This is a podcast from the archives of the BBC Ruth Lectures.

This lecture in the series The Persistence of Faith given by Jonathan Sacks

was originally broadcast in 1990.

For some reason, religious conviction in the modern world produces in us

a mixture of surprise, fascination and fright, as if a dinosaur had come to life and

lumbered, uninvited into a cocktail party. I remember three years ago taking part in a panel

on the use of bad language in broadcasting. Everyone else addressed the subject of obscenity. I was asked to speak about

blasphemy. No one had given blasphemy much thought for many years. The one exception, Mary White

House's prosecution of gay news, seemed to be just that, a stray pebble tossed into a sea of calm indifference.

At the time, I quoted T.S. Eliot, who believed that blasphemy was no longer possible.

He thought that you can only blaspheme if you profoundly believe in the reality of that which you profane.

No one, according to

Elliot, believed that strongly anymore. Along with faith, blasphemy too, had died. Few of us could

have imagined that within a few months, the satanic verses would make blasphemy front-page

news throughout the world, and that 18 people would

die in religious protests about a novel. Here was religious belief, very much alive, in the way the

Bible had once portrayed the presence of God, a whirlwind, shattering rocks, and uprooting the cedars of Lebanon,

fascinating in its power, terrifying in its destructiveness.

It was the hurricane our weather forecasters failed to predict.

Why did the resurgence of religion take us by surprise, and how shall we react to it?

We lamented the loss of faith. Shall we fear its rediscovery still more? One picture dominated our

understanding of religion in the modern world.

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