Godliness is next to cleanliness but sex is sinful: The roles of disgust in religious scrupulosity

There is a growing literature suggesting disgust plays a major role in religiosity. However the relationship between different domains of disgust sensitivity and general religious fundamentalism or religious scrupulosity remains unknown. Two studies are reported that examined the relationship between specific types of disgust sensitivity i.e., pathogen, sexual, and moral disgust and specific religious beliefs i.e., fear of sin and fear of God. In the first study it was found that fear of sin and fear of God were significantly related to sexual disgust and pathogen disgust, respectively. In the second study the experimental induction of disgust lead to greater fear of sin but not the fear of God. These findings suggest that pathogen and sexual disgust sensitivities may serve as effective mechanisms for inflated scrupulosity while state disgust is only related to specific forms of scrupulosity. Taken together the outcomes from both studies converge on a greater understanding of the so called ‘Human Behavioural Immune System’ model that can account for social behaviour with an evolutionary of adaptive benefit and perhaps more importantly highlights the possible drivers of specific religious behaviour.