A Defense of Blasphemy

John Milton is best known for Paradise Lost, written late in life, but his earlier fame was as a writer of political tracts, particularly the Areopagitica. This classic defense of the free press is so enduring that it has been cited by the US Supreme Court. Milton addresses Parliament and calls for the repeal of the Licensing Act of 1643, which required a government license before a book could be published--a practice that US law prohibits as “prior restraint.” 

     Milton argues for a  marketplace of ideas in which the “dust and cinders” of error “serve to polish and brighten the armory of truth” and so should not be discarded. “Truth is strong next to the Almighty; she needs no policies, nor stratagems, nor licensing to make her victorious. Those are the shifts and the defenses that error uses against her power.” In his view, only those who doubt their own beliefs will attack opposing beliefs by any means other than counter-argument. To use brute force to suppress disagreement is tantamount to confessing that you are wrong.

     This is most obvious in politics, where Milton was an early adopter of the idea that legitimate political power derives from the consent of the governed. Popularized by John Locke, this rejection of divine-right monarchy was a basis for the Declaration of Independence and is enshrined in the United Nation’s 1948 Declaration of Human Rights: “The will of the people will be the basis of the authority of government.” Of course, the devil is in the details. Consent may be claimed on questionable bases, and informed consent requires a free press and media. Any regime that restricts free speech advertises its own illegitimacy: an ideological flag that most Americans and much of the rest of the world would salute.

     Of course, restrictions on public information exist even where politicians are open to criticism. We still don’t hear from the radical left on American news outlets financed by existing systems of ownership. Egalitarian critiques exist on the Internet, but may be slighted by search engines. The far right—also disruptive to the status quo—complains that news is “fake” in what it includes and excludes. These are coinciding waves of influence from shared interests, distortion by a thousand cuts. And, beyond that, power is stolen by gerrymandering, voter suppression, vote fraud, campaign spending, and deceptive ads. But Milton's hope and mine is that somehow truth may win an extended semi-fair tournament, or at least that that's the best gamble. This has so far been about politics, but shouldn’t religion play by the same rules? 

     The most obviously fallacious means by which religions have been supported (and thus self-contradicted) is argument ad baculum or “appeal to the club." The fact that I have a club (or a police force) in no way demonstrates that I speak for God. Of course, if my “religion" impacts your basic rights—say, I believe that God commands me to steal your car—force is in order, but most religious beliefs don’t go so far, and so attempts to suppress them by force admit fault.

     Criminal prosecution of blasphemy or heresy seems to assume a god so sickly that he needs protection from words—puffs of shaped air, blots of ink, or the buried thoughts behind them. Looked at this way, any defense of a monotheistic religion ad baculum insults the deity it purports to defend. It self-identifies as faith in a power so weak that it can be victimized by the opinions of its own puny creations. The very idea seems disrespectful and absurd. So what’s going on?

     The ancient world respected religious diversity. Gods of different pantheons were read as synonyms. In this view, a supreme God was a supreme God—one and the same whether you called him Zeus father of Apollo or YHWH father of Jesus. Judaism was unusual in forbidding the worship of more than one god, but for centuries this problem was mitigated because Jews let non-Jews alone and, as a venerable tradition, were usually excused from worshipping the gods of their conquerors. Christians, upstart heirs of Jewish monotheism, were more suspect for their “atheism.” Denying the civic gods of Rome by refusing to participate in festivals was sedition. In ancient ideology, Christians were the intolerant ones for disrespecting other people's gods. Paul preached for two years in Ephesus, the site of pilgrimages to the temple of Artemus, and only got into trouble when silversmiths thought his critique of idols hurt the souvenir market (Acts 19). 

     After centuries of being persecuted, Christianity was suddenly established in Rome and began to outlaw the practice of other religions—eventually persecuting nonconformists within its own tradition. This persisted after the "fall" of Rome and culminated in the 13th century with the Albigensian Crusade’s mass live burnings of nonconforming Christians. Gradual relaxation of murderous intolerance, punctuated by wars of religion, followed the Reformation in the West, but religious nonconformity—especially “blasphemy”—is still a grave crime in the Middle East and has only recently been decriminalized in Europe--with blasphemy prosecutions as late as 1921 in the UK and 2012 and Spain. With the 2013 Pussy Riot case in Russia, the formerly atheist state began to punish blasphemy, supporting a faith so weak that it requires bodyguards. 

     Of course, the universe operates as if the creator God, if any, is indifferent to what people say about him in the material world that seems ruled by scientific cause and effect. There are stories about people struck by lightning for blasphemy, but a lack of  verified incidents. Calculations of physics predict outcomes with astonishing accuracy, unaffected by prayer. Atheistic China prospers while theocracies wobble. Bad things happen to good people (and vice versa) with clocklike regularity. Events like storms are called acts of God because they are beyond human control, but their movements are predicted by computer modeling. So how can we defend human defense of a creator God who, if he exists, clearly declines to defend himself?

     An important subset is hate speech, shorthand for attacks on a vulnerable minority such as one defined by religion, in which case the offense is civil, not theological. An art exhibition recently on international tour included a sculpture of Ronald McDonald crucified. There had been no objection in post-Christian Europe, where it was read as a critique of consumerism: “You cannot serve God and mammon” (Matthew 6: 24). But when the exhibition opened in Israel, the Christian minority there understood it, not as an attack on the “religion” of consumerism, but as implying that Christ was clownish. The difference was context. In a historically Christian country, the cross is normative, the fast-food icon the joke. But in a minority community, two percent surrounded by Jews and Muslims, veneration of Christ crucified is not normative, so Christ-as-clown mocks Christians This is a civil injury, not a religious one. 

     Article 20 of  the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights mandates that nations prohibit advocating “religious hatred that constitutes incitement to discrimination, hostility, or violence.” Anti-blasphemy laws in the West, notably in Scandinavia, take this form, criminalizing verbal assaults on minorities who, unlike God, may be defenseless. It's about public safety, not the advancement of an deity, so there is no self-referential paradox.

     Punishment of blasphemy may, of course, be a pious gesture. A magistrate on the fringes of a kingdom where peasant grumbling poses no threat to royal rule may punish an anti-royal peasant as a gesture of devotion to the king. On this basis, blasphemy is a capital crime in some countries today. Thomas Aquinas supports this, saying that “blasphemy, which is a sin committed directly against God, is more grave than murder, which is a sin against one's neighbor,” but true omnipotence easily punishes sins against itself if it deigns to. The analogy, if fully extended to an omnipresent God, would suppose that the king was standing, fully armed, next to the grumbling peasant and chose to ignore him. Only false gods need mortal help. As a pious gesture, then, human attacks on blasphemy either ignore the will of an actual god who has chosen to let the offense pass or they support a false one--or at least a false representation of one. On this basis, they are themselves blasphemous, undermining a power they presume to support.

     Of course, the point may be, not to defend God, but to defend a sect and its leaders—a political aim—which was the case of the Inquisition in late Middle Ages. The Cathars in Languedoc were ruthlessly suppressed—burned alive and their corpses exhumed for burning because they condemned the the Roman church as Satanic, an existential threat to the Papacy. For centuries the Inquisition led a Whack-a-Mole fight against what eventually emerged as Protestantism. The Quran calls, at least in one verse, for nonviolent rejection of blasphemy: "Whenever you hear God’s revelations mocked at, do not sit with them” (4: 140). But Sharia law allows the death penalty when Muslims blaspheme because apostasy is a capital offense under the Quran. Moderate Muslims may see this as an artifact of the embattled state of Islam in Muhammed’s time, when a lapsed convert was a turncoat, a danger to the religious community. Communities, religious or not, can indeed be vulnerable and justify violent self-defense.

     In some countries, punishment of blasphemy ironically serves to protect accused blasphemers from mob violence, recalling To Kill a Mockingbird, where Atticus Finch stands off murderous adherents to the cult of white female virtue. The black man in jail is innocent and, in actual justice, should be released, but in Jim Crow Alabama, only the threat of legal execution protects him from lynching. In Pakistan, an uneducated Christian woman was accused of disrespecting Muhammed when she shared a drinking cup with fellow farm workers--an apparently bogus charge--and in 2018, after almost a decade on death row, her acquittal was the occasion for angry protests. When religious mobs promise rough justice, as in Nigeria where rampaging mobs burned and killed Christians, state proxies provide protection for the accused, but this works best if blasphemy is a civil crime--a basis for arresting the would-be victim.

     In my view, the weakest objection to blasphemy is that it offends believers, going back to Milton’s principle that even the dust and cinders of error polish the armor of truth. It’s a good day when someone challenges my most cherished beliefs. Without such days, I risk dozing off in a false temple, worshipping rough-hewn words that, as words, can never more than approximate truth. There's nothing like an English Ph.D. and forty years of teaching English 101 to prove this.