On Monday morning, Alliance Defending Freedom published a Freedom Matters episode that sets forth the Philadelphia Statement as a tangible solution the pressing need to recommit to free speech and civil discourse. The video asks critical question: Will our generation be the one that saved free speech, or the one that gave it up? This is the question facing the United States as social media gatekeepers, campus speech codes, and “cancel culture” threaten to silence free speech in the name of tolerance, diversity, and inclusion. What can we do to save this fundamental right in our free society? Stand up, speak out, and sign on to the Philadelphia Statement, at www.ThePhillyStatement.org.
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“This summer—just as saying something controversial (or not saying something mandatory) got numerous charitable leaders excoriated, several academic leaders dumped, a host of editors and writers ousted, and articles and books cancelled by angry mobs—something interesting happened,” Philanthropy Roundtable wrote in its quarterly magazine. “Symmetrical open letters were published by separate groups of center-left thinkers and center-right thinkers, both of them warning that free speech, personal expression, and democratic functioning are being seriously threatened right now.”
Click here to read the article in full.
“In today's polarized political climate, many people are afraid to voice their beliefs,” Love and Fidelity Network executive director Alain Oliver writes. “Across ideologies, philosophies, and religious backgrounds, many have found themselves demonized and silenced. We at the Love and Fidelity Network, and our students, are too frequently subjected to retaliation for emphasizing the importance of discussing family, marriage, and sexual integrity, which is why we signed the Philadelphia Statement on Civil Discourse and the Strengthening of Liberal Democracy.”
Read the article in full here.
With over 15,000 signatures since its August 11 launch, the Philadelphia Statement continues to draw support from across a wide spectrum of ideological beliefs and spheres of influence.
As the Christian Post reported Friday morning, new signers include Babylon Bee CEO Seth Dillon and theologian Wayne Grudem, who highlight a newly released list of public signatories to the Statement.
Read the article here.
At its website Thursday, Americans for Prosperity CEO Emily Seidel voiced her support for the Philadelphia Statement and the thousands of everyday Americans who have signed onto the Statement since its launch on August 11.
Read the article here.
Writing at the Toronto Sun on Monday, George Mason University Professor of Economics Walter E. Williams clapped back at censorship and microaggressions on college campuses, pointing to the Philadelphia Statement as an encouraging sign of a much-needed recommitment to free speech.
Read the article here.
Why did you sign the Philadelphia statement?
Like many other people, I’m very concerned about the status of civil discourse in the United States right now. We see this in phenomena like cancel culture, where what you say or even think can get you erased from history and the public square. It's not as if we haven't had periods like this in the past—that's happened on many, many occasions. But what I think is striking about the present moment is just how ideologically driven it is. There’s a concerted effort to limit what people can say or think.
What we’re seeing isn’t an exchange of ideas, but instead, it's essentially about tearing people down and drowning them out with more noise so that their ideas and thoughts don't even have a chance of being articulated in the public square. This is why the Philadelphia Statement is needed, and it’s why I was very happy to sign it.
Why do you think we have lost the ability to disagree well with each other? And why do you think it has snowballed at such an accelerated pace?
I think there are several reasons, some of which have been around for a while, some of which have been precipitated by more recent events. There are many people for whom politics is essentially a substitute religion. All religions have dogmas and doctrines, and there is an intensity to the way we discuss religious truths and ideas. But substituting politics for religion leads you to a place where, if I don't win this particular argument, I’m willing to embark on a pseudo-religious quest to shut down those who are on the opposite side of the question.
This mindset is becoming more and more apparent. Perhaps it is magnified by the fact we are in a presidential election year, but we find many people who have a “winning-justifies-everything” attitude, even if it means that we have to destroy the public square in order to win. Other issues like the COVID pandemic and the uptick in urban violence are simply adding more fuel to the fire.
What do you believe are the benefits of pluralism in a society?
You always learn something from a society in which genuine pluralism prevails. Pluralism can be a positive good in the sense that differences of view, differences of institutions, differences of even politics and religion can and should be undergirded by a concern for truth and the search for truth. In these conditions, you can find that there are often different ways of approaching and trying to understand truth questions that, while dissimilar, highlight different dimensions of the same truth.
Now, the challenge is to make sure that pluralism doesn't become a synonym for relativism, whereby we say all views are the same, all views are equally sound or valid. Once you go down that path, pluralism gets untethered from a concern for the truth and starts to lose its point. It is easy to see how pluralism can degenerate into pure subjectivism or pure relativism. In such conditions, we stop bothering to even try and enter into the world of the person with whom we’re conversing.
Once that concern for truth goes away, you're just basically talking at or past each other, rather than being engaged for a mutual search for truth. So pluralism, plus a concern for truth, I think, is a way of deepening our understanding of the nature of truth. Pluralism plus relativism inevitably ends up with people living in bubbles and shouting at each other.
If we want a society that is pluralistic, in which viewpoint diversity is respected, what principles can we return to? How do we get there?
It has to start with a concern for truth. That’s essential if you're going to have a pluralism of viewpoint that is constructive and moves toward greater knowledge of the true and good. You also need institutional settings in which that type of pluralism can exist and flourish. These institutions do exist—or at least they used to. They are called colleges and universities. You could even say that they used to exist in large segments of the media. But we all know that intellectual pluralism is not prevailing in institutions like colleges and universities.
We need to rehabilitate colleges, universities and the media as places in which civil discussion of controversial and sometimes complicated issues can occur. No one should have to go into a discussion thinking “if I say what I think, I'm going to lose my job. If I say what I think, my tenure is going to be in peril. If I say what I think, no one in my department is going to talk to me.” If I am a student, I should not be worried that “if I say what I think, my professor is going to give me a C, rather than an A. This is why we need to rehabilitate viewpoint diversity—one that is genuinely concerned with truth and free intellectual inquiry—in our institutions.
In a recent episode of Thinking in Public, a forum dedicated to examining cultural and theological issues, Dr. R. Albert Mohler, Jr., the President of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, speaks with New Discourses founder and President Dr. James Lindsay about his new book, Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything about Race, Gender, and Identity—and Why This Harms Everybody.
Both Mohler and Lindsay are signatories of the Philadelphia Statement, so while they approach the conversation from different worldviews – Mohler is a Christian and Lindsay is an atheist – they find common ground in valuing viewpoint diversity.
During the show, Mohler and Lindsay cover a lot of ground, touching on critical theory, classical liberalism, and the current state of public discourse in America. “As a means of conflict resolution, [classical] liberalism allows you to forward your idea, me to forward my idea, you check my ideas, I check yours, and ideally, we would be carving away wheat from chaff by that process,” Lindsay remarks. Diversity of opinion is a critical feature of a free society and without it, we’re unable to explore truth through open debate. After all, as Lindsay points out, “ideas have consequences,” and the ideology driving cancel culture serves as a perfect reminder of this.
Mohler and Lindsay’s conversation is an example of what it looks like to patiently and charitably analyze even hotly contested issues with someone holding different opinions. To create a culture in which we can fiercely disagree with one another and yet still treat each other with dignity, this vision must be fostered – and it starts with every one of us. Join the movement to protect free speech and diversity of opinion and sign the Philadelphia Statement today.
Praising it as a “much-needed statement in response to the prevalent cancel culture that is threatening the bedrock of American right of free speech,” senior editor and director of the cultural program at the Independent Women’s Forum Charlotte Hays encouraged readers to read and sign the Philadelphia Statement.
Read the article here.
Diversity of thought is indispensable to a free society.
When the marketplace of ideas is open to differing opinions, we not only learn from each other, but we are forced to confront diverse opinions and even learn how to best defend our own. That’s why it’s vital that we protect the ability to speak freely in the public square and the right to search for truth with confidence that we won’t be punished for our beliefs.
But today, Twitter mobs condemn diversity of thought. Colleges bar students from sharing their faith with classmates. Even corporations are censoring and economically discriminating against certain viewpoints
Thankfully, over ten thousand people have taken a stand to commit to free speech and civil discourse, by signing the Philadelphia Statement. Signatories to the Philadelphia Statement include a diversity of thought leaders like Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Dr. Robert P. George, John Stonestreet, and Dr. James Lindsay.
And now, theologians Wayne Grudem and John Frame are adding themselves to the many signatories joining the movement against cancel culture.
Dr. Grudem, an evangelical theologian and professor of theology at Phoenix Seminary, said he signed the statement because “freedom of speech is increasingly threatened today, not just by governmental power but also by unruly mobs that have discovered that they face no punishment for using physical violence or social media intimidation and blacklisting to silence dissenting voices.”
“Freedom of speech enables us to shine a light on falsehood and reveal truth,” notes Dr. Grudem. “Because, after 3,000 years, the statement still holds true that ‘The one who states his case first seems right, until the other comes and examines him’” (Proverbs 18:17).
Dr. Frame, professor emeritus at Reformed Theological Seminary, likewise shares the concern that free speech is under attack:
I do believe that there are some kinds of evil speech like slander and libel that God condemns and that government should restrict. But this role of government should be sharply limited and subject to court challenge. No government official has the right to tell me what I should think or write. I have always been deeply grateful to God for allowing me to live in a country that has freedom of speech written into its very constitution. And I am terribly grieved that some groups are trying to take that freedom away from us.
From a Christian perspective, everything is under God’s control, even the fraught political discourse of our age.
“I believe that the Gospel has implications for all areas of life,” writes Dr. Frame. “If God is King, then only he has ultimate authority over our speech, feelings, and actions. This principle is a great blessing to the politics of nations: for if God is King, nobody else is absolute. If God is sovereign, people are free. If God alone can govern our speech, nobody else can.”
Join Wayne Grudem, John Frame, and thousands more in the movement to restore a culture of free speech and civil discourse by signing the Philadelphia Statement today!
