Tuesday, June 30, 2026
On Free Speech and Sacred Arguments
On Free Speech and Sacred Arguments
As we head into our nation’s 250th Independence Day celebration, a lot of us are thinking about the meaning and significance of this moment. At the end of May, Bruce Springsteen came through Cleveland. If you were at Rocket Arena that night, you’ll remember he took time between songs to share stories and to talk directly to the audience about what our nation means. America, he said, “was born out of disagreement. It's an argument. It's an ongoing, blessed, sacred argument about what course the country should take to form that more perfect union. We argue while still making progress with our common humanity, our dignity, our unity.”
Given the amount of arguing in our nation today, Springsteen offers a very useful perspective. And if America is an argument, I offer that we need to get better at disagreement. That doesn’t mean we need to get better at protest and shouting and grievance. We’re quite good at all of that already. What we need right now, at least from my point of view, is a little more courage and fearlessness about encountering and engaging with ideological differences. We need more conversation across different ideas, we need more curiosity coupled with a commitment to recognizing the essential humanity of the person we’re arguing with.
This is fundamentally about freedom of speech, which is having a bit of a moment. On the one hand, we’re all speaking up and speaking out everywhere, at rallies, demonstrations, counter protests, in statehouse testimony, and of course, all over social media. But at the same time, as a culture, we seem to be losing our collective commitment to free expression. You see this with book bans. You see this in the fights the FCC has picked with television stations and late-night hosts. And you see this with every call to cancel a speaker, even here in our community.
In justifying a departure from free speech ideals, we frequently hear something like, “This is too important; democracy is at stake.”
That’s right. Democracy is at stake. And if we believe free speech is one of the foundations of our democracy, then we should remember Springsteen’s words—this great project of our nation is an argument. And that’s ok. Democracy is hard and messy and will always involve disagreement. And though the free speech that comes with all this can be unpleasant, we shouldn’t fear it or shy away.
Listening to someone on a stage offer ideas that feel like an argument is exactly the kind of challenge Oliver Wendell Holmes contemplated in his dissent in The United States vs. Schwimmer. The defendant in that case, a 50-year-old female Hungarian immigrant and pacifist, refused to pledge to take up arms to defend the U.S. (a promise still in our nation’s naturalization oath). Justice Holmes wrote, “Some of her answers might excite popular prejudice, but, if there is any principle of the Constitution that more imperatively calls for attachment than any other, it is the principle of free thought—not free thought for those who agree with us, but freedom for the thought that we hate.”
Engagement with the “thought that we hate” is part of the sacred argument Springsteen was talking about. Engaging in that argument, rather than seeking to silence it, is fundamentally an act of optimism. It’s an act that says there is a future for this republic and for all of us, together. It’s an act that says We the People are resilient enough to disagree and remain committed to a shared future where we continue to work towards a more perfect union.
We all agree our democracy is at stake. It always is and always has been. And it’s our job, all of us, every neighbor on the right and the left, to act like it and recommit ourselves to freedom of expression for all, even when it calls for a sacred argument.
