The Patriot Post® · Good News: 'Sound of Freedom'

The true story of the experiences of Tim Ballard and his team has come to life in the film “Sound of Freedom.” This movie, starring Jim Caviezel as Ballard, knocked other box office films off the podium. In fact, it beat out such films as Disney’s “Indiana Jones: Dial of Destiny” (another first weekend flop for the company) and DreamWorks’ “Ruby Gillman, Teenage Kraken” on the 4th of July. “Sound of Freedom” grossed $14.2 million, and considering their limited scope to even have the film playing in theaters, that is amazing.

“Sound of Freedom” is a crime thriller that depicts the story of redemption that Tim Ballard’s character undergoes. Ballard was a former Homeland Security agent whose experiences prompted him to quit his job so that he would be able to rescue more children who were victims of human sex trafficking than he otherwise could as an agent.

Ballard’s journey takes him into the lair of some of the greatest evil that the human mind can conceive. As Jordan Peterson pointed out in his interview with Ballard and Caviezel, the story has a meta issue — that of child sex slavery — and a particular story about a specific victim he was trying to rescue that draws audiences in.

This film covers a difficult topic and is especially controversial because it’s a larger commentary on the depravity of the chaos at the southern border.

The U.S. is the No. 1 consumer of porn and sex trafficking in the world. As Caviezel told Fox News’s “Lighthouse Faith” podcast: “300,000 children under the age of 18 were lured into the sex trafficking business in the United States. We are the biggest consumers of child trafficking and pornography in the world. The United States — the home of the free, land of the brave. This is ridiculous. And so the film is a threat.” The southern border crisis is facilitating this. President Joe Biden is directly responsible for the continued pervasive exploitation of migrant children and the border crisis at large.

But “Sound of Freedom” is not just making a statement on America’s crimes. It is an indictment of Western culture’s acceptance of moral relativism and rejection of Judeo- Christian values. When confronted with such abject evil, moral relativism’s theory of life is blown right out of the water. In simple terms, moral relativism states that there are no universal principles of good and evil. If people can make up their own morality, the results are horrific depravity: Adults (both the slaver and the pedophile) taking advantage of children for their own gain.

Caviezel described this perfectly when he told Fox News: “You have good, and you have evil. It’s always been this way. But then you have the group in the middle that are riding the fence. The devil owns the fence.” It is the people who ride the fence, claiming that people have to do what is right in their own eyes, that allows this sort of evil to thrive.

Ballard and Caviezel had to overcome a lot of difficulty to even make this film.

Big Hollywood studios rejected the script (shocker) and there are many influential people who don’t want this film seen. The child-sex-slave trade is a $150 billion industry. These children are expendable objects to slave traders. 50 for Freedom, a website dedicated to eradicating myths surrounding modern-day slavery, has even claimed that there are more slaves today that at any other point in history. That includes forced labor, marriage, and sexual exploitation.

“The end of trafficking has to happen by the people. It’s not going to happen by the politicians,” said Caviezel in an interview on Huckabee TV.

Ballard’s organization — Operation Underground Railroad (O.U.R.) — is currently out there rescuing children. O.U.R. uses the knowledge and connections that Ballard developed as an agent to continue to infiltrate sex-trafficking rings and rescue children.

O.U.R. is not a religious organization, though many of the people working there are people of faith. Ballard himself is a Mormon. Tim Tebow, Christian and former football player, also has a charity that rescues trafficking victims all over the world. Both are doing important work to end modern-day slavery.

Even though the film’s content is difficult, it is an extraordinary glimpse into the true value of freedom and the work still left to be done. Human trafficking is a stain on society that should be challenged and fought on every level.