This article originally appeared in The Skeptic, Volume 22, Issue 3, from 2012.
After centuries of enforcement, the United Kingdom’s Blasphemy Law was abolished in March 2008 and was officially repealed in July 2008. Following hundreds of years of struggle, secularists sent the arcane law to history’s dustbin as a limitation of speech and safeguard of superstition. Despite the ongoing struggle between religion and government, opponents of the law thought it was a momentous achievement for free speech.
The celebration, however, may be short-lived. Great Britain, as well as France, Austria and other Western nations, has made it a crime to promote ‘religious hatred’ under various anti-discrimination and hate-crime laws (Turley, 2009). In fact, the same month the Blasphemy Law was abolished a 15-year-old boy was arrested for holding a sign that said, “Scientology is not a religion, it is a dangerous cult” in front of Scientology’s London headquarters.
While the Crown Prosecution Service eventually ruled the boy’s sign was not “abusive or insulting” to the church, in early 2009 the British police warned the public that it would consider making insults towards Scientology a crime.
More recently, Rowan Laxton, a high-ranking diplomat at the British Foreign Office, was arrested on suspicion of inciting religious hatred under the 2006 Act for yelling “[f]ucking Israelis, fucking Jews” while watching news reports about an Israeli attack on Gaza as he rode an exercise bike in a gym (Andrews & Cohen, 2009). In May, Laxton, who worked in the Middle East and South Asia, was officially charged with “racially aggravated harassment” and, if convicted, he faced a maximum of seven years in prison, a fine, or both (Daily Telegraph, 2009). In September 2009, he was convicted and was fined £350 and forced to pay £500 in prosecution costs.
A strong case could be made that prosecuting people for denouncing a religion is simply replacing one form of the Blasphemy Law with a new version. That becomes clearer when one compares religion to other beliefs, such as politics where one is not silenced for denouncing Marxism, capitalism, democracy, or fascism. To understand these issues we must look at the historical cases of blasphemy cases.
A short history of blasphemy
Prior to the 17th century, criticizing the Church of England was punishable by torture, prison, death, or a combination of the above. This was true of James Naylor, a Quaker, convicted of blasphemy in 1656. Historians Robert Bucholz and Newton Key explained that Naylor was
pilloried in London, whipped through the streets of Bristol, his tongue pierced with a hot iron, his forehead branded with a ‘B’ (for blasphemer), and, [was] finally put to death.
BUCHOLZ & KEY, 2003, page 254
Towards the end of the century the law was modified with the Blasphemy Act of 1697 preventing anyone from holding an official position in the Church or government who, for example, claimed there was more than one god.
In the following year, the Blasphemy Act of 1698 (for England and Wales) set a harsher penalty that defined blasphemy in several ways, including the denial of the Holy Scriptures to be divine authority. This changed the law so the harshest penalty one could receive was three years imprisonment after the third offence.
In the next century, the law was enforced for political reasons, targeting Thomas Williams (1797) and Richard Carlile (1819) who were indicted for blasphemy when they sold Thomas Paine’s Age of Reason. The state argued Paine’s book attacked the Old Testament. Yet, there is still controversy and debate surrounding which specific religion and what the words were really targeting.
By 1838 the court ruled one cannot be prosecuted for blasphemy if the religion criticized was Judaism, Islam, or Christian sects outside the Anglican Church. The law was restricted to protect the “tenets and beliefs of the Church of England” from criticism. In an 1838 case, Judge Edward Hall Alderson told the jury:
A person may, without being liable to prosecution for it, attack Judaism, or Mahomedanism, or even any sect of the Christian religion (save the established religion of the country); and the only reason why that latter is in a different situation from the others is, because it is the form established by law, and is therefore a part of the constitution of the country.
THE TIMES, 1990
In the 20th century, there have been only two convictions under the law: In 1922, John William Gott was sentenced to nine months of hard labour for saying Jesus Christ entered Jerusalem “like a circus clown on the back of two donkeys”. More recently in 1976, Mary Whitehouse brought a private prosecution of Gay News Ltd. and editor Denis Lemon over Professor James Kirkup’s poem “The Love that Dares to Speak its Name” published in the Gay News. The poem, in part, read:
As they took him from the cross
I, the centurion, took him in my arms –
the tough lean body
of a man no longer young,
beardless, breathless,
but well hung.
Lemon was convicted and the judge nearly sent him to jail, but decided on a suspended sentence. Nonetheless, Lemon was fined £500 and Gay News was fined £1,000, which did not include the £10,000 in court costs. Whitehouse celebrated the conviction saying,
I’m rejoicing because I saw the possibility of Our Lord being vilified. Now it’s been shown that it won’t be.
Lemon appealed, but the Court of Appeal upheld the conviction in 1978. This led some politicians to debate whether to repeal the law, but the law’s critics never gained significant support.
Ten years later, in 1988, Whitehouse denounced Martin Scorsese’s The Last Temptation of Christ asking the British Board of Film Classification director to “bear in mind that if the film were as offensive as it sounded, it would give offense to many people and could result in some kind of action for blasphemy.” She also wrote to the office of Britain’s attorney general who then considered indicting the distributors of Scorsese’s film if they screened the movie. Though the threat was never acted on, it demonstrates how the law served as a tool for fundamentalists to threaten censorship of ideas. The result of such a threat might cause a chilling effect of getting would-be critics to remain silent out of fear of prosecution.
Despite the law being limited to the Church of England, some British Muslims called for Salman Rushdie to be punished for The Satanic Verses. Among the parts that Muslims consider blasphemous were writings of a fictionalized account of Muhammad, naming him Mahound (an old Christian term calling the prophet Satanic), and giving prostitutes in a brothel the same names of Muhammad’s wives.
In 1989, Paul O’Higgins, Professor of Law at King’s College, wrote that the Rushdie controversy demonstrated that the UK’s Blasphemy Law was a relic of an older era having no place in modern society. Whereas, Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher said,
[f]reedom of speech and expression is subject only to the laws of this land, particularly libel and blasphemy, and will remain subject to the rule of law. It is absolutely fundamental in all we believe and cannot be interfered with by any outside force.
Though the Prime Minister was opposed to enforcing the law on Rushdie for his criticizing of Islam, the law remained.
Abolishing the law
Critics of the Blasphemy Law were reenergized when Parliament passed the Human Rights Act of 1998. The act made it illegal for any public body or law to be in contradiction to the European Convention on Human Rights. The law was in contradiction of articles nine and ten of the Convention in which article nine promised,
[f]reedom to change his religion or belief and freedom, either alone or in community with others and in public or private, to manifest his religion or belief, in worship, teaching, practice and observance,
whereas article ten gave the
[f]reedom to hold opinions and to receive and impart information and ideas without interference by public authority and regardless of frontiers.
Despite the obvious contradiction, the issue was never pressed.
In December 2007, the High Court rejected an attempt by a Christian evangelical group to prosecute the BBC for showing Jerry Springer: The Opera. In the following month, the Commons and the Lords considered abolishing the law, a movement which gained momentum with former Archbishop of Canterbury Lord Carey writing that the law was discriminatory since it protected only beliefs of the Church of England.
Subsequently, Prime Minister Gordon Brown’s office announced they would consider abolishing the law. Yet, the spokesman said:
However, we do believe it is necessary to consult with the churches, particularly the Anglican Church, before coming to a final decision, and that’s what we are doing.
After being consulted, the Church agreed with repealing it. In March, the Justice and Immigration Bill was passed, thus repealing the law, which officially began in July.
Old wine, new bottles?
The purpose of the Blasphemy Law was to protect a superstitious belief: it seems that preventing people from insulting a belief with the 2006 Racial and Religious Hatred Act does the same. In 1949, Lord Denning reflected on the Blasphemy Law explaining:
“he reason for this law was because it was thought that a denial of Christianity was liable to shake the fabric of society, which was itself founded upon Christian religion. There is no such danger to society now and the offence of blasphemy is a dead letter.
But after hundreds of years, it appears that religion is still given a level of protection that democracy itself does not receive. One can spew hatred and disgust at democracy and free speech, but if someone directs that hate to religion they might be prosecuted. Why is religion treated differently than the government and political system that gives us the right to practice our own religion?
References
- Andrews, E., & Cohen, T. (9 February 2009). High-ranking Foreign Office diplomat arrested over anti-Semitic gym tirade. Daily Mail
- Bucholz. R., & Key, N. (2003) Early Modern England 1485-1714: A Narrative History. New York: Wiley-Blackwell.
- Daily Telegraph (11 May, 2009) Diplomat charged with race crime against Jews,” Daily Telegraph.
- The Times (10 April, 1990) Extending law on blasphemy would be likely do more harm than good. The Times.
- Turley, J. (12 April 2009) The Free World Bars Free Speech, Washington Post.
