National Catholic Register, Apr 2, 2025 / 17:03 pm (CNA).
Vice President JD Vance hailed the accomplishments of the Trump administration in ushering in a return to democratic and faith-based values Tuesday evening at the screening of a documentary film series that warns a regime of “soft totalitarianism” threatens the United States and the West.
In his remarks, Vance returned to the theme he raised in his February speech at the Munich Security Conference in which he criticized European Union leaders for undermining free speech and democracy.
“The ruling elite of the societies have become actively hostile to some of the very ideas that those countries were founded on in the first place,” Vance said before an audience of about 100 people at the Heritage Foundation in Washington, D.C. In addition to Vance’s speech, the by-invitation-only event featured a screening and discussion of the first episode of the film series “Live Not by Lies” released April 1 by Angel Studios.
The vice president praised the 2020 book the film is based upon, “Live Not by Lies: A Manual for Christian Dissidents,” written by Rod Dreher, who he said is a “dear friend.”
The book’s title comes from a 1974 essay Soviet dissident Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn wrote in which he urged his countrymen to stand up for truth and resist the communist regime’s pervasive ideology. It features the accounts of survivors of Soviet persecution and argues that life in the West today is a sort of “soft totalitarianism” that bears a resemblance to life behind the Iron Curtain.
Vance called the work the author’s “most prophetic” book, pointing to its diagnosis that the problem afflicting the West is a spiritual one, created by the abandonment of the West’s Christian heritage. Dreher is the author of the bestselling 2017 book “The Benedict Option: A Strategy for Christians in a Post-Christian Nation.”
“It’s the 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,” Vance said.
“Those very ideas have not just fallen out of favor, 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 disfavored,” Vance said.
“You see, in Europe, people arrested for praying, and you have the police asking them, ‘Well, what are you praying about?’ — as if it was any of the police’s business. Yes, you see people who are thrown in prison or have their jobs destroyed because they don’t believe the right things or they don’t say the right things, according to the liberal intelligentsia that rules some of these societies,” Vance said.
The vice president credited President Donald Trump for “making progress” toward a return to these faith-based values, as evidenced by the administration’s protection of free speech.
“I think if you just look in the past two months in this administration, we’ve gone from a country where we would harass and threaten and investigate and even arrest pro-life protesters to one where we’re encouraging pro-life activists to do what they can to persuade their fellow Americans,” he said.
“A couple of months ago, we had social-media censorship run amok. We were threatening people’s right of free expression for not saying the things that Silicon Valley technology companies told them to say. Now, I believe that we have more free speech on the internet today than we’ve probably had in 10 or 15 years. So we’re making progress,” Vance continued.
Following the vice president’s remarks, Dreher concurred with Vance’s assessment of the Trump administration’s efforts to reverse the trends he documented in his book but warned against complacency.
“We are living in a time of hope,” he said. “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 won’t be gotten rid of overnight,” he said.
Dreher referred to the work of philosopher Hannah Arendt whose 1951 work “The Origins of Totalitarianism” pointed to certain conditions that made Germans and Russians incapable of resisting the state’s “lies,” even to the point of turning against their fellow citizens and reporting their transgressions to authorities.
Arendt, he said, saw that “mass atomization and loneliness, a complete lack of confidence in institutions, a desire for transgression for the sake of transgression” paved the way for totalitarianism then, adding that those conditions remain with us today.
“I’m very grateful that we have a president and a vice president who are pushing back hard against this stuff,” he said.
He said he hopes the book and the film “Live Not by Lies” are shared with young people, many of whom know little about the consequences of communism and even profess themselves enamored of it.
“Let’s remember that if we forget the past, we are condemned to repeat it. This film and the book, they’re acts of memory. And do not forget what you see here. And be sure to tell, especially young people, that it’s important to know what communism was,” he said, noting that there are dozens of films on Nazism on Netflix but little focus on communism from the streaming service.
Dreher emphasized: “This is why I believe we have a whole generation, a post-Cold War generation, of young people who are all into socialism and communism. That’s all on us. We can now turn it around. But you’ve got to share these stories with young people and let them know what happened and why it matters to them.”
Watch
“Live Not by Lies” is produced and distributed by Angel Studios, which previously produced the popular series “The Chosen” about the life of Jesus as well as the film “Sound of Freedom.” The first episode of the four-part documentary film is now available to stream on the Angel Studios app for members of the Angel Guild, a paid subscription service that allows the studio’s faith-based content to be crowdfunded. To join the Angel Guild, visit Angel Studios’ website. Subsequent episodes will be available to watch each week. Watch the trailer here.
This story was first published by the National Catholic Register, CNA’s sister news partner, and has been adapted by CNA.
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But…but…but…Vance is not a perfect Catholic so we can just dismiss everything he says.
I guess that means that I shouldn’t listen to anything I say or think, because I’m not a perfect Catholic, either!
Seriously, it’s possible for a person to say, write, or think worthwhile things, even if the person isn’t perfect. We need to learn how to filter–receive the wise and good sayings with joy, receive the questionable sayings with discernment, and reject sayings that are obviously incorrect or sinful.
Live not by lies? We have a President who lies constantly. And his lapdog Vice President will never disagree.
So you would have rather had a President and VP who believe that abortion should be legal throughout pregnancy? And promote transgender surgery as “health care??”
Pres. Trump is a businessman. Much of what he says is just him working through a situation out loud and trying to figure out the best approach or solution to the situation that will be acceptable to most of his “customer-base” (Americans and citizens of other countries). Yes, some of it is just nonsense (or you can use stronger words to describe it if you prefer). But eventually, he generally ends up doing the wisest or most appropriate thing.
I think it’s harder for him to get his plans approved these days because so many of the younger people grew up during COVID and missed a lot of school and socialization and also developed a “fear of everything”. Many of these young people live a fantasy life by their own choice–not working or going to school, staying home and playing video games or streaming movies, spending hours every day being brainwashed by various extremely-liberal online platforms, and waiting for their parents to fix their meals and pay for their stuff. The poor parents don’t dare tell their child to “Grow up!” and kick them out of the house because they know that the nearly-adult child is not capable of providing for themselves or discerning what most working adults have learned to discern and either avoid or procure.
It’s a sad situation, and I think that many younger parents these days have observed this happening to their peers and have determined that they will be tough parents who train up their children in the way they should go and not cave in when the child or teenager throws a full-on tantrum and demands their own way.
One indication that Pres. Trump has done well is to take a look at his children (by several wives). His kids are well-educated, hard-working, not addicted to anything, not involved with any “shady deals” and are working with their father and his wife to serve their country. We could not say this about Pres. Biden.
And every day, I am grateful that Americans rejected VP Harris and Gov. Walz!
You fell for it. You focus on the bright and shiny object that is the whole transgender thing and ignored how the billionaires are picking our pockets. BIG Example is Tariffs.
Tariffs are a tax,a regressive tax on everything we need, so that ordinary people pay more and more for their goods and are paying a larger percentage of their income to pay the tariff tax. The billionaires get a big cut in income and capital gains taxes courtesy of tariff taxes being paid by the average citizen. Don’t you see that?
William, are you losing sleep?
Just because you read about tariffs on MSNBC doesn’t mean you understand how they work. Your comment is a sad but typical leftist talking point.
What do you know about tariffs? Do you think these tariffs are good? Note: I lost $12,000 in stocks today. Trump is wrecking the economy.
ROD DREHER, EX-CATHOLIC
I believe that Rod Dreher qualifies to be acknowledged as a notorious schismatic and heretic under Canon 751 of the Catholic Code of Canon Law.
Canon 751 states: “HERESY is the obstinate denial or obstinate doubt after the reception of baptism of some truth which is to be believed by divine and Catholic faith;… SCHISM is the refusal of submission to the supreme pontiff or of communion with the members of the Church subject to him.”
In 1993, Dreher very publicly converted to the Catholic Church.
In 2006 (13 years later), Dreher very publicly disowned the Catholic Church and converted to the Russian Orthodox Church.
During the time in which he was a Catholic, Dreher wrote extensively about Catholic doctrine and history. So, he can hardly be viewed as ignorant or uninformed about his Catholic faith.
Thus, I think that Dreher’s schism from Christ’s one Church must be viewed as knowing, informed, and deliberate, and thus gravely sinful.
Dreher has cited moral corruption among the clergy in the Catholic Church as the reason for leaving.
But the Russian Orthodox Church has 100 times more clerical corruption, both sexual and financial, than the Catholic Church has or has ever had.
Reasons for this systematic corruption in the Russian Orthodox Church are:
–FSB, the current Russian gov’t intelligence service, exercises profound control over the episcopal hierarchy of the Russian Orthodox Church, just as the KGB did during the Communist era.
–There is no free press in Russia, so there are no journalists investigating and reporting on the Russian Orthodox Church the way free journalists in the West investigate and report on the Catholic Church.
–There are no independent judiciary or police in Russia. So, the Russian Orthodox Church, since it is supported by and is legally part of the non-democratic Russian gov’t, cannot be held accountable for sexual or financial abuse, or even violent crimes like murder.
Rod Dreher is a smart man. He must know all of this. It is well-documented, common knowledge.
Yet Dreher persists in his anti-Catholicism and in his adherence to schism and heresy. Why does he do so? I don’t know. Surely it can’t be the reason he states, given that the Russian Orthodox Church is much more morally corrupt than the Catholic Church. So, could it be something else that he does not speak of? I don’t know.
Well, so be it. Pray for him.
But at least can we stop treating Dreher like he’s still a Catholic?
He was once. He once had that privilege. But now, by his own choice, he’s not.
Isn’t Dreher a friend to the Church as Brutus was a friend to Caesar?
Shouldn’t Catholic publications, at the very least, identify Dreher in their articles as an “ex-Catholic”?
In 2022, after writing for years about his wonderful marriage and family (3 kids), his wife filed for divorce from Dreher. In an article published online, Dreher put the blame for the divorce on his now deceased parents and sister. He claimed that they never accepted him and his wife when they moved back to Louisiana.
Dreher especially promotes the writings of two Russian Orthodox authors: Solzhenitsyn and Dostoyevsky. Both of these authors were extremely anti-Catholic in their writings. Both described Catholicism as a corrupting perversion of Christ’s teachings.
Why take into our bosom people who hate us, call us liars about God, and dream of saving civilization by having the ultra-corrupt, schismatic, heretical Russian Orthodox Church become the official state religion of every nation on the earth?
The Eastern Orthodox Churches, because they did not modernize and secularize their liturgy the way the Catholic Church did in the late 1960s, misleads some outsiders into thinking that the Eastern Orthodox Churches are very traditional and ancient in doctrine, and very united. But the reality is far different. Since the 1920s, the Eastern Orthodox Churches have been racked by and suffused with theological modernism and liberalism, and there are unending doctrinal controversies, internal divisions, and excommunications and counter-excommunications. Only 12% of Russian Orthodox believers in Russia attend a Russian Orthodox religious service on at least a monthly basis.
Is Rod Dreher on the right track?
He’s made a film titled “Live Not by Lies.”
Does Rod Dreher himself live not by lies?
Don’t we need heroes and champions who are one of us and who are on our side and God’s side?
This analysis is simply unhinged.
Confiteor: Calm down. God’s got this.