When You Think You’re Free, You’re Often Already Captured

History teaches us that fascism rarely arrives with a bang

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Is U.S. democracy being taken for a ride to a place we don’t want to go?

In the movie, Taken (2008), two excited teenage girls walk into a Paris apartment, not realizing they have just signed their death warrant. (Well, at least one of them had — the one whose dad isn’t Liam Neeson.)

It’s a terrifying movie.

What a helpless feeling, watching the evil unfold. Their status had flipped from free to captive, without them realizing it. Once it was set in motion, there wasn’t much anyone could do to stop it.

Only a highly motivated person possessing a certain set of skills could salvage anything after that point.

The Point of No Return

It’s a terrifying helplessness, but it isn’t limited to action movies. I realized recently that this same slow, silent shift from freedom to captivity happens in our everyday lives, often in ways far more subtle than a movie plot.

I saw it play out right in front of me one morning at my dining room table, as I sat watching a gnat fly around inside a wine glass, left there from the night before. The tiny, airborne creature kept returning to a drop or two at the very bottom.

I watched it, thinking how it was free to fly away at that particular moment … how it wasn’t alarmed as I picked up the glass and slowly turned it upside down. It continued to busy itself in the intoxicating residue.

As I ever so gently placed the inverted glass down on the table, my distracted victim took no notice.

Lights out, baby.

They Thought They Were Free

The gnat’s total lack of awareness as the world closed in around it is exactly how ordinary people end up in extraordinary traps. It’s a pattern we see echoed in history, specifically in the way totalitarianism quietly takes hold.

The lessons are there. In movies, in nature, and in history.

Last year, a young friend, a 20-something middle school science teacher, sent me a TikTok introducing a 1955 book titled, *They Thought They Were Free: The Germans 1933–45 by Milton Mayer. *We decided to read and discuss it.

It was a terrifying book.

I knew the major players and events in WWII history. But Mayer’s book opened my eyes to the mindset of the average, obscure, German citizen as the Third Reich gained traction in the 1930s.

Here’s how one reviewer described the book: “The ordinary citizens Mayer interviewed genuinely believed they gained freedom under the Nazi regime, completely unaware that they were actually surrendering it.”

Like Kim and Amanda off to Paris to follow U2’s European tour … like the gnat flying around inside my wine glass, they were free. And then at some point, they thought they were free — but they were not.

The 10 Germans Mayer interviewed over the course of a year had been lured by the prospect of an economic upturn and a reinstatement of national pride.

Understandable, right?

Post WWI Germans lived in desperate times. Even in non-desperate times, money and status have a powerful hold over all of us. It’s not surprising that ordinary Germans fell prey to the vision sketched by their rising star in the 1930s. Why wouldn’t they? Why shouldn’t they?

The High Cost of Our Comfort

But once that hunger for security takes root, it creates a moral blind spot. We start to justify the things we once would have condemned. That’s when the danger stops being just about national policy and starts being about the condition of our hearts.

If the thing that prospers me causes the suffering of someone else, then it’s wrong. Think about it. If the greatest commandment is to love God and neighbor, and I instead worsen the plight of my neighbor, then I’m failing at what Jesus said is the most important thing.

Worse than failing. I’m doing the exact opposite.

It’s the equivalent of the Samaritan in Jesus’ story kicking the beaten up traveler further and further into the ditch … speeding along his demise. Instead of the story of The Good Samaritan, it would be the story of the Bad Samaritan.

The Germans, thinking they were free, were duped into informing on, rounding up, robbing, transporting, imprisoning, working to death, gassing — or merely turning a blind eye to —those who were in the ditch.

And when all was said and done, rather than prospering, the Germans were once again the big losers.

Drinking the Water We’re Swimming In

One reader recently commented: “ … it saddens me that I too knew so little about the treatment of other image bearers till recently.”

Yes. Let’s be sad together. It’s appropriate. It’s biblical. Lament is part of repentance. So is confession.

I have participated in this scapegoating type of counterfeit solutions throughout my life. It boggles the mind how easily I reversed the role of victim and offender:

• I grew up segregated and afraid of Black people, unaware that Blacks, terrorized by Jim Crow, racial prejudice, unfair housing laws, … actually had every reason to fear white people.
• I grew up believing the “Indians” were the bad guys, when they were the ones who had been cheated, displaced, wrongfully executed …
• I grew up captive to many other illusions entrenched in the culture: that women were not supposed to be leaders in certain arenas; that we are to applaud well-off, “law-abiding citizens” and denigrate protesters who have legitimate gripes; that poor people were poor because they didn’t work hard enough ...

The High Cost of Complacency

This is why the New Testament writers keep repeating the warning: “Be alert.” Alert is not our default. Left to ourselves, we automatically drink the water we’re swimming in. Without realizing it, we get drugged into compliancy, complacency, and complicity.

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Liam Neeson (or Bryan Mills, if you must) was alert. Otherwise, Kim would have ended up like Amanda.

Some things to be alert to:

• If concentration camps sprout up across the U.S.
• If people are sentenced and imprisoned without due process
• If our right to free speech and protest is taken away
• If those in power can break the law without fear of prosecution
• If the government decides what constitutes religious persecution
• If there is a weakening of the separation of church and state

These are things that would cause those in the future, reading about us, to say:

“It was a terrifying time in U.S. history.”

Signs of an Alert Follower of Jesus

Like Jesus, His followers care about the marginalized, the struggling, the outcasts …, the “least of these.” It makes no sense otherwise. How can we say we love Jesus, and at the same time kick His loved ones deeper into the ditch? We wouldn’t believe someone’s words of love for us while they were simultaneously hurting our children, our beloved.

How can we say we are unworthy of His salvation, it is by His grace alone that we are part of God’s family, and then condemn others as unworthy?

It takes a lot of effort to stay alert. We’re fighting against the drift of the water we’re swimming in. Only people of deep faith could believe that it’s in losing our life that we save our life (Matthew 16:25); that Someone who was rich beyond all measure would become poor for love’s sake (2 Corinthians 8:9); that instead of grasping privilege, we are prepared to let go of it. (Philippians 2:6)

If Only Kim and Amanda — Or We—Had Been Warned

As noted by Mayer’s research, “By the time the citizens realized they were trapped in a horrific totalitarian system, it was too late to resist. The government had systematically separated its operations from public oversight by using secret deliberations and manufacturing endless national security crises.”

Mayer emphasizes the “gradual habituation” experienced by these ordinary men. Little by little the boundary shifted, moving them closer to the ultimate trap.

And then it was too late.

Ultimately, Mayer chose this title, They Thought They Were Free, as a universal warning to democratic societies. It illustrates that fascism does not always arrive with obvious terror; it can sneak in comfortably, welcomed by ordinary people who believe their liberties are being protected even as they are completely destroyed.

As Edward R. Murrow put it: “A nation of sheep will begat a government of wolves.”