Vulgarity offensive to Spirit - Church News

"Vulgar and crude expressions are offensive to the Spirit of the Lord," Elder Dallin H. Oaks of the Quorum of the Twelve said at the April 1986 general conference.

"The Apostle James taught that followers of Christ should be 'slow to speak, slow to wrath,' and should 'lay apart all filthiness.' (James 1:19, 21.) In the Bible, filthiness is a term associated with sexual sin and with lewd language. (See Ezek. 16:36; 24:13; Eph. 5:3-4.) Thus, Paul was surely condemning vulgarity when he wrote the Colossians, 'Also put off all these; anger, wrath, malice, blasphemy, filthy communication out of your mouth.' " (Col. 3:8.)

Elder Oaks said that these biblical condemnations of vulgarity are needed today.

"Indecent and vulgar expressions pollute the air around us," he said. "Relations that are sacred between husband and wife are branded with coarse expressions that degrade what is intimate in marriage and make commonplace what is forbidden outside it. Moral sins that should be unspeakable are in the common vernacular. Human conduct plunging downward from the merely immodest to the utterly revolting is written on the walls and shouted in the streets. Twentieth-century men and women of sensitivity can easily understand how Lot, a fugitive from the actions and speech of Sodom and Gomorrah, could have been 'vexed with the filthy conversation of the wicked.' (2 Pet. 2:7.)

"How soberly we must regard the Book of Mormon teachings that 'there cannot any unclean thing enter into the kingdom of God; wherefore there must needs be a place of filthiness prepared for that which is filthy.' (1 Ne. 15:34.)

"Profane and vulgar expressions are public evidence of a speaker's ignorance, inadequacy, or immaturity.

"A speaker who profanes must be ignorant or indifferent to God's stern command that His name must be treated with reverence and not used in vain.

"A speaker who mouths profanity or vulgarity to punctuate or emphasize speech confesses inadequacy in his or her own language skills. Properly used, modern languages require no such artificial boosters.

"A speaker who employs profanity or vulgarity to catch someone's attention with shock effect engages in a babyish device that is inexcusable as juvenile or adult behavior. Such language is morally bankrupt. It is also progressively self-defeating, since shock diminishes with familiarity and the user can only maintain its effect by escalating its excess."