BUT NOT EVEN VERONICA MARS COULD MAKE “FRAK” AN OKAY WORD: Mark Shea has a terrific column on cussin’.

I find myself more or less diametrically opposed to the most common Catholic views of obscenity. I would absolutely, always in all cases, write “God d–n” rather than the horrific unhyphenated word, if it would read as reverent rather than twee; of all the four-letter words, it’s obvious that “damn” and “Hell” are the worst, and yet they’re the ones our culture treats most casually.

Meanwhile, if character and genre require me to use the basic Anglo-Saxonisms about sex, or describe an activity inter Christianos non nomine, or move from double entendre to single to zero… I’ll do it, because the story needs it. I will say that almost every writer–very, very, super much including Catholic or otherwise explicitly Christian writers–thinks she needs explicit talk to be the next Graham Greene or what honkin’ ever. And usually she really, really doesn’t; nor is that necessarily a model to which she should aspire, that mid-twentieth-century mindset where the “seventh proof of God” (the obvious existence of the Devil) becomes an excuse for wallowing, where self-indulgence is misdescribed as an attempt at ekstasis.

But even so, there are times when Christians need to make art that isn’t for everyone. And as much as the contemporary Christian culture really needs a vocabulary for making fun of its edgy, peacock-epigone sparkly descent into implicitly-disclaimed obscenity… sometimes it also needs a way of talking about nipples and “country matters” and the old in-and-out.

Shea notes this ground-level view from Clive Lewis:

C. S. Lewis once remarked that almost the whole of Christian doctrine could be deduced from the fact that we tell dirty jokes and feel the dead to be uncanny. Why? Because both testify to the fact that we are curiously estranged from our own bodies, a clue which, when followed, leads us back to the fact of original sin.

Shea’s column is one of the very few examples of a Christian who gets it. Bullocks fart in approval!