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Scruton on the Sacred and Profaned

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08.07.2026

From his lecture series “The Face of God”:

Only that which is sacred can be desecrated. Hence the habitual desecration of death and sexual love are, I venture to suggest, proofs of their sacred nature. And in a culture which is in full flight from the sacred, the practice of desecration becomes a kind of moral necessity — something that must be constantly performed, and performed collectively, in order to destroy the things that stand in judgement over us. All around us, therefore, we find a relentless habit of ‘objectification’: the display of human beings and their settlements as objects to be consumed and disposed of, the reduction of sex to a relation between body parts, and the display of death in images of crazed destruction, such as those........

© National Review