People under fifty in our society have never lived in America where movie language was not liberally laced with obscenities.
Claude Brown, the author of Manchild in the Promised Land, said that profanity has replaced English as the language of the American people. Then he said, “Most people don’t know it, but profanity is the language of violence.”
People say, words can’t hurt you. They can hurt you. Words can dehumanize. That’s why in war the enemy is always described in language that is dehumanizing. You will never hear the military referring to the enemy as “brothers and sisters,” or as “children of God.” They couldn’t kill them if they referred to them that way. You use language that describes the enemy as less than human. You hear this in the war going in now in Ukraine.
That is precisely the language that is being used in our cities today and by those who hold the highest office in our land. The language that is used in our society today is the language that has been coined in warfare. There are words that dehumanize. There are words that make life cheap and ugly. There are words that hurt people. There are words that profane what is sacred and holy about human life. You use them and they will affect your life, and the life of those around you.
But there are also words that heal. There are words that build. There are words that create. There are words that unite. There are words that can redeem. There are words that can reconcile you to someone from whom you are estranged. There are words that lead to peace. Who are the people in our society who today speak the words of peace? “This day you will be with me in paradise,” said Jesus Christ as he died upon the Cross.
Thanks to Mark Trotter for sharing these thoughts.
My Commentary:
Words are never neutral. They carry power — quietly shaping how we see one another and, eventually, how we treat one another. When language becomes coarse, violent, or profane, it does not merely reflect a hardened culture; it helps create one. Personally, I stopped using profanity in my 20’s when I came to my senses and saw how WEAK I was that I needed profanity to appear STRONG. I also discovered that I was hurting inside and needed to heal my inner wounds.
Claude Brown was right to warn that profanity functions as a language of violence. Long before a fist is raised or a weapon fired, language prepares the ground. In war, enemies must be reduced to something less than human, because it is far easier to destroy what has been stripped of dignity. Once people are no longer spoken of as “children of God,” it becomes easier to treat them as disposable.
What is troubling is how easily this wartime language has migrated into everyday life — into our streets, our entertainment, and even our public discourse. Words forged to justify killing are now casually used to dismiss, insult, and degrade. They make cruelty sound normal. They make life feel cheap.
Yet Scripture and experience remind us that language can also move in the opposite direction. Words can restore what violence has torn apart. They can name dignity where it has been denied. They can reopen doors long closed by resentment and fear. A single sentence, spoken in love, can change the course of a life.
At the darkest moment in human history, as nails held Him to a cross, Jesus Christ chose not the language of contempt, but the language of mercy: “This day you will be with me in paradise.” Even then, He spoke life.
The question before us is simple and demanding: which words will we choose? In a society fluent in dehumanization, who will speak peace? Who will use language not to wound, but to heal — to build, to reconcile, to redeem?
The future of our common life in the United States may depend less on the $1.5 Trillion dollars we are spending this year on our weapons and our military and more on the words we dare to speak.
Have YOU realized that some of the four-letter words coming from YOUR mouth are words of war? What are YOU prepared to do about it?
IF WE REFUSE TO HELP THE MIGRANTS WHO ARE ASKING FOR OUR HELP, WHAT IN THE WORLD ARE WE DOING, WHEN WE ASK GOD FOR HELP?
Please share this Message with others, both young and old.
