How to Avoid Offensive Language While Saying Absolutely Nothing

I was startled the other day to hear myself talking about “alcohol and drug abuse.” The words tripped off my tongue so smoothly and easily that it almost seemed as if they had a life of their own. Did I really say “alcohol and drug abuse”?

This kind of language is used by TV announcers and social commentators, as well as the millions like myself who listen to them. But such phraseology is, nevertheless, an odd way to use words. Abuse implies that there is a proper use. And yet, whatever we may think about the use of alcohol, we have indubitably crossed the lines of legality and good sense to suggest that there is a proper use of pot, crack, angel dust, and heroin. Why, then, do we speak of “drug abuse”?

I suspect we use this linguistic sleight of hand because we are reluctant to use words clearly where clarity is unwelcome. In matters where the pluralism of our society is evident, we find ways to speak without implying judgment. The drug is only being abused; its use is not finally and categorically wrong! Nowhere is the disappearance of clarity and moral content more evident than in the way we talk about sexual relations.

Sex Without Values

Have you noticed, for example, how we talk about a person’s “lifestyle”? We may know someone who enjoys the company of loose women. “Well,” we say, “that’s not my lifestyle.” We mean that we do not approve of the promiscuity. In a pluralistic society, however, one has to be careful about offending people who have different values from our own, or who have no values at all.

Fortunately, we have at hand a linguistic convention that short-circuits any possible embarrassment. It is the word lifestyle. A style is simply a fashion. But styles are hardly ever intrinsically right or wrong. They have more or less appeal, but seldom can they be commended or dismissed on moral grounds. So, a “lifestyle” becomes something we may or may not like, but it is not something that is either good or bad. The awkward moment has passed. We can now distance ourselves from those in the fast lane without having to say that what they are doing is wrong.

Now we are ready for something bolder: that newly created hybrid, the “alternative lifestyle.” What we have in mind, of course, is the person who is homosexual. Not only does the word lifestyle conceal the wrongdoing, but the suggestion is made, ever so subtly, that being gay is a legitimate option, an alternative. This is their “sexual preference.” Sexual preference? What on earth are we talking about? God offers no such alternative, and he allows no such preference.

And our language about “sexual partners” only muddies the waters further. These words are being used to describe a relationship that is inescapably moral in a way that circumvents moral reality. When people had “mistresses” and “paramours,” everyone knew that what was going on was illicit and in all likelihood furtive. That is no longer the case. “Sexual partners” are of all kinds, ranging from faithful spouses to homosexuals on a chance encounter; so let the listener import whatever content he or she wishes—or does not wish—when this language is used.

Plainly, our culture is having to evolve language that can do service in two directions. First, it must be morally neutral. Second, it must be able to describe the new arrangement in which the utility of sex has displaced any consideration of its mystery and propriety. Sex is often the way in which a relationship is begun, rather than the way it comes to final maturity. And people are important only insofar as they are of sexual benefit to us. What is right and wrong is, therefore, a pragmatic and not a principial matter. The language of “sexual partners” is sufficiently devoid of content to let us slide over these matters without suffering pain or embarrassment; and so, happy not to be pained or embarrassed, we use it.

Our national unwillingness to express values in the public domain and the corresponding need for neutral language is also hard to miss in the discussion of abortion. You have noticed, I am sure, that what is aborted is never a child. It is simply a “fetus.” Frankly, if I were an advocate of abortion, I too would restrict my conversation to the fetus, thereby putting as much psychological distance as possible between my advocacy of the procedure and the realization that what was being killed was a human being with a genetic code different from its mother’s.

Fetus, because it is a Latin word and comes out of a technical field, has a sense of something remote, unfamiliar, and impersonal. For those who want to promote abortion and obscure the moral reality of what is going on, fetus is a happy discovery.

These little clues in our everyday language, therefore, unlock the complex relations we are forging between our private and our public lives, between our individual and our social worlds. On the surface, it may seem merely as if we are looking at a new kind of etiquette; but beneath the surface are flowing powerful secular currents that demand this kind of language.

The World Without Moral Structure

Two powerful realities make our relation to the culture difficult and produce the psychological intimidation against using language with moral content: secularism and secularization. Secularism describes a particular network of cultural values; secularization has to do with the social organization that sustains those values. They can be distinguished, but they cannot be separated.

Secularism assumes there is no moral or transcendent order related to what we do and before which we are accountable. Secular people are not theoretical atheists, for the overwhelming majority believes in the existence of God. They are, however, practical atheists, for they live as if God did not exist.

Secularism is not selective. If there is no moral order overarching life, every value becomes arbitrary. No society can survive a prolonged assault of this kind. Its most basic institutions—like law, government, and education—lose their legitimacy. There is no way to justify their continued existence because each must assume the presence of a moral order to function.

Furthermore, where there is no moral order, there is no accountability. And without accountability nations collapse. In the long run, we are probably damaged less by the sleaze of some politicians than we are by the millions of people who are disaffected by their work, who do it poorly, who blame someone else, and who think they have a right to be fulfilled even if that means they must engage in petty larceny to reach this blessed experience.

All of this seems obvious. But if it is so self-evident, why do we not change course? The problem is that we feel powerless. We seem to be in the grip of forces so much larger than ourselves that we can only look out on our world with a sense of hopeless inevitability.

That, of course, is exactly what our social experts have in mind when they talk about secularization. They are thinking of the way our psychology and even our spirituality have been shaped by the forces of modernity, principally mechanization and urbanization.

By the year 2000, 94 percent of our population will live in cities. In the West, cities are giant centers of commerce and manufacturing that support other enterprises like higher education and cultural activities. And they produce their own psychological atmosphere because they bring into close proximity those of widely differing religious perspectives and “lifestyles.” In order to survive enforced proximity, pluralism must become an accepted reality. We are forced to accept other viewpoints, not merely to accord them freedoms guaranteed by the Constitution, but also as legitimate ways of being. This makes it incumbent upon us to find language that can describe these beliefs and practices without ever appearing to exercise any sort of moral discrimination about them.

Furthermore, in this situation, anonymity becomes a powerful psychological defense. Because of the massive congregations of people in our cities, to survive we have to keep our distance from all but a few friends. People are viewed in terms of their functions, not in terms of their character. When the bathtub refuses to empty, for example, we say we are going to call the plumber; we do not think of calling a particular person. When the plumber comes, we have little interest in him; we are interested in his function. Our modern world is largely a reflection of impersonal economic relations. It is a world in which moral values have no obvious or comfortable place.

Given this context, it is not surprising that we speak of the unborn as things. Indeed, we often relate to the born as things, too. Women used to complain that they were sometimes treated as “sex objects.” Is it not true, though, that people can never be anything but “objects” where there is a moral vacuum? The very structure that can lift us above being mere organisms is the structure that is attacked by secularists as being the enemy of our humanness. Thus sex floats free of the context of personal commitment; it becomes the end itself and not merely the means. And we are learning to talk about it in this way, stripping our language of all moral content.

The Chic And The Worldly

It is, of course, quite chic to speak about “sexual preferences” and “alternative lifestyles,” but it is also quite worldly. That point would have been embarrassingly self-evident a few years ago. It is not self-evident now. Sociologist James Hunter has discovered that many of the traditional standards of sexuality have fallen; only 64 percent of evangelical seminarians, for example, think that watching pornographic movies is morally wrong. Plainly, the secular habit of detaching sexuality from values is fast becoming a Christian habit. This has also become plain in the epidemic of evangelical leaders who have been compromised sexually.

Worldliness is what makes sin look normal. Conversely, it is those habits, those unconscious attitudes, those beliefs, those practices, that make biblical standards look odd, quaint, and undesirable. We, in the evangelical churches, have trivialized worldliness, forgetting that it is so serious that its practitioners are the enemies of God. It has become possible to be an honored member of our community while being in mentality or practice worldly in thoroughly reprehensible ways. Our thinking about sexuality may be a telltale sign that we, too, can make sin look normal in spite of our orthodoxy.

David Wells is Andrew Mutch Professor of Historical and Systematic Theology at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary.

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