Sermon: The Problem with Shame Based Religion

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The Problem with Shame Based Religion ¹

By Charles Rush

July 8, 2007

[ Audio (mp3, 7.2Mb) ]

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. You may recall the judge in the first World Trade Center attack upbraiding 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.

Over concern with judgment 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 once read in a NY Times magazine on the back page about a Rabbi reflecting on the fact that Oreos were now kosher. When he was a child, Oreos 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 tells 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 Harold Abrahams and Eric Liddell. Both of them won gold medals at the Olympics and yet what different paths they took to get there.

Abrahams 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 WASPWASPs 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, Abrahams 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.

Abrahams had one competitor that he had to beat, the Scotsman Eric Liddell. As a Scotsman, Liddell too was an outsider because the Scots were second-class citizens in the British Empire. But Liddell 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. Liddell was one of those people who are quite at home with themselves and who they are. 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 Abrahams, 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 Abrahams, he made the Olympic team. Like Abrahams, 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. Liddell 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.

Liddell and Abrahams were to race the 100 meters. You probably know the story that Liddell 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. Abrahams 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 Abrahams. 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.

Brothers and sisters, live free. Amen.

¹ Note: A version of this sermon was preached by Dr. Rush on January 11, 1998.