Faith leaders raise concerns over online censorship of religious speech

YouTube's blocking of a theologian's talk on the Christian view of sex as a "content violation" raises serious concerns that "religious speech is being censored online," San Francisco's archbishop and Focus on the Family's president said in a Wall Street Journal op-ed they co-wrote.

"Today's sexual politics function as a new kind of fundamentalism, one that presents a deep problem to a diverse and democratic society. ... Social media enables the new fundamentalism, enforced by the mysterious rules of big tech's quasi-monopoly," wrote Archbishop Salvatore J. Cordileone and Jim Daly.

In their Aug. 12 op-ed, they explained that twice on Aug. 7 a live broadcast by the Rev. Carl Trueman, a scholar, best-selling author and Presbyterian minister, "was booted off the air."

He was giving a series of talks at the Sacramento Gospel Conference that were livestreamed on the YouTube channel of the conference's host, Immanuel Baptist Church in Sacramento, California.