The God who created language also created the heavens and the earth. Whenever we speak, we ultimately speak of Him. Cursing does not necessarily reveal a meager vocabulary or low intelligence; but it does show a deficit of wonder and imagination.

In the summer of 1995, my father spent weeks building a shed in our backyard. We painted it blue-gray to match our house, but that fall an anonymous visitor added an enormous four-letter word with orange spray paint. My oldest brother, who was 9 years old, discovered it, and ran inside to spell out the word to my mother. She told us it was a bad word; so bad, in fact, that if we ever used it even our best friends would not want to be around us. In our small Christian circles this was likely true and a good incentive to keep our language clean. We did not lose any friends that year. So began my introduction to the world of profanity. My mother could put a fresh paint over the word, but not over our minds.

Growing in up 1990s evangelicalism, I was taught that curse words showed a lack of vocabulary and therefore low intelligence. Eventually I discovered people who scored a perfect 800 on the verbal section of the SAT but also had a penchant for cursing. So much for that theory. It turns out that those who can spell onomatopoeia also use expletives. Carl Trueman hit the mark when he argued that our culture loves profanity because it supposedly shows authenticity. In The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self, Trueman writes, “speaking with profanity is now considered evidence of integrity, a performance of authenticity.” Somehow, this belief has leaked into the Christian community.

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