Live Not By Lies, Today | January 25, 2026

What happens when the culture that once supported everyday faith turns indifferent—or even hostile—to belief? We take an unflinching look at that question and map a path forward that blends sturdy community with courageous truth-telling. Drawing on Rod Dreher’s ideas, we explore how the Benedict Option can look beyond cloistered walls: neighborhood prayer groups, classical academies that form souls, guilds that dignify work, and friendships that keep hope alive when headlines don’t. This isn’t about hiding from the world; it’s about building centers of gravity where love of God and neighbor can breathe.

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Father Don Wolf is a priest of the Archdiocese of Oklahoma City. Living Catholic also broadcasts on Oklahoma Catholic Radio several times per week, with new episodes airing every Sunday.

Transcript

Opening And Today’s Focus

SPEAKER_01 0:04

This is Living Catholic faith with Father Don Wolf. Who deals with Living the Catholic faith in our time? Discovering God's presence in our lives and finding hope in his word. And now, your host, Father Don Wolf.

Rod Dreher’s Two Proposals

Culture’s Drift And Human Dignity

Sexual Confusion As Symptom

Belonging, Identity, And Old Supports

From Cultural Backing To Cultural Pushback

Media Ignorance And Science Myths

Everyday Signs Of Cultural Decay

The Benedict Option In Practice

Education, Guilds, And Prayerful Networks

SPEAKER_00 0:19

Welcome, Oklahoma, to Living Catholic. I'm on Senior Don Wolf, pastor of Sacred Heart Parish and rector of the shrine of Blessed Stanley Rother. In 2020, the author Rod Dreyer published a book called Live Not by Lies. It was a follow-on to his book published a few years earlier in 2017, detailing a strategy for how to go about preparing for the difficulties of being a faithful Christian in the years to come. That book is called The Benedict Option. Dreyer is a journalist and blogger who had his own notable journey through various aspects of Christian life, and now has become a sounding board and a source for a great deal of the contemporary talk about the complications of living the Christian life in our day. His books have become a series of touchstones for those who are trying to think about how to proceed amidst the complications of our time. In the first book, Dreyer warned of the rubble caused by our abandonment of so much of the strengths of our institutions and common understandings. It doesn't take a genius to see how difficult things have become for all those people who want to grow in their common humanity. They seem to be stymied at every point. Add this, and this is because so much of our common agreement about the basics of our humanity has dried up. Rather than a robust view of the potentials of human life, we're surrounded by warnings about how stunted and rarefied we will become unless every boundary is blurred and every possibility is entertained. After a while, what we had always understood as the dynamic power latent in our humanity is just defined away. And like a raging river that has its steep banks worn away, what was a powerful torrent rushing past becomes a placid pond and eventually a stagnant pool. That's what we see happening all around us now. The most signal example of this, of course, is in the sexual realm. It would be difficult to explain to someone who had been transported into our present from fifty years in the past that we really do have advocates for child sexual mutilation, sterile marriages, and laboratory babies, all in the name of freedom of choice. In what had been thought of as liberation and endless joy a half century ago, when sexual freedoms were promoted on the other side of prudery and restraint, they have become the source of chaos and desperation. Only five decades later, and one of our senior jurists claims to be unable to acknowledge whether there is a difference between a man and a woman. And this is only the smallest tip of the larger iceberg. As Anthony Esselin pointed out, we now promote the prospect that a 10-year-old child can know herself so thoroughly she can claim an alternative identity as her, quote, real self, unquote, and then opt for life-altering surgery that will destroy her physiological distinctiveness and capacity as an adult. In all of history, the wisest and most honored heroes of humanity have confessed they hardly know themselves at all. Now we entrust not only the future of a ten-year-old's body to the frightening specter of style, we imagine we do so for the good of the child. We might as well offer up our future to the gods of torture by reading the on to the gods of fortune, by reading the entrails of geese. It is that insubstantial. We've come to the brink of insanity and have stepped over it. As Dreyer points out, Christians are not untouched by these challenges. It doesn't matter how strong a person's faith is or what confession an individual makes. It's impossible to imagine the currents of society don't carry him along with it. For almost all of Christian history, most believers would not have been able to define, much less defend their faith from strong attack. In my own family, fifty years ago, most of the patriarchs could have put up the sum of their beliefs squarely on the back of a matchbook. And yet they were fervent in their confidence and certain in their identity. What sustained them was the culture they were a part of. When it was robust and alive, filling out the corners of their practice and their thought, sustaining and motivating their lives, they were content. It didn't matter to them what the details of the faith were or whether what they believed was contentious or not. It only mattered to them who they were and what they belonged to. None of them worried whether they had the right answer or the correct point of view, as long as it was part of the larger world and the greater institution they were a part of. They were Catholics. It meant they belonged to and were sustained by all that the church was and had been. How many books there ought to be in the Bible, or what the origins of the sacraments were, or whether the Avignon Papacy was legitimate, or what the correct formula for baptism was. All of these questions, they were abstract and meaningless to them. They were part of the church, and the church had the answers to these and to any other questions that might be asked. The only relevant question in their mind was whether they belonged truly to the church or not. Belonging to it, they didn't worry about anything else. In addition, although they didn't know it at the time, it also mattered they were part of a country in which the practice of the Christian faith was understood and promoted. Now, here in Oklahoma, there were tensions arising from the startling anti-Catholic prejudices and discrimination that was everywhere at the time, but the wider culture knew and understood belief and promoted the practice of the churches. Catholic life was not harmonious and it wasn't easy here in Oklahoma. And everywhere on this local map was the nodding agreement that God was the supreme being, Jesus was the Savior, and the Bible was an inspired work of revelation. That was something everyone understood and affirmed, even if they had a hard time with the Catholic Church. This was perhaps signaled best by the quote from President Eisenhower, who said, Our form of government has no sense unless it's founded in a deeply felt religious faith, and I don't care what it is. He was speaking for the whole culture. Our ancestors here built their lives on such understandings. It was the culture. But cultures changed. It changed the way we go about the practice of the faith and our self-understanding as believers. Overall, the culture becomes suspicious of the truth claims of religion and has grown tired of the points of view of the Christian faith. For the most part, this is a general relaxing of attentiveness rather than a complete overthrow of all belief. There's no committee of pagan practice overseeing the dismantling of doctrine and the crumbling of ministry, as was present, say, in the French Revolution. Rather, there's a turning away from the entire edifice of Christian believing, ignoring it wholly rather than addressing it bit by bit. In fact, most of those who state their opposition to Christian culture know hardly anything about it or any of its corollaries or meanings. Bishop Robert Barron cited one example when he was being interviewed by a particularly obtuse reporter at the height of the New Atheist's popularity. The journalist asked him about the success of the modern age, the progress of so much technology, and how the church had been such an enemy of scientific thought through the ages. Bishop Barron pointed out that this point of view was completely wrong. The church is not the enemy of science, but became the source of its promotion, especially since it was Catholic Christian teaching that affirms the intelligibility of the universe and the blessedness of knowing and practicing the truth. No church, no science, it's a well-known proposition. It went hammering tongs because the reporter determined to get a quote about the obtuseness of the church. And finally, finishing the interview, the reporter asked, Well, at least you would say the church has now finally had to grapple with the questions about science and its meaning because of the conflicts going on these days. Can't the Catholic Church be grateful that at last it's coming to terms with science? And that's when Bishop Barron lost it. He had to tell the reporter that the Church's belief and teaching is at the heart of scientific thought, from the monks of the Middle Ages who transcribed and maintained the knowledge of the past to the famous clergy scientists who have been at the forefront of the developing sciences throughout the 20th century. And at the end of the interview, his interlocutor signed off by saying, Well, thank you for your opinion. The journalist knew nothing. But worse, he didn't know he didn't know anything. The culture sustained him in his sublime ignorance of what he was talking about. He was confident there was nothing to know that he didn't know. He was confident his stunning not knowing was sufficient to the day. That's the culture of turning away from belief. Since the pins have been knocked out from under our culture, the context of believing just isn't the same anymore. We're no longer confidently to go about our business of belief, prayer, and practice with the same insu sens as previously. The easy presumptions our parents and grandparents enjoyed will not be for us. Not only that, our believing and practicing will be opposed. Not just because there are those who disagree with us, but because the entire force of the culture will be recruited to stop us. That's the other side of not being a part of a culture of belief. Not only do people not just go along with some sort of general Christian belief, the culture has become actively opposed to those who do so. We're not simply losing the capacity to be comfortable with believing, we're losing the capacity actually to act as we believe. It's easy to dismiss these warnings, as most Christian or Catholic leaders have done for decades. These warning flags have been raised over and over throughout the years, but most people have found them to be too out of reach to be taken seriously. And they will be, until it becomes too overwhelming to ignore the reach of the culture. Even then, those of us who are older will be placid in our ways and keep to what we know, hardly aware of all that's changed. But anyone who's become serious about pursuing serious belief in serious ways will become aware of how pervasive the change is. I had a small taste of this while sitting in a diner the other day having breakfast. At the diner, they have a TV monitor that has on it the album title and song that's being played over the speakers there. That's on one side of the screen. On the other side, the words to the song run line by line as the song's being played. For the most part, it's all background noise to me. I never pay very much attention to the songs or to the artists. I hardly even notice whether it's a man or a woman singing or what the song is about. But the other day, I looked up and paid attention to the lyrics. I was appalled at their suggestive, demeaning, ghastly content. Sure, in the old days of rock and roll, there were a few double entendres and some risque suggestions embedded in what we heard. But the contemporary book on the lyrics being broadcast everywhere is appalling. And I say this as someone who spent a long time exposed to modern novels and contemporary moral situations. I couldn't believe what was being said and what we're hearing. Count me as newly awakened to the ghastly nature of what passes for popular culture. I've never been more aware of its awfulness. I guess I pretty much thought new music culture was more or less like old music culture, including how old people complain about how awful new music is. But I just didn't know what it was like or how genuinely awful, really, it is, without a shred of kindness, compassion, or value. And not just music, but what music and common culture promotes. About 30 years ago, Catholic charities wanted to begin a home where young women who were experiencing troubled pregnancies and a lack of support at home could get help. In place of a supportive and understand in place of support, in a place of support and understanding, they could bring their children to term and make plans for sustaining them by good choices for a good life. Also, if the mother wanted to consider adoption as an alternative, Catholic charities would be there to help them make that option possible. We rented a home, put a staff together, and then opened the place. But we quickly ran into a problem. At the high school the girls went to, the prevailing opinion was that abortion was inhuman and unacceptable under any was that adoption was inhuman and unacceptable under any circumstance. Abortion was fine in the mind of the young women at the school. It was an expression of the mother's unconstrained freedom of choice. Killing the child in the womb was laudable. But giving the child up for adoption was considered abandonment and betrayal. To give a child up for adoption was to treat it as if it were a puppy, a pet, to be given away. The inversion of good sense among the opinion of those students caused us to close the home and find another place where the culture of acceptance was a bit more alive, or at least where the notion of a future was something more expansive. But it was a problem we were unable to run away from, such as the culture of the day. In the face of the tumult of the times, the author Dreyer promotes two approaches, and thus he wrote these two books. The first is what he called the Benedict Option. His notion is that just as Saint Benedict removed himself from the decaying and chaotic world of the fall of the Roman Empire and made a space for himself and his community of believers, so also we should draw ourselves into intact, well-provided for communities of believers, where we can focus on living and sharing our faith. If we have in fact lost the culture war, then raging against the culture is going to be a losing battle on every front. It's better to acknowledge what we have lost and then find a place where we can live and prosper. Saint Benedict did this by founding a monastery and developing a code to help others live the monastic ideal. It was his insight to withdraw from the currents of the world so that he and those who wanted to follow him could focus their lives on a faithful response to God's word and his church. The Benedict option proved to be the salvation of the Western world and the foundation of Western learning. Saint Benedict didn't have this in mind when he began, but his efforts flowered into this enriching and purposeful culture. He wanted to find a spot where the gangrene of Roman decay would not reach. Eventually, he was able to create a culture all its own and thus remake the world that he was a part of. This is an age in which we're reminded of his achievement. We're now admitted invited, actually, to do the same. Dreyer pointed out that he's not talking about a monastery necessarily. He does love monastic examples and includes the description of one, who, by the way, is whose abbot is a former classmate of mine from the seminary. But gathering as monks to sing the liturgy of the hours and to spend our lives in work and prayer isn't the only or even the premier answer. Any manner in which we can gather our wits and strengthen our community of belief is a way to develop the cultural bonds we need for our lives of faith to take root and to grow stronger. Central to the effort will be the focus on education and formation, as well as our push against the constraints binding us in the culture at large. Now, some of these examples are already at large. The Christian Academy movement is one of them. Teaching the classics of Christian literature and focusing on the depth of a solid soul formative learning has the advantage of forming young people in a deep faith, even as it provides them with an untypical appreciation of the history and depth of Christian doctrine. No one's living in monasteries, but everyone's given a chance to know and understand the life of the church and the heart of teaching in a way that provides a bulwark against the corrosive ideas of the day. Cooperatives, brotherhoods, guilds, prayer groups, as well as convents and monasteries, are places where these efforts can take place. Some of them are revivifications of old practices and understandings. Others are adaptations of previous initiatives. Still others are new attempts at meeting the challenge of belief in our age. Secondly, Dreyer points out that our most basic response to the undermining of our faith is the requirement that we live in the truth. This book was written after he had spent some time making friends in Central Europe, friends who had previously lived behind the Iron Curtain. Coming away from there, he was more and more aware of how pervasive and destructive the lies of a culture can be. Plus, from their testimony, he was convinced of the only remedy for the overwhelmingly destructive outcome of living in lies, which is to tell the truth. Thus his book, Live Not by Lies. While it seems a much more vague and less satisfying response than rebuilding the foundations of a new culture, it's a powerful reflection on the power of truth telling and the fragility of the cultural products built on lies. It may seem profoundly old fashioned to tell people that they ought to tell the truth, and if they don't, everything will be worse off. But no matter when such blandishments were considered to be everyday, they were difficult then and they're difficult now. The power of lies is enormous. It can corrupt just about everything. This is especially an important insight when we consider the interconnected world we live in today, in which we have instantaneous communication and a credulous populace. Because we live in a world in which lying has such power and becomes so powerfully pervasive, telling the truth has never been harder or nor has it cost so much, which makes telling the truth all that much more important. Warnings about the power of untruth in our society have been around for a long time, for more than a hundred years. Evelyn Waugh, C.S. Lewis, and George Orwell, one a Catholic, one a Protestant, and one an atheistic socialist, all warned about it in their writings and novels. Waugh especially. He wrote several novels in which he ridiculed how newspapers deliberately lied to the public and to themselves about just about everything. And that was in the 1920s and 30s. Lewis did the same. Orwell's the most famous for his insights about lying, even providing the vocabulary we now use for describing our situation in which the opposite of truth is often promoted and prompted. The only remedy is to live, not by lies. This isn't easy. Because it's impossible to know all truth all at once. And it's impossible to know every aspect of every truth all at the same time. It can seem hopeless to begin even a small claim for truth in the vast sea of information and conclusions that's surrounding us. But that's the very foundation of our strength in these matters. We're only challenged to live and express the truth when we can where we find it. Living not by slogans, nor by mottos, nor memes, is the first thing we do. I've given up using phrases I know have been co-opted by political camps because rather than describing anything meaningful, they simply signify a hidden set of presumptions and unspoken expectations. Words like homelessness, minority, defense, legal, governmental, labor, populist, and criminal are all words I've begun to stay away from because they obscure more than they reveal and can be the sum of lying rather than telling the truth. And I got all of them from one article I read right now, today, on the internet. I could come up with fifty more in ten minutes. Living not by lies means being set against the laziness of thinking and then speaking in the comfortable argot of what everyone's talking about. It means remembering what's true and then living for the truth. We who believe have undertaken the work of living for God in the world. We do believe God waits on us. The divine will comes into the world because we enact it. Divine truth takes up residence here through us. We do the charity the gospel requires. We form the souls of those reaching for God. We live the faith. And if we don't, charity, conversion, faithfulness, and the Lord's gift of Himself don't have a foothold. That's why we have to live not by lies. It's up to us. Back in just a moment? Would you want to live a holy other life? Be able to give your time to another wife? Or is it enough for you to have today, the presence now in lieu of another path or way? Would both really so present a future at all? No matter what we know, we could answer another call? Would not God's greatness extend in every direction? We could survive weightless between now and later's connection. To be content to live right now, as well as think of the future, and so with a future endow, today beyond today's sorrow. That's would you have to do that? We face the world and all of its possibilities, all of the options that are available to us. And as we face the world and look at all of the uh uh decisions that lie before us, we have the chance to shape our response to the world and thereby shape the world by our influence and our presence. That's the gift that's offered to us as adults, as subjects, not objects, and as agents and not simply those who are passive. So our invitation is to live in the world that we have been given. Not the world of our parents, not the world of our grandparents, but us here today. That's what we try to do at Living Catholic. I hope that you can continue to join us in the weeks to come.

SPEAKER_01 24:39

Living Catholic is a production of the Archdiocese of Oklahoma City for Oklahoma Catholic Radio. To learn more, visit okcr.org.