On…..What’s that Sound? Is it Freedom? Nah, it’s something else.

Greetings from the world of the extremely online. If you aren’t a frequent visitor to our little digital isle of shit posts and meme wars then you may have missed the controversy brewing over a recently released movie that quickly found its way to the top of the box office. Don’t worry, that’s what we are here for. 

The Sound of Freedom (TSoF) is a 2023 movie starring Jim Caviezel and a bunch of other talented actors collecting a paycheck while demonstrating the need for a fair SAG contract. It’s based on the life of Tim Ballard, a former operative with the Department of Homeland security who primarily worked to stop child sex trafficking. 

I forgot to mention, this is going to be kind of depressing. 

Caviezel plays Ballard as he quits his job at DHS, frustrated at the lack of results in saving children before they are abused, and becomes an independent activist to free “god's children” from sex traffickers. This involved setting up a sting for sex slave brokers and infiltrating the deepest Colombian jungles in order to rescue kidnapped kids directly from FARC rebels. He goes on to create the organization Operation Underground Railroad (OUR) to continue his efforts with support from tech bros, minor celebrities and small dollar financial backers. 

The movie rocketed up the box office charts and beat the latest Indiana Jones movie on the day of its release. Extremely online conservatives have hailed the movie's success as a win for conservative Christians and a loss for the secular liberal left Hollywood elite who would otherwise like to keep the problem of child sex trafficking in the proverbial closet. They’ve also described curious happenings at their local theaters that give the impression that large theater chains like AMC don’t want people to see the film. 

As is the case with most biographical movies, TSoF takes some liberties with its source material. Although, its embellishments may go further than most. While OUR does regularly conduct stings that free children from bondage, Ballard did not go Rambo on Colombian FARC rebels to save a young girl from trafficking. More importantly, the movie presents stats on the problem that are problematic at best, misleading people on the number of children trafficked for sex as well as the most common way children enter this trade. 

Digging into the problems with Ballard and OUR would take its own article and other outlets like Slate and Vice have already extensively covered those. Aside from the actual effectiveness of Ballards methods and motivations and the question of if his organization is doing more harm than good, there are some interesting and honestly depressing social realities at play here that deserve some interrogation. 

Us vs Them

Let’s just get this out of the way first. If Disney had released this movie, the right would be calling it woke nonsense. Disney actually owned the distribution rights to film through their acquisition of Fox Studios. But the house of mouse shelved it and eventually the producers bought the rights back with some financing from self-help legend Tony Robbins.  

For conservatives, the fact that Disney owned the rights to TSoF but chose not to release it is further proof that the liberal establishment doesn’t want you to know about child sex trafficking. Other proof includes but is not limited to: theaters being too hot, theaters being too cold, empty theaters for sold out showings and a troll on twitter who claimed he was given a vial of nanobots to slip into movie goer’s sodas. 

The CEO’s of both AMC theaters and Angel Studios (the people who made the film) issued a statement denouncing these conspiracy theories for what it's worth. It's also worth noting that the liberal accusation framing The Sound of Freedom as a QAnon movie is wrong. There isn’t any Q adjacent material in the movie. There are no lizard people, Ballard doesn't claim that Hillary Clinton is the mastermind or that these kids are being harvested for adrenochrome. 

The film’s star Jim Caviezel is saying all that, but unfortunately for entertainment purposes, none of that makes it into the movie. 

Despite the enthusiastic proclamations from moviegoers on twitter, The Sound of Freedom is not shedding light on a horrific subject that no one is doing anything about. There are lots of anti-trafficking groups that do real work around the globe to stop the buying and selling of human lives. A lot of these groups are critical of OUR and the film, however, and they don’t sell tickets to go on child trafficking raids. 

Conservatives love this movie not for its muddled message or its inaccurate stats on child sex trafficking. They love it because it features a conservative movie star and its subject matter allows them to accuse any person who doesn’t like it of being a pedophile. Which is something that they really, really enjoy doing these days. 

No, really. 

TSoF isn’t trying to hide the fact that it's just as much a political statement as it is a feature film. The studio is promoting an app that lets people who’ve watched TSoF pay it forward by buying a ticket for someone else. This has accounted for around 2.6 million of its 13 million opening day box office gross. Also, as they want to do, big money conservative groups and public officials have bought tickets en masse to hand out. Which could account for the stories of sold out showings with empty theaters. 

Despite its subject matter and its star, Ballard and OUR have attempted to maintain some air of legitimacy. They take care to denounce conspiracy theories around sex trafficking and even explain that random abductions of innocent women and children are extremely rare. Oftentimes kids are sold into sex slavery by someone they know. However, they still made a movie with a random abduction at its core, they still paint the issue of child trafficking as something that people aren’t concerned with, and they still employed a Qanon nut job to be the star of their movie. They know exactly who they are marketing to. 

Given OUR’s model of soliciting donations from people by offering them a chance to participate in busting traffickers, it's clear that this movie has a third more important function besides political messaging and cinema. It's an advertisement for OUR.

Focus on the Family

VidAngel got its start as a Mormon company where concerned Christian parents could send their DVDs of popular movies to have all the curse words and untoward dress removed or blurred out. This business model was quickly shut down by major studios not happy with their third party post-post-production but now they have taken their talents to streaming. Angel Studios was created as an offshoot to produce original content safe for Mormon/Evangelical consumption. Tim Ballard himself is a member of the Church of Latter Day Saints. 

Recently we talked about how “what about the children” political rhetoric is almost never about actual kids, instead it's about using kids as voiceless victims of the monstrous other. This is very true here, as OUR is somewhat famous for not putting a lot of effort into taking care of trafficking victims after they are rescued. However, when it comes to evangelical Christian political projects, there is something else at play besides cynical political posturing. 

That would be Christian adoption. Putting adoption at the center of evangelical church work really took off in the 2000s, as pastors and church leaders sought a kinder alternative to abortion and something positive for their congregants to do. In response, a cottage industry of Christian adoption agencies sprang into existence. Tim Ballard’s wife is the head of one of those agencies. 

Adopting orphaned or extremely impoverished children in order to give them a good home is a decent thing to do. However, how these groups sourced those children for Chrisitan couples to adopt (and eventually turn them to whatever true faith runs that household) became a matter of disturbing speculation. A few years back, when Trump’s family separation policy at the border was all the rage, Christian adoption agencies were accused of helping families who were fostering separated children to permanently and legally adopt them against their actual family’s wishes. 

Or to put it more succinctly….they were trafficking children for adoption. 

Turns out that there just isn’t enough supply of orphaned kids to meet the demand of American Christian evangelicals called to protect the world’s children and bring them up in the faith. And so these groups have resorted to fraud, obfuscation, and outright stealing in order to provide kids for people to adopt. The people who receive these kids are mostly able to overlook the sketchy process by which their new family members arrived because they believe the comfortable Christian life they can provide is objectively better than what these kids would have with their biological families in Honduras, Haiti or Ethiopia.

Sometimes parents from these impoverished nations are induced to sell their children for adoption. Sometimes, they are lied to and told that they will be able to keep in touch with their adopted kids or that their children will only spend a few years with an American family, after which they can return with an education and perhaps a job to help the family out. Sometimes, the adopting families are lied to, believing they adopted an orphan when the parents are still alive and looking for their kids. 

In other words, these kids are being trafficked for adoption. 

Of course this problem of adoption trafficking predates the evangelical movements embrace. America has a long history of separating brown kids from their families for the purposes of civilizing them. Which brings us to our last point. 

My Gawd…is that Racism’s Music

I really didn’t want to do this for this particular story but there are just too many little details about OUR and TSoF for me to fully ignore. 

The first curious thing is the name of Ballard’s operation. “Operation Underground Railroad” Now anyone who has a decent knowledge of the racialized exploitation that undergirds a lot of American adoption and the myths surrounding human trafficking may find his choice of name to be offensive. But Ballard does actually free slaves. It may be a bit cringe to appropriate the name given to the network of courageous former slaves and white abolitionists that helped African people free themselves for your unabashedly white-savior project, but I wouldn’t rush to claim the R word.

But then there is the claim put forth in the movie that there are more humans enslaved today than any other point in history, including when slavery was legal. It’s not a matter of whether this claim is true or not, it's more that it’s a claim that is almost impossible to verify. There are varying definitions across anti-slavery organizations and even if you take the most extreme proposed number of people currently enslaved -- 40.3 million, it is very difficult to compare that to historical numbers. The people who have made this claim about contemporary slavery seem to be making the same mistake as those who would seek to downplay the brutality of American Chattel slavery by only counting the 13 million or so people who were kidnapped and transported through the triangle slave trade, while omitting the numbers of those who were bred into slavery over a period of centuries. 

But again, who are we to not allow a group of white people to run roughshod over history to make a point. No, the tipping point for me was when everyone’s favorite Jesus actor, Jim Caviezel, made it known that he thinks “we can make Sound of Freedom the Uncle Tom’s Cabin of 21st-century slavery.” 

Uncle Tom’s cabin was a book written by a religious white person about enslaved Black people, but that's where similarities end. Harriot Beecher Stowe’s novel centers the victims of slavery in the story. Not the white heroes who valiantly save them. Stowe read slave narratives and interviewed escaped slaves so that people could understand their experiences and perspectives. Uncle Tom isn’t a sellout as a contemporary epithet would lead you to believe, but he does somewhat put his faith in white people to do the right thing and that faith leads him to a tragic end and a pyrrhic victory. The novel's true happy ending is given to the family that makes their escape to Canada and ends up reunited.  

TSoF makes no such attempt to make the rescued children the main character. Their experiences only serve as motivation for the good Christian white people to show up and do the right thing. And I have to ask myself, why do Ballard, Caviezel and OUR seem so hellbent on comparing their project to that of the fight against Black American slavery. I’m not trying to read anyone minds here, but given the overall political valance of the films main star and producers, it's not an outlandish to assume that they believe that too much emphasis is put on the current marginalization of Black Americans, blinding people to what they believe is the most pressing issue of our time. 

Or maybe it has something to do with the fact that up until 2013, the mainstream Mormon belief was that Black people were cursed by God and whiteness was next to holiness. 

All this, combined with the racist assumptions that are embedded in the evangelical adoption movement and the myths around abduction and kidnapping, leads me to believe that there is some significant part of the cult of personality that Ballard is attempting to build here that is rooted in a white savior complex and white anxiety about the relative comfort they enjoy at the expense of the rest of the world. 

TSoF is a decently made movie. Unlike most Christian films it is shot well, the action is competently framed and the actors are mostly professionals. But this was not a movie that has anything to say beyond “Look how awesome these Christian badasses are” and “liberals who don’t like this must also support pedophilia.” It’s the latest attempt to build an alternative economy and thought ecosystem for white conservatives to feel comfortable in. It's less a wake up call than it is a safe space. 

And it sure as shit isn’t Uncle Tom’s Cabin.

Solidarity Forever.