A Nation without Shame

Don't ever let anyone shame you for who you are.

It's one of the axioms of our culture, so basic now that we take it divinely received wisdom.  Shame is just what people do when they're trying to control you, or put you down.  Love yourself!  Love everything about yourself!  Love your light and your shadow equally!  You're perfect!

This seems lovely, and affirming, and inclusive.  All of those things.

In some circumstances, these things can be true.

In Nadia Bolz-Weber's engaging 2019 book SHAMELESS, for instance, the case is made for stepping away from shame.  As she puts it:

“Christians should help one another to silence the voice that accuses. To celebrate a repentance—a snapping out of it, a thinking of new thoughts—which leads to possibilities we never considered. To love one another as God loves us. To love ourselves as God loves us. To remind each other of the true voice of God. And there’s only one way to do this: by being unapologetically and humbly ourselves. By not pretending. By being genuine. Real. Our actual, non-ideal selves.”

Shaming and mocking others is a significant human addiction, to be sure.  It's the entire business model of most influencers on X, and it's all too frequently used to bully, manipulate, and control.  What could possibly be wrong with being honestly, wholly yourself, and loving yourself unconditionally?  In the book, Bolz-Weber talks about needing to integrate every aspect of yourself, embracing the whole of who you are, and argues that shame is an impediment to that process. 

“In my pastoral work I've started to suspect that the more someone was exposed to religious messages about controlling their desires, avoiding sexual thoughts, and not lusting in their hearts, the less likely they are to be integrated physically, emotionally, sexually, and spiritually.”

And right there is where I am obligated to disagree.  If shame...anxiety over potential loss of status, wealth, or influence...prevents you from getting help in dealing with your mess, sure.  If you can't get started down the path to recovery and restoration because you fear people will think less of you, yeah, it's a problem.  

But that's a very very different thing from being shameless.  Because there are new things that are selfish, unexplored possibilities that are cruel and brutal, and you can be genuine by being genuinely evil.

Being shameless, I would contend, is the darkest form of toxic empathy.  Here, I'm not using that loaded term in the same way as the false "Christians" who have lately taken issue with caring for the poor and the stranger and the outcast.  Radical, unwavering, and complete love of neighbor is a Gospel imperative, and those clucking about feeding the hungry and showing hospitality to the foreigner are simply trying to justify their own ego-driven cruelty.  

At the same time, the most dangerous form of empathy is our own seemingly endless willingness to tolerate our own BS.  Compassion becomes poison when we constrain it with our selfishness.  It is toxic when we only feel our own pain, and only sympathize with those who are exactly like us.  Unwavering and shameless love of self is nothing more and nothing less than narcissism, and it wrecks lives.  It is purely amoral.

Morality...meaning our defining purpose, the governing ethogenetics by which we understand the good...is what integrates our personhood.   Just as pain and discomfort alert us to that which damages our physical being, shame alerts us to the damage we're doing to our souls when we act in ways that subvert our purpose.

Shame is our moral pain.  As such, it's not something we are to do to others.  It's a necessary aspect of our own ethical existence.

If and when I violate the moral teachings of Jesus...meaning the things he ACTUALLY TOLD US TO DO...shame is a healthy response.  If I harm another, if I lie or cheat or steal?  I feel shame.   When I find myself lustfully objectifying others, or am distracted by the trivial baubles offered up by consumerism?  I feel shame.  When my righteous anger devolves into blind and consuming hatred?  I feel shame.  

Those impulses are a part of me, sure.  I'm human.  Failure to acknowledge that would be fundamentally dishonest.

But those desires, uncontrolled, become my rotting edges, the parts of me that sabotage my growth in grace and justice.  They impede my life-purpose.  Like an untreated and gangrenous necrosis in a living system, they will spread in a soul until the soul dies.  They are fundamentally and essentially dis-integrative, and as such, they must...for a moral person...be debrided away.

Being truly shameless is the mark of the soulless sociopath, the bullying brute, the serial predator, the unteachable fool and the breaker-of-things.

This is true of persons.  It is also just as true of nations.

If a nation's only purpose is itself, it is just as amoral as the most venal narcissist.  Some, like 20th century theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, suggest that nations are inherently immoral.  As he argued in his seminal MORAL MAN AND MORAL SOCIETY, political collectives are interested only in their own constituent members, and are unable to make decisions that might go against their own power and wealth.

This is, apparently, America's national ethic now.  Brazen, self-glorifying, and utterly unwilling to acknowledge any error, we are becoming a nation without shame, blustering and shouting at the nations around us like a drunken reality show contestant.  

Our moral purpose is our own power and our own wealth, period, end of story.  We are told that to suggest otherwise is to be ashamed of America, and that we should instead glory in our greatness and our power.

If your moral purpose goes deeper than pride in national power, though, this feels like nothing more than collective narcissism.  For those of us who actually pay attention to the sacred stories of the Bible, and who understand that God relentlessly calls both persons and nations to account, this is just the teensiest bit troubling.

Because if you've spent even a few moments reading the Torah and the Prophets, or cracked open the Gospels and Epistles, you know that God has never had much patience with wanton and shameless nations.

Lord have mercy on our souls.

Subpoenas and Sermons

The netrage is out there, about everything, about anything, and one rage-meme that's been popping a whole bunch in my feeds lately has to do with the subpoenas issued to five Texas area pastors for copies of their sermons.

The reason has to do with a fight over a Houston ordinance protecting the rights of transgendered persons.  A coalition of conservative megachurch pastors actively opposed it, using the same odd tactic that's been attempted in my region.  They also used their large congregations as their political base in their attempt to overturn the law.  After a petition attempt to put the issue on the next ballot as a referendum failed, the coalition filed a lawsuit to stop the ordinance.

So the lawyers for the city, acting in defense of the municipality against the lawsuit filed by the churches, chose to subpoena the sermons of five representative communities.

This has created the netrage, as the pastors now stand firmly on the principle of the separation of church and state.  It has nothing to do with the LGBT community!  This is about the Constitution!  This is about religious liberty!

Of course, this is also coming from pastors who are using their pulpits and their congregations how?   To engage in political endeavor.  Complaining about the separation of church and state when you've actively used your congregation to mobilize politically is...well...mildly ironic.

Two particular things seem problematic about this carefully cultivated outrage.

Thing number one: why would you ever need to subpoena a sermon?  If a congregation and/or their pastor is doing their job, a sermon is not a secret.  This isn't a closed business meeting.  It's something you share, not just with the true believing Pureblood Christians, but with anyone and everyone.  It's not "inside the silo" speech.  It's a message to the whole world.  Anyone can hear it.  You should never, ever, need a subpoena to shake loose a sermon, any more than you'd need to subpoena the front page of the Washington Post or the Houston Chronicle.

Sermons are public speech, and speech you should be willing to have out there in the world in front of everyone.

I post the full text of every single sermon I preach online.  Thanks to the good work of folks at my church, the audio is also available...on iTunes, streamable, and downloadable.  Every single one of those sermons is there, my weekly efforts to interpret these ancient sacred texts with as much accuracy and grace as I can. Why?

Because what I preach is intended to spread the Gospel of Jesus Christ.

That's the whole point of preaching, isn't it?  Not to affirm what my congregation already believes as we whisper to each other in secret, but to challenge anyone who hears me to be more loving, more merciful, more compassionate, and more gracious.  If I'm doing my job right, it's a message of grace to anyone...the stranger, the visitor, anyone.

If one so chose, you could keyword search through my sermons, looking for anything and everything.  Go ahead.  I stand by those words.  They represent my best effort to articulate the grace of the Gospel of Jesus Christ into the world.

So if anyone ever says to me, I demand a copy of your sermons?  Sure.  Here's the link.  Go to town, buckaroo.

Which gets me to thing number two:  It's an effort to shame us, the pastors argue, and to tar us as anti-LGBT bigots.  We're being bullied by those mean government folks, just because we've used our pulpits in an effort to overturn a law that prevents discrimination against a tiny minority of Americans.  We will never turn over our sermons, they cry.  They're just trying to shame us with our own words!  We'd rather go to jail than turn over our preaching to these shamey bullies!  Because...liberty!  Because...Constitution!

From a libertarian/anarchist perspective, I can sort of see that.  We don't like being told what to do, not by anyone, for any reason.  It's an affront to my sovereign individuality to force me to do anything.

But from a Gospel perspective, a servant-of-Jesus-Christ perspective, this is completely insane.  If those messages contain the Gospel, then they're nothing to be ashamed of.  I want you to hear them.  I want you to read them, whoever you are, wherever you are.

If what they are would appear hateful in the sight of a neutral, objective third party, then they're not the Gospel.

The Apostle Paul, in his letter to the church at Rome, laid that out pretty clearly.  What we do and say, if we are acting and speaking as Christians, must be noble in the sight of all.  Following Jesus is self-evidently loving, self-evidently merciful, self-evidently just.

As preaching should be, if it is really and truly the preaching of the Gospel.