What do we mean by ‘free speech’?

‘Freedom’ is notoriously frustrating to do business with. When it is missing, we really notice its absence; but when we have it, we enjoy it often without even noticing. Nobody doesn’t want freedom, yet when we talk about it and celebrate it we can find, to our dismay, that entirely different kinds of freedom are being spoken of.

We can see from the biblical quotations above how highly it figures there. But even there, disagreements arise about what is meant: for example, biblical scholars still hotly debate what Paul thinks we are free from. And there are serious misuses of these texts: ‘the truth will set you free’ is famously emblazoned across the lobby the CIA headquarters in Langley West Virginia, as if Jesus was referring to the way intelligence gathering (‘truth’) enables democracy (‘set you free’).

Our next briefings will not try to solve all of the problems associated with ‘freedom’, but will seek to unravel something that a lot of people are thinking about at the moment: the extent of ‘free speech’. To understand what we mean by ‘free speech’, and to discover what (if any) limits it has, we’ll have to do some theological thinking, some legal thinking, and some philosophical thinking.

Files: sie49a-freeing_speech.pdf