American society is fractured; discourse that is civil is rarely heard. We are divided Red against Blue and Blue against Red. Our history is reckoned glorious; or it is taken to be an embarrassment. Technology throws gasoline on fires that otherwise might be easily extinguished, as we self-associate with comfortable voices, scrolling down “feeds” of images and postures of ironic self-assurance, tribally affirmed by what we see on our screens.

The technology is new, but the tribal divisions are ancient, as is the urge to pound the opposition into submission. One might consider the events of chapter 12 of the (first) Book of Kings. The king, Solomon, has died. His son Rehoboam has summoned all of Israel to his enthronement. Some malcontents in the crowd ask him to lighten burdens the late king had laid upon them. (Solomon built hundreds of glorious structures with expensive ornamentation; the taxation was indeed huge.) Rehoboam tells them to come back in three days, and he will answer them.

The new king takes counsel. First, he asks advice from the elders who had served with his father. They know the truth about the burdens. They also know that an initial act of generosity would pay future benefits. They tell him that if he grants the people’s request and lessens the burdens, he will have their affection and loyalty for all his days, as did King David, his grandfather.

But Rehoboam is young and finds tiresome the wisdom of old men. He then asks his contemporaries, those who had grown up with him, what he should do. They urge defiance. They are full of the spirit of youth, of a fresh start, of self-assertion—of being a powerful executive, one might say. So they advise him to begin by claiming his manly power: “My little finger shall be thicker than my father’s loins.” This strikes me as a crude assertion of physical dominance as the word “loins” here refers to the genital region and, perhaps, signifies the male genital organ. They also tell him to admit that, yes, “my father did lade you with a heavy yoke,” but then to warn: “I will add to your yoke.” Finally, he is to tell them that whereas Solomon “chastised you with whips, . . . I will chastise you with scorpions.”

When the Israelites return on the third day, Rehoboam, in speaking to them, follows the advice of his young fellows. The people then revolt, and the kingdom is split. In our day, when we listen only to those (as it were) we have grown up with—the familiar friends who tell us what we want to hear and lack the wisdom to discern a longer horizon—the unsurprising result is division.

One sign of societal fracture today is the proliferation of coarse speech. Consider, for just one example, how the f-bomb has entered just about every public space. In one sense, this makes it unremarkable; if the f-bomb is everywhere, it has no power to shock. One might say it ceases to be a bomb; nonetheless, its ubiquity debases language and coarsens communication. Likewise, one can recall men in the public eye who speak of their sexual organs and boast of sexual conquests; one can think of media stars, social media “influencers,” and many other such folk whose popularity is tied at the hip to their contributions to the coarsening of our cultural fabric.

To advance a culture of life, we need to resist the coarsening. Such resistance will be carried out in small ways. It may not even be noticed, since to resist the coarse gesture is to resist doing the sort of thing that gets notice. The photos from the Met Gala that get the most notice, for instance, are seldom of people dressed in traditionally elegant (and modest) styles. To resist the coarsening of culture is often a matter of what you don’t do; what you refrain from saying.

In this regard, there is a suggestive absence in 1 Kings 12. I have recounted here what Rehoboam’s young friends advised him to say to the people. But in the event, he did not repeat their first instruction—Rehoboam did not describe the size of his father’s loins. He did tell the people he would increase their burden, and that he would sting them worse than his father did. He should not have done this: He had other advice on offer, from the elders. Still, he refused the crude image, the implicitly sexual boast of his own male prowess.

When we resist adding to the coarseness of public disputation, it can be a small step towards bigger things. After Rehoboam lost the northern tribes, he called for the marshaling of an army to defeat them. He summoned, the biblical writer says, 180,000 fighting men. But a “man of God,” the prophet Shemaiah, suddenly comes on the scene and warns Rehoboam not to pursue the fight. This time, Rehoboam hearkens to the voice of his elder, and war is averted.

We who long for a culture of life to flourish need to take care in the small things. Let us resist the crude impulses—let us not imitate the cheap shots and cruelties that increasingly characterize the world around us. And let us never give up on the hope that, if and when a prophet comes into the world of those who are the enemies of life, they will hear the prophet speak—and desist.

— The Rev. Canon Victor Lee Austin, theologian-in-residence for the Episcopal Diocese of Dallas, is the author of a handful of books, including Christian Ethics: A Guide for the Perplexed.