In an April 18, 2015 article entitled “It is time to put an end to anti-choice speech,” Tanya Cohen (who says she is dedicated to “freedom, respect, equality, dignity”) argues that though “people have freedom of speech, [they] also have freedom from certain kinds of speech…that have no place in society.” We would want to ban hateful, racist speech, but notice what else Cohen is eager to ban.

G. K. Chesterton, a British philosopher who died in 1936, issued a warning about politics: “Wherever the people do not believe in something beyondthe world, they will worship the world. They will worship the strongest thing in the world…the Government [which] becomes God.” Chesterton believed that the opiate of the people was not religion, but irreligion.

The Christian religion is the key to political freedom. Chesterton says: “It is only by believing in God that we can ever criticize the Government.” So the basic political question is not: “Are you a Democrat or a Republican?” but “Do you still believe in God?” In 1983 Jeremy Rifkin, a spokesman for our modern world, answered that question:

We no longer feel ourselves to be guests in someone else’s home and therefore obliged to make our behavior conform with a set of preexisting cosmic rules.  It is our creation now.  We make the rules.  We establish the parameters of reality.  We create the world, and because we do, we no longer feel beholden to outside forces.  We no longer have to justify our behavior, for we are now the architects of the universe.  We are responsible for nothing outside ourselves, for we are the kingdom, the power, and the glory forever and ever.

We may use the phrase, “God bless America.” We may organize Washington “Prayer Breakfasts,” but we are now experiencing a progressivist refashioning of the culture that empties the term “God” of any biblical meaning. Oh, we “believe in God”— the “god within”— but we no longer believe in the God who made the heavens and the earth—   and the rules. As “architects of the universe,” the forces of “progress” are redefining the rules and creating a world in the image, not of God, but of man.

This drama is playing out at the level of “free speech.” Tanya Cohen is a deeply committed human rights activist who was a member of Amnesty International and the Human Rights Law Centre of Australia before coming to the States to be involved in similar work. She has laid out the goals of the “progressive” vision of “change.” Its totalitarian claims, in the name of free speech, are staggering.

In an April 18, 2015 article entitled “It is time to put an end to anti-choice speech,” Tanya Cohen (who says she is dedicated to “freedom, respect, equality, dignity”) argues that though “people have freedom of speech, [they] also have freedom from certain kinds of speech…that have no place in society.” We would want to ban hateful, racist speech, but notice what else Cohen is eager to ban. In one of the “memorable cases” of freedom, according to the author, the Human Rights Law Centre “campaigned successfully to have anti-abortion protests banned in Australia.”

Take a moment to consider: In Cohen’s utopian world of rights activists, all pro-life speech, including the defense of the unborn child, would be banned, because “opposing a woman’s right to make decisions about her own body …is no different than racism.” For this hateful discourse there is “no place in society.” She would also ban climate change denial, since “human-induced climate change is as certain as it is scientifically possible to demonstrate.” I would suggest you see the video The Great Global Warming Swindle,[1] and read the Cornwall Alliance, A Call to Truth, Prudence, and Protection of the Poor 2014: The Case against Harmful Climate Policies Gets Stronger— before these materials are criminalized! The science on climate change is actually not “settled” at all.

Other banned speech includes “Islamophobic protests, anti-choice protests, anti-Palestinian protests, anti-marriage equality protests, pro-gun speech, speech that voices approval of Israeli apartheid in Palestine, speech advocating oppressive economic systems [capitalism], anti-feminist speech, anti-environmental speech, anti-healthcare speech, and anti-immigration speech.” All have “no place in a civilized society.” Right-wing “journalism should be ‘muzzled’ and ‘criminalized.’” In a word, “People who oppose ‘human rights’ [as the progressives understand “rights”] have absolutely no place in a…liberal democracy.”

The Speech police are at American doors, especially in the case of same-sex marriage. As someone has said, liberal public opinion promoting same-sex marriage is “evolving in the direction of both theological certainty and illiberal intolerance.” Expressing their own ideological prejudice, liberals want opponents to have absolutely no place in their godless utopia.

Worshipers of “the God above” must show the religious character of this “progressive” definition of rights for what it is: pagan Oneism. With wisdom and love, we must propose another theology, Twoism, based on “God the Creator who is blessed forever” (Rom 1:25). Rights, truth, beauty, justice and salvation come only from the divine Creator and Redeemer, without whom our man-made utopian culture will soon become a dystopian nightmare.

[1] (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=52Mx0_8YEtg&spfreload=10)

Dr. Peter Jones is a Teaching Elder in the Presbyterian Church in America and is Director of truthXchange, and Adjunct Professor of New Testament, as well as Scholar in Residence, at Westminster Seminary California.