Watch your language

In the summer of 1995, my father spent weeks building a shed in our backyard. We painted it blue-gray to match our house, but that fall an anonymous visitor added an enormous four-letter word with orange spray paint. My oldest brother, who was 9 years old, discovered it, and ran inside to spell out the word to my mother. She told us it was a bad word; so bad, in fact, that if we ever used it even our best friends would not want to be around us. In our small Christian circles this was likely true and a good incentive to keep our language clean. We did not lose any friends that year. So began my introduction to the world of profanity. My mother could put a fresh paint over the word, but not over our minds.

Growing in up 1990s evangelicalism, I was taught that curse words showed a lack of vocabulary and therefore low intelligence. Eventually I discovered people who scored a perfect 800 on the verbal section of the SAT but also had a penchant for cursing. So much for that theory. It turns out that those who can spell onomatopoeia also use expletives. Carl Trueman hit the mark when he argued that our culture loves profanity because it supposedly shows authenticity. In The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self , Trueman writes, “speaking with profanity is now considered evidence of integrity, a performance of authenticity.” Somehow, this belief has leaked into the Christian community.

Critics applaud Harrison Scott Key’s recent memoir How to Stay Married for its focus on repentance and the gospel. Yet the author includes unnecessary profanity as he recounts his own internal monologues. Even in a work that proclaims the gospel, that brand of authenticity is still king. The cognitive dissonance should disorient those who have not been desensitized. I’ve experienced this same disconnect in my personal interactions.

Once I went on a few dates with a young woman who was proud of both her degree from a local seminary and her foul mouth. She informed me that the latter gave her “character.” Another Christian woman told me she did not want to go on any more dates because being with a pastor would curtail her crude vocabulary. We are in a troubling place when even God’s people embrace authenticity through vulgarity.

Who will bring us back? A corrective came last month from an unlikely corner—The New York Times. Last month the paper published an opinion column by Mark Edmundson, who is an English professor at the University of Virginia. In “Why Does Everybody Swear All The Time Now?” Edmundson writes:

Nasty language is a black-magic wand. When you touch it to a person, place or thing, you perform an act of mild (and sometimes not so mild) denigration. When you use everyone’s favorite vulgar word to denote the sexual act, you reduce the act. You gut the spirit life out of it. With profanity, you denigrate what you feel is overvalued. You try to cut it down to size. … When you curse compulsively you produce a view of the world that’s smaller and meaner.

Here Dr. Edmundson comes close to discovering the Third Commandment. Christians have long recognized that each of the Ten Commandments has both a narrow and a broad application. For example, the Fifth Commandment requires us not only to honor our biological or adoptive parents, but also every authority God has placed over us. Similarly, the Third Commandment applies both to our misuse of God’s name and our language in general.

Our words reveal our view of God even when we are not using his name. A statement about a work of art is also a statement about the artist. When we compare creation to excrement, we insult the creator. We do the same when we speak crassly of God’s great gift of sexual intimacy. Cursing other humans usurps God’s role of judge. Our attempts at authenticity become accusations against God. Mr. Edmundson is correct that these make the world “smaller and meaner.” Christians know exactly why: Profanity devalues God and his beautiful creation.

Dr. Edmundson goes on:

Omnipresent cursing, the programmatic reduction of nearly everything, pollutes our worldview. It makes it harder to see what is true and good and beautiful. We become blind to instances of courage and compassion. Our world shrinks. And we shrink along with it.

As an English Professor at the University of Virginia, Edmundson knows how language works. It can expand or shrink our world. As Christians, we know why: The God who created language also created the heavens and the earth. Whenever we speak, we ultimately speak of Him. Cursing does not necessarily reveal a meager vocabulary or low intelligence; but it does show a deficit of wonder and imagination.

Of course, we can’t “beat something with nothing.” Christians need replacements for the temptations of profanity. Instead of cursing others, we can use the words of Psalm 58, 82, 103 or 109 to cry out to God for justice; He tells us in Romans 12:19 that vengeance is his territory. Instead of venting our frustrations with crude language, we must rediscover the gift of lament. We can turn to passages like Psalm 13 or 61 to express our hurt and frustration. Profanity is a poor substitute for the riches of expression God provides for us in His word.

Authenticity is not an absolute or unqualified good. While appropriate at times, it can also degrade and warp us and others. Let’s use language that expands our world rather than shrinking it. Doing so makes our lives much brighter. Even more importantly, it honors God.