Coarse and crude language must have been in vogue in the Apostle Paul’s day for him to address Christians in two different locations not to resort to such language or speech, as was common to the pagans. We may never allow such words to depart from our lips, but let’s not let such words depart from our clicks on social media or anywhere else either.  God’s standard of holiness is the same for both oral and written language.

Who is not aware of the increasing coarseness of language today?  Words once considered the most obscene or even blasphemous were censored from newspapers, magazines, articles, movies, and TV programs. Today, such words have become prolific not only in everyday speech, but also in the media.
Recently, an article appeared in The Wall Street Journal entitled, “Curses! Why All the Crude Talk?” It was written by Peter Funt, the son of Allen Funt of the original Candid Camera TV program.  In it he makes some amazing and striking statements.  Bear in mind the article is not religious in nature.
Here are some of those statements: “When friends or colleagues use the F-word as matter-of-factly as my parents said ‘gosh’ or ‘golly,’ it makes me cringe—but I seem to be part of a bleeping minority.”  Here is another: “Science has actually given a name to the benefits of swearing: lalochezia. It refers to the emotional relief gained from using profane speech. As far as I know, however, there is no term for the discomfort that many of us suffer when friends and colleagues pepper conversation with words that seem to relate more to their quest for social liberation than to communication.”
He even mentions national leaders openly using such language: “As vice president, Joe Biden famously used the F-word when congratulating President Obama on completing the 2010 healthcare legislation. Mr. Obama’s 2016 appearance at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner included a video in which he jokingly says ‘F— you!’ to NBC’s Chuck Todd. In an interview with Vanity Fair, Mr. Obama conceded, ‘I curse more than I should, and I find myself cursing more in this office than I had in my previous life.’  Politico has reported that President Biden swears frequently in staff meetings, favoring the F-word.”
I am in a book club where the women are all Christians.  We read one book where on one page and in the same chapter that infamous word noted above was profusely mentioned more times than was needed.  It turned many of us off to be confronted with such obscene or profane language profusely.
As this is written to Christians in particular, am I implying I also hear Christians using such language?  Thankfully, no, I don’t.  But that doesn’t mean such language escapes us in a more subtle manner.  Most of us are involved in social media in some form.  Perhaps it’s Facebook or Twitter.  Those are the two I am most familiar with although I am on Facebook solely.  And that is where I have observed something that perhaps few have addressed.
This is what I am finding more often than I wish to see.  People post memes, that is, “an image, video, piece of text, etc., typically humorous in nature, that is copied and spread rapidly by internet users, often with slight variations.”  Some aren’t humorous, but rather wise or thoughtful sayings.  That in itself is fine, but more and more they may include an introduction with the F-word or some other thoughtless or coarse language.
What is sad to me is that Christians are posting such memes, apparently not aware of the language or oblivious to it.  I have decided to never post or repost anything that contains such language.  My decision is based on two biblical passages addressed to Christians in the epistles.  One is “. . . and there must be no filthiness or foolish talk, or vulgar joking, which are not fitting, but rather giving of thanks”  (Ephesians 5: 4). The other is “But now you also, rid yourselves of all of them: anger, wrath, malice, slander, and obscene speech from your mouth”  (Colossians 3: 8).
Coarse and crude language must have been in vogue in the Apostle Paul’s day for him to address Christians in two different locations not to resort to such language or speech, as was common to the pagans.
We may never allow such words to depart from our lips, but let’s not let such words depart from our clicks on social media or anywhere else either.  God’s standard of holiness is the same for both oral and written language.  We certainly do not wish to offend our God, do we?  Nor should we wish to offend and cause discomfort, as Mr. Funt noted, to those who read what we send.
It may help us to always remember these words: “Let the words of my mouth, and the meditations of my heart always be acceptable in thy sight, O LORD, my strength and my redeemer”  (Psalm 19: 14).
Helen Louise Herndon is a member of Central Presbyterian Church (EPC) in St. Louis, Missouri. She is freelance writer and served as a missionary to the Arab/Muslim world in France and North Africa.
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Out of all the innumerable sounds in heaven and earth, God pays special attention to the voice of his people. Psalm 34 is not simply a theological statement of this fact—it is the personal testimony of David, when he was a fugitive running for his life. He celebrates his own experience of God hearing his cry for help.

Have you ever considered all the things you hear in the course of one day? This morning, I heard birds singing outside, and the voices of my family. I heard the coffee machine and the clink of plates and cutlery at breakfast. Right now, I’m hearing the noise of construction above the ever-present sounds of traffic and the occasional gust of wind. I haven’t even had lunch yet. There will be plenty more to fill my ears before this day is finished.
Have you ever considered all the things that God hears? The creator of sound waves hears the unceasing worship of angels before his throne. He hears the swirling wind of Jupiter and the ice that melts on Mars. He hears beyond what is audible to us—the ultrasonic songs of katydids and the footsteps of aphids. He hears beyond the limits of location—
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In the machinery of modern industry and government, and in worldly, pragmatic ideologies, Machen saw a real threat to liberty, society, and the church. The only solution for him was the knowledge of a God who cared enough to send his Son, beneath whose cross and in whose church is the only refuge from the decay and depravity of the world.

J. Gresham Machen was certainly prescient about the havoc theological liberalism would wreak on the mainline churches in the 20th century. He also saw the rise of fascism and ethnonationalism in the 1920s and 1930s. We would do well to consider those warnings today.
Machen’s observations about the church and the world in his great short essay Mountains and Why We Love Them were published in 1933 (based on a mountain-climbing trip of the previous year) and have never been more relevant. In 1932 Italian fascist dictator Benito Mussolini was probably more well-known to most Americans than Adolf Hitler, who lost the German presidential election that year. But Machen, who had studied in Germany and knew it well, was keenly aware of Hitler’s threat. He looked out across Europe from a peak in the Swiss Alps and did not like what he saw:
Then there is something else about that view from the Matterhorn. I felt it partly at least as I stood there, and I wonder whether you can feel it with me. It is this. You are standing there not in any ordinary country, but in the very midst of Europe, looking out from its very centre. Germany just beyond where you can see to the northeast, Italy to the south, France beyond those snows of Mont Blanc. There, in that glorious round spread out before you, that land of Europe, humanity has put forth its best. There it has struggled; there it has fallen; there it has looked upward to God. The history of the race seems to pass before you in an instant of time, concentrated in that fairest of all the lands of the earth. You think of the great men whose memories you love, the men who have struggled there in those countries below you, who have struggled for light and freedom, struggled for beauty, struggled above all for God’s Word. And then you think of the present and its decadence and its slavery, and you desire to weep. It is a pathetic thing to contemplate the history of mankind.
Here it seems that Machen had in view modernity and its dehumanizing machinery (of state and of steel) and its godless “morality.” See the introductory chapter of Christianity and Liberalism (written 10 years before) to understand more fully what Machen had in mind. In that book, Machen had extolled “the great principles of Anglo-Saxon liberty,” meaning the tradition of individual rights pioneered in the British Isles.
Machen goes on to speak of the evil ends that modernity’s machines and men were beginning to serve:
I know that there are people who tell us contemptuously that always there are croakers who look always to the past, croakers who think that the good old times are the best. But I for my part refuse to acquiesce in this relativism which refuses to take stock of the times in which we are living. It does seem to me that there can never be any true advance, and above all there can never be any true prayer, unless a man does pause occasionally, as on some mountain vantage ground, to try, at least, to evaluate the age in which he is living. And when I do that, I cannot for the life of me see how any man with even the slightest knowledge of history can help recognizing the fact that we are living in a time of sad decadence—a decadence only thinly disguised by the material achievements of our age, which already are beginning to pall on us like a new toy. When Mussolini makes war deliberately and openly upon democracy and freedom, and is much admired for doing so even in countries like ours; when an ignorant ruffian is dictator of Germany, until recently the most highly educated country in the world—when we contemplate these things I do not see how we can possibly help seeing that something is radically wrong. Just read the latest utterances of our own General Johnson, his cheap and vulgar abuse of a recent appointee of our President, the cheap tirades in which he develops his view that economics are bunk—and then compare that kind of thing with the state papers of a Jefferson or a Washington—and you will inevitably come to the conclusion that we are living in a time when decadence has set in on a gigantic scale.
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