Recently, I ended a 30 year career as a youth minister. My context for ministry changed significantly throughout this time; I worked in suburban and urban congregations, small and large ones, and in several denominations. Throughout it all, I did maintain some consistent rules and policies, especially around language.
I’m told now by 30 somethings that I and other adults at one particular parish were the first adults they’d encountered to challenge their use of ‘gay’ or ‘lame’ as descriptions. “What exactly IS homosexual about that?” Bill would ask a complaining teen, and we would patiently wait for them to work it out. And they did: Nothing at all in this context was gay or queer and the use of gay as a derogatory term was cruel. We never said this actually to them, I don’t think. But they got there.
I was also very reluctant to ban specific words. If a teenager needed to curse to speak, it told me important things: there was something hard to be said, something for which words did not come easily, or something that triggered a deep or impassioned response. That was all important and necessary information for connection and ministry.
I discovered in my work with young people that they might choose specific words and phrases to test and question, try out and explore, or struggle to describe but that they were also always testing our reactions to their words. Were we listening? Would we be triggered by something salacious or edgy and cease to see them? Could we reach behind the words and hear what was really being said?
The give and take of communication, and the ability to hold each other accountable for the effects and impacts of language with empathy and often humor, requires trust and respect. Prohibition does not work; it just isn’t effective. George Carlin’s stand-up bit on media censorship [Here] comes to mind as a funny way to think about the futility of banning words. Things that must never be said must be said to be banned. It’s an obvious loop that should reveal the foolishness of the endeavor itself.
Which of course brings me back to recent actions by state legislatures and Boards of Education to ban ideas. Right now, their focus is on all conversation and content regarding race, gender, class, and faith in America but this kind of thing is not new.
In 2015, then Governor Scott banned use of the phrase “climate change” from state documents. [Here] I do not know how anyone can examine coastline shifts due to rising sea levels, maintain water integrity within the Everglades, measure and mitigate air toxins in dense urban areas, or indeed responsibly plan for any of Florida’s possible futures outside of the scope of climate change. Belief and magical thinking have nothing to do with the realities of superstorm hurricanes. Banning discussion of climate change only exposes Florida to more and unnecessary dangers. It’s a stunning abdication of the obligations of government to ensure our health, safety, and general welfare.
The same holds true around Critical Race Theory and the dire needs we have to delve into the truths of American history in order to heal, thrive, and perhaps survive. “Can we not pretend that didn’t happen?” is a phrase that we white people must ask over and over again. We must insist on delving more deeply, asking better questions, learning more facts.
We don’t understand the neighborhood and suburban patterns in our cities and regions until we grasp redlining, a practice of isolating areas as too poor or risky for investment, or the Homestead Acts, processes of giving formerly Native lands to generally white people who would move their families or industries and occupy the land, gaining ownership. We don’t understand the lack of generational wealth in the Black community until we comprehend the systematic destruction of viable Black economic centers. If we want to fix what is broken in our country -the immense wealth gaps, our toxic environmental trajectories, racial discrimination and oppression- we have to know more about how we got where we are now.
There are fundamental reasons banning words and ideas won’t work in an at least somewhat free society like ours, and it is my work with young people that informs how I see them. Firstly, lazy or manipulative use of language must be revealed for what it is. Laws requiring affordable housing are not excuses to build shoddily, but affordable becomes cheaper becomes poorer quality becomes derelict very easily. Like a teenager who says everything he hates is retarded, and cannot see how that language can be hurtful, we have to illuminate the through lines, reveal the connections so that real learning takes place.
Secondly, we have to be flexible and adaptive in our use and acceptance of language. While banning certain words or phrases is ultimately futile, those proscriptions themselves can challenge us to describe reality in other terms. Don’t want to hear about Climate Change? Then listen to this story about a hurricane and flood, a fire and mudslide, a tornado where funnel clouds are only usually seen in The Wizard of Oz… Don’t want to hear about Critical Race Theory? Then listen to this story of a family bombed out of their home in Philadelphia in the 1980s and how Lakota is now being taught in South Dakota public schools after being forbidden for decades.