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No Such Thing As Bad Words: A Manifesto on Taming the Tongue

GOD FORBIDS SWEARING, CURSING, AND DIRTY WORDS
—YET THE BIBLE MAKES USE OF ALL THREE.
What do we do with scriptures that feature holy men, prophets, and apostles swearing, cursing, and even using dirty words, obscenities, and colorful slang?

And what does it mean for your fourteen-year-old son who would love to say that word?

According to Pastor Douglas Wilson, there are no stone tablets stored in heaven listing what we cannot say. Instead, taming and disciplining the tongue requires more work and maturity than just appealing to a list. This book is an invitation to that hard work.

No Such Thing As Bad Words is not a license to say whatever comes to mind when stuck in traffic or stubbing your toe. Instead, it's a call to speak with authority.
For death and life are in the power of your tongue (Prov. 18:21).

248 pages, Paperback

Published March 17, 2026

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About the author

Douglas Wilson

320 books4,727 followers
I write in order to make the little voices in my head go away. Thus far it hasn't worked.

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Displaying 1 - 21 of 21 reviews
Profile Image for Ezra Youngren.
52 reviews4 followers
April 17, 2026
Fun. Relentlessly biblical and witty, as always.
Profile Image for Ed Lang.
49 reviews7 followers
July 22, 2026
Here’s the gold. Guidelines for godly satire:


“So let us imagine a potential satirist who is wondering if he ought to develop this particular “spiritual gift.” What questions should he ask and answer? What principles should he follow to help him distinguish satire that will be (in the long run) edifying in the Church from that which will be destructive to the Church? The following list is not exhaustive, but I do believe it answers the questions John raised in his review. Checklists should never be employed in a mechanical and quantitative way, but if that is kept in mind I think these principles should be helpful, especially since they are geared more to the character of the satirist than to an abstraction like “good satire.”

1. A godly satirist should be a member of a worshipping community of orthodox and faithful Christians, and he should live in such a way as to be accountable to others for his words and actions. He should not be the sole judge and arbiter of the words that come from his mouth and keyboard. He should be one who knows how to live fruitfully in community with other Christians (Eph. 5:21).

2. A godly satirist should be steeped in the language and categories of Scripture. This should be done through constant reading and rereading, and/or listening repeatedly to Scripture on audio. Spurgeon said of Bunyan that if you pricked him anywhere, his blood would run bibline. It should be the same here (2 Tim. 3:16-17).

3. A godly satirist should have a warm and affectionate relationship with his wife, sons, daughters, mother, and father. No close member of his family should flinch when he walks into the room (Col. 3:19, 21).

4. A godly satirist should be well-educated, well-read in the kind of literature that he is seeking to contribute to. A good ear comes not only from practice, but also from listening long and thoughtfully to those who are gifted and have practiced the same art. The list would include individuals who are not worthy of imitation in every respect (e.g. Swift, Mencken) and it should include those who are genuine exemplars (e.g. Spurgeon, Chesterton).

5. A godly satirist should study to learn the quantitative boundary between satire and scurrility, knowing from the outset that there is such a boundary. It is easy to pretend that there is no “logical” difference whatever between 37 lashes (sorry! xxxvii lashes) and 42 lashes, but the Scriptures say that the former is not necessarily degrading and the latter necessarily is (Dt. 25:1-3).

6. A godly satirist should study the qualitative difference between satire and scurrility. This is a matter of timbre and tone. No mechanical rules can be set down for it, but it is a very important distinction to make (Heb. 5:14). It is the shrillness or “screech” test. The ability to tell the difference between right and wrong in this kind of thing is a matter of long practice and godly maturity.

7. A godly satirist should not be too young. Paul tells Timothy not to ordain a neophyte, what Tyndale translated as “young scholar” (1 Tim. 3:6). The reason for this is to avoid the snare of the devil. An acid tongue is frequently a diabolical tongue. In his Table Talk, Martin Luther once quoted an old instructor of his who had long wondered how St. Jerome, God’s grouch, had ever gotten saved. But old and crotchety men come from somewhere, and where they come from are young men who were promoted too soon and too rapidly (usually because of native intellectual ability) to positions that then go to their heads. Because satire assumes a stance of rhetorical superiority, there is a real snare in it for certain young men. So native ability is no substitute for seasoned experience. And if I may speak autobiographically here, I was in my thirties before I began using satire in any kind of consistent way, and I was well into my forties before anybody noticed.

8. A godly satirist should target lack of proportion, not exhibit lack of proportion (Matt. 23:24).

9. A godly satirist should look carefully (and regularly) at the effect he is having on younger Christians who know him and desire to imitate him (2 Cor. 11:1). Does their imitation of him lead regularly to relational disasters in their lives? Does their imitation cause one firestorm after another in the church? Or do they, using wisdom, imitate more than just the fact that their mentor occasionally uses satire, and go on to make appropriate distinctions having to do with objects, levels, occasions, warrant, and so on? If the imitator is becoming more and more like the satirist, is this a matter that causes dismay in all godly observers? Or is it something that encourages them?

10. A godly satirist should have long experience in letting love cover a multitude of sins (1 Pet. 4:8). He should not be the kind of man who consistently gets bad service in restaurants. One of his chief characteristics in his day-to-day living should be his patience (Gal. 5:22). Road rage should be an alien temptation for him.

11. A godly satirist should be courageous. Lawful satire is leveled at targets that know how to defend themselves, and that will defend themselves. As King Lune of Archenland put it, “Never taunt a man save when he is stronger than you: then, as you please.” Lawful satire is a challenge to engage; nothing is more unbecoming than to act surprised when the challenge is received and answered. Don’t start what you are not prepared to finish.

12. A godly satirist should be a man who knows how to humble himself in order to seek forgiveness from others for sins he has committed (Jas. 5:16). If he is too proud to humble himself when he has sinned, then he is too proud for this calling.

13. A godly satirist should not be an angry man. His demeanor should generally be jolly, not angry. Man’s anger does not advance God’s righteousness (Jas. 1:20). Anger, even when it is righteous (Eph. 4:26), is like manna and goes bad overnight (Eph. 4:27). Occasions of anger are appropriate (as Christ’s example shows in Mk. 3:5), but if it is an accurate description of a man’s general demeanor, he should not even think about satire.

14. A godly satirist should not have “little man syndrome,” meaning that he should not employ satire because he has something deep inside to prove, usually to his father. If he is trying to make the little voices in his head go away, he should be aware that the use of satire only enflames them.

15. A godly satirist must be free of all envy. James tells us that truly destructive battles occur within the church because of envy (Jas. 4:1-6). This means that a satirist must be sure in his heart that he is not in any envious way dazzled or bewildered by that which he is attacking. The history of polemical exchanges has seen more than a few moralistic denouncers of immorality whose real beef was that they were not getting any. Envy operates on the philosophy that if “I can’t have it, nobody should have it,” and this can easily be expressed through moralistic denunciations. But the prophet Nathan would not have been able to deal with David rightly if Nathan had been secretly desiring Bathsheba for himself. Envious satire is brittle satire, and not very effective.

16. A godly satirist should know the difference between weakness and arrogance, and, as far as possible, reserve his arrows for the latter. No doubt sometimes the former are caught in the crossfire—some simple widow inIsrael probably thought that the gold sanctified the altar because her rabbi had told her that. Christ’s words of rebuke were directed at the rabbi, but His words still had a relationship to her. In the same way, if I were to attack some huckster televangelist for telling people to send ten dollars to get an anointed cloth to put on the top of their television in order to juice up the healing power of his weekly show, this attack does affect those simple souls who are getting fleeced. And some of them may indeed take offense because their spiritual master is being insulted. But this is not the intent—the main target needs to be those who know better.

17. A godly satirist needs to read widely in church history, particularly in ancient disputes. This will dislodge the very provincial notion that the current rules of academic etiquette are somehow binding on all generations of the Church. Scripture is the norm, not our current traditions. A good way to check ourselves is by looking at how Scripture was applied by other generations of the Church. C.S. Lewis’s essay on the reading of old books in God in the Dock is apropos here. Other generations are not the authority—Scripture is. But getting to know others who read and apply the same passages you know, but in a very different way, is a healthy spiritual exercise.

18. A godly satirist must love to sing all the psalms that God has given us (Eph. 5:19). Nothing serves like the psalms if the goal is to nurture and restore a vertebrate church. In these days of the invertebrate church, the satirist is thought to be the pestilent fellow, and he is the one who has to be put out in order to restore peace. The object of his satirical observations might be the lesbian bishop who thinks the central message of Romans is about global warming, but the more he says or writes anything about it, the more it is his behavior that is thought to be clearly “unscriptural.” Right—like, who cares about that anymore?

19. A godly satirist should not be stuck on one speed (Ecc. 3:1-8). All satire, all the time, would be tolerable for about forty-five minutes. We are to weep with those who weep, laugh with those who laugh, encourage the downcast, rebuke the arrogant and powerful, comfort the afflicted, and (here is where satire can come in) afflict the comfortable. This means that we cannot have a “one-response-fits-all-situations” approach. If I might be permitted one more personal reference, satire is just a tiny fraction of our ministry here. In other words, I have written not only A Serrated Edge but also My Life For Yours. Satire is just a small portion of what goes on in the pages of Credenda—I suspect that for many, turning to the Cave of Adullam first is a guilty pleasure, and if they don’t read further, they might come to assume that this is all we do. But the principle is that satiric response needs to be held in balance and tension with all the other appropriate responses that Scripture calls us to. And that balance means that satire occupies a clear minority position.

20. A godly satirist should hate what is evil. The fear of God is not only the beginning of knowledge, but it is also defined as the hatred of evil. “The fear of the LORD is to hate evil: pride, and arrogancy, and the evil way, and the froward mouth, do I hate” (Prov. 8:14, KJV).

21. A godly satirist should love what is good (Tit. 2:14). He should be motivated by a love that seeks to defend what is noble and right, or weak and defenseless, and not be motivated by a bitterness that seeks to bite and tear (Gal. 5:13-15).
Profile Image for Saolomon Mouacheupao.
170 reviews
July 25, 2026
Providentially, this year I also read the serrated edge for the first time, where Wilson defends his satiric bite. This book particularly addresses the use of his strong language. Those who would benefit most from this book are those who are familiar with Moscow, somewhat admire from afar, and have been generally helped by them, especially when it comes to the family and culture. I would fall in that camp, and he addresses readers like me, who generally benefit from them, but are fine to agree with critics who have problems with his language and “yeah, sometimes they’re crass, whatever.” In terms of the arguments of this book, I would largely agree. I just also have to confess that I would still land in a place where sometimes the particulars have made and make me uncomfortable, does that make me overly pious? Perhaps.

I enjoyed his respectful responses to Kevin Deyoung and Kenwood’s critiques of him and Moscow.
324 reviews
July 23, 2026
The Bible condemns the use of profanity, obscenity, vulgarity, and swearing. The Bible itself uses profanity, obscenity, vulgarity, and swearing. Our discipleship must wrestle with these realities instead of just settling on a list of "these words are sinful to say."

Great Quotes:

- Dedicated with gratitude for Kevin DeYoung, unironically.

- Keeping a rule, however technical or correct, falls easily into the trap of abstraction and impersonalization. As a result, we oppose sin with a false standard of holiness and are surprised at it's impotence.

- Scripture teaches us that gratitude and thanksgiving are central to a right relationship with God which, in turn, is central to a right relationship to the world around us. The fundamental problem with the unregenerate heart and mind is that it will not honor God as God and will not render him thanks. We want to make sure we are doing both. In confronting sin, particularly the sin of rancid or ungodly speech, we should approach it with gratitude displacement.

- My Savior comes, and with him mirth.

- We may fight with abandon precisely because we are not abandoned

- Joy is a weapon. Fight with your Joy. Many Christians spend their time fighting for their Joy When they ought to consider fighting with it. Joy is not the treasure behind us that we are fighting for, it is a sword in our hand that we are fighting with (Nehemiah 8:10).

- It is not possible to fight well when you are encumbered. One of the best ways to keep you out of fruitful conflict with those you ought to be fighting is through getting you into conflicts with those you ought not to be fighting. And one of the best ways to do that is by getting you into a backlog of unconfessed sin.

- To play it safe is to play it dangerous.

- As long as Christians try to pretend that this radical relativism [of our culture] is just another set of societal norms, the longer it will be until we recover our sanity. And the surrounding culture will never recover its relative sanity unless the church recovers its grounded sanity.
1 review1 follower
May 24, 2026
Wilson presents language in an excellent fashion. What he points to is that we serve a linguistic God and so our use of language is important and powerful. Wilson does not endorse a full scale sailor mouth for the sake of colourful language. When reading this text, it is important to realize there is nuance and the reader must get that in order to get the argument. Wilson defends the idea of using satire and "biting" language, when necessary, to call out sin and unrighteousness. Jesus was known for using language with a bite at times and Wilson is trying to faithfully present the wise position of doing the same. However, he realizes that not everyone must or even should use the bite but points out that if we evaluate someone doing so and find they are doing it rightly then we should withhold judgment because it is for a just cause (i.e., honoring God). Well worth the read, just remember the nuance!
Profile Image for Jordan Jefferson.
1 review1 follower
August 14, 2026
Really enjoyed this short collection of adjusted blog posts/articles over the last few decades that addresses the topic of language and speech. Doug covers a range of interesting topics with many Biblical references and does so with his sarcastic, yet informational style. If you’re looking for something that is filled with satire and yet also challenging to how we steward our tongue then this would be a great read.
Profile Image for Andrew Hoy.
139 reviews9 followers
August 13, 2026
While there are a few helpful insights in this book, it is primarily Doug‘s defense of the language that he has been criticized for. His book “The Serrated Edge” is a more helpful presentation of his principles. And the subtitle of the book is not inaccurate description of what he does in this book.
10 reviews
June 13, 2026
insights into the tongue

Opened my eyes to a world of his Scripture uses language appropriately and a chance for Pastor Wilson to respond to accusations against him that I grew up with.
Profile Image for Micah Hunter.
80 reviews1 follower
July 23, 2026
A very necessary and helpful follow up to “A Serrated Edge.” I’m unsure why the comments in the Appendix (particularly the qualifications required of a satirist) were relegated to the Appendix. They were the most meaningful to myself as a frequent purveyor of satire.
Profile Image for Éowyn (Eliza).
150 reviews2 followers
July 1, 2026
This was similar to the serrated edge, as I read them together and there was some overlap. I have the same critique and the same enjoyment of both. Why not read it?
Profile Image for Alanson Smith.
48 reviews
July 16, 2026
Great continuation of his defense of the serrated edge or pointy and sharp words.
Profile Image for Austin Cason.
38 reviews
July 21, 2026
What starts out as a controversial take on how "bad words" work, ends with a clear and high standard exhortation for Christians to really put in the work of taming their tongues.
Profile Image for Michael Schwander.
19 reviews2 followers
July 24, 2026
Doug Wilson encourages us to tame our tongues, preach boldly, and engage with disagreement wisely.
Displaying 1 - 21 of 21 reviews