The indictment against him invoked an interesting legal
term, a term unknown to contemporary courts when associated with God: The
defendant admitted the writing and publishing of the libel. To libel means
intentionally to write things about other persons that are false and would
publicly injure their reputation or expose them to public ridicule. While such
attacks on individuals still remain illegal today, in previous years, such
attacks on God and Christ fell under the laws constructed to protect
reputations the laws against libel.
After Kneeland was convicted by the jury, he appealed,
explaining that his conviction should be overturned because: 1 he claimed he
did not deny a belief in god; he was a pantheist and only denied the belief in
a God; he felt that everything was god; 2 he argued that the law under which he
was convicted had been superseded and overturned by the constitution’s
guarantee of religious freedom; and 3 he believed that the laws against
blasphemy were a violation of the “freedom of the press,” claiming that the
constitution “guarantees to me the strict right of propagating my sentiments,
by way of argument or discussion, on religion or any other subject.”
The court examined whether the law under which he was
convicted had been overturned by the constitution and concluded that it had not
since the law forbidding blasphemy was passed very soon after the adoption of
the constitution and no doubt many members of the convention which framed the
constitution were members of the legislature which passed this law.
The court next provided numerous precedents to
demonstrate that prohibitions against blasphemy did not conflict with
constitutional guarantees for religious rights: In New Hampshire, the
constitution of which State has a similar declaration of religious rights, the
open denial of the being and existence of God or of the Supreme Being is
prohibited by statute and declared to be blasphemy. In Vermont, with a similar
declaration of rights, a statute was passed in 1797 by which it was enacted
that if any person shall publicly deny the being and existence of God or the
Supreme Being, or shall contumeliously reproach his providence and government, he
shall be deemed a disturber of the peace and tranquility of the State and an
offender against the good morals and manners of society and shall be punishable
by fine.
The State of Maine also having adopted the same
constitutional provision with that of Massachusetts in her declaration of
rights in respect to religious freedom, immediately after the adoption of the
constitution reenacted the Massachusetts statute against blasphemy.
