I Swear 15 comments

By Joel Hartse

What does it say about evangelical Christians that we (yes, we, I'm implicated) bandy about the name of the Almighty God of the Universe—one represented by the four letters YHWH in Jewish tradition—in our pop songs, but tremble in fear before other four-letter words?

Something bad, I bet.

"Swear words," as we call them, are one of the things that has kept even a group of do-gooders like U2 from being embraced as a Genuine Christian Band—in fact, Bono’s use of one on television awards ceremony (“it’s f---ing brilliant!”) sparked a Supreme Court case on obscenity. It wasn’t the first time he’d used it—I recall him being bleeped by a network when he told the world that U2 would “continue to f--- with the mainstream.” (Maybe he meant it in the sense of, like, “become more intimate with the mainstream,” because, you know, All that You Can’t Leave Behind.)

You can't be a serious Christian and use words like that, some people seem to think.

Now it's happening again, this time with the Christian singer/songwriter Derek Webb, whose forthcoming album is rumored (only rumored!) to contain—wait for it—the "s-word." Blogs, including the one at the Kings College's Patrol Magazine, which seems to have started the speculation, have gone ape. Most commenters are defending the God-given Right to Swears while others question whether it is appropriate for a Christian to use such words.

The question is: why does anybody, whatever his or her opinion, care? Why and how do words get a hold of us like this? My understanding, and you can blame several years of graduate school at a state institution in California for this, is that we both construct and are constructed by language—we imbue words with meaning and power, and those words work together to help us form our own understandings of ourselves.

Really, I think words don’t mean a whole lot unless we allow them to mean a whole lot. Come to think of it, neither do pop songs. Yet many of us do allow both a great deal of meaning, maybe because of the mysterious ways they move us and allow us to move others.

Of course, Christian rock has something of a history when it comes to taboo words, going all the way back to Larry Norman singing about gonorrhea, not to mention various fiascoes involving the Violet Burning, Pedro the Lion, Over the Rhine, and Brave Saint Saturn, who have, from time to time, uttered (or even almost uttered, or uttered quietly) "bad words" in the course of pop songs and never lived to hear the end of it.

My knowing this—my being able to recite such a list—seems petty and nit-picking, even to me, but I can’t escape it. While I was forming my pop-culture-consciousness, I learned to count the number of Jesuses and the number of swears in songs, in a kind of bizarre cultural/theological equation. I grew out of it, kind of, but I grew to be the kind of person who notices when Derek Webb is accused of being a pottymouth.

And while I’m no longer paralyzed by decisions about whether to buy an album if it has a swear word on it, I am concerned about the spirit with which words, all words, are used, and I try hard to call myself out when I am enjoying music, any music, that seems to be communicating something destructive, or hateful, or cruel.

I don’t mean there’s no place for anger in music—I like the righteous indignation of Rage Against the Machine as much as anybody, for a couple of minutes—but there's value, at least, in discerning how and why language is being used in a song, swear words or not. Maybe after this latest episode blows over, we could start being more careful with the words that are supposed to mean a lot to us: God. Jesus. Christ. Love.

That kind of thing.

By the way, the latest internet rumor is that the true controversy of the Webb record is not even about profanity, but about gay rights. So while one shitstorm may be coming to an end, a new one is probably just beginning.