I don't use foul language, I swear

A SJSH Adventure

When I taught philosophy to college students I’d give them pretty wide latitude on the papers they wrote, so long as they had something to do with topics we were discussing. During a unit on language one time, a cheeky student turned in a first draft on curse words. We were at a religiously conservative college with rules about “unseemly language,” but he argued that if he used those words while meaning something different by them, he wasn’t technically breaking the rules.

Clever! I told him I admired the creativity, but asked him to revise in light of a fairly basic objection: none of us individually gets to stipulate the meanings of our words. Words mean what they do because a community uses them that way. He admitted the point and took the paper in a different direction. That little exchange gets us to the heart of a powerful 20th-century insight from philosophers: language isn’t a private code lodged inside one skull; it’s a practice sustained by public criteria and shared forms of life. And these tell us something about the communities out of which they emerge.

Fast-forward to this weekend. We spent a couple of days with dear friends, and the wife—truly one of the kindest and gentlest people I know—confessed she has started to swear occasionally “when the circumstances call for it.” This revelation was as shocking to us as it was hilarious—kind of like learning that your grandmother has joined a biker gang! The rest of the weekend turned into a (failed) attempt to manufacture the “right circumstances” to coax out her new vocabulary. We never succeeded, but we laughed a lot trying.

All of this is a long way from the house I grew up in, where we didn’t swear. Not even the “Christian” substitutes—darn, gee whiz, crap. (After all, heck is where people go who don’t believe in gosh!) I still don’t use the real swear words, and the mild ones only rarely. Plenty of Christians I admire do, though, and for some of them it’s become a kind of identity badge: “Oh, you’re that kind of Christian.”

When I was in junior high, I had a very specific worry: what if I was in a car crash, and right before we went off the cliff a swear word slipped out—would that one word punch my ticket to eternal damnation? I don’t think anyone explicitly taught me that, but I absorbed it from my Christian community like the scent of Folgers from the multipurpose room of the church. In hindsight, that anxiety was probably less healthy than occasionally letting a choice word fly under stress.

Here’s why the student’s paper and my friend’s confession both matter for the section on language in my “The Spiritual Journey of Homo Sapiens” book: words mean what they do because of how a community uses them. You can’t just say, like my student tried to at first, that when you use the f-word, you don’t mean anything offensive by it, so it’s on others if that’s how they take it.

But of course the way words are used in a community changes over time. The standard four-letter set that once felt radioactive in my world has, for many people, lost some voltage through over-exposure and everyday use. I used to think that anyone who used those words must have serious issues with their soul. Now, not so much even if I have chosen to continue to abstain from them. Meanwhile, a different class of words—slurs that demean whole groups—has become far more taboo, and rightly so. Those words don’t just vent feeling; they wound people and train our hearts to aim our contempt at them. If Christian ethics is about learning to love our neighbors (and even our enemies!), our speech is part of the training plan.

A couple takeaways I’m trying to write toward (and live with):

Words are deeds.
We like to imagine words as harmless labels for all the things out there in the world. But words do things. Some coordinate and comfort. Some warn. Some of your basic expletives act like a pressure valve when you stub your toe or miss your exit. (Or so I’ve heard… “ow” or “shoot” still work pretty well for me.) Slurs are different: they demean and reveal something about ourselves. They attempt to build a little pedestal where “we” stand above “them.” We imagine ourselves not just different, but better.

Community draws the lines, and the lines tell you about the community.
Every group has speech norms, and they shift. Sometimes the shift is growth. The fact that more of us instinctively flinch at demeaning labels suggests we’re learning to honor those who have been pushed to the margins. Taboos can be morally instructive: they reveal what we treasure. If my community treats certain epithets as unspeakable, that’s a sign we’re trying to draw the circle of moral concern wider. We’re hard-wired from evolution to have an in-group and the rest are “other”, but our spiritual journey ought to include seeing more and more of the others as one of us too.

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Where does that leave my gentle friend with her occasional cuss? Probably fine. Context is doing a lot of work here. A word shouted in pain or frustration is not the same as a word aimed like a dart. When she says she swears “when the circumstances call for it,” what she means is that language should match the moral weight of the moment. When circumstances are hard, sometimes a hard word is found on your tongue. There’s a kind of truthfulness in that. Language isn’t only about correctness; it’s about fittingness.

And where does that leave junior-high me, terrified of a last-second slip-up? Hopefully relieved. Salvation (and even holiness, I’m now convinced) doesn’t ride on avoiding certain monosyllables in a crisis. Our spiritual journey might involve:

• discerning which words build up and which tear down;

• refusing vocabulary that makes someone smaller so I can feel bigger;

• repenting when my speech harms; and

• practicing gratitude for words that heal.

I’ve started the draft of one chapter in my book with the anecdote about the student’s paper on swearing. But I don’t think I’m going to do a whole thing on this kind of language like I’ve done here. It’s just that I had just written the draft of that chapter just before this weekend and my friend’s revelation. So I couldn’t miss the opportunity to bring those two together here.

More relevant to the book is that language is one of humanity’s great social technologies. It lets us coordinate hunts and bake bread, tell stories and sing laments, pass along wisdom and confess failure. Precisely because it’s powerful, it can be misused. The same tool that binds communities together can also exclude and belittle. So I care less about whether Christians ever say “darn” (or worse), and more about whether our speech widens the circle of love.

I’m not really interested in starting to swear myself, any more than I’m interested in using certain recreational drugs just because they’ve been legalized. But I’m also not going to measure anyone’s discipleship by their vocabulary in a moment of stress. If we’re going to have taboos, let’s make sure they aim more at protecting people than protecting community codes. Let the words we don’t say be the ones that dehumanize. Let the words we do say tell the truth, bind up wounds, and make room at the table.

Your turn: have you had a “language shift”—words you once avoided that you now use, or words you used to shrug off as mostly harmless that you now refuse? And for extra credit, what’s the most creative “Christian cuss” from your childhood? I’ll start: “son of a Baptist deacon.” Surely someone can beat that.