Blasphemy and the Strange World of Linguistic Crimes

On May 1, 2017, the actor and comedian Stephen Fry was on The Meaning of Life, a Sunday-night TV talk show on Raidió Teilifís Éireann, the Irish national public service broadcaster. He was asked what he would say to God in face-to-face conversation. He suggested he might begin thus:

“Bone cancer in children: What’s that about? How dare you? How dare you create a world in which there is such misery that is not our fault? It’s not right. It’s utterly, utterly evil. Why should I respect a capricious, mean-minded, stupid god who creates a world which is so full of injustice and pain?”

He would say all this, he explained,

“because the god who created this universe, if it was created by God, is quite clearly a maniac, an utter maniac, totally selfish. We have to spend our lives on our knees thanking him? What kind of god would do that?”

However, Fry was speaking in a country whose Constitution stipulates: “The publication or utterance of blasphemous, seditious, or indecent matter is an offence which shall be punishable in accordance with law.”

And there was applicable law: the Defamation Act of 2009 states that anyone convicted of uttering or publishing “blasphemous matter” can be fined as much as €25,000 (about $28,000).

Blasphemous matter is defined as “grossly abusive or insulting in relation to matters held sacred by any religion, thereby causing outrage among a substantial number of the adherents of that religion.”

An official complaint was made under this law, and a criminal investigation began.

With all respect to people’s religious sensibilities, it is hard to see investigating the depth of public outrage over a celebrity’s remarks on a chat show as a sensible way to invest expensive police time; there are murders and robberies to be solved.

Blasphemy is unusual even in the weird world of linguistic crimes, being defined solely by reference to internal feelings of outrage experienced by people who apprehend (or perhaps just overhear) an utterance.

Perjury (a criminal matter) involves actively impeding the courts by lying; but whether a lie was told is a potentially verifiable mind-external fact, not a matter of anyone’s reaction.

Libel and slander are mostly civil matters, where an action can succeed only if the defamatory utterance would damage the plaintiff’s reputation among reasonable people. Again, there are supposed to be empirical facts about how social esteem works — it’s not just about feelings.

Even with criminal libel, the law is aimed at preventing a breach of the peace, not assuaging sensibilities.

Yet the Irish blasphemy statute mentions only outrage, on the part of the adherents of “any religion.” The offending utterance will often be a mere expression of personal opinion; it typically will not even mention the complainers, and may not have been addressed to them.

It seems to me that your status as a criminal (or noncriminal) shouldn’t depend on someone else’s state of emotional arousal. Sure, to some extent outrage can well up involuntarily; but surely it is to some degree volitional? You can decide just how much you will indulge your outrage; you can tell yourself to calm down, take it easy, don’t make a big thing out of it.

The Irish public didn’t ultimately make a big thing out of it for Stephen Fry; there was a happy ending. The police couldn’t find the necessary “substantial number” of outraged people, and dropped the case. And last month, the Irish people voted in a referendum (partially inspired by the Fry case) to eliminate the offense of blasphemy.

Elsewhere things are not quite so happy. An unnamed woman lost her appeal to the Austrian Supreme Court against her blasphemy conviction (in a seminar on Islam she had described the Prophet Muhammad as a pedophile). The European Court of Human Rights recently ruled that her conviction and fine (€480 = $545 plus costs) did not violate her right to freedom of expression.

And in Pakistan the situation is dire. The Supreme Court has quashed the conviction of Aasiya Noreen (a.k.a. Asia Bibi), a Christian woman who in 2010 was sentenced to death by hanging for an alleged insulting remark about the Prophet Muhammad (the inconsistent evidence being purely hearsay from women she had quarreled with); but she has spent years in solitary on death row in a windowless cell, and can never live safely in Pakistan again. Demonstrators are calling for her death, and that of her defense counsel and the Supreme Court justices. (The minister for minority affairs and the governor of Punjab province were assassinated several years ago, just for expressing sympathy for her.)

The oddly medieval crime of saying things that cause the pious to experience outrage survives in the 21st century — safe spaces for religion writ large in the criminal law.