Mind Your Language!

Is it wrong to swear, and do manners matter? I receive these kinds of questions regularly, especially from young people, and I thought I would use our Covenanter today to address them.

Let’s start with the low hanging fruit: Swearing. Paul makes it clear that there are words Christians should not use, and certain matters Christians ought not discuss (Eph. 5:3-5). Such speech just ain’t fitting. A moment’s reflection will suffice to prove this assertion.

People tend to swear for one of three reasons; none of which are good. First, men swear to express angry displeasure at something that happened, or deep regret at something they did. So, for example, it has been a long day, a man goes out to his car intending to drive home, only to discover a flat tire. In response he loudly exclaims, “Zut alors!”—or the American equivalent. Is this wrong and, if so, why? Whether the gentleman in question admits it or not, a significant portion of his anger is actually Godward in direction. He is not really cursing the nail, or the flat tire. He is actually cursing God, the first cause of all things, and make no mistake, the Day of Judgment will reveal such secret motivations (Rom. 2:16). Such behavior finds a suitable contrast (and rebuke) in the response of Job to a vastly greater misfortune (Job 1:21-22). Note Bene God’s interpretation of Job’s language, “Through all this, Job did not sin nor did He blame God.”

A second, and equally unacceptable reason people deploy profane language is to curse, impugn the character of, or malign the mental capacity of a fellow human being. You know the sort of thing: Somebody cuts you off in traffic and you say, “You bl@@dy idiot.” Such language is off limits for a host of reasons: It vituperates an image bearer of God (James 3:9), whom we have no right to judge (James 4:11-12)—or at least never so harshly, rudely, or profanely—and always represents a venting of sinful anger, and thus, a significant lack of self-control. I might also add it is almost always factually inaccurate: the man is not in fact bleeding, and it often demonstrates deplorable English grammar, coupled with a quite diminished range of vocabulary (I regularly hear young people use the F-bomb as a verbal adjective to describe how awesome something was, and I think to myself, “Really, is that the best you can do?”).

This leads, in the third place, to the discussion of propriety and decency in speech. It is not unusual in our day to hear men (and increasingly women) stoop to use profane, scatalogical terms to describe bodily functions and actions. Former, more polite generations studiously refrained from such language, preferring to speak euphemistically about them or not at all. Think, for example, of the phrase, “May I visit the restroom?” This is a euphemism—a way of speaking around an embarrassing or private matter without actually mentioning it. Nobody goes to the restroom because they are tired, and the phrase merely conjures up the image of a man walking towards a door, or visiting a room. It takes you no further. When a lady leaves the dinner table for the powder room, her fellow guests imagine her going to adjust her makeup—quite a different mental image from what might actually be transpiring in the hallowed confines of the water closet. To be sure, our age prefers the authenticity of more direct language: “I need to take a p!$$!” is certainly more anatomically correct, in the crassest and cheapest of ways. And that’s the point, isn’t it? We are more than animals, and our language should reflect our dignity, not demean it. I remember my mother telling me as a child, “Ladies don’t sweat: Horses sweat, men perspire, and ladies…, they glow! There’s a difference, son, please don’t forget it!”

In that regard, I remember one of my ministerial mentors telling me how the Rev. Dr. William Still (a much revered, 20th century minister from Aberdeen, Scotland) was once scandalized by a prayer request from that pastor, in the Church magazine (no less), which read: Please pray for our minister and his wife who are trying for a baby. “Trying for a baby?” he gently chided, “Laddie, such language says far too much, and unavoidably conjures up entirely the wrong images in the minds of your congregation!” The marriage bed is a holy place. We should not speak of such things, at least not openly. Like old black and white movies, our language should (almost always) stop at the bedroom door. Profanity sullies this principle at an even deeper level, speaking of such holy things in an unholy (as if they were ordinary and cheap) manner.

To the age of Trump, such concerns probably sound hopelessly Victorian and prudish—and perhaps they are? Perhaps the passing of Queen Victoria marked the beginning of the end of manners and polite society, when men began to forget they were more than animals, and women forgot they were intended for a higher purpose than merely imitating the roles and the vices of men (which are always much easier to ape than their distinctive manly virtues). Traditions and manners matter. Like the doors of a house and the walls of a city, they are designed to keep a certain class of men out. They are also the glue a culture needs to resist the centrifugal forces of individualism and the middling standard of populism. More than who we are, manners and traditions remind us who we are meant to be. So mind your P’s and Q’s, young man. You are much more than just an animal!