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In the United States today, Christians are expected to accept that the lives of Jesus and Mary and others are the property of artists and entertainers, not just the faithful, and that they can be rewritten (and, needless to say, frequently sexualized) for the sake of bestselling potboilers, transgressive plays, pseudo-histories, literary “experiments” and Very Important Cultural Events alike. Christians are used to having our sacred scripture challenged not only by academic scholarship, but all across the popular press, where the “discovery” of new scriptures allegedly proving this or that shocking thing about Jesus is a media standby during the Christmas and Easter seasons, along with various other creative exercises in the goading of believers. Christians are expected to accept that both our holiest figures and our earthly leaders will be represented in avant-garde art, not only unflatteringly or satirically, but using prophylactics, urine or excrement. And it’s fair to say, I think, that deliberate offense-giving is considerably more common around those Christian traditions that have historically been more marginal or outsider-ish in American culture — Catholicism, Mormonism, fundamentalist churches — than it is around the Protestantism that used to define the American mainstream … though that’s partially because that mainstream Protestantism has faded in influence and verve, and nobody wants to satirize the increasingly irrelevant….
So if you want to argue that Islam’s treatment at the hands of cartoonists and other critics deserves to be condemned, you need a stronger argument than, “self-censorship around people’s deeply-held religious beliefs is the normal Western way.” It simply isn’t; what’s being invoked here is a special kind of protection for Islamic sensibilities, not a universal rule.
