Faithful Free Speech: From Campus to the Hill

In a recent interview, the campus free speech advocate, Greg Lukianoff, noted that Americans are waking up from the “Vegas Delusion” when it comes to what’s happening at the nation’s colleges and universities regarding the freedom to express one’s views. No more does “what happened on campus, stay on campus,” he opined, this aversion to free speech was happening in our council chambers and corporate boardrooms. 

Our First Amendment ensures important protections of speech, press, and religion. Often seen as separate freedoms, what if they were actually mutually supportive. In other words, what if our free speech was actually grounded in our faith? In this timely talk sponsored by Pepperdine University’s School of Public Policy, Prof. Robert George (Reagan Honorary Professor at Pepperdine, and McCormick Professor at Princeton) helps us connect these treasured freedoms to more faithfully engage with a polarized public square.

Dr. Robert P. George is McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence and Director of the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions at Princeton University. He has served as chairman of the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF), and before that on the President’s Council on Bioethics and as a presidential appointee to the United States Commission on Civil Rights. He has also served as the U.S. member of UNESCO’s World Commission on the Ethics of Scientific Knowledge and Technology (COMEST). He is a former Judicial Fellow at the Supreme Court of the United States, where he received the Justice Tom C. Clark Award. A graduate of Swarthmore College, he holds J.D. and M.T.S. degrees from Harvard University and the degrees of D.Phil., B.C.L., D.C.L., and D.Litt. from Oxford University. He has been a visiting professor at Harvard Law School and is a member of the American Academy of Sciences and Letters and the Council on Foreign Relations.

This talk is a part of our Founding Freedoms Lecture Series, that seeks to help Capitol Hill Staff think more deeply about the freedoms bequeathed to this nation – and the religious tenets that undergird them.