Thought experiment via LEO Strauss: "consider the position of a “historian living in a totalitarian country, a generally respected and unsuspected member of the only party.”

...this historian comes “to doubt the soundness of the government-sponsored interpretation of the history of religion.”

On an exoteric level, this historian will make a passionate defense of the state-sponsored view,’ but esoterically, between the lines, “he would write three or four sentences in that terse and lively style which is apt to arrest the attention of young men who love to think.”

It would be enough for the attentive reader, but not enough for the invariably less intelligent government censors. Alternately, our writer might even state “certain truths quite openly by using as mouthpiece some disreputable character. .. . There would then be good reason for our finding in the greatest literature of the past so many interesting devils, madmen, beggars, sophists, drunkards, epicureans, and buffoons.”