I read this important book last year.

Rod Dreher may be a saved man. I am not sure. He is currently Eastern Orthodox but he moved in that direction from a Methodist background. He is conservative on social issues, on which he has written extensively for U.S. news media, like CNN, Fox, and the National Review.

The premise of this book is that someone claiming the name of Christ must never endorse a position that involves lies, especially when involving social issues or politics. That seems obvious until he explains how often people from both sides of the political aisle will not call their own party out on obvious lies lest that party lose an election.

Addressing our current national atmosphere, Mr. Dreher says he realized a few years ago that something extraordinary is going on. He had people who used to live in the Soviet Union or the Warsaw Pact countries during Communism coming up to him to caution him that American conservatives very much resemble Soviet dissidents back in the day. They said that we all drop our voices and look around to see who can hear us before we make a conservative statement. They recognize what we are doing because they used to do it (try to avoid getting denounced for speech that is not permitted to be openly expressed). In our case, we are trying to avoid attracting the attention of the "cancel culture" folks who get outraged at the idea that anyone should even possess a conservative idea. These older people who used to live under Communism are concluding that we do not actually possess free speech right now in the U.S., at least not for conservatives. Instead of having a government policy sending people to re-education camps like they had, we have leaders of industry threatening to fire us and make sure no one else will hire us if we openly identify with conservative ideas. Rather than talk about ideas in an exchange of free speech, we have one side shutting the other side down.

I will not give any specific examples here as Pastor shows us where society's values have departed from the Scripture and where we need to avoid lies that appear to build up an alternate world view that glorifies man in the place of Christ.

I will just say this book helps strengthen our resolve to live with integrity in a world where lies are increasingly common.