Sticks & Stones: Part 2, Exploring Blasphemy Sensitivity

The stimuli the students and I used to assess blasphemy sensitivity were mild compared to the tour of blasphemy we overviewed in the last post. For a few reasons:

1. No literature exists on blasphemy sensitivity. So, we didn't need to start big. Any exploration, even with mild stimuli, would be a novel contribution to the research literature.

2. Extremely offensive stimuli wouldn't create a variety of responses. We needed something that would "split" a group of average religious people into two broad groups, those more offended than not versus those more amused than offended.

What we did was to look for visual stimuli, the kind you might get forwarded as a joke through e-mail. We settled on two pictures of Jesus for our Christian participants. This was the first stimulus:



And this was the second stimulus (which you might have seen before as it was a bit of an Internet meme):



We asked our participants to look at each picture and rate how offended versus amused they were by the picture. As you might expect, these ratings were negatively correlated. The more offended you were by the picture the less humorous you found it. Conversely, the more humorous you found the picture the less offended you were.

The research question was: What kind of religious person would be most offended by the pictures? The students constructed the following profile for blasphemy sensitivity:

Older
Orthodox
Devout (i.e., religion is "important" to the person)
Dogmatic (i.e., resistant to changing religious beliefs)
Anxiety about God (e.g., fear that God would reject/judge you)

These predicted associations are not surprising. They are commonsensical if you know religious people. However, as noted above, no one has ever gone out and measured/tested these associations. Thus, obvious or not, good science recommends that you empirically log even the most "obvious" data points to build the foundation for future research. And sometimes even "obvious" trends don't hold up. Surprises do occur.

In our study the predicted trends were confirmed. Persons who were older, orthodox, devout, dogmatic, and who were worried about God's judgment were the most offended by the stimuli.

I think these findings are interesting. I'm particularly struck by how a view of God (and worries about God's judgment) is implicated in blasphemy sensitivity. In my experience, the people most upset by religious issues are those who live with the fear of an angry God. God is irascible. A grumpy old man. This suggests that a great deal of blasphemy sensitivity is narcissistic. That is, the root fear isn't that you are in danger of God's judgment but that my association with you is putting me in jeopardy. As a consequence, I distance myself, push you away or, in extreme cases, kill you. You are a threat to God's feelings about me.

But there is another side to blasphemy sensitivity. Is nothing to be considered sacred? Can Calvary be a joke? Where is the line?

In sum, the study was an interesting start. Lots of questions, empirical and theological, remain.

Finally, just yesterday, I found the following stimulus that I think would have been perfect for our study:



Is this funny? Clever? Offensive? Blasphemous? You can join the exploration. Evaluate your own reactions and show the pictures to others and see what you find.