Interesting perspective
When an underperforming television celebrity is fired by a private employer for workplace comments that violate their code of conduct, it’s condemned as injustice and government censorship.
When a Christian small businessman faces the full weight of government (legal system) for politely declining, without derogatory comment, to bake a cake that violated his convictions, it’s celebrated as justice.
How can this be?
Justice is reduced to power— a tool to strike down opponents.
The First Amendment means the government can’t control your words; it restrains government, not private citizens or businesses. A TV studio or a Christian baker alike have the freedom to decide what they will — and won’t — allow in their work.
Yet a worldview that decries the first case and delights in the second severs justice from any higher standard. Justice is reduced to power— a tool to strike down opponents.
This way of thinking didn’t emerge in a vacuum. Over the last century, influential voices — philosophers like Michel Foucault among them — pushed the idea of subjectivism, the denial of objective reality. Truth is not discovered but imposed through structures of power. Thus, language constructs rather than merely describes reality. Whoever defines the words controls the framework of truth, and therefore controls power.
Ironically, the very individuals it claims to defend are stripped of their dignity, reduced to pawns in the endless struggle for power.
When this philosophy is fused with identity politics, the result is devastating. People are no longer seen as unique, responsible image-bearers of God but as mere representatives of group categories. Society is reduced to the perpetual clash of groups — oppressed versus oppressor, victim versus victimizer. The individual no longer matters; only group identity counts. Ironically, the very individuals it claims to defend are stripped of their dignity, reduced to pawns in the endless struggle for power.
C.S. Lewis warned in The Abolition of Man that when truth is cut loose from objective reality — and ultimately from God — we lose our humanity and words become tools of manipulation. Once language itself becomes the battleground, justice is no longer anchored in transcendent truth but in sheer force. Dialogue collapses, speech becomes a weapon, and “free” speech is recast as violence whenever it challenges the the dominant narrative of the “oppressed”.
From a Christian perspective, this is a profound distortion. In Scripture, words are not arbitrary instruments of power but reflections of the eternal Word — the Logos — who grounds reality in truth and gives meaning to human dignity. Every person is created in God’s image and accountable to Him as an individual. Strip away transcendent truth and individual worth, and all that remains is group conflict, where language is manipulated to serve power. That is not merely cultural decline; it is the unraveling of civilization itself.