This morning, I got to thinking about freedom of religion and free speech both as they connect to Martin Luther and Facebook. Particularly, I just finished Eric Metaxas’s excellent biography Martin Luther: The Man Who Resdiscovered God and Changed the World, and immediately after it, I read another article in the Wall Street Journal’s Facebook Files – this one noting that Facebook’s strategy to stop hate and violent speech on the platform – artificial intelligence – isn’t up to the task.

Metaxas’s biography, which I highly recommend, closes by highlighting the connections between Luther’s views (and the reformation more broadly) and the freedom of speech and freedom of religion we have today. In particular, if we truly believe that as the Bible teaches, salvation involves an individual receiving the gift of God through faith in Jesus Christ and being born again, then we must see this as an individual event - one which not can be imposed on someone by force or by the government. This belief, once it worked itself out in history, led to freedom of religion as we know it today – as it was unknown throughout most of history. Somewhat similarly, freedom of speech can partly be traced to the view that God himself is sovereign over history and even intervenes in history on the behalf of truth. So, we don’t need to suppress opposing views, even if we believe they are wrong; the truth can (with God’s help) stand for itself. Again, this helped lead to the freedom of speech guaranteed in the US Constitution.

But what does all this have to do with Facebook? The Wall Street Journal’s article is rather unremarkable, in a way; it highlights how Facebook’s algorithms fail to adequately catch content which violates its rules, removing only a single-digit percentage of offending posts. The article quotes an engineer, who wrote:

The problem is that we do not and possibly never will have a model that captures even a majority of integrity harms, particularly in sensitive areas…

And the article goes on to explain that Facebook has deliberately hidden the problem and given the impression that their controls are adequate. I found it interesting, and not surprising given the difficulty of effectively identifying problematic content without human intervention.

Eventually, though, I found myself shocked by the article – not by what it says, but by its basic assumptions. Everyone quoted, and even the author, seem to assume that Facebook needs to stamp out hate speech. There’s no discussion of whether and to what extent it ought to be involved in policing content; its role in doing so is assumed. (Granted, some content surely ought to be policed – such as “videos of a person shooting someone” – but the article focuses a lot on speech.) It seems we’ve reached the point where we as a society largely agree that speech ought to be policed, and our concern is that those doing the policing aren’t doing it effectively enough.

One of my concerns with policing hate speech is that Christians frequently run afoul of hate speech prohibitions. And here I’m not just talking about those folks who stand on streetcorners with signs proclaiming “All X are going to hell…” but those who simply quote what the Bible says or paraphrase it. For example, some see it as hate speech to say that the Bible teaches that homosexuality is a sin. So, if the problem with Facebook is that it doesn’t do enough to restrict speech, I’m very concerned about what this may mean in the future as far as my ability to even state my beliefs openly.

Metaxas’s analysis in his Luther biography provides a powerful reminder that the foundations of the American Constitution rest on the principles of the Bible and of the Reformation – and as our society rejects those principles, it’s not surprising to see it moving away from freedom of religion and freedom of speech and demanding more restriction of both, in the interests of therapeutic individualism – that is, attempting to help people feel happy, whole, validated, etc.

One final tangent: Yesterday, my pastor began his sermon by remarking on some of the recent news about Facebook, and his basic point was, “Why would you be surprised?” or “Duh!” Companies are always pushing things, not necessarily for our good, but rather for their agenda. It’s not just Facebook which has an agenda; the whole world has an agenda. The Bible tells us that Satan is the god of this age, and he seeks to influence us, our thoughts, our desires, and turn them away from God – both at the individual and cultural level. So it’s not just Facebook engaged in this – it’s all the forces of this world. Why, then, would we be surprised to find out a company is just out to improve its bottom line, even when it comes at our expense? It’s just one of many venues through which we are constantly attacked. (The whole sermon, which was on coveting, is worth watching!)

Together, this book, article, and sermon formed a powerful reminder that our culture shows how desperately we need the truth of the Bible – today no less than in Luther’s day.