Blasphemy in America

If you want to know what a society truly worships, don’t look at its monuments. Don’t bother with its mission statements. Don’t visit its churches. Look at its forbidden words.

Every civilization in history has had verbal landmines that trigger disgust, fear, or punishment. The content of those taboos is never arbitrary. It is these forbidden words that reveal what a culture considers sacred, and when those taboos change, it indicates that the civilization has rearranged its moral furniture.

We are living through one of those shifts now, and the impact is far more profound than most people realize.

For most of human history, the gravest linguistic offenses revolved around the sacred. Blasphemy wasn’t just rude. It was dangerous. Words were treated as vessels of supernatural force, capable of desecrating holy things or calling down judgment from God.

You see this across cultures and across time. Ancient Israel treated irreverent speech about God as a capital crime. Medieval Europe considered oaths sworn in Christ’s name binding to the point of sacrilege. Islamic societies, then and now, punish insults to the Prophet or Qur’an with extreme severity. Indigenous cultures, even today, maintain strict verbal boundaries around ancestors, spirits, and ritual practices. In Cantonese, the most powerful insults attack lineage and ancestry, or violate family honor.

Taboo words served a structural purpose. They reinforced the pillars of the sacred order: God, king, ancestors, covenant, family, and the binding force of oaths. Violating an oath wasn’t dishonesty; it was treachery against the cosmic fabric. Desecrating a holy name wasn’t impolite; it was destabilizing and dangerous. The taboo on specific language protected the metaphysical foundations that held societies together.

As religious authority and influence weakened, the taboo center drifted. The West moved from sacred purity to hygiene purity. It was a worldview based on public decency and the belief that sexual and excretory words were polluting when used in polite society.  Language about sex or bodily waste became the new blasphemy. We fused these expressions with morality.

This is the world George Carlin walked into in 1970 with his famous comedy sketch “Seven Dirty Words You Can’t Say on Television.” This list wasn’t a personal ranking of offensiveness. It came straight from FCC obscenity standards, the last stronghold of hygiene-era morality. Carlin wasn’t mocking random prudishness; he was mocking a moral system obsessed with physical and sexual cleanliness.

What is essential to notice is this. Not one racial slur appeared on his list. This wasn’t because Carlin himself refused to say them. He used the N-word explicitly in other routines when analyzing racism and linguistic intent. The omission wasn’t a matter of personal morality; it was structural.

Slurs were not part of the FCC’s regulatory framework because they weren’t considered obscene. The fact that “shit” was illegal to say on television while racial slurs were not, told you where the moral voltage lived and how completely it has shifted since.

Today, the words on Carlin’s list show up on Netflix teen programming without anyone objecting. The F-word, one I rarely heard in my youth, even in private, is the most common adjective used by our social elite, politicians, and prominent leaders. No one blinks. Bodily terms may be considered crude by some, but harmless. Blasphemy barely registers. The hygiene era is dead, and into that vacuum has moved “identity purity.”

The easiest way to identify a culture’s sacred center is to ask which words instantly destroy people. Not hypothetically, but in practice. What language ends careers on contact? It’s not profanity. It’s not explicit sexual language. It’s not taking God’s name in vain. You can insult the nation, the Founders, burn the flag, kneel for the national anthem, insult Christianity in impunity, and be rewarded with a book deal.

But say a single racial slur or a slur targeting a protected gender or sexual identity, even once, even years ago, in a quote, or in a private message, and your life detonates. Job gone. Platform gone. Reputation is gone. Remorse doesn’t matter. Context doesn’t matter; Intent doesn’t matter.

You don’t have to like slurs- most decent people don’t- to acknowledge the scale of the shift. Don’t misunderstand that protecting identities is about kindness or compassion. It’s about institutional power. Modern taboo language reinforces a moral hierarchy built around fragility rather than strength, grievance rather than virtue, and bureaucratic classification rather than covenant or character.

Slurs are treated not as insults, but as sacrilege, acts of blasphemy, because they threaten the ideological scaffolding that defines legitimacy for the modern ruling class.

This understanding of blasphemy is unique to the Western world. Italian and Spanish profanity revolves around sacred oaths and violations of holy objects. Asian people’s most powerful insults are lineage and ancestry, or violations of family honor. Islamic cultures maintain blasphemy laws with severe consequences for those who insult the Prophet or disrespect the Qur’an.

Each of these societies protects what they consider holy. Only in Western culture, especially in America, do we find a moral order where insulting God is trivial, desecrating tradition is fine, and mocking the nation is fashionable, but insulting a protected identity is treated like spiritual contamination.

 We didn’t abolish blasphemy laws.

We just rewrote them.

Tim Powell