Tucker Carlson’s Incomplete Understanding of Speech and The Civil Religion
In the wake of Charlie Kirk’s assassination, Charlie’s good friend and well-known former Fox News commentator-turned podcaster, Tucker Carlson, ran a monologue reflecting on Kirk’s legacy. Carlson was concerned to set the record straight on what Charlie stood for, and to oppose the charlatans astroturfing as Charlie’s successors (such as Brilyn Hollyhand). Carlson’s reflections took a strong stance on the claims of Christianity and their implications for political life and free speech. While Tucker got some things right, his understanding and vision was incomplete in certain ways.
Charlie Kirk’s Christian Roots
Why did Charlie Kirk die, Carlson asks? Not because he was a fascist, not because he was a defender of Israel, not even because he was a conservative or a defender of free speech. What was Kirk’s life about that was so threatening, so powerful, that it invoked a violent response? Tucker’s answer—and he is right about this—was that Charlie Kirk was killed for his Christian faith. Everything Charlie did flowed from his belief in Jesus and his Christian life. Carlson is undoubtedly fascinated by this reality, by the type of public intellectual who is not only outspoken in their Christianity, but who is unashamed to declare that certain political and social truths necessary follow from basic Christian beliefs. To unearth these connections and articulate the logical relation between Kirk’s Christian theology and his political beliefs and behavior was the purpose of Tucker’s reflection.
Carlson begins by wondering why political authorities around the world wouldn’t want Christians to dominate among their citizens. Christianity is a religion of love and peace, and in many ways is non-violent (turning the other cheek, etc.). Christians are commanded to pay taxes, to pray for, honor, and submit to the governing authorities, to be the husband of only one wife, to provide for their families, and to love their children. In almost every measurable metric, Christians make superb citizens. What, then, is the hang-up? Why has the Anti-Defamation League recently labeled “Christian identity” as a hate group?
Carlson’s answers to these questions are good and can be strongly endorsed by all Christians. First, God exists, and you are not God. The transcendent gap between God and man means that God is not only distinct from man in his properties (in quality and quantity), but that God, as creator, providential governor, and supreme judge, means that each man must give an account of his life, his words, and his actions before God and Christ. This is deeply offensive to the communist and radical, who have bought the lie of the Garden that man can be like God and have embraced the vision of a self-deified humanity who can raise himself up to heaven. Thus, at its foundation, Christianity from the beginning demands a certain cosmic humility.
If men are not gods, then they don’t determine the rules of the universe. Instead, men must live by God’s rules and commands if they want to live well. Carlson is right that in Europe and America, the predominant conception of civil justice has been predicated upon a Christian understanding of justice—of divine law and a law written upon the hearts of men (natural law). Prohibitions on murder, adultery, and lying under oath; the justice of capital punishment, the presumption of innocence, and the testimony of two or more witnesses to determine guilt—all of these moral and judicial traditions are derived from the biblical texts and the Christian tradition.
Second, Tucker rightly argues that Christianity claims that humans are created by God and have not evolved from single-celled organisms. Each person has a “distinct, unique soul created by God.” From this truth, Carlson argues that certain things necessarily follow. The soul of man is a divine spark within him that requires that each person be treated with respect. Every man has “freedom of conscience,” which means you cannot force others to believe what you think they should. “Christianity does not convert by the sword—it can’t; it requires free will,” Carlson proclaimed, adding that “it requires free will because it respects the individual conscience emanating from the distinct soul of every human being.”
Additionally, since you cannot force someone to believe anything, they alone are responsible for their beliefs and actions. As such, they alone must stand before God to give an account of their life. Tucker deduces from this—rightly I would argue—that collective guilt or intergenerational punishment is wrong, and has been rejected by the West for centuries. Since every person is equal before the bar of God’s justice, so too each person must be treated equally by the civil law. Thus comes our insistence upon “equality under the law.”
These theological truths limit the political authorities. It directs them not only in the moral principles and laws that should characterize any just polity, but it also means they are accountable to God for their public conduct. From this realization comes the belief in “limited government.”
While Christians can agree with many of these ideas, Tucker’s presentation of core Christian teachings and their moral and political implications are incomplete and often inaccurate.
Christian Universalism
At one point, Carlson averred that Christianity is the only truly universal faith. While the Old Testament had favored the Jews as God’s chosen people, the New Testament did away with ethnic favoritism and pride. Instead, through Christ, salvation and redemption are now open to all people regardless of their bloodline or heritage (or any other factor). All persons have an opportunity to be saved, Carlson argued, and as such, there is no tribalism or identity politics in Christianity. While humans might naturally favor those who look like them, God is not partial, but he loves all, and Christ died for all.
The universal nature of Christianity in the fact of God’s love and Christ’s death, atonement, and resurrection that brings new and eternal life to all who believe in him is true and good. It is also true that the New Testament clearly teaches that God does not show favoritism (Romans 2:11; James 2:1; even the Old Testament teaches this, i.e., Deuteronomy 10:17). At the same time, Christians are to favor other Christians over non-believers (Galatians 6:10), even while not neglecting loving and witnessing to the lost (which we once all were).
Yet there is an important aspect of Christianity that Carlson misses, and in fact, most of evangelicalism misses as well. And that is that Christianity is the only religion in world history that is universal in its essence, but autochthonous in its form. What does this mean? It means that Christianity is both universal and particular; it teaches truths about God, man, salvation, and morality that apply to everyone without distinction, yet in its cultural expression, Christianity is highly malleable and adaptive to many different peoples and cultures. This is why in every Christian society throughout history, you find commonalities and similarities with other Christian societies (murder is wrong, there is only one God to be worshipped, etc.), yet you also observe distinctives and uniqueness specific to that people and era. Worship among Ugandan Christians will be African in nature, whereas Russian Orthodox Christians will worship in ways concomitant with Eastern European traditions.
Determining where the line falls between Christianity’s universal teachings that cannot be compromised and that must bring repentance and reform to each culture, and those elements of a particular society that are good and worthy of preservation—this line can be difficult to discern at times. But Christianity is not a totalizing or utterly homogenizing religion; it does not require that you cease to be Egyptian or Chinese or American. Instead, you become an Egyptian Christian, a Chinese Christian, or an American Christian. This truth is documented in the New Testament where John testifies in the book of Revelation that he saw “a great multitude that no one could number, from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages, standing before the throne and before the Lamb” (Revelation 7:9).
Thus, Tucker is wrong to declare that Christianity eschews tribalism. In its particular social, political, and cultural manifestations, Christianity is tribal. However, this “tribalism” is refined by its essential universal teachings—for example, that the “dividing wall of hostility” between different people groups that fleshly and sinful men erect has been broken down by Christ (Ephesians 2:11-22). This means that Christians in America, Christians in Uganda, and Christians in Great Britain can love each other as brothers and sisters in Christ, even while not abandoning those things that make them uniquely American, Ugandan, or British.
The universal and autochthonous nature of Christianity is but one example of how grace perfects nature in order to produce a “new man” and a new way of life, even on earth. Humans by nature are tribal, and without God’s love and Christ’s transforming power, these differences will lead to conflict and enmity. The gospel, however, takes these distinct peoples and ways of life and redeems them—not demolishing or eliminating them—such that what emerges is a godly tribalism, refined by the gospel.
Conviction vs. Conscience
At numerous times throughout his monologue, Carlson talked about the “right of conscience,” and how this flows from God’s creation of the soul and its freedom. At one point, Tucker commented that Charlie didn’t believe in free speech just because it was in the Bill of Rights, but because it is found in the New Testament, having been bestowed upon us by God. At another point, Carlson played a clip of Charlie telling a student that there is something in you that is telling you the truth (that aborting babies is wrong), and “that’s your soul talking.”
Carlson is right in a way, but also confused. In short, he is conflating the human conscience with our convictions or opinions. These are not the same. The conscience is a moral sense within man, the “law written on their hearts” and a “conscience bearing testimony” to what is true (Romans 2:14-15). These are truths that man can’t not know. Even if the conscience is obscured, twisted, ignored, or callused, it cannot be completely erased; it bears testimony to God’s existence, to the Ten Commandments, and to the human desire for justice and right. The precepts of the conscience are not person-dependent or up to us to decide. We merely recognize a law and reality independent of ourselves and decide either to submit to it or rebel against it.
Human opinions, on the other hand, are highly relative. Some of our opinions align with our conscience, with the natural law, and with divine revelation found in scripture. Other opinions diverge wildly from these standards. Of course, everyone believes they are orthodox unto themselves, but this does not require that we respect every opinion or entertain it as potentially being true. Charlie Kirk understood this distinction, as in his debates he continually sought to evoke or stir the students’ consciences to disturb and challenge their convictions.
No one has a right to false opinions, for no one has a right to be or do wrong—and especially not the right to live immorally according to one’s false beliefs. Here, too, Tucker is confusing freedom with right. While it is trivially true that every person has the philosophic ability (i.e., freedom) to believe what they want or to reason to a particular conclusion, this does not therefore extend to them a moral right to that conclusion. We do not have to respect the belief among many academics and students that trans women are women or that furries are real merely because they have a soul or free will or should not be forced to believe otherwise. In certain circumstances, it is good and proper for both private and public authorities to censor dangerous opinions, deadly to the common good. Every parent does this, every educator does this, every CEO does this, and every civil government already does this. The question, of course, is not whether, but which—and the moral and religious authority that stands behind these decisions.
The right of conscience is the right—and duty!—to bring one’s convictions in alignment with the truth, not to hold whatever noxious opinions you want and then defend them as being conscientious beliefs. To help citizens do this, much is needed. Healthy parents who know and live by the Christian faith are indispensable; good teachers and sound curriculum are paramount; right and wholesome civil laws that teach truth and deter wickedness cannot be neglected. An entire society in which every element plays a role in cultivating children into virtuous and functional citizens can be achieved without violence to the soul that Carlson is so fiercely against.
Incomplete Political Theology
Finally, it is important to point out that Tucker Carlson’s political theology is incomplete because he reasons primarily from Christian origins. Yes, God is the Creator and men are not God; yes, each person is uniquely created by God and has a soul and conscience that testifies to the truth; yes, men in their collective political existence must acknowledge God’s will and revelation in their laws. Yet Christianity is more than just a story of origins, or even that of a static nature or of eternal divine commands.
Christianity also teaches about the fall of man and his eternal ends (which Carlson recognizes), which Reformed theologians have commented on in detail. How did the fall affect human reason and speech? Is it enough merely to prescribe a realm of free speech and debate in order to reason people to the truth? Is it the case, as Carlson asserts, that because each person has a soul and free will, the only way to engage with them is through open dialogue and reasonable discourse? What is man’s ultimate purpose, and should this instead shape how we relate to one another?
First, it is not true that telling someone what they ought to believe is an assault upon their soul or a denial of the sacred and divine spark within them. If this were so, then no parent could ever rightly teach their child anything not agreeable to the child. Yet we all recognize (and those of us who are parents practice this) that the soul, beliefs, and reason of a child must be properly shaped, molded, and cultivated by their parents. This is also why early education is so critical (and also a contentious political battleground), because children are highly impressionable and malleable. Children are not imparted with a fully formed and perfectly functioning reason at birth. “Reason” is the result of both nature and nurture; it is a latent capacity that every child is born with, but whether it grows to maturity and strength, able to think clearly and discern truth from error, depends to a great degree upon its formation and education.
To complicate this issue, human reason was deeply impacted by the fall of man. When Adam sinned, he lost his original righteousness, or that divine gift within him that positively oriented his will, affections, and motives toward God. As the Westminster Confession of Faith describes it, God “created man male and female, with reasonable and immortal souls, endued with knowledge, righteousness, and true holiness, after His own image, having the law of God written in their hearts, and power to fulfill it” (WCF, 4.2). Yet sin and the curse removed Adam’s righteousness, resulting in man’s affections and will turning away from God. Reason, as natural to man qua man, was not utterly stricken, but in the words of the Puritan minister Stephen Charnock (1628-1680), become “purblind,” or impaired, even if able to function properly at times:
The eye is born quite blind to spiritual, but purblind only to natural knowledge. …This is excellently described by the apostle: Eph. iv. 17, 18, ‘Vanity of the mind, darkness in the understanding, and blindness of the heart.’ The essential faculties of the rational soul: the mind, the repository of principles, the faculty whereby we should judge of things honest or dishonest; the understanding, the discursive faculty and the reducer of those principles into practical dictates,—that part whereby we reason and collect one thing from another, framing conclusions from the principles in the mind; the heart, i.e. the will, conscience, affections, which were to apply those principles, draw out those reasonings upon the stage of the life, all corrupted,—one vain, the other dark, and the third stark blind.
If the reason of unredeemed man is purblind, how do you reason with adults whose reasoning is darkened? How can free speech lead them to the truth when their hearts and wills are in rebellion against God? How can civil debate hope to undo a life nurtured by lies, falsehoods, and godless ideologies that have only compounded reason’s corruption?
Free speech, rational debate, and persuasion alone are impotent to change the hearts and minds of fallen man. This is why Charlie Kirk’s legacy is so important, for Kirk used every opportunity in his campus debates over contemporary issues (abortion, gender, Trump, etc.) to share the gospel and the teachings of scripture. Charlie grasped that his words and arguments alone were powerless to affect the students without the simultaneous and divine work of the Holy Spirit. Without that evangelistic element—or at the least consistent prayer in the midst of debate—man’s words alone have no power to break the chains of darkness.
This is also why Carlson’s analogy between Christian salvation and free speech breaks down. Tucker argued that no person could be forced or coerced to believe in the gospel; so also, no person can be forced to accept someone else’s opinions. But the proper analogy is just the opposite: no one is ever merely ‘argued’ into faith, but salvation is always a mysterious work of God’s effectual calling and initiative in transforming the heart; so also, effective public debate with the radical left of today, who hate God and Christianity, must also be a work of the Holy Spirit. It is not the constitutional right of free speech, autonomous reason, or civility in debate that convinces people of the truth.
Tucker’s political theology is deficient for these reasons. It is not merely a matter of origins or man’s unchanging nature. How we conduct ourselves in private conversations or as public intellectuals has as much to do with the fall and redemption of man, as well as his eternal ends, as it does with the creation of the human soul and the reality of free will.
In this context, to believe that civil government must have no cognizance of religion, or must respect ‘both sides’ in every debate, or must uphold a liberally neutral conception of the constitutional right of free speech, is to err badly. Civil law always dictates what citizens can and cannot say, and what they can and cannot do. It does so on the basis of some kind of morality, anthropology, and civil religion. Therefore, while Carlson is right in the abstract that you cannot simply force someone to believe what you believe, this does not mean that the only alternative is absolute free speech or religiously neutral civil government. By supporting the religion of the American people (Christianity) at both the national and state levels, by implementing laws favorable to stable and traditional families, and by regulating education to exclude false and toxic ideologies while endorsing basic Christian beliefs and practices (e.g., prayer, the Ten Commandments), civil government can go a long way toward conducing conditions favorable toward right reason and public truth.
