Cussing {it happened on a sunday} Day 5

It was Sunday afternoon, and, as usual, the grown ups were still inside the air-conditioned church.  My sister and I had gone outside in the Texas sun with our friend, a boy who I thought might have a crush on my sister.  By now we had changed churches once more, this time to one called Free Will Baptist.  If you are wondering about what set apart these different denominations we attended, and whether other conferences of Baptists are being denied their free will (thus the need for our church to advertise this distinction), I recommend you Google it.  I am not now, nor have I ever been, interested in the minutiae of doctrine.  It just doesn't seem important whether a church believes in predestination or the ordination of women or the use of electric guitars in Sunday worship.

Anyway.  We stood on the sidewalk outside the church building, having some ridiculous conversation or something, when our friend noticed something on his shirt.  "What's this crap?" he asked, picking at the spot.  Cue my dramatic inhalation, the telltale sign of disapproval.  He looked confused.  "What?"

"You just cussed," I told him in a whisper.

"No I didn't," he argued back.

"Yes you did!" The big, bossy voice replaced the whisper.  "C-R-A-P is a cuss word!  You shouldn't be saying that!"

He and my sister looked at each other and burst out laughing.  They went on to insist that I was mistaken, that one could say crap or crud or dang or (my dad's personal catch phrase) dag nab it all!  I was horrified at their cavalier attitude towards words of such clear impropriety and marched right back inside the church to avoid the lightning bolts that were sure to rain down from heaven on those profane children.

Well, my sister managed to escape the merited punishment for her sin that day, but still I remained convinced that cussing was bad and I wasn't going to do it.  Even when kids at school started using those 7 words that you couldn't say on TV (not in the 80's anyway, not if you were on network broadcasting).  And while I eventually softened my stance on words like crap and dang, and even the more risque pissed, there was something about those other words, those Swear Words.  I just couldn't bring myself to say them out loud, with the exception of a college English class when I was asked to read a few pages of the Handmaid's Tale to the class.  Everything was going fine until Offred knelt between the knees of the Commander's wife and suddenly, oh my goodness, it was the F word, right there on the page, and I said it as quickly as I could but to this day I can still feel the burn of my cheeks to have that word cross my lips.

As a child, the adults around me, mostly people from our church, tried to impress upon me that these words were not good words, that if one wanted to be a Christian, then there were certain behaviors that were off limits.  It has taken many years and quite a bit of thoughtful introspection to realize that much of what I learned in my foundational years was how to act like a Christian rather than how to be a Christian.

We are all born into a culture, a tradition, a way of life that instructs us as we grow up.  Some are born to parents who instill rules at an early age, who have high expectations of their children's good behavior.  Some children are born to shoplifters and drug addicts and emotionally abusive people.  Those children grow up learning a different set of rules, that it's okay to take things without paying and sometimes the grown ups will lay on the couch unresponsive and maybe they really are worthless human beings.  We won't know any different, in fact we can't know any different, until we get older.  This is why teenagers rebel.  This is why young adults move out of their parents' houses.  This is why holidays can be tense or awkward.  Because sometimes we discover a different way of life, a more palatable set of rules, and we choose something other than what our parents chose.

This is why it is sometimes hard for me to distinguish between the specific way that my parents chose to raise me and what makes someone a Christian.  Later, during my own religious rebellion, one of the only things I held onto from my childhood was this inability to swear.  But if I had sworn off God and abandoned many of the practices of Christianity, then why did this thing stick?  Because it had nothing to do with God, and everything to do with how my parents taught me to live.  I couldn't turn it off like I did with the mandatory church attendance, because by the time I was 18, it was just a part of who I was.  I'm just not someone who swears, and honestly, my life would probably be easier if I did.  But it also means that I had to stop making a judgment every time someone else said something I considered to be "cussing."  It turns out that not only can you be a Christian who sometimes says the F word, but you can teach Sunday school and be the head pastor and serve as a missionary overseas.  This one thing doesn't negate Jesus on the cross, dying for our sins.

Now, I just want to address one area where some might find fault with my logic.  The Bible addresses our speech in verses like this from Ephesians 4:29, "Do not let any unwholesome talk come out of your mouths, but only that which is helpful for building others up according to their needs, that it may benefit those who listen." (NIV)  This verse and others like it are used to illustrate the point, God doesn't like people who swear.  Except it doesn't say "Thou shalt not repeat a George Carlin routine" or "Don't let C-R-A-P come out of your mouth".  It says unwholesome talk, or, in other versions, abusive language or corrupt communication or hateful words.  Now, absolutely, the man yelling the word c@%t at me across a parking lot a few years ago was engaging in hateful words.  His talk could not be described as building me up or benefitting anyone (like my young children) who was listening.  But is it just a few words God has a problem with?  Or is it a whole array of "unwholesome talk" like gossip, lying, slander, and bragging?  Could someone be verbally abusive without ever "cussing"?

As Jen Hatmaker puts it in her brilliant book of essays, For the Love, "good behavior won't guarantee anything.  If they [children raised in church] don't love Jesus and people, it matters zero if they remain virgins and don't say the F word.  We must shepherd their hearts, not just their hemlines."  Far too often, I was encouraged to merely whisper gossip, to not get caught telling a lie, but Sweet Jesus don't ever say those couple bad words, because then you're risking your salvation.  I would call BS on that line of thinking, if I ever said such bad words.