Archbishop - society should not leave the sacred unprotected

The Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams, yesterday addressed some of the problems with the present blasphemy laws as well as the difficulties society could face if all protection from religious offence is removed.

Delivering the James Callaghan Memorial lecture entitled "Religious Hatred and Religious Offence", Dr Williams questioned the liberal argument of free speech that some writers and artists use to defend their right to portray religion offensively, whilst ignoring the hurt that their actions may cause.

He also pointed to their lack of imagination in refusing to see people's belief choices from any other perspective but their own.

"It is one thing to deny a sacred point of reference for one's own moral or social policies. It is another to refuse to entertain - or imagine - what it might be like for someone else to experience the world differently," he said. "Spectres of colonialism, 'Orientalism', and, once again, anti-Semitism are roused when this insensibility to the otherness of the religious other goes unquestioned.

"And behind this is the nagging problem of what happens to a culture in which, systematically, nothing is sacred."

He went on to explain how this approach deprives society of the ability to have a sense of the value of humanity, beyond the most basic idea of human dignity: "The uncomfortable truth is that a desacralised world is not, as some fondly believe, a world without violence, but a world in which there can be no ultimate agreement about the worth of human or other beings.

"There may be a strong, even practically unbreakable consensus about the wrongness of torturing prisoners or raping children, but there will be no very clear sense of what, if anything, beyond the dignity of an individual is being 'violated' in such cases.

"This is not to make the facile claim that morality needs religion, only to note that a morality without the sacred is bound to work differently. And a post-religious morality that has simply lost any imaginative understanding of what the sacred once meant is dangerously impoverished."

In looking beyond the blasphemy laws, Dr Williams argued that the key to providing just laws against religious hatred was to look at the context, and that the political power and influence of those bringing forward cases should be taken into consideration.

"The grounds for legal restraint in respect of language and behaviour offensive to religious believers are pretty clear: the intention to limit or damage a believer's freedom to be visible and audible in the public life of a society is plainly an invasion of what a liberal society ought to be guaranteeing; and the obvious corollary is that the creation of an offence of incitement to religious hatred is a way of avoiding the civil disorder that threatens when a group comes to feel that it has been unjustly excluded," he said.

"Since the old offence of blasphemy - as we have seen - no longer works effectively to do this, there is no real case for its retention. How adequately the new laws will meet the case remains to be seen.

"I should only want to suggest that the relative power and political access of a group or person laying charges under this legislation might well be a factor in determining what is rightly actionable."