Two or three hundred years before Christ, the Jews came to a consensus that the traditional name for God, YHWH, was so holy that it could not even be spoken. They substituted the word Adonai, meaning “my Lord”, and punished anyone who refused to comply.

The modern mind has difficulty understanding this. So alien to us is the idea of blasphemy, and “the holy” on which it depends, that a law banning people from using a word seems close to insane and ripe for satire. Monty Python did a pretty good job.

When asked by British Social Attitudes (BSA) in 1990 what should happen to the blasphemy law in Britain, 9% of Britons said it should continue to apply only to Christianity, compared to a third who thought it should be extended to include other religions and nearly a half who thought it should be abolished altogether. The question was not asked again but it would be safe to bet that popular opinion continued to swing against the law, which was finally abolished in 2008.  Blasphemy was dead. Long live free speech.

Except… at about the same time (1991) BSA asked people whether they thought “freedom of speech [was] more important than maintaining order in the nation.” Less than 5% agreed strongly that it was and less a quarter agreed at all. In comparison, nearly forty percent disagreed, the remaining third having no opinion either way.

Similarly, when BSA regularly asks whether “maintaining order”, “giving people more say”, “fighting rising prices” or “protecting free speech” should be Britain’s highest priority, protecting free speech almost always comes last by some way. In 2005, less than 10% of people thought it should be top priority, compared with over 50% who voted for maintaining order. The public prefer social order to free speech. They always have done.

The obvious response to this is that it may well be so, but it is about public order rather than blasphemy. Of course you have to refuse free speech in certain circumstances. All but the most doctrinaire libertarians accept that Such a response badly misunderstands what blasphemy is, however. More precisely, it reads our own puzzled and emaciated understanding of it into earlier cultures.

Historically, the idea of blasphemy was not some kind of humourless puritanical bolt-on to an otherwise functioning social order. The sacred was understood to be woven into the fabric of society. The temporal depended on the spiritual. The divine underpinned the cosmic and often the political order. It united and cohered people who might otherwise be at one another’s throats. To blaspheme was to detune this order, to strike at the root of what made common life possible. Blasphemy was a form of hate speech, uttered not just against God but against everyone and everything.

If we recognise this, we may appreciate that there is less to separate us from our forbears than we imagine, as the public’s willingness to sacrifice free speech for public order testifies.

Our society is different, but in two specific ways. First, unlike most cultures in most places at most times, our icons are not religious, at least in the traditional sense of the word. Our present monarch, childhood innocence, the armed forces: these are quietly (or not so quietly) iconic. Abuse them in public and you may live to regret it. Second, we don’t have many icons left, and those we do are a bit tattered. The queen is easily satirised, childhood slowly gnawed away by shrewd marketing and our current sensitivity about the armed forces largely a function of the weekly death-toll in Afghanistan.

Blasphemy, whether in its historic theistic guise or its more modern secularised one, depends on a sense of the sacred. The less we hold sacred, the less blasphemy will matter. Some may welcome that prospect but its flip side – the less we hold sacred, the less we hold together – is less appealing.