For many years the common law of defamation, and statutory amendments to it, have protected a person’s reputation in the community, in the sense of the right not be denigrated in the eyes of others. While this involves a restriction on another powerful common law principle of “freedom of speech” (see the discussion in the High Court of Australia decision in Australian Broadcasting Corporation v O’Neill (2006) 227 CLR 57), a complex set of checks and balances have been developed to cope with this clash. The issues as to whether a person has a right not to be “vilified” (and what this means, ranging from “being the subject of death threats” to “humiliated” or “annoyed”) on the basis of their religious beliefs, have a number of connections with the issues dealt with by the law of defamation. In this paper I will explore some of these connections and examine whether a specific law on “religious vilification” is justified, or whether the protection provided by the law of defamation would be adequate for most purposes.