Even if your eyesight is worse than mine, for the next couple weeks you’ll be seeing hearts everywhere you look. You’ll see candy boxes shaped like hearts. You’ll see candy shaped like hearts. You’ll see a seemingly unceasing flow of ads adorned with hearts flowing across whatever screen has your focus at the moment.
Why? Because Valentine’s Day is coming. The attendant advertising reinforces the cliched notions that our emotions are centered in our hearts and that love instinctively and effortlessly flows from every human heart. So, if we just see enough hearts (and buy enough candy and greeting cards), love will fill the earth and we’ll live happily after.
Okay …
There’s a reason Valentine’s Day isn’t found on the liturgical calendar of the Christian Church: The Bible sees the human heart as representing something far beyond Hallmark and Whitmans sentimentality. Scripture speaks of the heart as the core of a person’s being. The Bible describes the heart as the seat of human thinking, willing, and feeling. (Yes, the Bible recognizes the value and validity of rightly ordered affections.) Even more important, the Bible speaks about the heart as the place where our character is shaped and where our response to God is formed. As we’ll see below, our heart is the source of our speech.
But first, it’s been 33 years since Daniel Patrick Moynihan published an article titled Defining Deviancy Down.[1] Moynihan, a Democrat and devout Catholic, taught at Harvard, served four U.S. presidents, and served four terms as a senator from New York. In this seminal essay, he observed that “deviancy – measured as increases in crime, broken homes, and mental illness – reached levels unimagined by earlier generations. … Actions once considered deviant from acceptable standards became, almost immaculately, within bounds.”2 His article was incisive and prophetic.
Given his chosen topics, Moynihan didn’t discuss an area where cultural decline is especially evident today – our speech. Last year, Virginia elected an Attorney General who insisted he was serious about killing a political opponent and his children.3 This year, a candidate for Ohio Attorney General is telling everyone who will listen how he plans to kill President Trump.4
When did causing children to die in their mother’s arms, just to change the opinion of a political opponent, become “within bounds?” How long have we been sliding down a slippery slope to have reached a place where planning the execution of a sitting president becomes an acceptable plank in a political platform? Is there anything anyone can do to reverse the trend?
To be sure, some have tried. But coarse discourse can’t be smoothed over by increasing the ranks and authority of the Speech Police. Throughout history, coordinated efforts to eliminate free speech have failed everywhere they’ve been tried. And they always will. That’s because speech doesn’t start with our tongues. Rather, it begins in our hearts. Jesus said, “For out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaks” (Matt. 12:34).
The way to change speech is to change hearts. So, perhaps the Church might want to take another look at all the hearts that will circulating in the run-up to Valentine’s Day.
Valentine’s Day is indeed a cultural custom. But I wonder: Could the Church co-opt the date but change the custom? What would happen if, in the coming years, God’s people were to use Valentine’s Days intentionally to examine the words we’ve spoken or written – edifying and unedifying – in the past 12 months. What might change if we gathered together, or sat silently alone, examined our hearts, and thought about all the words we might use in the year ahead?
What differences might such explorations of our own hearts make in each of our lives, in the life of this church, this community, this country?
[1] The American Scholar, vol. 62, 1993, pp. 17-30.
2 Kevin Warsh, Defining Deviancy, https://www.federalreserve.gov/newsevents/speech/warsh20090616a.htm.
