The Problem with Shame Based Religion
By Charles Rush
January 11, 1998
Matthew 13: 44-50
thought
I would begin this morning with a passage that critical
scholars say are quite likely the
ipsissima verba
of Jesus. The first two analogies that Jesus makes are characteristic
of the Joy that Jesus teaches about the Kingdom of God. It is like a
guy who finds a buried treasure or an antique dealer that finds a
tremendous pearl for cheap in the back of a mideastern bazaar.
And most critical scholars will say that the analogy of the Kingdom of
God being like a guy who catches fish in a net was also something Jesus
probably said. But the focus of this last piece is on the editorial
hand of Matthew because it is characteristic of the way that Matthew
interprets Jesus. I have mentioned before that Matthew takes
particular relish in the judgment of the after-life and you see it here
again.
Here you have two wonderfully positive images but they just don't
seem quite rounded for Matthew. Matthew thinks we need a little more
judgment and righteous fear thrown in so he puts some words in the
mouth of Jesus, having him say, ‘The angels will come out and
separate the evil from the righteous, and throw them into the furnace
of fire; there men will weep and gnash their teeth." You do not find
this line in the other gospels. It is characteristically Matthew to
focus on people getting thrown into the fiery furnace. It is
characteristically Matthew to predict much future weeping and gnashing
of teeth.
And when you just read this passage as a whole, the positive nature of
God's grace is pretty quickly overwhelmed by this eternality and
severity of God's judgment. The message is pretty clear,
‘you can love the ways of God or you can burn forever. This is
pretty much the view of God that the Church adopted, pretty much the
tradition that most of us were taught.
Gerard Hughes says that he grew up with a view of God like an uncle.
"God was a family relative, much admired by Mum and Dad, who described
him as very loving, a great friend of the family, very powerful and
interested in all of us. Eventually we are taken to visit ‘Good
Old Uncle George.' He lives in a formidable mansion, is bearded,
gruff and threatening. We cannot share our parents' professed
admiration for this jewel in the family. At the end of the visit,
Uncle George addressed us. ‘Now listen, dear', he begins,
looking very severe, ‘I want to see you here once a week, and if
you fail to come, let me just show you what will happen to you.
‘He then leads us down to the mansion's basement. It is
dark, becomes hotter and hotter as we descend, and we begin to hear
unearthly screams. In the basement there are steel doors. Uncle
George opens one. ‘Now look in there, dear', he says. We
see a nightmare vision, an array of blazing furnaces with little demons
in attendance, who hurl into the blaze those men, women and children
who failed to visit Uncle George or failed to act in a way he
approved. ‘And if you don't visit me, dear, that is where
you will most certainly go,' says Uncle George. He then takes us
upstairs again to meet Mum and Dad. As we go home, tightly clutching
Dad with one hand and Mum with the other, Mum leans over and says, And
now don't you love your uncle George with all your heart and soul,
mind and strength?' And we, loathing the monster, say, ‘Yes I
do,' because to say anything else would be to join the queue at
the furnace. At a tender age religious schizophrenia has set in and we
keep telling Uncle George how much we love him and how good he is and
that we want to do only what pleases him. We observe what we are told
are his wishes and dare not admit, even to ourselves, that we loathe
him."
That is pretty accurate. I got a note recently from a friend of mine,
a southerner, who now teaches at Andover Newton Seminary in Boston. It
was a quote about our youth from a book about Texas. It said
‘There were two things that they taught us growing up in Lubbock.
The first is that we are awful, sinful, miserable creatures who are
going straight to hell and God loves us. The other was that sex was
dirty, nasty, immoral and disgusting but it was so special you should
save it only for the one you love. And people wonder why we grew up
crazy.'
Guilt and shame have been major motivators in the past several
centuries. They are effective and important motivators on a social
level to prevent anti-social behavior from destroying the fabric of our
communal life. This week the judge in the World Trade Center bombings
upbraided Ramsey Yousef for his glorification of terrorism in his final
speech before the judge. The judge used shame to attack Mr.
Yousef's interpretation of Islam as ‘despicable' and
said ‘you don't worship Allah, you worship death.' He
called him a coward and sentenced him to life in prison, solitary
confinement, with no contact with his family.
We use shame and guilt for control and they are important because we
need very strong taboos against terrorism, against child abuse, against
sexual violence, etc. But it is also clear that the history of Western
Civilization too often overemphasized guilt and shame to keep their
citizens in order. And all too often the church was more than willing
to add the weight of eternal judgment to the temporal judgments of
men. Furthermore, it is unquestionable that the leaders of the church
took their cues on the meaning of authority from the political leaders
in society. They relied far too much on fear of damnation and coercion
to produce uniformity of belief, just as the political leaders used
fear of corporal punishment and coercion to produce unity of political
order.
Order was valued far more than freedom and control was far more
important that dissent or independence. Even to this day in many
places in the world, people cannot conceive of the separation of
politics and religion, as we know it in America. In the troubled
Balkans, the one assumption shared by all of the various parties, is
the slogan: One faith, one people, one government (or as they used to
say, ‘One King'). It is true that the church bears the
lion's share of responsibility for this over-emphasis on guilt and
shame through the centuries. But I point out the connection with
politics because the church is never any more (nor any less) than a
reflection of the values of the society in which it exists. And if it
weren't for the political need for unity, surely the history of
guilt and shame would not have been quite what it was.
Overconcern with judgement creates a religion that is rule bound and it
leads to a piety that is principally concerned about keeping an
ever-growing list of rules for holiness. This zeal runs from the
mundane to the profound. I was reading in today's NYT magazine on
the back page about a Rabbi reflecting on the fact that Oreo's
were now kosher. When he was a child, Oreo's were not kosher and
Orthodox Jewish kids either pined to be ordinary Americans who could
dunk one in milk or they ate them in secret and worried about it for
months afterward. Or Frank McCort in ‘Angela's Ashes'
talks about being an acolyte in the Catholic Church in Ireland in the
40's when he was a boy. You not only had to have the whole mass
memorized in the Latin but God forbid, you should drop the host after
it had been consecrated, the body of Christ there on the dirty slate
floor. Your career was over in an instant with one slip. When I was a
child in the south, once the preacher began his sermon you just
didn't leave the church for any reason (and you didn't think
of making any noise either). I remember Lee Conway crossing his legs,
squirming, and finally wetting his pants rather than get up to leave
the service. That is the atmosphere when guilt and shame predominate
the ethos of religion.
Of course it is more profound than that too. How many gay people have
moved from their homes to New York because they were objectively
ashamed of who they were. And the church community usually compounded
that sense of shame to boot. Andrew Tobias, the well-known author on
finance, says that being gay was the one big secret that ‘no one
was ever going to find out about'. Despite the fact that in their
official encyclicals the Catholic Church says that there is nothing
wrong with being gay, the atmosphere in the church twenty years ago was
such that it was the last place in the world, he would ever let such a
secret be known.
Sex and guilt is a whole sermon in itself. Shame based religion has
surely focused way too much on sex and created a certain
schizophrenia. In the Bible belt there were two types of girls you
dated, those that were fun and those that you brought home to Mom. It
encouraged a Madonna/Whore complex in budding teenage boys. Girls you
might marry, you elevated to a discarnate status where sex would ruin
the quality of the relationship. Or you ran around with girls who were
promiscuous and sex was something done in the dark of the night, far
away from home, with people who had no soul connection. Sex was not
naturally integrated with your heart. The church of judgment certainly
did nothing to help young people put their hearts and their hips
together, so that sex was positive and loving, joyful and integrating.
Girls interiorized much more for certain. They knew that they were
pretty and they also knew that they were responsible for controlling
sexual intimacy. They had more guilt and shame as a result. That
stress came out in all kinds of ways that undermined their
self-esteem. I read one story of a woman writing about her eating
disorders in her youth. She was somewhat driven to eat less because
thin is sexy but it became a compulsion because she didn't want to
be beautiful and have to be so responsible, worried about the guilt and
the shame. Years later she realized that she had turned her anger in
on herself and was destroying herself. Unhealthy guilt and shame (and
the fear of them) will do that.
Unhealthy guilt compounds real guilt and can make it crushing.
I've only had a few occasions to talk to women of my generation
who have had abortions. Abortion creates real guilt because there is
life involved and almost always because people realize that the
relationship that they are in cannot bear the responsibility that they
have been putting on it. The only people I have ever talked to
approached abortion with deep regret, solemnity, grief and guilt. This
guilt is real and tangible. That is bad enough but when you add the
weight of shame based religion, some people will interiorize that to
such an extent that they feel they are beyond the pale of redemption,
that they are dirty and not acceptable anymore. They hate themselves
in way that cuts to the heart of their being.
It seems to me that a principal part of what Jesus tried to tell us was
that we are never beyond the pale of redemption. Whatever is meant by
judgment in the thought of Jesus, it is a judgment that heals us. When
the woman was caught in adultery and the shame-based religionists
around Jesus wanted him to pass judgment on her, he would not. He was
clear to communicate acceptance of which she was as a person. In the
teaching of Jesus, over and over, he tell us that we are all children
of God. We are accepted by God. He does tell the woman ‘go and
sin no more' but it is a positive statement like ‘Go and be
healed'.
The spirituality that Jesus taught was positive in its approach. It is
joyful like a lost son who has returned home, like a treasure that was
found in a field, like a pearl of great price that you discover. Jesus
calls us to the positive acceptance of God in grace and to live out of
that healthy self-esteem and become joyous, positive people.
Judgment encourages us to live out of our negative energy where grace
encourages us to live positively. Consider the simple, yet profound
difference between Samuel Abraham and Eric Liddel. Both of them won
gold medals at the Olympics and yet what different paths they took to
get there.
Abraham lived out of his negative energy. He was a Jew at Cambridge in
the twenties. He never felt accepted because he wasn't WASP and
it was clear to him that WASP's really ran the upper echelons of
British society. He was a social and a career climber and it deeply
bothered him that he was born with this built in limitation because he
wanted to be part of the British elite. Because his self-perception
was that of an outsider who wanted to be an insider, he was incredibly
competitive. He wanted to beat other people to show that he was worthy
of being accepted, to be catapulted toward recognition and acceptance
in the elite. He beat most of the students to get into Cambridge. At
Cambridge, he ran a traditional race around the school quadrangle and
became the only person in 700 years of racing to make it under a
minute. He hired a personal trainer to coach him in track, reputedly
the best trainer in all of England. He was compelled to win. By
virtue of his success on the track, he met one of the leading actresses
in England and they struck up quite an affair. He became a star. Yet
all along the way, Abraham was never satisfied. He was never really
happy. He had one more goal to achieve, and presumably then he would
be happy. He had fleeting mirth to be sure but lasting satisfaction
eluded him because he lived out of his negative self-image and he was
never really able to accept himself.
Abraham had one competitor that he had to beat, the Scotsman Eric
Lidell. As a Scotsman, Lidell too was an outsider because the Scots
were second-class citizens in the British Empire. But Lidell was
raised by parents who were missionaries to China and they gave him a
very positive faith that emphasized the love of God for other people.
Lidell was one of those people who was quite at home with himself and
who he was. He never appears to have been intimidated by the fact that
he was not at Cambridge, just at the University of Edinburgh. He
exuded positive regard about everything he did. Like Abraham, he ran
like the wind. At certain points in his race, he appeared to pull into
himself with a blast of energy and speed that was breathtaking to all
that knew him. Like Abraham, he made the Olympic team. Like Abraham,
he had a girlfriend but she was not the trophy babe, just a girl he
knew from his youth group. In fact, she thought he should stop his
running because somehow the whole competitive world at the Olympic
level would change him and make him less religious. His response to
her, in part, was this ‘God made me fast and when I run I can feel
the pleasure of God'. Imagine that you could feel God smiling
down on you, shining down on you. Liddel lived out of this positive
energy. Before the start of a race, he would shake hands with all the
runners and say something like ‘do your best.' It was unusual
enough that he got quite a few blank stares.
Liddel and Abraham were to race the 100 meters. You probably know the
story that Liddel dropped out of the 100, though he was the favorite to
win, because he would not run on Sunday. Though all of Britain worried
for him, he did not because he didn't view it as something he
missed. He was just making a positive statement of his faith. Few
people could understand it. Later in the week, he did run in the 400,
for the first time in a major race, and he won the gold. Abraham ran
the 100 and won the gold for Britain. Curiously, after the race, he
was not ecstatic. He met with his coach. It was a meeting filled with
silence. They repeated over and again that they had grasped victory
but somehow it wasn't satisfying to Abraham. After his coach
left, he cried to himself.
Certainly there were many things that went into those tears. But part
of it was a reminder that no amount of victory, no material success, no
personal beauty or sex appeal, no standing among one's peers can
ever be genuinely satisfying if you are not at home with your self. It
all appears as an apparition, it appears as merely props, but there is
no pleasure in it.
As Jesus told us, we cannot simply will our self-acceptance because
self-acceptance is a by-product of a transcendent acceptance. We have
to know and feel that we are loved and accepted by God. We have to
know that no matter how broken we are, God wants to heal us and make us
whole. We have to feel the pleasure of God beaming over us and through
us. We need to be surrounded by the people of God who will accept us
where we are, as we are, and be there for us come what may. We
don't have to like everything about each other; I'm not
saying that. But we need the confidence that others will take our
limitations and our faults and deal with them in love, in good will, in
support. We need to be around people who will not take advantage of
us. That is the Spirit of God moving in our midst in a surprising,
transforming way. That is the positive energy of love that Jesus came
to tell us about. That is the grace that can heal our guilt and our
shame. Let us too spread the acceptance of God that those around us
might be relieved of their burdens and live in the joy that God intends
for them. Amen.
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