"Truth has collapsed into violence, and violence has collapsed into truth."

Columnist Jonah Goldberg’s comment on his podcast, The Remnant, struck a chord within me.

I see this truism at work as I watched a while back the footage of campus protests over the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. I experience the truth/violence collapse when laws are proposed that make certain Biblical views, notably on gender, human sexuality, and abortion, considered by some to be “hate speech.”

For a person of faith, goodness, for all of us, these are uncertain, if not dangerous times.

The freedom of speech, guaranteed to Americans in the First Amendment, is at risk as people equate speech with violence. We insult the victims of battery or sexual assault when violent crimes are equated to mere words in a speech or misgendering a pronoun.

Behind the First Amendment stands philosophical commitments to classical liberalism. Enlightenment thinkers like John Locke and Adam Smith sewed together the concepts of individual freedom, limited government, private property, free markets, and political freedom.

Free speech is the thread holding the world order we know together.

Behind classical liberalism (you see what I’m doing, yes?) lie key Christian truths. Truths that swirled around European monarchies for centuries, but only embraced and enacted 1700 years after Christ.

The doctrine of the Imago Dei (image of God) affords each and every human with dignity, agency, freedom. We reflect God’s thumbprint. In His image as Creator we are mini-creators charged with the cultural mandate (Genesis 1:27-28) to be fruitful and multiply. As free beings God allows us both to fail and succeed in obedience to Him.

There are notable examples throughout Scripture people having the freedom to argue with God, object, plea, and propose alternative courses of action. From Job to Jesus, Moses to Martha, God’s people are free to dialogue with Him without a suggestion of violence or threat. He welcomes our dissent.

If God allows for free speech, it’s the least we can do to afford it to our neighbor.

A Christ-follower’s duty in both maintaining (and redeeming) classical liberalism is to resist the collapse of speech into violence. Doing so affords dignity to one another and respects the vulnerable upon whom true violence has been visited.

May we be so bold.