No study of religious authority would be adequate without some discussion of the process by which that authority is questioned and ultimately rejected. Within faith communities, especially those derived from Western religious traditions, three of the terms most commonly used to label those who challenge or deny accepted religious authority are heretics, apostates, and blasphemers.
Although heresy and apostasy are often treated as the same for practical reasons, there are nevertheless imporant differences. Apostasy on the one hand involves deserting to an “enemy,” while heresy on the other hand involves creating of factions and division within the group.
This means that the presence of apostasy depends upon the prior existence of conflict between religious or political groups — thus, without a previously existing external enemy, there can be no apostasy. Heresy, though, implies the existence of conflict within the group — once an internal conflict reaches the point where two distinct groups exist, beliefs which were once heresy may then be described as apostasy.
Blasphemy as Spiritual Conflict
Whereas apostasy and heresy involve directly conflicts between social groups, whether within religious communities or between religious communities, blasphemy is conceived as a conflict between humans and the divine. Specifically, blasphemy is the accusation whenever a person fails to accord the divine the honor and respect that is presumably owed.
Generally speaking, blasphemy involves some sort of insult towards or speaking evil about God, God’s attributes, or God’s instructions. Defining it more precisely is often very difficult because what it is ends up being dependent upon the religious views of whoever is doing the investigating. Thus, the existence of blasphemy always takes two to exist: a giver and a receiver.
As a consequence of this, blasphemy is inevitably a social situation, involving some sort of challenge to the legitimacy of religious authority figures. Presumably, then, the punishment of blasphemy should be an exercise of that same religious authority. And, it is certainly true, there exist within the sphere of religious power a number of things which religious leaders can do, the most extreme of which would involve the exclusion of a person from continued membership in a religious community.
Nevertheless, the punishment of blasphemy has also often involved political authority as well. Blasphemy has been a crime since the very earliest times for which we have records and it is characteristic of a political system which is at least partially theocratic. Genuine separation of religious and political authority cannot exist so long as political leaders have been given the responsibility of solving religious problems or enforcing religious norms.
That, however, has been exactly the situation which has existed in much of the world for much of history, including the United States. Fortunately it has been changing, at least in some countries, thus allowing political leaders to remain independent of ecclesiastical control and exercise the political power that does lie within their sphere of competency.
