On Swearing

I think our language should reflect reality. Sometimes that reality is brutal.

I recently had a conversation with a woman who wasn’t Christian and who was curious about my faith. In particular, she was highly intrigued by the fact that, being a Christian myself, I will sometimes curse.

That intrigue led to a deep conversation about theodicy, and it left me with a sort of strong but loosely-held conviction about how we as Christians can use language to better face—and, perhaps, better minister to—the brutality of the world.

In short: I actually think we should swear more.

The Case Against Swearing

To be clear, I think that I as a person should probably swear less. My biological mother swore like a sailor, and I’ve gotten better but I’m still prone to cursing in completely inappropriate situations.

There are a few reasons why I want to limit my swearing, and which make me sympathetic to the notion that Christians in general shouldn’t swear. First of all, it’s just crass. Dropping the f-word in casual conversation is just not in line with my goal of being a gentleman. Swear words also carry a certain tone: when I swear, people are likely to hear more anger or bitterness in my words than I intend.

This is particularly something that I want to work on before my wife and I have children. Telling my computer to “f*** off” when it’s being slow, however casual and anger-free my tone may be, is a habit that I want to break. It’s certainly a habit that I want to break before I have a young child watching my every move in an effort to figure out how to behave in the world.

The Case For Swearing

That said, I do think there are cases where swearing can be appropriate and even helpful.

In my twenties, I was pretty broken. And two types of music really resonated with me: Christian songs, and Eminem.

Even though I was an atheist, Christian music gave me a glimpse of something holy, something pure and something hopeful—something that I knew, deep in my soul, that I wanted. I would blast Matthew West or Brandon Heath and just feel a little bit better about my life and about the world.

But Eminem was the artist who I felt actually understood me. Our childhoods and our experience with addiction rhymed, and his profanity-laced lyrics conveyed anger and bitterness, but they also conveyed something else: that here was a man who actually understood the brutality of what I was dealing with.

The church—or at least its music—offered me hope for a better world. Eminem offered me the feeling of being deeply seen in my brokenness. I think sometimes how wonderful it would have been for me, as an atheist struggling with addiction and suicidal depression and an Everest-sized mountain of self-loathing, if I had been able to find a church that offered both of those things to me.

To be clear, I’m not saying the church is always bad at seeing and ministering to broken people. Just last weekend, my wife and I went to a conference by a Christian organization called Renovaré that was amazing at ministering to people on the mountaintops and also people in the valleys. I know at least a couple of people who came in feeling very broken, and who left feeling understood and with the first vestiges of hope and healing.

But that generally wasn’t the church that I experienced in my 20s. Far more often, I saw a church that was too consumed by its own piousness to actually meet broken people where they were. When I showed up—crass, raw, and looking for someone who could understand me—I felt out of place far more often than I felt seen. Part of that was that my language just didn’t gel at all with the language of the average church-goer.

I saw the church’s piousness. What I didn’t see was a church that was able to, or interested in, actually understanding someone in as much pain as I was in.

As the church, we’re called to glorify God. We’re called to be different from the world.

Both of those things seem to lead us away from swearing. All well and good.

But we’re also called to minister to a broken world—and sometimes, a key part of that is having the vocabulary to frankly acknowledge the brutality of what that world can do to people.

What Is the Purpose of Language?

As I was brainstorming this piece, I started to wonder: is there a broader point about language that might be explored here? I think there is.

One case in which I think that language really matters is in how I refer to the inmates whom I work with in prison. I don’t call them “offenders” or “convicts.” The reason is simple: I don’t want to reduce them to the worst sins that they’ve committed. I would find it neither humanizing nor psychologically helpful if people referred to me as “sinner Julian,” and so for the same reason I’m not going to refer to “convict James.”

Humanizing and kindness aside, I’m also just trying to be accurate. The truth is that each of us is far, far more than our worst mistakes.

At the same time, some of my co-volunteers refer to inmates as “residents.” I refuse to do that, and after thinking about why, I realized that it’s for the same reason that I will sometimes deliberately swear.

“Residents” just sounds so…bloodless. “John’s a resident of XYZ correctional facility.” It sounds like John’s staying at a five-star resort. There’s nothing about the term “residents” that sears the soul.

But when we think about prisons in the United States, I think our souls ought to be seared.

I prefer the term “inmates” or “prisoners” because I think they’re more honest. “Inmates” summons up a series of images: of cramped one-room cells with bars on the windows, of gang fights that can break out at the drop of a hat, of being thrown in the hole for two weeks by guards who don’t care. It summons images of men who haven’t seen the mountains or tasted free air for more than a decade.

All of which happens. All of which is so disturbingly common that it took me awhile before I could do prison ministry without the brutality of the situation breaking me.

I think that’s my argument against euphemizing language (calling homeless people “unhoused,” calling inmates “residents,” saying that someone “died by suicide,” etc.). Advocates of this softer language are well-intentioned. And sometimes, the language that we use to describe a group of people who are struggling really is dehumanizing, and we should fix that.

But the world can also be a brutal place, and I worry that this kind of euphemistic language can hide that from us—that it can soften the sharp edges of the world, not in reality, but perhaps in our own minds. To the extent that it does that, it makes these problems all seem a little bit less urgent and a little bit less soul-searing. I’m not sure that that’s good for anyone—least of all the people who most desperately need our help.

I guess the through-thread for me of swearing, of refusing to call inmates “convicts,” and of refusing to over-euphemize language is this: language is a tool that ought to help us to accurately describe the world. When we can see the world accurately, all kinds of good things flow from that.

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