| A brief history of blasphemy In the West, making fun of the sacred is a sacred rite in itself. It took a long time to get there ANDREW CHUNG - TORONTO STAR February 12 2006 |
In a recent episode of the hit animated TV show The Family Guy, a white-bearded God invites Adam and Eve to
take a load off under any tree in the Garden of Eden.
Except, he says, for the one shading his porn collection.
A few hundred years ago, the very idea of God as smut connoisseur would likely have led to the slow death of
everyone involved with the show. The most likely reaction today is laughter on the living room couch.
In contemporary North America and Western Europe, there are countless examples of blasphemy, variously
defined as the gross contempt of God or irreverence toward the sacred.
But instead of eliciting shock, nowadays it works to establish cultural cred. To many in Western society,
blasphemy as sin is a foreign concept. When the Fox network cancelled Family Guy, fans invoked the term.
"Blasphemy," they cried on the Internet.
Blasphemy has become an accepted trope in our cultural landscape, taken as integral to the free exchange of
ideas and deemed worthy of protection.
In New York, no one blinked when a painting recently showed the Virgin Mary spanking the baby Jesus. In
1999, critical acclaim accompanied a depiction of Mary adorned with porn images and elephant dung. In the
'80s, a photo called Piss Christ became infamous for its depiction of a crucifix immersed in a cup of the artist's
urine.
Don't forget Madonna's eroticized video "Like a Prayer," which propelled her to greater celebrity, or Martin
Scorsese's film The Last Temptation of Christ, whose controversy only helped it at the box office.
But the road to this point has been bumpy and long — thousands of years long — and, as evidenced by the
ongoing violent protests over a Danish newspaper's cartoon depictions of the Muslim Prophet Mohammed,
not followed by everyone.
If there were social developments driving the West's acceptance of blasphemy, surely they would be the rise
of individuality, science and, ironically, blasphemy itself.
"In general, most of these debates over blasphemy have furthered feelings critical of religion," says religious
historian Arthur Sheps. "The champions of religious orthodoxy would say something like, `You're
blasphemous,' and in many cases it would backfire. They'd be viewed as anti-scientific."
For as long as people have blasphemed, there have been attempts to stop it. Jesus Christ was accused of
blasphemy. The Greeks tried Socrates for impiety, after which he drank the poison hemlock.
For early Christians, blasphemy became the cardinal sin. As Pulitzer Prize-winning author Leonard Levy points
out in his book Blasphemy, Thomas Aquinas said the sin is against God and is "more grave than murder, which
is a sin against one's neighbour."
Catholics vilified Protestants in the 16th century, burning heretics and blasphemers alive. Protestants such as
Lutherans, Calvinists and Anglicans took up the cause, rejecting Roman Catholicism but also other Christian
groups. Martin Luther advocated the death penalty for blasphemers.
Religious art was commissioned and then rejected as blasphemous. In Rome, baroque painter Michelangelo
Caravaggio's works were, to some, unacceptably vulgar. In 1606, Death of the Virgin was rejected by its
commissioners, some say because the artist used a prostitute as Mary's model.
Religious wars burned hotly, with each side labelling the other blasphemous. When the Anglican church
became the official church in Britain during the Restoration period, persecutions abounded.
Over that time, people witnessed the carnage and began to think differently. They too became blasphemers.
In 1770, the Baron d'Holbach published in France The System of Nature, in which he denied the existence of a
deity. The Catholic Church raged. "It was considered pretty radical," says 18th-century scholar Jennifer Mori, a
professor at the University of Toronto. "There was no God. Notions of good or evil were culturally
constructed. No such thing as heaven or hell."
But d'Holbach's work merely set the stage for a more persuasive attack on religion, The Age of Reason, by
British Enlightenment intellectual and pamphleteer Thomas Paine.
Paine's influence extended to America and France, where he was imprisoned for a time. It was a flowering of
contrarian ideas, and its seeds were drifting far and wide.
"No one could ask, `Who reads Tom Paine?' Almost everyone did," Levy says. "If the hod carrier, prostitute,
and common soldier could read, Paine was their favourite."
The opening of minds had a profound effect. "It was essentially a reaction to what happened prior to that
period of time: religious factions fighting with each other, states killing people, religious purges," says Jean-
Francois Gaudreault-Desbiens, a constitutional law professor at the University of Toronto.
"So the idea the state would try to impose a religion on everyone was seen as a source of chaos and
instability."
Then there was the effect of science. In 1859, biologist Charles Darwin scandalized conservative Christians by
positing natural selection in evolution. And geologists like Charles Lyell were discounting the Biblical tenet
that God created the Earth in just six days.
Helped by these momentous figures, as well as by free thinkers and sceptics inside the Christian churches,
the charge of blasphemy became more and more antithetical to a modern society. "There was an increasing
feeling amongst religious non-conformists and their supporters that the repressive legislation was becoming
outdated," Mori says.
Free expression and secularism were becoming the norm in public life, and along with them the desire to
keep the state from punishing people over religion.
That, however, didn't stop governments from trying. The 1925 "Monkey Trial" of Tennessee high school
teacher John Scopes, for teaching evolution in violation of state law, was one of the most sensational court
cases in American history.
In Canada, there were blasphemy cases in Quebec into the 1930s.
In Toronto, periodical editor Ernest Sterry was jailed in 1926 for libelling God and the Bible. "He had poked fun
at `touchy Jehovah,'" Levy writes.
But there have been no prosecutions since.
Some experts believe the fastest weaving of blasphemy into the public's cultural imagination occurred after
World War II. They attribute it to the atrocities of the Holocaust, which furthered the enshrinement of human
rights, including freedom of expression and religion.
The tension continued. French cartoonist Siné's Massacre, which included anti-cleric and blasphemous
material, was burned in Britain in 1967 by the founder of Penguin, which published it. The BBC shunned the
Monty Python film and Jesus satire Life of Brian.
But the Western world has moved inexorably toward a tolerance of blasphemy.
Canadian anthropologist Munir Jiwa explains it this way: "There is definitely a secular bias, because speaking
emotionally doesn't work anymore. There's a rational, scientific privilege, and all other sorts of language are
matters of the heart and don't have a place."
Of course, Western democracies are unique. The liberalization of ideas, the separation of church and state,
the establishment of representative institutions — these things didn't happen everywhere else.
"Because public accountability was out there and being promulgated in Western society before it was
elsewhere, it created a climate of open inquiry where people were more prepared to question things and
listen to differing points of view," Mori says.
Now, Sheps adds, "I think a lot of people are saying they don't even believe in blasphemy."
In many countries, it is still possible to blaspheme. Pakistan, for instance, continues to prosecute for the
crime.
The Danish cartoons have sparked huge protests, attacks, fires and deaths in the Middle East. Blasphemy,
these protesters are saying, is still a cardinal sin.
But Jiwa says the debate has turned to the inappropriateness of the reaction itself. Once again, the secular
bias is winning out.
He wonders whether it's a dangerous path.
"What kind of society are you building if you have the right to offend and to hate?" he asks. "What kind of
society do you want to build just to prove you have the right to offend someone and then knowingly do so?
What kind of democracy is that? How do you hold on to things like respect for others, dignity, and pluralism?
"And," he warns, "what happens next? If you're going to push this, and religion is not going to go away, then
what?"
take a load off under any tree in the Garden of Eden.
Except, he says, for the one shading his porn collection.
A few hundred years ago, the very idea of God as smut connoisseur would likely have led to the slow death of
everyone involved with the show. The most likely reaction today is laughter on the living room couch.
In contemporary North America and Western Europe, there are countless examples of blasphemy, variously
defined as the gross contempt of God or irreverence toward the sacred.
But instead of eliciting shock, nowadays it works to establish cultural cred. To many in Western society,
blasphemy as sin is a foreign concept. When the Fox network cancelled Family Guy, fans invoked the term.
"Blasphemy," they cried on the Internet.
Blasphemy has become an accepted trope in our cultural landscape, taken as integral to the free exchange of
ideas and deemed worthy of protection.
In New York, no one blinked when a painting recently showed the Virgin Mary spanking the baby Jesus. In
1999, critical acclaim accompanied a depiction of Mary adorned with porn images and elephant dung. In the
'80s, a photo called Piss Christ became infamous for its depiction of a crucifix immersed in a cup of the artist's
urine.
Don't forget Madonna's eroticized video "Like a Prayer," which propelled her to greater celebrity, or Martin
Scorsese's film The Last Temptation of Christ, whose controversy only helped it at the box office.
But the road to this point has been bumpy and long — thousands of years long — and, as evidenced by the
ongoing violent protests over a Danish newspaper's cartoon depictions of the Muslim Prophet Mohammed,
not followed by everyone.
If there were social developments driving the West's acceptance of blasphemy, surely they would be the rise
of individuality, science and, ironically, blasphemy itself.
"In general, most of these debates over blasphemy have furthered feelings critical of religion," says religious
historian Arthur Sheps. "The champions of religious orthodoxy would say something like, `You're
blasphemous,' and in many cases it would backfire. They'd be viewed as anti-scientific."
For as long as people have blasphemed, there have been attempts to stop it. Jesus Christ was accused of
blasphemy. The Greeks tried Socrates for impiety, after which he drank the poison hemlock.
For early Christians, blasphemy became the cardinal sin. As Pulitzer Prize-winning author Leonard Levy points
out in his book Blasphemy, Thomas Aquinas said the sin is against God and is "more grave than murder, which
is a sin against one's neighbour."
Catholics vilified Protestants in the 16th century, burning heretics and blasphemers alive. Protestants such as
Lutherans, Calvinists and Anglicans took up the cause, rejecting Roman Catholicism but also other Christian
groups. Martin Luther advocated the death penalty for blasphemers.
Religious art was commissioned and then rejected as blasphemous. In Rome, baroque painter Michelangelo
Caravaggio's works were, to some, unacceptably vulgar. In 1606, Death of the Virgin was rejected by its
commissioners, some say because the artist used a prostitute as Mary's model.
Religious wars burned hotly, with each side labelling the other blasphemous. When the Anglican church
became the official church in Britain during the Restoration period, persecutions abounded.
Over that time, people witnessed the carnage and began to think differently. They too became blasphemers.
In 1770, the Baron d'Holbach published in France The System of Nature, in which he denied the existence of a
deity. The Catholic Church raged. "It was considered pretty radical," says 18th-century scholar Jennifer Mori, a
professor at the University of Toronto. "There was no God. Notions of good or evil were culturally
constructed. No such thing as heaven or hell."
But d'Holbach's work merely set the stage for a more persuasive attack on religion, The Age of Reason, by
British Enlightenment intellectual and pamphleteer Thomas Paine.
Paine's influence extended to America and France, where he was imprisoned for a time. It was a flowering of
contrarian ideas, and its seeds were drifting far and wide.
"No one could ask, `Who reads Tom Paine?' Almost everyone did," Levy says. "If the hod carrier, prostitute,
and common soldier could read, Paine was their favourite."
The opening of minds had a profound effect. "It was essentially a reaction to what happened prior to that
period of time: religious factions fighting with each other, states killing people, religious purges," says Jean-
Francois Gaudreault-Desbiens, a constitutional law professor at the University of Toronto.
"So the idea the state would try to impose a religion on everyone was seen as a source of chaos and
instability."
Then there was the effect of science. In 1859, biologist Charles Darwin scandalized conservative Christians by
positing natural selection in evolution. And geologists like Charles Lyell were discounting the Biblical tenet
that God created the Earth in just six days.
Helped by these momentous figures, as well as by free thinkers and sceptics inside the Christian churches,
the charge of blasphemy became more and more antithetical to a modern society. "There was an increasing
feeling amongst religious non-conformists and their supporters that the repressive legislation was becoming
outdated," Mori says.
Free expression and secularism were becoming the norm in public life, and along with them the desire to
keep the state from punishing people over religion.
That, however, didn't stop governments from trying. The 1925 "Monkey Trial" of Tennessee high school
teacher John Scopes, for teaching evolution in violation of state law, was one of the most sensational court
cases in American history.
In Canada, there were blasphemy cases in Quebec into the 1930s.
In Toronto, periodical editor Ernest Sterry was jailed in 1926 for libelling God and the Bible. "He had poked fun
at `touchy Jehovah,'" Levy writes.
But there have been no prosecutions since.
Some experts believe the fastest weaving of blasphemy into the public's cultural imagination occurred after
World War II. They attribute it to the atrocities of the Holocaust, which furthered the enshrinement of human
rights, including freedom of expression and religion.
The tension continued. French cartoonist Siné's Massacre, which included anti-cleric and blasphemous
material, was burned in Britain in 1967 by the founder of Penguin, which published it. The BBC shunned the
Monty Python film and Jesus satire Life of Brian.
But the Western world has moved inexorably toward a tolerance of blasphemy.
Canadian anthropologist Munir Jiwa explains it this way: "There is definitely a secular bias, because speaking
emotionally doesn't work anymore. There's a rational, scientific privilege, and all other sorts of language are
matters of the heart and don't have a place."
Of course, Western democracies are unique. The liberalization of ideas, the separation of church and state,
the establishment of representative institutions — these things didn't happen everywhere else.
"Because public accountability was out there and being promulgated in Western society before it was
elsewhere, it created a climate of open inquiry where people were more prepared to question things and
listen to differing points of view," Mori says.
Now, Sheps adds, "I think a lot of people are saying they don't even believe in blasphemy."
In many countries, it is still possible to blaspheme. Pakistan, for instance, continues to prosecute for the
crime.
The Danish cartoons have sparked huge protests, attacks, fires and deaths in the Middle East. Blasphemy,
these protesters are saying, is still a cardinal sin.
But Jiwa says the debate has turned to the inappropriateness of the reaction itself. Once again, the secular
bias is winning out.
He wonders whether it's a dangerous path.
"What kind of society are you building if you have the right to offend and to hate?" he asks. "What kind of
society do you want to build just to prove you have the right to offend someone and then knowingly do so?
What kind of democracy is that? How do you hold on to things like respect for others, dignity, and pluralism?
"And," he warns, "what happens next? If you're going to push this, and religion is not going to go away, then
what?"