1. Blasphemy and sacrilege: A challenge to secularisation and theories of the modern?

The reaction to alien views in contemporary worlds and the historic past has quite often been termed blasphemy. In some respects it is easy to say that the outpourings of others deserve consideration and recognition whether or not their discourses or statements are coherent. But history reminds us that we must confront the consequences of the freedom that the modern world has given us. While those who fought for the extension of forms of democracy in the post-war world would celebrate the downfall of spurious and enslaving authority, the gap that this loss of authority left was large and threatening. Indeed, we should remember that there are important reasons for describing this situation as a gap. This became plain in a significant range of cultural discourses that talked about the ‘end’ of such reassuring concepts as civilisation, history, and, of course, the modernist project. Such discourses looked back at supposed species of tyranny and constraint that had apparently been transcended but scarcely, if at all, looked forward to a world of potential liberation and open ended expression. For the optimistic, and those who never gave a second thought to the fact that they themselves were empowered by culture, the future represented a wealth of opportunities. Clearly, empowerment was precisely the key to this so-called liberation. Those who had benefited from the material consequences of the modernist project, for example, through education, or through access to the public sphere and the media had simultaneously the wish, the means, and the ability to express themselves and to influence others. Paradoxically, the breakdown of confidence in these same mechanisms left others without such forms of liberation or expression. Moreover, this also contributed to their long-term loss of confidence in their own empowerment through the opportunities offered by the West.

The breakdown of this confidence emphasises how far we have grown deeply accustomed to writing an especially Whig, socio-democratic progressivist style history of both religion and rights in the West. A pejorative attitude to religion was also often present in modernisation theory which considered superstition and forms of belief to belong to primitive epochs and that these represented a phase through which human development passed.^[1] Traditionally, Whig religious history has told us that religious tolerance has developed in Western nation states as a consequence of these states conceding species of human rights. This concession of human rights often went hand in hand with these states surrendering stewardship and authority over the ideological makeup of their citizen’s moral and mental lives. Generally speaking, this stewardship was considered to be of a religio-moral nature and its withering away within this historical model of progress was often linked to the sociological theory of secularisation. In one branch of this theory, offered substantially in the 1960s by the then influential work of Peter Berger, the supposed authority of religion in the areas of behavioural morality, education and welfare were deemed to have been broken by developments within the post-war world.^[2] Such developments had arguably been at work since the Enlightenment. Teleological notions of society’s development from Hegel, Marx, Weber, Elias and Foucault envisaged the marginalisation of religion into various components. Whether this was brought about by revolution (Hegel/Marx), greater specialisation (Weber), civility (Elias), or the growth of the subjectively empowered self (Foucault), all theories predicted its potential demise.

A brief reflection over the last paragraph will alert readers to how old fashioned the secularisation paradigm sketched actually looks — yet systematic discrediting of its assumptions and conclusions is still required. Interestingly, the modernisation and peaceful transition model of religious change has a stunning longevity and some commentators have noted the capacity for such accounts to overwrite conflict models.^[3] In his examination of the archaeological evidence of religious violence from the classical world, Eberhard Saur examined how the archaeological processes of excavation and restoration are capable of denying the phenomenon of iconoclasm. In discussing the public display and portrayal of one statue (the statue of Mithras from Ostia), Saur notes that its archaeological value is too often considered through its carefully restored state. In this, the mutilation of the statue has been forgotten and similar evidence of destruction, so Saur argues, has been neglected or ignored. A factor that obscures the history of religious conflict still further is what Saur describes as a trend within archaeological explanations of change to adopt gradualist models of ‘acculturation’. Acculturation models argue for a much more gradual interleaving of cultures based around peaceful contact, mutual sharing of technology and cultural achievements — all opposed to ideas of conquest and cultural imperialism. Interestingly, this bears a striking resemblance to modern perceptions of the functioning and purpose of religious/multicultural tolerance. Of still greater concern is Saur’s suggestion that the advocates of ‘acculturation’ theses of change are apt to describe destructive conflict models of change as old fashioned and shaped by discredited nineteenth century paradigms.^[4]

Similarly, the Reformation was regularly described as a linear unstoppable process which came fundamentally to alter the social and religious makeup of the West. In this we are persuaded that the building blocks of modernism (constructed by More and Erasmus) were firmly in place before Marx, Hegel, Weber, and even Nietzsche put pen to paper. Likewise, the triumph of the Newtonian rational universe noted in the history of science and even within the histories of gambling and probability portrays a modernisation motif which explains rationality as the triumphant explanatory framework around which the universe turns.^[5] No longer did the turn of the dice or the shape of natural phenomena or laws display the divine will but instead could be explained through natural laws or the secular notion of probability.

Saur reminds us how archeological models that display destruction and iconcoclasm are worth taking with us in any study of secularisation as a consensual linear and modernising history. Attacks upon religious images represent a significant portion of blasphemy’s early history. Blasphemy in the ancient and early Christian periods most frequently comes down to the historian as the written record of individual acts of outrage. Like many other crimes, there must also have been a dark figure of iconoclastic acts against religious material culture that have subsequently left no trace. The wilful and calculated destruction of religious artefacts or buildings displayed an intent to damage the religious ‘currency’ of the religion so attacked. Evidence from the ancient world strongly suggests that monotheistic religions took the lead in iconoclastic practices and the identification of other religions as anathema. Pre-Christian Rome had been indulgent to both empire-wide and local deities and archaeologists have seen the widespread existence of some cults as tangible evidence of this. Individual deities were chosen for their usefulness and augmented existing belief systems rather than displaced them. It was monotheistic religions that set themselves against this equilibrium.^[6]

The creation of a single autonomous religious truth and route to salvation provides the obvious explanation as to why this was clearly the case. When Pharaoh Akhenaten adopted monotheism in ancient Egypt the destruction of rival deities was a logical and inevitable consequence of this choice. Judaism similarly had scriptural precedent for violent action against pagan deities, although some of these examples were aimed at religious usurpation or the Israelites ‘straying’ from the true God. After Christianity’s arrival, the trend was continued further by Islam’s adoption of iconoclastic practices. As Islam spread East its iconoclasm left its mark upon the Buddhist shrines and idols of India.

Later Christianity also regarded pagan relics and practices to be capable of routinely contaminating the lives of true believers. The systematic nature of Christian iconoclasm can be contrasted with the haphazard and inconclusive actions of Roman predecessors. Sauer suggests that the Emperor Aurelian’s capture of Palmyra resulted in half-hearted and piecemeal destruction of local sacred places and, perhaps, even represented a tolerance or respect for the deities of the defeated city.^[7]

In sum, the linear models of secularisation producing and being sustained by tolerance and rationality from the Enlightenment to the dawn of modernisation deserve to be qualified if not wholly questioned. Models of acculturation, of which secularisation is surely one, can be shown to have overshadowed models of conflict and episodic reaction. Similarly the post-Enlightenment ‘invention’ of religious tolerance ignores the relative tolerance that existed within some early civilisations.