The truth will set you free

FCC Rating: TV-PG
USCCB Rating: Not rated at the time of this review

Reel Rating: 3 out of 5 reels

Jesus famously said that “the truth will set you free” (Jn 8:32). Inversely, a lie will enslave you. Live Not By Lies, the new Angel Studios miniseries based on Rob Dreher’s 2022 bestselling book, immerses the viewer in a world that existed not too long ago and ran almost entirely on a diet of falsehood.

Yet, many voices rebelled from out of this dystopia and eventually conquered the lies, offering a means and method against similar movements today.

The basic plot of the series involves “the lie” as a primary tool of totalitarianism and how to fight effectively. Although the series looks at many examples, it primarily examines the Soviet Union’s control over Eastern Europe in the second half of the 20th century.

The audience is introduced to a wide range of dissidents and activists, including Kamila Bendová, a Czech mathematician who organized an underground book club that read Western literature that included the later president of the country. Many of these individuals are only in their late 60s or early 70s. The tortures of the gulags and intense scrutiny of the Stasi occurred quite recently, but seemed forgotten the moment the Berlin Wall fell.

Yet echoes of this tyranny are still felt today. For example, Isabel Vaughan-Spruce was arrested in 2022 for praying quietly outside an abortion clinic. Then there are many tragic stories of parents who lost custody of their children after refusing to affirm their child’s gender dysphoria.

There are many fascinating stories in Live Not By Lies, but no central narrative. Instead, it features four episodes, respectively on thinking, remembering, identifying, and living. This causes the show to wander and at times seem aimless. Occasionally, it acts like a Ken Burns documentary with old photographs and narration. Other times, it features sit-down interviews with conservative intellectuals such as James Orr and Douglas Murrey.

Thus, the series does not work well as a straightforward episodic program, but better as a video podcast that you can pick up, set down, and start up again.

The series presents two large antidotes to totalitarian lies.

The first is religion. Christianity is a threat to state control because it sees truth and value in a common humanity rather than a single political entity. God is also eternal and supernatural, whereas the state can only work with the material realm. If humans can find peace and meaning through love of God and neighbor, then they do not need to find it through government-sponsored programs.

This is why totalitarian systems, both on the left and the right, have always suppressed religion. All dictators and their laws are temporary, but God lasts. He also created the Universe and all its ordinances, so alternative laws and structures will never create lasting peace. When the people understand this, oppression seems to be the only option, but God promises that “the darkness will not overcome.”

The other antidote is the family. One surprising aspect of Soviet dissidents was their large family sizes. Despite Bendová being blacklisted and her husband forced from the university into hard labor, they raised six children in a tiny apartment. Families create bonds built on faith and blood rather than political ideology. They support one another, even when they disagree. This is connected to religion because the Christian family is a domestic church, an evangelical witness to the Gospel. When lived rightly, the Christian husband and wife act as Christ and the Church towards one another, showing the world the truth of God’s properly ordered love.

The state tries to stop the family by encouraging abortion, promiscuity, or–if children must be had–forcing them into state-run centers. In one of the most heartbreaking sequences, Bovi Martin–a Romanian dissident–recalls working in an orphanage with appalling conditions where children were raised like an assembly line, changed, fed, and trained to work in factories with no love or education. Fortunately, he was able to find families in the West for some of them.

It’s easy in 2025 to think that such a world is behind us. Yet, as Alexander Solzhenitsyn stated in his famous 1978 Harvard address, the West has become complacent in its worldly pleasures. And now we are facing ever greater calls to censorship, especially in the areas of religion and the family, just as before.

It can happen again, and it will happen again, in some shape or form. Yet the Gospel gives us the tools to keep the human spirit alive. And we have the promise that Christ “will be with you, until the very end of the age” (Mt 28:20).