Society should not leave the sacred unprotected - Archbishop
The Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams outlined the problems with the current blasphemy laws this week in the James Callaghan Memorial lecture entitled “Religious Hatred and Religious Offence”.
In his lecture, Dr Williams looked at the problems that society could face without any protection from religious offence. He questioned the liberal argument of free speech that some writers and artists use to defend their right to portray religion offensively, ignoring the hurt that their actions may cause and their lack of imagination in refusing to see people’s belief choices from any other perspective but their own.
“Spectres of colonialism, ‘Orientalism’, and, once again, anti-Semitism are roused when this insensibility to the otherness of the religious other goes unquestioned, “he said. “And behind this is the nagging problem of what happens to a culture in which, systematically, nothing is sacred.
He went on to explain how this approach deprives society of the ability to have a sense of the value of humanity, beyond the most basic idea of human dignity.
He also looked beyond the blasphemy laws, arguing that the key to providing just laws against religious hatred is to look at the context, that the political power and influence of those bringing forward cases should be taken into consideration:
“The grounds for legal restraint in respect of language and behaviour offensive to religious believers are pretty clear: the intention to limit or damage a believer’s freedom to be visible and audible in the public life of a society is plainly an invasion of what a liberal society ought to be guaranteeing; and the obvious corollary is that the creation of an offence of incitement to religious hatred is a way of avoiding the civil disorder that threatens when a group comes to feel that it has been unjustly excluded.
“Since the old offence of blasphemy – as we have seen – no longer works effectively to do this, there is no real case for its retention. How adequately the new laws will meet the case remains to be seen; I should only want to suggest that the relative power and political access of a group or person laying charges under this legislation might well be a factor in determining what is rightly actionable.”
