- Joined
- Mar 11, 2013
- Messages
- 13,719
- Points
- 113
he leader of the Conservative party warns us that Labour is planning a “blasphemy law by the back door”. James Price, writing for the Spectator, called the prospect of blasphemy laws a “terrifying development”. John Cooper MP, speaking in parliament, sternly intoned that such laws “have no place in modern British society”. He was here to remind us of our proud cultural patrimony: “This is the land of ‘Monty Python’s Life of Brian’ after all”.
Great minds at work. But what were they talking about? The topic was a Labour plan to create an “Islamophobia Council”. This conjures visions, perhaps, of robed and bearded men sentencing confused Brits to public lashings for public indecency — no such luck, however. The reality will be of the high-vis brigade knocking on doors to haul people away for dodgy Facebook posts at the behest of a committee of earnest SOAS graduates. Or, as we saw recently, the astonishing sight of an individual having their name and date of birth shared by the police on Twitter having been prosecuted for burning a copy of the Quran.
An outrageous action, and yet another example of “two tier” policing in which those who offend against liberal shibboleths are viciously pursued, even as child rapists walk free, and illegal migrants get hotel rooms rather than a ticket on the next flight home. But claims of “blasphemy laws” miss the point, and plunge headfirst into total historical illiteracy and cultural amnesia.
We live in a world, clearly and obviously, not of religious blasphemy laws, but secular ones; a world in which not only public but private speech is ruthlessly policed. Say the wrong thing, display the wrong flag — or, like a non-conforming churchgoer of old, fail to show up at the diversity seminar — and your career, your friendships, your reputation, are over. This, along with a bevy of restrictive and often applied laws, is a far harsher regime than the actual age of blasphemy laws.
Britain’s constitutional settlement is distinct, and departs from both the civil law, revolutionary legacy of France and the formalistic rights-based constitution of America. Blasphemy was long understood to be an offence under common law, and even in America where the protection of the First Amendment gave wider scope for potentially blasphemous speech, state and municipal laws continued to be applied against blasphemy well into the 20th century. Such rulings were even upheld by the Supreme Court. Whilst explicit blasphemy laws were the exception, laws against obscenity were frequently applied as de facto blasphemy laws, reflecting a shared civic sense of decency and respect within the multi-religious republic.
As I wrote in 2023, the free speech tradition of Britain and America is one in which clear limits and exceptions have long applied, without straying into oppressive state regulation of thought along the totalitarian model. This historic balance has been upended by the social and legal revolutions of the 20th century, but these revolutions have often been elite-led, and occurred behind closed doors rather than coming about through democratic pressure.
Blasphemy is given considerable emphasis by William Blackstone, the 18th century jurist whose writings were hugely influential on the development of both British and American law and politics in the 18th-19th centuries. On the topic of blasphemy, he is unambiguous:
The belief of a future state of rewards and punishments, the entertaining just ideas of the moral attributes of the supreme being, and a firm persuasion that he superintends and will finally compensate every action in human life (all which are clearly revealed in the doctrines, and forcibly inculcated by the precepts, of our saviour Christ) these are the grand foundation of all judicial oaths; which call to witness the truth of those, which perhaps may be only know to him and the party attesting: all moral evidence therefore, all confidence in human veracity, must be weakened by irreligion, and overthrown by infidelity. Wherefore all affronts to Christianity, or endeavors to depreciate its efficacy, are highly deserving of human punishment.
Blackstone does however make important and consequential distinctions. First of all he distinguishes between divine, natural, and merely human laws. Secondly, he places private vices beyond the scope of the law, which governs only human society, not man’s conscience nor his relationship to his creator. He criticises the historic penalty of death for heresy and apostasy, noting that “the loss of life is a heavier penalty than the offense, taken in a civil light, deserves: and, taken in a spiritual light, our laws have no jurisdiction over it.”
However he notes that such liberties are being abused — “the civil liberties to which we were then restored being used as a cloak of maliciousness, and the most horrid doctrine subversive of all religion being publicly avowed both in discourse and writings, it was found necessary again for the civil power to interpose, by not admitting those miscreants to the privileges of society, who maintained such principle as destroyed all moral obligation”.
His understanding, in continuity with both classical and medieval political thought, is that the political commonwealth is a moral community in which the liberties and privileges of the citizen are imperilled by outright assaults on those common principles. This he distinguishes from mere difference of opinions on doctrine and religious truth — punishments of which he denounces as “blind zeal and pious cruelty” — and of outright public outrages against Christianity. His legal basis for this is straightforward — “These are offenses punishable at common law by fine and imprisonment, or other infamous corporal punishment: for Christianity is part of the laws of England”.
That principle, that Christianity is inextricably bound up with the laws and constitution of England, has never been formally revoked, and indeed the Church of England remains our established Church.
We are not bound, of course, to agree with 18th century jurisprudence. But it is important to remember that blasphemy is no alien principle to our law or culture, with the law only having been abolished in 2008 along with a series of constitutional wrecking balls unleashed by Blair and Brown’s Labour government.
Nor are Islamic complaints about blasphemy purely the product of a desire to impose Sharia law. In former British territories, from Israel to India and Pakistan, blasphemy laws, specifically intended to protect Muslim sensibilities, were introduced by British colonial administrators — hardly figures championed by modern progressives.
That isn’t a call for complacency of course. Pakistan’s blasphemy laws were radicalised and “Islamicised” in the 1980s, and it is under those revised laws that the death penalty — long excluded from English common law — was applied, often against religious minorities.
As Britain has gone from a denominationally plural Christian state to a multicultural one, where Muslims and Hindus fight in the streets of Leicester, it is perhaps hardly surprising that the same laws used to quell community tensions in the British Raj would return, albeit in new, progressively inflected forms.
A reality that has not dawned on much of the libertarian Right is that all societies have blasphemy laws — because any system of laws must punish those who attack the principles upon which those laws are based, even if it is through the relatively light measures of restricting publication and exacting fines.
The great social revolution that unwove Britain’s religious settlement in the 60s and 70s and radically liberalised speech led, inevitably, to a new post-religious settlement with its own implicit theology. Individual rights, diversity, and social (but not economic) equality became its sacred principles. Rival sources of sacral authority, whether Church or Crown, were to be attacked, marginalised, or subverted. Blasphemy laws themself became, ironically, taboo — an offence against post-religious piety. To forbid became forbidden, to live as an autonomous individual a sacred right and duty.
To protect these new dogmas, laws were enacted. They come under the headings of “The Equality Act”, hate speech laws, and are even enforced by a distant ecclesiastical court — the ECHR. Their force extends far beyond the law, as they are rigorously socially enforced by the most zealously progressive organisations and bodies. Groups like Hope not Hate dole out vigilante justice to heretics, police forces bear the symbols of this moral order on their vehicles, civil servants on their lanyards.
The comparison of “wokeness” to religion is the most unoriginal of observations, but the corollary is missed — every ideology, every political settlement, is inescapably sacred, will always find a way to model and enforce a moral order on society. What we have done is trade a humane, tolerant, carefully mediated and bounded Christian constitution for a viciously theocratic and totalitarian liberalism.
Great minds at work. But what were they talking about? The topic was a Labour plan to create an “Islamophobia Council”. This conjures visions, perhaps, of robed and bearded men sentencing confused Brits to public lashings for public indecency — no such luck, however. The reality will be of the high-vis brigade knocking on doors to haul people away for dodgy Facebook posts at the behest of a committee of earnest SOAS graduates. Or, as we saw recently, the astonishing sight of an individual having their name and date of birth shared by the police on Twitter having been prosecuted for burning a copy of the Quran.
An outrageous action, and yet another example of “two tier” policing in which those who offend against liberal shibboleths are viciously pursued, even as child rapists walk free, and illegal migrants get hotel rooms rather than a ticket on the next flight home. But claims of “blasphemy laws” miss the point, and plunge headfirst into total historical illiteracy and cultural amnesia.
We live in a world, clearly and obviously, not of religious blasphemy laws, but secular ones; a world in which not only public but private speech is ruthlessly policed. Say the wrong thing, display the wrong flag — or, like a non-conforming churchgoer of old, fail to show up at the diversity seminar — and your career, your friendships, your reputation, are over. This, along with a bevy of restrictive and often applied laws, is a far harsher regime than the actual age of blasphemy laws.
Britain’s constitutional settlement is distinct, and departs from both the civil law, revolutionary legacy of France and the formalistic rights-based constitution of America. Blasphemy was long understood to be an offence under common law, and even in America where the protection of the First Amendment gave wider scope for potentially blasphemous speech, state and municipal laws continued to be applied against blasphemy well into the 20th century. Such rulings were even upheld by the Supreme Court. Whilst explicit blasphemy laws were the exception, laws against obscenity were frequently applied as de facto blasphemy laws, reflecting a shared civic sense of decency and respect within the multi-religious republic.
As I wrote in 2023, the free speech tradition of Britain and America is one in which clear limits and exceptions have long applied, without straying into oppressive state regulation of thought along the totalitarian model. This historic balance has been upended by the social and legal revolutions of the 20th century, but these revolutions have often been elite-led, and occurred behind closed doors rather than coming about through democratic pressure.
Blasphemy is given considerable emphasis by William Blackstone, the 18th century jurist whose writings were hugely influential on the development of both British and American law and politics in the 18th-19th centuries. On the topic of blasphemy, he is unambiguous:
The belief of a future state of rewards and punishments, the entertaining just ideas of the moral attributes of the supreme being, and a firm persuasion that he superintends and will finally compensate every action in human life (all which are clearly revealed in the doctrines, and forcibly inculcated by the precepts, of our saviour Christ) these are the grand foundation of all judicial oaths; which call to witness the truth of those, which perhaps may be only know to him and the party attesting: all moral evidence therefore, all confidence in human veracity, must be weakened by irreligion, and overthrown by infidelity. Wherefore all affronts to Christianity, or endeavors to depreciate its efficacy, are highly deserving of human punishment.
Blackstone does however make important and consequential distinctions. First of all he distinguishes between divine, natural, and merely human laws. Secondly, he places private vices beyond the scope of the law, which governs only human society, not man’s conscience nor his relationship to his creator. He criticises the historic penalty of death for heresy and apostasy, noting that “the loss of life is a heavier penalty than the offense, taken in a civil light, deserves: and, taken in a spiritual light, our laws have no jurisdiction over it.”
However he notes that such liberties are being abused — “the civil liberties to which we were then restored being used as a cloak of maliciousness, and the most horrid doctrine subversive of all religion being publicly avowed both in discourse and writings, it was found necessary again for the civil power to interpose, by not admitting those miscreants to the privileges of society, who maintained such principle as destroyed all moral obligation”.
His understanding, in continuity with both classical and medieval political thought, is that the political commonwealth is a moral community in which the liberties and privileges of the citizen are imperilled by outright assaults on those common principles. This he distinguishes from mere difference of opinions on doctrine and religious truth — punishments of which he denounces as “blind zeal and pious cruelty” — and of outright public outrages against Christianity. His legal basis for this is straightforward — “These are offenses punishable at common law by fine and imprisonment, or other infamous corporal punishment: for Christianity is part of the laws of England”.
That principle, that Christianity is inextricably bound up with the laws and constitution of England, has never been formally revoked, and indeed the Church of England remains our established Church.
We are not bound, of course, to agree with 18th century jurisprudence. But it is important to remember that blasphemy is no alien principle to our law or culture, with the law only having been abolished in 2008 along with a series of constitutional wrecking balls unleashed by Blair and Brown’s Labour government.
Nor are Islamic complaints about blasphemy purely the product of a desire to impose Sharia law. In former British territories, from Israel to India and Pakistan, blasphemy laws, specifically intended to protect Muslim sensibilities, were introduced by British colonial administrators — hardly figures championed by modern progressives.
That isn’t a call for complacency of course. Pakistan’s blasphemy laws were radicalised and “Islamicised” in the 1980s, and it is under those revised laws that the death penalty — long excluded from English common law — was applied, often against religious minorities.
As Britain has gone from a denominationally plural Christian state to a multicultural one, where Muslims and Hindus fight in the streets of Leicester, it is perhaps hardly surprising that the same laws used to quell community tensions in the British Raj would return, albeit in new, progressively inflected forms.
A reality that has not dawned on much of the libertarian Right is that all societies have blasphemy laws — because any system of laws must punish those who attack the principles upon which those laws are based, even if it is through the relatively light measures of restricting publication and exacting fines.
The great social revolution that unwove Britain’s religious settlement in the 60s and 70s and radically liberalised speech led, inevitably, to a new post-religious settlement with its own implicit theology. Individual rights, diversity, and social (but not economic) equality became its sacred principles. Rival sources of sacral authority, whether Church or Crown, were to be attacked, marginalised, or subverted. Blasphemy laws themself became, ironically, taboo — an offence against post-religious piety. To forbid became forbidden, to live as an autonomous individual a sacred right and duty.
To protect these new dogmas, laws were enacted. They come under the headings of “The Equality Act”, hate speech laws, and are even enforced by a distant ecclesiastical court — the ECHR. Their force extends far beyond the law, as they are rigorously socially enforced by the most zealously progressive organisations and bodies. Groups like Hope not Hate dole out vigilante justice to heretics, police forces bear the symbols of this moral order on their vehicles, civil servants on their lanyards.
The comparison of “wokeness” to religion is the most unoriginal of observations, but the corollary is missed — every ideology, every political settlement, is inescapably sacred, will always find a way to model and enforce a moral order on society. What we have done is trade a humane, tolerant, carefully mediated and bounded Christian constitution for a viciously theocratic and totalitarian liberalism.
