Over the past century, the term blasphemy has developed an old-fashioned, out-of-date feeling and governmental laws against blasphemy have been disappearing.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.”
As a result of pressure brought by religious groups, evolution is not taught in many public schools and in some instances, there is a requirement that the teaching of Biblical creation be given equal weight and time if evolution is taught. In 1973, for example, Tennessee passed a law requiring that the Genesis account in the Bible be given equal emphasis with evolution. However, the federal courts struck down this law. In 2007, one out of eight public high school biology teachers presented creationism as scientifically credible despite the unconstitutionality of this practice.
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.”
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.
Book Banning and Censorship
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.
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 make witchcraft evil, are often banned from school libraries. Thus, each year school librarians and others report numerous attempts, many of them successful, to have the 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 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.
Religion 101
Religion 101 is a series in which the concept of religion is not restricted to the concepts which are important to the Abrahamic religions, but includes ethnic, shamanistic, and non-theistic religions. More from this series:
Religion 201: Heresy
Religion 201: Apostasy
Religion 201: Deism
Religion 201: Blasphemy
Religion 101: Confucianism
Religion 101: The Evolution of Morality
Religion 101: Shamanistic Ceremonies
Religion 101: Religion and Patriarchy
Religion 101: Evolution and Creationism
