Social harmony to explore this question and others we speak with actress filmmaker and author Sam Sorbo she and her husband Kevin Sorbo from the hit TV show Hercules recently released a new documentary irreligious Nation now available in Epic TV focused on rediscovering faith and exploring what faith means for a nation
Hey Sam Sorbo thanks for being here again it’s always so much fun to talk to you so you have a new documentary out on Epoch TV by the way folks called your religious Nation uh you did it with your husband Kevin Sorbo Hercules remember Hercules everyone uh and it’s it’s a
Great documentary I watched it and you know of course it’s more like your religious Journey you went to Israel with your family but it contains actually some really deep ideas about what religion means to a nation what religion means to the culture and what you lose when you lose that
I guess first just tell us a bit about kind of what made you want to do this document and then we’ll get into I want to get into these points with you well I’ve always Israel’s been on my bucket list as it is on many peoples and
So um we were approached to lead a tour and do this documentary and I just thought well this is you know sort of the best of all worlds coalescing um and the idea of doing this this discovery so part of the documentary follows another family and they’ve you
Know we’re we we are very involved in our faith and in pursuing our faith and and that looks like a different thing uh than somebody who just says that they’re a Christian and maybe goes you know the CEO Christians as we call them right uh Christmas and Easter only
Um you know that kind of thing and so the so the other family that came with us uh you know there were a lot of people that came with us on the trip but this other family we’ve kind of focused on because they were sort of trying to
Get back to Roots because they felt that they had lost something of family something of meaning in their lives and they didn’t know if it was going if it was religion or if it was something else but I think they had their suspicions I think the the patriarch the father and the family
Had his suspicion so he he talked to his family he said I think we want to do this I think we should go to Israel and um and just take a look and I will say that in our culture today and in our schools we are trained to not
Look we are trained to look away from spirituality religiosity uh we’re taught to disdain uh religious values religious ideas um we we really are trained because we don’t study it in school therefore the school being the the um the the the representation of Education By ignoring the Bible By
Ignoring religion teaches us to disdain it and when you when you put religion forward like in some schools they do teach world religions but by putting all religions out there as equivalent what you’re saying is they have no value because they’re all equally valued and so really what value do they bring some
People do that who cares kind of thing and so on the journey in this documentary we we follow this journey and we ask some really pertinent questions I think uh you know what do we mean by religion what what does it mean to us it and that’s that’s reciprocal right
What do we mean and what does it mean to us or two different things um and and maybe maybe it’s important to take a look at that I have a friend who says our traditions are solutions to problems that we’ve long since forgotten and we release and rescind and break our
Traditions at our own peril because just because you’ve forgotten what the problem was that the tradition solved doesn’t mean that problem won’t come back again if you if you break with tradition and I think that’s what we’re seeing in our culture today we’ve broken with tradition in big big ways
And we are reaping problems that we’ve here to for not experienced in our lifetime certainly and in our recent memory as a culture that’s interesting you know I think the problem we’re seeing in society these days is is something that we’ve been dealing with for a few hundred years
Um you know going back to like even like the 1600s and especially the 1700s you started watching what people saw as like human development uh new technologies and breakthroughs in science and basically societies began to change and maybe as they began to change culture couldn’t keep up with it because
Culture informed us how to deal with the world as it was for thousands of years and didn’t change significantly that much but as it changed basically culture did not inform us how to deal with the new world that was being created and it was a weird conflict that started I
Think between these two worlds and if you look at society today you know religion doesn’t maybe it does to an extent if you look at just an immoral level it doesn’t teach you how to deal with your smartphone or deal with a car or these types of things
Unless you get down to like the granular the granular level of like morality right and so I I guess this gets to the point you mentioned where you talked about what does religion mean to you because while it may not tell you how to deal with like modern technology per se can
Tell you how to manage your life or maybe manage your your moral choices when it comes to these things but I I know your trip to Israel was kind of something a little deeper you got into like I think what religion means to a society as a whole right
For sure I’m I’m gonna have to push back a little bit we have we have this idea that the Bible is this Antiquated book that doesn’t apply I disagree yeah and and in fact my children would disagree which you know now I’m thinking about this like what do my children think about this
Um these are like Tick-Tock generation kids by the way you know right yeah and and uh uh and I would say to you that if you read the Bible it’s the only book that reads you okay uh it’s it’s a history book we disdain it but it is
The best history book that we have it has it is more um documented more authentic it it is closest to the history that it purports to tell closer than Homer The Iliad for instance uh among other things it is a phenomenal history book and even just as a history
Book the stories that it tell that it tells um if you want to if you want to refer to Jordan Peterson um he maintains that the stories in the Bible are truer than true because they are not only true in the sense that they tell the real story but they tell a
Greater story they give a meta narrative and so to say that the Bible doesn’t necessarily apply today because we have Tick Tock and so how does it speak to tick tock I I would say it absolutely speaks to tick tock because it speaks to The Meta narrative and frankly tick-tock
Is nothing new it’s a new iteration of an old old thing yeah okay so when you arm your children with the teachings in the Bible you are arming them against current day culture you you might not think that you do if you don’t immerse yourself in the Bible enough to know but
I’m here to tell you that it it does and so I think that’s that’s partly what we got to in the documentary that we did in Israel is we we show that the connection to Our Roots because Israel is Our Roots and and especially as a judeo-christian
Culture from America Israel is very much Our Roots but not only that the current day is real is we we ought to consider in in uh very close alignment with our values and it is this tiny little speck of a nation in amongst a number of of uh
Uh enemies the the idea that Israel still exists is ridiculous by any by any reasonable standards Israel would no longer exist there’s a supernatural thing that’s surrounding Israel that it still exists that it ever existed right and so that’s part of what we explore in this documentary but I think more
Importantly the documentary really delves into personally from an from a personal Viewpoint how do people respond when they when they are faced with actual events in history because there’s there there are very very few people who are disputing one the existence of Christ to the the question of whether he was crucified
Um and then three when you’re faced with the testimonies of current day people who testify that they saw him after the third day you you start to go maybe there’s something to all of this maybe I should maybe this is a bigger story that that really require really
Just not requires but begs begs me to delve further and that’s I think that’s partly what we want to do with this documentary is inspire people to delve further personally but also just from let’s save this nation point of view because in because Jesus was the author
Of freedom when when he he’s the first person who said hey people should be free we they they are individually created by a creator and it was through the spread of Christianity and if you follow the history through the spread of Christianity that we saw Freedom being
Uh it was lit sort of like a fire that spread through Europe and that’s why we had the cultures in Europe and you’re right these days those cultures are waning and and the spread of slavery is growing do you know today we have more slaves than we did under Roman times
That’s because the enslavement mentality is growing and pushing back on the judeo-christian mentality of you don’t enslave people that’s wrong now you’ll talk to people who go through our school system and they will tell you it’s wrong to enslave people but they support socialism which is slavery so
You know what what our school system has managed to do is confuse us so we will say one thing we think we believe it but on the other hand we’re ready to enforce something completely different that’s completely contrary to the value that we just espouse
