When Thomas Aikenhead was hanged in 1697 for questioning the Bible, it was the last time someone was executed for blasphemy in Britain. But it didn't mean that debates around blasphemy went away.
In this episode, we'll trace the history of blasphemy in Britain, and discover how debates about insulting religion still shape British law and public life today.
[00:00:04] Hello, hello, hello, and welcome to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English, the show where you can listen to fascinating stories and learn weird and wonderful things about the world at the same time as improving your English.
[00:00:21] I'm Alastair Budge, and today it's the start of a three-part mini-series, this time on the theme of blasphemy and free expression.
[00:00:33] In part one, this episode, we'll be talking about the history of blasphemy in Britain.
[00:00:39] Parts two and three will follow the story of the most famous blasphemy case in modern British history, the story of Salman Rushdie and the Satanic Verses. It’s a story about a famous British author whose book was deemed so incendiary, so blasphemous, that the Supreme Leader of Iran issued a death sentence against him and he had to go into hiding for 10 years.
[00:01:07] OK then, let's not waste a minute and get right into it.
[00:01:13] In January 1697, a young man named Thomas Aikenhead was sitting in a prison cell in Edinburgh, waiting to die.
[00:01:24] He was twenty years old, a student at the University of Edinburgh. His crime, for which he had been tried, convicted, and sentenced to hang by his neck until dead, was blasphemy.
[00:01:41] So, what exactly had he done?
[00:01:45] Well, he had done what many students around the world still do today.
[00:01:49] He had questioned what he had been told was true.
[00:01:54] He had made remarks to friends, in conversation, at a dinner.
[00:01:58] He had called the Old Testament "Ezra's fables," suggesting that the first part of the Bible was no more reliable than a myth.
[00:02:09] He had described theology as, and I quote, “a rhapsody of ill-invented nonsense”.
[00:02:17] He had suggested, at various points, that Jesus Christ was an impostor.
[00:02:23] He had not published a pamphlet, or preached in a public square, or nailed anything to a church door.
[00:02:31] He had floated these ideas to his friends. The problem was that these ideas were blasphemous.
[00:02:40] On the 8th of January, 1697, Thomas Aikenhead was hanged.
[00:02:47] He was the last person executed for blasphemy in Britain.
[00:02:52] Now, it is tempting to think of this as a story from the distant past — the kind of thing that happened in a more primitive era, before science and reason arrived to improve the world.
[00:03:05] But the distance is not as great as it might seem.
[00:03:10] 1697 is not the Middle Ages.
[00:03:13] The Bank of England had been founded just a few years earlier.
[00:03:17] Isaac Newton's theories of motion and gravitation were ten years old. John Locke had recently published his famous Essay Concerning Human Understanding.
[00:03:28] This was, by the standards of its time, a highly educated and rational society.
[00:03:36] And yet it hanged a student for conversation.
[00:03:40] That fact, and the long strange journey from that moment to the present, is what this episode is about.
[00:03:49] So, to go back to its origins, “blasphemy” is a very old word, and where it comes from is important.
[00:03:58] It comes from the Greek, blasphemia.
[00:04:02] The root blapt means to injure; and pheme means speech or reputation.
[00:04:09] Blasphemia, then, means roughly to speak harmfully of something, or to speak ill of it.
[00:04:18] And in its original Greek sense, it did not specifically mean speaking against God, or a religious deity.
[00:04:28] It meant speaking harmfully about anyone or anything held in high regard. You could blaspheme a person, a king, or a reputation.
[00:04:41] When the word passed into English through Latin and Old French, it had already changed.
[00:04:49] Blasphemy now meant, specifically, speaking against God, against sacred things, against the teachings of the Church.
[00:05:00] And the reason this was treated as a serious crime was not simply religious.
[00:05:07] It was political.
[00:05:09] In a society where the Church and the state were deeply connected, speaking against God was speaking against the order of the world.
[00:05:20] A king ruled by divine right. Courts relied on Christian oaths. The law itself was intertwined with Christian assumptions about morality and order.
[00:05:35] And this was made even more explicit in the XVI century when Henry VIII broke with Rome. When he made himself the head of the Church of England, religious authority and political authority became one and the same. The Crown and the Church were fused.
[00:05:59] This meant that to challenge the Church was, effectively, to challenge the Crown.
[00:06:05] And that made blasphemy not just a sin, but something closer to rebellion.
[00:06:13] The law that developed around this was never tidy — there was no single act of Parliament that defined it — but its purpose was consistent.
[00:06:25] It protected the established Church of England and, by extension, the political order that rested upon it.
[00:06:33] That point will become very important later on.
[00:06:37] But set aside, for a moment, the question of which church the law was protecting.
[00:06:43] There is a more basic question worth asking: why did it matter so much at all?
[00:06:50] Why would a supposedly confident Christian society care so much about a few offensive words?
[00:06:59] Of course, people genuinely believed that the sacred mattered, and that they had a Christian duty to protect it.
[00:07:08] But private doubt was never the real target.
[00:07:13] What the law cared about was public challenge: the pamphlet, the printing press, the speech in a public square.
[00:07:23] And those who faced the consequences were those who dared to challenge most openly.
[00:07:30] Percy Bysshe Shelley is a good example. Today he is remembered as one of England's greatest Romantic poets.
[00:07:39] But in 1811, he was expelled from Oxford University for publishing a short pamphlet called "The Necessity of Atheism."
[00:07:49] He and his co-author had sent the pamphlet to the heads of Oxford colleges and to several bishops, apparently hoping to start a debate. What they started was a disciplinary hearing, and they were expelled the same afternoon.
[00:08:06] And if Shelley shows what institutional punishment could look like, the experience of a man called Richard Carlile shows what happened when the criminal law was used more directly.
[00:08:20] Carlile was a printer and political journalist who spent years in prison in the 1820s for publishing works considered blasphemous, including Thomas Paine's "The Age of Reason," which is a critique of the Bible and organised religion.
[00:08:37] While Carlile was in prison, his wife and sister kept running the publishing shop in London.
[00:08:43] They were also charged and imprisoned.
[00:08:46] Then volunteers came to keep the shop open. They were imprisoned too.
[00:08:52] Carlile argued, explicitly, that blasphemy law was a political tool.
[00:08:58] It was not being used to protect God; it was being used to protect the ruling class, which had built its authority on the claim that the social order was God's design.
[00:09:10] To question the Bible was, in this reading, to question why some people owned land and others did not.
[00:09:19] Now, by the twentieth century, most people in Britain assumed that blasphemy law was effectively dead.
[00:09:29] It hadn't been enforced in decades.
[00:09:32] Religious belief was in decline. Satirical publications were more than happy to poke fun at the church.
[00:09:40] The general feeling was that, as a society, we had moved past all that.
[00:09:47] In 1977, a woman named Mary Whitehouse proved that was not the case.
[00:09:54] Whitehouse was a campaigner for what she called moral standards in public life. She had spent years challenging what she saw as the moral decline of British television and publishing.
[00:10:10] In 1977, she brought a private prosecution against a newspaper called Gay News for publishing a poem called "The Love That Dares to Speak Its Name."
[00:10:24] The poem was written by the academic James Kirkup.
[00:10:28] Now, you can find this poem online, but I have to warn you, it is quite explicit and not for the easily offended.
[00:10:36] It is written from the perspective of a homosexual Roman soldier who had been at the crucifixion, and it describes his erotic feelings towards the body of Christ.
[00:10:50] Whitehouse argued this was blasphemous libel.
[00:10:55] The case went to trial at the Old Bailey, England's most famous criminal court.
[00:11:02] The editor of Gay News, Denis Lemon, was convicted. He received a suspended prison sentence and a fine.
[00:11:11] This was 1977. The year of the Sex Pistols and the Queen's Silver Jubilee.
[00:11:18] And yet a newspaper editor had been convicted for publishing a poem, under a law whose roots stretched back nearly three centuries.
[00:11:29] The reaction was fierce. For many people, especially in journalism and the arts, the conviction was an outrage.
[00:11:39] A poem was not a crime. Freedom of expression had to include the right to offend.
[00:11:47] For Whitehouse and her supporters, it was a statement that some things were beyond what a decent society should tolerate.
[00:11:56] And two years later, in 1979, Monty Python released Life of Brian.
[00:12:03] The film follows Brian of Nazareth, a man born in a stable next door to Jesus, who is constantly mistaken for the Messiah.
[00:12:14] The Church of England and the Catholic Church condemned it. Several local councils in Britain banned it outright. Norway banned it altogether, which Swedish cinema posters exploited cheerfully, writing "So funny it was banned in Norway."
[00:12:33] Now, Life of Brian was never prosecuted.
[00:12:37] But the Gay News case and the Life of Brian row showed that, in Britain in the late 1970s, the question of what could and couldn't be said about religion was still very much alive.
[00:12:53] And then, a decade later, everything shifted.
[00:12:57] In September 1988, Salman Rushdie published a novel called The Satanic Verses.
[00:13:06] The novel caused immediate and widespread offence among Muslim communities around the world. The full story of that controversy is what we'll cover in the next two episodes, so you’ll forgive me for only mentioning it in passing here.
[00:13:22] But one consequence of the protests and this uproar matters directly for the history of blasphemy law.
[00:13:32] When Muslim organisations in Britain looked for legal protection against the book, naturally, they turned to blasphemy law.
[00:13:42] And here they discovered something remarkable.
[00:13:46] The law was not available to them.
[00:13:49] English blasphemy law, as it had developed over three centuries, protected Christianity, specifically the Church of England.
[00:13:59] It had never been extended to cover Islam, or Judaism, or any other faith.
[00:14:07] This was not a technicality. It revealed the real character of the law. It had never been a neutral law protecting the sacred as such. It was a structural feature of a law that had grown up as the legal arm of an established Christian state.
[00:14:28] Still, the implication was deeply uncomfortable.
[00:14:33] British law was telling Muslim citizens that their faith deserved less legal protection than the faith of their Christian neighbours.
[00:14:43] For communities already dealing with racism, economic disadvantages, and often a sense that mainstream British society didn't understand them, this was more than a legal disappointment.
[00:14:58] It confirmed something many had long suspected.
[00:15:03] And the debate that followed was long and difficult.
[00:15:08] Should blasphemy law be extended to cover all religions?
[00:15:13] That would give equal protection to Islam, Judaism, Hinduism, and every other faith.
[00:15:19] But it would also make it far harder to criticise or satirise any of them.
[00:15:26] Or should the law be abolished altogether?
[00:15:31] The argument for abolition was that in a largely secular society with many different religions and beliefs, no set of ideas — however important to those who hold them — can be protected from challenge by law.
[00:15:47] You can protect people. You cannot protect ideas.
[00:15:53] Parliament eventually chose abolition.
[00:15:56] The Criminal Justice and Immigration Act of 2008 ended blasphemy as a criminal offence in England and Wales. The three-hundred-year experiment was over.
[00:16:08] And of course, Britain was not and has not been having these discussions in isolation.
[00:16:15] The Danish cartoons controversy, and later the murders at Charlie Hebdo, were reminders that even where blasphemy is no longer a crime, offence to religion can still have enormous political and sometimes deadly consequences.
[00:16:33] And beyond Britain, the legal picture is still very uneven.
[00:16:39] In some countries, especially Muslim-majority countries, blasphemy laws remain harsh, and in a few cases can carry the death penalty.
[00:16:50] In others, there may be no formal blasphemy law as such, but there are still laws against insulting religion, offending religious feelings, or disturbing religious peace.
[00:17:03] Now, bringing it back to Britain, you might think that abolishing blasphemy law in 2008 settled the question.
[00:17:13] It didn't.
[00:17:14] In November 2024 — less than two years ago — a Labour MP named Tahir Ali stood up at Prime Minister's Questions and asked the Prime Minister, Keir Starmer, to introduce laws prohibiting the "desecration" of religious texts and the prophets of the Abrahamic religions.
[00:17:36] In other words: a new blasphemy law.
[00:17:40] The timing was deliberate. Ali was speaking during Islamophobia Awareness Month, and his target was clear — protection for Islam, in particular, from public mockery and insult. And specifically, making burning the Quran a criminal act.
[00:18:00] Starmer's initial response did not include a clear no.
[00:18:04] He said that "desecration is awful" and that his government was "committed to tackling all forms of hatred and division."
[00:18:14] This non-answer caused immediate alarm, because it stopped short of a clear rejection.
[00:18:22] The National Secular Society wrote to the government to demand a clear rejection. Journalists and commentators across the political spectrum expressed concern.
[00:18:35] A few weeks later, the government clarified its position. A minister stated that the government would in fact "completely rule out" re-introducing blasphemy laws.
[00:18:46] So, to wrap things up, for centuries, blasphemy law in Britain was never really about protecting all faith equally.
[00:18:56] It was about protecting the religious foundations of public order. And once Britain stopped being a uniformly Christian society, these laws began to look not only old, but unfair.
[00:19:12] But still, questions about religious protection are as present as ever.
[00:19:18] Where does criticism of a religion end, and where does incitement against its followers begin?
[00:19:25] How much offence must a free society be willing to tolerate?
[00:19:29] And who gets to decide?
[00:19:32] These are old questions, but they have not stayed in the past.
[00:19:36] The language has changed. The laws have changed. Britain itself has changed.
[00:19:42] Fortunately, my country no longer hangs students for saying the wrong things at dinner, but we still have not fully settled how a free society should respond to the sacred.
[00:19:55] OK then, that is it for today's episode on the history of blasphemy in Britain.
[00:20:01] As a reminder, this is part one of a three-part mini-series.
[00:20:06] Next up, in part two and three, we tell the story of Salman Rushdie and The Satanic Verses — the book itself, the protests, the fatwa, the public debate, the assassination attempts, and the questions it got people asking about freedom of expression.
[00:20:23] You've been listening to English Learning for Curious Minds by Leonardo English. I'm Alastair Budge, you stay safe, and I'll catch you in the next episode.
[00:00:04] Hello, hello, hello, and welcome to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English, the show where you can listen to fascinating stories and learn weird and wonderful things about the world at the same time as improving your English.
[00:00:21] I'm Alastair Budge, and today it's the start of a three-part mini-series, this time on the theme of blasphemy and free expression.
[00:00:33] In part one, this episode, we'll be talking about the history of blasphemy in Britain.
[00:00:39] Parts two and three will follow the story of the most famous blasphemy case in modern British history, the story of Salman Rushdie and the Satanic Verses. It’s a story about a famous British author whose book was deemed so incendiary, so blasphemous, that the Supreme Leader of Iran issued a death sentence against him and he had to go into hiding for 10 years.
[00:01:07] OK then, let's not waste a minute and get right into it.
[00:01:13] In January 1697, a young man named Thomas Aikenhead was sitting in a prison cell in Edinburgh, waiting to die.
[00:01:24] He was twenty years old, a student at the University of Edinburgh. His crime, for which he had been tried, convicted, and sentenced to hang by his neck until dead, was blasphemy.
[00:01:41] So, what exactly had he done?
[00:01:45] Well, he had done what many students around the world still do today.
[00:01:49] He had questioned what he had been told was true.
[00:01:54] He had made remarks to friends, in conversation, at a dinner.
[00:01:58] He had called the Old Testament "Ezra's fables," suggesting that the first part of the Bible was no more reliable than a myth.
[00:02:09] He had described theology as, and I quote, “a rhapsody of ill-invented nonsense”.
[00:02:17] He had suggested, at various points, that Jesus Christ was an impostor.
[00:02:23] He had not published a pamphlet, or preached in a public square, or nailed anything to a church door.
[00:02:31] He had floated these ideas to his friends. The problem was that these ideas were blasphemous.
[00:02:40] On the 8th of January, 1697, Thomas Aikenhead was hanged.
[00:02:47] He was the last person executed for blasphemy in Britain.
[00:02:52] Now, it is tempting to think of this as a story from the distant past — the kind of thing that happened in a more primitive era, before science and reason arrived to improve the world.
[00:03:05] But the distance is not as great as it might seem.
[00:03:10] 1697 is not the Middle Ages.
[00:03:13] The Bank of England had been founded just a few years earlier.
[00:03:17] Isaac Newton's theories of motion and gravitation were ten years old. John Locke had recently published his famous Essay Concerning Human Understanding.
[00:03:28] This was, by the standards of its time, a highly educated and rational society.
[00:03:36] And yet it hanged a student for conversation.
[00:03:40] That fact, and the long strange journey from that moment to the present, is what this episode is about.
[00:03:49] So, to go back to its origins, “blasphemy” is a very old word, and where it comes from is important.
[00:03:58] It comes from the Greek, blasphemia.
[00:04:02] The root blapt means to injure; and pheme means speech or reputation.
[00:04:09] Blasphemia, then, means roughly to speak harmfully of something, or to speak ill of it.
[00:04:18] And in its original Greek sense, it did not specifically mean speaking against God, or a religious deity.
[00:04:28] It meant speaking harmfully about anyone or anything held in high regard. You could blaspheme a person, a king, or a reputation.
[00:04:41] When the word passed into English through Latin and Old French, it had already changed.
[00:04:49] Blasphemy now meant, specifically, speaking against God, against sacred things, against the teachings of the Church.
[00:05:00] And the reason this was treated as a serious crime was not simply religious.
[00:05:07] It was political.
[00:05:09] In a society where the Church and the state were deeply connected, speaking against God was speaking against the order of the world.
[00:05:20] A king ruled by divine right. Courts relied on Christian oaths. The law itself was intertwined with Christian assumptions about morality and order.
[00:05:35] And this was made even more explicit in the XVI century when Henry VIII broke with Rome. When he made himself the head of the Church of England, religious authority and political authority became one and the same. The Crown and the Church were fused.
[00:05:59] This meant that to challenge the Church was, effectively, to challenge the Crown.
[00:06:05] And that made blasphemy not just a sin, but something closer to rebellion.
[00:06:13] The law that developed around this was never tidy — there was no single act of Parliament that defined it — but its purpose was consistent.
[00:06:25] It protected the established Church of England and, by extension, the political order that rested upon it.
[00:06:33] That point will become very important later on.
[00:06:37] But set aside, for a moment, the question of which church the law was protecting.
[00:06:43] There is a more basic question worth asking: why did it matter so much at all?
[00:06:50] Why would a supposedly confident Christian society care so much about a few offensive words?
[00:06:59] Of course, people genuinely believed that the sacred mattered, and that they had a Christian duty to protect it.
[00:07:08] But private doubt was never the real target.
[00:07:13] What the law cared about was public challenge: the pamphlet, the printing press, the speech in a public square.
[00:07:23] And those who faced the consequences were those who dared to challenge most openly.
[00:07:30] Percy Bysshe Shelley is a good example. Today he is remembered as one of England's greatest Romantic poets.
[00:07:39] But in 1811, he was expelled from Oxford University for publishing a short pamphlet called "The Necessity of Atheism."
[00:07:49] He and his co-author had sent the pamphlet to the heads of Oxford colleges and to several bishops, apparently hoping to start a debate. What they started was a disciplinary hearing, and they were expelled the same afternoon.
[00:08:06] And if Shelley shows what institutional punishment could look like, the experience of a man called Richard Carlile shows what happened when the criminal law was used more directly.
[00:08:20] Carlile was a printer and political journalist who spent years in prison in the 1820s for publishing works considered blasphemous, including Thomas Paine's "The Age of Reason," which is a critique of the Bible and organised religion.
[00:08:37] While Carlile was in prison, his wife and sister kept running the publishing shop in London.
[00:08:43] They were also charged and imprisoned.
[00:08:46] Then volunteers came to keep the shop open. They were imprisoned too.
[00:08:52] Carlile argued, explicitly, that blasphemy law was a political tool.
[00:08:58] It was not being used to protect God; it was being used to protect the ruling class, which had built its authority on the claim that the social order was God's design.
[00:09:10] To question the Bible was, in this reading, to question why some people owned land and others did not.
[00:09:19] Now, by the twentieth century, most people in Britain assumed that blasphemy law was effectively dead.
[00:09:29] It hadn't been enforced in decades.
[00:09:32] Religious belief was in decline. Satirical publications were more than happy to poke fun at the church.
[00:09:40] The general feeling was that, as a society, we had moved past all that.
[00:09:47] In 1977, a woman named Mary Whitehouse proved that was not the case.
[00:09:54] Whitehouse was a campaigner for what she called moral standards in public life. She had spent years challenging what she saw as the moral decline of British television and publishing.
[00:10:10] In 1977, she brought a private prosecution against a newspaper called Gay News for publishing a poem called "The Love That Dares to Speak Its Name."
[00:10:24] The poem was written by the academic James Kirkup.
[00:10:28] Now, you can find this poem online, but I have to warn you, it is quite explicit and not for the easily offended.
[00:10:36] It is written from the perspective of a homosexual Roman soldier who had been at the crucifixion, and it describes his erotic feelings towards the body of Christ.
[00:10:50] Whitehouse argued this was blasphemous libel.
[00:10:55] The case went to trial at the Old Bailey, England's most famous criminal court.
[00:11:02] The editor of Gay News, Denis Lemon, was convicted. He received a suspended prison sentence and a fine.
[00:11:11] This was 1977. The year of the Sex Pistols and the Queen's Silver Jubilee.
[00:11:18] And yet a newspaper editor had been convicted for publishing a poem, under a law whose roots stretched back nearly three centuries.
[00:11:29] The reaction was fierce. For many people, especially in journalism and the arts, the conviction was an outrage.
[00:11:39] A poem was not a crime. Freedom of expression had to include the right to offend.
[00:11:47] For Whitehouse and her supporters, it was a statement that some things were beyond what a decent society should tolerate.
[00:11:56] And two years later, in 1979, Monty Python released Life of Brian.
[00:12:03] The film follows Brian of Nazareth, a man born in a stable next door to Jesus, who is constantly mistaken for the Messiah.
[00:12:14] The Church of England and the Catholic Church condemned it. Several local councils in Britain banned it outright. Norway banned it altogether, which Swedish cinema posters exploited cheerfully, writing "So funny it was banned in Norway."
[00:12:33] Now, Life of Brian was never prosecuted.
[00:12:37] But the Gay News case and the Life of Brian row showed that, in Britain in the late 1970s, the question of what could and couldn't be said about religion was still very much alive.
[00:12:53] And then, a decade later, everything shifted.
[00:12:57] In September 1988, Salman Rushdie published a novel called The Satanic Verses.
[00:13:06] The novel caused immediate and widespread offence among Muslim communities around the world. The full story of that controversy is what we'll cover in the next two episodes, so you’ll forgive me for only mentioning it in passing here.
[00:13:22] But one consequence of the protests and this uproar matters directly for the history of blasphemy law.
[00:13:32] When Muslim organisations in Britain looked for legal protection against the book, naturally, they turned to blasphemy law.
[00:13:42] And here they discovered something remarkable.
[00:13:46] The law was not available to them.
[00:13:49] English blasphemy law, as it had developed over three centuries, protected Christianity, specifically the Church of England.
[00:13:59] It had never been extended to cover Islam, or Judaism, or any other faith.
[00:14:07] This was not a technicality. It revealed the real character of the law. It had never been a neutral law protecting the sacred as such. It was a structural feature of a law that had grown up as the legal arm of an established Christian state.
[00:14:28] Still, the implication was deeply uncomfortable.
[00:14:33] British law was telling Muslim citizens that their faith deserved less legal protection than the faith of their Christian neighbours.
[00:14:43] For communities already dealing with racism, economic disadvantages, and often a sense that mainstream British society didn't understand them, this was more than a legal disappointment.
[00:14:58] It confirmed something many had long suspected.
[00:15:03] And the debate that followed was long and difficult.
[00:15:08] Should blasphemy law be extended to cover all religions?
[00:15:13] That would give equal protection to Islam, Judaism, Hinduism, and every other faith.
[00:15:19] But it would also make it far harder to criticise or satirise any of them.
[00:15:26] Or should the law be abolished altogether?
[00:15:31] The argument for abolition was that in a largely secular society with many different religions and beliefs, no set of ideas — however important to those who hold them — can be protected from challenge by law.
[00:15:47] You can protect people. You cannot protect ideas.
[00:15:53] Parliament eventually chose abolition.
[00:15:56] The Criminal Justice and Immigration Act of 2008 ended blasphemy as a criminal offence in England and Wales. The three-hundred-year experiment was over.
[00:16:08] And of course, Britain was not and has not been having these discussions in isolation.
[00:16:15] The Danish cartoons controversy, and later the murders at Charlie Hebdo, were reminders that even where blasphemy is no longer a crime, offence to religion can still have enormous political and sometimes deadly consequences.
[00:16:33] And beyond Britain, the legal picture is still very uneven.
[00:16:39] In some countries, especially Muslim-majority countries, blasphemy laws remain harsh, and in a few cases can carry the death penalty.
[00:16:50] In others, there may be no formal blasphemy law as such, but there are still laws against insulting religion, offending religious feelings, or disturbing religious peace.
[00:17:03] Now, bringing it back to Britain, you might think that abolishing blasphemy law in 2008 settled the question.
[00:17:13] It didn't.
[00:17:14] In November 2024 — less than two years ago — a Labour MP named Tahir Ali stood up at Prime Minister's Questions and asked the Prime Minister, Keir Starmer, to introduce laws prohibiting the "desecration" of religious texts and the prophets of the Abrahamic religions.
[00:17:36] In other words: a new blasphemy law.
[00:17:40] The timing was deliberate. Ali was speaking during Islamophobia Awareness Month, and his target was clear — protection for Islam, in particular, from public mockery and insult. And specifically, making burning the Quran a criminal act.
[00:18:00] Starmer's initial response did not include a clear no.
[00:18:04] He said that "desecration is awful" and that his government was "committed to tackling all forms of hatred and division."
[00:18:14] This non-answer caused immediate alarm, because it stopped short of a clear rejection.
[00:18:22] The National Secular Society wrote to the government to demand a clear rejection. Journalists and commentators across the political spectrum expressed concern.
[00:18:35] A few weeks later, the government clarified its position. A minister stated that the government would in fact "completely rule out" re-introducing blasphemy laws.
[00:18:46] So, to wrap things up, for centuries, blasphemy law in Britain was never really about protecting all faith equally.
[00:18:56] It was about protecting the religious foundations of public order. And once Britain stopped being a uniformly Christian society, these laws began to look not only old, but unfair.
[00:19:12] But still, questions about religious protection are as present as ever.
[00:19:18] Where does criticism of a religion end, and where does incitement against its followers begin?
[00:19:25] How much offence must a free society be willing to tolerate?
[00:19:29] And who gets to decide?
[00:19:32] These are old questions, but they have not stayed in the past.
[00:19:36] The language has changed. The laws have changed. Britain itself has changed.
[00:19:42] Fortunately, my country no longer hangs students for saying the wrong things at dinner, but we still have not fully settled how a free society should respond to the sacred.
[00:19:55] OK then, that is it for today's episode on the history of blasphemy in Britain.
[00:20:01] As a reminder, this is part one of a three-part mini-series.
[00:20:06] Next up, in part two and three, we tell the story of Salman Rushdie and The Satanic Verses — the book itself, the protests, the fatwa, the public debate, the assassination attempts, and the questions it got people asking about freedom of expression.
[00:20:23] You've been listening to English Learning for Curious Minds by Leonardo English. I'm Alastair Budge, you stay safe, and I'll catch you in the next episode.
[00:00:04] Hello, hello, hello, and welcome to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English, the show where you can listen to fascinating stories and learn weird and wonderful things about the world at the same time as improving your English.
[00:00:21] I'm Alastair Budge, and today it's the start of a three-part mini-series, this time on the theme of blasphemy and free expression.
[00:00:33] In part one, this episode, we'll be talking about the history of blasphemy in Britain.
[00:00:39] Parts two and three will follow the story of the most famous blasphemy case in modern British history, the story of Salman Rushdie and the Satanic Verses. It’s a story about a famous British author whose book was deemed so incendiary, so blasphemous, that the Supreme Leader of Iran issued a death sentence against him and he had to go into hiding for 10 years.
[00:01:07] OK then, let's not waste a minute and get right into it.
[00:01:13] In January 1697, a young man named Thomas Aikenhead was sitting in a prison cell in Edinburgh, waiting to die.
[00:01:24] He was twenty years old, a student at the University of Edinburgh. His crime, for which he had been tried, convicted, and sentenced to hang by his neck until dead, was blasphemy.
[00:01:41] So, what exactly had he done?
[00:01:45] Well, he had done what many students around the world still do today.
[00:01:49] He had questioned what he had been told was true.
[00:01:54] He had made remarks to friends, in conversation, at a dinner.
[00:01:58] He had called the Old Testament "Ezra's fables," suggesting that the first part of the Bible was no more reliable than a myth.
[00:02:09] He had described theology as, and I quote, “a rhapsody of ill-invented nonsense”.
[00:02:17] He had suggested, at various points, that Jesus Christ was an impostor.
[00:02:23] He had not published a pamphlet, or preached in a public square, or nailed anything to a church door.
[00:02:31] He had floated these ideas to his friends. The problem was that these ideas were blasphemous.
[00:02:40] On the 8th of January, 1697, Thomas Aikenhead was hanged.
[00:02:47] He was the last person executed for blasphemy in Britain.
[00:02:52] Now, it is tempting to think of this as a story from the distant past — the kind of thing that happened in a more primitive era, before science and reason arrived to improve the world.
[00:03:05] But the distance is not as great as it might seem.
[00:03:10] 1697 is not the Middle Ages.
[00:03:13] The Bank of England had been founded just a few years earlier.
[00:03:17] Isaac Newton's theories of motion and gravitation were ten years old. John Locke had recently published his famous Essay Concerning Human Understanding.
[00:03:28] This was, by the standards of its time, a highly educated and rational society.
[00:03:36] And yet it hanged a student for conversation.
[00:03:40] That fact, and the long strange journey from that moment to the present, is what this episode is about.
[00:03:49] So, to go back to its origins, “blasphemy” is a very old word, and where it comes from is important.
[00:03:58] It comes from the Greek, blasphemia.
[00:04:02] The root blapt means to injure; and pheme means speech or reputation.
[00:04:09] Blasphemia, then, means roughly to speak harmfully of something, or to speak ill of it.
[00:04:18] And in its original Greek sense, it did not specifically mean speaking against God, or a religious deity.
[00:04:28] It meant speaking harmfully about anyone or anything held in high regard. You could blaspheme a person, a king, or a reputation.
[00:04:41] When the word passed into English through Latin and Old French, it had already changed.
[00:04:49] Blasphemy now meant, specifically, speaking against God, against sacred things, against the teachings of the Church.
[00:05:00] And the reason this was treated as a serious crime was not simply religious.
[00:05:07] It was political.
[00:05:09] In a society where the Church and the state were deeply connected, speaking against God was speaking against the order of the world.
[00:05:20] A king ruled by divine right. Courts relied on Christian oaths. The law itself was intertwined with Christian assumptions about morality and order.
[00:05:35] And this was made even more explicit in the XVI century when Henry VIII broke with Rome. When he made himself the head of the Church of England, religious authority and political authority became one and the same. The Crown and the Church were fused.
[00:05:59] This meant that to challenge the Church was, effectively, to challenge the Crown.
[00:06:05] And that made blasphemy not just a sin, but something closer to rebellion.
[00:06:13] The law that developed around this was never tidy — there was no single act of Parliament that defined it — but its purpose was consistent.
[00:06:25] It protected the established Church of England and, by extension, the political order that rested upon it.
[00:06:33] That point will become very important later on.
[00:06:37] But set aside, for a moment, the question of which church the law was protecting.
[00:06:43] There is a more basic question worth asking: why did it matter so much at all?
[00:06:50] Why would a supposedly confident Christian society care so much about a few offensive words?
[00:06:59] Of course, people genuinely believed that the sacred mattered, and that they had a Christian duty to protect it.
[00:07:08] But private doubt was never the real target.
[00:07:13] What the law cared about was public challenge: the pamphlet, the printing press, the speech in a public square.
[00:07:23] And those who faced the consequences were those who dared to challenge most openly.
[00:07:30] Percy Bysshe Shelley is a good example. Today he is remembered as one of England's greatest Romantic poets.
[00:07:39] But in 1811, he was expelled from Oxford University for publishing a short pamphlet called "The Necessity of Atheism."
[00:07:49] He and his co-author had sent the pamphlet to the heads of Oxford colleges and to several bishops, apparently hoping to start a debate. What they started was a disciplinary hearing, and they were expelled the same afternoon.
[00:08:06] And if Shelley shows what institutional punishment could look like, the experience of a man called Richard Carlile shows what happened when the criminal law was used more directly.
[00:08:20] Carlile was a printer and political journalist who spent years in prison in the 1820s for publishing works considered blasphemous, including Thomas Paine's "The Age of Reason," which is a critique of the Bible and organised religion.
[00:08:37] While Carlile was in prison, his wife and sister kept running the publishing shop in London.
[00:08:43] They were also charged and imprisoned.
[00:08:46] Then volunteers came to keep the shop open. They were imprisoned too.
[00:08:52] Carlile argued, explicitly, that blasphemy law was a political tool.
[00:08:58] It was not being used to protect God; it was being used to protect the ruling class, which had built its authority on the claim that the social order was God's design.
[00:09:10] To question the Bible was, in this reading, to question why some people owned land and others did not.
[00:09:19] Now, by the twentieth century, most people in Britain assumed that blasphemy law was effectively dead.
[00:09:29] It hadn't been enforced in decades.
[00:09:32] Religious belief was in decline. Satirical publications were more than happy to poke fun at the church.
[00:09:40] The general feeling was that, as a society, we had moved past all that.
[00:09:47] In 1977, a woman named Mary Whitehouse proved that was not the case.
[00:09:54] Whitehouse was a campaigner for what she called moral standards in public life. She had spent years challenging what she saw as the moral decline of British television and publishing.
[00:10:10] In 1977, she brought a private prosecution against a newspaper called Gay News for publishing a poem called "The Love That Dares to Speak Its Name."
[00:10:24] The poem was written by the academic James Kirkup.
[00:10:28] Now, you can find this poem online, but I have to warn you, it is quite explicit and not for the easily offended.
[00:10:36] It is written from the perspective of a homosexual Roman soldier who had been at the crucifixion, and it describes his erotic feelings towards the body of Christ.
[00:10:50] Whitehouse argued this was blasphemous libel.
[00:10:55] The case went to trial at the Old Bailey, England's most famous criminal court.
[00:11:02] The editor of Gay News, Denis Lemon, was convicted. He received a suspended prison sentence and a fine.
[00:11:11] This was 1977. The year of the Sex Pistols and the Queen's Silver Jubilee.
[00:11:18] And yet a newspaper editor had been convicted for publishing a poem, under a law whose roots stretched back nearly three centuries.
[00:11:29] The reaction was fierce. For many people, especially in journalism and the arts, the conviction was an outrage.
[00:11:39] A poem was not a crime. Freedom of expression had to include the right to offend.
[00:11:47] For Whitehouse and her supporters, it was a statement that some things were beyond what a decent society should tolerate.
[00:11:56] And two years later, in 1979, Monty Python released Life of Brian.
[00:12:03] The film follows Brian of Nazareth, a man born in a stable next door to Jesus, who is constantly mistaken for the Messiah.
[00:12:14] The Church of England and the Catholic Church condemned it. Several local councils in Britain banned it outright. Norway banned it altogether, which Swedish cinema posters exploited cheerfully, writing "So funny it was banned in Norway."
[00:12:33] Now, Life of Brian was never prosecuted.
[00:12:37] But the Gay News case and the Life of Brian row showed that, in Britain in the late 1970s, the question of what could and couldn't be said about religion was still very much alive.
[00:12:53] And then, a decade later, everything shifted.
[00:12:57] In September 1988, Salman Rushdie published a novel called The Satanic Verses.
[00:13:06] The novel caused immediate and widespread offence among Muslim communities around the world. The full story of that controversy is what we'll cover in the next two episodes, so you’ll forgive me for only mentioning it in passing here.
[00:13:22] But one consequence of the protests and this uproar matters directly for the history of blasphemy law.
[00:13:32] When Muslim organisations in Britain looked for legal protection against the book, naturally, they turned to blasphemy law.
[00:13:42] And here they discovered something remarkable.
[00:13:46] The law was not available to them.
[00:13:49] English blasphemy law, as it had developed over three centuries, protected Christianity, specifically the Church of England.
[00:13:59] It had never been extended to cover Islam, or Judaism, or any other faith.
[00:14:07] This was not a technicality. It revealed the real character of the law. It had never been a neutral law protecting the sacred as such. It was a structural feature of a law that had grown up as the legal arm of an established Christian state.
[00:14:28] Still, the implication was deeply uncomfortable.
[00:14:33] British law was telling Muslim citizens that their faith deserved less legal protection than the faith of their Christian neighbours.
[00:14:43] For communities already dealing with racism, economic disadvantages, and often a sense that mainstream British society didn't understand them, this was more than a legal disappointment.
[00:14:58] It confirmed something many had long suspected.
[00:15:03] And the debate that followed was long and difficult.
[00:15:08] Should blasphemy law be extended to cover all religions?
[00:15:13] That would give equal protection to Islam, Judaism, Hinduism, and every other faith.
[00:15:19] But it would also make it far harder to criticise or satirise any of them.
[00:15:26] Or should the law be abolished altogether?
[00:15:31] The argument for abolition was that in a largely secular society with many different religions and beliefs, no set of ideas — however important to those who hold them — can be protected from challenge by law.
[00:15:47] You can protect people. You cannot protect ideas.
[00:15:53] Parliament eventually chose abolition.
[00:15:56] The Criminal Justice and Immigration Act of 2008 ended blasphemy as a criminal offence in England and Wales. The three-hundred-year experiment was over.
[00:16:08] And of course, Britain was not and has not been having these discussions in isolation.
[00:16:15] The Danish cartoons controversy, and later the murders at Charlie Hebdo, were reminders that even where blasphemy is no longer a crime, offence to religion can still have enormous political and sometimes deadly consequences.
[00:16:33] And beyond Britain, the legal picture is still very uneven.
[00:16:39] In some countries, especially Muslim-majority countries, blasphemy laws remain harsh, and in a few cases can carry the death penalty.
[00:16:50] In others, there may be no formal blasphemy law as such, but there are still laws against insulting religion, offending religious feelings, or disturbing religious peace.
[00:17:03] Now, bringing it back to Britain, you might think that abolishing blasphemy law in 2008 settled the question.
[00:17:13] It didn't.
[00:17:14] In November 2024 — less than two years ago — a Labour MP named Tahir Ali stood up at Prime Minister's Questions and asked the Prime Minister, Keir Starmer, to introduce laws prohibiting the "desecration" of religious texts and the prophets of the Abrahamic religions.
[00:17:36] In other words: a new blasphemy law.
[00:17:40] The timing was deliberate. Ali was speaking during Islamophobia Awareness Month, and his target was clear — protection for Islam, in particular, from public mockery and insult. And specifically, making burning the Quran a criminal act.
[00:18:00] Starmer's initial response did not include a clear no.
[00:18:04] He said that "desecration is awful" and that his government was "committed to tackling all forms of hatred and division."
[00:18:14] This non-answer caused immediate alarm, because it stopped short of a clear rejection.
[00:18:22] The National Secular Society wrote to the government to demand a clear rejection. Journalists and commentators across the political spectrum expressed concern.
[00:18:35] A few weeks later, the government clarified its position. A minister stated that the government would in fact "completely rule out" re-introducing blasphemy laws.
[00:18:46] So, to wrap things up, for centuries, blasphemy law in Britain was never really about protecting all faith equally.
[00:18:56] It was about protecting the religious foundations of public order. And once Britain stopped being a uniformly Christian society, these laws began to look not only old, but unfair.
[00:19:12] But still, questions about religious protection are as present as ever.
[00:19:18] Where does criticism of a religion end, and where does incitement against its followers begin?
[00:19:25] How much offence must a free society be willing to tolerate?
[00:19:29] And who gets to decide?
[00:19:32] These are old questions, but they have not stayed in the past.
[00:19:36] The language has changed. The laws have changed. Britain itself has changed.
[00:19:42] Fortunately, my country no longer hangs students for saying the wrong things at dinner, but we still have not fully settled how a free society should respond to the sacred.
[00:19:55] OK then, that is it for today's episode on the history of blasphemy in Britain.
[00:20:01] As a reminder, this is part one of a three-part mini-series.
[00:20:06] Next up, in part two and three, we tell the story of Salman Rushdie and The Satanic Verses — the book itself, the protests, the fatwa, the public debate, the assassination attempts, and the questions it got people asking about freedom of expression.
[00:20:23] You've been listening to English Learning for Curious Minds by Leonardo English. I'm Alastair Budge, you stay safe, and I'll catch you in the next episode.
