How Do You Use Your Lit Match?

This was originally going to be a link on my Facebook, but then I realised there was no way I could say everything about it in a status update, and truthfully this is a post that has been nearly a year simmering. As such, it is long, you’ve been warned.

I am a proponent of free speech. I am a proponent of the freedom to read. I am a proponent of freedom to read, search, and view what you wish on the Internet. I dislike censors whether they are in the form of government thugs (Nazis, and more modern equivalents), well-meaning parents trying to pull books off bookshelves for an entire community of readers (they are allowed to choose what they wish their own children to read; they are not allowed to choose what my children read), or computerized blacklists of websites (which, even if you agree with the definition of whatever it is they are blocking — frequently questionable — are always going to block material they should not block).

All of the above are forms of censorship, and it is always interesting to me that some who claim to be avidly against the former two will be shocked — ‘but it’s just blocking (fill in the blank here with some nasty thing)’ — when you suggest that censorship of the Internet might be bad. Truthfully there’s a whole post on that subject alone.

When I was twelve I read The Witch of Blackbird Pond by Elizabeth George Speare. This is a book published in the late fifties and it’s a Newbery Medal winner. It also is one of my first memories of someone looking at what I was reading and judging it. At a church youth event I remember a peer looked at the title and then looked at me and then said: ‘you’re reading a book about a witch?’ Now, as anyone who has read The Witch of Blackbird Pond knows, the book is not about a witch, but it is rather about a highly religious community of Puritans, and two misunderstood members of that community, a young girl from ‘heathen’ Barbados & a Quaker woman who lives by the pond who are, as you may have gathered, accused of witchcraft. Ironically for my accuser, the book says more about prejudice, and acting from ignorance and misunderstanding than it does about witchcraft and had my peer read the book they (hopefully) would have felt rather silly about their comment.

This week I visited Elmshaven in California. During that visit I saw a book – I believe it was a Great Controversy but I didn’t know I would be blogging about it later this week so I may be remembering wrong. However, what I know I am remembering correctly is that it was written in Russia during the 1970s. Our guide explained that the mere ownership of a typewriter would mean a fine of a years worth of wages, thus people had to retype forbidden books behind sound proof walls and watch very carefully for the KGB as they typed their forbidden books.

I mention these two stories together as context for why I feel so strongly about free speech and freedom to read and to find and disseminate information. The first incident I credit as being the personal incident that made me understand how important it was to not judge a book by its cover, its title, or simply to throw information out because it ‘looked’ bad. The second I feel speaks to how my religious background ties into these views.

It seems one argument frequently provided in favour of censorship is that we are each others brothers, and thus we are to keep each other from reading or viewing bad things. I don’t believe that this argument is contradictory to my view that individuals need to have the freedom to make their own choices. I belong to a church that has strong ties to religious liberty. We have organizations that support it, and we have stories the world over from countries of our fellow believers who have been persecuted for wanting to read those books that we in the United States consider some of the key writings in our faith. It would not surprise me if even as I write this, there are websites that contain those same writings that are filtered behind some countries’ Internet censorship walls. Thus for me, the freedom of each person to choose what they can read, write, draw, view, and how they believe is hugely important.

This does not mean that as a Christian I do not believe I have a responsibility towards my fellow believers. But it does mean that I view very differently the individual responsibility that allows me to look at a friend who may be struggling and speak with them personally, trying to meet them where they are and meet their specific needs, versus a sort of blanket organizational censorship of this or that, which effects many without that individual voice. So long of course, as such decisions rest in private organization I frown, but there isn’t much discourse. Legally the right is there, even if I dislike censorship at a very fundamental level. But when such decisions begin being made in the government & within government funded organizations — and they do, and they are — that is when I get twitchy.

Thus as Salman Rushdie said when I heard him speak a few years back, and I am paraphrasing here, being a proponent of freedom of speech & expression means that you can end up with strange bedfellows: You can end up defending speech you don’t agree with, art you don’t really like or find offensive, and beliefs that you find strange. But for me personally I would always rather end up on that side even though I feel frequently people look at that and feel that you are supporting the work itself, not just the ability of the person to read/view/write/believe it.

My personal viewpoint on a work I can give it to you! But I will not force it on you. From a spiritual perspective I feel that this is not my job. Even if my view is undeniably correct & morally superior, I believe it is the Holy Spirit’s job to move you to a similar conclusion & it is only my responsibility to do my best to guide you to the Holy Spirit and to allow the Holy Spirit to move you as you are ready to be moved. As my sister said the other day (& I believe she got this from Joyce Meyer): I am not the Holy Spirit, jr. I can point the way, but I cannot and will not force you to believe as I do any more than God forces us to believe as He does. If you choose otherwise, similarly to how I cannot force you to believe, you cannot stop me from praying that God will continue his work with you! This is personal choice for both persons, and it may not be perfect, but it is what God has granted all of us.

From a legal perspective, which is necessarily different from the spiritual perspective (although for me there is no contradiction) as I want the freedom to choose what I will read, look at, search for, & believe, I must defend the right of others to do so as well.

The reason simply is this:

Freedom to write, freedom to read, freedom to own material that you believe is worth defending means you’re going to have to stand up for stuff you don’t believe is worth defending, even stuff you find actively distasteful, because laws are big blunt instruments that do not differentiate between what you like and what you don’t, because prosecutors are humans and bear grudges and fight for re-election, because one person’s obscenity is another person’s art.

Because if you don’t stand up for the stuff you don’t like, when they come for the stuff you do like, you’ve already lost. – Neil Gaiman

As it turns out, this long essay is at least partially Neil’s fault. I woke this morning to this blog post, Why defend freedom of icky speech, in my Twitter feed, and was particularly amused that one of his labels is: Bible Stories that nearly sent publishers to prison. It’s another long essay, but is, in my opinion well worth reading. Neil is more articulate than I am.

As I said before, this essay has been nearly a year in the making and I finally share it now because I believe it is important to state publicly that there are times I will link to information about censorship of beliefs I do not believe, ideas I do not support, art work I wouldn’t want to view, and books I would not wish to read. But because there are beliefs, ideas, art work, and books, that I feel are worth defending, I will defend much I would not think is worth defending because I would want another to do the same for me because my ability to easily share my religion, my God, and much that makes me who I am depends upon that freedom of speech.

Ultimately censorship blocks thought & belief, it is not concerned with actions. If an individual acts in a way that directly harms another, this is different, but while thoughts certainly can be dangerous and may be the prelude to actions, they are not necessarily so. You cannot play thought police, and the instant you begin to do so, every thought, every belief, every book, every piece of art is in danger, because there is always someone out there who will find the thing you believe, think, read, and view to be distasteful, hateful, or even dangerous. The only thing that needs to happen for censorship of your beliefs, thoughts, books, and art to occur is for that individual to be placed in a position of power and for censorship ‘for the common good of all’ to be common place & acceptable.

As Ray Bradbury says:

There is more than one way to burn a book. And the world is full of people running about with lit matches.

I long ago decided I would use my match only to guide people to the truth, not for burning the falsehoods. How do you use yours?