The Berlin Wall and Christian Dissent

Recently it was the anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, which harbinged the collapse of Communism throughout Eastern Europe. This celebration also highlighted the role of dissent, which involved different ideological positions, including many Christian intellectuals.

Do we not need an underground Christian resistance movement in the contemporary West? Of course, we do not live under a totalitarian regime. But we do live in one that is ‘totalising’. Totalitarianism is a deliberate system of ideological conformity. In the West, under cover of official pluralism, we inhabit a totalising system which imposes a single view of reality.

This is similar to Antonio Gramsci’s concept of ‘hegemony’: that is the system governs not only by force, but through persuading its subjects that it is the only common sense approach, that its strictures are ‘normal’, ‘natural’, rather than constructed by interested parties.

In the West, this system manifests as consumer capitalism. This system survives by constantly manufacturing, not only new goods, but by persuading us that we need them; things we didn’t know even existed. Thus the capitalist ethic penetrates deeper: marketising, commodifying, and colonising fresh areas of the life-world.

Consequently, according to Zygmunt Bauman, consumerist values infiltrate even the most personal of spheres: sexual and romantic relationships. So these too become commodified: bought and sold. Family too is atomised, no longer serving the continuance of the system. Thus, critiques from Left and right coincide in a wholistic criticism of the system as such.

In this culture, there is therefore indifference, if not outright hostility, to Christianity, with its restrictions on personal choice. Many Christians unthinkingly succumb by default to the ideological onslaught. From Right and Left, far from being nonconformist dissenters, believers are selling out, compromising with this elevation of individual autonomy. Instead of being persecuted, however, which happens to sisters and brothers under Communism and Islam, we are being seduced. The church, the faith, is being eaten away, from the inside.

Herbert Marcuse coined terms like ‘liberal totalitarianism’ and ‘repressive tolerance’, to explain how, apparently tolerant, liberal societies, exclude discourses which threaten the system’s stability, and even co-opt others. This is how counter-cultural rebellious movements, like Punk for example, are bought off, to become part of the ideological spread of tolerated, and therefore emasculated, opinions.

Even the transgressive potential of sexual ‘deviancy’ is thereby brought within conventional aceptance. ‘Desublimation’, Marcuse wrote, replaces the Freudian emphasise on sublimating our drives, into productive cultural activity. Instead absolute freedom reigns; but it is no longer threatening to the system. As Zizek writes, the super-ego injunction is no longer one of repression, but a command to ‘enjoy!’, fitting perfectly within our late capitalist consumer ethic.

For us to be a counter-cultural community, Christians must recover the importance of the small. The conservative, Arnold Toynbee, stressed the role of the ‘creative minority’ in civilizational revitalisation. While, leftist Gilles Deleuze emphasised ‘minoritarian thinking’ for constructing radical alternatives. Both were right: believers must embrace our marginalised position, in order to subvert an apostate culture and church.