Religious Offence in Advertising
21 January 2005
Click here to see full versions of both posters in the campaign.
Last Christmas brought with it a spate of complaints about advertising that caused offence on religious grounds.
Press advertisements and posters for the Channel Four comedy series, Shameless, prompted over 250 people to contact the ASA. The ads - which parodied the Leonardo da Vinci painting The Last Supper - attracted complaints that they were offensive and shocking because the complainants believed that they mocked the Christian faith, showed Christ in a drunken state and depicted scenes of unnecessary violence.
In its consideration of the complaints, the ASA Council observed that the ads were for a television programme about a dysfunctional family, most of whom drank, smoked and regularly fought one another. Because the ads reflected the content of the programme and lampooned da Vinci's painting and not the event that inspired it, Council considered that they were likely to be seen as light-hearted and unlikely to cause serious or widespread offence.
However, 179 complaints for another Christmas campaign, for morning-after pill Levonelle, were upheld because of religious insensitivity. The campaign stated: “Immaculate contraception? If only. It might be Christmas time, but condoms still split and pills still get forgotten.” The ASA Council agreed with members of the public, religious groups and an MP that the ads were likely to be seen as a pun on the Roman Catholic dogma of the Immaculate Conception and so likely to cause serious or widespread offence.
There is much guidance surrounding acceptable references to religion in advertising. In 2003, the Committee of Advertising Practice (CAP) published a Help Note on Religious Offence for advertisers, full of useful tips for avoiding offence.
The Help Note advises that the symbols, language and customs associated with Christianity are largely integrated into mainstream culture in the UK. However, there are some aspects of religion that are so sacred that their use in advertising material is likely to cause serious offence. For example, the guidelines warn advertisers to steer clear of dismissive or irreverent depictions of sacred figures, symbols, texts and places. A nightclub ad was banned in June last year because it was deemed to trivialise the resurrection by depicting Jesus on the cross, crowd-surfing at a concert with a speech bubble saying “Hope I rise again before they play Britney!”
The guidelines also advise advertisers not to make links between religion and sex or nudity, not to use religion to promote inappropriate products - such as using Muslim imagery to sell alcohol - and not to employ swearwords or sexual innuendo, which will often cause offence to those with strong religious beliefs.