Phil Thomson suggests Christian music has its own problems with the use of language.

This issue Cross Rhythms' hard-hitting columnist Phil Thomson takes a look at the use of bad language used by rock bands and suggests that polite Christian music has its own bad language problem as well.

"To make a solemn declaration or statement, possibly with an appeal to God, in confirmation of what is said" "To utter a form of oath lightly or irreverently, as an expression of anger, vexation or other feelings"

How far does your swearing go? You see, I'm always a bit sceptical of those who say they never swear. I wonder what they use for expletives, out of earshot, when the hammer hits the thumb. And there is surely some point to letting out a noise with a word attached to it. As long as you don't go too far. I know quite a few people who say it does them a lot of good. It is an honest, gut response to how they feel. Even in such a grey area, it really is fascinating what you can do with the twenty-six letters of our alphabet. Bad language, I fear, is a relative term.

The beauty of words, good or bad, is that they mean different things to different people - but that is also their undoing - for with their use comes responsibility, especially to those in the arts and media, who have but one shot at the meaning (or otherwise) and cannot always fix the listener with eye contact or intonation. Their search for economy and precision can either leave everything to the imagination, or nothing. So much depends on the message and the motive.

Take the humble lyric, for instance; never elevated to the status of sermon or maxim; I am convinced that in large areas of the Christian music industry it is a second-class citizen. Where people are scared of truth, falling sales, or something they don't immediately understand, they settle for less. There's no gut reaction, only a measured response and the acceptance of the status quo. Which reinforces the idea that words are actually a very limited form of communication. Treat them so, and they are easily abused.

Last summer in a Florida court, the band '2 Live Crew' were sentenced to prison terms for continuing to perform following the history-making ban on their latest release' As Nasty As They Wanna Be.' It was an obscenity trial which cut right to the heart of the arts funding debate still raging in the USA, with demonstrations, record store prosecutions, much media hype about the black/white divide, and inevitably, rocketing album sales. There definitely was a case to answer. For the record, there were 163 uses of the word 'bitch', 117 explicit terms for the male and female genitalia, 226 uses of the 'f word, with repeated accounts of sexual deviation - that's a lot of nasty.

For the band to hang the 'nigger-bashing' on what amounts to issues of censorship was pushing it, even if they were able to point the finger at the excesses of such as comedian Andrew Dice Clay or white metal band W.A.S.P. Extremes in the name of 'art' always raise the temperature - and the stakes - but the band's concepts and language could never be condoned. The plain fact is that most of this kind of stuff is simply unnecessary. Yet it was conveniently and cynically exploited for the simple expedient of money.

Now here's the point. Could you say the same of Christian music? I'm talking mainstream, white and MOR, which is by far the biggest market. Much of its use of language is so safe, so 'right', so repetitively banal, so dangerously close to being unnecessary that if you were to come in from the opposite angle, you could easily say that it is also conveniently and cynically exploited for much the same reason. Where there's a living to be made, there's justification. Sometimes it's good; but not always.

Of course '2 Live Crew's efforts were gratuitous and offensive. Yet if it is wrong to make a crust out of the subversive language of rap, might it just be as wrong to make it out of the stupifyingly numbing language of evangelicalism? I fear that a lot of what we 'turn on to' enters our language as legitimate spiritual communication, works its way down to the level of everyday conversation and is then thoughtlessly and effortlessly endorsed.

Nobody stops to weigh what they are saying. Lack of imagination and an insatiable appetite for the ultimate spiritual panacea have eroded standards in the use of the words we listen to; there's still too much 'loss and cross' and 'tree and calvary' around. And when it comes to praise and worship, what on earth is happening to our language? Some of it is becoming nothing more than monosyllabic garbage. I swear the Music Industry and the Mindless Punter are in collusion to deny the risk-taking lyricist his or her moment.

As far as swearing is concerned, if you need to clean up your act, do it. The right form of communication is vital, no matter who is listening. There was one dictionary definition of it which I took to immediately. It seemed to have a bearing on what sometimes passes as Christian song-writing: To utter a harsh, guttural sound, as an angry cat or other animal'. In some cases, that might just have more meaning.