Angel Studios is a rare enterprise in American film, trying to put together popularity, prestige, Christianity, and new media. They had a major hit with Sound of Freedom (2023), then aimed for the Oscars with Bonhoeffer (2024). In 2025, they’re entering the culture wars with Live Not by Lies, a documentary based on my friend Rod Dreher’s eponymous report on the spiritual threat to Christians and the need to learn from those who have suffered persecution, as is suggested from the title, Solzhenitsyn’s most famous maxim.
The book Live Not by Lies: A Manual for Christian Dissidents appeared in 2020. Rod has a gift for prescience. Two decades back, he was talking about “Crunchy Cons,” long before all my right-wing friends turned against seed oils, decided to go for natural food and living, for reasons of health and taste, thus shedding the demeanor of the blazer-and-slacks Republicans of the Bush era. At this point, we’ve moved so far to the “crunchy” side that RFK Jr. is running HHS. Does Rod get any credit for predicting this trend?
The Benedict Option (2017) broke news about the resurgence of faith, especially among men, in this generation and the deeply felt need among them to return to the original sources of our way of life. Years down the road, we’re all learning that Gen Z is more religious than Millennials and that young men are especially drawn to a stricter theological and liturgical understanding of Christianity than was typical of evangelicals. Does Rod get any credit for predicting this other trend?
But Live Not By Lies was the first time Rod confronted his great fear of the modern state turning against the rights of conscience and forcing Christians to return to suffering and even martyrdom. And he turned out to be right again. As soon as COVID hit, elites around the world started using the power of the state to attack religious freedom and, indeed, they canceled Easter, i.e., the Resurrection. I remember listening to the Easter liturgy from a window high up in a high-rise looking out on a city under arrest, searching for other windows in other buildings where other people like me, imprisoned, would light candles. I knew there would be no going back.
As noted above, Rod’s a friend and, normally, I’d rather criticize than praise a friend, since friendship is something else than flattery. But I believe he has earned a right to our attention by getting the major spiritual crises right. He has bestsellers to his name but has also been ignored in his warnings, as though he were too right too early. So it’s very welcome news to see his work turned into a documentary and brought into the digital era, recording the last living witnesses of communism in Europe, establishing continuity across the great moment of amnesia that was the ’90s.
Live Not by Lies the documentary is a four-part story about totalitarianism as it appeared in the 20th century and as it has reappeared in the 21st. We are reminded of Mussolini, Stalin, Hitler, Mao, and Pol Pot; Auschwitz and the Gulag; the horrible possibility that enlightenment—from technology to ideology—could turn into a tyranny of such power that it would overwhelm human nature itself. We are warned that totalitarianism is back, now in the guise of safety and sensitivity, inclusion and diversity.
The work juxtaposes old recordings of communist dissidents from Central Europe, new interviews with them today in old age, in democratic Prague and Bratislava, as well as contemporary recordings of dissidents in the West, such as Isabel Vaughan-Spruce, who was arrested for possibly praying in her head, which is antisocial behavior in England. The realities of our days are even more incredible than the testimony of those brave dissidents, who are as isolated among us as anti-communist dissidents were in their countries. We are free, of course, in ways undreamt of during communism. But we must still ask, What are our virtues and what is our defense of our freedom? Do we not fear losing the latter and therefore throwing away the former with some regularity? Do we not hope we will have champions to stand up for us when we feel humiliated by the attack of vast, impersonal, institutional state powers? Do we not then discover the need for truth telling?
In Live Not by Lies, we can look at ourselves through the eyes of those dissidents. We see the great man Václav Havel—long before he became the president of a free, democratic Czechia and addressed a joint session of Congress—mock the police in home recordings from the 1970s for setting up a listening and surveillance post outside his countryside hut. That ironic man Havel, a playwright and a playboy, went to jail for his beliefs with the hope we would help him—the recordings were in English—and that his countrymen would discover their courage. But is there anyone among us so brave as to mock the surveillance and censorship state built around us? Who would we ask for help? We used to somewhat look down on the victims of communism because they suffer what could never befall us—but how about now?
We see the BBC go into the apartment of Kamilla Bendová, wife of another famous Czech dissident, Václav Benda, and survey her everyday life with her kids. How strange to enter into the privacy of people already under state surveillance; only that violation of the secrecy of their home, however, can protect them. Shy children and a heartbreakingly friendly woman welcome us in, hoping we will look on their poverty and their dignity alike—their faith, their learning, their public spirit. We might learn to look up to them.
Then Rod visits Mrs. Bendová in her Prague apartment now and shows us her eventual triumph, her Christian contentment in the midst of her large family, a sign of divine providence, you may think, for those who obeyed the Christian commandment of love and faith. I’ve been in that apartment, talked to this impressive woman who is still living out that life from the BBC documentary excerpted in this new documentary, as keeper of the flame, remembering her life with her long dead husband and their struggle against communism and for faith for visitors, to inspire others. She has inspired Rod, which has led to this documentary. This documentary can inspire you.
Live Not By Lies suggests lessons as well. If we believe we are in trouble, we have to see how one may act. One lesson is Benda’s “Parallel Polis,” the need for institutions to promote those who are “canceled.” Another is the Committee for the Defense of the Unjustly Persecuted, public defense through lawyers, courts, and the court of public opinion. A third is the need to understand the Progressive attack on Christianity, to be prepared to suffer, survive, and restore freedom in secrecy—spiritual freedom—and then to restore public freedom when the conditions permit. In this regard, Live Not by Lies is not simply a documentary or a public exhortation; it suggests guidance for practical purposes.
There is, however, a great tension between the documentary form and the living witnesses it shows us in interviews, so I end on a critical note. The documentary format is probably outdated. It relied on assumptions about general knowledge and the ongoing education of a mass audience by mass media that don’t make any sense in the new situation of fragmentation. When you see Douglas Murray or Victor Davis Hanson in 10-second clips in Live Not by Lies, you realize how preposterous everything in old media is. You can now listen to these impressive intellectuals talk for hours on new media platforms, podcasts or on YouTube, without these cameo techniques!
History will replace the documentary, taking over its techniques and adapting them for digital media. Everything from hyperlinks leading you to the texts themselves to connections to other histories and historians working in parallel on related matters. Something else than the moral concerns of the op-ed is needed now. We need to recover our memories. This documentary is a transition to this future, and it does a rare service in bringing to America the voices of the dissenters of communism who are not simply victims but also teachers, having learned from their suffering so we may learn in ours.
