Truth Unites - Should Pastors Use Profanity?

Episode Date: August 15, 2025

In this video, Gavin Ortlund addresses the growing normalization of profanity and ungodly speech among Christians, urging them to follow the Bible’s call to speak with humility, grace, and integrity.Substack article: https://kaeleytrillerharms.substack.com/p/doug-wilsonjust-the-facts-maam?r=gu9cl&utm_medium=ios&fbclid=IwY2xjawMIU_RleHRuA2FlbQIxMQABHj48QaoTM7exjXi9FN2jihnpLVsNYmlbP-F0et6hHe7vEeNl5sCWO5j_Bm7-_aem_qsl0Ulko8UXla9BO2rLpSg&triedRedirect=trueClearly Reformed article: https://clearlyreformed.org/on-culture-war-doug-wilson-and-the-moscow-mood/Truth Unites (https://truthunites.org) exists to promote gospel assurance through theological depth. Gavin Ortlund (PhD, Fuller Theological Seminary) is President of Truth Unites, Visiting Professor of Historical Theology at Phoenix Seminary, and Theologian-in-Residence at Immanuel Nashville.SUPPORT:Tax Deductible Support: https://truthunites.org/donate/Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/truthunitesFOLLOW: Website: https://truthunites.org/Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/truth.unites/X: https://x.com/gavinortlundFacebook: https://www.facebook.com/TruthUnitesPage/

One of the trends that I'm observing in the American Church right now, maybe you see this too. Let me know in the comments is a trend toward overreaction, and so you have this polarization. So on the one hand, we have this massive pult in sort of liberal and secular directions. We see a lot of deconstruction, a lot of sort of melting away from a solid, healthy Christianity. We all feel that. I mean, I have five young kids. I'm thinking of raising my kids. They're starting to become teenagers.

We feel this. We feel the sense of alarm at just where the world is at. and there's so much that goes into that. And we're also, many of us are sort of exasperated with soft, accommodating forms of Christianity that don't have a backbone and aren't really standing against unhealthy trends. And speaking the truth, people want courage right now, and that's good. But then, and this is the human nature and how we sometimes react to one problem by falling into another one, there's also these alarming tendencies and extremes bubbling up in conservative spaces

as well. Am I alone in this? Do you see this? I'm concerned about this. I think about this all the time, maybe every day. This comes up in some way or another. I want to give my life to spreading the gospel to communicating the beauty of Christ right now. So it's worth thinking about anything that is going to detract us from that. And I'm seeing a lot of things bubbling up on the conservative side of things that are very troubling. The one that I want to talk about in this video is speech. And an increase of more extreme speech, ungodly speech, and the normalizing of this, this is very serious because the way we speak to each other, you know, online, on the internet, and then in the broader culture, this is a very serious matter. This has been on my mind lately because CNN did a recent segment

on Doug Wilson, who's a pastor in Idaho, who has very, very much a growing influence right now in certain circles. And there were lots of concerning aspects to this interview, such as the idea of wanting to repeal the 19th Amendment, which granted women the right to vote. That came up from one of his fellow pastors, and then Wilson defended this position in a follow-up, framing it as a matter of household voting. And then another concern is just speech, particularly speech about women. Unfortunately, this has been a pattern with Wilson. I'm not going to read the words on the screen. I'm not going to dwell on this. I'll link to in the video description to this article that you're seeing here on screen. And then also to this one, which I'll leave up for just a second here,

you can see some of the language that he has used over the years. You can read these, you know, check out these articles, read them in context. Unfortunately, the context doesn't help. There is simply no excuse whatsoever for this kind of language. It is a scandal to the gospel that a minister would use sexualized insults like this. Now, the rest of this video is not going to be about that. I'm not going to be criticizing one movement or person specifically because I think this is a broader trend. And it's not just in one place or another. I see this, again, the concern I have here is a normalization of ungodly speech. In some circles, especially with young people, for example, it's even perceived to be kind of

cool or edgy to use language that 10 years ago would have been seen as disgraceful, even five years ago, but times are changing. And so we've got to talk about these things coming up on the, this is one of these things that you see right now, and it's this kind of lunge toward ungodly speech. more extreme forms of speech being normalized. And I think Christ calls us to something better. So the rest of this video isn't going to be criticizing that as much as just, okay, reflecting biblically on what does this look like for us who are trying to be biblical in how we think about speech? Because this is not simple or formulaic either. And I try to offer some biblical

thoughts that might be constructive and helpful for people who are wrestling and thinking this through. Let me start by addressing one of the concerns that comes up right out of the gate. and that is you're attacking the wrong side here. You're, you know, people, I'm addressing this because I think people feel understandably in some cases defensive. And so I just want to make a bit of an appeal for openness. Here's what I see. Because the polarization is so thick and because people feel so embattled, sometimes the mentality is we can't call out any of the problems on our own side. So for Christians who are conservative, you know, we don't want to attack anything else that's on the conservative side. A metaphor could be you feel, you know, the enemy is shooting so many bullets at you

that you don't have time to worry about and you think it's wrong to talk about the soldier on your right or your left in the foxhole because the enemy, you know, so many bullets are coming at me that that's the urgent and pressing need and so forth. And the appeal that I want to make here for to try to create a little bit of openness to think about this is, is that if you're a conservative, an approach that says we can't criticize anything happening in conservative circles ultimately weakens conservatism, particularly in the long run. Just like if you never practice church discipline, your church becomes less healthy because it allows toxicity in to flourish, or to go back to the metaphor, if you're so focused on the enemy that you're

not willing to ever talk about problems with the people to your right and your left, if the person to your right pulls out a grenade and pulls out the pin. You know, you just have to stop and help him put the pin back in or at least throw the grenade or run away or something. You know, you can't just ignore that. Similarly, we have to be able to address sin and evil, whatever it happens. And in traditionally conservative spaces where we see misogynistic speech being normalized, where we see anti-Semitism on the rise, other forms of racism, if all articulation of concern about this is just brushed off as, well, that's just woke. This weakens and degrades conservative spaces

because it allows things that are real and are happening and are evil to become normalized and to fester and to become rooted. And so the appeal here is if you care about conservatism, don't just be defensive to every criticism about what happens in conservative spaces today. I hope that comes across right for the heart there

of why just all I'm saying so far is to have an open heart to consider. So let's talk for a minute about this issue of speech and what do we see happening here. Again, for the rest of this video, just not intending to attack, but just help think constructively for each of us. How do we do this? Because it's not simple. So let's first address this concern. What about Jesus and Paul? And for that matter, Elijah and Ezekiel. So we find harsh and extreme language in scripture. Jesus and Paul used very fierce polemics. The prophet Elijah uses sarcasm and mockery, in a sense, in First Kings 18 to the prophets of Bail. And then we have some very graphic and sensual imagery in the prophets like Ezekiel and elsewhere. And that is true. And that's where

we get into this. It actually is complicated to think through. So I've put together three reflections here that I'm going to offer to people thinking about these topics that I hope could be helpful. just to think this through. Number one, it may help us to distinguish between the gravity of biblical harsh speech versus the glibness that is often present in some modern harsh speech, especially on the internet. You know, I care about this topic a lot because I see this a lot, especially my young men online. And I think there's just a drastic undersensitivity to the dangers of sinful speech. And so what we can observe here is that biblically, when we find harsh or extreme language, it's not given with a chuckle or a smirk or a sense of cleverness. It's not characterized by bravado or snark. It's not performative.

It's often conjoined with a deep grief over the evil that is being addressed. So take the example of Jesus in Matthew chapter 23. He speaks very harshly, right? I mean, I don't know of any harsher passage than that, to be honest. I mean, he's saying, you know, you snakes and broods of vipers, how will you escape being sentenced to hell. He's speaking very stridently. But then look immediately how the chapter ends. There's lament over the sins of Jerusalem. Right after he's talked about them killing the prophets who go to them, he's saying, I would welcome you back. He's grieving over this evil. There's a genuine grief here. Much of the harsh language that we see proliferating today doesn't have this sense of godly grief. It doesn't have the sense of the Apostle Paul in Philippians 318, giving a warning

about the enemies of Christ with tears. Instead, sometimes it almost seems like it's gleeful and seeking victory over the other party. Rather than having a pastoral and protective concern, as Paul does when he warns about wolves that will arise in Acts 20, a lot of the harsh and strident speech today that we see in the church is more about scoring points or building a brand or all kinds of things that are sometimes not only more selfish, but even just kind of more petty and thin sometimes. And once you start looking for this, I'm not saying this solves every problem, but this is just one criterion to think through. Once you start looking for this, you can start to make distinctions between harsh speech that has gravity and love in it and a harsh speech that lacks those qualities.

When we think about this, I often think of this story of Edmund Clowny asking Dr. Martin Lloyd-Jones, the great Welsh preacher, how do we know when we're preaching in the energy of the flesh or in the power of the spirit? And his response is very intriguing and helpful to reflect upon. He says, if you're preaching in the energy of the flesh, you will feel exalted and lifted up. If you're preaching in the power of the spirit, you will feel awe and humility. I think this is true also for when we speak a hard rebuke or a difficult truth. We will have a lively sense in our hearts that I'm going to stand before God's judgment throne. There will be an awe and a humility, not a flippancy.

Unfortunately, a lot of the speech that we see today, especially on the line, lacks this humility. Here's the second thing to think about. We are not Jesus or Paul. we are not Elijah or Ezekiel. The harsh or extreme language that we find in scripture comes from authoritative leaders among God's people facing extreme circumstances. That does not mean it's never a model or that we can't learn from it, but it does mean that humility is needed to not too quickly put ourselves into their position because there's a lot of differences. Even for ordained ministers today. We do not have the same, thus saith the Lord, authority of a prophet or an apostle. And this

just means humility and how we think this through. There's differences between Paul and ourselves. I mean, one obvious one is the internet. You know, when we communicate over the internet, I try to speak in very restrained ways on the internet versus if I'm talking face-to-face with someone. You speak more openly. You know, people often who only know me through YouTube often and talk about how he's super nice and this kind of thing. But, you know, face to face, I'm much more candid, but I just think online we need to be more careful. And face-to-face is when you're more open.

The temptation of the flesh probably will push us in the other direction, you know, to be very flippant online, but then face-to-face we kind of pull back. And I think that's where we should be more open. But even apart from just, you know, circumstances like technology, the more basic point is we don't have the same level of authority as these biblical figures, and we're not facing all the same contexts. And so we need to be very careful here.

One of my friends put it to me like this, thinking this through this morning. He said, imagine that a pastor was wearing far too little clothing. Sorry, I don't know how else to make this point, but to say it. And then when he has confronted, he appeals to Isaiah 20 verse 2. And he says, well, look, it's in the Bible. Isaiah the prophet did this, therefore I can do it. I mean, that's a more obvious example, hopefully, but it shows the need for humility and just saying, well, there's an example of something in the scripture, therefore I have a blueprint that I can now follow. And what is needed here is humility to see our place in the bigger picture. To the extent that we do experience being led by the Lord to speak harsher truths, that will mean much more prayer, much more counsel, much more spending time in the word, much more

And again, probably not over the internet. But those are two setting up points that really leads to what I think is the main point I want to emphasize here that I hope could be helpful, especially for young men who watch my videos to think about this. The extremes are not the general model. The general pastoral ethos of the New Testament with regard to our speech to non-Christians should be derived from the repeated instructions to God's people that we find, not more one-off narrative examples of a person in a leadership position. We can learn from that as well, but we want to put the whole scripture together and then put the emphasis where the scripture puts the emphasis.

And so, you know, this is going to mean a real consideration of every time in the pastoral epistles, every time in the general, let's just say the New Testament epistles, where we find instruction for how Christians are to speak to non-Christians. here's some examples. Listen to how these land upon you. Titus 3-2, show perfect courtesy, perfect courtesy toward all people. Colossians 4-6, let your speech always be gracious seasoned with salt. 1st Peter 315, be prepared to make a defense, yet do it with gentleness and respect. Ephesians 429. This one is not about speech to non-Christians specifically, but still very relevant. Let no corrupting talk come out of your mouths, but only.

only what is good for building up. This should be the regular diet of our speech. This should be the norm. Kevin DeYoung has a response to Doug Wilson that is helpful on making this point about sarcasm and satire, not being the norm. These should be used sparingly

and against the hardened, not against would-be allies. I think that's very well said and leads to two or three final pastoral comments here to finish off, trying to round this out with comments that could be useful for people. Because, again, I recognize this is complicated, and there are times to crank it up a notch. There are times to be blunt. So that's why I think it's worth trying to think through the biblical nuances of this.

So a few final points. Number one, some speech is just always wrong. When we're recognizing that there are rare moments for more strident language, we should also say, okay, yeah, but some speech is just never okay. Some speech is so toxic and so sinful that we should have a zero tolerance policy and repentance and discipline should be required so that the church is not scandalized when it occurs. So in other words, no one should say, you know, well, I can just drop the worst curse words I know because I only do, I've only done that like twice in my life, so therefore it's okay. It's like, no, even those rare occasions where firmer or more strident or more colorful speech might be acceptable,

it should still have extremely tight parameters and be carefully measured. It's very interesting that in Matthew 12, Jesus does not say that you will give an account on judgment day for every evil word, but rather for every careless word. So biblical severity should never be sort of throw away and careless. It's not a reflexive outburst. It's sober and intentional and proportionate to the issue being addressed, aligned with the goals of love and restoration. Ultimately, it should carry an emotional weight of grief and longing and pastoral urgency. It shouldn't be flippant and have the lightness of just a witty jab.

I think this sometimes can This undercuts what you sometimes hear of when people say Well, I'm just telling the truth You know, I'm just telling it like it is And I think Jesus is actually calling us to say more than the truth But to speak words that are careful To exhibit great care You have a tight rain over our tongue

Be cautious A second comment is Cultural pressure increases Not decreases the need for godly speech I think sometimes people, the mentality that is a temptation for us in some circles is look how bad things are getting. We can't play by the normal rules, desperate times call for desperate measures. And so kind of normal patterns of speech are put on the back burner. And now we can speak in a more extreme way.

And to the extent that there is a fear that is motivating that, I don't despise that or look down on that. I understand we are in unusual times that does feel turbulent right now. But the appeal that I would make is that this makes all the more urgent to speak words of hope and life. And, you know, it's like when the darkness is deepening, the light of the hope of Christ should shine out all the brighter, not flicker out in frustration or bitterness. The Apostle Peter said, keep your conduct among the Gentiles honorable. Those words right there already worth thinking about. But then notice the context is so that when they speak against you as evildoers,

they may see your good deeds and glorify God on the day of visitation. So Peter is writing to Christians who are being maligned and being slandered. The pressure was real, but the call was in that context, even in dire circumstances, to live with honor and integrity in a way that glorifies God. And this is the charge, ultimately to have speech that reflects the beauty. and reality of Christ. Here's a sobering thought. People will draw conclusions about Christ based upon the words we use.

This should make us all tremble a little bit. Final pastoral point is just to remember, I'm going to, this is a practical one for if you have a difficult conversation coming up, or you're trying to think about this in a specific moment. If all else fails, think about this. Imagine Jesus is in the room with you right now when you're talking. It might sound kind of cheesy, but it's helpful. How would you speak, knowing Jesus is like standing over your shoulder?

At time, by the way, part of that will be to remember, if anyone feels condemned by this topic, to remember Jesus died for our sins, that includes our sins of speech. And so when we have spoken malicious words, when we have lied, and we have spoken ugly and toxic words, if we have done that, if we're willing to repent and bring that to him, he will forgive that. He and those sins get nailed to the cross along with our other sins. So none of us need to feel exposed and condemned by this topic. We can simply respond to Christ and say, okay, now, now I'm going to repent of that.

I'm going to acknowledge that. And then I'm going to speak out words of hope. But the other thing is just that remembering Jesus is in the room with you, it will restrain you at times. I also think at times it'll make you bold. it'll help you speak up and find your courage. And I think, you know, all of us have different temptations, but this is not formulaic, and it is not the case that the great need right now is more restraint.

That is not my position. That is not my feeling. I don't think restraint is the great need right now. I think that is one piece of what is needed in many times for all of us, but there's also this tremendous need to let loose words of hope and love and boldness because they are so desperately needed right now. I say this in almost every video, but I believe it, now is the time for evangelism.

There is so much disintegration. People are desperate for hope. Now is a great time to speak words of hope that reflect the beauty of Christ. And I believe to do that, we do need to resist multiple pressures at once. We need to resist whatever would detract us from the beauty of Christ.

And I feel so strongly about that. I want to keep speaking to this and give my life to it. I can. Let me know what you think in the comments. What did I miss here? What are the other things we need to think about? I think this is an ongoing project where we're going to be asking the Lord to help us. But I think this whole area is important. The Bible has, if anyone thinks, oh, speech, that's not really the big deal. Actually, the Bible has tremendous premium on our speech. It matters a great deal. How we as Christians speak to each other, about each other, to the

watching non-Christian world, all of this, people will draw conclusions upon Christ himself, rightly or wrongly, based upon us. That's why this topic is so important. So I hope this will give us some encouragement and reflection along the way, even as we keep working on this important topic. Thanks for watching, everybody.