Once at BYU-Idaho, my roommate and I drove clear across state from Rexburg to Boise, crashed at a cousin’s house, and then got up at 4am in order to catch the absolute cheapest flight home for the Holidays that we could find^[1]As a general rule, one does not attend BYU-Idaho if one has a surplus of disposable income laying around.. We reserved a taxi to pick us up at dark-thirty. As the grizzled old cab driver ferried us up to the airport, someone cut him off at the freeway entrance. “G-d damn piece of s***,” he groused loudly, “The hell is wrong with ya?” My roommate and I just smiled at each other, because we suddenly realized we were hearing genuine swearing for the first time in months.

Not that we hadn’t been hearing swear words this entire time, mind you; plenty of the student body at Rexburg still dropped their fair share of profanities–but it was always with a giggle, a smirk, a deviant wink and a shifty-eyed smile, like they were getting away with something, because they were getting away with something. We had all been lectured since children to avoid vulgarisms as not only uncouth but sacrilegious–such that to sneak in an occasional swear word had a deliciously subversive thrill about it.

It was specifically at BYU, in fact, where a group of friends first exposed me to The Boondock Saints–a gratuitously violent, expletive-laden vigilante fantasy whose primary appeal (seriously, this is what its fans always gleefully highlight) is the sheer versatility of the f-words used therein, and the scene where William DeFoe calls his male lover a “f*g” in bed.^[2]I did not stay friends with them for much longer. It’s the sort of film one would only find boldly shocking in a culture that finds swearing itself boldly shocking.

But dropping swear words on the sly is not the same as actually swearing. True swearing is not self-conscious, nor deviant, nor a juvenile titillation; true swearing explodes out of you organically, impulsively, passionately, without malice and without premeditation. It emerges without compulsory means when someone cuts you off on an empty freeway at four in the morning; or when your hammer slides off the roof in the middle of a grueling roofing project; or when you spill all the tire nuts in the snow while fixing a flat^[3]These were all Idaho experiences featuring yours truly.. You get the idea. What the kids at BYU and BYU-I were doing wasn’t swearing, but merely play-acting at swearing, pretend swearing, pantomiming swearing; what that taxi driver in Boise did was actual swearing. Truth be told, it just felt so much more honest, even a relief, to at long last hear real swearing again.

Mormonism has a complex relationship with swearing. From Primary clear up through adulthood, we ceaselessly drill our children and ourselves to avoid swearing at all costs. We read Exodus 20:7 and James 3:3-10 as screeds against obscenity specifically^[4]As opposed to declamations against swearing false oaths, or against speaking maliciously more broadly.. We repeatedly tell ourselves to “bridle our passions” (Alma 38:12), to not give expression to those crass and vulgar words that “offend the Spirit.” It is one of our defining shibboleths, up there with no tea & coffee, no R-rated movies, only one pair of earrings on women, and modest clothing. I knew a missionary, the only member of the Church in his entire inner-city high school, who told of dropping a stray “dammit!” in the hall one day, only for every single gang-banger in ear-shot–dudes who blasted the crassest Hip-Hop from their rides and who swore a steady stream of profanities all the day long—to suddenly gang up on him and tell him to never use that word again, cause he was a Mormon and he should know better.

The societal pressure is real, and so we go to comical lengths to sanitize our swearings, using everything from those old standbys “dang,” “gosh,” and “heck,” to more boundary pushing fare like “freakin’,” “shiz,” and “B–.” An ex-Marine Bishop of mine reported training himself to shout out “Cookies!” instead of profanities in the service, even when his unit was under enemy fire. A roommate of mine in Utah started saying “blerg” after Liz Lemon on 30 Rock. The release of Mean Girls and Napoleon Dynamite in 2004 were veritable god-sends to the Youth of Zion, because we could finally make “fetch” happen–for a few brief, glorious years there, we were able to blend in with the larger pop-culture without calling too much attention to our self-consciously clean language.

Yet we have our own traditions of colorful language; folk-tales of J. Golden Kimball, the “Swearing Apostle” of the Heber J. Grant era^[5]Although Kimball was more precisely a Seventy, not an Apostle., still circulate affectionately to this day. We tell, for example, of the time a Seminary Teacher told him he would just as soon commit adultery as drink Coca Cola, to which Kimball quipped, “Who the hell wouldn’t?” or the time he declared, “I won’t go to Hell for swearing because I repent too damn fast!” or the time he knocked on President Grant’s door and said, “Heber, some son of a bitch stole my lawn mower and I just came down here to see if you had it.” And so on.

Partly we still tell those old folk-stories as a safety valve of sorts, for when we need a break from the constant pressure to keep our tongue in check during our stress-filled mortal probation. But we also still share them because I suspect, deep down, we intuit that swearing is not the most important thing we should be focusing on. “I love that man better who swears a stream as long as my arm yet deals justice to his neighbors and mercifully deals his substance to the poor,” declared no less than the Prophet Joseph Smith, “than the long, smooth-faced hypocrite”^[6]Teachings of the Prophet Joseph Smith, ed. Joseph Fielding Smith, 1976, pg. 303.. And in this, he was only paraphrasing the Savior: “Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For ye pay tithe of mint and anise and cummin, and have omitted the weightier matters of the law: judgment, mercy, and faith. These ought ye to have done and not to leave the other undone” (Matt. 23:23). Certainly my time at Rexburg was populated by people who wouldn’t dream of dropping a swear word, yet who still piously engaged in the most appalling dishonesty via Summer Sales–they paid tithing on their commissions, but neglected the weightier matters of honesty and truth.

We were always lectured at the various BYUs that obedience in the small things facilitates obedience in the big things–that rigid adherence to, say, the dress and grooming standards, the beard-bans, and no-swearing rules, were those small things by which great things would come to pass. The thinking appeared to be that, if you learn to strain at gnats, you will definitely strain at camels. Except, of course, that is not what Christ taught at all, no; as the Savior scathingly noted, those who strain at gnats are the ones most likely to swallow camels whole.

What offended the Savior more than anything wasn’t swearing or immodesty, but hypocrisy. The most vicious insult he ever lobbed at the self-righteous Pharisees was, again, “Oh ye hypocrites!” And this hypocrisy is still with us today; the political Hip-Hop duo Run the Jewels, on their explosive 2016 track “A Report to the Shareholders: Kill Your Masters”, lambasted those who “Talk clean and bomb hospitals/So I speak with the foulest mouth possible.” (Certainly I knew way too many BYUI students in the 2000s who talked clean, turned off movies with swear words, yet still whole-heartedly supported the invasion of Iraq and all our attendant war-crimes). I dare say that these lyrics’ sentiments were ones that Joseph Smith–perhaps even the Savior himself–might have approved of.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not trying to give anyone a psychological excuse to let loose a stream of profanities over the pulpit or whatever; civility does matter, endless swearing swiftly becomes a bore, and it can be nice to have a breather from the endless profanities of the world. But I do think it important to keep a proper perspective in place, of what really matters, and where the majority of our limited mental energy should be focused. I once heard a poet–a BYU grad–say that the older he gets, the more he is convinced that God does not care about nearly as many things as we think he cares about; but the things that the Almighty does care about, he absolutely cares about. And I increasingly suspect that swearing is not one of them.