Why did Billy Sunday use slang in his sermons? He tells us . . .

TIME FOR SLANG SAYS SUNDAY

Evangelist Explains Why He Uses Language of Streets In His Sermons

“Richmond ministers are dead right when they declare that if they said in their own pulpits some of the things I say in mine, it would sound ridiculous,” Billy Sunday admitted yesterday.

“There is a time and a place for all things,” continued Sunday. “Staid old church people, reared in Sunday schools, prayer meetings and churches and familiar with elegant phraseology, do not need to have things told them in the plain language of the street in order to comprehend them. Richmond ministers preach to about the same crowd every Sunday and they understand them perfectly.

Short Over Heads.

“But I speak to multitudes whose fathers never darken a church door. If I put them to the usual pulpit terms it would be clouds over their heads. Some of my hearers never went to school, never received church training. Their vocabulary is often limited to 500 words—many of them idioms of the street and slang, and some of them bordering on cuss words. Now I do not use cuss words, but I use the slang or phrase of the street that I know they will understand and respond to—and they do.

“I saw a man seated in front of me in the tabernacle whose dress and appearance showed he was a sport. He was plainly no church-goer. When I said in my sermon, ‘Don’t pass the buck!’ his face lighted up immediately. He was all smiles and he quickly got the idea I was trying to convey. Had I used highfalutin terms they would have been wasted on him.

Never So.

“When Lincoln used the word ‘sugar coated’ in one of his messages, Secretary of State Seward said he would never do—it was not refined enough.

“All right, you put in a better word,” Lincoln told Seward. Next day Seward came back and said he couldn’t find a better word, and ‘sugar-coated’ remained in the message.

Lincoln said there never would come a time when the American people would not know what ‘sugar-coated’ meant.

The apostle said: ‘By their works ye shall know them’—and when I put it: ‘Show me! I’m from Missouri,’ the man of the street not used to going to church gets the idea in a jiffy.”

Cited in: The Richmond Item. Sun, May 07, 1922 ·Page 6