"[2] Webster gives the controversy surrounding Monty Python's film The Life of Brian (1979), which he calls "a rather slight production" as a satire on religion, as an example of the way in which blasphemy has been restrained not by force of law but by internalised censorship.

The book has been described as "thoughtful" and "closely argued" by the journalist Tim Radford,[6] and "energetic and ingenious" by academic Lorna Sage,[7] and Webster has been credited with explaining how "we have internalised puritan iconoclasm to the point where we mistake it for a secular universal truth",[7] and with showing that the western liberal concept of "inner conscience" upon which the secularist arguments of The Crime of Blasphemy were founded is a secular transformation of Puritanism.

[7] Webster shows, in Petersson's view, that Rushdie combines a potentially violent and offensive code with the holiest Islamic traditions, and that the language in The Satanic Verses has a charge that he was too careless with.

She believes his critique of the freedom to blaspheme implicitly supports the group of Muslims who unsuccessfully sought to invoke British blasphemy laws that applied only to Christianity against The Satanic Verses in 1989.

[10] Webster has been credited by the novelist J. M. Coetzee with showing that "Rushdie has been made to stand for an entire intellectual establishment" that compounded the outrage The Satanic Verses caused to Muslims by celebrating it.