Thou Shalt Not Mock
My enemies mock me to my face; All day long they mock me.
Mocking doesn’t just hurt feelings. It shuts down ideas. It cripples courage. It silences the one voice that might have held the missing answer.
As I work through the long road of healing from two traumas I kept buried for decades, I’ve come to believe that mockery may be one of the most evil forces in human culture. And yet, we rarely name it. We rarely confront it. In fact, we laugh along with it.
Why isn’t there a commandment against mocking? There should be. Sure, Scripture condemns it—the word “raca” from Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount is essentially a mocking insult, and He warns sternly against it. “They laughed him to scorn” is a repeated line throughout Scripture, usually directed at those brave enough to speak truth alone, against a crowd.
And that’s the thing. Mocking is a crowd sport. It’s rarely done one-on-one, and never in the context of real conversation. It’s designed not to debate, but to humiliate. It doesn’t spark dialogue—it shuts it down.
And in our time, mockery has become a cultural art form. We build careers on snark. We reward cruelty with followers. We click, repost, and meme the people we should be listening to. A person opens their heart with a vulnerable idea, and a thousand voices pile on to laugh them off the stage.
I've felt that sting. I’ve avoided singing solos in public—not because I couldn’t sing, but because I feared the mockery. I passed on running for office—not because I lacked ideas, but because I dreaded the ridicule. I delayed therapy—not because I didn’t need it, but because I didn’t want to be "that guy."
And now I’m 64, finally realizing how much joy, growth, and healing I’ve deferred… because of mockery. Not violence. Not censorship. Just laughter with a sneer.
We talk a lot about harm these days—about microaggressions, about language, about safety. But if you want to trace real harm, look at the mocking voices that never get checked.
The ones that make kids afraid to ask questions.
The ones that silence good men and women before they ever step up.
The ones that block breakthroughs—because “that idea is just dumb.”
But maybe the dumb idea was the brilliant one. Maybe the person you just laughed off had something to say. Maybe Stephen Covey was right: the culture of mockery had to go. And then he died. And it got worse.
What’s the worst thing David’s enemies did to him? It wasn’t the ambush. It wasn’t the exile. It wasn’t the price on his head.
It was the mocking.
“All day long they mock me.”
That’s the line that made it into the Psalm.
If you want to make the world better—shut down mockery. Call it out. Refuse to laugh at it. Stop treating the bigmouths like heroes.
Because every time we reward mockery, we lose a little more courage, a little more joy, and maybe—just maybe—the next big idea that would have saved someone’s life.
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