Clean Up Your Language: Christians Are Often the Worst Offenders

These days, you don’t have to go far to see and hear language used poorly. Stores fill entire shelves with mugs and t-shirts decorated with profanity. People post online and then lose their jobs. The media posts daily the casualties of a political and cultural battle being fought with words.

Christians have notoriety for censorship and eschewing vulgarity. We even have our own romance, mystery, and women’s fiction lines so that Christian audiences can confidently enjoy stories they know are free from profanity and offensively graphic scenes. Scripture exhorts us to dwell on ideas and words that are pure, lovely, and of good repute (Phil. 4:8), but experience has taught me that excising profanity and sex from communication and storytelling addresses only the surface of the problem—and even that, not very well.

We are tasked with growing to maturity in concert with and for the sake of the whole body of Christ by “speaking the truth in love” (Eph. 4:15–16, ESV). We “will give account for every careless word” we speak (Matt 12:36, ESV). But I find that my brothers and sisters in Christ unwilling to examine the words we use. We complain about “political correctness,” and we’re often more focused on what we have to say rather than how others hear us.

Several years ago, I chaperoned my daughter’s choir on a singing tour in Italy. I had three young women in my care in a foreign country. Where they went, I went. No down time. No letting them out of my sight. As it happened, I woke up in Rome with a fever and sore throat. Not a cold, this sore throat made it hard to swallow and felt like some demon was poking my tonsils with hundreds of pins. I had brought basic first aid, but the fever reducer did little to mask those constant sharp pricks.

That day we had an especially tight schedule. Near noon, we stopped in a Roman piazza and the girls and I were given thirty minutes to find a fast lunch. As we looked for a food stand with a short line, we walked by a little farmacie shop, marked with a green cross. I grabbed the girls and we popped inside. Rasping out a buon giorno, I asked if anyone spoke English. Nope. In a hurry and desperate, I moaned while patting my throat and mimed spraying something into my mouth.

The pharmacist’s eyes lit up. “Bene,” he said. He turned to a shelf behind him and handed me a small box with a spray bottle inside.

I could read nothing on the package, but he nodded at me and mimicked my throat-spraying mime. I paid, left the store, got brave, and sprayed my throat. Ah—numbness. Just what I needed.

I needed help and could not speak the pharmacist’s language. But he welcomed me, adapted his communication to mine, and created trust so that my need was met. Is that situation so much different from how Christ-followers are called to love and give aid to the world? Others will not speak our language, yet we often have what they need if we can only communicate so they feel understood—and, in turn, understand.

If we want to communicate meaningfully with anyone outside the fold, we need to recognize what language says about our thought patterns, how communication really works, and how adopting better “aural optics” reminds us to focus on others more than ourselves. Whether we’re talking about unbiased language, capitalization, usage, jargon, or vitriol, it’s well past time to apply some soap to our tongues and typing fingers and clean up our language.

Inspect Language-Based Thought Patterns

Day in and day out, I see writers and pastors and Tweeters use language natural for insiders but not for the people they want to reach. I receive huge pushback when I suggest authors or organizations move to a more modern style, usage, and syntax. And I hear downright grumpiness about how various people groups, especially young people, change, dumb down, and adulterate “perfectly good” syntax and vocabulary.

Take the current push toward gender-neutral language that seems over-the-top to some. After all, the male pronoun and words like mankind, manpower, and manmade have had universal meanings for centuries. Why should they stop having those meanings now? Are we just more sensitive and persnickety?

Yes, we are more sensitive—because we have taken time to study and consider what language does, and because our culture is changing to value women more than it has in the past. Language, like people, lives in a constant state of flux. Each generation births new energy and angst to push back on the ideas of their elders—or move them forward. Power shifts, and with cultural authority goes the stronghold for architecting language usage. This shift of power becomes even more exciting or insidious (depending on whether you’re the group in power or not) when we consider how language and syntax wire our thought patterns. Cognition happens in multiple ways outside of language, but like an industrial factory, language funnels our thoughts through particular gateways and stamps them to fit into a cultural mold.

For instance, many languages assign female and male gender to words. In French, nurse (l’infirmière) is a feminine word requiring feminine articles and adjectives while doctor (le docteur) is a masculine word requiring masculine articles and adjectives. Office is also masculine, while house is feminine. But objects without connection to stereotypical roles also have gender, like wastebasket (fem.), leaf (fem.), and wind (masc.). This grammatical syntax predisposes speakers, at best, to subconsciously pattern their thoughts about gender to the gender assignments embedded in the language and, at worst, to persist in misogynistic behavior reinforced by the words we say.

Researchers have compared reactions of native speakers whose languages assign opposite gender to the same object word, like bridge and key. They proved that grammatical gender in a native language influences thinking even when the subjects are using a third, grammatically gender-neutral language or no language and only pictures.[1] The results show that our default thinking lines up with the inherent bias of our languages. And how many of us, even with good intentions toward equity, examine the underlying and inherent thinking behind every word say? If your answer was “few to none,” that means most of us operate in the default mode of our language most of the time, especially when familiar words and syntax seem to raise no red flags of overt racism, sexism, or other bias.

But our languages—so many of them formed and controlled by male-centric cultures, if not all—have much more inherent bias than you might think, well beyond the expected pronoun debate and words that refer specifically to men (freshmen, forefathers, noblemen). Consider these common terms: erectile dysfunction and incompetent cervix. Familiar to most of us, these words sound neutral. They describe medical conditions that in today’s culture are becoming more treatable and much less taboo. But just for a moment, consider your reaction to the term incompetent penis. Is calling one malady an incompetent penis any different than calling the other an incompetent cervix? Both describe medical conditions where a gender-specific body part softens too soon. Both affect the ability to successfully reproduce. But I’m willing to bet an incompetent male organ sounds much more harsh or shocking to you than an incompetent female one, and it’s a term our culture would never adopt.

Even as I write the term and discuss this issue, my alarm bells are going off, impelling me to apologize for even bringing up this subject in print. But doesn’t my need to apologize in some ways, just prove the point?

Similarly, using male word forms universally, when we have perfectly good neutral words like humanity, labor force, and handmade, reinforces a male-centric society that pushes women to the fringes. Do you instantly picture a woman or a man when you read the words chairman and fireman? Those terms predispose us to default thinking that considers men first in nearly every arena. And when we fight changes that give more dignity and parity to others, whether because we’re just used to the old way or because we like the familiar language of our Bible translations, what are we saying to the larger community and those marginalized by the words we prefer?

An important consequence of language change is that it makes us examine our subconscious thought habits. Even more importantly, change that removes bias and becomes common usage, will over time wire the thought patterns of new generations—hopefully, for the better.

Language matters because language reflects and forms how we think.

Understand the Communication Process

But good communication goes well beyond language and syntax. We all have experienced times when others have misunderstood our words—and I’m not just talking about the telephone game where, in a hurry, we mishear and misremember a whispered phrase. Even my husband of twenty-five years and I regularly misinterpret on a core level what each other is saying. We all have a unique expectation and framework for what words mean. What I picture in my head and the feelings that ensue from words and syntax may differ significantly from yours, according to our personality, experience, and circumstances.

Rather than a direct line from speaker to hearer or writer to reader, communication, at minimum, goes through a process of several steps. Language is representation of meaning, not the meaning itself. So first comes the concept or object or relationship or action (the signified) that creates the basic unit of meaning (the sign). Language, pictures, gestures, and symbols—really anything that communicates that sign—are called “signifiers.” Thus, the chair and la chaise are both signifiers that could potentially communicate the same object in a room. But so is a pointed finger. Or הכיסא. Or an icon of seating hanging over the door. An open, turned-up palm extended toward the chair communicates a slightly different sign—an invitation to sit in the chair—while a mother’s raised eyebrow to her child in time-out is not an invitation, but a command.

To complicate matters even further, signs must have interpreters. Perhaps you’ve never learned French as I have. The signifier la chaise will communicate differently to you than to me. You might recognize the letters of the French alphabet and be able to sound it out and think the signifier points to a piece of furniture built slightly longer for lounging rather than my petite chair. But you also might have no clue that the squiggles in the paragraphs above are Hebrew letters—or how they sound as a word.  For you, although those squiggles have no precise definition pointing to a sign, they still communicate something, such as the concept of foreign or Middle Eastern. Likewise, a rebellious child might interpret the mother’s eyebrow not as a firm directive to be obeyed but a challenge to be defeated. Interpreters bring their own unique steps to the process.

The study of signs and their meaning (semiotics) might seem tedious, but it’s an important science that helps us understand, for example, how literary devices convey meaning, as well as how (and what) cultural phenomena communicate. With so many transmission steps, the connections between sign, signifier, and signified can surely get muddy, and might even be transformed or reimagined into something else by the interpreter. Truly, it’s amazing that we can communicate clearly at all.

Communication happens because social groups agree together, albeit imprecisely, on what signifiers mean. Yet we often change our minds—not only about what words mean but which words are important. Which ideas are important. And how to say them. So when language changes, or others misunderstand us, we should listen. Heart values are often rising to the surface, and those are the sounds we most need to hear.

Writing with the Audience in Mind

When my words, “I have a sore throat,” had no effect on the Italian pharmacist, I had to change my signifiers to something familiar to him. Similarly, Rome’s pharmacies need to communicate their services to tourists of many languages, and so they have opted to identify their stores predominantly through the familiar green cross and recognizable word farmacie rather than a franchise name, like an Italian CVS or Walgreens, that would be known only by the locals.

To communicate well, we should be aware that even within our own language, we may be like foreigners to one another, in need of a translator. I must not only organize and articulate well my thoughts—which is hard enough—but I also need to bridge the gap between how I interpret the world and how you do. Which means I need to be a student of you.

Often when writers discuss the mantra to write with the audience in mind, we are thinking on a conceptual level. Absolutely, we must think and write about topics relevant to our audience and with signifiers they understand. We must also pay attention to what words mean to our target group—not just denotations, the dictionary definitions, but also connotations, the associated baggage words have in our culture. Merriam-Webster’s Unabridged dictionary lists five definitions for the word gay as having to do with brightness, pleasantness, and merriment; it labels a couple more definitions as obsolete; and only at number eight does it define gay as a homosexual. But that last definition, however that meaning evolved in our language, now informs all instances of the word, and I’m liable to create offense and misunderstanding by using gay to mean “merriment.” Most authors understand these issues.

But I find that writers often fail to realize how the little details affect perception. Many Christian writers strongly prefer to capitalize deity pronouns at a time when most modern writing has moved away from frequent capitalization. Writers appear shocked when I ask them to lowercase these references to God, as though doing so would be disrespectful. But as the Christian Writer’s Manual of Style reminds us, English capitalization isn’t an issue of respect but of proper noun versus generic noun. If it were a matter of respect, perhaps we would lowercase the names of Satan and Hitler, but we don’t.[2] Most people are surprised to realize that not only do most publishers lowercase pronouns referring to God, so do most Bible versions. We cannot even call the trend a modern travesty—since the beloved King James Bible lowercases these little words too. Of more importance than our sensibility is the perception of those who read our writing. Lots of unnecessary capitals sprinkled throughout sentences and paragraphs—for deity pronouns as well as generic-noun religious terms—gives the impression that the writing is old-fashioned. And for some, old-fashioned means obsolete.

I also want to avoid flooding my writing with “Christianese”—biblical jargon that has little meaning out of context. Have you ever had friends have an entire conversation or joke fest using movie lines from a movie you’ve never seen? Or does your family dinner go like mine, where my teenagers spin off into a conversation populated entirely by memes and YouTube quotes? If you’ve ever been left completely lost in a conversation, recognize that a large part of our country feels that way whenever Christians start talking about the “blood of the Lamb” and “asking Jesus into their hearts.” Whatever your favorite catchphrases are, whether about grace, the cross, or your morning quiet time, articulate those concepts in non-churchy language.

Consider, too, how what you leave out can be as noticeable as what you put in. If every illustration has a sports theme, are you ignoring a large part of your audience? If you refer repeatedly to families when you intend to mean the larger church body, are you marginalizing widows and singles? Do the pictures in your book or the characters in your story reflect the diversity of our communities?

One of my beloved undergraduate professors at Texas Christian University, Dr. Bob Frye, would often mention his roommate during class. Now he had been married many years by then, and his roommate was his wife, but he intentionally shifted the story of his situation to look more like ours so that we could see he really did remember the pressures of being a student.

What are you doing to put meaning in the reader’s corner? Just as politicians consider the color of their “power ties” for the optics of a speech or television appearance, paying attention to the aural and visual optics of what we write will help our audiences hear us.

Tame the Tongue

Most importantly, Christians should be the first people willing to tame the tongue. Too often on social media and in the public square, we can become so sure we are the righteous ones that we “curse people made God’s image” (James 3:10, NET). “The tongue is set among our members, staining the whole body, setting on fire the entire course of life, and set on fire by hell,” and what we say and type “is a restless evil, full of deadly poison (3:7, 9, ESV).

As I read it, Jesus never gave us much license to holler as he did, “You brood of vipers!” (Matt 12:34); he kept that prerogative for himself. And—if you will notice—he directs that language not at them, but at us. So who will remember that a Christian avoided profanity if our favorite four-letter word is “You fool”? “Whoever says, ‘You fool!’ will be liable to the hell of fire” (Matt 5:22). But we are to explain the hope we have “with gentleness and respect” (1 Pet. 3:15).

No group in our divisive era stands out for keeping their Wednesday-wash whites unstained all week. And that’s a shame—because Christians should. More than anyone else, we should be other-centered, full of grace and truth, becoming “all things to all people, that by all means, [we] might save some” (1 Cor. 9:22).

It’s time for us to clean up our language. You can borrow my soap.

[1] Lawrence T. White, “Masculine or Feminine? (And Why It Matters),” Psychology Today, September 21, 2012, http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/culture-conscious/201209/masculine-or-feminine-and-why-it-matters.

[2] Bob Hudson, ed., The Christian Writer’s Manual of Style, 4th Edition (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2016) 144–147.

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