Christopher Stroop points out some unseemly similarities in the weaponization of the First Amendment when it comes to religious liberty and free speech
The theocratic Christian right, alongside fringe alt-right voters, is at the core of the success of President Donald Trump, whose presidency has been marked by GOP-enabled disinformation campaigns and a brazen disregard for democracy. In the 2016 presidential election, 81 percent of white evangelicals voted for Trump. That may be why the MAGA crowd seems to weaponize bad-faith arguments for religious liberty as often as it does for free speech, with the ultimate goal of restricting the freedom of others. How do we counter dishonest appeals to democratic values?
In the first volume of The Open Society and Its Enemies, published in 1945, the Austrian-born British philosopher Karl Popper warns that “in order to maintain a tolerant society, the society must be intolerant of intolerance.” In his seminal 1971 A Theory of Justice, however, American political philosopher John Rawls argues that those committed to justice should extend tolerance to “intolerant sects.” Yet even Rawls concedes there should be limits “when the tolerant sincerely and with reason believe that their institutions of liberty are in danger.”
According to Frederick Clarkson, a senior research analyst at the think tank Political Research Associates, “the demagogic statements by President Trump and his allies who call the media the ‘enemy of the people’ are the most serious threats to free speech” in our current political environment. Melissa Hooper, a director at the nonpartisan organization Human Rights First, similarly argues that we should be concerned that “leaders like the president and other influential figures are confusing facts they don’t like with false information.”
We must embrace a robust concept of religious freedom in order to counter the Christian right’s attempts to claim it as justification for censorship and discrimination.
People who are quick to decry what they perceive to be restrictions on their speech tend to use rhetorical strategies similar to those who decry encroachments on religious liberty. The former conflate First Amendment rights with unregulated access to prestigious platforms, as demonstrated by the brouhaha surrounding Milo Yiannopoulos’s canceled appearance at the University of California, Berkeley in 2017, The New York Times’s 2018 firing of Quinn Norton based on her ties to white supremacist Andrew Auernheimer, and The Atlantic’s termination of Kevin Williamson for a 2014 podcast in which he expressed support for hanging women who’ve had abortions.
Williamson’s statement—and his subsequent firing—neatly illustrates how the battle over “religious freedom” waged by the Christian right (which may finally achieve its goal of overturning Roe v. Wade now that Brett Kavanaugh is on the Supreme Court) intersects with bad-faith arguments about freedom of speech. This is ironic, given that evangelical colleges such as Pennsylvania’s Grove City College and Kentucky’s Asbury University invoke “religious liberty” to justify their censorship of student newspapers and suppression of support for LGBTQ rights. For all the concern in our public sphere over liberal students and college administrations supposedly rejecting free speech, this serious campus free-speech crisis remains little-known.
When it comes to abortion, Clarkson notes that religious-liberty rhetoric has already trumped freedom of speech in some jurisdictions. “There are laws in many states that require health care workers to read scripted statements to patients with misleading claims that abortion would increase their risk of breast cancer and suicide,” he says. “Government-mandated false scripts are not only a violation of the free speech of health workers but a violation of a patient’s right to receive unbiased medical information.”
Just as he sees “the best answer to disagreeable speech” as “more speech,” Clarkson believes we must embrace a robust concept of religious freedom in order to counter the Christian right’s attempts to claim it as justification for censorship and discrimination. He notes that in the case of marriage equality, “many Christians, Christian institutions and non-Christians honor the love of same-sex couples.” In other words, religious liberty should not preference anti-LGBTQ religion over affirming religion.
“Bad-faith arguments with respect to freedom of religion often fail to account for the fact that the argument denies the rights of another person,” Hooper says. Given that the rise of American authoritarianism is occurring in an era of bots, trolls and social media manipulation, it will take more than more speech and the embrace of pluralism to restore civil society. Clarkson prescribes deeper involvement in electoral politics and a renewed emphasis on the practice of democratic citizenship. Hooper agrees, suggesting that to counter disinformation, we need to focus on teaching civics and media literacy.
The first step is admitting we have a problem. Living with authoritarian-identifying leaders in power is like being in an abusive relationship: We’re subjected to continual gaslighting. If we want to preserve democracy, we must recognize that not all arguments that invoke democratic values aim to protect all citizens.
This article appears in the Winter 2019 PLAYBOY.