Sectarian cinema?
by Stephen Daisley, The Critic:
It may not be easy, but multicultural societies must embrace liberal values if they are to survive.
Religious censorship is a dying art in the West and particularly difficult in England, a country with an established church and a thoroughly irreligious culture. The days when forbidding prelates were television fixtures are a distant memory. These days Conservative MPs censure the Archbishop of Canterbury for offering a Christian view on government policy because “we separated the church from the state a long time ago”. (In constitutional temperament, as in so much else, there is no progressive like a Conservative.)
Monty Python’s Life of Brian, once regarded as a monstrous orgy of blasphemy, has been rendered tame by four decades of societal and cultural upheaval. Christian groups failed to prevent a 2005 BBC broadcast of Jerry Springer: The Opera, in which Christ wears a nappy and admits he’s “a bit gay”; their attempt to prosecute the Corporation for blasphemy was thrown out by the High Court. Blasphemy ceased to be a common law offence in England and Wales in 2008, and Scotland has since followed suit.
The demise of public Christianity hastened this inevitable, pervasive contempt for authority and tradition in popular culture, while the relentless march of autonomy-maximising liberalism gave it logical heft. The law could hardly enforce piety on a proudly impious country. So the religious lost the censorship war, and among liberals this was agreed to be a good thing. That is until satirists started drawing cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad, which prompted a lot of handwringing, some doctrinal skirmishes and the occasional dead cartoonist. Now Islam places an even more fraught question before us: what do we do when one faction of Muslims seeks to censor another?
Read also: from the archive – The chilling legacy of the Rushdie affair by Jonathan Rauch, spiked
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