Languages of Truth: Essays 2003-2020

by Salman Rushdie

I did, however, come away wondering why, in the Land of the Free, people were everywhere imprisoned by the antique ideology called God. Here is the explanation, the two-dollar theory I came up with. It has a lot to do with the way people think about freedom. In Europe, the battle for freedom of thought and expression was fought against the Church more than the state. The Church, with its apparatus of oppression—excommunication, anathema, the Index Expurgatorius, torture, the drowning of witches, the dismemberment or burning of dissidents—was in the business of placing limiting points upon what could be thought and said, and if you crossed those frontiers you might, like Giordano Bruno, like Savonarola, find yourself being burned at the stake or, at the very least, being forced, like Galileo, to recant what you knew to be true. So in European thought, “freedom” came to be understood as “freedom from religion.” The writers and philosophers of the French Enlightenment understood this very well, made it their business to erode the power of the Church to silence expression, using blasphemy as one of their weapons, and it’s their work that ended up being the cornerstone of our modern ideas about liberty.