What is alarming is the number of evangelical Christians who bow to culture by incorporating the cultural lies into the life of their institutions/organizations and justifying it as Christian.  This involves participating in the lies of Marxist cultural ideology as embedded in the “Diversity, Equity and Inclusion,” (DEI) doctrine. It is appalling to witness Christian organizations and institutions create diversity offices to implement the Woke lies. Christians are not against diversity or inclusion but should refuse to bow down to the Marxist definition and practice of those ideas.

Some might be familiar with the name of the internationally known Russian Christian dissident Alexander Solzhenitsyn. He and his family were expelled from Russia on February 13, 1974, eventually ending up in the United States (Vermont). After the collapse of the Soviet Union, he returned to Moscow to spend his last years in the country he loved.

However, the night before his deportation, he circulated to the Moscow intellectual community a brief essay titled “Live Not by Lies”. In this essay, Solzhenitsyn laid bare the naked reality of Communism’s cruel crushing of humanity with its lies and asked the reader to refuse to participate in the lies. He wrote: “The circle—is it closed? And is there really no way out? And is there only one thing left for us to do, to wait without taking action? Maybe something will happen by itself? It will never happen as long as we daily acknowledge, extol, and strengthen—and do not sever ourselves from the most perceptible of its aspects: Lies.”  “And the simplest and most accessible key to our self-neglected liberation lies right here: Personal non-participation in lies. Though lies conceal everything, though lies embrace everything, but not with any help from me.”

In  this missive Solzhenitsyn challenged the individual citizen to refuse to participate in the lies of the State. These were the lies  that flowed out from  naturalistic atheistic communism. It was a plea for citizens to reject the lies that aim at crushing the human spirit, denying personal freedom, and assaulting humanity itself. The idea was that to protect one’s human dignity requires the personal choice to reject the cultural lies shaping everyday life and live according to the truth of creation.

Solzhenitsyn realized this would mean different degrees of rejection for different people, but that each must have the courage to draw a line somewhere. Christians did this in the first Century. They committed to saying no to the lies of the Roman culture and to face each day resolved to live according to the Truth as it is in Christ and to accept the consequences (I Peter 5:29). They were not foolish nor reckless in this but confessed they owed allegiance to neither the Roman Emperor nor the Roman culture. They understood that claiming Christ as Lord meant not just refusing the lordship of the emperor but also the lordship of culture that flowed from the Emperor. One needs only to read the literature of first and second century Christian apologists to see how that worked out in real life.

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