Kerby Anderson

Civilizations that abandon God as a foundation of their society will ultimately fall into decay and decadence. They must root their rights and liberty on the bedrock of faith in God or else anarchy and nihilism are the result. Those are the powerful conclusions of the new documentary film, Torchbearer. In it, Duck Dynasty’s Phil Robertson stands like an Old Testament prophet and challenges the modern, post-Christian worldview prevalent in our secular culture. He takes us through history and to important places in the world to make the case that all civilizations are bound to decay and fall. He argues that: “a civilization’s best chance of survival is to anchor itself in the God of creation.” “From the guillotine to the gas chamber to the gulag, the story is the same” he reminds us. “When you take out God as the anchor of your civilization you open the door to tyranny. Instead of human rights you have the will to power of the ruler who makes himself the sole determinant of what is true and just.” When he was on my radio program, he told me of what happened when he stood on Mars Hill where the Apostle Paul gave the speech in Acts 17 that introduced Christianity to the Greeks. With the camera rolling, he gave the speech he memorized to the people gathered around the filming. When he finished, some of the people from around the world who were watching began crying because of the impact of the message he repeated from Paul’s sermon to the Stoic and Epicurean philosophers in the first century. The documentary was not only filmed in Athens, but in Rome, Paris, Auschwitz, Omaha Beach, and Martin Luther King’s jail cell in Birmingham, Alabama. Each site gives him an opportunity to provide a lesson from history and make the case for why America must once again take its place as a “Torchbearer” in this dark world.