Within the last year, Peter Hitchens, a British columnist, published an article titled "An Entire Generation are Puzzled by the Idea that Anyone has the Right to say Things they don't Agree With." Hitchens claims, "Free speech is already dead in Britain. It is just that the chattering classes have not realised it yet."
Larry Kirkpatrick reacts to Hitchens' article, and observes there is a violence toward the very idea of freedom embedded in all attacks on free speech.
Within the last year, Peter Hitchens, a British columnist, published an article titled "An Entire Generation are Puzzled by the Idea that Anyone has the Right to say Things they don't Agree With".(1) I only just read it. Hitchens says, "Free speech is already dead in Britain. It is just that the chattering classes have not realised it yet." I'll skip his comment on a then-recent incident at Durham University. It is nothing new to us: university professor says something not outrageous, mob reacts, the university throws him under the bus, and forces him to apologize.
Hitchens:
There is still a very limited liberty to say a few nonconformist things in some newspapers and magazines, and perhaps in some universities and schools. It is also possible on one or two smaller low-audience broadcasting stations and bits of the internet.
I am–for the moment–one of the luckier ones. But I do not expect it to last for ever. I can see that, for most people, true free speech has ceased to exist…. Among millions, the idea that you can defend someone’s right to say something you disagree with is now puzzling. They have no idea why anyone would do that. For them, the debate is over, they have won, and those who oppose them are stupid and wrong.
The whole concept of tolerance has almost died in this generation, as far as I can see.
It is fascinating to note that the holders of these dominant opinions are already starting to joke about actually killing those who disagree with them. I mistrust such jokes, as I have known plenty of people who have dressed up their nastiest thoughts and desires as jests.(2)
When you erode free speech you erode free thought. Thought is always embodied in speech. This is why Jesus says "those things which proceed out of the mouth come from the heart" (Matthew 15:18). When you joke about killing someone for what they said, you are joking about killing them for what they thought. Hitchens warns,
These new totalitarians no doubt deeply oppose the death penalty for murder. Yet in my own home town, Oxford, I have seen people walking around wearing T-shirts carrying the words A Platform For Fascists and a picture of a guillotine, the instrument by which the radical French Revolutionaries murdered thousands of their conservative opponents after kangaroo trials. You can buy these witty garments for a bargain £12.84 on the internet.(3)
There is a violence toward the very idea of freedom embedded in all attacks on free speech. Words scare people. Your words (gasp) might be different than my words. Your conception of reality might be different than my conception of reality. Your words might lead me to think differently than I presently do. Your words might wake me up. I might use my God-given mind to think something new. And we surely cannot have that.
Listen to this clip of Hitchens and Owen Jones:
Jones: Why is it that we are both scared that actualy we're both on the losing side of the culture war?
Hitchens: Well, I expect we both are. And one of the problems with revolutionaries is that they are almost always eaten by the revolutions they engender. And the problem with counterrevolutionaries is that they always get eaten. So, we'll get eaten by the same people for different reasons.
Jones: I think we're both scared of each others' side in this war.
Hitchens: There is nothing to be scared about from my side. My side is totally powerless.(4)
In another clip, Jones talks with people in one of these movements:
Jones: Are we in the middle of a culture war?
Young Woman 1: What is a culture war? It's not a terminology I'm familiar with at all. It sounds daft.
Young Woman 2: This is ending a war. This is to get to peace.(5)
Hitchens shares a personal experience:
A few years ago I was given a warning of what is coming. I went to speak to a meeting at Balliol College in Oxford, about a favourite subject – the foolish destruction of state grammar schools. As I neared the college, the organisers intercepted me, to warn I was the object of a protest.
The demonstrators awaited me, carrying hand-made placards declaring ‘History will forget you’, ‘Stop Platforming Hate’, and ‘Welcome to our Heresy Hunt’.
Rather originally, they had decided to object to me in total silence, and they walked backwards in front of me holding the placards and trying to look hostile.
When I saw one of them walking backwards into a bush, I tried to warn her, but she would not listen to my Fascist advice and duly got badly mixed up in the plant.
Trying not to laugh, I accepted a leaflet from one of them, in which I was denounced in detail for many, many offences against political correctness over many years. It was entitled The Words Of Peter Hitchens – A Brief Guide To The Bigotry And Vanity Of Peter Hitchens. The fascinating thing about it was that it was all very nearly true. By using slanted reported speech and partial quotation, it managed to suggest that I was an even more horrible person than I no doubt am. Most of all, it gave the impression I am motivated by hatred of people rather than by dislike of ideas and policies.
And this is the basis of what will eventually happen to everyone like me. It was the indictment I will face at my show trial, which will come if I live long enough. In a few years the sort of people who took part in that demonstration will be police officers, lawyers, civil servants and, of course, BBC journalists.(6)
Hitchens is right. Those who are being indoctrinated today wlll be those, on the basis of their indoctrination, who kill tomorrow. God gave men freedom to think, freedom to choose; the adversary of souls is ever engaged in the removal of that sacred heritage. You may or may not believe in a devil, but there are today countless disciples of oppression. Some have called them snowflakes. It might be wiser to think of the phenomenon as a radioactive rain destroying the culture that preserved their freedoms. After all, it was the young Russians who bought Lenin's sales pitch and led the 1917 revolution that gave us the USSR. When people do not know how low they can go, they soon find out.
Back to Hitchens' article:
Nonsense, you will say. Free speech may be a bit tattered in this country, but dissenters will never be put on trial, let alone punished for what they have said. But my opponents genuinely think I have spread hate and so done actual damage to vulnerable human beings. They do not view my words as expressions of opinion but as incitement to discrimination against certain people, and as ‘hate speech’ intended to harm.
They also view my doubts about the theory of man-made global warming as ‘denial’ of a fact which they regard as proven. To them, this is little short of sabotage of efforts to combat this peril.
All these positions are modern variations of the totalitarian states which grew up between the two world wars of the 20th Century.
All of them believed that they owned the truth, that they were profoundly good and that those who got in their way were therefore evil as well as wrong.
In Germany, Italy and Russia, this came about through crude seizures of power backed by the threat of street violence. In Spain it followed a barbaric civil war.
Here, in the cleverest revolution in human history, it has come about through a peaceful, often boring and very slow seizure of power over the mind. Do you know what your children are being taught at school about global warming, about sex and marriage, about immigration, about history? Of course you don’t…. You have assumed that, for them, school is like what you experienced. It is not.(7)
And there it is: the "often boring and very slow seizure of power over the mind." The ideas, the way people think, is being changed. That is normal. What is not normal is broad acceptance of the totalitarian assumption that thought is to be policed, that ideas themselves are to be blacklisted.
Hear Hitchens well: "All of them believed that they owned the truth, that they were profoundly good and that those who got in their way were therefore evil as well as wrong."
Nor will these ideas merely roam the secular wild. At the rate things are proceeding, it may not be long before in the church itself, any expression of disagreement with women's ordination, any support for something called "last generation," any divergence from the chief narratives in the surrounding culture, will be deemed dangerous and worthy of being suppressed, no matter what the rules formerly were. The spirit of the age is infecting the church. That's not new. It's just sad.
Hitchens closed with these two sentences:
Our course begins to resemble the Chinese Cultural Revolution of the 1960s, when legions of ignorant, indoctrinated Red Guards pulled down everything they did not understand and cleared the way for a new, more intolerant, narrower world.
It is worse than you think and, as I keep telling you, it is so big that you cannot believe its scale, and that is why most people cannot see it until it is far too late.(8)
I'm not here to incite gloom. But I want you to see it happening today, and have your part in preventing it from becoming reality tomorrow—at least in your church.
And how exactly do we do that? By realizing that liberty, even in the church, is never assured. Each generation must refight the battle to be free. There are always those who think they are so much more right than you are right that they can overturn previously shared rights, processes, and expectations. Constitutions and Bylaws, the system of church order, how we interpret the Bible, everything is apt to be unscrewed and dismantled in service to the ideology of the moment.
Two-thousand years ago Jesus came "to proclaim liberty to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to set at liberty those who are oppressed" (Luke 4:18). This work He will still do if we follow Him toward home.
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Larry Kirkpatrick serves as pastor of the Muskegon and Fremont MI Seventh-day Adventist churches. His website is GreatControversy.org and YouTube channel is “Larry the guy from Michigan.” Every morning Larry publishes a new devotional video.
NOTES
1. Peter Hitchens, "An Entire Generation are Puzzled by the Idea that anyone has the right to say things they don't agree with," Dec. 11, 2021,
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid.
4. Slavery, statues and racism | Owen Jones Beyond the Culture Wars. July 17, 2020, https://youtu.be/P-XIEMwj0GU
5. Ibid.
6. Hitchens.
7. Ibid.
8. Ibid.