The Sacred Orders of Finnish Political Discourse on the Revision of the Blasphemy Law

Abstract

This article examines how Finnish politicians constructed the legal protection of religion and the relationship between religion and society during the process of revising the blasphemy and religious insult sections of the Finnish criminal code in the late 1990s. In doing so, it analyzes their discourses on religion and the sacred. It identifies two “sacred orders” in these discourses. One is a “secular sacred order,” concerned with the defense of religious plurality, secular progress, and the principles of public order and freedom of religion. The other is a “Christian sacred order”; it defends Finnish national and cultural identity, is connected to the national form of Christianity, and refers explicitly to the Christian God. These orders represent different views on the role of religion in society but, as the article shows, during the legislative process proponents of both invoked a category of religion that presumed a Christian prototype. Based on this analysis, the article suggests that theories utilizing the Durkheimian notion of the sacred should take into account issues of power, the nature of sacred things as social constructions and thus variable, and the existence of hierarchical relationships between different sacred things.