Zounds 
Frank Kermode
- Blasphemy: Impious Speech in the West from the 17th to the 19th Century by Alain Cabantous, translated by Eric Rauth
Blasphemy is still a crime in English law, though I imagine few now think it should be. A quarter-century has passed since anybody was charged with it, but another determined zealot like Mary Whitehouse might still manage a prosecution. The law holds that Christianity, in effect the Church of England with its secular Head, is the only religion that can be blasphemed, and one still hears arguments in favour of extending the privilege to other religions. So far they have failed: a cause for rejoicing rather than ethnic envy, for the judges, already notoriously capricious in such matters, would have in each case to decide how the law applied to religions of which they knew little or nothing, and of which it could not be said, as it is of Christianity, that they are inseparably ‘part of the law itself’. That was the judgment of a Lord Chief Justice in 1676, since when blasphemy has been an offence in common law; the sanction may be asleep but it is not dead. If tempted to believe that it is, one needs to recall the 1976 prosecution of Gay News and the subsequent failure in the House of Lords of an attempt to get rid of it.
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From the LRB letters page: [ 25 April 2002 ] Eric Rauth.
Frank Kermode’s books include The Sense of an Ending and The Uses of Error.
Other articles by this contributor:
Writing about Shakespeare · Frank Kermode has his say
Flinch Wince Jerk Shirk · Christine Brooke-Rose
Retripotent · B. S. Johnson
Complicated Detours · Darwin’s Worms by Adam Phillips
Nothing for Ever and Ever · Housman’s Pleasures
‘Disgusting’ · Frank Kermode remembers William Empson
Point of View · Atonement by Ian McEwan
At Tate Britain · William Blake
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