It used to be that if a Christian dropped an F-bomb, its mushroom cloud and subsequent radiation would kill every evangelical in a ten mile radius. Nowadays, the cussing Christian is an old issue; I’ve almost made myself irrelevant by writing an essay about it.
I don’t cuss. The salty-tongued, at least to me, seem to be either lazy linguists, cultural copycats, or seventh graders. I’ve never heard my parents utter a single expletive, and my children watch my face for signs of disapproval when we’re watching movies together. It’s my instinct. I do judge people by the obscenities they use (or don't use), and I suspect they will do the same with me.
But are the cussers morally weak? I was certainly raised to believe so. In defense of the traditionalists, It’s clear that the Bible condemns careless oath-giving and obscene talk, and the man who relishes perverse language usually betrays his heart. I’ve never liked the lame defense that cussing is good because it “gives you an more authentic witness” or that we should ignore expletives because “they’re just some random sounds after all.” Words contain power and context. To dismiss that is to seriously misunderstand the complexity of human language. Certainly a study in racial history, sexual objectification, and discrimination shows us that words and world-views are closely aligned.
At the same time, the older I get the more I think that serious Christians have more on their minds than counting the dirty words in a movie. My husband, who was raised in a secular home with three boys in the house, sometimes uses absurd profanity to comic effect in the privacy of our one-on-one conversations. (The best phrase I can think of is that it is his “language of domestic intimacy.”) He is also one of the most intensely committed Christian believers I’ve ever met. Our relationship gives me an intimate view of his motives and I do not shush him. In the company of his children, his students, or his professional life, however, profanity is off the table—not because he is biting his tongue but because he has authentic decorum, and his Christ-leaning heart doesn’t want to offend. His natural self-censorship is neither studied nor forced.
I also know several deeply committed Christian women who, at particularly broken times in their lives, “went off” in a string of expletives that would have cost them a month’s salary in FCC fines had they been on television. (In fact, some studies have shown that women in particular find swearing alleviates pain far better than in men, the theory being that the wider the gap between propriety and impropriety, the more powerful the opiate effect of bad language. In other words, if Lil’ Wayne cusses while stubbing a toe, he’s probably out of luck, but my grandmother could get through an entire surgery under the influence of a single F-Word.)
The Bible, of course, doesn’t give us a list. If I utter a curse word in Icelandic, am I off the hook? What if I make up my own naughty word—and it’s naughty only to me? Is that displeasing to God? If a pure-hearted man can bandy around four letter words—what does it mean if you keep a strict list of language no-no’s. Does that make you pure? Does the person who makes soft substitutions like gosh, heck, and fudge fare better in the moral realm (or as Jon Acuff calls it “two degrees of blasphemy separation”). If you scream at your children—but you keep it PG—does that reduce your sin factor? Even my asking questions such as these suggest that we’re accustomed tosearching for loopholes rather than using Scripture for discernment and wisdom. Put this way, it seems absurd to measure our hearts by a linguistic ruler, centimeter by sinful centimeter.
I think the panic that arises in certain conservative circles when pastors and seminarians are heard uttering an expletive is often misguided. Without context, it is easy to leap from ordinary shit to doctrinal shift. A “bad” word—in context—does not a theological revolution make. Are there really that many men of God who have thrown away their decorum and propriety and taken to talking like sailors? The editors at Patrol magazine made an astute observation that taking offense to the new, emergent Christian “boorishly spewing obscenities” is merely attacking straw men—mythical creatures that don’t really exist en masse but sure help fundamentalists make the argument that "out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaks.”
I don’t want my pious defense of a squeaky clean mouth to be grounded in fear of evangelical fads that might not even exist. I want my defense to be grounded in the kind of instruction from Paul in Colossians 3:8—the reminder to get rid of words rooted in selfish anger or a foul heart.
I will not teach my twelve-year old son that he is free to cuss as long as his heart is pure. That would make me a moron. But I will try to teach him that being a good boy might be more than keeping his language clean; it will require a heart shaped by the spirit of God himself—a forgiven sinner. Oxymorons are much better than morons anyway.
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