It doesn’t seem like it’s Christians who are “intolerant of criticism,” does it?
Whatever happened to “I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it”? That Voltairean principle, it seems, may not survive the thorough secularization of Western societies.
Isn’t it odd that intolerant Christians are defending free speech rights in court? While the presumably more enlightened and tolerant folks who don’t like what the Christians say are resorting to the law to shut them up?
As a matter of fact, it’s not a historical anomaly for the Christians to be on the side of civil liberties. If you know more about the history of free speech than the notion that the Enlightenment freed us from religious oppression—or the popular story about how Europeans, exhausted by the Wars of Religion, decided for tolerance because they realized that the establishment of religious truth wasn’t worth all that bloodletting—then you may know about John Milton’s Areopagitica.
The Areopagitica is an early high water mark in the history of the free press. It’s a pamphlet written by a Puritan urging the Puritan Parliament of England to allow unlicensed printing. The Areopagitica predates not only the Enlightenment but even the end of the war over religion in England. And its argument for freedom of the press rests on explicitly Christian grounds. Religious truth, Milton urged, is so important that truth-seekers need all the light that even bad books might shed on that truth.
Christianity played a crucial role in the establishment of the civil liberties we enjoy. And Christians are on the front lines defending those liberties today. These are important facts to remember, when evaluating warnings about “Christianists” and “theocracy.”
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