Blasphemy Laws Are a Gift to Tyrants—Not a Path to Order

The path to tyranny is paved with laws meant to protect the sacred from scrutiny

“You can have a free country or blasphemy laws. You can’t have both,” Greg Lukianoff wrote on X earlier this week. The line was meant to push back against a growing number of conservatives suggesting we might be better off if we brought back laws that punish speech deemed offensive to religion.

One of those voices, Daily Wire host Michael Knowles, replied: “America had blasphemy laws for most of our history.” And he's right. We did. We also had slavery, child labor, and property requirements for voting. History isn’t always an endorsement.

I write this not just as an American journalist, but as someone who reports regularly on the Middle East, where real blasphemy laws still exist and are often deadly in their enforcement. Iran, Afghanistan, and Saudi Arabia are among the seven remaining countries where the punishment for blasphemy is execution. I've seen what happens to individuals who have the temerity to question authority cloaked in scripture. I've interviewed translators and students who have been detained, surveilled, or driven underground for doing nothing more than discussing liberty, individual rights, or the separation of powers.

One of them, Abdulmueen Alsebai, was summoned twice by Syrian intelligence for translating books about governance and economics. His real crime, in the eyes of the regime, was making Western political philosophy accessible to Arabic-speaking readers. In one interrogation, he was told to report any material that mentioned Assad, Syria, or Hezbollah. He refused. And for years, he lived in fear that another knock would come. “Every time I got a call from an unknown number, I had a mini heart attack,” he told me.

This is the natural end of blasphemy laws: not reverence or holiness, but repression and control.

That’s what makes the recent flirtation with speech restrictions on the American right so disturbing. Post-liberal conservatives—those who argue the state should enforce a moral order rooted in traditional Christianity—are increasingly impatient with liberalism’s messiness. They want order and virtue on their terms, and they believe that free speech absolutism has failed to deliver either.

But the answer to cultural fragmentation is not to hand the state a Bible and a billy club. It’s to strengthen and rebuild trust in the broken institutions that once gave people meaning and moral grounding without criminalizing dissent.

Because here’s the thing: once the state has the power to determine what’s “sacred,” it also gets to decide what’s profane. And if you think blasphemy laws would be used to protect Christianity in modern America, you’re kidding yourself.

Lukianoff was right again when he noted the irony: “Impressive to see some conservatives finding something they can agree with Islamists about!” Both theocratic conservatives and Islamist hardliners share a belief that the state should enforce religious orthodoxy and punish blasphemy. They may disagree on which religion holds ultimate truth, but they agree that heresy should be met with legal force. That alignment should disturb anyone who values liberty.

In practice, these laws wouldn’t merely defend traditional Christian beliefs—they’d almost certainly be turned against them once power changes hands. The same cultural forces that deride traditional values as bigotry would quickly use blasphemy laws to criminalize sermons on sex and marriage, ban religious critiques of state ideology, and silence pastors under the guise of public order. Conservatives dreaming of a moral revival enforced from above would find themselves censored, fined, or prosecuted for preaching truths that no longer align with the approved secular creed. Give the state the power to punish heresy, and it won’t be long before you are the heretic.

Let’s take a look at Europe.

On June 2, a man named Hamit Coskun was convicted in the UK for burning a Quran and shouting anti-Islamic slurs outside the Turkish consulate in London. The court called it a “religiously aggravated public order offense” and fined him. Offensive? Sure. But criminal? In a free society, no. If Coskun had burned a Bible, a contingent on the American right would be gleeful about his conviction. The groups defending Coskun—among them the Free Speech Union and the National Secular Society—warned that the ruling sets a dangerous precedent. “This decision is an assault on free speech,” Coskun said, vowing to appeal the conviction all the way to the European Court of Human Rights.

Once you criminalize offense, who decides what’s offensive? The state? A judge? An Imam or a Priest? And when precedent is set, it rarely protects the powerful. It stifles the dissenters, minorities, reformers, and whistleblowers, allowing state authorities to run roughshod over citizens who deviate from the day’s accepted orthodoxy.

The United States is an outlier for good reason. The First Amendment offers one-of-a-kind protections for speech and dissent. And while other democracies have criminalized offensive speech in the name of social harmony, America stands nearly alone in refusing to do so. In Canada, Christian pastors have faced prosecution for sermons. In France, Muslim reformers have been banned from entering the country. But in the U.S., the Constitution protects everyone—believers, heretics, and critics alike—from the tyranny of enforced piety.

Blasphemy laws are not a path back to God, but they are a surefire shortcut to authoritarianism. That shortcut may begin with noble intentions, but it always ends in fear, silence, and state overreach.

If we want to revive faith, we should do it in the churches, not the courts. And if we want to rebuild a moral society, we should do it by building stronger families, better schools, and a better culture, not by resurrecting the legal tools of tyrants.

The conservative movement must decide if it wants to preserve liberty or enforce conformity, because you can’t do both. And if you think the state can be trusted with the power to punish heresy, spend some time in a place where that power has never gone away. You’ll come back grateful for the freedom to speak, to believe—or not—and to say “no” to anyone who claims to speak for God with a badge.

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