How the Waning of Religious Belief Impacts America: Sam Sorbo

'We can get our culture back,' actress and education activist says

Sam and Kevin Sorbo attend the inaugural Gateway Celebrity Fight Night, in Phoenix, Ariz., on March 12, 2022. Phillip Faraone/Getty Images for Gateway Celebrity Fight Night Foundation

In a world gradually diverging from religions and traditions, the Sorbo family is exploring the hard question of whether people need religious beliefs, and looking at the impact of irreligion and atheism on American society.

Actress, filmmaker, and author Sam Sorbo, and her husband, actor Kevin Sorbo—star of the hit TV series “Hercules”—were approached to lead a tour to Israel. They produced a documentary sharing the insights the travelers gained from the journey, with the goal of re-discovering the meaning of religion in human life.

“What do we mean by religion?” “What does it mean to us?” The couple posed the two questions in the recently released documentary “Irreligious Nation.“  Those questions are ”reciprocal,“ Sam Sorbo said. ”What do we mean by religion and what does it mean to us are two different things.”

“We’ve broken with tradition in big, big ways. We are reaping problems that we have not experienced in our lifetimes, certainly, and in our recent memory as a culture.”

“In our culture today and in our schools, we are trained to look away from spirituality [and] religiosity,” Sam Sorbo told EpochTV’s “Crossroads” program in an interview on Feb. 17.

The school—the representative of education—ignores religion, religious values, and religious ideas, Sorbo explained. By ignoring religion, it teaches students to disdain it.

Although some schools teach world religions, Sorbo continued, “by putting all religions out there as equivalent, what you’re saying is they have no value because they’re all equally valued.”

The Bible’s Meta-Narrative

There is an idea that the Bible is an antiquated book that does not apply to today’s world, Sorbo said. “I disagree. And, in fact, my children would disagree.” The Sorbos’ children are aged 21, 19, and 17.

Sorbo called the Bible “the only book that reads you.”

“It’s a history book,” she said. “We disdain it but it is the best history book that we have.”

The stories in the Bible are not only true in the sense that they tell the real story, they also give a meta-narrative, Sorbo explained.

Responding to claims that the Bible is not relevant to today’s “TikTok generation,” Sorbo said,“It absolutely speaks to TikTok because it speaks to the meta-narrative. Frankly, TikTok is nothing new. It’s a new iteration of an old, old thing. So when you arm your children with the teachings in the Bible, you are arming them against current-day culture.”

Connecting Israel to America’s Roots

The documentary made by the Sorbos includes a family who joined the tour to Israel, “trying to get back to roots because they felt that they had lost something of family, something of meaning, in their lives,” Sorbo said.

The Sea of Galilee, in northeast Israel, on Aug. 30, 2018. Ahmad Gharabli/AFP via Getty Images

The tour in the documentary featured places in Israel that are associated with the origins and early history of Christianity and Judaism, and with Biblical events.

Sorbo said that the film shows the connection between what they saw and learned in Israel and the roots of Judeo-Christian culture in America.

The documentary really delves into–from a personal viewpoint–how people respond when they are faced with actual events in history, the filmmaker said. She expressed the hope that it will inspire people to delve further into these events, both personally and from an American perspective.

“Jesus was the author of freedom,” Sorbo asserted. He was the first person who said that people should be free, because they are individually created by a Creator.

Christianity spread this idea of human freedom throughout Europe, but the cultures that embraced it are waning today, Sorbo noted. Meanwhile, slavery and an enslavement mentality is growing, along with resistance to a Judeo-Christian worldview.

Those who go through the American school system come out espousing the principle that slavery is wrong. But on the other hand, they support socialism because the schools have infused them with socialist ideas, Sorbo said. She called socialism “slavery.”

“What our school system has managed to do is confuse us ... I’m hoping that with this documentary, we get people to start thinking.”

Although Sorbo describes herself as outgoing, an extrovert, and a person who loves people, she said that the trip to Israel moved her deeply and changed her as a person. “I came back from Israel loving people more. I love them more now.”

Actress Sam Sorbo, left, meets with April Few, protagonist of the new film, "Truth & Lies in American Education," which follows Few's real-life journey uncovering hidden agendas in the U.S. education system. Courtesy of United States Parents Involved in Education

Driving a Wedge Between Parent and Child

The school system separates children from their parents by driving a wedge between the parent and the child, Sorbo said.

The American public school system teaches children critical race theory (CRT), gender ideology, and diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI), she noted.

When a child comes home and shares what they learned in school about these topics, parents may disapprove of it. However, “what parents don’t understand is when you surrender your child to an institution, you’re telling that child: ‘Darling, the institution knows better than I do. Trust them; I cede my authority.’”

When the child comes home and challenges the parent’s knowledge or wisdom, “the parent has already lost; they’ve already given up their authority,” Sorbo stressed.

CRT stems from an offshoot of Marxist thought known as critical theory, which is based on the Marxist concept of class struggle. Marxism pits two social classes against each other: the bourgeoisie, “the oppressor,” and the proletariat, “the oppressed.” In CRT, however, the statuses of oppressor and oppressed are assigned to people on the basis of their skin color.

Gender ideology is built on the premise that the person’s gender may be different from their biological one. Based on this ideology, teachers teach children as early as preschool that that there is an unlimited number of genders and that gender can change every day, so kids must discover what their gender is.

Common Core Math

As an example of the education system’s challenges to parental authority, Sorbo pointed to Common Core math.

Common Core standards are a set of academic standards in mathematics, English language arts, and literacy imposed on the American school system by the Obama administration.

The Common Core has been criticized for its dumbed-down standards and the centralization of education at the national level, said Alex Newman, an award-winning international journalist and educator, writing in The Epoch Times.

According to Newman, the only math expert on the Common Core Validation Committee, Dr. James Milgram of Stanford University, actually spoke out against the standards.

“The Core mathematics standards are written to reflect very low expectations,” Milgram said. “They are as non-challenging as possible with extremely serious failings.”

A federally funded study released in 2019 found that Common Core produced “significant negative effects” in both English and math, Newman wrote.

Common Core changed the standard way of doing math and “fixed it with something that was completely untried and untested,” Sorbo said. “Common Core math is one step further removed from logic. Math is the language of logic. And so clearly, they don’t want the children thinking logically.”

Sorbo describes a likely scenario:  a child asks his or her parents for help with math homework, but the parents—who were taught math in the traditional, logical way—cannot help because they are not familiar with Common Core.

The child, however, is instructed by the teacher only to do math using Common Core methods. That child then begins to look down on his or her parents for being unable to help with basic math, Sorbo cautioned.

Ayinde (L), age 10, and Zion, 17, do their school work at their home in Washington, DC, on Feb. 24, 2017. Mandel Ngan/AFP via Getty Images

Home Schooling

Many teachers in American schools were educated by teaching colleges that are “notoriously Marxist,” Sorbo said, but “Marxism is against the family unit [and it] seeks to isolate individuals, so they are more easily controlled.”

Sorbo maintains that schools separate the child from the parent by undermining parental authority. In doing so, they destroy the family and destroy children. However, she does not put the entire blame for this on teachers.

“The teachers who subscribe to this scenario are supporting an enslavement ideology,” Sorbo explained. “They just don’t realize it.”

“I’m not saying that they’re bad people. But I’m saying that they’re very misguided,” she said, admitting, however, that “there are some very bad teachers in the system.”

“We can fix that, and the moment that we fix it, we have a nation of free thinkers.”

“We can get our culture back very, very easily and quickly by home-teaching our children, by not sending them to the institution,” Sorbo, an education activist, said."They will challenge us, which is a good thing. We will grow, we will learn as parents, and the children will grow in love. And it’s the cohesion of the family.”