One of the things that define human civilisation is that we are civilised enough to pretend that all religions offer an equal path to God.
We do this even though a part of our brain nags us with the thought that, logically, surely this can’t be possible. But we bite our tongue so as to make the world turn more smoothly; much the way that we might tell someone how pretty their daughter is even though we know, in our hearts, she looks like Leonid Brezhnev.
We used to fight about such things as religion, but it is now generally regarded as bad form to go around saying, “My God is better than your God”; especially since if any of us had to provide court-worthy evidence to show that we even had a God we’d be on pretty shaky ground.
We have gone further. Like G. K. Chesterton we have decided that “the test of a good religion is whether you can joke about it”. No, wait. Not all us have actually decided that, which is what created an opening for Stewart Lee, the co-writer of Jerry Springer: The Musical, to make a film for Five’s series Don’t Get Me Started, entitled What’s Wrong with Blasphemy? Many Christians didn’t take offence at Jerry Springer: The Musical, especially those who swotted up enough about it to know that it did not, as some critics alleged, feature Jesus Christ on stage wearing a nappy. But other Christians found it blasphemous. They protested outside theatres staging the musical, and to the BBC when the BBC prepared to screen it on TV.
This level of outrage confuses some people, who wonder how it is that so powerful a being as God can’t take a little ribbing on the chin every now and then? Surely he’s big enough? Then again, God has his own security posse: they’re the religious version of those agents, publicists and truck-size security guards who collectively decide what the movie star for whom they act will and won’t do, or tolerate. People can impute the oddest things to their God. I heard of a sisterhood of nuns who always bathe wearing a cotton shift, so that they might never offend God by appearing naked before him. You wondered how they came to decide that God could see through the thick masonry of the bathroom walls, but not through their thin cotton shifts.
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But Lee’s musical was hardly the first to provoke charges of blasphemy. There was Monty Python’s Life of Brian. Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses earned him a fatwa from the ayatollahs. In 2005 Sikh protesters forced off the stage at Birmingham theatre a play written by a Sikh woman about the role of women in the Sikh community. Also last year came the publication in Denmark of what Lee referred to as “cartoons which made clumsy jokes about Islam”.
So should we have a right to make jokes, even if they’re bad jokes?
Most of the people Lee quizzed thought we should. “People have a right to be offended,” said Shami Chakrabati, director of Liberty, “and they have the right to protest against a play or an article that has caused them offence. What they don’t have is a right to take the law into their own hands, or even to suggest that there should be a law to limit speech that’s merely offensive.”
That pretty succinctly sums up the position of anyone who grows queasy when they start to wonder who — if free speech is curtailed — will do the curtailing; and where they will draw the line; and if this wouldn’t be worse than having no line at all. They also seemed to agree that we don’t have a right not to be offended. If we did, where would it stop? Should we pass laws preventing people making jokes about Michael Jackson, or David Gest, or James Blunt, lest they get upset? What about politicians? Or Simon Cowell? Or Cowell’s victims on TV shows?
And then, as if deliberately to test the world’s tolerance, Channel 4 broadcast Peaches Geldof chaperoning us around Morocco in The Beginner’s Guide to Islam. Was this some kind of satire? But of what? Of celebrity? Of celebrity-obsessed TV commissioning editors? Of Peaches Geldof? Was Peaches perhaps doing the whole thing tongue in cheek, to see if she could get a rise out of the mullahs and really catapult herself into the headlines beyond the gossip pages?
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Or, given some of her quips (asking a man training to be an imam at a Koran-study school if he didn’t “just wish there were some sexy Fatimas in the school so you could find a girlfriend?”. Later in a Sufi retreat: “It’s basically just a looney bin”), was Peaches making a pitch to be a younger, skinnier Jade Goody? Or is Peaches Geldof Ali G’s latest alter ego?