“A Past That Promises More”
Rev. Dr. Steven Jungkeit
Texts: Genesis 2:2, 3:7; Genesis 4: 1-10; Romans 8: 1-2
No Condemnation: The Unspoken History of a Strong Emotion
What if the history of the world – its wars, its peace, its economics, its art and artifacts, its alliances and rivalries – could be understood as responses to a set of common human emotions – shame or anger, fear or joy, sorrow or compassion?
That’s the question behind a recent development called “affect theory” cutting across a number of fields within the humanities. It seeks to understand how affect – structures of feeling – is marshalled in order to govern, to shape public opinion, to move products and to attract and sustain attention. For example, they trace the way much of the economy in places like the U.S. and Europe turns on what we can think of as affective labor – managing the feelings of others. We can think about the rise of human relations departments within corporate structures, or customer relations in everything from airlines to banks to insurance companies, all of it there in order to manage feelings. We can think of product placements that are, in essence, there to produce affect, and we can think of the entire wellness industry which has to do with producing feelings – primarily of well being. Arguably, we as ministers are affective laborers, tasked not (we hope) with manipulating feeling, but to sense it, to respond to it, and when we can, to shape it, hopefully for the better. Chances are fair that some component of your job also deals in the realm of affect – of emotions.
This isn’t something extraneous to the life of faith. It is, in fact, one of the principal subjects with which the biblical narrative is concerned. One of our tasks as people of faith and conscience is to learn how to steward our emotions, the way we steward our money, possessions or power. Faith would have us understand the inner dynamics of our own affect, that we might discern where certain strong emotions are coming from, and then learning how to deploy those emotions constructively. Insofar as it is possible, we are to be stewards of emotional life, that our emotions are not squandered, that we not be tossed about by the winds of this or that manufactured feeling, that we shepherd affect for the good.
Today I wish to concentrate on one particularly strong emotion, one that the Bible seems especially concerned to diagnose, and then to ease – to steward, if you will: shame. The more I read the Bible, the more I’ve come to think that this may be the central emotional dynamic governing much of the drama between God and humanity, from Genesis through the ministry of Jesus. Throughout the Bible, and throughout much of human history, this strong emotion, shame, together with all of its aftereffects, has been the driving engine toward violence. Tellingly, I also believe that it is an experience of shame that is governing much of our own national life at the moment. For the past two months, I have been processing and turning over in my mind what it was, and what it is, that is making a rather dark figure like Charlie Kirk so attractive to so many, but especially to so many evangelical Christians. Were I to attempt an answer, I would say that it springs from this very cycle of shame, followed by an attempt to address that shame through the symbolic defeat of one’s enemies. But first the Bible.
Reading the story of the fall in Genesis, at the very beginning of the Bible, establishes the pattern for us. We all know the story, of course – Adam and Eve are alone in the garden, and are warned not to eat the fruit of the tree of knowledge. They are, the text tells us, naked – and here the text names the dynamic openly – and they are unashamed. Eve then eats the fruit, and then Adam follows. After that, they hide themselves from God. And they sew fig leaves together in order to hide themselves from one another. This primal human moment has to do with the discovery of shame.
The consequences of that discovery become clear in the following chapter, when we encounter the children of Adam and Eve, Cain and Abel. Once again, it’s a familiar story. The two brothers bring offerings before God. One offering is acceptable – Abel’s – and the other is not – Cain’s. We’re not told why this is so. The point here is to read the emotional dynamic at work. The rejection that Cain experiences leads to a feeling of shame, and then of anger. He then directs that anger toward his brother, killing him in a murderous rage.
Keep reading, and you’ll find the pattern replicated over and over in the biblical saga – the sons of Jacob selling their brother Joseph into enslavement after he is given the favor they are not, the conquest of Canaan by the wandering children of Abraham after their debasement in Egypt, the warfare of the kings Saul and David after David is blessed and Saul is not, the utter humiliation of the people in the time of the prophets, which leads to the dream of a great restoration – one, it was hoped, that Jesus would bring. That way – the recovery of honor, the restoration of greatness – are you listening? – was not the way of Jesus. It wasn’t what he offered then. And it is not what he offers now.
We’ve all experienced shame in one form or another, usually not in these extreme ways. Mostly, I think, it makes us want to hide, to cover ourselves, the way Adam and Eve do in the garden. The unkind word spoken in haste, the embarrassing slip, the unchecked desire that causes us to stumble – usually we treat such unpleasant memories with silence – the fig leaves we sew for ourselves. But sometimes the sustained humiliations inflicted by others elicit the response of Cain – a shooting, an attack, an uprising. Sometimes that dynamic can affect an entire population, sweeping through like an untreated plague.
Years ago I read a book that continues to linger with me, one that I believe explains this time in our collective history better than most any other. It’s a book about shame and its consequences in American religious life. It’s called Less Than Conquerors: How Evangelicals Entered the Twentieth Century, written by a friend of mine named Doug Frank. It’s still in print, and I encourage you to track it down. It is impossible to understand where we are today in America without an understanding of American evangelicalism. And it is impossible to understand American evangelicalism without an understanding of its emotional undercurrents. Frank traces how evangelicals were ridiculed in the late 19th and early 20th centuries as illiterate, backwards, and bigoted fools. They were, in essence, shamed. Often clustered in the middle of the country, these Bible believing and pious individuals responded defensively, building networks of churches and seminaries, together with an entire fortress-like worldview, that would serve to protect them from outside criticism.
In the midst of that defensiveness, a revivalist and showman named Billy Sunday crisscrossed the country in the first two decades of the twentieth century, holding tent meetings – rallies we might call them today – that attracted hundreds of thousands of besieged evangelicals. Using insinuations of violence, Sunday mocked and jeered at his opponents – the secularists, the evolutionists, the whiskey runners, the liberal and effeminate Christians who failed to demonstrate a manly and muscular approach to cultural life – and his audiences encouraged him with shouts and applause. At the end of every revival meeting, they were urged to accept into their hearts the Christ that Billy Sunday had preached, and thousands, perhaps millions, responded.
Frank suggests that Billy Sunday’s revivals were a form of symbolic bloodletting, where audiences gathered to witness Sunday slaying each of their perceived enemies. The rhetoric was ugly but it was also wildly effective. Consider, after all, who Billy Sunday was preaching to: they were a people who had seen their own cultural influence decline precipitously at the end of the 19th century. America had urbanized, and industrialized, and secularized seemingly overnight, leaving a whole population disoriented and bewildered. These were, like my own family on both my mother’s and my father’s side, first or second generation immigrants from Northern Europe. They were farmers and tradespeople – peasants of an earlier generation, and they did not have traditions of learning behind them. And so amidst the tumult, they clung to Jesus with all their might, and a deeply felt experience of God, in order to make sense of these upheavals. Adding insult to injury, many outside observers heaped scorn and abuse on that faith, sneering at its simplicity. No wonder, then, that a figure like Billy Sunday could ride into town and gain such a following, appealing to the perceived losses and resentments stirring in his audiences. No wonder that he could perform his ritual “killings” every night, symbolically slaying those who had brought a kind of shame, or disorientation, or bewilderment upon his gathered listeners. And no wonder the crowds responded so enthusiastically, aligning themselves with one who could defeat their own perceived tormentors.
Here’s what happens next. In 1925, the Scopes-Monkey Trial in Dayton, Tennessee pitted evangelicals against the teaching of evolution in public schools, and evangelicals were badly defeated in the court of public opinion. They were embarrassed, and once again, shamed, by H.L. Mencken’s ruthless reporting of the trial. Evangelicalism went into a kind of hibernation for several decades after that, emerging again in the Postwar years. After another few decades of retrenchment, they emerged again with a vengeance in 1979 with Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority. From there, evangelicals have gone on to become the most consequential political ideology of the 21st century, dominating not only US elections, but those in Brazil and other parts of Latin America, while exerting influence in places like Israel, Hungary, Russia, and many parts of Africa. The framework for that rise was set in the early 20th century.
Reading Doug Frank’s account of Billy Sunday’s revival services allows us to trace a direct link from Billy Sunday to the attraction that millions of people, many of them evangelical Christians, feel for the President or for someone like Charlie Kirk. There are important differences between then and now, of course. But just the way emotional patterns are passed down in families, so too the emotional dynamics of evangelical culture has remained more or less constant. It remains embattled, forever feeling as if it is under siege. Often, self-professed evangelicals compensate by projecting a fragile and brittle kind of strength that masks an abiding insecurity. Were I allowed to speculate, I would say that the evangelical self-imagination is trapped in a previous era, when it was still possible to imagine oneself as part of a besieged minority, rather than, as is now the case, being a part of a powerful and very mainstream cultural juggernaut responsible for shaping world events. And so even if the reality is fairly different, the structure of feeling remains very similar – a structure defined by shame, by a perceived sense of loss, and by the need to embody a kind of confidence and strength that often translates into arrogance, or aggression.
Take all of that history and gather it in. But then add the snide comments and insinuations slipped into TV and film and talk shows. Add the asides spoken at dinner tables and in classrooms disparaging evangelicals and their beliefs. And though I’m doing my best to be fair, you could probably add sermons like this one, and theologies and churches like ours to the mix. Add it all together, and you can begin to imagine why it might be a relief to watch someone like Kirk, or the President, or their many acolytes, symbolically slaying your own perceived tormentors – addressing all the large and small humiliations you have endured by humiliating those who humiliate you. It is a vicious, and a never ending cycle.
And what of Jesus – not the cultural construct fashioned for evangelical power, but the Jesus of the Gospels, the man of sorrows who is acquainted with grief? This is not a man who busies himself restoring lost greatness. Rather, we see him everywhere unlocking this cycle of shame and retribution, untying it within souls as if it were a stubborn emotional knot. Think of him sitting and talking with a woman shamed by having married some seven times. Think of how he treats the woman caught in the act of adultery. Think of how he deals with the tax collectors, those craven collaborators with Roman rule. Think of how he handles the leprous, the diseased, the blind, and the lame. Think of how he interacts with the poor. Think of how he treats children, or the Samaritans.
In each and every case, Jesus identifies with an individual or a population that had been subjected to shame, and therefore a literal or a symbolic banishment. In each and every case, Jesus unlocks that cycle of shame and retribution by treating people as human beings, as friends, worthy of his time and attention. Worthy of his emotion. He undoes the logic of shame not by symbolically slaying an enemy, but by reaching into the places where people have been hurt or humiliated, in order to say, “You matter to me, and to God.” When he himself is ritually shamed, stripped naked and executed, he refuses to cover that shame, or to hide, or to pay his enemies back in kind. Instead, it is forgiveness that he offers on the cross. The Apostle Paul later puts it this way: in Christ, there is no condemnation. Not for you. Not for me. Not for anyone.
This is a Jesus that continues to attract and to draw me in. It’s a Jesus that I continue to believe in, one who may yet help to unknot the cycle of shaming and retribution we seem to be locked in. I don’t imagine that the problems or differences we face can be easily overcome. But as often as not, the conflicts we do face come down to some pretty basic human emotions having to do with respect and the conveyance of dignity, or conversely disrespect and the conveyance of humiliation, or shame. Imagine if we could say to those we disagreed with something like this: “I hear you. I respect where you’re coming from. I am in a very different place, and I cannot change those things I value. But I will respect who you are without trying to change you.” I don’t wish to be naive, but I do wonder what might open up in our relationships if we learned to speak like that. And then I also think about all the board rooms and circles of diplomacy where highly charged but fairly simple human emotions are in play. What might the world look like if those seated at the table were attuned to the affective world of those around them, and spoke accordingly?
And while it may be too late for much of what passes for evangelical Christianity these days, I wish I could sit a few representative leaders down, not to tell them they’re wrong, but simply to say: “In the name of Jesus, you are free to walk away from this endless cycle of shame and its cover-up. There is, therefore, no need to chase after power. There is, therefore, no need to chase after acclaim. There is, therefore, no need to strive so hard to make the world listen to you. You are accepted. You are respected. There is no condemnation. You have the freedom simply to be.” I don’t know that such things can be heard any longer in evangelical circles. And yet I still dream that it might be said, and heard.
This may or may not be the emotional dynamic that many of us here in Old Lyme are acquainted with. It’s not always so, but many of us come from more privileged backgrounds, and so haven’t had to face these dynamics. Still, I’d like to believe that we might learn to read these emotional currents, and to respond compassionately. But I also tend to think that somewhere along the way each of us has been exposed to some form of shame – as children, or maybe as adults, and that we carry those burdens somewhere within us. I’ve come to believe that Jesus seeks us out in order to untie the knots of shame that we do sometimes carry, and with it the resentment, anger, envy, and false pride that follow in its wake. I believe that Jesus seeks each of us out in the vulnerable spaces of our hearts, in order to say: I love you. I accept you just as you are. And that is that. Amen.