I grew up in a culture of shame.
Even as an evangelical teenager on fire for God who never missed church or Sunday School or the chance to explain to someone why they were going to hell, I still carried a lot of shame.
Purity culture will definitely do that to you and it rightfully garners headlines for the way it manipulates and shames teenagers into feeling bad about their sexuality regardless of how it is expressed.
I definitely had some of that, but for me the shame came more from never feeling like I could live up to the ideals of Christian perfection that were preached in my tradition. Even though I would have told you I thought the Christian life was a journey, not a moment of instantaneous perfection and that there would be missteps along the way, the idea that I had to be perfect or at least needed to try to be perfect or risk losing jewels in my heavenly crowd if I wasn’t something approaching perfect weighed on me every day. I was elated anytime a day passed by when I could tell myself I hadn’t sinned, but if I committed even the smallest sin the next day - like not reciprocating with “you too” when someone at Chick-fil-a told me to have a blessed day - I felt like I had let God down, that God was silently disappointed in me and I would have to be extra perfect the following day to make up from my hostilities towards the employees at Chick-fil-a.
So, you can imagine my confusion when I look around today and discover vast swaths of the community I grew up in, both the ones seeking perfection as well as the greater evangelical world I once called home, suddenly seemed to lose all sense of shame.
I’m not sure there was one single moment when it happened.
Fear of hell drives so much of evangelicalism that in the pursuit of avoiding it at all cost it can be hard to pinpoint a particular moment of shamelessness. More likely the culture of shame that I grew up in seems to have slowly, but surely and entirely lost its sense of shame over the course of several years. That can happen more easily than you might think when hell is on the line and you - ironically and confusedly - tell yourself it’s ok to make a deal with an earthly devil to save your soul from an eternity in hell, not stopping to consider the possibility that maybe that devil might be more clever than you thought, perhaps even just using you for his own personal gain and the faustian bargain you made may just end up corrupting your own soul without you even realizing it.
But that’s what fear of hell can do to a person.
It’s makes you forget who you are and you are meant to be, to the point that if a politician shows up promising to ban abortion, for example, and if you are convinced that anything less than fanatically opposition to abortion will anger God and endanger your soul, then who that politician is and whatever else they may be promising to do no matter how distasteful or even antithetical to the way of Jesus it might be, it can be overlooked and then justified and then eventually embraced, if not entirely sanctified as the will of God made manifest through the Lord’s anointed.
But it doesn’t have to be something as horrific as hell to scare someone into embracing their less than saintly impulses.
After all, a culture of shame doesn’t spawn itself.
It’s born out of fear and hell is but one thing I was taught to be afraid of.
People who were different than me - whether that be religiously, politically, sexually, or any other sort of different - were also a source of fear. After all, objectively speaking, if they weren’t conservative evangelical Christians, they were obviously sinners, willful agents of Satan hellbent on dragging me down with them into the eternal abyss.
So when you find yourself in that position and a politician shows up promising to ban all the things you consider sinful and restore the culture you miss and get rid of the people you don’t want around, that can be a very intoxicating temptation. And if you give into that temptation it can very quickly become all but impossible to tell the devil from the Lord’s anointed or truth from lies, especially when that person and those lies work together to quell your fears. But as the dominoes continue to tumble, morals become relative, truth becomes whatever you want it to be, and shame? Shame, you come to realize, is for suckers who lack the courage to do what is necessary regardless the cost.
It’s an incredibly ironic and sad twist of fate, that the same people who once warned me about the dangers of moral relativism have now embraced moral relativism as the way of Jesus. It’s ironic and sad, at least for someone like me who grew up in a culture of shame to one day discover that that same community now has no shame. And not in the healthy sort of way where we loosen the bonds of shame to fully embrace the person God created to us to be. Rather, it is the bonds of morality and integrity, character and compassion, inclusion and embrace from which so many of my fellow Christians seem to have been set free.
Sure, elementary schools might not be performing sex change operations during recess, but when you’re set free from shame you come to understand that even the possibility of a rumor being true which confirms your suspicions of a corrupt world is something worth passing on as true if it gets you one step closer to reshaping the world in your own image.
And ok maybe, Haitian immigrants aren’t eating other people’s pets, but if you know deep down that immigrants are a threat to your safety and lily white way of life then there is no shame in creating a story if it can make their deportation a reality.
And yeah apparently that Algerian boxer was actually, biologically a woman, but technicalities don’t matter when you need a scapegoat and there is no shame to be found in creating that scapegoat if the scandal justifies ostracizing undesirables.
And perhaps doctors aren’t really executing babies after they’re born, but if you know beyond a shadow of a doubt that God is going to send you to hell for even considering the possibility that other people should have control of their own bodies, then forget shame and definitely forget fact-checking. Spread propaganda with pride if it gets you the political power you need to do God’s will.
When you’re free from shame truth becomes whatever you want it to be.
Facts and integrity and honesty might have a place when you possess a sense of shame, but when we break free from the shackles of shame, the lies we tell ourselves can become more than just truth. They can become our gospel. After all, isn’t it good news to learn your enemies have been conquered and your power restored and the world made right again? Hallelujah.
Personally, I don’t miss living in a culture of constant shame, but it is surprising to discover that that same community, the one that taught me the importance of loving my neighbor and welcoming the stranger and caring for the poor and simple honesty seems to have no problem abandoning those principles in the pursuit of political power and cultural purity.
It’s weird.
And, frankly, really sad, like grieving the loss of a loved one.
But maybe I’m wrong.
Maybe I’m the one that should be ashamed.
Maybe spreading lies and demonizing immigrants and ostracizing people who are different from me is the way of Jesus.
Maybe the whole point of Christianity is to rule the world with an iron fist and punish anyone who stands in our way.
Maybe the real reason Jesus died on the cross was to set me free from the burden of loving my neighbor.
Maybe so.
But if that is indeed the case, if lying and racism and bigotry are the true virtues of faith, if Christian ethics and the teachings of Jesus can be suspended in the pursuit of political power because the end justifies the means and anyone denouncing this machiavellian gospel is the true sinner for sowing seeds of disunity and spreading false teaching in the Church for which they will one day find themselves doomed to hell, then alright.
I’ll go to hell.
Ah yes-- Shame and then rededicating my life every 23 days because of fear. It's no wonder I became so riddled with anxiety. I am thankful for truly learning better and finding communities to foster something other than fear and shame. I appreciate the time you took to write this article. Thank you!