Is Thursday, September 7, 2023, I'm Albert Moeller, and this is The Briefing, a daily

analysis of news and events from a Christian worldview.

The nations of Denmark and Sweden have both been basically driven by controversies over

the burning of the Quran, and over whether or not such burning should be legal.

Are they legally protected, constitutionally protected forms of free speech?

Or are they acts of blasphemy that should be punished by the society and even by the

judicial and prosecutorial branches of the government?

These are big questions, and these questions are not just limited to Sweden and Denmark,

although those two countries in Scandinavia right now are very much front and center.

In both countries, there has been a pattern of recent public burnings of the Quran that

has led not only to controversy inside those two nations.

We might take note of that, we might even talk about it, but it's different when this

becomes a global matter, and in particular, increasingly a matter of Islamic nations

claiming that these two northern European nations, by the way, both of them have some

form of official state religion that would be an established form of Christianity, but

both of them are also incredibly secular.

Both of them in Western terms are very much committed to very, very liberal understandings

of free speech and expression, or at least they have been.

And what we see now is a head-on collision between the Islamic world and those two Scandinavian

countries, and it's going to be a very important issue for all of us to watch, because there

are global lines of argument that are developing here, and we need to look at those lines of

argument and understand what is at stake.

...