Free Speech, New Media, and Theology
YouTube vs. The Church
I've been a bit distracted by a job interview at a university. (Woohoo!) I taught a class as part of the process, and prep. detracted from work on www.theologyontheway.com. Thanks for your forbearance as I explored this opportunity.
In the meantime, I've also been grappling with the suspension of my YouTube account. Here's what I see when I try to access YouTube on a computer:
My videos are still accessible to others (though they're not supposed to be according to YouTube's stated procedure), but I'm unable to post new ones. Strangely, I can still access the service on my phone app, just not on a computer browser. Anyway, I've spoken with Google support four times, and the bottom line is that the office that reviews suspensions is isolated, and support can't help. I've been advised to wait for a response. The email automatically generated when you ask Google to restore your account states, "We typically notify you of the decision within 24 hours." It has been three weeks.
Two things can trigger a suspension: a user complaint or Google's AI. I have no way to tell which it was. I've seen some wild stuff on YouTube, so it's hard to imagine what would justify the suspension in my case, but there is no telling who I might have offended. Whether the cause is a complaint or an AI flag, the system is absurdly vulnerable to unwarranted censorship. And the fact that the reinstatement system is a black hole only makes the situation worse. You can do better, YouTube!
For now, the video version of the podcast is fully available on www.theologyontheway.com. If you haven't subscribed there, do it! Substack will send new episodes and articles to your inbox, or you can get the app and rely on notifications. It's a great system for staying current, and they don't allow for an arbitrary shutdown of the channel. In addition, I wager that Substack will soon be a primary source of all kinds of information, from legit journalism (in contrast to compromised corporate news media) to more focused content like mine. Substack is a centralized platform (unlike your painstakingly curated list of blogs and websites) that more and more great creators are using, profoundly creator-friendly, and unencumbered by the kind of censorship that afflicts other major platforms. Give the app a look. I think you'll find it worth your while.
I turned to new media in search of an outlet. Between YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, and Substack, I hoped to find a way to engage with a wider audience. It's still early days, and the audience (bless you!) is not so wide yet. But it's growing. So I wonder what to make of YouTube's censorship.
I'm not the kind of Christian who sees religious discrimination around every corner, and I resist reactionary conclusions. But I am aware of both the wider dialogue about free speech and the tendency of progressively minded tech companies to object to aspects of traditionally Christian viewpoints. I doubt that is what's going on because there is so much egregiously hard-line conservative content on YouTube and because none of my content has expressed the kinds of ideas that typically draw those objections. Then again, I've touched on hot topics such as the mental health of LGBTQ folks and the Israel-Hamas conflict. Perhaps someone deemed a part of one of those conversations to be misinformation? Only Google's black-box review team knows at this point.
In any case, Google is a private company that gets to decide what it wants to allow on its platforms. As with other social media platforms that have become brokers of public discourse, the question is how the presumptive right to censor bears on the right to freedom of speech. At what point is private censorship an infringement of the public good?
Frankly, I don't know. And I'm not interested in telling private corporations what to do. I have no problem calling them out, but I do not expect that they should pay attention. Our interests do not align.
It doesn't particularly matter which taboo I might have stepped on. I'm open to conversation about such things—that's the whole premise of the podcast—and might be persuaded to take a different view or avoid the use of a word, and so on. But at the end of the day, that's not possible if the conversation referee says not only, "That's out of bounds," but also, "Therefore, you don't get to play anymore." When every penalty is a red card, we're destined shortly to have no game at all.
Now, to reiterate, I don't know what's going on with YouTube, and I suspect it might be some kind of technical error, but I don't want to talk about YouTube per se. I'm more interested in the analogy for the church—another institution prone to shut down discourse for its own reasons. "Do as I say, not as I do" is necessary advice in some cases (parents know this pain), but it's also always an admission of empty moralizing. We can do better, church!
So what would modeling theological freedom of speech look like in the local church? For those who assume the role of referee, the question is about risk. To borrow Google's policy language, what constitutes "harmful content"? How do we measure harm, and how should we ward against it?
No doubt, language can be harmful, and the stakes of theological language can be existential. But I'm often left wondering what these facts have to do with how we process the notion of "harm" today. For most of the church's existence, theologians have had no problem representing bad ideas in order to refute them. Theology has always been an open dialogue about truth and its alternatives. To a great extent, freedom of speech has been a given of Christian discourse about God.
Of course, the church made determinations along the way. To rule some ideas out of bounds is not to make them unspeakable. It is to make them unintelligible in the church's idiom. So theologians continue to identify some contemporary ideas as Arianism, docetism, gnosticism, and so on. These heresies are not unspeakable; they require refutation because we are free to speak our minds, and our minds may be (often are!) wrong. Despite the popular depiction of the church as an intolerant, witch-hunting, monolithic institution, the reality is that we continue to grapple with how best to represent faith in Jesus generation after generation. The guidance of the tradition is indispensable, but it is not absolutist.
This means that Christian theological discourse on the local level is both determined and open. It is real dialogue beholden to tradition and contemporary context. What we say about God, church, and world follows from a sustained practice of discourse that is identifiably Christian by virtue of certain commitments. These include the confession that our knowledge of God is partial, so we expect that faith's pursuit of understanding will be met with surprising discoveries—even after millennia.
The fact of how Christian theological discourse proceeds encourages the church to be extremely cautious about shutting down dialogue—as cautious as, or perhaps more cautious than, she is about avoiding potential harm. Hence, there is a certain fearlessness in theological discourse that is rooted in our confidence in God's graciousness, but equally, is a function of the nature of the pursuit. Fear does not serve the articulation of faith in new contexts and circumstances. Open debate and intelligent argument address bad ideas; censorship cannot.
But what of harm? To be clear, Christians take theological error with deadly seriousness. In our view, it is no less consequential than the kinds of speech that YouTube is concerned with: "hate speech, harassment, child safety, and violent extremism amongst others." Theology is, in the end, profoundly practical. It determines how we live.
But in case it seems that theological speech is just about thinking one way or another, let me point out that in addition to the concerns listed above, YouTube (like others) has added "harmful misinformation" to its set of censorship triggers. The company has decided to concern itself with the consequences of being wrong. There is no difference between "misinformation" and "falsehood"—the issue is truth. And living according to falsehood can be harmful in all kinds of ways. The church couldn't agree more. But our approach to the problem diverges sharply, or at least it should.
Whereas YouTube believes it should silence perceived falsehood—prevent it from being heard—the church is called to meet it and make the case for a different understanding. Again, this is not because the stakes are low. On the contrary, precisely because they are so high, we cannot resort to an imposition of understanding, which also produces mortal effects.
Now, to state the obvious, Christianity is rife with just the opposite. Churches regularly communicate something like, "If you think differently, you're not welcome here." This is seemingly identical to the kind of censorship that YouTube exercises. Here is a place where X, Y, or Z viewpoint cannot have a voice. It's helpful, though, to distinguish between two versions of this tendency.
One begins with certainty and has no interest in real conversation. Discipleship is conformity to predetermined conclusions. Theology is about holding the correct understanding and ensuring others know what it is.
The other begins with a humble commitment to received tradition and seeks to bring it into conversation with contemporary questions. Discipleship is an appropriation of a particular faith articulated in many ways across the centuries. Theology is about journeying together toward understanding.
Despite greater humility and openness, the latter approach may still send the message that some perspectives are not welcome because the particularity of the faith tradition inherently excludes some ways of speaking. For instance, our confession that Jesus is Israel's Messiah is not up for debate. Of course, this means that someone who believes otherwise is necessarily excluded from being a community member.
This definitional exclusion isn’t about being inhospitable to people who hold other perspectives, much less does the church rightly attempt to silence their viewpoints. In fact, many of us are quite interested in conversations with neighbors who think differently and understand hospitality to others as one of the very commitments at issue. It's just the case that churches, like every other kind of community, have defining characteristics that necessarily exclude people who do not share those characteristics from being part of the community so defined.
The difference between this kind of built-in exclusion and the censorship exorcised by a media platform like YouTube is categorical. YouTube is not a social community with a belief system that one subscribes to in order to become a user. In other words, one does not get a YouTube account by affirming particular truths. One gets a YouTube account by deciding to use the company's service. Terms of service are not doctrine. Social media consumption is not religious affiliation.
Then again, it is telling how like a religious belief system YouTube's exclusion of misinformation seems. Numerous social commentators have observed the religious nature of so-called woke culture, and the platform's "misinformation" language is inconceivable apart from that social movement. Something strange is afoot. Suddenly, to use the company's services, one cannot express certain ideas—ostensibly because they are harmful but more fundamentally because they are deemed wrong. At this point, YouTube ceases to be an equal-access media platform and becomes a community of shared belief that arbitrates membership based on orthodoxy.
So, despite the distinctions I've offered, the analogy between YouTube's content censorship and the church's theological discourse holds. We can shut down speech we disagree with. The question is, should we? I think not. Open theological discourse—the pursuit rather than the arbitration of truth—should be one of the church's defining commitments. If it were, the question would be what freedom of speech looks like in relation to other theological commitments. That is a question worth answering for ourselves because models like YouTube are not feasible for communities like ours.