Ruining Words
The meanings of words naturally evolve - but we seem bent on ruining them - bending them to our will and losing them - only to be replaced by another ... and so on
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I want to write about words. Actually, I don’t really want to write about them, because what I want to say about them might hit all of us in some way. I want to say that we ruin words, all of us do. It is an aspect of our culture that it is fairly hard to avoid. I know that, in talking about these words that we ruin, I will be addressing culturally divisive issues - that is part of the ruination of these words. I also can’t address all of them, leaving myself open to the “fine, so what about (other word we ruined) - why didn’t you talk about that one?”objection. There are just a lot of these words and I don’t intend to try to catalogue them. I want to talk about the phenomenon itself and why we tend to do it. And, I know more about some of these ruined words than others. In fact, I will look closely at one word which will serve as a template for the others. So, apologizing in advance, here we go.
If I asked you what percentage of American Muslims self-identify as “Evangelical” or “Born-Again”, especially if you are a Christian or are familiar with these as words with meanings that relate exclusively to Christianity, you would probably be a little confused. But from the five year period from 2015 to 2019, the average share of American Muslims who self-identify as “Evangelical/Born-Again” is 21.64% and it is 17% in the total data set over the life of the survey. This data comes from the CCES - the Cooperative Congressional Election Study, now called the Cooperative Election Study even as it goes by the CCES moniker. It is a Harvard University survey done administered every year by YouGov - the sample size each year is in the tens of thousands, which is larger than most other surveys. One note on this data point:
I do need to contextualize these numbers, though. Just 1% of Americans are Muslims and just about 17% of them identify as evangelical in the overall sample. So, this isn’t a huge part of the American population.
Ryan Burge, What’s Up with Born-Again Muslims?, Religion In Public
Even so, what is going on here? At least part of what is going on is that the word has been ruined. A linguist might object that the meaning of a word often changes over time. True, but the phenomenon I am observing is something a little more than that and it is related to our particular cultural moment.
But before we talk about its ruination, we have to talk about what “evangelical” means.
A couple of years ago, I was teaching an evening class in a church - talking about basic Christian beliefs, I think. I can’t exactly remember what the class was about but I remember one person attending. A woman in the class raised her hand and asked, “… but … we aren’t evangelicals, right?” The church in question, where I used to be a staff member, was a member of the Evangelical Free Church of America. The question, and to be fair this woman was not a regular attender, is understandable from a number of angles. But the most obvious angle is that the meaning of the word most in use is no longer the original meaning of the word.
If you look the word up you may find that the word (as a Latin version of a Greek word) has its roots in the Protestant Reformation - all the way back to the 1560’s or so. The term evangelical derives from the Greek word euangelion meaning “gospel” or “good news.” It came into our use in English more than a century ago to refer to those who interpret the Bible in such a way as to include a belief in the miraculous, who believe that Christians should share this good news, and that the Bible is sufficient to understand the faith and to live as a Christian. This meaning connects back to the usage from the Reformation. This meaning is connected to all sorts of things Christian, Protestant and Catholic. But the most common use in our culture at present, as the woman in my class illustrated, is something else.
That something else may have started as we began, in our political analysis, to refer to “evangelicals” as a social (and therefore voting) demographic. This was probably the first time most Americans heard the word - “the evangelical vote”. It came to represent a segment of our culture that originally was comprised of conservative, pro-life Christians - and, therefore, conservative, pro-life voters. For the purpose of cultural and political analysis, the Christian part wasn’t important. The second meaning - again, the meaning most people would have understood, conservative, pro-life voters - overtook the first. At the same time, a number of trends within and around evangelicalism - scandal, deconstruction, hypocrisy, over-politicized church leaders - helped add another meaning to the word - something between “hypocrite” and “someone I hate” and “pharisee”. For many people, especially younger people, this is the meaning they understand for the word. This is the meaning the woman in my class was worried about … “we aren’t those people, right?” I don’t have first-hand knowledge of why Muslims would self-identify as Evangelical or Born-Again, but I can surmise it is the conservative (especially culturally conservative), pro-life meaning they have in mind. In both cases, the original meaning of the word, while still in use in its original context, has largely been overtaken. It is quite possible that the original meaning is unknown to many people who use the word - in fact, I suspect that is the case. We’ve taken a word that meant something and turned it into a word we already had words for. A cultural reclassification. And that is how we ruin words. The word comes to mean either “my kind of people” or “not my kind of people”, “us” or “them”.
This dynamic - one of us or not one of us - is behind how many words are ruined. Actual words may represent nuance and history and, well, something real. In our culture, we flatten these words and lose any accountability to their actual meaning. Some may say Evangelicals are bad while they, unknowingly, are one and others may identify as Evangelical while they are pretty far from fulfilling the original meaning. The word is a placeholder for what we already want to say - an appeal for our side and against theirs - or an attempt to identify with one side or the other.
What are some other words we have ruined? Well, “Fascist” and “Nazi” used to mean something specific. Their meanings held important places in our history representing hard lessons learned, never to be repeated. Now, they are used by those on both sides of our culture war to refer to the other - the equivalent of “bad person” or “I hate you” - while the trends represented by the actual meanings of these words, who had their origin a century ago, begin to creep back from the right and from the left. Though now, we lack the ability to describe these trends, having ruined the words we had for them. I used to understand what was meant by the word “Feminist”, now it requires some knowledge of who is using it to discern what is being said. The same is true for “Zionist”. Even “Conservative” or “Liberal” have become words that roughly translate to “us” or “them”. Recently, I was explaining to a person in their late 20’s why some “Conservatives” don’t feel like they have a place in the current Republican party. They didn’t have any real idea what the word “Conservative” meant, certainly if the meaning is separated from the Republican party - and I don’t blame them. We don’t tend to use these words with their actual meanings engaged. I think many of us don’t even know their meaning as we use them.
We begin to lose the ability to talk about reality …
The flattening of these words mirrors and serves the polarization of our culture. We use words as we wish in order to please our cultural patrons and defeat our cultural foes. This negative trend in our culture I have noted many times. But I want to point out that flattening all words connected to our widening cultural divide into either “good” and “bad”, or “us” and “them” has effects beyond the cultural moment. We will miss these words, their history, their impact, their meaning. In an earlier post, I said that we will miss the truth when it is gone. This is, I suppose, a way of saying the same thing. The truth of these words, something that might unify, might appeal, might challenge … we need that truth, those meanings. We will miss them when they are gone. We begin to lose the ability to talk about reality in many important areas of life, only able to describe our experience and views in terms of the cultural divide, only able to say “us” or “them”. But life is more than “us” and “them”. We need to avoid being complicit in losing the ability to say so.
Links
What’s Up with Born-Again Muslims? - Ryan P. Burge - Religion in Public - March 2, 2021
We’ll Miss the Truth When it is Gone - Mike Sherman - The Embassy - June 11, 2022
