The Western tradition of freedom of speech is increasingly under threat in academia, media and politics. This is the claim of Andrew Michta in a recent piece in The American Interest.[1] Michta is concerned that the West is “at an inflection point on free speech, and it’s not clear which way things will go on this issue in the next 20 or 30 years.”
Michta’s concluding sentences reveal what he considers to be at stake in the declining commitment to freedom of speech,
With freedom of speech under assault, the West, both as a polity and as a distinct cultural inheritance, is in the throes of a fundamental battle for the survival of its democratic traditions. It is time for all of us to stand up for liberty. And to do so out loud.
Michta is correct about the significance of declining commitment to free speech. What is at stake in the maintenance of free speech is the very survival of democracy. If speech is constrained, democratic institutions cannot function. Freedom of speech underpins all other democratic freedoms, including religious liberty. Michta points out that we have reached the current situation in a single generation. The Western self-congratulations following the collapse of Soviet and European communism were part of widespread expectations that liberal democracy would sweep the world. I personally cannot recall any high-profile commentator at the time expressing misgivings about the future of democracy.
Yet, against all the trends at the time, freedom of speech and democracy are now in serious jeopardy. How did we arrive at this point? What happened?
Michta chronicles the forces and missteps that have led to the current dire situation. But what is puzzling is the inability of commentators a generation ago to see any potential downside to the triumph of the West, given that the ideas that sustained twentieth-century totalitarianism were influential in significant sectors of the West, including academia and the media. The cultural triumphalism of the West a generation ago masked internal forces that morphed into a more serious danger to the West than anything thrown up by the “living example” of communism in the twentieth century.
But why could the West not see any dangers ahead? Are there no sources of wisdom in the West that might have enabled the culture to anticipate problems with its own triumphalism?
Modern Western culture has significant roots in Biblical revelation. Ironically, this revelation portends a world-wide crisis that presages the second coming of Christ and the end of the world.[2]In this prophecy, the world comes under religio-political totalitarian control. Religious liberty has been expunged from the world. An essential step towards this scenario is loss of freedom of speech.
If the West had not been so consumed with its own triumph and so dismissive of the important Biblical underpinnings of its culture, it might have been more attentive to Biblical prophecy. An enduring awareness of the apocalyptic end of human history might have acted as a counterpoint to the complacency in the West in the immediate aftermath of the collapse of European communism. This didn’t happen. Western culture was undermined not by utopian dreams without but by utopian dreams within. The West turned on itself at the time of its greatest triumph. The West’s survival is not assured.
It is time for another look at the apocalyptic prophecies of the Bible. I am not alone in drawing attention to these prophecies but Chapter 5 of It’s Sunday in America deals in an accessible way with the sobering prophecy of Revelation 13. Given the rapidly declining commitment to freedom of speech in the West, this chapter is worthy of serious consideration by all who value religious freedom.
[1]Michta, Andrew. “The Rise of Unfreedom in the West.” The American Interest. March 19, 2019. https://www.the-american-interest.com/2019/03/19/the-rise-of-unfreedom-in-the-west/
[2]Revelation 13:11-18.
