Our very own contributor, Rod Dreher, has received the great honour of having the documentary based on his book introduced by the sitting Vice President of the United States, JD Vance, at a screening.
Live Not By Lies is a documentary series produced by Angel Studios based on Dreher’s 2020 book Live Not by Lies: A Manual for Christian Dissidents. The first installment of the film series was released on 1 April 2025, and a celebratory launch event was held by the Heritage Foundation in Washington, DC, on the same day.
The film series explores the threat of ‘soft totalitarianism’ in the West, referring to the censorship and ideological mandates of the modern woke movement. The title is directly taken from that of a 1974 essay by Soviet dissident Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.
Vice President Vance famously spoke of this very issue at the Munich Security Conference in February this year. In his speech, he criticized Western European governments for bringing criminal charges against their citizens simply for social media posts, or, what would have been a crude exaggeration only a few years ago, praying in the vicinity of an abortion clinic.
In his remarks at the screening for Live Not By Lies, Vice President Vance referred to Rod Dreher as ‘a dear friend’. About the film itself, he stated: ‘It’s most prophetic about where Western civilization has gone; and, in particular, some of the very founding ideas of the West, the Christian faith on which all Western nations were in some important respect really based on in their original charter’.
‘Those very ideas have not just fallen out of favour, and they’re not just less popular than they were 200 years ago or 300 years ago; of course, in the case of our friends in Europe, a thousand years ago. What we’ve seen is that those ideas have become disfavoured,’ he added, according to the National Catholic Register.
Vice President Vance also praised President Trump for ‘making progress’ on returning the United States to its faith-based values. The author, Rod Dreher, seconded that sentiment, and also commended President Trump for his efforts.
‘We are living in a time of hope. But we can’t lose our vigilance because the conditions that allow for totalitarianism to rise are still with us. These evil lies do not conquer our institutions overnight, and they will not be gotten rid of overnight,’ he told the audience.
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