The New Gods Are Easily Offended

De-Humanising Words and Secular "Blasphemy" Laws

There is a reason people are disproportionately cancelled over offensive-sounding words and/or name-calling in the modern west. It is not political, but theological.

Because the people of our society stopped believing in God per se, even when they thought they were moving beyond the fairy-tales of “religion”, in reality they simply switched the object of their worship, transferring their worship from God to human beings. This is why one of the worst things you can possibly do in a western context is to use words which “de-humanise” another human being.

This is the essence of humanism, where humans have been so elevated that to “lower” them even in jest, is to blaspheme their quasi-divine status. There are good, Christian reasons not to de-humanise someone, but they are different to why a secular humanist person does not want to de-humanise someone. Their “humanism” is wildly inconsistent, of course. They slaughter millions of human babies per year and call it “good” (by using dehumanising words to re-categorise the victims as non-humans). Simultaneously, they castigate people (but not all people) who use, say, “the N-word” as though they are the worst human beings on earth, far worse than those other humans who support the slaughter of innocent babies but who refrain from the “wrong” words.

Most ancient societies cared far more about their words offending God than their words offending other people (Ex. 20:7). But because the secular west essentially worships humanity, it cannot abide feeling offended by “blasphemous” words against itself. And so the priests of the new temples take swift action to excommunicate the offenders, whether by termination of their employment, destruction of their reputation, or even arrest and imprisonment.

The “tell” is that this concern for the use of bad words is selective and inconsistent. Shouting “Jesus Christ!” in anger will not get you in trouble, though Jesus Christ is the king of kings and the lord of lords (1Tim. 6:15) and the name that is above every name (Phil. 2:9). Surely taking his name in vain should be the worst imaginable offence? Not according to the Enlightened western world, fattened on its own wisdom, unknowingly fuelled by the foundations built in the name of the One they so casually blaspheme.

Not even vulgar sexual swear words will get people in the same kind of trouble—unless, that is, they are directed against another human being. But again, it needs to be the “right type” of human being who does the directing, and the “right type” of victim, all in accordance with the doctrines of the new gods—what aligns with all that unmistakeably revolutionary “wisdom” of the last three centuries. It’s not that we should want to use forbidden or unpleasant or offensive words per se; it’s that we should question why such words are forbidden when others are not.

Matt Walsh spoke out about this a few weeks ago, challenging the way western society creates arbitrary and contradictory conventions for speech depending on who the individual happens to be. A white western heterosexual male, for example, tends to be the “wrong person” for virtually all the forbidden words in all contexts. He is at the bottom of the pile precisely because—so the revolutionary narrative goes—he was always at the top of the pile for time immemorial and thus he and his descendants are never to be permitted to return but must instead wander the earth forever in perpetual sackcloth and ashes. He is ever more liable to tick all blasphemy boxes, regardless of whether his words happen to offend whichever of the various demi-gods of the humanist pantheon, be it BLM or feminism or postcolonialism or LGBT+.

Generally speaking, I agree with Walsh that it's not good to use dehumanising words which demean others blanketly or unnecessarily. But many people actually avoid such expressions not because they are more righteous but because they are slavishly paying homage to the humanist gods of this age. This is why they submit to all sorts of rules and moral standards which we ourselves invented as if they were written on tablets of stone by God Himself.

In contrast, it should not go unnoticed in this humanist society—which in recent centuries has been busily upturning the Biblical foundations on which it was built—that the Bible actually uses offensive, demeaning words for people surprisingly often. At various points, righteous people (including the Son of God Himself) refer to other human beings as:

• "dogs" (Phil. 3:2)

• "cows" (Amos 4:1)

• "pigs" (Matt. 7:6)

• "beasts" (Titus 1:2)

• "vipers" (Luke 3:7)

• "children of hell" (Matt. 23:15)

• "sons of the Devil" (John 8:44)

Where such use of terms might have been seen as merely “impolite” in other ages, it is outright heresy in our own. It goes without saying that most of the apostles and prophets in the Bible would be seen as “immoral” by the new humanist standards of our time simply because of their choice of words.

The apostles and prophets spoke the way they did not because the Bible has a low view of humans but because it has a higher view of God. This is what our age has forgotten. In so desperately trying to reach a utopia of human “equality” without reference to God, we have unravelled and undignified ourselves, as though we were not made in our creator’s image at all, seeking to snatch the crown that only He can bestow.

In trying to bestow a “higher” dignity upon people, we have actually debased ourselves, becoming more and more like beasts, when it was only ever God who could give humans any dignity in the first place:

"What is man that you are mindful of him, and the son of man that you care for him? Yet you have made him a little lower than the heavenly beings and crowned him with glory and honour." (Psalm 8:4-5)

If you take God out of the picture, you end up elevating human feelings to sacred status. This is why offending another person by saying the wrong word is seen like a kind of incantation or a curse, because, functionally speaking, the West has inadvertently re-paganised itself, echoing Paul’s words—spoken long before the advent of Christendom—of those who "exchanged the truth about God for a lie and worshipped and served the creature rather than the Creator" (Rom. 1:25).

If our society is ever to break free of our enslavement to the chaos of cancel culture, we must first break free of our enslavement to ourselves. You cannot love your neighbour by worshipping your neighbour's feelings. You will best love your neighbour by worshipping Christ and submitting to His Word, even where it bites.