Over the past century, the term blasphemy has developed an old-fashioned, out-of-date feeling and governmental laws against blasphemy have been disappearing. The battles against blasphemy—against ideas, actions, statements that seem to contradict the foundational concepts of some religious beliefs—continue without the label blasphemy. These battles, which might be called a form of hidden blasphemy, are waged because it is felt that they so offend God (the name that they have given to their deity) that the entire nation is going to be punished. Hurricanes, tornados, mass shootings, forest fires, floods, earthquakes, and other events are often seen as evidence of the wrath of this feared, loving deity’s response to blasphemy.
The battles of hidden blasphemy, particularly in secular nations such as the United States, may be viewed as a form of creeping theocracy in which minority religious groups are imposing their beliefs and rules on everyone.
Evolution
During the twentieth century, Christian fundamentalism in the United States increased. According to fundamentalism dogma their interpretation of the Bible provides an accurate account of the creation of life, particularly the creation of human life. Therefore, the scientific theories of evolution are blasphemous as they challenge, disprove, or doubt this story of creation. In his book Undeniable: Evolution and the Science of Creation, Bill Nye writes:
“Many people who are troubled by evolution want to suppress teaching the whole concept of descent through natural selection in schools.”
In an Op-Ed piece in Free Inquiry, Russell Blackford writes:
“In every generation, scientists and scholars are pressured to conform to the expectations of moralists, ideologues, politicians, religious dogmatists, and sometimes even each other and to avoid teaching certain ideas or researching certain topics.”
The teaching of evolution, particularly human evolution, has been discouraged, banned, and even criminalized as being blasphemous to some Christian sects. In an article in Skeptical Inquirer, Brian Bolton writes:
“For all biblical creationists, the central complaint about evolution is that humans are reduced to just another species of animal. This is unacceptable to many Christians, because the Genesis account of separate creation supports the fundamentalist dogma of ‘human exceptionalism.’”
In 1925, Tennessee passed the Butler Act which prohibited the teaching of human evolution. The Tennessee Supreme Court found the law to be constitutional. In 1961, the Tennessee state legislature attempted to repeal the Butler Act but failed. One legislator equated evolutionists with communists. In 1967, Gary Scott was fired for violating the Butler Act and fought his case in court. The Butler Act was ruled unconstitutional by Federal Courts. In 1968, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that all state “monkey laws” against teaching evolution were unconstitutional.
With regard to the ongoing fight against the blasphemy of evolution, Lenny Flank, in his book Deception by Design: The Intelligent Design Movement in America, writes:
“The history of the anti-evolution movement indicated that all of the legal rulings against creation ‘science’, against Intelligent Design ‘theory’, and against its latest ‘teach the controversy’ clone, will not end the anti-evolution fight.”
In his book Undeniable: Evolution and the Science of Creation, Bill Nye writes:
“Creationism strikes me as an astonishing waste of time and energy. I would love to be able to ignore it and focus on the real science, but creationists work very hard to disrupt science education and force their weird worldview on our students.”
In 2007, one out of eight public high school biology teachers presented creationism as scientifically credible despite the unconstitutionality of this practice.
Women’s Rights and Gender Issues
One of the apparent human universals seems to have been assigning certain social roles on the basis of gender. However, it should be pointed out that cross-cultural studies have shown that gender-based roles differ widely from culture to culture. While many cultures recognized two genders—male and female—there are other cultures which recognize more than two genders.
With regard to religion’s influence on defining gender roles, John Renard, in his book The Handy Religion Answer Book, writes:
“A common pattern is that gender roles deeply rooted in local custom gradually acquire religious justification. With the added weight of sacred authority, social change becomes considerably more traumatic and threatening, especially in ostensibly male-dominated societies. Gender roles, both social and religious, have a great deal to do with the exercise of power. Religious rhetoric invariably canonizes the social status quo in the interest of greater stability, arguing that time-honored gender-based divisions of labor are divinely ordained. To tamper with the balance in quest of gender equality is to court disaster, traditionalists argue.”
For some Christians, gender is seen as binary: their god created men and women and intended for them to belong to difference spheres. Men were to be in the public sphere and women in the domestic sphere. There were certain jobs or occupations that were intended to be done only by men and some which were intended to be done only by women. Men were created to be superior to women and dominant over them. Therefore, laws and public actions which are intended to provide women with rights similar to those granted to men are deemed to be blasphemous, to be an affront to their concept of god.
In his book American Taliban, Markos Moulistas quotes Christian politician Mike Huckabee:
“God, by creating Adam first and also by creating women for man has set the gender-based role and responsibility of males in the most basic unit of society (the family) to be that of leader, provider and self-sacrificial protector, and likewise has set the gender-based role and responsibility of females to be that of help and nurture and life-giving under male leadership and protection.”
From this viewpoint, espousing the idea that women might be able to hold jobs that have been customarily held by men, by suggesting that women can be in leadership positions over men, is a form of blasphemy. This is not just a fundamentalist Christian viewpoint, for Markos Moulistas points out:
“The rule of man over woman is just as clear in contemporary Islamic fundamentalist advice to women.”
From the perspective of some fundamentalist Christians, modern feminism is seen as what they call the “Jezebel spirit” that leads women away from the god-ordained order of the world and the god-ordained roles for men and women. According to one prominent evangelist, feminism is—
“…a socialist, anti-family political movement that encourages women to leave their husbands, kill their children, practice witchcraft, destroy capitalism and become lesbians.”
Abortion and Birth Control
For most of the 200,000 years that our species—Homo sapiens—has inhabited this world, people lived in relatively small bands, dependent on gathering wild plants, fishing, and hunting wild animals to obtain the food they needed for survival. This way of life often required a great deal of mobility as people migrated from one resource area to another. Infants who had to be carried as the band traveled from resource area to resource area were a burden on the group. Using a combination of contraception, abortion, and infanticide, children were spaced at about five-year intervals.
With an increasing dependence on agriculture which began 11-12,000 years ago, people settled into permanent villages and infants became less of a burden. In his book Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, Yuval Harari reports:
“Giving up the nomadic lifestyle enabled women to have a child every year. Babies were weaned at an earlier age—they could be fed on porridge and gruel. The extra hands were sorely needed in the fields.”
The religions which emerged from the agricultural societies began to instill the idea of women having a primary role in giving birth. This meant that practices such as abortion and birth control were discouraged. Eventually, it became a form of blasphemy in many religions to promote, advocate, or even teach about abortion and birth control.
The battle to suppress birth control information by calling it blasphemous was led in the United States by Anthony Comstock (1844-1915), who is generally described as a “devout Christian.” In 1873, he persuaded Congress to pass a law that banned contraception and made it a federal offense to disseminate birth control, including information about birth control, across state lines. During his career, Comstock destroyed 15 tons of books which he had deemed to be immoral (i.e. blasphemous) and arrested 4,000 people for immorality.
During the 1960s and 1970s, information about birth control, including abortion, became more readily available. However, in the twenty-first century the blasphemous idea of family planning is still under attack by some fundamentalists.
The current suppression of abortion in the United States is forcing religious ideas of human behavior on all people, not just those who belong to a particular religious community. From the viewpoint of some religious groups, abortion is a form of blasphemy. In an Op-Ed piece in Free Inquiry, Barry Kosmin writes:
“The current battle over abortion in the United States appears similar to previous struggles against the society-wide application of religious values. The Catholic and evangelical churches not only wish to control the bodies and fertility of their female adherents but also all other American women.”
In an article in Free Inquiry, Gregory Paul writes:
“The Right is not really trying to save babies; instead it is engaged in a grand conspiracy to use the premise that abortion is murder—a religious doctrine with which many theists disagree—to remake society in its own controlling, misogynistic, traditionalist image.”
Book Banning and Censorship
Since the invention of writing and printing, many religions, such as Christianity, are religions of the book, meaning that they have writings which are considered to be the primary source of knowledge and morality. Any writings which are interpreted as opposing or not supporting a particular interpretation of the sacred writings are, therefore, blasphemous and must be suppressed. As literacy, books, and public libraries become more common, booking banning has increased.
In 1550, for example, England passed an act against superstitious books. The very possession of these books was illegal. From the Protestant perspective at this time, Catholicism was a form of superstition and thus many Catholic books were destroyed. Many of those people involved with rooting and burning superstitious books could not see the difference between works of historical importance and those of Catholic theology.
In 1559, Pope Paul IV: issued the Index Auctorum et Librorum Prohibitorum, the first of a series banning certain works. In their book The Library: A Fragile History, Andrew Pettegree and Arthur der Weduwen write:
“Publication of the first papal index was accompanied by substantial book burning, but mostly in Rome itself.”
Andrew Pettegree and Arthur der Weduwen also report:
“Between 1597 and 1603, the Inquisition carried out a survey of all books in Italian monasteries, to purge them of forbidden books.”
One of the most massive instances of book banning, book burning, and censorship occurred in the twentieth century in Nazi Germany. Andrew Pettegree and Arthur der Weduwen report:
“The ideologies of the thousand-year Reich had more ambitious plans for books and libraries, and these were pursued with extraordinary tenacity until the very last days of the war. The first strand was the wholesale destruction of the entire written record of groups singled out for obliteration: this assault on culture, to wipe memory from the face of the earth, has been described as libricide, the genocide of books.”
At the present time book banning and censorship primarily involves libraries (particularly school libraries), textbooks, and school curricula under the guise of “protecting” children from dangerous (that is, blasphemous) ideas. Andrew Pettegree and Arthur der Weduwen write:
“To many, censorship was not a dirty word, but the defense of essential values relentlessly threatened by sedition, bad literature and the weak curation of public library collections.”
From the viewpoint of many Christians, witchcraft is not only a form of blasphemy, but for baptized children to be involved with it may be a form of apostasy. Books which appear to describe activities and viewpoints which might be considered witchcraft, particularly if these descriptions do not portray witchcraft as evil, are often banned from school libraries. Thus, each year school librarians and others report numerous attempts, many of them successful, to have the popular Harry Potter books removed from the libraries or removed from general circulation.
From the viewpoint of many Christians, there are only two genders, these genders are determined at birth, and the only relationships approved by their concept of god are heterosexual. They believe that books which appear to promote homosexuality or to portray homosexuality as a normal form of behavior should not be allowed in schools or libraries. And Tango Makes Three is a book about a couple of male penguins who hatch an egg together. This little book has made the American Library Association’s list of top 10 challenged books because some people feel that it has a homosexual story line. Some libraries have responded by moving the book from children’s fiction to children’s nonfiction.
One book which has been often challenged and banned is Our Bodies, Ourselves by the Boston Women’s Health Collective. Historian Howard Zinn, in his book A People’s History of the United States (another book which some people have attempted to ban), describes it this way:
“It contained an enormous amount of practical information on women’s anatomy, on sexuality and sexual relationships, on lesbianism, on nutrition and health, on rape, self-defense, venereal disease, birth control, abortion, pregnancy, childbirth, and menopause.”
Our Bodies, Ourselves continues to be condemned by conservative Christians who feel that it “elevates the body and its urges, libidinal and otherwise, above soul and spirit.” In other words, it is blasphemous.
For some people, abortion is a sin and contrary to what they feel are the desires of their god. Therefore, the promotion of abortion, including any description of the possibility of abortion, is a form of blasphemy. In compliance with this, the United States banned the mention of abortion by agencies receiving federal aid. Using the 1887 Comstock Act, religious groups are blocking distribution of abortion medications as immoral and obscene—in other words, blasphemous.
Banning books is closely related to banning the authors of banned books. This can range from prohibiting an author to speak publicly at certain events or certain locations, to putting them in prison, to calling for them to be killed. In an article in Free Inquiry, Paul Fidalgo writes:
“For some who hold certain ideas as sacred and inviolable, the sword becomes an attractive instrument for preventing a pen from ever being picked up in the first place. By slicing off the hand that holds the pen, some seek to prevent any opposing ideas from ever coming into being.”
In the Classroom
Hidden blasphemy can also be found in the classroom in which school policies and state laws may prohibit showing materials or teaching subjects which may be considered blasphemous in some religious traditions. For Christian fundamentalists in the United States there is the fear that exposing students to blasphemous ideas and, perhaps more importantly, facts will lead to having students question the validity of certain religious beliefs which in turn can lead to apostasy. These blasphemous ideas and facts include science (particularly evolution), history (particularly the role of religion, racism, and genocide in American history), gender (including non-binary people and the role of women), and sex, to mention a few of the current issues.
A recent example of hidden blasphemy in the classroom can be seen in an incident in Hamline University in Saint Paul, Minnesota in 2023. While the school is affiliated with the United Methodist Church, an adjunct art history instructor did not have her contract renewed for committing blasphemy against Islam. The instructor had displayed a fourteenth-century illustration of Muhammad and illustrations of Muhammad are considered blasphemy in Islam. Russell Blackford writes: “At Hamline University, the issue is partly that some Muslim students perceive showing images of Muhammad as insensitive and ‘Islamophobic,’ although some Muslim organizations and scholars have also commented that objecting to images of Muhammad has historically been an extreme conservative position within Islam.”
Blue Laws
Another form of hidden blasphemy can be seen in so-called “Blue Laws” which were fairly common in the United States until recently. The term blue law refers to laws and regulations based on the belief that Sunday was somehow sacred and that only religious activities should be allowed on this day. The purpose of these laws was to encourage church attendance—and ignoring the fact that Sunday is not a special day in many religious traditions—many businesses were to be closed or to maintain limited hours on this day. In an article in Free Inquiry, Barry Kosmin writes:
“These laws restricted a wide range of activities, from shop openings to hunting and professional sports on Sunday.”
Blue Laws in the United States have historically been attempts to express the superiority of Christianity and to help maintain some kind of Christian-oriented theocracy. On the other hand, the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution seems to prohibit laws “respecting an establishment of religion.” Laws which designate Sunday as a special religious day and restricting the activity of non-Christians would certainly appear to be establishing Christianity. In 1961, the Supreme Court ruled on this matter in McGowan v. Maryland. In this case it was argued that the law was intended to encourage church attendance while ignoring the religious practices of other religious groups. The Supreme Court, in its “infinite wisdom”, acknowledged the religious origins of the Sunday Blue Laws, but ruled that such laws were permissible because the state has the power to regulate public health, safety, welfare, and morals. According to the Court, the law simply provided a day for leisure and family and did not impose any religious practices.
In Braunfeld v. Brown (1961) the Supreme Court ruled that a Pennsylvania state law requiring certain retail business to close on Sunday did not violate the First Amendment free exercise clause. The court found that the law applied to all people and did not target any particular religious practice nor did it make any religious practices unlawful.
One of the primary concerns of the Blue Laws has been the sale and consumption of alcohol. At the present time, 28 states have some kind of restriction on Sunday alcohol sales. Montana, West Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Texas do not allow hard liquor sales on Sunday.
An example of a non-alcohol related Blue Law is seen in North Carolina where hunting is not allowed on Sundays within 500 feet of a place of worship or within a county with a population over 70,000. This law has been on the books since 1896. Several other states also restrict hunting on Sunday.
Not all Blue Laws are about Sunday: many of them are about location. For example, zoning laws may prohibit certain businesses—bars, liquor stores, marijuana dispensaries, abortion clinics, books stores, and so on—from locating close to churches and schools.
What does this mean?
Blasphemy is a religious crime and as such it is a crime only for people who belong to that particular religious group. There are, however, people who feel that their religious laws should apply to everyone and so seemingly secular laws are created to enforce the blasphemy laws of a particular religious group. In the United States hidden blasphemy is a form of creeping Christian theocracy.
More religion
This series explores various topics relating to religion. The term religion, as used here, is not restricted to the Abrahamic religions but includes both polytheistic religions and non-theistic religions. Religion 102/201 is a revision of an earlier essay. More from this series:
Religion 201: Blasphemy
Religion 201: Apostasy
Religion 201: Heresy
Religion 102: Agnosticism
Religion 102: Religious Humanism and Secular Humanism
Religion 101: Creation Science and Intelligent Design
Religion 101: Science and Religion
Religion 102: The Protestant Reformation