UNTIL LAST month, a Greek citizen could be jailed for up to two years for “publicly and maliciously blaspheming” against God, the Greek Orthodox church or “any other permitted religion”. In one of its last acts before losing an election, a leftist government quietly dropped this article as part of a revision of the criminal code.

The law had not fallen into disuse; a man had been sentenced to a ten-month term in 2012 for facetiously comparing a famous monk to a pasta dish. It took him five years to appeal and clear his name. (Short prison terms can generally be bought off in Greece, so the humourist faced little risk of going to jail. But the case stirred strong emotions.)

New Zealand also abolished its virtually dormant blasphemy law in March; it was the seventh democracy to take this step since 2015. In most liberal-minded countries, it is now agreed that outlawing blasphemy, even through mildish and half-forgotten laws, sets a bad example to the states where bans are applied harshly, including the 40 or so which prescribe prison terms and at least five where the penalty can be death.

Scotland and Northern Ireland are now among the few democratic jurisdictions where blasphemy is still punishable. In those places, too, it seems likely that the law will eventually be changed, even though vocal lobbies may drag their feet. Northern Ireland’s Democratic Unionist Party, whose MPs prop up the British government, is resisting change.

Yet despite this liberalising trend, people who monitor the freedom of religion-related speech in the West, especially Europe, see no reason to be complacent. Whether because of old habits that die hard, or because of new ideas about how to manage diverse societies, threats to the freedom of expression are still palpable and in some ways rising, they say.

As examples of the unpleasant experiences that “trouble-makers” in the field of religion can still suffer, campaigners reel off a list of cases. A retired teacher in Germany who adorned his car with anti-Christian slogans was fined €500 ($560) in 2016; last year, a Spanish actor was arrested after ridiculing God and the Virgin Mary on Facebook; earlier this year, a Christian street preacher from Africa was detained by police in London and moved elsewhere after refusing to tone down the message that his faith was the only true one. (Neither the actor nor the preacher was charged eventually.)

More fundamentally, campaigners for free speech are worried by the rise in the seductive but dangerous notion that people have a right not to be offended. Kenan Malik, a British writer, has argued that in the Western world, secular notions of “offence” and the protection of different communities’ feelings are taking the place of blasphemy laws explicitly based on religion.

In fact, Mr Malik maintains, there is no real contradiction between the formal abolition of blasphemy legislation and the secular world’s ambivalent interpretation of “hate speech” or extremism to encompass meanings that can easily shut down all vigorous religious debate. Blasphemy is not so much being decriminalised as redefined.

Stephen Evans of the National Secular Society, a lobby group, says the British right to robust philosophical debate survived only by the skin of its teeth in 2006, when legislation on religious and racial hatred was crafted. In its final iteration, it specified that religion-related speech had to be threatening as well as abusive and insulting to break the law. But many people would still like to lower the bar, Mr Evans notes. He points to a dangerous tendency to see freedom of speech as a necessary evil rather than a positive good.

For some campaigners, the cause of free speech in Europe remains under the shadow of a ruling from the European Court of Human Rights last October: it upheld the conviction of an Austrian woman who was found guilty of causing offence with disparaging remarks about Islam.

It is the court’s reasoning, as much as its conclusion, that liberty advocates find troubling. States could take action to curb religion-related speech “where such expressions go beyond the limits of a critical denial of other people’s religious beliefs and are likely to incite religious intolerance, for example in the event of an improper or even abusive attack on an object of religious veneration,” the ECHR judges found.

Jacob Mchangama, a Danish lawyer who has chronicled the history of free speech in the West, says this loose language is a lamentable regression for a part of the world that spawned the Enlightenment. “It’s quite ironic that the ECHR should emerge as the last defender of [de facto] blasphemy bans in a continent where brave philosophers were persecuted for violating religious dogmas. The court should be the guardian of the rights which those philosophers pioneered.”

Peter Tatchell, a gay-rights veteran who defends the liberty even of religious conservatives, finds that advancing metaphysical ideas is generally unhindered in his home country, Britain, “apart from the occasional over-zealous arrest of bigoted preachers.”

However, he adds, “it is getting more risky to criticise religious ideas. Some people have been vilified, arrested or banned from speaking on the grounds that their critique of religion caused offence to faith communities.” As a close and often contrarian observer of free-speech controversies, he finds that the devout can apply double standards: “Conservative religious adherents demand the freedom to say what they like but don’t extend that same right to others who are critical of their religious standpoint. The law and elements of public opinion sometimes seem to bend in their favour.”

One mildly encouraging sign, perhaps, is that the British government has virtually given up its effort to find a precise legal definition of extremism. Defining extremism might sound like a good idea, but for freedom advocates, almost any definition proposed runs the risk of silencing the merely eccentric. Laws that criminalise open incitement to violence, which exist in all countries, should suffice, as these advocates see things.

In a speech about extremism last month Sajid Javid, who was then still Britain’s home secretary, sounded a little-noticed note of humility: “Of course you shouldn’t arrest everyone with a suspect view. I won’t be the thought-police; people are entitled to hold and express their own views.”

Mr Javid’s words may not be those of a libertarian but they do reflect an internal debate in the British establishment, involving legal experts and the police as well as civil servants and ministers, about how extremist ideas, whether religiously-inspired or otherwise, can best be countered.

Proscribing and punishing perceived extremists, in the absence of any clear threat to harm others, does not seem to be the best way, at least for a country which took pride in letting any zealot sound off in the street about heaven, hell and human destiny. Britain’s unwritten political order, as the writer George Orwell noted, has always cherished eccentricity; in many other democracies, a formal, constitutional right to free speech reflects long struggles against authoritarianism and theocracy. Removing traces of that theocracy, in the form of blasphemy laws, doesn’t mean that liberty is safe.