In 2020, Rod Dreher released his book, Live Not by Lies: A Manual for Christian Dissidents, which warned Christians of the growing “soft authoritarianism” of the United States. At the time of the book’s release, the United States was still in the throes of the COVID-19 pandemic, with churches only slowly being allowed to reopen in certain states for in-person worship. Now, five years later, the book is being turned into a documentary.

The documentary, released by Angel Studios, focuses on interviews with people who lived through totalitarian regimes and compares their experiences to the growing secular culture of the United States. Dreher recently spoke about the project to The Christian Post, noting that while his contribution to the project had been “fairly minimal,” he was impressed by director Isaiah Smallman’s “somewhat different” approach.

Some of the differences Dreher noted were that while his book is more “methodical,” Smallman leans more into the emotional side of the issue. “That’s not to say that he doesn’t fill it with facts,” noted Dreher. “It’s really more of a style matter.” Dreher then addressed the issue of book banning and whether or not allowing certain materials in public libraries is similar to communist book banning of the past. There has been fierce debate on what types of materials should be allowed in schools, with books like Gender Queer causing outrage for their explicit content while being allowed in public schools. Supporters of the book have accused those who pull such books from libraries of censorship.

Dreher, however, said he did not believe the two things are the same. “And so, I think people who believe that everything should always be freely available, I think that that’s completely unrealistic,” he said. “That said, under communism, the bans were across the board. They were about politics, anything political, anything that violated the governing ideology was banned. That’s not what we’re dealing with in the U.S. They’re not really bans. You can still buy these books. You just can’t necessarily teach them in elementary schools.”

The real concern for Dreher is the inclination for comfort, which leads to “soft totalitarianism.” He cited George Orwell’s 1984 where the masses are forced to submit to full devotion to the omnipresent “Big Brother” as a form of “hard totalitarianism.” “Aldous Huxley’s [soft totalitarianism] in Brave New World, that’s much more like what we’re dealing with. And this is a system in which you can manufacture consent of the governed by making them very comfortable and then threatening to take away their comfort if they don’t go along with whatever the ideology demands,” he said. He noted that most people are made to believe they ought to avoid suffering but that suffering “makes us human.”

He also warned that while American culture has been dominated by left-wing soft totalitarianism, right-wing totalitarianism is on the rise as well. “Just because left-wing soft totalitarianism has been dominant does not mean that we on the right are not susceptible to it. So, we need to be very careful in policing ourselves and our own communities to avoid that,” he warned. He also stated that conservative churches have “failed in trying to understand the signs of the times.” “We have to be careful about this, but in the end, you have to confront this stuff.”