The Coarse Course of American Culture

Hilton Head Island, SC – August 21, 2022
The Chapel Without Walls
Jeremiah 6:6-12; Jeremiah 6:13-19
A Sermon by John M. Miller

Text – “Were they ashamed when they committed abomination? No, they were not at all ashamed; they did not know how to blush.” – Jeremiah 6:15a (and 8:12a)

  

Jeremiah was surely the most gloomy of all the biblical prophets. This is linguistically validated by the fact that a caustically carping criticism of anything is often called a “jeremiad.” Furthermore, the passage I chose to illustrate today’s sermon title was such a severe criticism that it is repeated verbatim in both the 6th and the 8th chapters of Jeremiah’s prophecy. But then, biblical prophets always appeared when things were bad, not when things were good, and things were really bad when Jeremiah came along.

 

Jeremiah was convinced that the wheels were rapidly coming off Judean culture at the end of the seventh century BCE, that is, about 610 to 590 BCE or so. He was right. The Babylonians came and conquered Judah and destroyed Jerusalem in 587 BCE. And why did this happen? It happened, according to Jeremiah, because too many of the Judeans had become too corrupt for their culture to survive its own internal degradation. Ultimately, he felt the people had given up on God, and therefore they were destined to collapse.

 

Many old people tend to think that everyone younger than they are has “gone to the dogs,” as we say. Probably that thought has always existed among the elderly. But is it true, or is it even often true? Might it be that old people think more highly of themselves than they ought to think (as it says in the Episcopalian Book of Common Prayer), and they think less highly of many younger people? I wonder about these things, because I realize I may be just an old crank who is getting older and crankier in every passing day, and I wonder whether I should be preaching a sermon like this at all. But, as I do every Sunday, I shall press on, letting the homiletic chips fall wherever they may. However, I will admit my elderly impressions may be suspect, and if so, you should exercise your own conclusions about what follows, especially if you also are a geezer.

 

It seems to me that profanity and scatology are much more prevalent among many more people of all ages than was the case fifty or seventy-five years ago. Naughty words were almost never heard in “polite society” back then, however it is that “polite society” was defined back then. On the other hand, only one president in American history ever resigned his office, and he did so fifty years ago because he knew that he would be convicted of impeachment charges if he did not resign. In the events leading up to that resignation, many transcripts of the conversations he had secretly audiotaped in the Oval Office had profane words that he or others used in those conversations. Because he kept all those audiotapes, and the Supreme Court said he must give them up, he was hoisted on his own technological petard. When the tapes were publicly aired, however, always the transcripts said “expletive deleted” whenever a naughty word was uttered. The profanity was never printed.

 

That no longer happens. Politicians, entertainers, newscasters, sports figures, and many others say words on camera or in public that never would have been used decades ago under such circumstances. The offending words are regularly printed in newspapers and magazines. It is astonishing to hear highly respected people use these off-color words.

 

Such language betrays a deliberately limited vocabulary.  Lots of folks don’t seem to realize they don’t need to use socially-unacceptable words to get their message or meaning across. This may suggest that many Americans either never were taught or and did not learn that they should not use foul language, or they chose to ignore such advice, if indeed it was ever given in their homes, schools, or other honored social circles.

 

But it is much more than coarse language which indicates a coarse course of American culture. Clothing does as well. Some young men, and even older men, wear their pants low enough that their underwear or their upper bare backsides are on public display. Some women wear blouses or dresses that, in the new days of LGBTQ, leave no doubt that they are women, and possibly what used to be called “Jezebels.” People now pay good money to buy jeans that are mechanically ripped below and above the knee. I guess it is a fashion statement, but it also is a cultural statement. I am saying these things with a light touch so as not to be perceived as a latter-day Jeremiah, who was clearly a grouch. However, I would certainly rather be considered a Jeremiah than an Ahab or a Jehoram or a Simon the Magician. If you are not familiar with those nasty biblical characters, it may be because people today don’t know the Bible like they did fifty or seventy-five years ago, which also may hasten the decline of our potentially catapulting culture.  

 

Many contemporary movies and songs are peppered with profanity. Last Monday evening Lois and I watched Dolores Claiborne on television. It is a captivating 1995 film about aberrant behavior, based on a novel by Stephen King. The actors, especially Kathy Bates as the title character, played their parts very well, but the language was simply atrocious. I am convinced many movies have awful language in order to get an “R” rating, which is better for ticket sales.

 

Modesty for many has also lost its popularity. Millions of people “let it all hang out,” in whatever behavior or context they might choose to do that. All violence is illustrative of a certain kind of coarseness, and we are becoming an ever more violent society, especially because of our unique attachments to firearms, compared to all other nations on earth.

 

Do these examples of a coarse course in culture suggest that we are a nation in decline? What do more dignified nations think of us? George H.W. Bush wanted us to be “a kinder, gentler nation,” but we were not that when he was president, and even less so when his son was president. As someone who was born of Canadian parents and who therefore has always had more Canadian than American relatives, I think Canadians represent more kindness and gentleness and even gentility than do Americans. If so, why is that? What are we missing that we are becoming more coarse, if in truth that is happening? Why have we become so rough around the edges?

 

I cannot clearly validate this, and I suspect it cannot be validated, but my supposition is that every unusually powerful nation that ever existed eventually became culturally crass. If power corrupts, as Lord Acton stated, it may also coincidentally promote coarseness. At the zenith of their power, no one would accuse Nebuchadnezzar, Rameses II, Julius Caesar, Attila the Hun, Genghis Khan, Henry VIII, Hitler, Stalin, Mao, or Kim Il Sung or the nations they ruled to be  epitomes of refinement. Raw power is raw, but refined power is refined.

 

Speaking as God on behalf of God, Jeremiah says, “I am full of…wrath…; I am weary of holding it in. Pour it out upon the children in the street, and upon the gatherings of young men, also; both husband and wife shall be taken, the old folk and the very aged….I will stretch out my hand against the inhabitants of the land,” says the Lord (Jeremiah 6:11-12). The culture of Judah in 600 BCE was ragged, and the culture of the USA in 2022 is more than a tad tattered.

 

Are we now fully in a totally corrupt state? Probably not. It takes most powerful nations centuries to dissipate into a has-been status. That was the case for Babylon, Egypt, Greece, and Rome. Germany, Japan, and Russia were huge players on the world stage for only a relatively short period of time. All three fell relatively quickly from the highest point of their influence, although Britain and France are still among the most influential of the world’s countries, even though they are not on the highest rungs of the power ladder.

 

Americans do not engage in gunboat diplomacy anymore; now we use guided missile diplomacy. Exterminating the leader of Al Qaeda as he stands on an apartment balcony in Kabul is not a refined action; it is coarse, but very effective. The speaker of the US House of Representatives goes to Taiwan, deliberately causing the Chinese to react in a frothy frenzy, and the Chinese send missiles cascading into the East China Sea on all sides of Taiwan as a raw show of force.

 

Refined policies are nuanced. Coarse policies rely on threats of brute strength. Politicians knowingly tell lies, but they do so because they know their base loves lies. Nonetheless, it is base to play to the base if the base is base, and by definition it is a base base who loves lies.

 

Without understanding what we are saying, we defiantly proclaim, “Stick and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me.” But words do hurt; they pierce spirits and damage souls. Crass words are hurled from one side of the globe to the other, and from one side of the room or street to the other, with no thought given to how innocent parties may be injured by careless, coarse words. Perhaps the guilty deserve to be bombastically bombarded, but not the innocent, not the ones who are attempting to refine a culture that seems intent on destroying itself.

 

From 1619 to 1865, most Black people in America were slaves. From the end of the Civil War to the present, white supremacists have done everything in their power to keep Blacks subservient, and far too frequently they have succeeded. “They have healed the wounds of my people lightly, saying, ‘Peace, peace,’ when there is no peace. Were they ashamed when they committed abomination? No, they were not at all ashamed; they did not know how to blush” (Jeremiah 6:14-15).

 

Those who feel no shame have lost all awareness of what constitutes coarse behavior. They think any behavior is acceptable, especially if it succeeds in putting others down. In the absence of cultural folkways and mores, they live in a no-holds-barred world. A young man with an automatic rifle shoots into the crowd watching a parade, killing many, and injuring many more. Other young men use their automobiles as weapons as they careen through marchers or observers in other parades. The scenes are repeated over and over on television news shows, and other young men get other ideas for their own repeat performances. Is there any nation in the world that is more coarse than the USA? Americans surely think so, we hope so, but is it so?

 

In 2016 a presidential candidate was caught on camera boasting of sexually abusing women. It did not damage his campaign, and it even may have enhanced it. Who are we? What have we become? Is there no limit to the depths into which we continually plunge?

 

Before and after signing a contract with an NFL team for $23 million dollars per year for ten years, an obviously talented athlete is accused of sexual abuse by twenty-four women. He buys silence from all but two of them. No one ejects him from the NFL, and all things considered, his punishment is quite modest. Who are we? What have we become?

 

Crime is on the rise again. In part because of the pandemic, in part due to other factors, including the highest rate of inflation in decades, poverty is once more on the upswing. Sympathy and empathy seem to be declining. The Culture Wars may be another index of a culture that seems to find itself on an irreparable coarse course. The people who declare culture wars appear to have no idea of what constitutes admirable culture.

 

“Thus says the Lord: ‘Stand by the roads, and look, and ask for the ancient paths, where the good way is, and walk in it, and find rest for your souls’” Jeremiah 6:16. Self-destruction is not a forgone conclusion, nor is collapse an historical certainty. With God to inspire us, there is always hope for a course correction, a societal re-direction.

 

Besides, this sermon is being delivered to a congregation of mostly well-seasoned senior citizens, most of whom no longer possess the oomph necessary for engaging in a scandalously coarse course, even if we were so inclined. Though we are not a major part of the problem, neither shall we be a major part of the solution. It is our children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren and their peers who must turn the corner, if the corner is to be turned. Nonetheless, we cannot afford to ignore the problem, because it is our nation’s problem, and we are citizens of the nation. Therefore it is also our problem, because we are and will always be allied to this nation, come what may.    

 

By definition, a coarse nation is not a refined nation. National refinement takes a very long time. Through many centuries, China, India, Greece, Rome, Turkey, Italy, Japan, Germany, France and Britain managed to become refined, but through one misstep or another, they dropped from the zeniths of their cultural refinement. Now China and India are rising again. What we and the world call “America” has never been notably refined, because for most of our brief history we were constantly moving our frontier to the west, and that resulted in much bloodshed among both the pioneers and the peoples whom their expansion displaced. When weapons rather than ideas are the main means of “progress,” the nature of the progress may be dubious indeed. Under those circumstances it was almost impossible for us to become very refined.

 

If America had had the luxury after World War II of being the world’s sole superpower, and there had been no Soviet Union to contend with, we might have become what we always have thought we were. But we didn’t have that luxury, and we became much more coarse because we didn’t.

 

We certainly don’t need a return to seventeenth century New England Puritanism. But a strong jolt of gentility would serve us well. We could still manage to do it - - - but will we?