Hate Speech And The Christian

A couple things seem clear for Christians. First, hate speech is not right for someone following Jesus Christ. I just heard earlier today from a black pastor who said in his younger days when he lived in Atlanta he was not allowed to attend a white church. The church actually split over the decision, and the whole experience affected his understanding of race relations and reconciliation. I’m referring to Dr. Tony Evans who spoke on race relations at the height of the BLM protests and riots. He’s also written a book on the subject. Here’s part of the description:

Oneness is hard achieve. Let the kingdom unity of Scripture point the way.

Today’s world is torn apart. Tension is everywhere. Brother is pitted against brother, sister against sister, citizen against citizen, even Christian against Christian. It’s so hard to find agreement—much less real harmony—in our polarized society. Can there be a way forward?

Tony Evans knows how elusive unity can be. As a black man who’s also a leader in white evangelicalism, he understands how hard it can be to bring these worlds together. Yet he’s convinced that the gospel provides a way for Christians to find oneness despite the things that divide us.

If you’ve never heard him speak, here’s a video I chose randomly. He’s Biblical.

All that to say, Christians of many races believe in the unity of believers that crosses racial and ethnic lines. Christians around the world understand that hate speech is against God’s plan. I mean, if a person believes the Bible, he’ll see right there in 1 John 4:21:

If someone says, “I love God,” and yet he hates his brother or sister, he is a liar; for the one who does not love his brother and sister whom he has seen, cannot love God, whom he has not seen.

The second thing that should be clear is that we believers will soon become the target of those who accuse of hate speech, with the accusations will come the whole cancel culture pressure.

Why do I think this? If Christians are not to engage in hate speech, how is it that we will be accused of it?

We’ve already seen this. In a recent election, Christian business owners who supported voting for a heterosexual definition of marriage, were boycotted, and some were harassed. Since then, the concept of “hate speech” has only grown.

As long as Christians teach what the Bible does—that God created us in His image, but sin entered the world and marred His good creation; ever since, every human alive struggles with a sin nature that only Christ can take care of—we will be the target of hate speech. People who are deceiving themselves don’t like to be told they are sinners in need of a Savior. I even had one atheist who used to visit here some years ago, tell me that teaching children that they are sinners is akin to child abuse.

It’s not. It’s actually the most loving thing a person can do, on the par with a doctor telling a patient that he has cancer, but that there is a treatment that has 100% success rate. That doctor would be accused of malpractice if he “loved” his patient so much he didn’t want to give him the bad news about the cancer.

In the same way, Christians show our love for the broken and dying world by telling them the good news—which, of course, follows the bad news of our condition.

In reality, broken people know they are broken. They might not want to admit it. They may dress up their circumstances to look a if they are not broken, but they aren’t fooling anyone else. Just themselves. Their spouse, their kids, their boss, their fellow employees, even their good friends know the flaws and foibles. Because we try so desperately to hide our sin condition, someone needs to tell us the truth.

I just heard a program by Focus on the Family today which featured two guests who were both formerly in the transgender lifestyle. One man who had presented as a woman. One woman who had presented as a man. The woman said she finally came to understand her need to leave that life when, as a Christian seeking God, she read Psalm 139. Here are the pertinent verses:

For You created my innermost parts;
You wove me in my mother’s womb.
I will give thanks to You, because I am awesomely and wonderfully made;
Wonderful are Your works,
And my soul knows it very well.
My frame was not hidden from You
When I was made in secret,
And skillfully formed in the depths of the earth;

She asked herself then, What have I done?

Praise God she and the male guest both “came to their senses,” much like the prodigal son in the Biblical parable, and returned to the life God had intended for them.

But how long will Christians be allowed to say things like God heals the broken gender-confused individual? We are on a course in which that statement will soon be considered hate speech.

The main thing, I think, is for Christians to do what Daniel did: when confronted with compromise, he made up his mind to do things God’s way. We today must make up our mind, and the sooner, the better. Are we going to continue preaching what the Bible says, or are we going to bow to the culture? Many Christians have already decided to follow the culture when it comes to child rearing. Many follow the culture in the matter of woman pastors. Where is our line in the sand, that point where we say, as the apostles said, We ought to obey God rather than man? At that point, we will likely be accused of hate speech.

Hate Speech—Some Implications

I have to admit— twenty years ago I did not see “cancel culture” coming. I did not see the US President being banned from a social media platform. I did not see censorship of books in print, of cartoons. But sadly, in the name of “protecting” the world from “hate speech,” that’s where we are. I suspect we have only begun to see the tip of the iceberg.

For instance, some may not realize that back in January the San Francisco School Board voted to change the names of 44 different schools. Fortunately the decision has been stalled, but the intent is to eliminate such school names as Abraham Lincoln High School, George Washington High School, Dianne Feinstein Elementary, Roosevelt Middle School, Jefferson Elementary and Alamo Elementary. When I saw those names I thought it an odd list. Here’s the explanation, according to CNN, including one that explains why the current sitting Democrat California US Senator is included:

Lincoln was chosen based on “his treatment of First Nation peoples,” teacher Jeremiah Jeffries told the San Francisco Chronicle in December 2020.
Washington and Jefferson were slaveowners.

Feinstein, a former San Francisco mayor, was listed for reportedly ordering a Confederate flag to be replaced after it was torn down, according to the Sacramento Bee. (CNN)

This movement to expunge American history of names and statues and pictures of people associated in some way with what today’s culture has ruled harmful, is just beginning. The pictures of African-American business innovators, Uncle Ben and Aunt Jemima, have been removed or changed on their product. Why? I guess because they don’t look like African-Americans of today.

And so goes the culture under the iron hand of “hate speech.” That’s why the Washington Redskins is now the Washington Football Team, and their once proud logo that depicted a fierce Indian wearing a headdress, has now become WFT printed in caps on the helmet.

Surprisingly logos such as Notre Dame’s Fighting Irish or the Tampa Bay Buccaneers which also single out a specific group of people as representative of their respective team, have received no criticism. So, practically speaking, logos that identify minorities that have not received the “hate speech” label are OK . . . today. But tomorrow, that could change.

After all, if Diane Feinstein can be reelected to the Senate five times and receive “the most popular votes in any U.S. Senate election in history,” yet still have her name scrubbed from the name of an elementary school in her home state, then clearly the tide can turn on anyone at any time.

Perhaps the ridiculousness of this “hate speech” run amok is best seen in the censorship of six Dr. Seuss titles (they call it “self-censorship, but the media pressure spurred the action) and in the cancellation of a cartoon featuring a skunk, Pepe Le Pew.

The sad thing is, removing books like Huckleberry Finn and Uncle Tom’s Cabin from libraries because they contain the n___ word or because they depict slavery, means we are to deny a great chunk of history—not our own only, but also of the rest of the world. Certainly we should not glorify the stereotypes of old or the evils of the past, but acknowledging them seems vital. How can a people learn from their mistakes if we are never allowed to talk about them?

In addition, how are we to learn that people are not just all evil or all good—as if Abraham Lincoln, who signed into law the Emancipation Proclamation that ended slavery, was a wicked man because of some report that his treatment of Native Americans didn’t meet the 21st Century standards. Was he perfect? Of course not. But he has rightly been celebrated because of his stand against Southern secession and ultimately against slavery.

I haven’t even mentioned the change of rules in the US House of Representatives:

The 117th Congress altered the definition of “relative” to be gender-neutral and succinct. That change, in full:

(3) In clause 8(c)(3) of rule XXIII, strike “father, mother, son, daughter, brother, sister, uncle, aunt, first cousin, nephew, niece, husband, wife, father-in-law, mother-in-law, son-in-law, daughter-in-law, brother-in-law, sister-in-law, stepfather, stepmother, stepson, stepdaughter, stepbrother, stepsister, half brother, half sister, grandson, or granddaughter” and insert “parent, child, sibling, parent’s sibling, first cousin, sibling’s child, spouse, parent-in-law, child-in-law, sibling-in-law, stepparent, stepchild, stepsibling, half-sibling, or grandchild” (WUSA9).

Or what about YouTube removing some 30,000 videos created by doctors and health workers who discussed reasons not to receive the Covid vaccine? Apparently it’s “hateful” to think for yourself today.

How many other businesses or books or historical figures will we lose along the way to the far, far left’s dream of a classless, sexless, “woke” society under their control?

Hate Speech—What It Is

Years ago, I learned that not all speech was protected in the US by our First Amendment to the Constitution. The words as they are written sound as if they are. In fact a former Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. once asserted that the Constitution and the First Amendment are not just about protecting “free thought for those who agree with us but freedom for the thought that we hate.” Here’s what the First Amendment actually says:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press, or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances. (emphasis mine)

However, as time passed the Supreme Court pivoted a bit, believing there were abridgments, or curtailment of rights, in speech. The classic example that makes such perfect sense is that no one has a right to yell, “Fire” in a crowded theater when there is no fire. To do so could be harmful, so people don’t have that freedom.

The idea of “hate speech,” then, was first tied to the concept of harm—if someone said something to incite violence, that was hate speech.

But like so many things, the concept of hate speech expanded. According to an article at The Heritage Foundation by Kim R. Holmes, Ph.D.,

All this started to change with the rise of radical multiculturalism. Under its influence the ideas of hate speech and hate crimes were invented. Instead of worrying about the violent intent of individuals, hate speech advocates wanted to ban utterances, gestures, conduct, or writing that they deemed prejudicial against a protected individual or group.”The Origins Of Hate Speech“

The article goes on to identify President Clinton’s broad-brush blame placed on “the loud and angry voices of hate” for the Oklahoma City bombing, as moving the needle from blaming the actual persons engaged in speech deemed hateful to blaming people who held political or moral beliefs that they shared with that individual.

A decade later, the idea of hate speech advanced further:

In 2009, the National Hispanic Media Coalition outlined its definition in a report. It specified four areas as hate speech: false facts, flawed argumentation, divisive language, and dehumanizing metaphors.

Hate speech was no longer about the explicit words of individuals meant to incite violence, but a general atmosphere of public opinion that could be construed to encourage violence against certain kinds of people.

With this expanded definition, then, social media platforms declared a discussion of election irregularities as “false facts” (what an oxymoron), and therefore felt justified in removing those posts and even blocking any number of people from using their site.

Sadly, we have moved so far along the line that a writer at the Washington Post concluded his article by saying, “All speech is not equal. And where truth cannot drive out lies, we must add new guardrails.”

Ironically, his argument hinges on the idea that truth doesn’t always win out. We can’t just let people discuss ideas because they can be fooled. He cites some stats about middle schoolers and high schoolers to prove his point. Middle schoolers? High schoolers? Apparently his belief is that adults are just as easily fooled as they, though there was a marked increase in the ability of the older kids to discern lies.

Oddly, when I was of that middle school age, I had teachers who taught the class how to recognize loaded, slanted, negative words that were used to manipulate rather than to inform. We called it propaganda, and the USSR was the prime example of its use, though clearly anyone trying to sell something was apt to use loaded, slanted, and overly positive words to manipulate, too.

In fact, one of the reasons it’s important to know who is backing a particular article (the Washington Post vs the Heritage Foundation, for example) is to help recognize the direction of the slant those words might take.

Clearly, the move toward the use of “guardrails,” which is just a palatable way of saying censorship, is accelerating. The real issue today is, who gets to tell the rest of us where those “guardrails” are? In other words, who gets to censor our speech? Personally, I tend to think censoring someone is apt to make them angrier and less inclined to unite, rather than make them feel all peaceful and fuzzy and warm. Maybe that’s just me.

Featured photo by Stas Tsibro from Pexels

Hate Speech, An Introduction

I think the topic of “hate speech” is so significant, it needs a lengthy treatment, but I don’t think I can or should put it all into one post. First, some initial thoughts.

Hate speech fits into a wider contest of censorship, cancel culture, and the role of the press—at least it does here in the US.

Essentially the cat got out when journalists crossed a line and started calling President Trump a liar, right in their headlines of their newspapers, and then those words were quoted (or parroted) by the “legacy” broadcast media. Of course, this negative slant, not the unbiased reporting which has marked journalism over the years, fit in well with the social media bans on whatever they deemed “hate speech.”

We already had a growth in “cancel culture,” which had it’s roots in boycotts and other shaming tactics bent on hurting a company or a person financially. Initially these methods were used to foster change—such as South Africa ending apartheid. But the tool has become a sledge hammer designed more to punish than to correct.

What ironically ends up taking place is one side declares a party guilty of hate speech, then heaps hateful invective on them in a way that causes others to do the same. In other words, this atmosphere of cancel culture approves of hate speech that attacks hate speech.

Of course, the supposed goal of this process is to bring an end to ugly disagreements and disharmony. The answer is the same that the Soviet Union settled on: eliminate opposition by silencing people with opposing views. Then all can appear calm and unified.

Some may think this is an extreme way of describing what’s happening in Western culture, but it’s not. Silencing and censoring people start with small steps. The greatest surprise is that the social media giants have moved as quickly as they have.

When I first joined Facebook some ten years ago, I refused to create content on their site. As I read their agreement (well, skimmed it) I realized they were claiming the right over my work. They could use it or delete it at will. But they never actually ever did. Until now.

First, the Big Tech communication platform groups stopped acting like a platform and started acting like publishers. It was their opinion and theirs alone that decided what was “hate speech,” and would therefore be censored or not.

The greatest example of this was the successful squelching of the Hunter Biden/China story before the election. The New York Post, the fourth largest newspaper in the US, published a story about Hunter’s activities and the possibility that his father knew about what he was doing, but before many could share the story, the social media gurus labeled this fact-based story as “false,” and therefore hateful. Further, the legacy media outlets claimed, without any basis in fact, that the story was “Russian disinformation.”

In other words, people who wanted to repeat the story, to let others know what it said, were silenced, or at least restricted from passing the information along to a wide audience.

In many ways a similar treatment of the riots that erupted from BLM protests, was handled in the same way. Not completely because most people knew there was something going on. But when a reporter stands in front of a burning building and claims that the protests are “mostly peaceful,” there is a problem.

In other words, as I see it, there is a connection with “hate speech” labeling, cancel culture, and honest reporting. Now, apparently, “legacy media” outlets have no qualms about slanting their stories to meet their own particular biases. Or, more accurately, the biases of the owners and editors that run the show.

I honestly can’t remember how I found this video, but the point for this article is, this speaker is an “insider,” a journalist who knows what she’s talking about. The video is long, but I thought she was an interesting speaker and supported her claims with specific examples. I had intended to listen to a few minutes in order to get the gist of what she was saying, but ended up listening to the whole video.

More on hate speech another day.

Featured Photo by Lina Kivaka from Pexels