Joshua DuBois, former head of the White House Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships, identified in 2010 four points of focus at the intersection of the political, spiritual and social realms. Three of those — loss of fatherhood roles, attempts to get beyond the abortion impasse and interfaith cooperation through service — were and are pressing issues. However, at the top of the list was the hope to utilize political, spiritual and social forces to transcend what he called “the coarsening of culture.”
It’s a phrase which has stuck with me since then, because it aptly describes the drumbeat beneath so much of what has become degraded in our society. It is at the spine of our frequent inability to have civil political discourse, the routine presentation of pornographic violence and sexuality as entertainment, and perhaps the lack of evenhandedness in some of our congregational and denominational conversations.
At the root of coarsened culture is coarsened language, for language creates culture. We in North America have obviously trended toward a linguistic universe unrecognizable to our grandparents. Martin Scorcese’s 2013 movie, The Wolf of Wall Street, supposedly claimed the title for most uses of a singularly coarse word, employing it in every grammatical derivative more than 500 times. I’m too depressed to research whether that record has since been broken, because I’m afraid it will have been.
Why are we more frequently speaking more coarsely? Linguists point to several possible explanations. One paper at a meeting of the British Psychological Society said that “taboo words communicate emotional information” more efficiently and “allow us to vent anger without getting physical.” Another study claimed that cursing enabled higher pain tolerance — which would explain the words after the hammer hits the wrong nail! Other studies point to cursing as a way to build social solidarity or sway sympathetic listeners as an indicator of passion. Of course, our marked cultural preference for the informal and the immediacy of emerging communication platforms (i.e., texting and Twitter) get those coarse words out in public on impulse, often too quickly for the tempered pull-back of further reflection.
How should the community of Jesus respond to coarse language? On the one hand, few want to be priggish (that’s not a curse word; look it up!). On the other, we follow a Savior who, though he lived among coarse people, did not speak in coarse language. Hard truth, yes; coarse speech, no. Can we live in a coarsening culture without cussing?
I suspect the way forward is creating communities, households, relationships and platforms where the virtues of temperance reign. If the fruit of the Spirit includes kindness, gentleness and self-control, then surely we can figure out how to speak out of that.