Email |  Print | RSS | Comment |  

Sunday, August 23, 2015 | By R. Joseph Hoffmann

“James McConnell didn’t incite hatred or encourage violence against any Muslim…He simply expressed his views about another religion. Freedom of speech should mean that he has every right to lambast Islam, as Islamic clerics have to lambast him and Christianity if they so choose. Those who disagree with Pastor McConnell should challenge him and attempt to win the debate, rather than close it down… Freedom of speech isn’t only for polite persons of mild disposition airing their views within government-policed parameters. It’s about letting awkward, insulting and even offensive voices be heard too. And yet the silence from civil liberties and human rights organisations here has been deafening. In any democracy worth its salt, freedom of speech isn’t a luxury for your friends, it’s a necessity for your enemies. Defending Pastor McConnell’s right to say what he said doesn’t mean approving or embracing his sentiments.” — Suzanne Breen, writing in The Belfast Telegraph.

Pastor James McConnell speaking the truth about islam (image grab YouTube)

The Reverend James McConnell says he doesn’t have hatred in his heart for any Muslim. But he does believe that the basic doctrine of Islam encourages violence against unbelievers and other Muslims. The charge against him — almost unimaginable in other constitutional democracies — is making grossly offensive remarks against Islam.

Those remarks, encapsulated in a rather pedestrian sermon he gave from his Belfast megachurch pulpit on May 18, 2015, included this florid and modestly hateful bit:

“The Muslim religion was created many hundreds of years after Christ. Mohammed, was born in 570. But Muslims believe that Islam is the true religion, dating back to Adam, and that the biblical Patriarchs were all Muslims, including Noah and Abraham and Moses, and even our Lord Jesus Christ…. To judge by some of what I have heard in the past few months, you would think that Islam was little more than a variation of Christianity and Judaism. Not so. Islam’s ideas about God, about humanity, about salvation are vastly different from the teachings of the Holy Scriptures. Islam is heathen. Islam is satanic. Islam is a doctrine spawned in Hell.”

Following immediate cries of foul from the local Islamic Centre, McConnell was finally charged with inciting to riot — with hate speech in short. At 78, and preaching a familiar grassroots message that would be typical of low-church evangelical preaching almost anywhere in the world, he is charged — effectively — with blasphemy. His chief accuser is an extremist Muslim cleric named Dr. Raied Al-Wazzan, is doing what by now is the familiar recourse of the new and burgeoning victim class; claiming that defamation of religion is the main cause of religious violence, thereby overlooking the root and genetic causes of violence within Islam — the very ones that the elderly Calvinist minister is calling out.

It is easy to overstate threats to freedom of speech in the Age of Political Propriety. The west in its liberality has embraced tolerance as it mantra, multiculturalism as its favourite T-shirt logo and pluralism as it recipe for Just Getting On. But the part of the world that gave us Enlightenment and separation of church (and theoretically mosque) and state has lived for two generations in a cloud of unknowing about how religious minorities, especially those from the Islamic world, are free to ignore, ridicule and attack the principles of free speech and religious tolerance. The basic assumption — that a post-colonial Islamic diaspora would eventually learn or assimilate the value of secular democracy by osmosis has been proved false again and again, and the very laws that existed to guarantee freedom of expression are now being subverted to spare the feelings of a loud and obnoxious religious cadre that claims rights for themselves that they would happily deny to others without a second thought.

The new trop — reflected in various United Nations “resolutions” (usually politely overlooked by western nations) is that the defamation of religion is a violation of human rights, since clearly (at least on the American model) belief is a private and inviolable thing.

But that is not, in fact, the letter or the spirit of the laws various western democracies have enshrined in their various spins on the United States First Amendment. The canonical position that grows out of the European experience of sectarian warfare is that the state must be indifferent to religion, and interfere with it only when its interests come into direct conflict with the rule of law — a threat to “domestic tranquility.”

Extreme and pandering tolerance of religious movements whose motives may explicitly include political agendas and programs is not the same as the tradition of a private, even if politically self-conscious and invested religious establishment like the Christian Church or the synagogue. Liberal Christian (think of the last Archbishop of Canterbury’s efforts to accommodate “some aspects” of Sharia within English law) efforts to mainstream and fast-tack Islam on a road to “virtual” assimilation are abject failures — a pablum fed to the religiously restless as a way of preventing tantrums but easily confused as the normative response of a religious majority willing to negotiate away its religious hegemony. Or these concessions and protections may be a completely misguided and foolish attempt to redress grievances alleged by those same minorities — grievances that have religious edges, but are social and political and economic at the core.

What these concessions and protections cannot be is a reasonable extension of the obligation of the state to leave religion to one side, not to encourage its propagation or its demise, not protect its beliefs and liturgies and practices. If Christianity has no special status and no self-evident right to doctrinal protection, freedom from ridicule, from satire or criticism — even of an offensive kind — then Islam cannot claim that immunity either.

Pastor McConnell may be, for all I know, a narrow minded Belfast bigot. Scotland’s muscular Christianity after all was the burliest form of the sort that made its way into the American south and Appalachia and created the Bible Belt in the 18^th century — now ever-widening.

I dealt extensively with this offense against free expression in a Butterflies and Wheels essay in 2009, when the Organization of the Islamic Conference’s “anti-defamation” resolution was passed by the UNHRC. This latest example of double-standarding religious free expression should be worrying not because it is recent, but because the logic of the victims is now becoming dominant. Repetition is beginning to make it seem sensible. Meantime we need to say loudly: Pastor McConnell may be a foolish and opinionated man. Or he may be right and would do well to be quiet. Either way, he is innocent of any wrongdoing in which a modern nation state should take any legal or punitive interest.

R. Joseph Hoffmann graduated from Harvard Divinity School and the University of Oxford (Ancient Near Eastern Studies). Hoffmann was tutor in Greek at Keble College and Senior Scholar at St Cross College, Oxford, and Wissenschaftlicher Assistent in Patristics and Classical Studies at the University of Heidelberg. He taught at universities in the United States, Britain and Lebanon. He has held visiting positions at universities in Africa, the Middle East, the Pacific and South Asia. He is now Professor of Liberal Arts at the American University of Central Asia. Beyond academe, he is well known for his advocacy of the humanist tradition. In his recent work, Hoffmann has turned increasingly to the work of ”humanist restoration”. His most recent books include an edited volume entitled Just War and Jihad: Violence in Judaism, Christianity and Islam (2006) and Sources of the Jesus Tradition (2010.) His study of the concept of the right to life in early Christianity, Faith and Foeticide, will be published in 2015, along with another in his series of translations of the classical philosophical critiques of the Christian movement: Christianity: The Minor Critics. He blogs at The New Oxonian. Read his full biography here. For all the exclusive blog entries by R. Joseph Hoffmann, go here.