IT was bound to happen that laws against the incitement of religious hatred would be the logical next step after the racial hatred laws. For many civil libertarians, even the racial hatred legislation was objectionable because it contravened what seemed a fundamental principle of English law - deeds or direct incitement to unlawful action should be punished, not thoughts. To forbid the stirring up of hatred rather than, say, inflammatory language likely to incite a riot seemed like a revival of ancient, oppressive laws against "sedition".
To incite people to hate others purely on account of their race is always contemptible and often evil. Our race is not something we choose. You can make a reasonable, pragmatic argument that the laws against racial hatred do help preserve civil peace.
Should religion come into the same category? It would not be new if it did. A law prohibiting blasphemy against the Christian religion is still on the statute book; not many years ago, Gay News was successfully prosecuted for a poem in which the centurion at the foot of the Cross indulged in homosexual fantasies about Christ. At the time of the fatwa against Salman Rushdie, British Muslims called for an extension of the law to cover their own religion.
I have some sympathy with the Muslim position. Anyone who writes respectfully about Islam in the newspapers can expect letters full of bitter tirades. I speak from experience in saying that these are not only from believers in a worldwide Muslim conspiracy, but also from feminists, liberals, rationalists, Jews and Christians.
But this is precisely the reason why new laws against religious hatred (David Blunkett even seems to want to forbid "abuse") would be misguided and oppressive. The claims made by all the three religions "of the Book" are so extraordinary that those who disbelieve in them will very naturally be drawn to hostile polemic and bitter satire. History suggests that believers in their turn will be outraged, and tempted to suppress the taunts of the sceptics.
Everyone knows of the atrocities committed against pagans and other unbelievers - the death penalty for blasphemy, the destruction of whole tribes as sanctioned in the Old Testament. These are proper subjects for hostile comment by unbelievers. The New Testament is full of the satires of Jesus against the Pharisees' remarks, which Jewish scholars still find offensive and unfair. As soon as Christians felt safe to do so, they assailed Greek and Roman gods as demons and closed temples.
The Muslims have always enforced strict anti-blasphemy laws that used to be integral to Judaism and Christianity. In ninth-century Spain, a group of Christians went before the Muslim emir of Cordova and sought martyrdom by defaming the Prophet Mohammed as a charlatan. Martyrdom was instantly granted to them.
The difference with Muslims is that they still enforce blasphemy laws. We have not really done so since the 19th century. But Gibbon, writing about the rise of Christianity, had to disguise his unbelief with elaborate irony. He affects to deplore the supine inattention of the pagan world, in an age of philosophy and science, to the miracles that accompanied the life and death of Christ. What he meant was that the Romans were as intelligent as Enlightenment Europeans, and therefore were not taken in by fantastical stories emanating from the Middle East. Had Gibbon been more open in his infidelity, he might well have got into trouble with the law.
You cannot easily distinguish between attacks on religion that bring it into ridicule and contempt from those that stir up hatred. People who consider absurd the Augustinian and Calvinist doctrine of predestination, according to which millions could be sent to Hell just because God has decided that they should be, are pretty certain to think it wicked as well. When Cardinal Newman writes that it is better that the whole world die in extremest agony rather than one venial sin be committed, disagreement with that might reasonably be accompanied by hatred for the whole system of doctrine from which it springs.
William Empson, in his book on Milton, describes the Jewish-Christian God as the wickedest creation of the black heart of man. Deep antagonism to a religion is always related to blasphemy, for this is the most obvious way of rebelling against the astonishing claims of supernatural creeds. Belief in the divinity of Christ or the prophetic mission of Mohammed involves love and reverence, not mere intellectual assent. Passion is inseparable from serious religion, which is why odium theologicum and acceptance of martyrdom have been such an enduring feature of all the religions of the Book.
The proposal to forbid abuse of religions is an attempt to legislate for good manners. Obviously, gross and indecent insults to the faith of our fellow citizens, or abuse of the Jews by Abu Hamza, could cause a breach of the peace. But that is already covered by existing laws. I should anyway prefer to leave such crackpots alone.
The temptation to blasphemy, to ridicule the sacred, is found not only among sceptics, but also among believers themselves. Indeed, among saints and mystics, the urge to blaspheme has often been documented, and usually ascribed to the temptations of Satan. T S Eliot thought that both Catholics and lapsed Catholics were especially drawn to this intimate rebellion - which is why he described the diabolist Baudelaire as man enough for damnation.
Well-meaning liberals who want religiouss believers of different faiths always to be nice to each other have no imaginative understanding of religious belief, its loves and hatreds. To use the language of excommunication, anathema sint - let them be anathema!