Working at Plugged In, I have a front-row seat when it comes to observing trends in our culture. And one of the ones we’ve talked about for years is our society’s slow-but-steady descent into increasing coarseness. You don’t have to look very hard to find evidence of this, especially if you’re tuned into to what’s happening in the entertainment world.
That said, I’m increasingly aware of how vulgarity continues to seep into new areas—places where I’m not expecting to have to deal with it.
The latest apparent front: movie trailers. It doesn’t seem like it was that long ago that you’d never hear profanity in a trailer approved for all audiences. Now, I’m hearing words such as “d–n,” “h—,” “b–ch” and abuses of God’s name in them. I think that’s significant for families, because even if you’re taking your kids to a PG or PG-13 film you’ve thoroughly vetted for content concerns, you may find yourself surprised by profanity (not to mention other content concerns) in the trailers before the actual movie even begins.
I’ve also noticed that the casual use of profanity is increasing in print and online forums as well. I was glancing over Slate.com’s homepage the other day, for example, and I noticed an uncensored use of the word “s—ty” in an article blurb. It struck me as equal parts lazy, gratuitous and mildly shocking that the writer couldn’t have selected a less profane adjective to get people’s attention.
But here I am writing about it—so it obviously got my attention. Which is another reason, I think, we’re seeing more and more communicators stooping into the verbal gutter.
My third example: Newsweek. Since controversial editor Tina Brown (who also shook things up at Vanity Fair and the New Yorker) took over the news-oriented magazine in 2010, things have had a decidedly more tabloid-esque feel. Even so, to open a recent issue and find Charlie Sheen seated in the lotus position flipping two birds to the camera was an unwanted surprise.
Trying to avoid our culture’s coarseness, and trying to shield our families from it, continues to be an uphill battle—one that’s getting steeper all the time. I don’t expect that reality to change.
But Scripture calls those who follow Christ to embrace a different standard: One that’s shaped by truth and grace, one that looks radically different from the world’s lowest-common denominator gratuity.
In Romans 12:1-2, the Apostle Paul exhorts, “Therefore, I urge you, brothers and sisters, in view of God’s mercy, to offer your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and pleasing to God—this is your true and proper worship. Do not conform to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Then you will be able to test and approve what God’s will is—his good, pleasing and perfect will.”
I especially like the way Eugene Petersen paraphrases these verses in The Message:
So here's what I want you to do, God helping you: Take your everyday, ordinary life—your sleeping, eating, going-to-work, and walking-around life—and place it before God as an offering. Embracing what God does for you is the best thing you can do for him. Don't become so well-adjusted to your culture that you fit into it without even thinking. Instead, fix your attention on God. You'll be changed from the inside out. Readily recognize what he wants from you, and quickly respond to it. Unlike the culture around you, always dragging you down to its level of immaturity, God brings the best out of you, develops well-formed maturity in you.
The coarse aspects of our culture will always have the capacity to drag us down into the mud and muck if we let them. But the Gospel invites us to live differently, to “be changed from the inside out” so that we can cooperate with God as he shapes and molds us, leading us on a different path, a path to “well-formed maturity” as we offer our lives to Him day in and day out.
Our culture may be headed the wrong way. But I’m deeply thankful that our faith offers a redemptive, restorative vision of how we can live differently as we seek, individually and collectively, to be salt and light in a badly fractured world.
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