The Free Speech Apocalypse

​“If we accept the deaths of 600,000 men
as a necessary tradeoff for ending slavery, what would the tradeoff be
for 60,000,000 babies?”

The Queer Shall Inherit the Earth” reads a banner held by angry protesters at Doug Wilson’s “Sexual by Design” lectures at Indiana University in 2012. The students clutching the banner amid their disruption eventually leave as the lecture proceeds, but the message lingers, inviting more reaction than reflection. They have an end game, too; we might even call it an eschatology. That end game, professed by the “gay mirage” crowd, as Doug Wilson describes them, is not simply to obtain equal rights with everyone else. It is that everyone must praise their position. Fundamentally, the ideology they promote must be celebrated and named as good.

The Free Speech Apocalypse, directed by Darren Doane, is perhaps Doane’s best film. It most certainly and undoubtedly is his most important one. Collision will remain one of my personal favorites, but I think most will be hard-pressed to disagree with my own assessment to follow. Although this film is a documentary, it projects a different feel than most others in its respective category. The stereotypical expectation that a Christian movie is probably going to be bad should be suspended upon watching this film. The creative use of camera angles, interview texts, and even the end credits feels fresh throughout its entirety. Cinematically, there is nothing to draw the viewer to a yawn.

Throughout the course of the film, two basic lines of thought emerge from the footage of Doug Wilson’s lecture, interspersed with a personal interview. The first line of thought pertains to tolerance, and the second to parallels from the Civil War. This last year alone has witnessed a tsunami of current events that are all tied to the ever-fluid word “tolerance.” In an interview with Apologia Radio prior to this film’s release, Darren Doane described these events and weaved together an eerie thread of continuity between one news headline and the next.
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All of a sudden, April 24th, Bruce Jenner says he’s a woman. June 16th, Rachel Dolezal says, ‘I’m black.’ But before we can make fun of that, one day later, June 17th, was the Charleston shooting, and that was the Confederate flag, and it was like, ‘Whoa, things are moving.’ June 26th was gay marriage. And I couldn’t even keep up with it--we had transgender, the military, we’re figuring things out, and then BOOM. Planned Parenthood hits.”

Doane went on to explain that after the avalanche of these events and what he thought was the end of filming, the Kim Davis drama hit the news.
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If I may crudely erect a four-tiered hierarchy of dialogue, it may prove useful for illustrating the “free speech apocalypse” as opposed to the quality dialogue we should be aiming for. Let’s imagine the top tier of dialogue being occupied by two religious systems of belief—such as Christianity and Islam—which willingly enter into a formal, moderated debate. These systems, though deeply divided, are at least able to deal with each other honestly and rigorously because they can display a level of tolerance in the truest sense. Then imagine that the next tier down is the kind of dialogue in which the participants—to use a familiar quip—“agree to disagree.” They too hold onto an admirable level of tolerance, but engagement with one of an opposing view is less frequent; getting along with each other is of a higher moral good in this tier. Yet another tier down would be an inter-religious dialogue in which the two sides unite around the “least common denominator” between their faiths—the “we both believe in one God” cliché that is often employed. Lastly, the bottom tier is occupied by the kind of dialogue illustrated in this film: “If you don’t praise my position, then shut up; if you speak against my position, you’re hurting my feelings and should be silenced.” It is truly baffling the immaturity we have seen unfold with this rhetoric, and it is simultaneously alarming what some will do to silence opposition and garner praise.

1) Mutual Scrutiny
2) Agree to Disagree
3) Least Common Denominator
4) Celebrate Me or Shut Up

The quality of dialogue displayed in The Free Speech Apocalypse amounts to the very lowest tier I have described. Not the arguments or thesis laid out by Doane or Wilson, but that of what Wilson wittily describes as “the tolerance buzz saw.”

Yet the picture becomes more dire as it traces out a second line of thought. What will probably be the most contested aspect of this film is Doug Wilson’s view on the Civil War. Whether we agree with him or not, Wilson (rightfully) forces us to grapple with our assumptions about the Civil War. Among the chief consequences of the Civil War (and the 14th Amendment) is the Supreme Court’s claim to power as the final arbiter and interpreter of the Constitution. “I think [Lincoln's] presidency,” Doug Wilson says, “had a number of destructive consequences that we’re still dealing with today.”

Among the chief consequences of the Civil War (and particularly the 14th Amendment, which resulted from this war) was the Supreme Court’s claim to power as the final arbiter and interpreter of the Constitution. This doctrine has since developed the name “judicial supremacy,” particularly among its critics. Unfortunately for amateur viewers, the film doesn’t fully articulate how the 14th Amendment produced judicial supremacy, but it strongly implies that the 14th Amendment — particularly in vesting the Supreme Court with the responsibility of protecting all citizens equally — was a key enabler of judicial abuse. As many observers will know, the “equal protection” clause of the 14th Amendment has been used as a false pretext for several disastrous Supreme Court decisions, including Roe v. Wade. It is unclear if Doug Wilson is categorically opposed to the Supreme Court giving equal protection of the law to all citizens or if he is simply opposed to the abuse of the judicial power that wields the 14th Amendment as its pretext. I think most will watch this film and probably be unbothered by the Supreme Court’s power to strike down state laws that don’t afford citizens equal protection under law. It was this power, for example, that enabled the Supreme Court to strike down a host of segregations laws in the Jim Crow South. It is the abuse of this power, however, that has allowed the Supreme Court to impose all kinds of unconstitutional (and immoral) views on states that rightfully stand opposed to them. Yet I don’t think this is even the point that Wilson aims to make in the film. His tone and earlier statements in the film seem to indicate that he believes the Supreme Court shouldn’t have any power to strike down state laws that are unconstitutional. That would indeed be a more radical view – not radical in the sense that Doug Wilson is some sort of right-wing extremist (I hardly get the impression he desires to hold himself as “left” or “right”) – but radical in the sense that this gets more to a foundational element of where this argument begins and is not commonly held. The film doesn’t fully flesh out these details though, so I will hold my interpretation as penultimate.

With that ambiguity aside though, the face of judicial supremacy alone made the next aspect of the film chilling for me. At one point, the Chocolate Knox (producer of The Free Speech Apocalypse) asks Senator Ted Cruz if he is unwilling to go to war for the unborn. I think Cruz’s reaction was revealing—not just about him, but in connecting the dots myself.  If the Civil War was a just and necessary solution for ending slavery, how much more would a war be just and necessary for ending abortion?
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That’s a tough question. I felt myself shift uncomfortably upon hearing it, but the Chocolate Knox is correct. If we accept the deaths of 600,000 men as a necessary tradeoff for ending slavery, what would the tradeoff be for 60,000,000 babies? The point here is not that we should go to war — though logical consistency would demand it — but rather that the most horrifying holocaust the U.S. has known has been enabled by judicial supremacy; as the film shows, this was deeply entrenched in the aftermath of the Civil War. Following this line of reasoning, Roe v. Wade is only possible in a world where the Supreme Court can ultimately rule over all fifty of the state’s supreme courts. The enshrined place of abortion in our society isn’t the only SCOTUS-induced injustice we’re dealing with—and as the film walks us through, it won’t be the last. Just recently SCOTUS gave us same-sex “marriage,” and if this last year is any indication of where we are headed, we can expect further inventions from our rogue Supreme Court. It would be fair to ask Wilson at this point if ending segregation by rule of the Supreme Court was wrong. A few quick scenes of Eisenhower sending troops into Little Rock, Arkansas, in 1957 are depicted, suggesting that this was perhaps an executive over-reach only enabled because of the Supreme Court’s rule in the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education. I think Wilson’s reply would hearken to earlier in the film when he compared solutions to trade-offs. The solution (as I assume) was good, but came at the cost of lending more judicial prudence to the court. Perhaps the pattern of the Supreme Court ruling can be likened to a rut out of line with the course -- a tradition unfounded in the constitution.

The Free Speech Apocalypse refreshingly does not end on the Orwellian note it begins with. It is not a “1984 moment” in which we sit in terror awaiting the end of the world, of free speech, or of America as we know it. Instead of being left with the eschatology of the student’s professing that “the queer shall inherit the earth,” we are left with the words Jesus left us. “All authority has been given to Me in heaven and on earth. Go therefore and make disciples of all the nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I commanded you; and lo, I am with you always, even to the end of the age.” “The Christian faith,” Wilson says in closing, “is a religion of world conquest. Not by arms, not my carnal weapons, the Apostle Paul taught, but by preaching the gospel.”

I have no qualms or reservations in recommending The Free Speech Apocalypse to all Christians. Without a doubt, this film will face the onslaught of trolls reviewing it on IMDB before they have actually watched the film. If the thesis of the film is even half correct, we will see the film largely discredited by the LGBT community and the tolerance police. Much of this will likely be done in name of silencing hatred. But it is at this point I encourage those watching the film to give it a fair shake. The handful of points in the film where Christians may disagree should only serve to give Christians an opportunity to rise above the lowest tier on the scale above and embody the essence of true constructive criticism and dialogue. If you are a Christian and you have the opportunity to watch this film with people you know will be opposed to it, your presence may curb some potentially volatile responses. I would even recommend welcoming those of a different persuasion to come watch the film and following it with a Q & A.

​Doug Wilson does make one point that I do hope is wrong, though—I hope we won’t be too busy checking our emails to watch a documentary as important at this one.