'Truth Rising'

On November 4, 2025, New York City’s mayoral election captured the nation’s attention with the election of Zohran Mamdani, a self-described Democratic socialist and Muslim immigrant. This shocking choice in the nation’s largest city left many wondering where America is heading. How can the city that endured the 9/11 terrorist attacks, the city that is known as “the seat of capitalism” in America, openly embrace radical Islam and aggressive socialism?

The edge of collapse

This is a trend that threatens not just the United States, but all of Western civilization, as Christian theologian and apologist Os Guinness (osguinness.com) points out in the documentary Truth Rising. This project was released in September 2025 by Focus on the Family (focusonthefamily.com), in conjunction with The Colson Center (colsoncenter.org).

“We are at a civilizational moment,” Guinness tells viewers. A civilizational moment, he explains, is when a civilization has come so far from its founding that the core principles that made it great are forgotten – and it begins to fail. When a society forgets its founding beliefs, another ideology steps in to replace them, unless the founding values are remembered and revived. This is the crisis that the West – both Europe and North America – is facing. The predominant power that is seeking to replace a fading Judeo-Christian worldview in the West is a form of communism-embracing, Islam-governed totalitarianism.

“Radical political Islam finds the West in this state [of rejecting its founding principles] and thinks it is very easy to take over,” Somalian-born political activist Ayaan Hirsi Ali explains in the film. “[They] don’t actually have to be taking planes and [flying] them into tall buildings anymore. [They] can do it a different way: take advantage of the woke.”

To unpack this claim, Guinness travels throughout Europe and the United States, speaking to some remarkable thinkers and activists who describe their experiences with the reality of the current civilizational moment. The U.S. examples he documents in the film include baker Jack Phillips, who won in the Supreme Court case Masterpiece Cake Shop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission; Chloe Cole, who detransitioned as a teen and now speaks against the transgender agenda; American Family Radio’s Katy Faust, founder of the child advocacy group Them Before Us (thembeforeus.com); and Seth Dillon, CEO of The Babylon Bee (babylonbee.com).

Hope for the moment

While Truth Rising confronts some harsh realities, the film’s tone is not disheartening. Instead, the testimony of Ali, who fled from Islam as a teen girl to escape a forced marriage, highlights the overwhelming hope she found in Jesus Christ after spending many years as an atheist vocally condemning religion.

“All my life I craved freedom, and I craved love; in Jesus Christ, I have found both,” she says. “For me, surrender to the teachings of Christ means ultimate freedom.”

The film also addresses the question of what ordinary people can do to preserve the values of Judeo-Christian civilization, particularly as seen in the brave testimonies featured in the documentary.

“If you are willing to stand up, there will be other people who are inspired by that and actually take action and do something about it,” says Dillon.

An accompanying four-unit study delves deeper into how viewers can counteract the civilizational crisis outlined in the film. The study includes a participant guide with four key truths per topic and a 25-minute video for each unit.

“As important as our cultural moment is … there is something way bigger than a moment, and that is a story,” says John Stonestreet, president of the Colson Center. “The story that [Scripture] gives us of life in the world is the most reliable and prolific account of reality that there actually is.”