Remember Solzhenitsyn

 REMEMBERING SOLZHENITSYN

June 8, 1978, 46 years ago today Nobel Prize winner and Soviet dissident Alexander Solzhenitsyn offered his stunning prophetic words for America as Harvard’s commencement speaker. In his speech, he argued that the rapid moral decline of the West was America’s biggest problem not the threat of Communism. The West lost “civil courage”. 

John Stonestreet, of the Colson Center, summed up Solzhenitsyn’s diagnosis “as the “absence of ‘courage’ played out in three tragic realities: the worship of unbridled freedom, the decadence of art and a corrosive pop culture, and the lack of great statesmen. This last point especially—the lack of courageous leaders worthy of respect—has only become more evident in the years since.”

Today, few college commencement speakers dare challenge or even get the opportunity to challenge our culture’s rampant secularism. Forty-six years ago this courageous leader provoked people to think and many at Harvard to “boo”. Again, John Stonestreet states, “Why would the audience boo this moral giant, who had stared down a brutal communist dictatorship’s Gulags and won the Nobel Prize in literature? Because people expected him to celebrate the West and condemn communism, but he came over and condemned communism and the West. Not only this, but Solzhenitsyn had the gall to speak of something reviled at the time by the elites on both sides of the Atlantic: truth. “[T]ruth,” Solzhenitsyn said at the start, “eludes us if we do not concentrate our attention totally on its pursuit. But even while it eludes us, the illusion of knowing it still lingers and leads to many misunderstandings. Also, truth seldom is pleasant; it is almost invariably bitter.”

Solzhenitsyn was imprisoned in the Gulag for eight years after he wrote a letter to a friend critical of Stalin in 1945. He rediscovered his Christian roots in prison and was taught how to pray. Solzhenitsyn was an Orthodox Chris­tian who spoke out no matter the cost.

Over the years, Solzhenitsyn’s Harvard speech has largely been proven prophetic and become a classic. Will we have Solzhenitsyn-like courage when the crowd turns on us for our faith? Will we pursue Biblical Truth? The Roman Empire and many superpowers throughout history collapsed internally before they were conquered from the outside. Will we?