Profanity: The Gnostic Affront of the Seven Words you can Never Say on Television

Abstract

Profanity remains a mystery to psychological science as we have little understanding as to why obscene speech tends to cluster around body-related subject matter. However, recent work in the areas of Terror Management Theory and disgust psychology suggest that the offense of profanity may be due to the fact that profanity highlights the animal nature of the human body, which, in turn, implicates profanity as a death/mortality reminder. If so, profanity might be experienced differently in Christian populations depending upon the degree to which the body is viewed suspiciously, a lingering influence of Gnostic thought within the Christian tradition. This paper presents empirical research that attempted to assess these associations. Overall, the data was found to be consistent with the notion that profanity may function, particularly in some Christian communities, as a Gnostic affront, as an insult to a creature aspiring to be more than an animal.