Why Truth May Not Prevail
In 1784, the famed Patrick Henry, who had once declared, “give me liberty, or give me death!”, introduced into the Virginia legislature a bill that would have funded religion in the state by taxing Virginians to support their ministers. The Episcopal Church had lost its privileged position in Virigina as the established church at the beginning of the Revolutionary War and had never regained it. Henry’s bill would have restored religious establishment to Virginia, but with one caveat: the bill created a “general assessment” of religion in which each denomination could use tax monies for the support of their own religion. This kind of equal establishment among all Protestant denominations mirrored similar assessments that had been passed in the northern states, such as Massachusetts. It was meant to diffuse religious tensions while providing robust support for religion.
In opposition to the bill stood James Madison. Madison managed to delay passage of the bill until 1785. In the meantime, he wrote his Memorial and Remonstrance while working with Baptist dissenters to oppose Henry’s bill. The result was that Henry’s bill was defeated in 1785 and in its place the Virginia assembly passed the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom the next year. This statute was written by Madison, but he borrowed heavily from Thomas Jefferson’s 1779 Bill for Establishing Religious Freedom (which the legislature had never enacted). It is here, in the thought of Jefferson and Madison, that we find the origin of the “marketplace of ideas.”
The Truth Will Win Out
The first section of the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom lists a number of reasons why religious liberty should be preserved and religious establishment struck down. However, at the very end of that section appears the following (and final) reason given by Jefferson and Madison:
truth is great and will prevail if left to herself; …she is the proper and sufficient antagonist to error, and has nothing to fear from the conflict unless by human interposition disarmed of her natural weapons, free argument and debate; errors ceasing to be dangerous when it is permitted freely to contradict them.
In juxtaposition to this, the Virginia duo believed that any attempt to establish a religion at the state level, no matter how mild or uncontroversial, would inevitably lead to the political authorities declaring what “true religion” is and is not. Protestants had long been believed to the one of the proper religious duties of civil government was to support and maintain “true religion,” but that what counted as true religion (versus false religion) was not decided by the civil magistrate but by ecclesiastical authorities.
Jefferson and Madison opposed this societal ordering, and in its place sought to remove from both the church and the civil government the right and duty to have a say about the truth regarding religious claims (or really any opinion). Instead, no public or private authority could put its thumb on the scale in favor of truth, for what if they were wrong and instead were promoting false ideas or a false religion? The only alternative, in their minds, was to allow all opinions to be openly aired in public, with the sure belief that the arguments and evidence in favor of the truth would prevail over error and lies.
The idea of an open public square where the strength and veracity of ideas were to be debated was not new to Jefferson and Madison. Well over a century early, the English Christian and republican writer and poet John Milton had made a similar argument in his 1644 book Areopagitica. Milton’s goal in writing Areopagitica was a defense of freedom of speech and the press against Britain’s licensing regime that had gone into effect with the Licensing Order of 1643 (which required authors to have a government-approved license before they could publish).
At one point in his pamphlet, Milton makes an argument like Jefferson’s:
And though all the winds of doctrine were let loose to play upon the earth, so Truth be in the field, we do injuriously by licensing and prohibiting to misdoubt her strength. Let her and Falsehood grapple; who ever knew Truth put to the worse in a free and open encounter? Her confuting is the best and surest suppressing.
Of course, the reality was that Jefferson was pulling directly from Milton, as Milton was one of Jefferson’s favorite poets and had probably read most of the Englishman’s works. Milton was no liberal; he was, if anything, a sincere Anglican attempting to retrieve the classical republican tradition for England. Yet Jefferson still found inspiration in many of Milton’s ideas.
The nineteenth and twentieth centuries witnessed other defenders of the marketplace of ideas. John Stuart Mill defended the liberty of thought and discussion in On Liberty, and in the early twentieth-century, the Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendall Holmes defended it in his dissent in Abrams v. United States (1919). That case was about the right of anti-war political speech by immigrant activists who opposed American military operations and munitions production against Russia’s Bolshevik Revolution.
The defendants were tried and found guilty under the Sedition Act of 1918 of impeding American war production. Ironically, the Court used Holmes’ “clear and present danger” standard from a previous case, Schenck v. United States (1919), to censor the defendants’ speech and render them guilty. In his dissent, Holmes did not abandon the clear and present danger standard, but merely denied that it was rightly applied by the Court. While Holmes was not entirely against censorship of truly harmful speech, he argued instead the most speech should be constitutionally protected within the marketplace of ideas:
But when men have realized that time has upset many fighting faiths, they may come to believe even more than they believe the very foundations of their own conduct that the ultimate good desired is better reached by free trade in ideas—that the best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market, and that truth is the only ground upon which their wishes safely can be carried out. That, at any rate, is the theory of our Constitution. It is an experiment, as all life is an experiment.
Here Holmes does what neither Milton, Jefferson, Madison, or Mill had done—draw an explicit analogy between competing ideas in the public sphere and that of capitalist production, consumption, and commercial activity. Thus, in the same way that we do not protest when one commercial product eclipses another, nor should we be afraid when new ideas overtake and surpass more traditional ones.
For Holmes, the “truth” of an idea was attached to its social utility—whether it can “get itself accepted” by the majority of people. Holmes, of course, was well known for his rejection of natural law and his embrace of legal realism, pragmatism, and social Darwinianism. While Holmes might sound like Milton or Jefferson (and he is certainly reflecting upon their tradition), his sentiments reflect a qualitative evolution of the marketplace of ideas away from transcendent standards of truth and knowledge and instead toward social relativity and a democratic pragmatism.
Marketplace Fallacies
There are at least four fallacies with the “marketplace of ideas” approach to free speech, truth, and falsehood. The first, most obviously, is that it is not the theory or practice of our Constitution (pace Holmes). The First Amendment only limited Congress in regulating speech and the press, and those provisions primarily applied to political speech. The states were left to their traditional sovereign powers to regulate speech, which they did.
Second, the idea that truth is great and will win in a free contest with falsehood and error is not necessarily true. It presupposes that “Truth” can defend itself. But the truth is powerless without great men to preach and teach and defend it against slander and lies. Thus, the truth can only possibly prevail in an ideological marketplace where there exist public intellectuals and men of integrity, honor, intelligence, and rhetorical power to defend her. Most civilizations throughout history have not had such men. Or if they have, they have often been assassinated because the truth they preach offends against men’s wickedness.
Third, the “marketplace of ideas” as espoused by Jefferson and Madison was predicated upon many assumptions that circumscribe its legitimacy to only certain times and places. They presupposed that men believe there exists a set of mind-independent Truths that can be truly known by man (contra radical skepticism); they assumed that most men care more about truth than falsehood, or are actively seeking the truth because they value truth for their lives (epistemic honesty); they presupposed that when confronted with the Truth, such men would be willing to abandon their false beliefs even if sincerely held—and even if this required a complete change of life (humility and repentance); and they assumed that conniving men would not take advantage of the marketplace of ideas to advance ideas that would undermine the fair rules of play between truth and falsehood (relativism, postmodernism).
As most readers will recognize, once these and similar presuppositions of the marketplace of ideas are spelled out, most men throughout history (and even today) would be disqualified from participating in the debate. They are not intellectually, spiritually, or temperamentally fit to participate in the open search for truth. The marketplace itself has served as a Trojan Horse, allowing all kinds of falsehoods to flourish—falsehoods that are fatal to the common pursuit of truth. What if most people in a society come to believe that there is no such thing as the Truth? Or that all “truths” are projections of a self-chosen identity (i.e., there is no mind-independent reality)? Or what if they are educated and indoctrinated into believing that truth is irrelevant because life is meaningless and ends at the grave? The marketplace of ideas has little power to protect itself against such invasive and undermining lies.
Fourth, even if all of the above conditions are met, it is not true as Milton, Jefferson, Madison, and Holmes contend that in a fair and equal contest, truth will prevail against error and falsehood. Men are weak, their reason falters; they are self-deceived and more often want to believe error than be confronted with painful truths. The mass of humanity is more ready to be told what to believe than to question and search out knowledge for themselves. They are too busy with work, bread, and circuses to suffer in body and soul to gain true knowledge and drive out ignorance and deceit.
This task is not merely a philosophic one, but is deeply spiritual, as it is the spiritually dead condition of natural man that makes knowing the truth so difficult. Thus even if you are Socrates, you may very well be deceived. Accordingly, for the marketplace of ideas to work, you need a new kind of human being—you need a spiritually renewed man who is born again, whose mind has been redeemed and baptized with the truth of scripture and the revelation of Christ. In essence, the marketplace of ideas only works in a Christian society and nation.
The Alternative
Today we witness the folly of the marketplace of ideas. America in 2025 is awash with falsehoods, error, and lies. We are lectured about how we are to not live by lies, but most Americans live under some kind of life-destroying lie—and they do not even know it. That is the power of lies and falsehood.
The irony is that we have more “free speech” today than we’ve ever had before, but we are more deceived and degenerate as a people than we’ve even been before. Perhaps these trends are connected. Perhaps the marketplace of ideas is itself a lie that needs to be scrutinized and repudiated.
What is the alternative, you may ask? The alternative is to recognize that all speech is always regulated—either by one’s parents, religious authorities, teachers, friends, or civil government. There are always things that you cannot say in polite society and ideas that you cannot openly defend without severe consequences. In short, the marketplace of ideas has always been a fiction. It is a myth that we live in such a marketplace or that we ought to strive for one.
The alternative is to recognize that “free speech” is not about saying whatever you want. It is about using speech as God intended: to worship him, teach what is good, true, and beautiful, and to bless others (James 3:9-10). There is no right to speech that is profane, to teach wickedness, or to curse God. There is no right to believe errors.
The alternative is to understand that human speech is learned. It develops and grows, first within the family, and then in one’s education. The kind of speech modeled by parents and teachers will determine the speech of children who grow into adults. Those who are habituated and educated to be careless or obscene with their speech, to emote and make noise, but who never learn to distinguish good from evil, truth from falsehood, and the beautiful from the ugly—these persons will not have free speech and will not contribute to public debate of a civil kind.
The alternative, therefore, is to recover the conditions that make free speech and the knowledge of the truth possible in the first place. This means healthy families with mature and virtuous adults; it means good public and private schools that teach and take a stand on what we can know, and do not pander to “critical thinking;” it means businesses, churches, and other civil institutions that uphold righteous standards of the law of fashion (of honor and shame); and it means civil government that properly regulates the speech of its citizens. This is what America used to be. It is what Jefferson and Madison took for granted but failed to preserve. May we chart a different path.
