Blasphemy in the Christian World: A History (review)

In Blasphemy in the Christian World, Nash provides a rich and sweeping history of blasphemy from the medieval period to present day. The history of blasphemy, Nash contends, not only illuminates the changing views of the sacred but also shows the extent to which religion has regulated societies and individuals within them.

Despite modernist and postmodernist expectations that religion would wither away, the power of religion and, consequently, the threat of blasphemy persists. In the first chapter, Nash illustrates the endurance and relevance of blasphemy as a phenomenon in the modern world. In 2004, Jerry Springer: The Opera generated widespread controversy in England because the production not only contained a great deal of profanity but also ridiculed Judeo-Christian beliefs. Blasphemy controversies, however, are not unique to Christians. Witness the furor caused by the twelve cartoons of Muhammad published in the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten in 2005.

In Chapters 2 and 3, Nash outlines the history of blasphemy from 1500 a.d. to the present, delineating the differences and similarities between premodern and modern understandings of the concept. In the thirteenth century, Christians in Europe began to distinguish between heresy (the propagation of false doctrine and apostasy from orthodoxy) and blasphemy (expressing disrespect to God by using profanity or ridicule to discredit God’s power). Yet the concept of blasphemy proved to be remarkably malleable. Originally, Nash contends, blasphemy was interpreted as a religious crime with secular repercussions. Blasphemy laws helped the church and the state to exercise social control of deviant behavior, since blasphemy often occurred at taverns, and blasphemers were typically drunk.

During the Enlightenment, secular activists intentionally sought to subvert the intellectual credibility of orthodox Christianity and the Church’s cultural hegemony. Unable to extinguish such “active blasphemy,” states and churches slowly began to grant religious toleration to deists in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and to freethinkers in the nineteenth. By the twentieth century, libertarian concerns about free speech rights had eclipsed concerns about theology or the well-being of the community. But the triumph of free-speech rights has hardly been secured. As the recent debates about Andres Serrano’s photograph, Piss Christ, and Salman Rushdie’s Satanic Verses (New York, 1988) indicate, multiculturalism and other efforts to generate cultural and social inclusion conflict with issues of freedom of expression.

In light of this general survey, the final four chapters probe several themes. The fourth chapter analyzes blasphemy from the blasphemer’s point of view. Between the thirteenth and seventeenth century, “passive blasphemy,” typically committed by an unwitting drunk, gave way to “active blasphemy,” intentionally performed by an anti-Christian activist and artist. The fifth chapter examines how blasphemy laws provided local and central governments with policies to control unruly and subversive behavior. The sixth chapter assesses the different ways that blasphemers damaged their victims. The final chapter reviews the history of the relationship between blasphemy and film. Monty Python’s Life of Brian and Martin Scorsese’s The Last Temptation of Christ receive extended attention. The work concludes with a brisk and provocative survey of contemporary debates about the censorship of allegedly offensive challenges to conventional beliefs and morals.

This work will be of interest to historians of diverse fields, since the study provides a legal history of blasphemy that chronicles legislative changes. This particular dimension of Nash’s analysis draws heavily upon secondary sources, although his examination of twentieth-century blasphemy controversies relies upon primary sources, most notably landmark legal decisions, especially in Britain. The legal history of blasphemy explains what happened, but it does not adequately explain why the meaning of blasphemy changed. To answer this question, Nash draws upon religious and cultural history to recover the sources that fueled these changes throughout the past seven centuries. The entire study is framed by the work of Foucault on power and as well as Elias’ understanding of the role of manners in the evolution of society.¹ Consequently, the degree to which the work’s thesis is convincing...