Two readers challenged my comparison of Islam and Christianity. Their questions led me to examine something more consequential: the power of governments to turn religious prohibitions into criminal offences.

A reader responding to my recent article on Islam, Christianity and homosexuality asked a pointed question: Would I rather be gay in the United States or Iran?

I answered that I would choose the United States. Iran criminalizes consensual same-sex sexual relations and permits severe punishments, including the death penalty in certain circumstances. The difference in legal protection is substantial.

Another reader approached the subject differently. He described himself as a liberal Christian who struggles with traditional religious teaching but believes the state should generally leave consenting adults alone. He then suggested that Muslim societies seemed more willing than Western societies to put their religious beliefs into practice.

I appreciated his question because it identified an issue my original article on Islam and Christianity had not fully examined.

Religious communities have rules about how people ought to live. Governments have police, prosecutors and prisons. The connection between the two is neither automatic nor inevitable. How does a religious prohibition become a criminal offence? And who has the authority to decide?

The distinction that gets lost

A Christian may believe that same-sex sexual conduct is sinful. A Muslim may hold a similar view. Neither position tells us, by itself, whether that person wants the police to arrest anyone.

Religious morality addresses conduct through conscience, worship, teaching and communal expectations. Criminal law imposes penalties backed by the coercive power of the state. The distinction becomes especially important when a government proposes to punish conduct between consenting adults in private.

Someone may consider an act morally wrong without believing that imprisonment is an appropriate response. This is not necessarily inconsistency. It may reflect a view about the limits of government authority.

The reverse is also possible. A politician may support criminal penalties for reasons involving nationalism, public morality or political advantage, whether or not the policy follows directly from a coherent religious argument. We should therefore be careful about describing a country’s penal code as the simple expression of its population’s faith.

What the global figures tell us

According to ILGA World’s legal database, updated in June 2026, 63 United Nations member states criminalized consensual same-sex sexual acts through legislation. Two more were classified as criminalizing them in practice.

The countries concerned do not share one religion or one political history. Some laws reflect particular interpretations of Islamic jurisprudence. Others emerged through British colonial legislation. Some governments have introduced or expanded restrictions comparatively recently.

Nor does decriminalization necessarily mean that gay people can live openly or safely. Social hostility, police harassment and discrimination may continue where private consensual conduct is not itself a crime.

These distinctions matter because arguments about homosexuality frequently collapse several different questions into one: what a religion teaches, what the law prohibits, how officials enforce it and how people are treated in everyday life. The answers are not always the same.

Iran makes the consequences clear

The first reader’s comparison between America and Iran cannot be dismissed as sarcasm. Human Rights Watch reported that Iran continued to criminalize consensual same-sex sexual relations, with punishments ranging from flogging to the death penalty. LGBT people also faced discrimination and violence.

A person living under such laws faces risks that go well beyond religious disapproval. It would be misleading to treat Iran’s legal system as merely another expression of personal moral belief. Its penalties are enforced through state institutions.

But it would also be a mistake to infer that every Muslim who considers homosexual conduct sinful supports Iran’s criminal laws. Iran is a state with a particular legal and political system. It cannot stand in for the beliefs of all Muslims, any more than one Christian government’s legislation can represent every Christian denomination.

Jordan offers an awkward counterexample

Consider Jordan. It is a Muslim-majority country where consensual same-sex sexual acts between adults are not explicitly criminalized. ILGA World traces this position to the country’s 1951 Penal Code.

Yet Jordan is not a model of comprehensive LGBT legal protection. Human Rights Watch has documented the use of vague morality provisions against sexual and gender minorities, alongside the absence of explicit protections against discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity.

Jordan’s religious establishment has also expressed conservative views on same-sex relationships. Such religious rulings do not automatically become binding criminal statutes.

A country can retain traditional religious teaching without maintaining a specific criminal prohibition on consensual same-sex conduct. It can also allow that conduct under criminal law while failing to protect people adequately from harassment. The legal question is more complicated than whether a society is religious or secular.

Pakistan’s law has a British history

Pakistan provides an especially important case. Section 377 of the Pakistan Penal Code criminalizes certain sexual acts described in the nineteenth-century language of intercourse “against the order of nature.” It is a provision inherited from the colonial penal code of 1860.

The law was not drafted by Pakistan’s Islamic scholars after independence. It came through the British colonial legal system. That historical origin does not settle the contemporary debate over its retention. Pakistan’s religious and political institutions have their own positions on sexual morality, and the provision remains part of the country’s criminal law.

But its origin should make us cautious about describing the statute as a direct, uncomplicated translation of Quranic teaching into legislation. The British Empire exported criminal provisions to territories with different religious traditions. Colonial law sometimes survived independence because governments retained inherited institutions and statutes.

In 2018, India’s Supreme Court ruled that Section 377 could no longer criminalize consensual sexual conduct between adults in private. The judgment rested on constitutional protections, including dignity, equality and personal liberty. Two countries inherited related colonial legislation. Their subsequent legal paths diverged.

This also raises the wider issue explored in my article on the Qur’an and the design of government in Pakistan: religious principles and the institutional choices of states are not the same thing.

Christianity’s own legal history

Western countries did not always separate religious disapproval from criminal punishment. In England, laws against certain sexual acts long preceded the modern debate over LGBT rights. The 1967 Sexual Offences Act partially decriminalized homosexual acts between consenting men aged 21 or older in private in England and Wales, subject to restrictive conditions.

That was a limited reform, not immediate legal equality. In the United States, the Supreme Court’s 2003 decision in Lawrence v. Texas invalidated a Texas law criminalizing certain consensual sexual conduct between adults of the same sex.

These developments occurred within societies shaped historically by Christianity. Churches did not all abandon traditional teaching when criminal laws changed. Legal reform resulted from political argument, litigation, changing public attitudes and campaigns for individual rights. Religious communities themselves responded in different ways.

Who gets to decide what the police should enforce?

Religious believers routinely distinguish between wrongdoing and crime, even when they disagree about where the boundary belongs. Most modern legal systems do not attempt to prosecute every breach of religious morality. They make decisions about which conduct warrants punishment, what interests the law should protect and what restrictions constitutional principles permit.

Supporters of laws against consensual same-sex conduct may argue that the state has a legitimate responsibility to preserve public morality and the social order. Some see legal restraint as necessary to maintain religious or cultural norms.

Critics argue that criminal punishment for private consensual adult relationships intrudes on personal liberty, invites selective enforcement and exposes vulnerable people to harassment or blackmail. These arguments deserve to be examined on their legal and practical merits.

The fact that a prohibition is religiously grounded does not, by itself, answer whether the state should enforce it. Nor does the existence of a criminal law establish that its application is fair or effective. A government must be judged by what its laws authorize officials to do to actual people.

What the two readers helped me see

The first reader wanted a practical answer about freedom and safety. The second was trying to reconcile religious conviction with the right of adults to make private decisions. Both questions were useful.

The comparison between the United States and Iran reminds us that legal consequences matter. A debate about equal standards of religious criticism must never obscure the difference between disapproval and criminal prosecution.

The second comment reminds us that religious believers are not necessarily demanding that every moral rule become a statute. We should scrutinize religious teachings fairly, without treating one tradition’s conservative beliefs as uniquely disqualifying. But when governments impose penalties, the discussion changes. We are examining the exercise of state power.

Pakistan’s colonial inheritance, Jordan’s legal position, Iran’s criminal penalties and the history of reform in Britain and America show that there is no single route from religious belief to criminal law.

The issue also connects to my earlier reporting on Pakistan’s hijra community and human dignity. Legal systems have consequences for the people who live under them.

If a person believes something is sinful, what additional justification is needed before the state may punish another person for doing it? That is a question religious conservatives, liberals and secular citizens all have reason to confront.