THAT OLD TIME LIBERALISM:

More and more, it seems progressive consensus considers freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, and other basic political freedoms, as less important than the freedom not to be offended, at least for certain people.

In doing so, Western Elites forget where their freedoms came from, and how transformative they have been. Street preachers can seem irritating, and progressive westerners may hold a trendy disdain for proselytising or missionary efforts around the world, but it was religious nuts, with their refusal to go quietly, who were historically responsible for most of the liberal rights we take for granted. Long before mass democracy, or party politics; it was non-conformist Christians -- Congregationalists, Baptists, Quakers, and others -- relentlessly demanding the right to preach, to worship and organise in their own communities, that eventually extracted those rights from the dominant Establishment. 

Not particularly because the Establishment wanted to give them, but through sheer bloody perseverance that could not be ignored. Fortified by a profound religious faith and the especial Protestant emphasis on individual faith and conscience, between the 16th and 19th centuries, these groups simply could not be repressed. The culture of religious pluralism, debate and tolerance, itself then became the essential prototype for the political culture of pluralism, debate and tolerance, that followed it in the latter 19th and 20th Centuries.

England had a parliament since shortly after the Magna Carta (itself drafted by Stephen Langton, the Archbishop of Canterbury, drawing on the Bible), but it was only the addition of Protestant individualism in the 16th Century that radicalised that representative structure and led within a century to parliament actually overthrowing the king and (temporarily) abolishing the monarchy! The government that followed, in turn, tried and failed to control the religious situation, and the English-speaking world would be permanently, crucially marked by both religious and political pluralism and debate. An inheritance that went on to powerfully influence the American revolution, in turn, and then our fundamental, global ideas about democracy, liberalism and pluralism.

This is not a cultural environment that can be taken for granted worldwide. 

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