Sion City of Allah<\/a> Christian sect and six of his followers for straying from \u201ccorrect Christian teachings.\u201d Because the Sect is based on only one book of the Bible (the Book of Jeremiah), the government banned it as an unacceptable branch of Christianity and forbade its followers from attending church till 2011.<\/p>\nThese cases underscore the problematic nature of the Blasphemy Act. While private citizens and religious groups should be able to decide among themselves what does or does not constitute the essence of a religion, and while they should be able to exclude certain individuals from membership on the basis of such disagreements, the Act appoints the state, with all of its police power, as arbiter of what a particular group believes and what it should be allowed to propagate.<\/p>\n
In some cases, the state will deem a group blasphemous even when the allegedly blasphemed group disagrees. For instance, in the Sion City case, the government charged the sect with blaspheming the Timor Evangelical Church, despite the Church\u2019s statements to the contrary. Instead of ceding autonomy to the Church and allowing it to determine religious questions, including blasphemy, for itself, the state stated, \u201cWe hope the church will not interfere in the case.\u201d<\/p>\n
Religion, regulated as such, is defined by the state and is necessarily politicized by the state\u2019s involvement. The state-approved version of religion often tempers social justice components of faith, especially in the case of authoritarian regimes, which use religion to protect and legitimate their own power. Religious matters in this way become intertwined with questions of national security and public order.<\/p>\n
Indeed, the public order argument played a big role in the Court\u2019s decision to uphold the Blasphemy Act. The idea is that blasphemy \u2014 real or supposed, intentional or unintentional \u2014 would anger adherents of a given religion, who will then cause destruction or otherwise act violently. This is different from regulating incitement to violence because it limits peaceful, not violent, speech. According to the Court, the state has to control potentially blasphemous statements, peacefully expressed, in order to increase societal harmony.<\/p>\n
However, the court\u2019s reasoning in this regard is deeply flawed as it protects the wrong party and provides the wrong incentives. The Blasphemy Act appeases rather than controls violent extremists, giving them license to continue bullying religious minorities while the police look the other way. It creates a culture of impunity where increasingly egregious crimes are committed with little or no consequences for the criminals.<\/p>\n
Instead of penalizing the speaker in order to prevent violence, the law should compel potentially violent actors to regulate their own behavior \u2014 even, indeed especially, in the face of insults. Violence is far more effectively controlled if states enforce those laws which punish criminal behavior.<\/p>\n
This sort of legal scheme makes sense not simply because it\u2019s more effective, but also because it protects the fundamental human right to free religious expression. Individuals have the right to not only hold particular beliefs but also to express them openly in public \u2014 as long as they are peaceful and do not contravene the rights of others. This works in favor of the larger society rather than against it, as only in a free marketplace of ideas can those ideas with greater utility or persuasive power prevail.<\/p>\n
In upholding the Blasphemy Act, the Court affirmed the power of the state to compel individuals to abide by certain beliefs against their own conscience \u2014 all for the sake of keeping at bay a presumably uncontrollable public. The decision is both logically and morally flawed, and a major setback for human rights in Indonesia.<\/p>\n
Asma Uddin is Associate Editor of altmuslim.com and founder of Altmuslimah.com. This article was originally published in the Huffington Post<\/a>.<\/i><\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Instead of penalizing the speaker in order to prevent violence, as Indonesia has just done by upholding a blasphemy law, potentially violent actors should be compelled to regulate their own behavior, even – indeed especially – in the face of insults.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":519,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10,2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3703","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-asma_uddin","category-briefings"],"yoast_head":"\n
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