How Beneath Sheep’s Clothing Came to Be
How Beneath Sheep’s Clothing Came to Be
In 1997 I was a fresh college graduate who embarked on an LDS mission to Russia for a year and a half. I had taken 5 semesters of Russian but even after 9 weeks of intensive language study at the LDS Missionary Training Center, it still took me a good 2-3 months in Russia before I could hold a conversation with anyone other than the most patient of individuals.
I felt strangely at home in Russia even though I had never travelled abroad before. It was a nation that was half industrialized, cultured, and advanced and half third world. Russia gave me my first introduction to herbal medicine and natural healing, something I would delve more deeply into in subsequent years. It also introduced me to a society just a few years into recovery from 70 years of communism. I got to know and love so much about the people of Russia who were tough as nails – much more so than their American cohorts.
After my mission I had moved back to my old college town – Tallahassee, FL – to be around old friends as I tried to figure out what to do next with my life. I ended up being recruited to the graduate program at Florida State for Russian Language & Literature. They needed a teaching assistant for beginning and intermediate Russian, and I fit the bill. A year into my program I learned there was also another graduate program at FSU in Russian & East European Studies, so I figured I might as well tack on an extra year of studies and take a bunch Russian history classes.
One semester, I took both 20th century Russian history and 20th century Russian literature. I cried almost every day as the traumas of the peoples of the Soviet Union were opened up to me in historical fact, short story, poem, and novel. It was devastating for me to learn what the people I had come to love had experienced, collectively. The tortures and bloodbath of the purges, mass incarceration of innocent people in the Gulag, the smothering of speech, artistic expression, and scientific study that didn’t sufficiently praise the Soviet state - all in the name of supposedly helping the “oppressed” Soviet proletariat. I struggled to come to terms with why I had learned almost nothing about any of this history either high school or my undergraduate college years.
In the course of this second master’s program, I was given the option to write a master’s thesis. I had already been deeply drawn into researching the social, religious, and cultural history of Russia. And years before when I was a missionary there, my interest in underground Soviet religious movements had been piqued when I had encountered some people who had been part of these movements. I had found them to be among the most inspiring people I had ever met.
So, in 2002 I embarked on the lengthy and laborious process of researching and writing my master’s thesis on underground Christians in the Soviet Union. Over the next two years, I would return back to Russia for a study abroad in Moscow during which I was able to meet some former Soviet dissident Christians and get first-hand information about their church’s operation during the Soviet era. I would spend countless tedious hours engaged in research in the old-school, pre-internet way - as dial-up internet doesn’t count.
In my research, I specifically looked at the tactics and characteristics of the different denominations of underground Christians that were most associated with their success and failure. I learned that the feature most associated with success was a decentralized leadership structure. This allowed the operation of a church to continue on more easily even when top leaders were carted off and sentenced to the Gulag for 10-20 years. On the other hand, churches with a more highly-centralized leadership were subject to more severe interruption when top leaders were arrested. It also made these churches more susceptible to the ramifications of infiltration – one of the major tactics the Soviets used to either control the churches from within or create artificial schism in order to break up a church.
Further, I discovered that the three major tactics to the Soviet government used to try to destroy and dismantle Christianity, from post WWII to Perestroika in the mid-80’s, were as follows:
1. Anti-religious and pro-socialist propaganda through all aspects of society – in the schools, media, entertainment, and the arts;
2. Continual heavy persecution not of all churches as was done in the early decades of Soviet rule, but only of those underground dissident churches who resisted control; and
3. Infiltration of the churches through KGB agents – carried out most successfully with the mainstream churches such as the Russian Orthodox Church.
Much to my surprise, 4 years after completing my master’s thesis in 2008, I began seeing some of the same tactics the Soviets used to try to destroy Christianity happening right here in America! I researched and wrote most of my book Beneath Sheep’s Clothing from 2009-2011. I experienced numerous shocking realizations going down at least a hundred different rabbit holes. Some people in my life thought I was insane. After all, in 2010 who in the hell believed America to be at risk of falling to communism? By 2011 I set the book aside unfinished. Something was missing that I couldn’t put my finger on and I needed to get back to focusing on other things, like paying the bills.
Fast forward ten years to the Summer of 2021, and I realized it was now or never to complete Beneath Sheep’s Clothing. Some things shifted in my life and in January 2022 I put my then 7-year-old son back in a brick-and-mortar school for a time so I could catch the book up to modern day. What had happened with communism and the schools and churches since 2011? Obviously, quite a lot. I came across the revelatory content of James Lindsay and Trevor Loudon, which in particular helped fill in the holes of the subsequent decade – everything from the true nature of Critical Race Theory, the existence of neo-Marxist queer and gender theories, and the fact that in the ensuing 10 years since I last worked on my book, the evangelical churches had become deeply infested with Marxist infiltration from the top down. I did have some freak-out moments realizing how communist incursion in America had become exponentially worse!
https://www.amazon.com/Beneath-Sheeps-Clothing-Communist-Parallels/dp/0578265850/
When I finally self-published Beneath Sheep’s Clothing on Amazon in late March of 2022, it had been exactly 20 years since I had first begun research for my thesis. When I clicked the button to publish the book, I was sure I was going to feel a sense of relief that my work was finally complete! Only that’s not what happened. I lay awake in bed that night until 4 AM, seeing in my mind’s eye concepts from my book in cinematic format. It felt like I was being shown that this was the next step for me. I said a prayer asking God to send me someone who could work with video in the way needed, if this was to be. And then I left it at that.
One month later I was contacted by a documentary filmmaker – Steve Sorensen of Sacred Honor Media – with whom I was connected on Facebook. He told me he saw me post about my book and it sounded like it should be made into a documentary. He asked if I was open to discussing that with him. I said yes, and a few months later we decided to move forward – even without any money for me to pay him. We filmed the first interview for Beneath Sheep’s Clothing with Alex Newman in November 2022. It was powerful and shocking – filling in so many holes on the communist history of public education in America from its very inception and beyond! Once we had our first film trailer ready in May 2023, I emailed it to James Lindsay whom I had met nearly a year earlier at an event he spoke at in Utah. I asked him if he would allow me to interview him for the film and he agreed to participate! A month later he was in southern Utah sitting for the first of 3 interviews I would do with him. A month and a half after that when the Utah podcasters Jason and Alexia Preston of We ARE the People held a fundraiser for the film, we miraculously met an old friend of theirs, Cristhian Palacios who agreed to fully fund the film. He flew to Utah all the way from south Florida not because he knew he was attending a fundraiser, but because James Lindsay would be there and he really wanted to meet him in person. The Soviets demolished countless ornate Christian churches in their bid to destroy Christianity. And, ironically, a man named Cristhian Palacios (“Christian palaces” in Spanish) decided to do his best to help damage the cause of communism in America by funding a film exposing the communist playbook to dismantle Christianity and culture in America!
We had our stressful moments producing Beneath Sheep’s Clothing, but I was able to interview the absolute best people possible for the film. And the footage of our reenactments of a Soviet classroom and modern woke American classroom did not disappoint! After premiering the initial version of the film in January 2024, our funder and Executive Producer was blown away. It was much better than he was expecting, and he wanted to put in some more time and money to make it the absolute best it could be. The final version of the film was released in August 2024 and is available at
https://beneathsheepsclothing.movie
and the Salem Now streaming platform for online streaming and for purchase on DVD.
Now it is mid-November 2024 at the time of my writing this article. The 2024 Election has come and (mostly) gone. Americans made their choice – not for the communism of a Kamala Harris administration, but for a radical transformation of America back to sanity, prosperity, and freedom. People are now saying that “woke is dead.” But I must caution that it is still in the schools. Beneath Sheep’s Clothing exposes that better than anything else out there. Woke is also still in many if not most of the churches. It’s still rampant throughout the culture our children are swimming in. Beneath Sheep’s Clothing is just as much if not more relevant now as it was leading up to the election. No matter what those in Washington DC may do, we the people have much work to do at the “bottom” - work that only we can do at the local and state level. We must reclaim our culture, through persuasion, to one that supports freedom rather than the woke Marxist one we currently have that is preparatory to a communist takeover of society. We must dismantle the Marxist indoctrination machinery that has been installed in our schools through Social & Emotional Learning, and much more.
Please watch Beneath Sheep’s Clothing and share it. Get the book, as well. And may we all be blessed by God as we work together for the cause of freedom in our nation and world!
Julie Behling is the author of the book "Beneath Sheep’s Clothing - The Communist Takeover of Culture in the USSR & Parallels in Today’s America." She is the writer and producer of the documentary Beneath Sheep’s Clothing and co-founder of The People's Network. She is a homeschool mom and resides in southern Utah. Find her on X here.
