The Persistence of Purity Taboos in Secular Societies: Tracing Religious Concepts of Contamination in Modern Social Norms

Abstract:

The secularisation of Western societies is often framed as a decisive withdrawal of religious structures from public life. Yet closer examination reveals the persistence of symbolic frameworks historically articulated through religious systems, particularly those concerning purity, contamination, and social exclusion. This research proposes to investigate how ancient religious purity laws persist in secular moral practices such as “clean eating,” “toxic relationships,” and social “cancellation.” By combining historical-theological analysis with contemporary literary theory – drawing from new materialism, affect theory, and posthumanism – this study will trace the structural continuities that sustain symbolic order amid cultural transformation. It argues that secular societies, far from escaping the symbolic management of disorder, ritualise it anew under the sign of modern virtue. In doing so, it seeks to offer an account of the hidden theological and anthropological architecture of contemporary secular morality. 

 

Introduction:

While often regarded as products of ancient religion, purity taboos remain among the most resilient symbolic structures in modern societies. Encoded distinctions between clean and defiled, pure and polluted, continue to organise both moral thought and social boundaries – even in settings ostensibly detached from theology. In religious traditions, purity laws were crucial for maintaining cosmic, social, and moral order. This is supported by Mary Douglas’s anthropological analysis in Purity and Danger, which frames religious “pollution” as symbolic disorder, not empirical filth, stating that “Dirt is matter out of place.” Similarly, Thomas Aquinas, in the Summa Theologiae, situates ritual purity not as an expression of divine emotional volatility, but as the outward dramatisation of rational cosmic order. In contemporary secular societies, however, these notions manifest in practices of social policing, dietary virtue, and the moral exclusion of "toxic" individuals or groups. Contemporary theoretical frameworks – new materialism (Bennett, 2010), affect theory (Ahmed, 2004), and posthumanism (Braidotti, 2013) – further reveal that symbolic boundary-making extends beyond theological narratives, into the management of societal and political interactions. Recognising these continuities is essential to understanding how modern societies construct and enforce boundaries of belonging, legitimacy, and virtue. Thus, this research addresses the question of how religious concepts of purity and contamination have persisted and transformed within secular societies' moral and social norms.

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Literature Review:

The symbolic function of purity has been the subject of extensive anthropological, theological, and psychological inquiry. Mary Douglas’s foundational work, Purity and Danger (1966), argues that impurity is not a material property but a symbolic disorder – “matter out of place.” Taboos, in her view, preserve the classification systems that make the world intelligible. This is echoed in Thomas Aquinas’s Summa Theologiae (ca. 1265–1273), where ritual purity is framed as an extension of divine and moral ‘order’. Ceremonial laws such as those in Leviticus are not expressions of divine emotion but rational means through which humans participate in cosmic harmony (ST I, Q19; ST I-II, Q99). Contemporary psychological and sociological studies confirm the persistence of purity structures beyond religious contexts. Rozin et al. (2009) show that purity remains a core moral foundation, particularly in relation to bodily disgust, sexuality, and social exclusion. Crawford (2014) argues that purity rhetoric continues to shape political discourse, often underpinning ideological polarisation. Walsh and Baker (2020) analyse how Instagram’s “clean eating” culture recreates symbolic hierarchies of purity and defilement through visual aesthetics and moralised consumption. Similarly, Bokek-Cohen and Ravon (2022) examine the performative nature of wellness culture, showing how dietary practices are framed in moral terms that echo ritualised concerns with bodily purity and virtue. Recent theoretical frameworks extend this inquiry. Bennett (2010), from a new materialist perspective, discusses the agency of non-human matter, suggesting that modern purification practices reflect anxieties about “bodily and ecological entanglement.” Ahmed (2004), via affect theory, shows how disgust circulates socially, shaping communal moral boundaries. Braidotti (2013), in posthumanist terms, interprets purity rituals as ontological strategies for navigating blurred boundaries between human, technological, and ecological domains. While these studies affirm the resilience of purity logics, they remain largely isolated across disciplines. Few have traced how ritual frameworks – first codified in religious law – have been transformed across media, moral psychology, and digital culture. This research addresses that gap by constructing a genealogical account of symbolic purity from theological ritual to secular moral practice, examining how the management of disorder continues to shape moral life in modern societies.

 

Methodology:​ 

This research will adopt a dual-pronged approach grounded in comparative cultural analysis and sociological theory. The first component will involve a historical-comparative analysis of classical religious purity systems. Primary sources will include the Levitical laws in the Hebrew Bible, Islamic Hadith collections, Hindu Dharmashastras, and theological commentaries such as Aquinas’s Summa Theologiae. These texts will be examined to identify core conceptual structures of purity, pollution, and disorder, especially how violations were viewed as threats to communal and cosmic order. The second component will consist of a content and semiotic analysis of contemporary secular material. A corpus of approximately 100 sources will be assembled, including news articles (2019-2025) from mainstream outlets on themes such as “toxic” relationships, cancel culture, and clean eating; social media content (Twitter, TikTok, etc) employing contamination-related moral language; and lifestyle and wellness publications centred on dietary and environmental ‘purification’. These materials will be coded thematically using NVivo, with categories derived from both religious purity systems and their secular analogues (e.g., Ritual Impurity → Dietary Cleanliness; Moral Defilement → Public Shaming). A semiotic lens will then be applied to selected case studies to analyse how symbolic boundary-making is enacted through language, image, and ritual performance. The analytical framework will draw on moral foundations theory (Graham et al., 2011), particularly the Purity/Sanctity dimension, and Taylor’s theory of secularisation (2007), supporting a genealogical reading of symbolic transformation. This methodology will enable a rigorous, historically anchored account of how purity logics persist and evolve within the moral architecture of modern secular societies.

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References :

Ahmed, S. (2004). The cultural politics of emotion. Edinburgh University Press.

 

Aquinas, T. (1265–1273/2006). Summa Theologiae (T. Gilby, Trans.). Cambridge University Press. (Original work published 1265–1273)

 

Bennett, J. (2010). Vibrant matter: A political ecology of things. Duke University Press.

 

Bokek-Cohen, Y., & Ravon, O. (2022). “Clean eating” as secular purity ritual: An anthropological perspective. Appetite, 168, 105741. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.appet.2021.105741

 

Braidotti, R. (2013). The posthuman. Polity Press.

 

Crawford, J. T. (2014). The moral foundations of political purity: Disgust, purity, and ideology. Social Psychological and Personality Science, 5(6), 698–705. https://doi.org/10.1177/1948550614527117

 

Douglas, M. (1966). Purity and danger: An analysis of concepts of pollution and taboo. Routledge.

 

Graham, J., Haidt, J., Koleva, S., Motyl, M., Iyer, R., Wojcik, S. P., & Ditto, P. H. (2011). Moral foundations theory: The pragmatic validity of moral pluralism. Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, 47, 55–130. https://doi.org/10.1016/B978-0-12-385522-0.00002-4

 

Rozin, P., Haidt, J., & McCauley, C. R. (2009). Disgust: The body and soul emotion. In M. Lewis, J. M. Haviland-Jones, & L. F. Barrett (Eds.), Handbook of emotions (3rd ed., pp. 757–776). Guilford Press.

 

Taylor, C. (2007). A secular age. Harvard University Press.

 

Walsh, M. J., & Baker, S. A. (2020). Clean eating and Instagram: Purity, defilement, and the idealisation of food. Food, Culture & Society, 23(5), 570–588. https://doi.org/10.1080/15528014.2020.1806636