We are living in a culture where activist shout down, try to cancel out, and label people who don’t agree with them. For example, anyone who believes that black people should be treated equally and fairly in society, cannot possibly support President Trump. Recently, a former professional football player said that those who support Trump, and are also supporting an end to racism, are insincere. Those who want to abolish police forces will call you a fascist and racist if you disagree. Author JK Rowling recently gave her opinion in favor of the traditional male-female relationship, and the radical left exercised extreme “cancel culture” methods to silence her. Sadly, the socialist radical left is become the mainstream left.
Cancel culture calls for boycotting a person because of perceived problematic behaviors or actions. When the larger public decides someone is “canceled,” it will avoid supporting or engaging with that person, trying to foment a decline in that person’s relevance. Professor and social commentator Jordan Peterson explains this as underserved access to power. He says the classical defense for free speech is that it is good to exchange opinions. In dialogue, we can alter one another’s opinions in a way that is mutually beneficial. But Peterson says, “There is no autonomous individual in the post-modern world. You don’t have ideas or opinions. There is your group, your identity, your struggle for power and that’s all.”
The current environment in America reflects this phenomena and it is very dangerous to your freedoms of speech and religion. Socialists are trying to place a death grip on our free society. Christians must stand otherwise freedom will cease to exist. “Freedom sees in religion the companion of its struggles and its triumphs, the cradle of its infancy, the divine source of its rights. It considers religion as the safeguard of mores; and mores as the guarantee of laws and the pledge of its own duration.”–these are the words of Alexis de Tocqueville, a French aristocrat who came to America in the 1830s to observe what made the country so great. His “Democracy in America” is considered a historic treasure about the unique success of the United States. Tocqueville wrote that America is free because of its collective Christian religion.
What we are experiencing today is not new, just louder. Cotton Mather wrote in 1820, “There is a liberty of corrupt nature, which is affected both by men and beasts, to do what they list; and this liberty is inconsistent with authority, impatient of all restraint; by this liberty we are all inferior; ‘tis the grand enemy of truth and peace, and all the ordinances of God are bent against it. But there is a civil, a moral, a federal liberty, which is the proper end and object of authority; it is a liberty for that only which is just and good; for this liberty you are to stand with the hazard of your very lives.” Galatians 5:1 says, “Stand fast therefore in the liberty wherewith Christ has made us free, and be not entangled again with the yoke of bondage.” As Christians, we must demand and accept no other form of liberty.
