Blasphemy laws

DEFINITION: Blasphemy is an irreverent or contemptuous expression about God or something held sacred

SIGNIFICANCE: Blasphemy continues to be a justification for censorship, even for the death penalty

According to the Mosaic law of the Hebrew Bible, blasphemous remarks are punishable by death. The crime of blasphemy was incorporated into the Roman emperor Justinian’s codification of Roman law in the sixth century. In medieval Europe, blasphemy was included in canon law and was generally punishable by death. 

For centuries, writing in Europe was subject to prior censorship; this pre-reading before publication or performance was intended, among other things, to prevent blasphemy. Blasphemy was typically prosecuted in ecclesiastical courts, which usually condemned the convicted to burning at the stake. In seventeenth-century England, blasphemy was treated as a political crime by the Star Chamber, a committee with broad powers of prosecution, so named because the hall it met had stars painted on the ceiling. With the demise of Star Chamber proceedings, blasphemy became an offense of common law in 1675 because it “tended to the subversion of all government.” Later in the century, a Blasphemy Statute was enacted and became the basis for self-censorship and numerous prosecutions when deterrence failed. Scottish law also punished blasphemy, originally by death, but after 1825 by fines and imprisonment.

In other parts of the English-speaking world, such as the United States and Australia, both common and statute law made blasphemy punishable with fines and imprisonment. In Australia, resistance to prior censorship began in earnest in the 1870s. In 1871, William Jones was prosecuted and sentenced in New South Wales to two years imprisonment. He was fined a large sum for denying the central tenets of Christianity and for declaring the Bible “the most immoral book ever published.” Opposition to the sentence was so significant that he was released after four months. Resistance to similar charges continued for the remainder of the nineteenth century. Authorities of various English-speaking nations attempted to silence offensive publications but, in the end, failed.

In the twentieth century, efforts to censor religiously objectionable material diminished, but did not disappear. In Australia, attempts were made to ban an Italian socialist magazine in 1911, and several years later, issues of another offending magazine were destroyed.

In England, W. J. Gott was sentenced in 1922 to nine months of hard labor for distributing blasphemous pamphlets and died shortly after being released. Although the law was still on the books for the next half-century, blasphemy prosecutions in England ceased. In 1977, however, the editor and publishers of the London newspaper Gay News were tried, convicted, and fined for the crime of blasphemous libel for publishing a poem. In 2008, England abolished its blasphemy common law in an amendment to the Criminal Justice and Immigration Bill. 

In the United States, the legal definition of blasphemy has included “fighting words,” or speech so offensive as to incite violence. In Chaplinsky v. New Hampshire (1942) and in other cases involving offensive speech of Jehovah’s Witnesses, the U.S. Supreme Court recognized fighting words as impermissible speech, but the Court made clear the deciding issue was not the words themselves but the “clear and present danger” that the words would cause a breach of the peace. Later, the requirement was softened to “clear and probable danger” of a breach of the peace. The speech itself, however offensive, including speech that would in earlier times be outlawed as blasphemous, is, however, protected. The United States in the twentieth century witnessed the growth of a veritable industry of censorship attempts, many successful, against school textbooks and school libraries. These attempts were often led by Fundamentalist Christians who considered various books or passages within books blasphemous.

A notorious example of an attempt to punish a writer for blasphemy began in 1989, when a powerful Iranian cleric, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, issued a fatwa (legal opinion) declaring British writer Salman Rushdie’s novel The Satanic Verses (1988) blasphemous and offered a large reward for his murder. Rushdie went into hiding to safeguard his life, and did not emerge from his hiding until 1998. The Rushdie case became an international cause célèbre. According to the Pew Research Center, as of 2012, 22 percent of the countries and territories had laws or policies prohibiting blasphemy. Most of these countries77 percentwere in the Middle East or Africa. However, some European countries, notably Germany, Italy, and Poland, also had antiblasphemy laws. 

Blasphemy laws continued to evolve worldwide. Since 2022, Pakistan enforced harsh penalties, while Scotland and Ireland began phasing out these laws altogether. Although the United Nations push to end religious and speech restrictions, the European Court of Human Rights believes well-crafted blasphemy laws could help protect both religious beliefs and free speech rights.

Bibliography

Abbas, Shemeem Burney. Pakistan's Blasphemy Laws: From Islamic Empires to the Taliban. U of Texas P, 2013.

Dershowitz, Alan M. Blasphemy: How the Religious Right Is Hijacking Our Declaration of Independence. Wiley, 2007.

Heins, Marjorie. Sex, Sin, and Blasphemy: A Guide to America's Censorship Wars. Rev. ed., Norton, 1998.

Saiya, Nilay. "The Politics of Blasphemy: Why Pakistan and Some Other Muslim Countries Are Passing New Blasphemy Laws." The Conversation, 6 Feb. 2023, theconversation.com/the-politics-of-blasphemy-why-pakistan-and-some-other-muslim-countries-are-passing-new-blasphemy-laws-198647. Accessed 9 Nov. 2024.

"UN HRC Passes Resolution Backing Penalties for Defaming Religion, Including Burning the Qur'an." ADF International, 21 July 2023, adfinternational.org/en-gb/news/uk-at-un. Accessed 9 Nov. 2024.