The Church Needs Shame to Function
By: Dan Foster
Tags: Religion, Christianity, Faith, Church, Spirituality

A false conversion

Far too many years later, I realized that my conversion to Christianity had been something done under duress. I was pressured. I was shamed. I was emotionally manipulated. I was presented with a horrible choice, and I chose the path that I thought would deliver me from the nightmarish scenario presented to me from the pulpit — time and time again.

When I started following Jesus, I did it to avoid the consequences of not following Jesus. I did not love Jesus. I was not compelled to follow him by reading about his exemplary life through the Gospels. I was simply following Jesus to avoid punishment — to escape the flames — and to avoid the kind of public humiliation that might make one wish to vanish into thin air.

I arrived at a troubling conclusion: The church’s primary weapon to achieve many of its goals is shame. I think back over the years that I was part of the evangelical church, and I saw it time and time again — experienced it myself and, though it pains me to admit, participated in the shaming of others. It was the culture in which I was raised.

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The many uses of shame

The church is full of lovely people beholden to a broken system — a guilt-based religious structure that ultimately keeps people enslaved. Here is a snapshot of the various ways that I have observed the use of shame and shaming in the church:

Using shame to create converts

Shame is used to convince people that they need to accept Jesus in the first instance. I want to say that my ‘conversion’ story was an exception to the common narrative, but sadly it is not. The threat of Hell was the sales pitch that was used to get many to sign on the dotted line when it comes to following Christ. Vivid images of having your worst sins exposed for all the world to see are all too typical.

Annette Kämmerer, in her article on the scientific effects of shame, points out that adolescents are more susceptible to the negative effects of shame than fully grown adults. It makes me wonder if the whole “Your-life-will-be-played-back-on-the-big-screen” illustration was actually used by design to achieve a certain result or elicit a certain response in teenagers.

Either way, a person will only follow another out of fear for so long before deciding to break free from their puritanical regime. Love, on the other hand, compels a person to follow indefinitely. The problem is that love takes longer to reap a harvest than fear, and the church has never been known for its patience.

Using shame to create conformity

Shame is used in the church to make people conform to the norms of the group. Belief, in any system, is a social exercise. Nowhere is this more evident than in the evangelical church. If you want to fit in, there are a bunch of so-called, not-negotiable “truths” that you must ascribe to. Many of them are extra-Biblical and have more to do with tradition and dogma than the actual practice of following Christ.

You will quickly find yourself frozen out if you begin to question certain things like Scripture's inerrancy, for example. Don’t talk too loudly about how you support gay marriage. And mention that you do not believe in a literal seven-day creation narrative at your own peril. Anyone on the liberal end of the spectrum is treated as an object of suspicion.

When it comes to free-thinking, there is very little room to move in the evangelical church. People who hold to views that deviate from what is considered orthodox are most certainly shamed — both behind their backs on the gossip circuit and from the pulpit when the alarmed Pastor seeks to correct your wicked heresy before it takes root and leads others astray. You can sense the concern in your well-meaning Christian friends when you express your doubts and difficult questions. Most of us care so much about belonging that we suppress and bury these uneasy feelings for the sake of fitting in. After all, we have seen what happens to people who refuse to conform: They always end up on the outer.

Using shame to generate income

Shame is used in the church to make people open their wallets and give. In a system where churches spend around 75% of their income on paying the pastor’s wage and maintain the church building, money really does make the world go around.

If I had a dollar for every time I had been guilted into giving more money to the church, I would have a considerable amount of money to give to the church. The ancient, Old Testament practice of tithing — giving away a tenth of your income — has found its home in modern Christian churches, even though much of the rest of the Old Testament has been dispensed with. Moreover, the biblical command to tithe is taken to literally mean, “You ought to be giving your money to the institutionalized church.”

What is even more abhorrent than this is the suggestion that your financial giving is somehow linked to the blessing of God. The more you give, the more God will bless you, some churches will assert. In fact, your monetary gifts are capable of unlocking the blessing of God, they say. Commonly known as the “prosperity Gospel,” this mindset insinuates that God can somehow be ‘bought off’ and that the blessing of God is somehow for sale. Appalling!

Consequently, the church has, at times, suggested that if your life is not going according to your plan, perhaps you are not giving enough of your cash. Either way, the message presented in the church is clear. Good Christians give their money to the church. Bad Christians do not.

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Using shame to lift attendance

Shame is used in the church to make people participate, attend, and serve. As a Christian who does not attend a mainstream traditional church, preferring instead to practice my faith simply and free from the institution, I have experienced first hand the kind of shaming that is dispensed at the hands of good, Bible-believing, church-attending Christians towards those who chose not to attend, participate and serve in a traditional church setting.

When I bump into friends from my past life — a life of church-attending — I am commonly asked where I am going to church these days. When I reply that I am not part of a congregation anymore, I am usually met with a mix of pity and concern and just a hint of indignation. “Well, I’ll be praying for you,” is the common conclusion to these kinds of conversations — as if I were somehow a lost pagan.

In reality, since leaving the church, my faith has found new life. No longer is my life hyper-scheduled with prayer meetings, potluck suppers, and Bible studies, largely at the expense of God’s command to take observe a Sabbath and have a rest. I am no longer made to feel bad for spending Saturday with my family instead of going to the church working bee.

Using shame to manage behavior

It is a great irony that the church preaches a message that says, “Come to God as you are and receive full acceptance,” while simultaneously promoting a performance-based religious system with obvious boundary markers about what is and is not acceptable behavior. How many of the sermons you hear in your average church, when you boil them down, are simply a message of condemnation: “You're doing it wrong! Get better, do better, do this more, do this less,” and so on.

I cannot believe that I sat through so many sermons where I was told that I need to improve myself — wherein all my very human actions, emotions, and reactions were painted as shameful to God.

Christianity is supposed to be a life-transforming faith, but it has been reduced to a sin-management program in many churches where there are very clear guidelines about what a good Christian is and does. The result is quite the opposite of the Gospel's intent, with many believing that they don’t measure up, that they aren’t good enough for God and never will be.

The result of a shame-based system

Guilt-based religion and shame work well to keep the troops in line because shame certainly is a powerful motivator — but only in the short term. It does not result in real, lasting transformation. In the longer term, it produces some rather different results:

A misrepresented God

A system that uses shame to achieve its goals ultimately makes out God to be the same. Unwittingly, the church made God seem like an arm-folding, eye-rolling, head-shaking, fist-waving, disapproving megalomaniac, who is impossible to please and constantly unimpressed. Moreover, the church made it seem like God, with a heaving sigh, begrudgingly came and died for our sins, and we ought to feel constantly guilty about making him die in the first place.

Consequently, the “God” the church presents seems to struggle to show unconditional love or mercy to sinners, even though, according to Jesus, it is in God’s very job description.

In fact, under the message that most of us have heard, we up being more loving than God and then not taking God very seriously. When I think about my non-Christian friends — ordinary people — I know that they would usually give a guy a break, overlook someone’s mistakes, and, even on their worst days, would not imagine torturing people who do not like them, worship them, or believe in them. Yet, that is how the “God” that the church presents appears to be. He ends up looking rather petty, needy, narcissistic and easily offended.

In the church, we are told that we ought to love unconditionally, but the God who commands this is depicted as having a very conditional and quite exclusive love himself. We are told to love our enemies, but it seems that “God” clearly does not. In fact, God punishes them for all eternity.

Why would anyone trust or love such a God and want to follow him? Much less spend eternity with such a being?

I wouldn’t.

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A breeding ground for hypocrites

In every sense, it feels like, in a church, you cannot be both fully known and fully loved — for to be fully known would be to be rejected based on the invisible and unspoken expectations placed on Christians by the church that everyone is, in fact, struggling to meet. This perpetuates the very problem that harkens back to the Garden of Eden, where Adam and Eve felt that they had to hide their nakedness from God. They believed that if God saw them fully, he would reject them outright.

As a result, so many who attend churches pick up their fig leaves and cover their own shame and sense of not measuring up. Christians are forced to pretend, repress, deny, or become a hypocrite because nothing they do will ever be good enough. It is not so much that hypocrites join churches, but that the evangelical church’s very structures encourage people to act and pretend.

At some point, many Christians — finally fed up with the sheer level of energy it takes to play this game — give up and leave the church for good. Often these are people of real inner integrity and spiritual intelligence who refuse to deny, repress, or pretend any longer. In a cruel twist, they are treated as backslidden, fallen, and unfaithful Christians by those who remain inside the system—what a tragic irony.

A Church without shame

All of my experiences of the church to date — some four decades worth — have taught me that the church, as it is right now, couldn’t function without shame. And that’s a shame.

I wonder though, what would a church look like if it did not resort to shame and shaming to achieve its goals?

Could we really convince a person that Christ is worth following based on the compelling life that he lived, wherein he demonstrated that he is the preeminent teacher and practitioner of love, compassion, and mercy?

Could the man who was humiliated and hung naked on a cross convince us all that in shamelessly bearing our wounds to the world, we may actually become agents of healing and change?

Could we become a community without pretense, where the need to act, perform, and pretend was overrun by unconditional acceptance and love?

I am not ashamed to say that I am holding on to that hope.