were hundreds of young believers, sustained by prayer meetings, samizdat, and one another’s fellowship.

“Finally, in 1988, the secret police called me in and said, ‘Mr. Mikloško, this is it. If you all don’t stop what you’re doing, you will force us to act,’” he says. “But by then, there were so many people, and the network was so large, that they couldn’t stop it.