'Hate Speech' and America's Crisis of Meaning

Meditations on Genesis #27

Genesis 11:1

Now the whole earth had one language and the same words.

A few years ago, I remember diving into the weeds of congressional hearings, listening to countless debates in the House and Senate, and one particular moment still astounds me. It was the moment during a senate confirmation hearing when a female Supreme Court nominee was asked the simple yet somehow controversial question, “What is a woman?”, and she replied on record, “I don’t know.” Now, to hear that feigned agnosticism from a confused college freshman is one thing; but to hear it from a potential member of the highest court in our land is beyond disturbing, and from a woman no less. But worse than that is how the word ‘love’ has become a smoke screen for deep and troubling malice. Love for women means we applaud them for ending the lives of their unborn babies in the womb—and sometimes even after the baby is born. Love for children means we affirm and even inspire their desire to mutilate their bodies and undergo hormonal therapies, especially if they’re struggling with the pain of identity confusion, mental disorder, or just adolescence. Love for ourselves means we trample over our neighbors and play the victim for our own shortcomings and file lawsuits against those who hurt our feelings.

But that’s still only a start.

Add to these the universal concepts of ‘freedom’ and ‘rights’ which now mean something akin to license to sin and worship of self, and the gravity of the decay becomes clearer. In fact, I believe that the bastardization of such sacred language has done more to destroy and undermine the soul of our society than all the World Wars, Civil uprisings, and political upheavals combined. Even the words we consider bad words and refrain from speaking aren’t half as profane as those good words we use to cover some nefarious action. When words like Love and Truth and Freedom and Justice and Rights and Marriage and Man and Woman and Humanity and Virtue are deprived of their true objects, robbed of their spiritual meaning, they become Trojan Horses outside the gates of our hearts. The devil pretties up the prose and gift-wraps the artifice and frames it so that it all looks friendly and stately and lovely, till the grim reapers that got smuggled in with the terms come running out to kill and destroy.

But think of another case that goes even deeper. Consider how our Declaration of Independance eloquently states that “we are endowed by our Creator with certain inalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of happiness.” Yet, Paul writes in Romans 6:23 that “the wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.” Do you see the discrepancy? We can’t actually claim a right to any single aspect of our lives. Did you conceive yourself in the womb? Did you create your own lungs and your heart valves and your brain stem? Did you speak into existence the trees to give you oxygen and the seas to give you rain and the harvests to give you food? Of course not. Which is why life is definitionally a gift to be stewarded rather than a right to be demanded. The same is true of liberty. The only inalienable liberty we’ve been given is the freedom of will to choose good rather than evil, and to obey God while rejecting the forbidden fruit of the enemy, and to live as Christ with a peace that no man or devil can take away. But that, too, is a gift and not a right. Our founding fathers, in their attempt to elevate our human condition in uplifting terms, were not precise enough in their language, and they skewed the direction of our ambition a little off course, inadvertently establishing a society where such rights can be demanded as a rule. No wonder then that after generations of moral decay and societal degradation, the phrase ‘human rights’ has morphed from a statement of sacred, inalienable connections to God into a declaration of autonomy from God.

“Women’s Rights are human rights”, cry the feminists. “Gay rights are human rights!”, cry the progressives. “Trans rights are human rights!”, cry the LGBTQ activists. But what if we all just get on board? What if we all just sang from the same hymn sheet and joined the same parade and shouted in a uniform protest? In fact, what if we all, right here and right now, stopped splitting hairs and just consolidated all the warring factions under a unitarian universalist sort of creed, “All rights are human rights!” Wouldn’t that settle it? No, it would only transfigure the half-truth of the original language into a tautology, making a farce of whatever semblance of logic and life that remains. Those who live under the delusion that they’re entitled by nature to certain rights waste their God-given gifts attempting to discover and define and demand such rights, ad nauseum, till the protests get louder and more convoluted, and the factions widen, and the despondency deepens, and every imagined step of progress turns out to be an infinite regress.

Today, friend, calibrate your heart and mind to God’s Word, to His definitions, to His wonderful vision for your life, because He doesn’t just speak truth; He is Truth. And His unchanging perfection of will be your equilibrium through this topsy turvy world.

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