Wall Street Journal Op-Ed: Social Media is Threatening Christian Religious Freedom
Evan James
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The Wall Street Journal has published an op-ed warning that social media companies are increasingly representing a threat to speech that defends authentic Christian doctrine on sexuality and the family.
“We sense that the First Amendment guarantee of religious liberty is being dismantled, and with it the profound contributions that religion makes to American unity and self-government,” write Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone (San Francisco) and Focus on the Family president Jim Daly in their joint article Thursday.
To illustrate their sense of worry, Cordileone and Daly shared a questionable experience that Presbyterian minister and scholar Carl Trueman had with YouTube. On August 7 he had been offering “a thoughtful analysis of American cultural attitudes toward sex through the lens of classic Christian thought” at the Sacramento Gospel Conference, which Immanuel Baptist Church was livestreaming on their YouTube channel. But YouTube cut the stream on two separate occasions, once for a “copyright violation” and then again for an unspecified “content violation.”
It remains unknown what the “content violation” was. It is also unknown whether a YouTube employee or artificial intelligence cut the livestream.
Social media companies, Cordileone and Daly argue, “enable a new fundamentalism” of sexuality and the human person that is aggressively attempting to displace traditional moral values.
“On public sidewalks, the First Amendment still theoretically protects free speech. In the new public square of the internet, power displaces liberty and conscience,” they write.
There is plenty more in Cordileone and Daly’s op-ed, so click here to read the rest.
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