Freedom of and from speech

A Mancunian whose daughter was murdered by Hamas on 7 October, 2023, publicly burned a copy of the Koran, live-streaming the event for our delectation.

He was immediately arrested, charged under the blasphemy provisions of the 1998 Crime and Disorder Act, tried and acquitted by the jury. Correctly observing in his Telegraph article that no Muslim would be arrested for a similar abuse of the Bible, Tom Harris is appalled.

This kind of two-tier justice, he writes irrefutably, is an offence against such fundamental tenets as free speech and equal protection under the law. And in any case, blasphemy shouldn’t fall under the purview of a secular state:  

“Why should anyone, whatever religious views they have chosen to adopt, have the right to use the police or courts to guard against being offended? Religious faith is a personal thing, not one that the state has any right to become involved in.”

Mr Harris’s heart, if not his syntax, is in the right place, but his treatment of the issue is facile. To begin with, religion, as discrete from faith, isn’t just a personal thing, certainly not in a country where it’s an integral part of the state.

We have an established religion in Britain, which must have slipped Mr Harris’s mind. Our head of state is also the Supreme Governor of the Church of England, which job sharing alone should have given Mr Harris a clue.

Our civilisation is historically – and, in Britain, officially – Christian, or Judaeo-Christian if you’d rather. That’s why protecting Christianity and Judaism is tantamount to protecting the core values of our civilisation, including those Mr Harris holds in such high regard.

Both free speech and equality before the law can be traced back to Christian origins. Islam, on the other hand, not only denies such things in its creed but is aggressively hostile to them. Quite right too: if condoned, free discussion would have put paid to Islam centuries ago.

Hence, if any religions merit preferential treatment under our laws, it’s Christianity and Judaism. An offence against Christianity is an offence against the foundations of British statehood and, more broadly, Western civilisation.

By contrast, Islam may be tolerated but not singled out for any special protection. That kind of two-tier justice would be consonant with the core essence of our civilisation – if it were still Judaeo-Christian in anything but name.

But that old civilisation was ousted by post-Enlightenment modernity, whose core values demand extra protection for any systems of thought and worship that are inimical to Judaeo-Christianity. These could be secular cults, such as Marxism and its offshoots, or marginal religions, such as Islam.

Modernity is defined by a revolt that goes deeper than the one pointed out by Ortega y Gasset. The mass revolt he described was directed against traditional hierarchies, social and economic, and it had indeed taken place. But that revolt was only a sub-set of the tectonic shift Nietzsche identified in his Zarathustra.

God is dead, wrote that coroner to divinity, meaning that the educated – and educating – elite no longer believed in Him. But man is ontologically and existentially conditioned to believe in some cause. Modern Man is no exception.

For him, that cause has two principal components, positive and negative, or philistine and nihilist, as I call them. The positive end is defined by striving for physical comfort (and political conditions conducive to it) above all else; the negative one, by the urge to spread coarse-grained salt on the spiritual soil of the old civilisation, making sure that nothing similar ever grows there again.

The two components are observable in every modern country, but their ratio differs from one place to another and from one time to the next. The philistine holds the upper hand in the West, the nihilist in Russia.

Hostility to Western tradition is thus alive in all those places, although its manifestations vary from open aggression, as in Russia, to surreptitious subversion, as in the West. However, it’s becoming more overt by the day.

Against this background, preferential treatment for the West’s doctrinal and visceral enemy, Islam, is easily explicable. Conversely, openly offering more or even equal protection to Christianity, which is after all the state religion, would mean reaffirming the very ethos modernity detests and wishes to expunge. That would be like a carnivore promoting veganism.

Islam has been used as a battering ram of modernity for a relatively short time. Until the 1960s Muslim presence in Britain was insignificant. Thus, during the first quarter of the 20^th century there were only around 10,000 Muslims in the UK. Now there are close to three million, and these are just the ones we know about.

Under the guise of respecting their delicate religious sensibilities, HMG turns a blind eye on what increasingly looks more like colonisation than immigration.

Before Islam, it had been Buddhism that awakened the protective, maternal instincts of the modern British intelligentsia. Thus Chesterton wittily wrote over a century ago that: “Students of popular science… are always insisting that Christianity and Buddhism are very much alike, especially Buddhism.”

He was right: where Christianity and Buddhism differed, it was fashionable to believe Buddhism was better. But today’s counterparts of those “students of popular science” don’t necessarily believe Islam is better than Christianity.

Christianity survives in their mind only as an unfortunate relic of the past whose vestiges are still extant in some of our institutions and culture. Islam, on the other hand, is very much active at present, and it’s a useful tool for eradicating those vestiges.

That’s why it must indeed be given extra protection in the name of religious equality. Mr Harris commendably doesn’t share such subversive notions. But by insisting that the two religions be treated equally, he inadvertently works towards the same goal.

“In modern Britain,” he writes, “Islam and the Koran are protected by the law, by the courts and by the police. Christianity is not. That is not an argument that Christianity should receive equal protection; it is an argument that Islam should receive the same level of legal respect and protection as Christianity – ie, none.”

If our laws are to include injunctions against blasphemy (which Blair’s Crime and Disorder Act does), these should protect only the two religions after which our Judaeo-Christian civilisation is named. Affording equal protection to Islam, that is none, means admitting publicly that Britain is no longer a Christian country.

The logical next step is disestablishment, removal of all references to faith in the title of our monarchs and reshaping British education in line with DEI demands, something already proceeding apace.

You can’t dismiss, as Mr Harris does, the toxic offshoots of the liberal mind simply by appealing to the values it holds sacred. “Freedom of speech means the freedom to offend, the right to say awful things that some people dislike”, he writes, sharing with his readers a self-evident cliché.

Of course it does. But freedom of speech has no self-sufficient absolute value. To act as an essential entitlement, it must coexist with freedom from speech as a defence mechanism of our civilisation. That’s why I believe that blasphemy laws should be on the books, but they should protect only Christianity and Judaism, the core religions of Western civilisation.

How, whether and under what circumstances they should be enforced is a different matter. I don’t mean that films like The Life of Brian should be banned, for example. No legal protection for someone offended by that spoof is needed – he can protect himself by not going to the cinema.

Nor do I think that a bonfire of Islamic vanities should be condoned: burning the Koran is a barbarous act that deserves censure. But the need for civilisational self-defence demands that a similar offence against the Bible must be punished more severely.

The same goes for public anti-Christian and anti-Muslim rants. Both are unpleasant and, if they violate public order, they should be punished. But rants against Christianity or anti-Semitic diatribes at a street corner ought to incur a stiffer penalty.

When it doesn’t rest on a solid premise, which R.G. Collingwood called an ‘absolute presupposition’, the liberal mindset can easily turn into a suicide pact. The process is gradual, sometimes imperceptible. But, like tuberculosis, when it becomes clearly visible, it’s too late to do anything about it.

What we are witnessing at the moment is the middle stage of that development, rapidly approaching the final stage. Nothing short of aggressive treatment is required, and this is something that Donald Trump understands. Our government doesn’t, and good-natured support for basic liberties isn’t going to work, not by itself. That ship has sailed.