One decade ago this week, two gunmen entered the offices of satirical French magazine Charlie Hebdo and opened fire, killing cartoonists, journalists, and security personnel as part of coordinated terror attacks that would ultimately claim 17 lives. The attack on the magazine — which is now commemorating the 10th anniversary with a God cartoon contest — was likely due to its cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad.
In the immediate aftermath, proverbial battle lines were drawn around the contentious magazine and the legal and social rules around what we can, without punishment or retribution, say about religious symbols, holy figures, and their believers.
Some quickly marched under the banner of “Je suis Charlie,” while others staked out more censorial ground, arguing that Charlie Hebdo’s staff shared some of the blame for the tragedy they suffered. Mocking people’s most deeply held beliefs rarely comes without a cost, the argument went, and there is a balancing act between preserving the right to speak and protecting the feelings of religious believers.
This is a deeply dangerous and misguided attitude but, amidst the shifting legal and moral boundaries since 2015, the advocates of limiting our right to religious dissent are gaining ground. As the months and years have passed since the killings, countries around the world have veered perilously closer to torching hard fought victories for the freedom of conscience and the right to criticize, even harshly or crudely, the religious powers who preside over our prayers and, sometimes, our politics.
Dozens of countries, from Poland to Italy to Saudi Arabia to Bangladesh, maintain blasphemy laws, and six of them still threaten accused blasphemers with the death penalty. Even if the state is not willing to kill, its subjects may be. In places like Pakistan or Nigeria, an accusation alone can inspire deadly mob violence. Police in Pakistan sometimes even assign themselves the role of executioner without waiting for a judge or jury.
While the situation remains grim in nations that have long enforced these laws, it’s also worsened in countries and institutions that generally promise better protections for free expression.
Some responsibility rests at the feet of the United Nations Human Rights Council, which took a distinctly anti-human rights position in 2023 in response to a series of controversial Quran burnings earlier that year. In a 28-12 vote, the council passed a resolution encouraging nations to “address, prevent and prosecute acts and advocacy of religious hatred” (emphasis added). The 57-nation Organization of Islamic Cooperation followed that with a resolution urging punishment of online speech lambasting religious “institutions, holy books and religious symbols” and “the immediate cessation, and criminalization” of Quran desecrations.
If the higher powers wish to punish their mortal critics and needlers, so be it. The powers-that-be here on earth don’t need to carry out the sentence for them.
Months after these resolutions, blasphemy law supporters notched a surprising victory: Denmark’s parliament, weary of the controversy caused by Quran burnings in the region, passed a law criminalizing the public desecration of “a writing with significant religious significance for a religious community or an object that appears as such.” And just weeks ago, UK Member of Parliament Tahir Ali pressed Prime Minister Keir Starmer to introduce “measures to prohibit the desecration of all religious texts and the prophets of the Abrahamic religions.”
These initiatives are usually cloaked with flowery language about the need to protect feelings, minimize harm, and better society, but make no mistake: These are blasphemy laws that allow governments to set the terms of how politely and civilly their citizens are allowed to express disagreement with beliefs that carry immense philosophical and often direct political power.
Even here in the United States, with our strong protections for the right to believe or not, we are still plagued by these challenges. A handful of states still keep blasphemy laws on the books, even if they go unenforced. Michigan’s criminal code, for example, warns that people who “blaspheme the holy name of God, by cursing or contumeliously reproaching God, shall be guilty of a misdemeanor.” The Satanic Temple regularly faces efforts by local officials to censor their displays. And when they do manage to obtain permission to express themselves alongside other groups’ religious symbols, their displays are vandalized.
We’ve seen these questions bloom on American college campuses, too. Within months after the almost-deadly attack on Salman Rushdie, Minnesota’s Hamline College rid itself of an instructor who respectfully, and with advance warning, displayed a medieval portrait of the Prophet Muhammad in class. Then at nearby Macalester College, administrators covered up an Iranian-American artist’s feminist art exhibition about gender, politics, and religion “to prevent unintentional or non-consensual viewing.”
From Denmark to the United Nations to the UK, we are forgetting the lessons from the Charlie Hebdo attacks — if we ever really learned them at all.
Police killings worsen crisis of mob violence against Pakistan’s blasphemers
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Plenty of free speech news out of Europe, the sedition crackdown in Hong Kong, efforts to control discussion of foreign governments in Canada and the U.S.
It is not the role of the government to set civility rules for the way we express our opinions about the major faiths that, in some parts of the world, are as much political powers as religious ones.
You cannot act against the holy book burner or the impertinent cartoonist without also targeting vocal victims of abuse in the Catholic Church, protesters against forced hijab laws, or critics of the secretive Church of Scientology. But in our eagerness to expediently paper over discomfort, anger, and occasional high-profile controversies provoked by blasphemous expression, we’re sacrificing the rights of dissenters around the world who speak out against very real religious and political oppression.
The feelings of religious believers cannot be used as a shield to protect religious and political authorities from their dissenters. If the higher powers wish to punish their mortal critics and needlers, so be it. The powers-that-be here on earth don’t need to carry out the sentence for them.