No Place to Hide: Why 'How Should We Then Live?' Might Be the Most Timely Book You Haven't Read

There's probably a small black camera on a pole somewhere near you. You might have walked or driven past a dozen of them this week without noticing. And there's also an increasing chance it photographs your license plate, your bumper stickers, the dent in your rear fender, and quietly files all of it into a database that law enforcement agencies across the country can search, usually without a warrant. Somewhere between eighty and a hundred thousand of these cameras are already up nationwide, but not without pushback. Cities have been canceling their contracts by the dozen in recent months.¹ And a small but growing number of people have decided not to wait on their city council. In Virginia alone, residents have taken vice grips and spray paint to the cameras themselves.²

That fight is happening right now, and it's happening across the political spectrum in a way almost nothing else does anymore. Democrats and Republicans agree on very little these days, but a growing disgust with Big Brother seems to be one of the exceptions. What does it say about a culture when this is one of the only things left that unites it?

Francis Schaeffer thought he knew the answer, and he wrote it down fifty years ago. Schaeffer was an American Presbyterian pastor who spent much of his ministry in Switzerland, where he and his wife Edith founded a study community called L'Abri. By the time he wrote How Should We Then Live? in 1976, he'd spent two decades listening to young people from across the West arrive at his door with the same questions underneath all their different questions: what's actually true, and is there any solid ground left to stand on while we figure that out. That's the vantage point the book comes from. It isn't an academic's detached survey. It's a pastor's field report on what he'd watched an entire generation go looking for and fail to find.

A Roman Bridge

Schaeffer opens with Rome, and the choice is deliberate. Rome is the ancestor civilization of the modern West, the place its law, its architecture, and a good deal of its self-image still trace back to, and Schaeffer wants you to watch a civilization fall before he asks you to consider whether ours might be walking the same road.

To make the point, he reaches for a small, homely picture. The Romans built humpbacked stone bridges across the streams of Europe, and those bridges carried foot traffic and wagons safely for two thousand years. Drive a modern six-wheeled truck over one, though, and it collapses instantly, not because the bridge changed, but because the load finally exceeded what its foundation could bear.³

That's Schaeffer's picture for a civilization, not just a bridge. A culture can run for centuries on a weak foundation, as long as the pressure on it stays light. Rome inherited its foundation partly from Greece: the polis, the city-state, was the Greek attempt to found a society on shared citizenship, complete enough to define a person's whole meaning, as when Socrates chose death over exile from it. Even that kind of devotion couldn't make the polis a sufficient foundation. It still collapsed.

What Rome shared with Greece more deeply was its gods, and both were finite: human-shaped deities, amplified humanity rather than anything actually divine, dressed up as ultimate answers to questions they were never built to answer. That foundation held for a long time. It held right up until the pressures of empire (a self-interest that outran any shared sense of the common good, a citizenry that had stopped believing in anything worth sacrificing for) finally exceeded what a merely human foundation could bear, and Rome reached for Caesar to hold the pieces together. This is the pattern Schaeffer wants you watching for. Not the specific gods, but the general shape: a civilization's foundation determines how much pressure it can take before it trades its freedom for order.

Losing the Reference Point

How Should We Then Live? was never meant to be read as a philosophy textbook, even though it walks through four centuries of Western art, philosophy, and law along the way. Schaeffer's actual subject is simpler and more personal than that survey suggests. The young people who found their way to L'Abri weren't confused about facts. They were living after a series of two world wars and a century of collapsing certainties had quietly stripped away the shared Christian framework their grandparents' generation still took for granted, and nobody had ever handed them anything to put in its place. They had all the freedom in the world to ask any question they liked, and increasingly no shared ground on which any answer could be judged true or false. Schaeffer wrote this book to explain to a general reader how the West arrived at that condition, and what it costs a civilization to stay there.

The thread running through the whole book is this. Western thought once rested on what Schaeffer called an infinite reference point: specifically the Christian God, an infinite and personal Creator who had spoken and could actually be known, and against whose character truth and right and wrong could be measured with some confidence.⁴ As confidence in that reference point eroded across the centuries Schaeffer surveys, Western thought didn't find a sturdier replacement. It found nothing, and slid toward a point where a culture no longer has any shared basis for calling one thing true and another false, one act right and another wrong.

Once that shared basis is gone, Schaeffer argues, something still has to settle the disagreements that inevitably come. If it isn't truth, it's force. And a society, he was careful to note, cannot stand chaos indefinitely. When enough pressure mounts (economic strain, the threat of war, rampant criminality, plain apathy) people will trade freedom for order almost without noticing they've made the trade, as long as the trains keep running and the shelves stay stocked. He named the two values he expected to survive the collapse of everything else: personal peace, meaning simply the wish to be left alone and undisturbed by anyone else's troubles, and affluence, an ever-increasing pile of material comfort.⁵ Once those two things are all a people still cares about, an elite that can guarantee them, an intellectual and technical class running things by data and expertise rather than conviction, doesn't have to seize power. It gets handed the keys.

That's a fifty-year-old argument that reads like this morning's headlines, and it moves fast to get there. Scholars sympathetic to Schaeffer have long noted that a four-hundred-year sweep through Aquinas, the Reformation, and Hegel in one volume compresses real nuance. Fair enough for a book that was always a pastor's panorama, not a specialist's monograph. The broad brush still deserves your trust, even where a brushstroke or two moved too fast.

He Named the Tools, Not Just the Trend

Here's what intrigued me most as I returned to this work for yet another pass. Schaeffer doesn't just gesture vaguely at "technology" as a looming threat. He runs through a specific inventory of mechanisms he expected a manipulative elite to reach for: genetic engineering deciding who gets born, B.F. Skinner's behavioral conditioning shaping what a population wants without its consent, Jose Delgado's experiments using implanted sensors to control aggression electronically.⁶ And then, in language that reads less like 1976 and more like a headline from this month, he turns to the computer.

The high-speed computer, he wrote, makes it possible to call up a person's entire recorded history at the touch of a button, and paired with the technical capacity to monitor a nation's phone and cable communications, the combination "leaves no place to hide and little room for any privacy."⁷ He wasn't picturing a shadowy villain flipping a switch. He was picturing exactly what has happened: a slow, largely uncontested layering of data collection and monitoring capability, adopted piece by piece because each piece solved a real, immediate problem.

Which brings us back to the camera on your street corner. Schaeffer named this exact mechanism, information storage plus communications monitoring, as one of the concrete tools he expected an authoritarian order to use, decades before either was remotely practical at this scale.

Fewer than one percent of the cars these cameras scan turn out to be connected to any crime at all, and roughly one plate in ten gets misread outright.¹ That imprecision hasn't stayed theoretical. A CBS News investigation spent six months verifying more than a dozen wrongful stops around the country, including a mother and her young daughter pulled over at gunpoint in Aurora, Colorado, after a misread plate flagged their car as a stolen motorcycle registered in a different state.⁸ The tool has also been turned against critics rather than crime. Police in Lenexa, Kansas used their license-plate network to investigate a resident who had written a newspaper op-ed critical of the department, opening a case over sidewalk posters within hours of his column running.⁹ Whatever you make of the underlying public-safety case for these systems, that's the actual cost side of the ledger, not a hypothetical one.

What's striking about the current backlash, cameras vandalized and all, is who's driving it. Dozens of cities have voted to cancel their contracts in recent months, and the opposition runs across the political spectrum in a way almost nothing else does right now. Schaeffer's own account predicted the opposite: a population sedated by personal peace and affluence, trading liberty for order so quietly it barely notices. The fact that this fight is loud, bipartisan, and ongoing is either a hopeful wrinkle in his prediction, evidence the deeper consensus he thought was dying isn't quite dead yet, or simply the early skirmish before the larger apathy sets in. I don't think it's obvious yet which.

China offers one well-documented example of this pattern playing out at scale. According to a peer-reviewed study out of Stanford's Center on China's Economy and Institutions, about 19 of China's roughly 330 cities run a comprehensive local system of this kind.¹⁰ One of them, studied closely and treated within China as something of a model for the others, gives every adult resident a social credit score tied to their national ID, starting at 1,000 points and sorted into eight tiers from AAA down to D. The system runs on 389 separate rules, 124 rewarding behavior the local government wants and 265 penalizing behavior it doesn't, drawing on data from traffic police, banks, and neighborhood staff who report on everyday conduct like how residents dispose of trash. Most of what gets penalized, the researchers found, already breaks some existing law; the system mostly just formalizes it. The more telling part is the minority that doesn't. Certain offenses trigger an automatic downgrade regardless of context, drunk driving among them, and new rules get added on short notice whenever local officials decide the moment calls for it, mask mandates during COVID among them. So, oddly, does petitioning the local government, a legally protected activity that nonetheless accounts for two-thirds of the system's most severe political penalties. Top scorers get a discount on their heating bill. The lowest tier gets police monitoring.¹⁰

It's a government deciding, rule by granular rule, what counts as "sociologically helpful," and building the machinery to reward and punish accordingly, argued entirely in the register of civic order rather than any account of what a person is actually owed. That's the mechanism Schaeffer described, working exactly the way he said it would.

None of this requires believing any single official or company is secretly plotting tyranny. That was never Schaeffer's argument. His argument was quieter and more disturbing: once a culture loses its footing on why a person matters, the tools built for entirely reasonable purposes (public safety, efficiency, convenience) tend to get used exactly the way tools without a moral floor eventually get used.

Why This Book Matters Today

What How Should We Then Live? offers is a category: a name for something easy to feel and hard to argue, the sense that today's fights over privacy and power never really land because nobody involved can say, with any shared authority, why a person's dignity should outweigh whatever the system finds efficient.

Schaeffer thought Christians already had that answer: a Creator who made people with an intrinsic dignity, the same root Locke would later secularize into inalienable rights, that no efficiency argument could override. That's the one reference point sturdy enough to hold once autonomy runs out of road, and it's worth the time to hear him make the case.

Read the Book

How Should We Then Live? Francis A. Schaeffer (Fleming H. Revell, 1976). Also available in Crossway's 50th Anniversary edition. Read it this summer.

[Get the book on Amazon → https://amzn.to/4h59wjx]

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This article represents the personal creative and educational work of the author, undertaken independently. It does not represent the positions, endorsements, or official teaching of any church, denomination, employer, or organization with which the author may be affiliated. Historical and contemporary claims in this piece reflect the author's understanding of the available documentary record; sources are cited in the notes below, and readers are encouraged to consult them and engage critically with all claims made. No copyright infringement is intended with respect to any quoted or referenced works; fair use is claimed for brief educational quotation of third-party material.

Footnotes

1. American Civil Liberties Union, "Fight Creepy ALPR Cameras" ("Get the Flock Out"), aclu.org, last updated June 25, 2026, https://www.aclu.org/campaigns-initiatives/get-the-flock-out.
2. "People are vandalizing Flock surveillance cameras in Virginia amid privacy concerns," WUSA9, https://www.wusa9.com/article/news/crime/people-vandalizing-flock-surveillance-cameras-in-virginia/65-16c95c7e-378e-4d01-b1a1-00e30c2e27f8.
3. Francis A. Schaeffer, How Should We Then Live? (Old Tappan, NJ: Fleming H. Revell, 1976), 20–21 (the polis, Socrates, and the finite gods of Greece and Rome), 23 (the bridge).
4. Schaeffer, How Should We Then Live?, 87.
5. Schaeffer, How Should We Then Live?, 205 (definitions of personal peace and affluence); 247–250 (the pressures that trade freedom for order).
6. Schaeffer, How Should We Then Live?, 228–239 (Skinner, Crick, Delgado, and the chapter's broader survey of manipulative techniques).
7. Schaeffer, How Should We Then Live?, 243–244.
8. "When license plate readers get it wrong," CBS News, https://www.cbsnews.com/news/license-plate-readers-alpr-mistakes/.
9. Sam Zeff, "Missouri and Kansas police use cameras to track license plates, but residents resist surveillance," KCUR, https://www.kcur.org/news/2026-06-29/automated-license-plate-readers-alpr-kansas-city-lenexa-weston-police.
10. Chuncheng Liu and Akos Rona-Tas, "Trusting by Numbers: An Analysis of a Chinese Social Credit System Governance Infrastructure," Critical Sociology (2024), as summarized in "Assessing China's 'National Model' Social Credit System," Stanford Center on China's Economy and Institutions, https://sccei.fsi.stanford.edu/china-briefs/assessing-chinas-national-model-social-credit-system.