Last week's interesting encounter with the secular media over Jerry Springer the Opera made me think about blasphemy. Specifically - is it possible to blaspheme against secular culture?
In the ancient world, the first Christians were accused of impiety. The records of the interrogations of the martyrs contain this accusation. Despite the Christians protesting that in fact they were dutiful citizens in good standing with everybody, they could not go forward and sacrifice to the Emperor in order to maintain the peace.

That is to say: their lack of worshipful regard for those spirits that were held to be the guarantors of social order and agricultural fruitfulness caused their neighbours (or at least their governors) to worry very much. The Christian writer Tertullian famously joked:

If the Tiber rises so high it floods the walls, or the Nile so low it doesn’t flood the fields, if the earth opens, or the heavens don’t, if there is famine, if there is plague, instantly the howl goes up, "The Christians to the lion!" What, all of them? to a single lion?

That Christians were charged with atheism was another way of describing their evident impiety. They were rocking the boat.

Contemporary secularism has its own version of piety, too. American philosopher Jeffrey Stout has made a study of the development of a democratic 'piety', following in the tradition of such political writers as Burke and Emerson. He defines piety in these terms:

Piety ... is not to be understood primarily as a feeling, expressed in acts of devotion, but rather as a virtue, a morally excellent aspect of character. It consists in just or appropriate response to the sources of one’s existence and progress through life. Family, political community, the natural world, and God are all said to be sources on which we depend, sources to be acknowledged appropriately.

As Stout sees it, there is still today a properly socially-oriented piety, even in secular societies: that 'just or appropriate response to the sources of one's existence and progress'. This response may be completely non-religious.

That does not mean that acknowledgement of and gratitude for the sources of one's existence is any less pious, however.

For example: the great concepts that are held to bind our society together - freedom of speech, human rights, freedom of/from religion, equality and so on ¬- need to be treated with due regard. We are to treat them with reverence, we might say. They can even be sung about. For we are young and free.

The way in which that nebulous thing called 'the environment' has assumed almost fundamental moral significance is evidence of the same thing.

The alarm of our contemporaries at the possibility of religious martyrdom can be read as another form of this accusation of blasphemy, or of impiety. To be prepared to die for one's religious faith is a terrible blasphemy against the preciousness and fragility of human life. It apparently shows flagrant disregard for the goodness of life in the natural world. It cuts off the possibility human fulfillment. It shows far too deep a disregard for good and just order, and promotes tribalism. As 20th century thinker E.M. Cioran wrote,

“Great persecutors are recruited among martyrs whose heads haven't been cut off.”

The precious and precarious civil peace attained by democratic societies is threatened by those who so blatantly refuse to hold their metaphysical commitments at arm's length. Further, religious believers stand accused of an avoidance of the harshness of reality - of dying in denial, in other words.

That's blasphemy to a 'T'.isn't it?