At the end of Sound of Freedom, a new movie that was released for a limited theatrical run on July 4, the credits roll and the actor Jim Caviezel addresses the camera directly, his face grim.
“I imagine you’re feeling sad or overwhelmed or even fearful,” he tells the audience. “But living in fear isn’t how we solve this problem.”
The problem, broadly, is child sex trafficking—and the solution, implied by the plot of the Sound of Freedom, is courageous sting operations targeting groomers and traffickers willing to provide children to rich Americans.
But the broader politics behind this movie are messy, and the heroic storyline is anything but straightforward. To understand this movie and the many groups embracing it, it’s important to parse the particular religious tradition it taps into—as well as the controversies that surround the man at the film’s center, his organization, and the actor selected to play him.
Sound of Freedom starts with the abduction of two happy young Honduran children. A brother and sister are stolen from their father by a former beauty queen after being tricked into auditioning for a nonexistent youth talent agency. They are placed in a van with other children, and shipped off as freight to Colombia. The boy, Miguel, is then flown off to Tijuana, where a leering American man is paid to transport him across the border. That is where the siblings’ story intersects with Ballard’s. A very American-looking blond man with a blond wife and six blond children, Ballard (played by Caviezel) works at the Department of Homeland Security going after child traffickers. At the border, he rescues Miguel from being sold into sex slavery in the U.S. and commits himself to finding Miguel’s sister, Rocio.
Soon, the movie shows Ballard quitting his job at DHS and, with the help of a handsome rich man who “likes to play cop,” staging a deal with traffickers, offering them access to a fake sex resort on an island off Cartagena to capture the smugglers with local police support. When Rocio still doesn’t turn up, Ballard then transforms into an action star, venturing into cartel-held territory in the jungle, sneaking around a village guarded by cartel soldiers, killing Rocio’s captor, and escaping with Rocio in tow while fleeing machine gun–firing goons. It’s a pretty compelling watch, made even more so by the knowledge that the story is rooted in reality.
Rooted is the key word. Parts of the actual story have been questioned by reporting, including at Vice, which found a pattern of exaggerations and misleading claims by the real Ballard. Other outlets have pointed out that official documents tell a different story about the border arrest than the movie does. The plunge into the Colombian jungle to rescue Rocio is an invention. And some elements of Ballard’s life story are simply hard to fact-check. But the real-life Ballard really did stage a sting operation in Colombia that led to the arrests of several human traffickers.
Ballard’s organization, Operation Underground Railroad, was started in 2013 with funding help from Glenn Beck and Beck’s listeners. The group became known for striking deals with child traffickers in developing countries and staging secretly recorded raids at the appointed time of the handoff. Ballard and his team claim to have rescued 123 victims, 55 of whom were minors, during a series of coordinated stings in Colombia that unfolded during a single day, and that were coordinated with Homeland Security Investigations.
These stings are controversial. No one questions the importance of keeping children out of sex slavery, or Ballard’s belief in his Christian mission, but plenty of experts have questioned his tactics—particularly Ballard’s choice to turn these raids into, essentially, tourism opportunities for rich tech bros and celebrities longing to feel like heroes. As Foreign Policy reported, high-dollar donors have been able to either join Ballard’s missions or watch them from the comfort of their homes. Smaller donors can sign up for text-message alerts to learn when children are saved. Minor celebrities, too, have participated in raids, including Walking Dead star Laurie Holden and Dancing With the Stars’ Chelsie Hightower. (Ballard has justified these methods as necessary to funding his work.) Some have also questioned the expertise involved; according to Vice, Ballard once brought a psychic along to help.
What’s more, experts in anti-trafficking work have been critical of Operation Underground Railroad’s operations, arguing that these dramatic raids and rescues are not actually effective or are sometimes even damaging to the long-term goal of ending human-trafficking practices. And the consideration of what happens to saved individuals after a raid has sometimes been an afterthought. Writing in Slate about her experience attending an OUR raid in the Dominican Republic in 2014, Meg Conley recalled feeling that everyone involved was passionate but inexperienced.
They believed in Ballard, too, and were doing their best to bootstrap his vision of salvation. The calls were fervent but flawed. Everybody wanted to “save the kids,” but no one really knew anything about these kids. We talked mostly about fundraising. The calls never addressed real things children need to be saved from.
Conley’s sting rescued 26 girls. Later, after reading a report in Foreign Policy, Conley learned that the local organization tapped for aftercare of the children found itself overwhelmed. The group released the girls in a matter of days. The local group lost track of a number of them.
OUR, for its part, told Slate in 2021 that it had matured as an organization since its early operations and that it now does more to support victims after the raids.
The bigger problem with the movie—when watched through an uncritical lens—is that it is misleading about the nature and root causes of human trafficking. More often than not, children are not rounded up and shoved into vans by strangers.
Although the real Ballard does not present the issue in measured tones, a blog post on the OUR website readily admits that “while this type of human trafficking exists, it isn’t the majority” and that “most trafficking happens through a manipulative grooming process” by a person already in the victim’s life, rather than through some frightening and sudden abduction. The latter kind does happen—but very rarely. Statistics on human trafficking are notoriously difficult to pin down, but the often-circulated claim that 800,000 children go missing in the U.S. each year is an extreme exaggeration. Such claims conflate different kinds of disappearances, and confuse reports with crimes; the reality in America is likely around 115 kidnappings a year. Sound of Freedom doesn’t give audiences that context, though. It starts with a montage of real footage of child abductions and ends with some pretty alarming stats, presented in somber text:
Human trafficking is a $150 billion a year industry.
The US is one of the top destinations for human trafficking and is one of the top consumers for child sex.
There are more humans trapped today in slavery than at any point in human history, including when slavery was legal.
Millions of these slaves are children.
These numbers do reflect an ugly reality, but they are misleading in the context of the film. The $150 billion refers to profits for all human trafficking—the great majority of which is for labor, not sex, and which includes both adults and children. And while it’s true that, per UNICEF, the U.S. is “considered one of the top destination points for victims of child trafficking and exploitation,” the reality is that there are so many factors affecting the gathering of international trafficking data that it’s hard to rank nations like this with certainty. Similarly, the claims about more humans in slavery than at any point in history is hard to establish, and is made more complicated by variations in definition. Worldwide, there are likely millions of children who exist in slavery, but that slavery can take many horrific forms: forced marriage, armed forces, and forced labor. All kinds of slavery put children at risk of sexual abuse, but the movie portrays the goal of trafficking those millions as sexual, and it suggests that kids are constantly being shipped between abusers. Neither is the reality.
Perhaps mass-distributed misinformation about child abductions wouldn’t be so bad, except we know that overblown fears of this kind of practice lead to widespread paranoia and societal scapegoating. It has in many ways engulfed our political reality. The producers of Sound of Freedom may be well intentioned, but they must also know that their film is feeding into a dangerous and deluded mindset that millions of Americans have come to share. Since 2020, panic about children’s sexual corruption has become a political boogeyman wielded by politicians, especially on the right.
Remember Pizzagate? It wasn’t the first time the country had become gripped by a moral panic over the belief in nonexistent child-sex-trafficking rings. But it was the first time it had happened in the era of social media, and the conspiracy theory grew out of control, eventually helping spawn QAnon. Soon enough, other cultural anxieties could be filtered through this theory of mass child trafficking: Supporting gay children became grooming them. The resurgence in vilification of LGBTQ+ Americans is directly related to these conspiracy theories about child-sex-trafficking rings—and the ballooning effect has created a dangerous reality for LGBTQ+ adults and children.
“The way people process information when it comes to children is different,” said Adam Enders, a professor of political science at the University of Louisville, who finds that people tend to wildly overestimate the amount of child sex trafficking going on. “Fear and anxiety override that stop-and-think process.”
Even those outside the QAnon world came to believe absurd figures they’d heard cited without proof, like the widely shared figure that “300,000 or more” U.S. children a year are abducted for trafficking. Suddenly, thousands of American citizens felt they were going mad with helplessness, outraged that untold numbers of children were being trafficked for the pleasure of evil elites and that no one was talking about it. And sinister political forces must be to blame.
This has echoes in Sound of Freedom. At one point in the movie, Caviezel’s Ballard monologues about this underworld crime ring:
The fact is that it is the fastest-growing international crime network that the world has ever seen. It has already passed the illegal arms trade, and soon it will pass the drug trade. ’Cause you can sell a bag of cocaine one time. But a child, the most precious child? You can sell a 5-year-old kid five to 10 times a day, for 10 years straight. And everyday, ordinary people don’t want to hear it. It’s too ugly for polite conversation. Over 2 million children a year are being sucked into the deep recesses of hell.
Ballard and OUR are the exact point where the world of legitimate anti-trafficking work and the world of dangerous conspiracy theory meet. When, in 2020, the Wayfair child-sex-trafficking conspiracy theory took off, Ballard himself seemed to encourage rampant and bogus speculation.
“With or without Wayfair, child trafficking is real and happening!!!” he wrote on Twitter. “The children need us.” He then added, “Reports of child abuse cases are millions higher this year than they were last year. This is not a small thing or a conspiracy theory; this is the fastest growing criminal enterprise in the world.” This was false.
In an Instagram post, he told more than 2 million viewers: “No question about it, children are sold on social media platforms, on websites, and so forth.” Later he told the New York Times, “Some of these theories have allowed people to open their eyes.”
Putting aside the harm that can come to innocent people who are unwittingly caught up in any conspiracy theories, sex-trafficking conspiracy theories are especially worrying because they drain resources that should be saved for legitimate trafficking cases. Because of this, in 2020, dozens of anti-trafficking organizations signed an open letter condemning anyone who lends legitimacy to QAnon. As the Atlantic pointed out, OUR was absent from the list of signatories.
Sound of Freedom, to its credit, does not depict a QAnon-esque cabal of satanic elites. Its villains are a mix of creepy pedophiles, greedy locals, eerily charismatic groomers, and murderous cartel bosses. The only time the movie hits Q-adjacent territory is when Caviezel’s Ballard reads a fake newspaper headline about an American executive who ran a child sex club in Thailand and gets inspired to start a fake “high-end sex hotel” that could draw “rich perverts, jet-setters, CEOs.”
But where Sound of Freedom plays it safe, its star does not. Caviezel is a longtime celebrity of the far right, and he frequently appears as the headliner at events for QAnon-friendly crowds. During the press tour for the film, Caviezel went on the shows of right-wing figures such as Steve Bannon and the conspiracy theorist Scott McKay. Caviezel got more frank about his beliefs in these appearances than on Fox News. The actor casually tossed out claims in these interviews that the major movie studios were “controlled by the central banks” (an old, common antisemitic trope); that the CIA, FBI, and other agencies were trying to hinder the film’s spread because they were involved in the cover-up of child sex trafficking; and that children are being sold for their organs. “[Ballard is] the one that opened the book with me on organ harvesting,” Caviezel said.
When asked by Bannon why children were being trafficked—apart from sex and organs—Caviezel had a quick answer.
“Adrenochrome, the whole adrenochrome empire,” he said, citing a conspiracy theory that posits that global elites are torturing and terrorizing children in order to harvest the adrenaline from their blood. “It’s an elite drug that they’ve used for many years. It’s 10 times more potent than heroin, and it has some mystical qualities as far as making you look younger.”
In June, Angel Studios replied to a comment on Twitter describing Caviezel as “QAnon Jim,” neither embracing nor fully distancing itself from Caviezel’s conspiracy theorist beliefs.
“Caveizel’s personal statements are his own,” the account wrote (misspelling the actor’s name). “His portrayal of Ballard in this true story is masterful and should bring awareness to illegal trafficking, and inspire people to take action, helping individuals and communities put an end to this modern day slavery.”
According to the story he tells, the real Ballard felt called by God to find and save the children. That religious origin is not a part of OUR’s stated mission, but he did tell Foreign Policy that “if someone isn’t comfortable praying, they’re not going to be comfortable working with us.”
OUR isn’t unique in this. The anti-trafficking world is full of Christian and specifically evangelical organizations. (Ballard is actually outside the norm somewhat, as a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.) OUR comes from a tradition started by the Christian nonprofit International Justice Mission, which popularized the undercover raid-and-rescue strategy in the early 2000s.
Related from Slate
I Saw the Grim Child-Trafficking Movie That’s Filling Theaters. People Acted Like They Were at Top Gun.
And as Ruth Graham wrote for Slate in 2015, sex trafficking itself has become something of a hot issue among evangelicals, inspiring related Sunday school curricula, church ministries, and even a line of lipsticks meant to help “kiss slavery goodbye.” In the early 2000s, bolstered by funding from the Bush administration, Christian groups launched a number of organizations dedicated to anti-trafficking work.
“There’s something about sex trafficking, the moral panic of it, that seems to have captured the imagination of American evangelicals in a sustained way,” said Elizabeth Dolfi, a professor of religion at Columbia University who has studied the evangelical anti-trafficking movement. “It’s the kind of issue that’s difficult to say, I disagree with your stance that human trafficking is bad. They can point to this, over and over again, to say, This is who we are. We are abolitionists. We care about social justice.”
OUR isn’t exactly a giant in the world of anti-trafficking. But culturally, it is. Few organizations have been so zealous about producing media content and cultivating a fan base. And that strategy has paid off for OUR: It brought in $47.5 million in revenue in 2020, largely from donations.
“We don’t have big studio money to market this movie,” Caviezel said in his post-credits special address. “But we have you. And the baton has been passed to you.”
This content was originally published here.
