This article is taken from the March 2025 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10.
The first recorded use of the acronym OMG is not by a teenage girl in the 2000s; it was by Admiral the Lord Fisher in a letter to Winston Churchill in 1917, expressing outrage at the failures of the Admiralty in the First World War.
“Are we really incapable of a big Enterprise?” he asks at the end of his letter. “I hear that a new order of Knighthood is on the tapis — O.M.G. (Oh! My God!) — Shower it on the Admiralty!”
Purists will say this is blasphemy. “Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain” is the third commandment; and until very recently it was seen as socially unacceptable to blaspheme casually in polite society. (Naval officers have always had an exemption to this rule.)
Life of Brian was banned for blasphemy at Aberystwyth, until a star of the film was elected mayor
And polite society had tools at its disposal. Monty Python’s Life of Brian was banned by 11 councils in Britain, including Aberystwyth, amusingly until Sue Jones-Davies, the Welsh actress who features in the film, became Mayor of the town in 2008 and overturned the ban.
It was also in 2008 that the Common Law offences of blasphemy and blasphemous libel were abolished in England and Wales — and only 2021 in Scotland. The last successful blasphemy trial was in 1977 when Mary Whitehouse brought a private prosecution against the Gay Times for publishing a poem about a centurion having sex with Jesus after his crucifixion.
Questions of blasphemy have returned to the national stage in the last few weeks after the arrest and conviction of Martin Frost for publicly burning a copy of the Koran. This came a few days after an Iraqi Christian was murdered in Sweden (where he had taken refuge) for doing the same.
Much of the blasphemy and free speech debate has been between those who care little or nothing for religion and people representing Muslim minorities in Western countries, who do. Broadly speaking, it’s a debate between people who do not have a sense of the holy and those whose sense of the holy is highly sensitive. I find myself in a curious position between the two.
I don’t like blasphemy.
I feel acutely uncomfortable with attempts to trash a person’s faith. My sense of what is and isn’t blasphemy is, however, different from those of earlier eras.
I find Life of Brian hilarious and more theologically interesting than Mel Gibson’s Passion of the Christ. I don’t especially like using “Oh! My God!” as a phrase, but I don’t exactly come out in hives when people do.
I also feel that whilst I’m all in favour of attacking the theology and history of other religions with vigour, I’m not enormously comfortable with attempts to outrage their faithful. I confess that I rushed out and bought one of the offending Charlie Hebdo copies after the massacre in 2015 and even posed with one on social media, but it has left a slightly bad taste in my mouth ever since.
You will note that in all of this I have led with what I feel.
I, as a priest and believer in God, probably have a more sensitively tuned antenna for concepts of the holy than most others and what I have described is my gut instinct. And there is no particular reason why my gut should govern the behaviour and liberty of others.
In this I am a prisoner of my own faith and morals. The greatest blasphemy in history was when Roman soldiers dragged the Eternal Word to a cross and made him endure an agonising and tortured death whilst gambling over his clothes.
His response was to pray, “Father, forgive them for they know not what they do.”
I might hate a poem about Jesus’s dead body fictionally being raped, but I file that alongside Jesus’s actual body being scourged and pray forgiveness not vengeance.
We know that this is not the reaction of all. Others will (by definition) not have the model of Christ submitting to crucifixion as a part of their framework for ethical reasoning. Amongst those others are some people who have shown that they will use violence and the law, and sometimes both, in revenge for blasphemy.
We have only two options: we restore a form of the offence of blasphemy and use the strong arm of the law to suppress it; or we reinforce the liberty of the individual to blaspheme and we use the strong arm of the law to protect it.
At the moment, we are in a toxic half-way house, where you are free to blaspheme unless your blasphemy might tempt others into violence, at which point you are disturbing the peace.
Giving any highly motivated group the power to force a person into prison by the threat of violence only encourages every highly motivated group to consider threatening violence to achieve their aims.
And that is called paying the Dane-geld;
But we’ve proved it again and again,
That if once you have paid him the Dane-geld
You never get rid of the Dane.
