Does Free Speech Come from Government or from God?

​“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

​Those words, penned by Thomas Jefferson in the Declaration of Independence in 1776, were revolutionary in every sense. They defined human rights not as gifts bestowed on people by their rulers, but as birthrights we all possess as human beings. In a provocative and thought-provoking essay published by the Ethics and Public Policy Center, Andrew Walker and Kristen Waggoner ask whether the right to free speech is related, as the Declaration suggested, to the will of our Creator.
 
Of course, for that question to make sense, one must believe in God. The late Nat Hentoff, author of Free Speech for Me, But Not for Thee, was a confirmed atheist and passionate defender of free speech. He believed in the ethical roots of free speech – as well as its value for democracy. But Walker and Waggoner see moral roots in free speech – “not merely a political concession of liberal democracies but [one that] arises from humanity’s nature as rational agents made in the image of God, created to be seekers and speakers of truth.”
 
The rub, as Pontius Pilate asked, is: What is truth? The answer from belief is that truth is rock-solid and not subject to the relativism of politicians. “In general,” the authors write, “speech enters a ‘danger zone’ when people abandon the pursuit and expression of truth, allowing prurient (valueless), scandalous, malicious, and inciteful (physically animating) speech to predominate.” They later write: “Not all sinful speech should invite government regulation.”
 
On that note, we can imagine Lenny Bruce crushing a cigarette on the floor and saying – with a few choice expletives – “not any *@#$% regulation at all!” Walker and Waggoner, however, in defining their “Public Theology of Free Speech,” also see the dangers of government regulation: “We allow free speech as a political concession in service of a deeper moral and theological right – the right to seek and speak the truth.”
 
As theologians have argued for millennia, free will enables sin, but without that enablement, no virtue would be possible. The same holds true for speech. The Supreme Court allows government sanction of direct calls for violence, as well as the punishment of libel and false advertising. Going further than that risks tampering with free will. The authors quote Christ, who warned in the parable of the weeds, “lest in gathering the weeds you root up the wheat along with them.”
 
Whether the roots of free speech are divine or ethical, Walker and Waggoner converge with Hentoff on the value of free speech. The latter wrote:
 
“Those who created this country chose freedom. With all of its dangers. And do you know the riskiest part of that choice they made? They actually believed that we could be trusted to make up our own minds in the whirl of differing ideas. That we could be trusted to remain free, even when there were very, very seductive voices – taking advantage of our freedom of speech – who were trying to turn this country into the kind of place where the government could tell you what you can and cannot do.”
 
Is there a better use of humanity’s free will than that?

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