The Offenses of Blasphemy: Messages in and through Art

Abstract

In 2007, Bill Donohue, president of the United States of America Catholic League, objected to a plan to exhibit My Sweet Lord, a sculpture of a crucified Christ figure depicted naked and made from chocolate by the Canadian artist Cosimo Cavallaro, at a New York art gallery in the week before Easter, likening it to hate speech. He added that it was ‘‘one of the worst assaults on Christian sensibilities ever’’ and that to ‘‘to choose Holy Week is astounding.’’ Interpreting blasphemy as a form of hate speech is common. Understanding blasphemy has become increasingly important in a globalized world in which works of art, such as the Satanic Verses or the Danish cartoons, can cause violent occurrences internationally, as well as within multicultural states. In 1996, the European Court of Human Rights found that the right to freedom of speech included the duty to avoid expression that, in regard to objects of veneration, is gratuitously offensive to others. Moreover, in 2008 the United Nations adopted a resolution against religious vilification, specifically mentioning Islam. But it is unclear how an artwork can be blasphemous, or whether all blasphemy should be understood as hate speech. The objection of religious groups that works of art may be blasphemous is often dismissed as naive. In In Good Faith, Salman Rushdie claimed that the people accusing him of blasphemy had made a fundamental error in their interpretation of the book, ‘‘Fiction uses facts as a starting-point and then spirals away to explore its real concerns.... Not to see this, to treat fiction as if it were fact, is to make a serious mistake of categories. The case of The Satanic Verses may be one of the biggest category mistakes in literary history.’’ One reason for this dismissal is that the fact