While the First Amendment guarantees freedom of speech and religion, all too often these protections boil down the questions of, “Whose speech?” and “Whose religion?”

A notable example is the recent holiday display erected in Concord by something known as The Satanic Temple in New Hampshire and Vermont.

This display, which was quickly destroyed by vandals, included a statue and a tablet inscribed with the temple’s Seven Fundamental Tenets. In accordance with a permit issued — albeit grudgingly — by the city, it was placed on a city plaza adjacent to the Statehouse, near a nativity scene celebrating the birth of Jesus. (We’re not sure if its placement near the Statehouse was merely a happy accident, but we did enjoy the juxtaposition, however briefly it persisted.)

City officials correctly determined that their choice under the Constitution was to issue the permit to The Satanic Temple or “ban all holiday displays installed by other groups.” Denying the permit would invite litigation, they concluded.

Perhaps in a pre-emptive defense, the city added in explaining the issuance of the permit that the group is “not to be confused with the Church of Satan” and “that the stated mission of The Satanic Temple is to ‘encourage benevolence and empathy among all people, reject tyrannical authority, advocate practical common sense, oppose injustice and undertake noble pursuits.’ ”

Mayor Byron Champlin, for one, was not a believer. “My preference was to deny the permit and accept the risk of the threatened lawsuit,” he said. “I oppose the permit because I believe the request was made not in the interest of promoting religious equity but in order to drive an anti-religious agenda.”

It apparently has escaped the mayor’s attention that the First Amendment guarantees both freedom of religion and freedom from religion. And if he thinks that Christian symbolism is not used to drive a political agenda, he ought to consult the evangelical congregations that constitute core membership of the Cult of Donald Trump.

But maybe Champlin’s underlying objection was voiced in an interview with The Boston Globe, in which he related that he had heard from a few people who said they would not shop in Concord because of the Satanic display. That would be a sacrilege indeed.

Before vandals tore it down, the display consisted of a statue of Baphomet, a goat-headed deity with bright yellow eyes, holding a bouquet of lilacs and an apple, which the Temple said represented free inquiry, the pursuit of knowledge, goodwill and camaraderie. (Too bad it was destroyed before legislators had a chance to reflect on that message, which is perhaps as alien in the Statehouse as would be a statue of Baphomet.)

Being all in favor of the pursuit of knowledge, we took the next step of consulting the Seven Fundamental Tenets, the fourth of which constitutes a ringing endorsement of the First Amendment: “The freedoms of others should be respected, including the freedom to offend. To willfully and unjustly encroach upon the freedoms of another is to forgo one’s own.”

Indeed, the right to offend is at the heart of free speech protections. We all cherish speech with which we agree. It’s a much harder proposition to defend that which offends our deeply held religious, cultural or political values. In fact there’s evidence that support for free expression is eroding among some segments of American society. Maybe that’s because too many Americans nowadays conflate the right to offend with a presumed duty to do so.

We don’t know much beyond what we read in the papers about The Satanic Temple, which is based in Salem, Mass. But we infer that the display of its message was a deliberate provocation intended to highlight religious and political intolerance. Whoever destroyed its display in Concord gave the city a black eye and in the process succeeded in attracting attention to what otherwise might have been widely ignored.