Will Grigg?s Liberty Minute

August 4, 2008

Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who passed away on August 3 at age 89, heroically exposed the Soviet Union?s prison camp system. He was rewarded with a Nobel Prize and punished by exile from Russia.

After arriving in America, he endured a different kind of exile. In his Harvard Commencement Address thirty years ago, Solzhenitsyn provoked the incurable hostility of the Western academic elite by showing how their brand of humanistic materialism differs only in detail from that of the totalitarian Soviet regime.

Westerners were free to fill their bellies even as their souls starved, he observed, warning against a worldview that displaces God and puts man at the center of everything. The West was staring into ?the abyss of human decadence,? typified by a degenerate popular culture and depraved ruling elite.

Unless the West turns back to God, this corruption will eventually destroy both our prosperity and our individual freedom.

Alexander Solzhenitsyn understood that we cannot reclaim our liberty unless we recognize that it is Christ who sets us free.