Friday, September 5, 2025

Part I

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Is Europe Abandoning Free Speech?’ Irish Comedy Writer is Arrested for Anti-Transgender Social Media Posts. So Who’s Next?

In the United States House of Representatives just days ago in the House Judiciary Committee, there was a hearing on the effect of online censorship in other countries, particularly in the United Kingdom, that’s Britain, and in Europe, and the effect of that censorship in the United States. One of the big issues going on here is that we are looking at two different cultures when it comes to the definition of free speech, and at this point the cultures are increasingly on opposite sides of the Atlantic Ocean. And so for a matter of years now, we have seen speech curtailed, particularly in many European nations, and even more recently now in the United Kingdom.

And when you think of a nation like Britain, like the United Kingdom, you think of a nation very much analogous ours. We are a part of the Anglosphere, the English-speaking world. We share a common heritage in common law and also in constitutionalism. But when you compare the United Kingdom and the United States on the question of the constitution, there is a huge difference. That huge difference is that the American Constitution is a text. It is a written document. It’s a written document that was composed by the founders of this nation and was ratified by the States in order to become the Constitution of the United States of America.

Now, of course, this is frontline news just about every week in the United States because in the great cultural conflict right now in our society, one of the central issues is how you interpret the Constitution. Now, that most often comes up when the Supreme Court of the United States, which was established according to the Constitution and operates on constitutional authority, its responsibility is to uphold, and to interpret, and to apply the Constitution of the United States. For the better part of several decades, certainly the last half of the 20th century. The Supreme Court of the United States was under the control of progressivist legal theorists who argued for a so-called living constitution. “We’re not bound by the words of the Constitution. Instead, we can see an evolving principle we can find in the Constitution applied.” That’s how you ended up with an entire series of culture-shaping cases. Most importantly, you think of Roe v. Wade in 1973 legalizing abortion, declaring that it is unconstitutional for a state to restrict all abortions.

Now, the obvious truth is that the Constitution of the United States, and by that I mean the text, the words, the sentences, the paragraphs, the sections, the articles, make no mention of abortion. And so if you’re going to find a so-called right to abortion, you’re going to have to ground it in something that’s not in the text of the Constitution. So wait just a minute. If abortion is not in the Constitution, and by the way, it’s never been in the constitutional text, then how did the Supreme Court, a majority, 7-2 majority, in 1973 supposedly find a right to abortion? Well, it is because they said, “Well, the right to abortion is basically implicit or evolving out of a woman’s right to privacy.”

Now wait just a minute. The right to privacy is not exactly in the constitutional text either. It just shows you how far this liberal jurisprudence had gone, and this is when you had a conservative assertion, a corrective argument that came in the form of what’s called strict constructionism or originalism. It’s the argument that we are bound by, judges should be bound by, and the nation should be bound by the actual words and sentences of the Constitution of the United States. And so what you have is on the American side a right of language, a free speech that is in language in the Constitution, indeed in the Bill of Rights, the first 10 Amendments to the US Constitution, which, remember, were necessary in order for the Constitution to be ratified in the first place. And so this is basic to our constitutional order, the freedom of speech.

Now, in the United Kingdom, they would claim they have freedom of speech too, and they would also say that it’s in the constitution. Well, you say, “Show me in the Constitution.” They can’t show you the Constitution because their constitution is an evolving tradition. It is not a text. So that’s one central distinction. That’s why guarantees of free speech in the United States are in almost every way stronger than what you find in many European nations. I just took the UK as one example.

But you also have a different understanding of the relationship of the issue of free speech and, say, some of the modern social media technologies, and this is where European nations as a whole, and I’m just generalizing here, have been more prone to restrict and even to outlaw some of that language online. And that has gone so far, by the way, in some nations as to have more or less acceptable and not acceptable political arguments. That’s a big issue in some European countries where right now there are frontline questions as to whether or not political parties that are considered on the Right will be just declared, well, not acceptable, therefore they can’t run candidates. That’s a big issue in Germany right now.

All right. So when you look at the constitutional tradition, both will say they have freedom of speech, but the big issue right now and the issue that was before the Judiciary Committee and the House of Representatives in the United States is what actions in Europe will mean for the curtailment of the free speech of Americans. Now, how’s that for an interesting equation? Because here’s the reality. If these European nations are able to put in place limitations on free speech that they will require major social media and digital media platforms, then that means free speech in the United States is going to be curtailed because of restrictions on freedom of speech in European countries. And there have been those, and indeed there were some. Representative Jamie Raskin, by the way, a Democrat, basically said in the hearing, “This isn’t a real issue in the United States. This is a made-up issue.” It’s not a made-up issue.

And I want to refer to a news story that came from The Washington Times just yesterday. Headline, “Republicans Warn About Spread of European Online Censorship to the United States.” Okay, so what’s helpful is an example, and this example came up in the hearings of the Judiciary Committee on Wednesday, reported yesterday by The Washington Times. It has to do with a writer, an Irish writer who was arrested when he landed Monday of this week at Heathrow Airport in London. He landed in London and was arrested because of a post or actually two or three posts that he had put up on social media, and it was about the transgender question. And so he was arrested, and according to the report, and according to the evidence that was put forward in the US House of Representatives committee this week, he was arrested by five uniformed officers and taken into custody. What in the world had he done?

Well, I don’t have all the evidence of what exactly he did in terms of some of the language, but I think it’s fair to say, I’m not going to repeat a lot of the language, but I want to tell you the point he was making. So I’m going to read to you most of one of these tweets. It came down to this. This, for instance, was one post to X, formerly known as Twitter. It was dated April the 20th. “If a trans-identified male is in a female-only space, he’s committing a violent abusive act.” Then I’m not going to quote all of the rest of it, but he said, “Make a scene, call the cops, and if all else fails, basically push back.”

Now, I want to be clear, I don’t know all that this writer, Graham Linehan, has said. I’m not taking responsibility for the entirety of his posts. I don’t actually think we have to consider that when we understand what is at stake here. And Nigel Farage, who is a member of Parliament and the founder of a new conservative party there known as Reform UK, he also gave testimony, and he said to the Americans, “You’ll be doing us and yourselves and all freedom-loving people a favor if your politicians and your businesses said to the British government, ‘You simply got this wrong.'” He then went on to ask about his own country. “At what point did we become North Korea?” “Well,” he said, “I think the Irish comedy writer found that out two days ago at Heathrow Airport.”

So I think it’s really interesting that this has developed. I think most Americans are giving this very little attention. I think the most immediate issue here is whether or not the social media giants are going to bend to the European laws which will make them, frankly, a situation in which the language, the free speech, the political speech of Americans will be necessarily curtailed as well. And I want to tell you the big issue here is I don’t want awful things to be said, I don’t want bad things to be said, I don’t want rude things to be said, I don’t want risque things to be said. But the world of social media is right now the world of information thoroughfare, and the fact is that those who would use these censorship principles will, and we know they will, apply them towards political speech they don’t like, and that’s exactly what we have seen in election cycles.

Now, I want to be clear, we’ve seen it particularly in Europe. We have seen where more liberal parties, more liberal governments have simply shut some conservative voices out of the public square entirely. Harder to do in the United States. But here’s what’s insidious. It turns out you might be able to do that in the United States because the social media platforms will be accountable to laws passed in Europe. And I was in a meeting just this week in Washington DC, where this came up, and where one of the big discussion points was how cancellation and censorship is a growing threat. We’ve seen it in the United States on college campuses in terms of all the speech codes and things. We see it even in companies, major American corporations. Now, given the fact that there’s cultural pushback on that right now, some of that has gone more quiet, but it hasn’t gone away, and I have to say as a Christian, I have an even deeper concern here, and that is that if they can curtail this kind of speech, they can curtail Christian witness, Christian testimony, and Christian truth-telling as well.

And by the way, remember that at least in some European nations there have been people, including legislators, lawmakers, who have been brought up on charges for posting verses from the Bible. Okay, that’s not hypothetical. Again, that’s real, and I think it should be a wake-up call for Americans. I appreciate the fact that the Judiciary Committee and the House of Representatives had this hearing. I can only hope that some of this information is disseminated more widely and frankly that the American government, and that begins with Congress and the President, begin to take actions to make certain, that European bureaucrats don’t decide what Americans can say.

Part II

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Nothing to Cheer About: Gender-Bending Cheerleaders in the NFL and the Reality of Cultural Decay

All right, it’s Friday, and that means that sometimes we look at issues that will be pressed out by more urgent concerns on other days of the week, but sometimes there are issues that really are big in worldview significance and we need to give them a little bit of attention. So let’s do that. And so today I want to talk about the controversy over cheerleaders in the NFL. Okay, that’s not the usual issue I would take up. So why am I talking about it? It’s because there’s a bigger issue underneath this issue. Some of the controversy more recently has been directed particularly to the Minnesota Vikings, and they have a cheerleading squad. Now, one of the issues that’s, of course, very much connected to this is what exactly cheerleading is. It’s really sexually provocative dance, okay, so let’s just say it. They call them a cheerleading squad, but they’re actually entertainment in a different way. And so let’s just say it’s now something that would have been considered risqué, out of bounds regardless of the gender, just a matter of a few years ago. 

But it’s become big time on some NFL teams. Not all NFL teams have them, but an increasing number of the teams that do have them are now allowing biological men on the teams as well as biological women, and they’re identified as men and women. But the controversy comes down with the Vikings to a figure known as Blaize Shiek, and all you have to do is look at the pictures. I’m not inviting you to do that, but all I can tell you is there’s something here that’s just profoundly wrong. This week, earlier in the week, I talked about pregnant soldiers on the front lines in Ukraine, and I mentioned that’s just a huge problem when it’s viewed in terms of creation order. I think the same thing is true here.

And what I’m not doing is saying we need to return to an America where only women were doing the sexually-suggestive dancing. That is not the point I want to make. As a matter of fact, I think the entire thing is an embarrassment, and that’s why I agree with a recent article that appeared in the Washington Examiner with the headline “Abolish Cheerleaders” when it comes to the NFL, because it is just a race to the most sexually explicit. And the writer of this particular article, Timothy P. Carney, summarized it this way. He made a moral point. Rare are the moral points made in such observations. I want to draw attention to it. He said, “A father trying to be faithful to his wife should be able to sit down to watch a game on Sunday afternoon without exposing himself and his sons, whom he’s trying to educate in chastity, to wriggling female flesh, and without exposing his daughters to this objectified and commercialized view of what men want from women.”

That’s a profoundly important point, but it’s also a point that when you look at the fact that this is the intentional insertion and the brags about the advance made for civilization, that now you have men dancing, I’ll simply say in a ritualized, feminized way on a cheerleading squad that historically is made up of females, let’s just say this too, it’s not as significant, it’s not as morally important as a pregnant soldier on the front lines in Ukraine, but it’s just another part of how culture changes, and what I want to make clear here is that when you look at theories of social change and you look, for instance, at the guidebooks of the Left on how to bring about social change, you look at figures like the Italian theorist Gramsci and others, you look in the United States at Saul Alinsky and others who have given the left wing in this country guidebooks as to how to force cultural change.

One of the things you do is that you make people look at something until they don’t notice it anymore, and that’s the agenda here. You start putting male bodies where male bodies don’t go and you make sure that there’s camera attention to them, and so eventually you see it and then you don’t see it anymore. And that’s one of the ways that all of this that I think most Americans would say just ought not to happen, it becomes absolutely normalized, and here’s where we also remember the fact that after this comes something else. I want to go back to the picture of a man with his sons watching the football game and his daughters also observing what’s going on. I think we similarly need to understand what’s going on when this kind of issue is discussed in the culture. I want you to notice how many of the powers that be in sports are simply telling mainstream, normal Americans, “There is nothing to see here, and you’re wrong if you think that this could possibly be wrong.”

One final thought on this before we turn to questions. This also demonstrates again that you will have sectors of American culture, and let’s just say that traditionally the NFL is about as red-blooded as it gets, and yet the cultural shifts that are going on are going to show up there too, and in this case, they’re showing up on the cheerleading squad.

Part III

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What Do You Make of President Trump’s Recent Comments About Getting into Heaven? — Dr. Mohler Responds to Letters from Listeners of The Briefing

All right, now let’s turn to questions. I appreciate all your questions. Just send them into mail@AlbertMohler.com. Sometimes they come in a pattern, and that pattern’s a good signal to me. This is something we need to talk about. Some of the conversation recently in this country, and among Christians in particular, and in letters that have come to me, have to do with President Trump and the statement he made, which he said, “I want to try and get to heaven.” And so I’ve had several people just ask the question, “What do you think that means?”

Well, in the context, when he was talking about fundraising and a specific project, I’m not sure in that context it meant a whole lot. On the other hand, I think we need to consider something, let’s say two things we need to consider. First of all, every single human being has to know that there is a judge and that we are sinners and that thus there is a problem. I think that’s a knowledge in the human heart. Of course that doesn’t take anyone to the gospel. They have to hear the gospel, and hearing, they have to believe, and believing be saved. And so I just want to say I think that’s always in the background. And so I do find it interesting that when the President was reaching for an illustration for something he wanted to say, he talked about wanting to get to heaven. He’s made some interesting comments along those lines otherwise as well.

I want to come back and say the mainstream media looks at this and says, “Well, what could be the problem? There’s no way Donald Trump is going to heaven because of A, B, C, D, or E.” And this is weird, by the way. The mainstream media has no understanding of the grace and mercy of God and, frankly, no clear understanding of the gospel of Jesus Christ. And so we as Christians, when the gospel is at stake, we’re the people who’ve got to lean into the gospel, and at this point I’ll simply say I hope and pray for every opportunity for President Trump to be confronted with the gospel, surrounded by gospel people. I believe there are some very seriously-minded believers around him, and I just have to hope and pray that he’s surrounded by the gospel.

And just like every other person, what’s true of President Donald J. Trump is just as true of you, is just as true of me. There is no hope for my salvation, there is no hope for me to be with Christ reigning in heaven. There is no hope other than the sheer grace and mercy of God manifest in the atonement accomplished by the Lord Jesus Christ. And then coming to us with the promise of the gospel, and that means individual belief, that means coming to know and to believe and to trust that God’s promises in Jesus Christ are true. And so I just want to come back and say that’s true for everybody. I think there’s an awful lot of reference in the larger culture about people who will talk about heaven, or talk about hell, or talk about judgment, or talk about God, talk about death, and they don’t even know how serious they are when they make those comments.

I am in no position to judge the President’s heart and mind in that context in terms of exactly what he believes, but you know, it’s a good reminder to us that the gospel of Jesus Christ is our message. We should be ready to share it, eager to share it at every single point, and we need to remember that it doesn’t matter if you’re a prisoner in a third-world country buried in a cellar somewhere or you’re the President of the United States in the White House, you have the same problem. As the Scripture says, “All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.” The Scripture says the wages of sin is death and our only hope is the grace and mercy of God manifested in the atonement accomplished by the Lord Jesus Christ and in the gospel that was preached to us, the gospel we believed, and thus we are saved, and it is our task to share that gospel with as many people as possible, and that includes anyone in the world, and that also includes the President of the United States.

Part IV

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How Do You Square Your Support for Mandatory Reporting Laws with Religious Freedom? — Dr. Mohler Responds to Letters from Listeners of The Briefing

All right, I want to come back, and sometimes I answer one question and that leads to someone else, but I want to come back to something really, really serious. I address this issue about mandatory report laws in terms of abuse, and I’ve had some pushback, and someone wrote in asking how I can square that with religious liberty and basically suggesting what I proposed is a government superiority over the church. I assure you that is not what I am proposing. I’m going to say that even the person who wrote this letter, I think, would contradict his own argument. And by the way, he said that he thinks I demonstrate the flaws in Baptist theology. Okay, so let me just say I don’t think that has anything to do with this, and I’m going to stand by my Baptist theology.

I’m going to say this. I think if the sin were murder, and there was someone who confessed to a pastor murder, no one would question the mandatory report nature of that. In other words, otherwise you’re complicit in murder. And that’s the same situation when it comes to abuse. And I think the problem that’s implicit in the argument back to me here, is the assumption that the church, therefore, does not have its full freedom and responsibility under the authority of Scripture, the sovereignty of Christ, and the power of the gospel to do what the church must do. No, the church must do what only the church must do, and the pastor must do in that situation exactly what the pastor must do. But I think we can understand that in particular we make no claim, and should forswear the claim that the state could have anything to do with our responsibility in the church, but we also recognize as Christians, the state has a responsibility as the state when it comes to defending persons, and that’s where this comes in.

And honestly, it worries me when someone comes back to argue, “No, the church could know of this kind of threat to people and keep it to themselves as a matter of some kind of pastoral trust.” I don’t think anyone can say that when you extend that logic even just a little bit, and I think this is how you can get in big trouble real quick. It would be a gross infringement of religious liberty if the state presumed to tell the church how we would perform church discipline, what message we should preach, what should be our convictions, or our confession, or our creed, how we should operate within our own church life. That would be an infringement of religious liberty. But the state truly doing the state’s job, as in Romans Chapter 13, that’s what the church needs to respect as well.

Part V

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My 5-Year-Old is Disturbed by the Brutality of the Cross. How Do I Continue to Talk to Him About the Gospel? — Dr. Mohler Responds to Letters from Listeners of The Briefing

Okay, to end today, another really sweet question coming from a parent, in this case a father, about his five-year-old son asking some questions just because of the nature of the gospel and hearing some things in Scripture that trouble him. In this case, what troubles him is that Jesus was nailed to a cross. And this father says, “I get the sense that his young mind, a young man mind,” he writes all of that, “can’t comprehend something being done that is so evil. But I wonder if you could give me some guidelines for talking to him about this.”

I want to say this, Dad. I think the most important point you can make is that this is what sinful humanity did to Jesus. I think that’s the most important thing. In its cruelty, he actually sees it rightly. He actually understands it, and the innocence in terms of his understanding and being offended by Jesus being nailed to the cross, that’s exactly the way every one of us should respond to the same gospel message, the same biblical teaching, the same picture that comes inevitably to our minds. This is the horrible sinfulness of sin made absolutely clear in the nailing of Jesus to the cross. You know, there’s more to it than that as well, and that is that he was nailed to the cross in our place, as the entire atonement comes down to substitutionary atonement. God loved us so much that he sent his only son and whosoever believes in him will not perish but have everlasting life.

The story of the gospel is shocking to a five-year-old. You know how I simply say we need never to get over that shock? I appreciate a very sensitive Christian father here concerned with the heart of his son, and I think a part of what that might mean is simply taking the picture and making certain you get over the next three days to the empty tomb and the glorious resurrection of the Lord Jesus Christ from the dead. And I wouldn’t presume that a five-year-old can connect all those dots. I wouldn’t presume that I can connect all those dots. By God’s grace, maturity in the Christian faith means that we can connect more of those dots, but all of it is to drive us into a deeper love for Christ and thankfulness to God for his grace and mercy to us, and that grace and mercy sometimes shows up wondrously, including in the sweet question of a five-year-old boy to his dad.

Again, your questions, just send them to mail@albertmohler.com.