Paul Marshall, Senior Fellow at the Center for Religious Freedom, has written a succinct summary of the unfolding controversy over the Mohammed cartoons and a brief reflection. A tireless advocate for the cause of religious liberty, he has played an important role in publicising the plight of persecuted Christians around the world.

Dr Marshall supports religious liberty in the current controversy and objects to what he sees as attempts by Muslim governments to impose their brand of censorship on European countries. They must not be allowed to dictate the framework of the debate in the West.

Defending freedom of religion and freedom of the press requires distinguishing who is being criticized, and distinguishing criticism from threats. It is one thing to condemn Jyllands-Posten for offending millions of people. It is a very different thing to criticize the Danish or other governments, since the criticism itself, even apart from invidious calls for cartoonists to be punished by the state, assumes that government should control the media. Saudi Arabia, Iran, and their authoritarian brethren, as well as jihadist vigilantes, are attempting to export and impose their media censorship and version of sharia on the world at large, using economic pressure, international organizations, or violence.

Dr Marshall further thinks that putting up with insults and blasphemy is preferable to foregoing our liberal freedoms.

Religious toleration means not insulting somebody else's religion, and it is a good thing. But religious freedom means being free to reject somebody else's religion and even to insult it. Government should want and encourage its citizens to be tolerant of one another, but its primary responsibility is to protect its citizens' rights and freedoms. The fact that people are sometimes insulted is one cost of freedom. The Jyllands-Posten affair calls us to uphold that principle internationally as well as domestically.

As Wilfrid McClay points out, this is a challenging teaching for anyone who takes religion seriously.

What Marshall is here putting forward is actually a hard doctrine for Christians, or any other believers, or even nonbelievers who revere anything at all, since it means they too must be prepared to endure seeing and hearing the worst kinds of blasphemies directed at the things that matter most to them, without ever being able to appeal to the state to do something about it.

That may indeed be the price of freedom in our time. I would rather not face a choice between, on the one hand, insults from witless television shows and blasphemous "art" exhibits and, on the other, embassy burnings and mob violence over cartoons. Given the real-world alternatives on offer, however, I’ll accept the insults.

Paul Marshall was one of the participants in this 2003 symposium on persecution of Christians in Islamic countries. Several of Dr Marshall’s articles are linked at the bottom of this page. His best-known book is Their Blood Cries Out.