Towards the Blasphemous Self: Constructing Societal Identity in Danish Debates on the Blasphemy Provision in the Twentieth and Twenty-first Centuries

Abstract

By challenging or scorning what has been thought of as the sacred core of society, the blasphemer has been historically seen as the societal other. In contemporary Denmark, however, the perception of the blasphemer has changed. In this article, I argue that the study of parliamentary debates about the future of the blasphemy provision in Danish penal law over the last one hundred years shows that the blasphemy provision is a ‘floating signifier’ which has been re-appropriated to fit different political goals and societal identity constructions. In the last 40 years, Denmark has been the scene of two international and high-profile diplomatic crises relating to blasphemous acts (in the 1970s and in the 2000s). In the current political climate, these crises are articulated as constituents of the cultural history of Denmark and being blasphemous is, accordingly, no longer linked to alterity, but rather inscribed in what might be referred to as ‘the societal self’.