Blasphemy was, and is, more than a transgressionary activity. Its long history suggests that controversies about blasphemy are places where definitions of the universe and its working are debated; places where identities are forged and where communities debate issues about public order. All these lead us to a history away from the certainties offered by secularisation narratives. Blasphemy always reminded us that the relationship between individuals and the sacred were very often problematic. Secularisation theorists always spoke about ideas of collective, normal, and everyday belief, thereby homogenising both the experience of belief and the definitions that historians and sociologists would give to it. Blasphemy’s illumination of conflict models and incidents showed that belief was capable of ebbing and flowing and appearing at pressure points in the interactions of individuals and societies. In this, the inevitable triumph of the secular over the sacred looks a far-fetched suggestion. Even if secularisation theorists did have some justification in arguing that religion would become less important, it remains a teleological theory of progress and continual enlightenment. But the religion supposedly supplanted by reason was not by any means destroyed or damaged beyond repair, and secularisation theorists failed to pay much attention to the residues and legacies that Christianity left in the West.

Artists who explore and contemplate the West’s myths, stories and cultural legacy became the people who rescued religion from its appointed status on the periphery of experience. What motivates artistic consideration of the sacred, and why artists as diverse as Andres Serrano, Bettina Rheims, Tracey Emin and Tania Kovats have quarried the sacred for inspiration, are important questions. While these artists themselves may have lucid, exciting and informative answers, the wider ‘influence’ of the sacred needs to form exploration of the fuller context in this area.^[19] In this respect, it is valuable to ask how far this art reflects a re-discovery or re-orientation around the sacred imagery of the past, or a simple acknowledgement of religion’s enthralling nature as one of the West’s strongest and most compelling ‘stories’. In this, it has not been for many of these artists a re-evangelisation of life, or necessarily a quest for spiritual longing, but has equally sometimes been spawned by the simple curiosity of those brought up with secular outlooks.

This interest means that investigations of popular culture and media studies will inevitably be drawn to the sporadic appearance of the sacred in popular culture. In a sense, each particular media can be said to have its fifteen minutes in the spotlight. Irving Welsh showed the power of disreputable images of the almighty to shock in the context of the modern novel. His Granton Star Cause depicted a profane and drunken deity and was the last controversy Mary Whitehouse, Britain’s premier twentieth-century critic of media morality, was involved in before her death. Madonna’s sense of melodrama almost inevitably took her in the direction of the sacred long before she thought of actually being crucified on stage. In 2006, her ‘Confessions’ tour played with Catholic motifs and extended her belief that suffering and crucifixes could be ‘made sexy’. Even culturally conservative British comedy, which always wishes it was more subversive than it ever manages to be, produced a publication with religious offensiveness as a keynote feature. The British comedian Rik Mayal’s recent autobiography contained a picture of himself beatified and described as ‘better than God’. All these are in danger of demonstrating a de facto cheapening and ubiquitousness of the sacred while noting the rediscovery of religion’s powers to shock. Yet equating these with outright blasphemy brings problems of intention when, for example, Maddona had embarked on a quest to entertain as much as to problematise or inform her audience about religion and the sacred.

In particular, we might note how images and portrayals of Christ on film have caused especial problems of interpretation sometimes leading to accusations of blasphemy. Of greater concern have been the attempts to humanise Christ which, in some eyes, appeared to be an assault upon the idea of his divinity — a constant struggle in such depictions. Dennis Potter’s Son of Man portrayed a Christ at war with himself and sceptical of the divine nature of his own destiny. Similarly, Scorsese’s Last Temptation gave critics, both hostile and sympathetic, an opportunity to air the sheer variety of interpretation to which the gospel story, and its depiction, could be subjected. Yet, conclusions from this area were not readily transferable to other blasphemous instances. Films, and their subsequent greater availability on video, are capable of multiple consumption and re-consumption in the quest for favourable or unfavourable meanings.^[20] But the engagement of artists and writers with the religious has provided the opportunity for religious world views to challenge ownership of these cultural ideas and have asked the searching question of whether the ideas of the religious belong to society as a whole. The protests against everything from Last Temptation of Christ to Jerry Springer the Opera have given religious individuals the opportunity to bring arguments about the sacred and its inviolability back to the public sphere. In this they are aided by agendas which promote social inclusiveness and the urge to marginalise differences of opinion and viewpoints in the more consensually driven societies of the new millennium.

These are all conundrums and challenges to artists and thinkers. In such a climate, it is scarcely surprising that a cultural phenomenon so capable of controversy should excite and fascinate the artistic mind used to sifting and redefining the problem areas of civilisation. In the end, we should protect such rights and imperatives since they offer a blueprint for possible change against regimes of abject quietism and stasis. This is necessary because all culture — religious or secular — is capable of development and change. Whether we really can provide an equality of public space for the religious and those who would denounce it to re-enter the public sphere is a difficult question for us to answer. Ironically, societies faced by these dilemmas will have to decide how far they can tolerate a conflict model between the religious and the free speech advocate in the name of so-called consensus.