I was raised in a strict household where saying 'gee' got you a time-out because you were taking the Lord's name in vain. A bit more extreme than the norm, but everyone knows there's words not to say in polite company.
I guess you could say all bad words are demeaning, whether using them demeans something holy, someone else, or yourself, but I'm wondering if cursing was ever seen in a totally different light, or if what's normal now has always been more or less the status quo.
Ashley Montagu, in the Anatomy of Swearing, once made a distinction between obscene swearing and profane swearing: "one makes use of the sacred while the other employs the indecent."
The general trend in the English language since the 19th century has been to replace profane swearing with obscene swearing.
In the Middle Ages, the worst kinds of words were those that subverted a religious oath: such as zounds (short for "By God's wounds!" or bloody ("By Our Lady!"). As Melissa Mohr has written, these words were especially bad because they were essentially a form of blasphemy:
.... these words were offensive for two reasons. Partly because from how sincere oaths were supposed to work, so when you swear sincerely what people in the Middle Ages believed they were doing was asking God to look down from heaven and guarantee that your were true and according to covenants he made with the people of the Bible he actually is almost required to do that.
Secondly, medieval Christians believed that words could affect divine bodies (as was the case with the Eucharist, in which parishioners would symbolically eat the blood and flesh of Christ):
...to us it doesn’t make any sense.. but in makes sense as a sort of Catholic Eucharist, where a priest said some words and makes God’s physical body which he then breaks and eats, and shares among the congregation. And in swearing anybody could say these magic words that could tear Christ’s body part. So this was a kind of terrifying language that people were tremendously worried about, and so if you wanted to you insult someone or express joy or you stubbed your toe and wanted to relieve the pain, those were the words that you were going to use because they had this tremendous power.
(See Melissa Mohr, Holy Sh-t: A Brief History of Swearing)
By contrast, the obscene words we now use when we want to swear (which typically involve sex or bodily functions) weren't considered to be especially offensive in the Middle Ages. For example, the word "cunt" didn't really bother people that much - if you wanted to find a prostitute in a medieval village, you would typically ask to the way to Gropecunt Lane.
It wasn't until the 20th century that obscene words eclipsed profane words as the swearwords of choice in the English language.
Edit: fixed formatting
Language and diction are not something that fall under the scope of History. Try /r/linguistics or something similar.