Director's Note

A note from the directors on the day this community opens its doors

We did not set out to make a film about religion.

We set out to make a film about honesty, and about what it takes to stop performing a life and start living one.

Across small towns and rural America, millions of people go to church, profess belief, and raise their children in the faith while privately no longer believing. They do it for human reasons: a job, a marriage, a family's love, a place in the only community they have ever known.

The Czech dissident Václav Havel once described a greengrocer who puts the regime's slogan in his shop window. Not because he believes it, but because it is dangerous not to. Havel called it "living within the lie." We found a quieter version of that bargain in the American pew, and we wanted to witness what happens when people choose, at real cost, to live within the truth instead.

So we followed five strangers to a secluded retreat in the Blue Ridge Mountains. Several arrived without their families' knowledge. Each was carrying the same secret. Over one weekend they found each other, and then they went home to learn, one by one, what honesty would cost them.

Not rejection. Synthesis.

The people in Heathens were formed by gospel music, and most still love what the church gave them. They are not crusaders against the faithful. Several hold their believing families close. What they refuse to do is throw away the music, the belonging, and the beauty that made them. They carry those things across the threshold into honest, self-determined lives.

All five reclaim the word once used to shame them. They say "heathen" with joy.

We have not hidden the cost. Leaving can mean lost friendships, fractured families, and years of loneliness. The film honors that cost because it is the reason the affirmation matters.

What moved us most was watching people trade certainty for wonder, doctrine for empathy, and inherited belonging for a community they choose. Against long odds, they find friendship and joy, and they get their music back.

Five faces for a silent number

When we began, we focused on documenting a handful of brave individuals. Then a Cornell University study showed us the scale. Over 80 million American adults hide religious doubts or exaggerate how religious they are.¹ That is roughly one in three of us.

They are your brother, your mother, your cousin, and even your pastor. They deserve a full seat at the table as citizens, neighbors, and family. The Declaration and the Constitution protect the right to believe anything, including nothing, and the United States was among the first nations in history to reject an established church. This film is, in the end, a story about that founding promise and the people still waiting to claim it.

Heathens gives that vast, silent number five faces. Our hope is that audiences of every belief, and of none, leave not with their convictions attacked but with their compassion enlarged.

Why this site exists

Heathens.community is the place we did not have when we started. It is for the five people in the film and the tens of millions who recognize themselves in them, and just as much for the people who love them and want to understand.

Here you will find screening announcements as we bring the film to festivals and theaters around the country, ways to host a screening in your own town, congregation, or campus, the music and the people behind the film, and a place to tell your own story if you are ready to.

If you have been living within the lie, in a pew or a kitchen or a family group chat, you are not alone. You never were.

Welcome home.

Shawn Hardin and David Cowan Producers & Co-Directors, Heathens

¹ Schnabel et al., Cornell University, 2024. The paper has been resubmitted to Sociology of Religion and is in peer review.