Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn—Nobel laureate, novelist, and historian of the Soviet camps where political prisoners were held—is the man who made “gulag” an English word through the success of his book The Gulag Archipelago. A Soviet dissident who was later exiled, he delivered a number of powerful speeches during and after the Cold War, many of which have been translated by his sons and compiled into the book We Have Ceased to See the Purpose.
One of Solzhenitsyn’s speeches was delivered as a BBC radio broadcast in March 1976. It caused an uproar in England. Listeners expected a gushing celebration of Western freedom and democracy but encountered instead a searing critique of the free world’s complacency and compromise.
Longing for a True Word
Solzhenitsyn reached back to 1951 to paint a vivid picture for Western listeners of what it was like when he, as a political prisoner in a Kazakh labor camp, looked to the West as a beacon of freedom and stronghold of hope.
That was the year when Herbert Morrison, Britain’s foreign secretary, persuaded Pravda (the Communist Party’s official newspaper and mouthpiece of the Soviet State) to publish a statement he wrote, without any censorship. If England published Soviet views without censorship, why shouldn’t the Soviets do the same? he asked. The Soviets accepted the challenge.
Solzhenitsyn said, “How eagerly we used to run to the stand where the central Bolshevik newspaper was displayed—a crowd of convicts with shaven heads, in ragged, filthy padded jackets, stamping our clumsy camp boots as we ran.” Their sense of anticipation for the uncensored essay grew every day: “Right now, at long last, even our own subterranean kingdom would be transpierced with the diamond-bright, diamond-hard ray of truth and hope.” Solzhenitsyn and the other convicts couldn’t wait to see the truth laid out plainly in Pravda:
After forty years, an unheard-of breach in Soviet censorship’s bulldog grip! Oh, how he’ll sock it to them with the truth! Oh, how he’ll help us!
For a Western voice to break through Soviet censorship and be published in the regime’s flagship paper seemed like a crack in the wall of lies that held up the Communist dictatorship. But then the article came out.
We read and reread that feeble, insipid article—and our hopes sank: these were the flippant words of a man who hadn’t the foggiest idea of the savage framework and pitiless aims of the Communist world. (No wonder Pravda had felt generous enough to publish it.) For us, survivors of forty years of hell, this British minister could find not one saving word.
“Not one saving word.” That line has stuck with me.
Solzhenitsyn didn’t criticize Morrison’s article for being full of falsehoods. No, Morrison had spoken the truth. But he had said so little. He had misdiagnosed the problem. He had treated the differences between the Soviets and the free world as a mere diplomatic misunderstanding, implying that a little more peace and goodwill would make everything work out, as if the Soviet Union was just a normal country with some bad policies, not a regime that had killed and imprisoned millions of people.
Solzhenitsyn’s broadcast 50 years ago gave voice to his disappointment when the West was given the microphone for one shining moment, but then showed it had nothing to say. The problem with the West, Solzhenitsyn lamented, is a spiritual shallowness, a loss of courage among people who have reduced the purpose of life to comfort. There was no saving word to offer.
Christianity as an Accessory
Reflecting on this essay from Solzhenitsyn, I can’t help but wonder how many pulpits across America deliver commonsense and scriptural wisdom Sunday after Sunday, yet never transpierce the subterranean kingdom of darkness “with the diamond-bright, diamond-hard ray of truth and hope.” And then I wonder about myself and the occasions I converse with unbelievers, how easy it is to say good things, even true things, but to neglect the one saving word that would puncture the prison walls around people in spiritual chains.
It’s possible as a Christian to believe right doctrines and engage in devotional practices, yet misdiagnose the lostness that surrounds us. To think of the gospel as a help, an add-on, just an accessory to a comfortable way of life.
How commonplace it is for people to speak of Christianity as a means of simplifying your life, of making you feel better about yourself, or giving you strength to make it through difficult times, or helping you get along better with family members and friends, or offering financial counsel to maximize your money, or fostering a sense of community through gatherings and rituals. All fine and good, but without the one saving word, such talk is no better than Morrison’s feeble and flippant contribution to Pravda—a smattering of truths that leaves out the capital-T Truth.
More than a decade ago, David Wells lamented this problem:
Our world is being shaken to its very foundations. Instead of offering great thoughts about God, the meaning of reality, and the gospel, there are evangelical churches that are offering only little therapeutic nostrums that are sweet but mostly worthless. One even wonders whether some current churchgoers might even be resistant were they to encounter a Christianity that is deep, costly, and demanding.
We don’t have to wonder. A deep, costly, and demanding Christianity is surely off-putting to a segment of churchgoers.
As evangelicals, we take pride in our doctrinal fidelity and distinctive practices, and yet we can easily fall back into a version of Christianity focused primarily on comfort.
- We say our goal is faithfulness to the Bible, but what we mean is—faithfulness to the Bible that leaves our personal peace and affluence intact.
- We say our goal is Christlikeness, but what we mean is—Christlikeness only to the degree our most fundamental commitments will permit.
- We say our goal is love for neighbor, but what we mean is—we’ll love the neighbor it makes sense to love, and look past anyone who doesn’t meet our qualifications.
- We say our priority is the kingdom of God, but what we mean is—we seek the kingdom, only insofar as it remains circumscribed by the American Dream.
We want the church to challenge us at the periphery of our lives, not the center, so that the changes we make are cosmetic and superficial yet still offer us the veneer of pleasant self-righteousness.
“Hard” preaching still has a place in such a world. We love the prophetic voice; we just prefer its sharpest edges never escape the grooves we’ve established. Prophetic on sexuality, but quiet on racial justice (or vice versa). Prophetic on the dignity of Man, but quiet on the idolatry of Mammon.
We gravitate to preachers who will accommodate our sensibilities and decry the sins and evils of the groups we oppose. Something of the prophetic remains, but its serrated edge only cuts one way. The resulting pulpit ministry is a smattering of little truths, diplomatically delivered to never run afoul of the censors of Pravda because it’s shorn of the capital-T Truth that would expose the superficiality of faith today.
World in Chains
Capital-T Truth—the in-breaking word of the gospel—is able to better diagnose both the severity of our societal problems and the radical solution provided through Christ’s cross and resurrection.
Too often, we misdiagnose the problems in society when we see only the surface-level symptoms. Loneliness and isolation. Political polarization. Gender confusion. Sexual dissatisfaction. Racial tensions. Technological distraction. Addiction to our devices.
Surely, the church has something to say to all these symptoms of sadness. And yet, the gospel won’t let us address merely the symptoms with over-the-counter medication; it scans our hearts to reveal the underlying disease. The deeper problem is Sin—both as personal transgression against God and neighbor and as an enslaving force that keeps us in bondage.
Much like the captives in the Kazakh labor camp, the world around us lives in chains. In chains to creature comforts. In chains to false ideologies, bad habits, and harmful preferences. In chains to the toxicity of a therapy culture that has exceeded the bounds of its expertise. In chains to a degraded and devalued perspective on human life. In chains to false philosophies that deny the goodness of being made male and female. In chains to theories of racial classification and superiority. In chains to spiritualities and pseudoreligious practices that promise mystery yet never allow a speck of the truly transcendent, for fear that acknowledging a personal God as Creator might constrain individual liberty.
Into this world the gospel comes as a saving word, a freedom cry. It breaks these chains and more.
When We Love Our Chains
But what happens when we start to love our chains? When we resist yet desire our captivity?
That is the challenge we face today—we’re called to bring the saving word of the gospel to captives who don’t always recognize their bondage.
In Solzhenitsyn’s gulag, the chains were physical, brutal, felt. He and his fellow convicts tramped in their tattered clothes and clunky boots to the newsstand, desperate for a word of truth from the outside world. In our case, the chains are covered in velvet. There’s no healing salve for the chafing caused by our shackles, only lotion to dull our discomfort. No medicine or cure, only a tonic to keep us sedated and compliant in a dehumanizing world.
In The Burnout Society, the German-Korean philosopher Byung-Chul Han contrasts the “disciplinary society” of previous generations with today’s “achievement society.” In one sense, we’re free from our ancestors’ fear of penalties and discipline from superiors, yet what do we do with our newfound freedom? We willingly exploit ourselves. The language of moral prohibition (“Thou shalt not”) has dissolved into a sea of self-improvement (“Be a better you”)—a more expansive and oppressive law than the “Thou shalts” we’ve cast off.
When your self becomes both the project and the product, you may not feel as though you’re dominated by something outside yourself, but your vision is now constrained by the pressure to maximize your own achievements.
Thus, today’s world looks less like Solzhenitsyn and his labor-camp prisoners crying out for the word of truth to lay bare the insanities of our age and more like people under house arrest, chained to our devices and endlessly distracted by the spell they cast. And so, we fritter away our “free time,” playing into the hands of advertisers who’ve mastered the art of monopolizing and monetizing our most precious treasure: our attention. We love the house that has become our prison.
One Saving Word
Solzhenitsyn upset his British listeners when he showed them it wasn’t only the Soviets who were in chains. He diagnosed the spiritual vacuum in the Western world, even with (and sometimes because of) our material wealth. “We have forgotten God,” he said in 1983. The spiritual shallowness he saw decades ago continues to mark our hollowed-out civilization. The rot of complacency and compromise has spread.
As Christians who long to see the gospel take deeper root in our own lives and then transform the lives of the those around us, we must tether ourselves to the good news that every heart needs most, the one saving word that releases us sinners from bondage.
And yet we must admit we don’t always recognize our own captivity to commonplace cultural narratives and invisible spiritual forces. If we’re to open the eyes of people to their cultural captivity, we must have our own eyes opened to the ways we’ve been molded by the world we’re called to oppose.
Renewal can only come from a fresh word rising from a renewed people. It’s not a newspaper message that will break through the hegemony of lies our culture sells. It’s a message embodied in a people—a community of believers whose life together showcases something bigger, more beautiful, more human, than the luxurious prisons we’ve constructed for ourselves, the degrading ideologies and practices normalized by either Big Government or Big Business, or both.
The church, with confidence in capital-T Truth, is the only community with the resources to resist the spirit of this age and then resolve to offer fellow prisoners in invisible labor camps something more than the feeble and insipid chatter everywhere around us: the one saving word that rings the bell of freedom and breaks the chains of bondage.
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