If you had told me back in the 1970s, when I was watching actor Scott Baio on the hit sitcom Happy Days, that 50 years later I would be talking to him about China’s Cultural Revolution, I would have thought you were crazy. Yet here we are. Baio, an outspoken conservative, may be the bravest man in Hollywood.

I got to talk to Baio about the new movie he’s in, God’s Not Dead: In God We Trust, which opens this weekend. The film stars David A. R. White as David Hill, a pastor who enters a congressional race after the sudden death of the incumbent. The favorite to assume the position is state senator Peter Kane, who at first has no serious competition. Kane is a secularist who touts the Enlightenment at every media stop and has deep antipathy towards Christians. Pastor Hill’s campaign inspires people who want more morality, honesty, and decency in American public life. 

Baio plays Wesley, a sleazy opposition researcher who works for Senator Kane. Wesley tries to destroy Hill’s chances by planting false or exaggerated stories about him in the media. One of the minor characters is Martin, played by Paul Kwo, who has come to the U.S. from Communist China. A former atheist and now a Christian, Martin warns Hill about the Cultural Revolution in China and how it has spread to America. The Cultural Revolution was a period in China during the 1960s when people were tortured and killed if they dissented from the Marxist teachings of Mao Zedong. Hollywood loves to make movies about Joe McCarthy, but they are far more reluctant to address China’s Cultural Revolution, perhaps because it bears striking similarities with the past few years in America.

“I think you see it a lot with the persecution Christians,” Baio told me. He continued:

They want to take away the Ten Commandments. You can’t say Merry Christmas. The meaning of Christmas has been totally whitewashed.  I’ll watch a movie where Christmas is about buying gifts for people—that’s not what Christmas is about, it’s about the birth of Christ. From the time that I was a boy until now, so much faith has left this country. There’s no faith in schools, no religion in public schools. I’m going to get a little crazy, but I think what people want is for the government to be God, When you control life and death then you can be God.

Speaking such truth has not been great for Baio’s career in Hollywood. I asked him to gauge how bad the antipathy towards conservatives is in Tinsel Town. “I’ll give you one short story” he said. “A friend of mine contacted ABC because he had an idea for a show. He contacted an executive an ABC named Dawn Soler.  She wrote back: I don’t want Scott ‘Trump’ Baio.”

Baio said it isn’t that he has become a far-right political ideologue—rather, it is liberalism that has gone off the deep end. “I’m the same person I was 10, 20, 30 years ago,” Baio said. Indeed, the pro-God and pro-freedom message of God’s Not Dead was once mainstream in American movies. Despite the liberal takeover of Hollywood since the 1960s, the American public has shown that it is interested in faith-based films. God’s Not Dead: In God We Trust is the fifth in a franchise based on a book by Rice Broocks. The first one, released in 2014, God’s Not Dead, stunned Hollywood, grossing more than $62 million on a $2 million budget. The first film’s success has allowed the filmmakers to attract well-known talent for the sequels. God’s Not Dead: In God We Trust also features Dean Cain, Scott Charlene Tilton, Ray Wise, and Samaire Armstrong.

Joining me for my talk with Baio was the film’s star, David A. R. White. White is a veteran actor in both TV and film, as well as a producer and the founder of Pure Flix, a  Christian film production company.  I mentioned to White that I’ve been covering the Christian film industry for years, and the quality of the movies has gotten better and better. 

“It’s improved to the point where we got Scott Baio to show up in one of these,” White joked. He went on:

I’ve been in this market for a long time. I started doing these in my 20s. I started doing these little short films with no budgets; they were made for all the different ministries at the time. They are the only movies that existed, aside from ones being done with Billy Graham. This is an undeserved marketplace. Half the country are people of faith who say they go to church once a month. They deserve to have movies. 

Both Baio and White also noted this statistic: There are 40 million Christians in America who don’t vote. Both offered a variation on the idea that if you want things to change, people need to get out and vote.

“This is a movie about an underdog who doesn’t want to get involved,” White said. “They eliminate prayer and now they’re going to start taking Christ out of Christmas. It’s a call to action—to get involved. It’s a movie about hope and inspiration. It starts with you.”

“If you believe in God and want this to be a God-fearing nation,” Baio added, “go see this movie. Don’t just get pissed off, vote.”

God’s Not Dead: In God We Trust may spur people to do just that—to avoid the Cultural Revolution coming to America that the character Martin warns about.