Are You Obscene?
When you’re done eating a Big Mac in your car, do you throw the wrapper out the window?
When you finish your Sprite, do you believe the neighbor’s yard, just over the fence, is the proper place to dispose of the can?
Do you drop gooey tissues on the floor at business meetings?
When you see a guy leaving broken beer bottles in the park, are you impressed with how tough and masculine he is?
You don’t do these things, I bet. But you do something almost as bad. You speak litterers above disgusting? Yes. Are you? Well—yes. Sorry, but there it is.1 You don’t trash up our country with your Big Macs, your Sprites, your kleenex, and your broken beer bottles. But what about the garbage that comes out of your mouth? Matthew 15: 11 says,
Not what goes into the mouth defiles a man; but what comes out of the mouth, this defiles a man.
“Defiles” is pretty strong. Some of you will respond, “Hey, it’s just words. Why does anyone care what I say?”
Nobody has explained this to you, I know. I looked for articles on the web, even using AI, and couldn’t find any useful ones. Your mother has, I am sure, told you not to use dirty language, even if she hasn’t had you wash your mouth out with soap, the traditional punishment and one that we will see is highly appropriate. But she probably didn’t explain it to you.
Let’s go back to what obscenity consists of. It is not profanity, the use of words which dishonor or minimize God. It is not like the modern forbidden word N—, which reminds people of racism unless spoken by a black person, in which case it is merely low-class. Rather, obscene words are those that refer to things we feel should be kept private: nudity, defecation, and copulation.
Do you believe that people should not be naked, defecate, or copulation in public? My guess is that you do. I won’t explain why; let’s just start from that. If you do then it makes sense that words referring to these activities should not be used in public either. These things are not exactly unclean, and certainly are not wrong in private, but we don’t want to be reminded of them in casual conversation.
It’s not a prejudice. Wiktionary says the origin of the word “obscenity” is “towards filth”.
From Middle French obscene (modern French obscène (“indecent, obscene”)), and from its etymon Latin obscēnus, obscaenus (“inauspicious; ominous; disgusting, filthy; offensive, repulsive; indecent, lewd, obscene”).
The further etymology is uncertain, but may be from ob- (prefix meaning ‘towards’) + caenum (“dirt, filth; mire, mud”) (possibly ultimately from Proto-Indo-European *ḱweyn- (“to make dirty, soil; filth; mud”)) or scaevus (“left, on the left side; clumsy; (figurative) unlucky”) (from Proto-Indo-European *skeh₂iwo-).
Men and women have an innate idea of filth. It includes the viewing of activities which are not sinful in themselves but which every tribe and nation knows ought not to be seen. The peeping tom is filthy even when what he observes is virginal. Indeed, it is then that he is most filthy, not when he peeps at a fat old man performing an indecent act.
Not all of you readers are peeping toms. But you are using obscene language more often than you used to. Consider President Trump’s 2026 tweet on Truthsocial:
Tuesday will be Power Plant Day, and Bridge Day, all wrapped up in one, in Iran. There will be nothing like it!!! Open the OBSCENITY Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in PROFANITY - JUST WATCH! Praise be to FALSE_GOD. President DONALD J. TRUMP
84.7k Likes Apr 05, 2026, 8:03 AM
The Trump tweet includes profanity as well as obscenity, and has a reference to Allah which is as offensive to Christians and Jews as to Moslems. Trump is trying to show how tough he is, but what he is showing is how loose is his grasp of common decency.
Trying to show how tough you are has always been a big motive for obscenity. The boy wants to show he’s grown up. The man wants to show he’s a real man. President Nixon was a pitiful example. He did not use dirty words in public. The tapes he made of his office conversation were when transcribed full of “EXPLETIVE DELETED” in his conversations with his aides. Nixon was a Quaker and utterly conventional. But he was insecure, and he really wanted to be one of the boys, even though he never could, being too middle class and intellectual.
Not as pathetic, but more sad, is the case of the girls who are obscene. To be obscene in dress is common, and something every mother and father has to fight against in their teenage girls who don’t realize the effect of their undress. But what is the purpose of obscene language? I hear a lot of it every time I stand on Third Street protesting abortion, along with shouts of, “Yes, I know it’s a baby but I want to kill it!”. I think they’re trying to show they’re tough, just like Nixon. Nixon, though, wasn’t trying to get a date. What man wants a woman who talks in obscenities? It’s similar to girls who pierce their noses. No man thinks a ring in a nose is attractive. As one X post put it, “Ladies, stop putting that stupid bull ring in your nose. You look disgusting. No one thinks it’s attractive.” (X and “Nose ring theory”.) Men think it’s repulsive. The only exception to this is that having a nose ring or using obscene language does indicate that you’re easy, to be had for something between $200 and a large Budweiser.
More could be said on this topic, and I hope others will write on it. I will end, though, with Colossians 3:8:
But now ye also put off all these; anger, wrath, malice, blasphemy, filthy communication out of your mouth.
Footnotes
I’m a Christian, an evangelical, even a fundamentalist, if you like. Our fashion nowadays is to say we are all sinners, but to be somewhat vague about exactly which sins. I’m pinning you down. I should include the obligatory and very important disclaimer, though. If you repent and decide to obey God, your sins— of which these are relatively minor— and you know what I mean— will be forgiven because of the death of Jesus on the Cross. You’re still disgusting, though. But so are we all.
Funny, a theologian I met last year just wrote an article on this topic: https://substack.com/@alastairroberts146619/note/c-253604897?r=1dx2xp&utm_medium=ios&utm_source=notes-share-action
That is not obscenity, or profanity, but it is in the general class of things which ought not to be public. Words describing it, howevr, do not offend us. This is a very interesting point, and deserves its own treatment.