More Bait and Switch

Surprisingly, my post on the bait and switch of contemporary Christianity continues to rattle around the internet and generate conversation. In one conversation someone posted the following comic strip.

Enjoy (click to enlarge):

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Christians and Torture: Part 3, Conformity, Authority and Religious Justification

The first study I want to review was done by Dan, Page, Bonnie and Kelsey. This team of students was inspired to investigate how conformity and authority affect attitudes regarding torture.

The team's research question was simple: What if college students were told that most of the faculty at the University endorsed the use of torture? Would this put pressure on the students to fall in line with the majority opinion of these authority figures? Also, given the When God Sanctions Killing research, what if the faculty endorsing torture were the Bible faculty? Would the opinions of the Bible faculty, people who should know a bit about God's will and Christian ethics, intensify a conformity or authority effect?

The students were inspired by two famous studies in the area of conformity and obedience to authority. Regarding conformity, the students talked a great deal about the the famous Solomon Asch studies concerning group conformity conducted in 1953. That research is replicated in this YouTube clip:



Concerning obedience to authority the students were inspired by Stanley Milgram and his obedience experiments. Milgram's paper, "Behavioral study of obedience," is probably the most significant and controversial paper ever published in psychology. The question of the study was simply this: How many normal people would administer painful and potentially dangerous electric shocks over the protest of a victim simply because an authority figure asked them to? The result was shocking: 65%. You can watch a modern-day replication of the Milgram study here on YouTube.

Inspired by these studies my students devised a simple manipulation to see if conformity and authority effects might influence how college students at a Christian university endorsed the use of torture. The team asked fellow college students to respond to the same question used by the Pew Research Center (i.e., Can torture often, sometimes, rarely or never be justified?). Prior to asking that question the team added an introductory statement to explain the nature of the survey and why we were interested in student responses on this issue. The template for the introduction was this:

Recent polling done by the Office of Research at ACU found that ___ of ACU Faculty supported the use of torture against suspected terrorists. In light of these results, the ACU Psychology Department is following up with a survey to gather more information about student opinions regarding the use of torture.

The blank was filled in with one of two numbers, 20% or 80%. The research question was, would the students informed that 80% of the faculty endorsed torture also be more likely to endorse torture, conforming to the majority opinion of the authority figures? By contrast, would those reading that only 20% endorsed torture move in the opposite direction, following the majority of the faculty in the rejection of torture?

A final manipulation involved inserting the word "Bible" between "ACU" and "Faculty." That is, some participants read "80% of the ACU Faculty" and others read "80% of the ACU Bible Faculty." The goal here was to determine if an explicit religious endorsement of torture would have a more potent conformity and authority effect. (Note to my faculty friends. Participants were debriefed at the completion of the study.)

The overall results were what you might expect. Torture endorsement was highest among college students who read that 80% of their faculty endorsed the use of torture. That is, student opinion tended to conform to the opinions of the authority figures. Further, this conformity intensified when the students were told that torture was endorsed by the Bible faculty. This is the effect we expected given the research regarding God sanctioning killing. Violence is more likely to be approved of when it is given religious warrant and justification.

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Two Friends

With over three million YouTube views you've probably seen this. But we just discovered this today.

Hat Tip to CF:

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Christians and Torture: Part 2, When God Sanctions Killing

After reading the Pew report (where Christians were found to be more in favor of torture than non-Christians) I asked the students to ponder the link between religion and violence. There is, obviously, an association. Islamic terrorists flew planes into buildings on 9/11 and Christian terrorists shoot abortion doctors or lynch gay people. In both cases the violence is motivated by the conviction that God sanctions the killing.

To stir the pot on this topic I had the students read a study in Psychological Science by Bushman, Ridge, Das, Key, and Busath. The study was entitled When God Sanctions Killing: Effect of Scriptural Violence on Aggression.

In the study the researchers had the subjects read a relatively obscure account of violence from the Old Testament, Judges 19-21. Prior to reading the story the first experimental manipulation occurred. Half the participants were told, accurately, that the story was from the bible. The other half of the participants were told that the story was taken from a scroll "discovered in ancient ruins near Wadi Al-Murabba‘ah during a 1984 archaeological expedition headed by Professor William Deyer." That is, half the subjects believed (correctly) that the account came the bible while the rest were lead to believe that the story was extra-biblical.

The account in Judges 19-21 begins with a Levite who takes a concubine from Bethlehem in Judah and brings her back to his home in Ephraim. Apparently unhappy in the arrangement, the woman flees back to Judah. The Levite goes to Judah to recover her. He does so and starts the journey back home. The group stops one night in the town of Gibeah in Benjamin and plans to spend the night in the city square. Eventually, however, they are taken in by a kindly old man. They go to the old man's house, are fed and refreshed, and then the following events transpire:

While they were enjoying themselves, some of the wicked men of the city surrounded the house. Pounding on the door, they shouted to the old man who owned the house, "Bring out the man who came to your house so we can have sex with him."

The owner of the house went outside and said to them, "No, my friends, don't be so vile. Since this man is my guest, don't do this disgraceful thing. Look, here is my virgin daughter, and his concubine. I will bring them out to you now, and you can use them and do to them whatever you wish. But to this man, don't do such a disgraceful thing."

But the men would not listen to him. So the man took his concubine and sent her outside to them, and they raped her and abused her throughout the night, and at dawn they let her go. At daybreak the woman went back to the house where her master was staying, fell down at the door and lay there until daylight.

When her master got up in the morning and opened the door of the house and stepped out to continue on his way, there lay his concubine, fallen in the doorway of the house, with her hands on the threshold. He said to her, "Get up; let's go." But there was no answer. Then the man put her on his donkey and set out for home.

When he reached home, he took a knife and cut up his concubine, limb by limb, into twelve parts and sent them into all the areas of Israel. Everyone who saw it said, "Such a thing has never been seen or done, not since the day the Israelites came up out of Egypt. Think about it! Consider it! Tell us what to do!"

Then all the Israelites from Dan to Beersheba and from the land of Gilead came out as one man and assembled before the LORD in Mizpah. The leaders of all the people of the tribes of Israel took their places in the assembly of the people of God, four hundred thousand soldiers armed with swords. (The Benjamites heard that the Israelites had gone up to Mizpah.) Then the Israelites said, "Tell us how this awful thing happened."

So the Levite, the husband of the murdered woman, said, "I and my concubine came to Gibeah in Benjamin to spend the night. During the night the men of Gibeah came after me and surrounded the house, intending to kill me. They raped my concubine, and she died. I took my concubine, cut her into pieces and sent one piece to each region of Israel's inheritance, because they committed this lewd and disgraceful act in Israel. Now, all you Israelites, speak up and give your verdict."

At this point in the text the researchers added a second experimental manipulation. For half of the participants the following lines were inserted into the story:

The assembly fasted and prayed before the LORD and asked
‘‘What shall be done about the sins of our brothers in Benjamin?’’;
and the LORD answered them, saying that no such abomination
could stand among his people. The LORD commanded Israel to
take arms against their brothers and chasten them before the LORD.

The story then continues with the Isrealites taking up arms against the Benjamites. In the ensuing battle ten of thousands are killed on both sides. Given the experimental manipulation, half of the participants read that this retaliatory violence was commanded by God.

Summarizing, the study had two manipulations which created four groups. The first division was between those who were told that the story was biblical versus those who were told it was extra-biblical. These two groups were then divided again with half of each group reading the non-modified text versus those who read the inserted text of God commanding the retaliatory violence.

After these groups read their respective texts they engaged in a laboratory task intended to measure aggression. Subjects were placed in a competitive task where they had to push a button faster than their "opponent." The loser would receive a blast of noise through headphones he/she was wearing. Further, the participants could select the decibel level of the blast they could deliver to the defeated opponent. Specifically, the subjects had control of a dial that ranged from Level 0 (no noise) to Level 10 (105 db, the volume of a smoke alarm). The measure of aggression was how often the subject selected Levels 9 and 10 to inflict upon their opponent.

The outcome of the study was intriguing. Specifically, subjects who where told that the story above came from the bible were more aggressive than those told the story came from an extra-biblical scroll. Apparently, if violence is in the bible this seems to sanction the use of violence. This trend was confirmed in that those who read that God sanctioned the violence in the story (i.e., read the inserted text) were more aggressive than those who did not read about God commanding the retaliatory violence.

In the second study of the Bushman et al. paper these effects were examined for both Christians and non-Christians. Overall, God sanctioned violence (being in the bible and commanded by God) increased aggression for both Christians and non-Christians. However, this effect was strongest for the Christians (i.e., they were more aggressive than non-Christians when God was seen to sanction violence).

To conclude, I wanted the students to digest this study as it might illuminate the trends found in the Pew report. Specifically, and this is no real surprise, religious believers become more violent when they feel that God sanctions the violence. The implication is that if Christians believe that the use of torture in the war on terror has a religious component, is sanctioned by God, then their approval of torture increases. In fact, this is what I think is going on. During the Bush administration there was a strong conflation between God and Country. Insofar as these are identified with each other (God and Country) the actions of the government are seen as sanctioned by God. This judgment is heightened by the fact that the war on terror is felt to be a holy war, a war between Islam and Christianity. To probe this tension I asked my students to consider the following. Imagine we caught a radical evangelical preacher who was at the center of a plot to blow up a government building in protest of the Obama administration. The bomb is ticking and we have to get him to confess or the bomb will detonate and kill hundreds of people. Will we, in this case, torture an American citizen and a Chrisitan to find the bomb?

And what if the bomb was not in a government building but in a mosque? Or an abortion clinic?

What then?

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Giving Up Your Place in Heaven

I'm reading Cornel West's memoir Brother West. I enjoyed this story from his childhood:

Though I had accepted Jesus into my heart, it was not my nature to dwell on literal notions of heaven and hell. In fact, when my Sunday School teacher, the wonderous Mrs. Sarah Ray, posed the question, "If there is only one place left in heaven, would you take it?" my answer was, "No."

"Why in heavens not?" asked Mrs. Ray.

"Because I'd have to do the Christian thing, and the Christian theing would be to let someone else pass into heaven first."

Mrs. Ray was amazed. "And you'd choose to fall into hell, Cornel?"

I just assumed that Jesus has promised to be with me even until the end of the world. So I just stand on his promise. I have always believed that ours is in the trying; the rest is not our business.

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Christians and Torture: Part 1, The Pew Report

One of the joys I have teaching at ACU is doing research with undergraduates. In the coming posts I'd like to share a bit of the research I supervised this summer working with some very talented students: Allison, Whitney, Daniel, Page, Bonnie, Courtney and Kelsey. The students plan to present their research this coming spring at a psychological conference.

Our broad topic was attitudes toward torture and the use enhanced interrogation techniques. A more specific focus in some of the research was the relationship between religious belief and attitudes concerning torture.

Our research discussions began with me handing out a report published by the Pew Research Center. Specifically, at the height of the torture debates in America last spring Pew published a report regarding the relationship between church attendance, religious affiliation and attitudes about the use of torture.

The following question was asked:

Do you think the use of torture against suspected terrorists in order to gain important information can often be justified, sometimes be justified, rarely be justified, or never be justified?

The following likert scale was provided:

1. Can often be justified.
2. Can sometimes be justified.
3. Can rarely be justified.
4. Can never be justified.

The findings, broken down by religious demographics, were curious and alarming for people of faith. Specifically, 49% of the total US population felt that torture can often or sometimes be justified. When this population trend was broken down by religious demographic the following trends emerged. First, 62% White evangelical Protestants said torture can often or sometimes be justified. This is an increase of +13% in pro-torture sentiment for people who ostensibly serve a Lord who said "Love your enemies."

As similar trend emerged when church attendance was examined. Fifty-four percent of people who attend religious services "at least weekly" said that torture is often or sometimes justified. That is a +5% increase over the national average. This difference might not be much but it's downright embarrassing, morally speaking, given that only 42% of people who "seldom or never" attend religious worship services saw torture as often or sometimes justified. That is, religious people were +12% more in favor of torture than the irreligious. Translated into my religious tradition, this means Christians were more in favor of torture than non-Christians.

I asked the students to process these findings. What is going on? Their first response is likely to be your first response. Might these findings be confounded by political affiliation? That is, there might be more Republicans in the religious group. This is most definitely the case for the White evangelical Protestants who had the highest pro-torture ratings. So might all this just be a Democrat/Republican split rather than a Christian/non-Christian issue?

I think so, and some additional Pew analyses support this notion (that the religious differences go away when political affiliation is controlled for). But this still begs the question. Republican or no, why would Christians be more in favor of torture than non-Christians? It's a curious position given the explicit teachings of Jesus in the gospels. And let me be clear, I'm not even talking about pacifism. I'm talking about torture. That is, even if you believe in just war a Christian should be very reticent about the use of violence. Even if a Christian doesn't totally eschew violence they have to be very, very squeamish about it. Right? Isn't that the Christian position? And yet, that's not what we see in the Pew Research. We don't see the Christian population being more worried and angst-filled about torture. They seem, rather, more gung-ho. It's the exact opposite of what Christ-followers should be doing.

So I asked my students, what's going on here? Is this all just about politics? Or is there something about religious people, Christians in particular, that make them pro-torture?

In the coming posts I'll share what the students discovered.

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SuperFreakonomics & The Greatest Question Ever Asked

I was a big fan of the book Freakonomics and have a copy of SuperFreakonomics on my bedstand. Today on the Freakonomics blog, a blog about human behavior and incentives, Stephen Dubner writes today about what might be the greatest question he's ever been asked. It's from a journalist in India:

You state that your book is based on one fundamental assumption about human nature: people respond to incentives. Which is another way of saying that people are basically selfish. Take someone like Jesus Christ. What was his “incentive” to go on the cross?

Dubner is looking for perspectives on this question. Surf on over to the Freakonomics blog and let him know what you think.

My take: It's difficult to fit kenosis and agape into traditional models of Homo economicus.

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The KIngdom of God: Fun, Improv and Flash Mobs

Andrew Sullivan pointed to Volkswagen's Fun Theory project, where they use fun to make the world a better place.

Here's the clip showing how they get people to use the stairs:



Two more experiments where you can see how they get people to recycle and throw away litter.

At church on Wednesday, Dwayne pointed me to the group Improv Everywhere. This group does dramatic group experiments in public places. Here are two samples of their work:





Finally, awhile back, Tyler Priest passed on Peter Rollins' comment that the Kingdom of God might be like a flash mob. A flash mob as Tyler describes it:

A flash mob is the result of social networking via technologies like cell-phone text messaging, viral email, Facebook, etc. Essentially, a flash mob leader will typically choose a crowded public space (think city center, campus commons, massive train station, shopping mall (ick), etcetera). The flash mob leader or mob network will communicate a detailed plan to a critical mass, including a designated meeting space at a designated time, with specific instructions, such as, “Bring a pillow for a massive fight in the City Center,” or “Bring an umbrella to the center of campus and we’ll form a massive canopy under which we will sing children’s songs.” Then, as if the event had never happened, participants will nonchalantly walk away and fade back into the street crowd and go their separate ways.

Here's the example Tyler posted:



Many more examples of flash mobs can be found on YouTube.

Here's why I'm pointing you to all this stuff:

Christian worship has always had a dramatic element to it. From the smells and costumes of high liturgy to the multimedia extravaganza of mega-churches. But by and large these dramatic presentations and rituals are for the church. But I wonder, as I think about the Fun Theory experiments, Improv Everywhere and flash mobs, what it would be like if the church started taking its flair for the dramatic into the world. Perform for the world and in the world. And not just perform. Invite into a life, a new way of being, a new community. More, move into the world, as the Fun Theory does, to make the world a better place, to nudge people into joy and goodness. What would church be like if worship planning committees sat around thinking this: "What can we do for the world and in the world that can invite people into the joy and goodness of God?"

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Skull Chic

Slate has a slideshow with commentary about skull-themed fashion, then and now.

I've written about the Vanitas artwork in the Christian tradition, where skulls, hourglasses or bubbles were inserted into pictures to provide a mortality reminder.

I actually have a skull (not a real one) in my office for just this purpose.

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Demonic Candy Alert!

The Huffington Post has up an article about demonic candy. Apparently, Pat Robertson's Christian Broadcasting Network posted a blog by Kimberly Daniels warning of evil Milk Duds and satanic candycorn. I surfed to the CBN website but it looks like they took the post down. But according to Huff Post the CBN writer wrote that:

"During this period demons are assigned against those who participate in the rituals and festivities. These demons are automatically drawn to the fetishes that open doors for them to come into the lives of human beings. For example, most of the candy sold during this season has been dedicated and prayed over by witches."

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Aliens at Roswell, NM

One more Halloween-week post!

Our youngest son, Aidan, loves aliens. So for his birthday this year Jana and I decided that we'd take Aidan to Roswell, NM.

Aidan was thrilled with this idea. A friend of his at school had gone to Roswell during Spring Break and brought back pictures to show the class. Ever since, Aidan has been wanting to go to Roswell and see the aliens for himself.

For the uninitiated, Roswell is the UFO center of the world. Area 51 being the other hot spot. Roswell's reputation comes from the fact that on July 8, 1947 the Roswell Daily Record ran the following headline: RAAF Captures Flying Saucer on Ranch in Roswell Region. Here's a picture of that headline:

Facsimile copies of the July 8, 1947 Roswell Register can be purchased all over Roswell. The Register story eventually made its way onto the news wires and got reported around the country, in big city papers and on the radio. You can read more about the Roswell UFO Incident here.

Today, downtown Roswell is a sleepy place with alien-themed streetlamps and couple of alien-themed stores to pull in the tourists and the visitors of the International UFO Museum and Research Library. We went to Roswell with the intent to do every cheesy tourist thing you could do that involved UFOs and aliens.

The funnest and goofiest stop was Area 51. The front of Area 51 is an alien gift shop:

The back area of Area 51 is a bunch of sets with aliens placed in them: A backyard barbecue, a bar, an alien autopsy room, a living room. You pose yourself in these scenes and take as many pictures as you want, being as goofy as you want. Here's Brenden in one scene:

Here's the birthday boy chilling with an alien:

Finally, here's yours truly in an outhouse, taking care of business, with an alien:

The serious UFO visitor also makes a stop at the International UFO Museum and Research Library:

The Museum is mainly, although its trying to be more, a record of the media and newspaper coverage of the Roswell incident with most of the "exhibits" being newspaper clippings hung on the wall. But there was also lots of neat vintage UFO material documenting the UFO craze in America in the 1950s and 60s. Here's Aidan looking at a circa-1950s UFO identification guide:

We also watched an interesting documentary about crop circles while at the museum. Very illuminating.

All in all, a very fun visit and our birthday boy had a blast.

But this isn't a blog about my family and personal life. This is a blog about psychology and religion. So what's the connection?

Well, in planning for our Roswell trip on the internet I came across a Christian group in Roswell called Alien Resistance that takes the position that "aliens" are actually demons. On one of their websites I found the following Q and A under the FAQ section:

Question:
Does invoking the name of JESUS CHRIST to stop an Abduction experience work for everyone that uses it?

Answer:
No it does not. It is not a magic word. For those who have accepted JESUS CHRIST as their LORD and Master and have made a personal relationship with him it does work.

I think this highly important for my non-Christian readers to note. Please, if you are a non-Christian reader, don't think that invoking the name of Jesus will help you escape from an alien abduction. This only works for us Christians. Non-Christians will have to try something else. Best of luck with that.

Obviously, as a psychologist, I'm just riveted by all this. The whole UFO phenomenon and the culture surrounding it. Anthropologically speaking, it's just interesting to dip into these "cultures of belief" noting how they develop, evolve and deal with skepticism. The main feature is a kind of ideological insularity, gorging yourself on the information and voices that support the worldview. And it's not just with paranormal cults. Religious groups show similar tendencies, as do secular groups. Think about how FOX News or MSNBC thrive by feeding the true-believers exactly what they want to hear. It's a universal phenomenon.

Which is why I think it so important to develop the trait of intellectual hospitality and curiosity. These are the epistemic virtues lacking in today's world, especially among many religious groups.

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The Facebook for the Dead

More Halloween-week fun.

Interesting article today in Slate about the hobby of graving. A description of the graving hobby from the Slate article:

The graving hobby encompasses a range of activities: There are tombstone tourists who plan vacations around the resting places of 1950s Hollywood stars and military gravers who track down the government-issue markers of fallen 101^st Airborne soldiers. Genealogical gravers fill blank spots in their family tree with information gleaned from far-flung headstones. Preservationist gravers use bleach to clean mottle from 200-year-old markers. Many gravers just like to hang out in cemeteries and look at the stones.

Many gravers use the website Find a Grave, which Slate calls "The Facebook for the Dead."

I don't think I'd consider myself a graver, but I am an aficionado of cemeteries. I love to visit old cemeteries and look at the symbolism of the statuary and artwork. I've always found this to be a spiritual activity, a part of the memento mori tradition. It's also why I like Ecclesiastes so much:

I also thought, "As for men, God tests them so that they may see that they are like the animals. Man's fate is like that of the animals; the same fate awaits them both: As one dies, so dies the other. All have the same breath; man has no advantage over the animal. Everything is meaningless. All go to the same place; all come from dust, and to dust all return. Who knows if the spirit of man rises upward and if the spirit of the animal goes down into the earth?"

So I saw that there is nothing better for a man than to enjoy his work, because that is his lot. For who can bring him to see what will happen after him?

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Believing in Bigfoot

Continuing with our week of Halloween-themed posts.

The Associated Press reports today that members of Sasquatch Watch of Virginia were looking for Bigfoot in the Allegheny Mountain highlands of the Dolly Sods Wilderness Area in West Virginia. The group didn't have a sighting, but they did take footprint casts.

I was a huge Bigfoot fan when I was a kid. For some reason, Bigfoot was huge in the 70s. Sunday morning had Bigfoot and Wildboy (1977):



And in 1976 the Bionic Man had a big fight with Bigfoot (and we found out, during the fight, that Bigfoot was actually a robot! Man, was I surprised as a kid.):



A lot of this craze was probably kicked off by the famous Patterson-Gimlin film which came out in 1967, the year I was born:



I ate this stuff up as a kid. I hunted for Bigfoot in the Pennsylvania woods behind my grandparents house. I read books about Bigfoot. I even tried to convince my friends that Bigfoot lived in our neighborhood by walking around in the snow late at night in Bigfoot snowshoes, a Christmas present I asked for, that looked kind of like this:



Now you might be wondering, what does Bigfoot have to do with psychology and religion? Well, my very first published paper after getting my PhD was an examination of how beliefs in the paranormal (e.g., ESP, aliens, Bigfoot) relate to beliefs in the supernatural (e.g., God, angels, miracles). At times these seem very similar, like seeing Jesus in a piece of toast:



Or the paranoia and conspiracy theory similarities between alien abduction accounts and the Left Behind series. It's these similarities that drive people like Dennett, Harris, Dawkins and Hitchens crazy.

So is there a difference between believing in Bigfoot versus believing in angels? Or even God? I can't say that my study shed a lot of light on the issue, but I don't think I've ever stopped asking that question and pondering the answers.

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Trick or Treat?: Musings on Monsters, Judgement Houses, and the Survival of the Virgins

Some thoughts and links to get us all in the Halloween spirit:

1)
Halloween is full of monsters. As I've written about before, monsters are often hybrids. A fun and colorful illustration of this is this mythical creatures Venn diagram. Check it out.

2)
George forwarded me this very good article about monsters and our moral imagination. Here are the concluding paragraphs from Stephen Asma's article:

My own view is that the concept of monster cannot be erased from our language and thinking. It cannot be replaced by other more polite terms and concepts, because it still refers to something that has no satisfactory semantic substitute or refinement. The term's imprecision, within parameters, is part of its usefulness. Terms like "monster" and "evil" have a lot of metaphysical residue on them, left over from the Western traditions. But even if we neuter the term from obscure theological questions about Cain, or metaphysical questions about demons, the language still successfully expresses a radical frustration over the inhumanity of some enemy. The meaning of "monster" is found in its context, in its use.

So this Halloween season, let us, by all means, enjoy our fright fest, but let's not forget to take monsters seriously, too. I'll be checking under my bed, as usual. But remember, things don't strike fear in our hearts unless our hearts are already seriously committed to something (e.g., life, limb, children, ideologies, whatever). Ironically then, inhuman threats are great reminders of our own humanity. And for that we can all thank our zombies.

3)
Remember when churches used to host haunted houses? I remember having them in my church as a kid and teen. Then the 80s happened and the Christian community collectively freaked out about Satanism, backmasking, and Halloween. No more haunted houses, but plenty of "fall festivals" (a Christian euphemism for "Halloween party"). But have you see the Judgment Houses? These are Christianized versions of haunted houses. The basic script has you witness the death of a wayward teen and then follow him/her through a room-by-room tour of hell. At the end of the tour, properly sobered and scared, you get a chance to accept Jesus into your heart as your personal Lord and Savior. It's a delightful evangelism tool. Numerous clips of judgment houses can be found on YouTube.

4)
Last night I watched a bit of John Carpenter's 1978 Halloween on TV. Halloween is generally regarded as the movie that launched the slasher film genre (early examples include Nightmare on Elm Street and Friday the 13th with the Saw series as a recent incarnation). As I watched the show I surfed the web about the movie (I often do this) and discovered that one of the influences of Halloween upon subsequent slasher movies is the trope of "the survival of the virgins." From the Wikipedia entry: In these films "characters who practice illicit sex and substance abuse generally meet a gruesome end at the hands of the killer. On the other hand, female characters portrayed as chaste and temperate tend to confront and defeat the killer in the end."

Now what is that all about? Is the survival of the virgins some odd longing for a morally comprehensible universe? A way to scare teens into chastity and sobriety? A form of patriarchy intended to scare young girls into keeping their virginity?

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Purity and Defilement: Conclusion, Disgust and the Life of the Church

We've reached the final post in this series. Let's review where we've been and work toward a constructive conclusion.

These posts have been an extended meditation upon how disgust psychology affects the life of the church. We've noted how disgust psychology adversely affects moral judgments, undermines hospitality, and represses a recognition of our mortality, need and dependency. Again and again we've observed the pernicious influence of disgust psychology.

So what are we to do about disgust psychology in the life of the church? I'd like to conclude these posts by thinking through two different responses the church might consider.

The first response is elimination. Disgust psychology is so toxic and immune to reason that we might systematically remove its influence in the life of the church. There is much to recommend this response. Notions of purity and holiness create judgments regarding pollution, defilement and contamination. These are dangerous attributions. Purity and holiness carve the world into clean and unclean and then directs feelings of revulsion and contempt toward the self or the Other designated as unclean. Once these judgments and boundaries are in place it is almost impossible to see how the mission of the church can be accomplished. Recall, love and disgust are reciprocal processes. Both cannot be operative. Given all this, it might just be safer to put purity and holiness categories on the shelf, to restrict or eliminate their use in the faith community. This is not to say that purity and holiness categories are wrong, just that the psychology they activate is morally dangerous and difficult to tame. Psychologically, purity and holiness are akin to nuclear weapons. The judgments they create tend to be catastrophic. Emotionally, due to the all-or-nothing judgments involved, everything is threatened when we reason about the life of faith with purity categories. In short, purity might be a category the church should just leave alone. It's too dangerous. People get hurt.

This move is similar to the case made by Martha Nussbaum in her book Hiding from Humanity. In Hiding Nussbaum, a legal philosopher, asks if disgust can be a reliable guide for law and social policy. On first blush it seems that disgust could be a legitimate part of civic discourse as we negotiate our social contracts. That is, society might seek to regulate certain aspects of social life when behaviors or activities are widely deemed to be profane, obscene or disgusting. Consequently, the emotion of disgust might be taken as a legitimate warrant in deciding law or policy. Activity X is illegal because it is disgusting.

But there are a couple of problems with using disgust as a criterion for law. First, as we've noted in these posts, disgust is a dumbfounding emotion. When there is no agreement on what is considered to be profane or illicit we are at a loss when we try to adjudicate between viewpoints. A similar dumbfounding occurs in the church when two groups hold differing sensibilities about what is appropriate, offensive or blasphemous. In short, disgust might prompt a discussion about law or social regulation but additional criteria are needed if we are to make any headway. These additional criteria need to be publicly available; usually they are appeals to an objective location of harm. Consequently, why make the appeal to disgust in the first place? Why not reduce legal and policy issues to objective considerations of freedom, equality and harm? Let's keep disgust out of it.

The second problem with using disgust as a criterion of law and policy is that disgust is difficult to control. If allowed to regulate social life disgust can have disastrous consequences. Nussbaum summarizes:

[Disgust's] propensity for magical thinking and its connection to group-based prejudice and exclusion make it look particularly unreliable...even the moralized form of disgust partakes in the demand for purity and freedom from contamination, a demand that is all to easily connected to the denigration of persons who are unpopular, and too little tethered to any concrete issue of wrongdoing, for which evidence might be offered and examined.

In the end, Nussbaum rejects disgust as a criterion for the law. She admits the adaptive and protective functions of disgust, but concludes that disgust is too toxic a category upon which to build a just and civil society.

A similar analysis might apply to church. Disgust, given its dangerous and dumbfounding nature, should be marginalized in the life of the church. Such a move would involve a dramatic reframing of the purity and holiness categories in the biblical witness. In fact, this is exactly what many faith communities have done. Jesus' statement of "I desire mercy, not sacrifice" is read strongly, as a rejection of Levitical notions of purity in favor of an ethic of love and mercy. In this reading Jesus reconceptualizes the purity tradition in the Old Testament. Purity is folded into mercy. Injustice is what makes us unclean. The purity language is retained but its inner meaning has been reconfigured.

One way to imagine this reading of "I desire mercy, not sacrifice" is to claim that Jesus is forming a identity relationship between the Greatest Commandments, loving God and loving one's neighbor. That is, rather than seeing those commands as separate injunctions that might compete with each other, the commands are fused, forming an identity. Loving God is loving my neighbor. Loving my neighbor is loving God. This identity is most clearly articulated in I John.

The goal of this identity relationship is to keep the Greatest Commandments from being uncoupled and dislocated. That is, as seen in Matthew 9, the pursuit of purity is very often understood to be a way of "loving" or "pleasing" God. As a consequence, my pursuit of First Commandment purity and holiness compromises my ability to love my neighbor. The most tragic form of dislocation between the Greatest Commandments occurs when the pursuit of holiness leads to God-sanctioned violence, killing to please God.

So there seem to be excellent moral reasons for conflating the Greatest Commandments. But there are consequences as well. When the Greatest Commandments form an identity relationship the vertical, transcendent pursuit of holiness and purity is collapsed into the horizontal, immanent affairs of human relationships. Something is both gained and lost in this collapse. The gain is obvious. The purity of God can never become dislocated from the treatment of the Other. Sacrifice has been folded into mercy. Purity is identified with justice. The cost of this move is the loss of the transcendent dimension. Without the transcendent dimension the Christian life becomes, essentially, a political pursuit. Pleasing God is the activity of seeking justice and mercy for all of humanity, to work toward the vision of Advent: "Peace on earth, good will to all."

We have already encountered these issues and tensions. Recall the research on moral foundations and the differences between conservatives and liberals in how they deploy those foundations in making moral judgments. Conservatives make appeals to the purity foundation where liberals restrict their moral judgments to the foundations of justice and equity. This is simply another way of saying that conservatives have, weakly or strongly, decoupled the vertical (holiness) and horizontal (political) dimensions. That is, conservatives will often pursue purity at the expense of human relations. Purity and holiness can trump justice and mercy. Liberals, by contrast, have largely rejected the vertical dimension, folding it into the immanent concerns of justice and equity. For liberals, purity isn't a category worthy of consideration. In the end, only justice and equity count as legitimate moral warrants.

This, then, is one path the church can take. Finding disgust psychology too toxic and unmanageable the church might reframe or eliminate purity categories from its life and practice. This is accomplished by forming an identity relationship between the Greatest Commandments, effectively collapsing the vertical pursuit of holiness into the immanent pursuit of mercy, equity and justice. We generally describe this as a liberal move, where the moral foundation of purity is shelved in favor of the foundations of justice and equity.

In describing this liberal choice I am, in fact, simply describing the rise of liberal humanism and secularism in the West. Broadly speaking, over the last 500 years the West has moved away from a religious worldview to a secular, humanistic worldview. In this, the rise of the "secular age" provides us a model for the options facing the church regarding the role of purity and the sacred.

As Charles Taylor discusses in his book The Secular Age one of the driving forces behind the rise of secularism was the collapse of the transcendent dimension in human affairs. Much of this collapse was driven by Protestant Reformation and the dissolution of the clergy/laity distinction. This dissolution had two related effects. First, it moved us toward a disenchanted world. The ancient world was enchanted, filled with spirits, ghosts and sacred mysteries. The church, being set apart from worldly affairs and alive with supernatural power, inhabited this enchanted, mysterious realm. But during the Protestant Reformation the division between sacred and profane places, offices, and rituals was broken down. Protestant churches became functional "meeting places," a disenchanted space in stark contrast to the enchanted medieval cathedral. A second outcome of the clergy/laity fusion was an increased moral burden upon the laity. In Medieval Christianity holiness was an occupation carried out by church professionals: The clergy, the monastic orders, and the saints. The "holiness professionals" built up reserves of merit that could be appealed to, purchased, and generally relied on. These "merit reserves" carried, spiritually speaking, the laity. But with reform holiness specialists were no longer set apart. Everyone was now a saint and each person was expected to carry his or her own moral burden. This moral pressure upon the common person was unprecedented and was a significant force in the rise of secularism. As Taylor writes, with the rise of reform there was "an attempt to make the mass of the laity...shape up more fully as Christians." This increased moral burden upon the laity also collapsed the distinction between the town and the church. In light of reform, Taylor writes, "all valid Christian vocations are those of ordinary life, or production and reproduction in the world. The crucial issue is how you live these vocations. The two spheres are collapsed into each other. Monastic rules disappear, but ordinary lay life is now under more stringent demands. Some of the ascetic norms of monastic life are now transferred to the secular."

Why would this moral pressure on the masses produce secularism? Taylor suggests that the moral intensification on the laity (along with disenchantment) made morality the telos, the goal of the Christian faith. What we owe God is goodness. As a result of disenchanted reform Christianity becomes less spiritual but more moral. Further, while this moral reform was going on there was an increased valuing of mechanistic, instrumental reason (e.g., Newtonian physics). Consequently, in reform we see religious groups applying instrumental, mechanistic reason to solve the problem of morally educating the polis. Reform goes civic. This moral and civic reform, the implementation of a kind of "moral engineering", was most clearly seen in Calvin's Geneva. In effect, the entire city or nation becomes the monastery. Spiritually goes political.

From here, according to Taylor, it is only a short step from those reforming Protestant political experiments to secular humanism. In short, if goodness (or its more public face: "civility") is the goal and if reason alone can be used to create well-functioning moral communities then God and the sacred becomes less and less important. Reason and nature become guides to the good life, politically understood. God grows more distant, mainly thanked for creating reason and a morally coherent universe. The moral core of this civic and political existence was a "universal beneficence" that would foster peace and a well-functioning society. This "universal beneficence" became the hallmark of humanism, the focus on equality and justice that is the defining moral virtue of secular societies.

Summarizing Taylor's analysis, during the Protestant Reformation the transcendent dimension was collapsed into the horizontal plane of human affairs. One outcome of this collapse, the movement from enchantment to disenchantment, was the humanistic focus on civic and political life. The affairs of the town, and not the church, were the most important and in need of reform. With the loss of the sacred the pursuit of purity and holiness was replaced with political concern and civic action. The secular age thus finds its life in what Taylor calls "the immanent frame," the plane of solely human affairs after the collapse of the sacred.

Generally speaking, liberal churches have followed this path, pursuing faith in the immanent frame. One positive outcome of this choice is the marginalization of disgust psychology. With the collapse of the sacred we see a decline in the pursuit of holiness and purity separate from immanent moral or political concerns. But there are costs to be considered as well. Despite the political focus on justice and equity, the immanent frame can seem hollow, devoid of meaning, and insipid. As Taylor notes, "There is a generalized sense in our culture that with the eclipse of the transcendent, something may have been lost." In the immanent frame "the quotidian is emptied of deeper resonance, is dry, flat; the things which surround us are dead, ugly, empty; and the way we organize them, shape them, in order to live has not meaning, beauty, depth, sense." In the secular age we now experience "a terrible flatness in the everyday."

Following Taylor, we can see the path ahead for a church that seeks to eliminate disgust psychology from its life and practice. Such a church would follow the liberalizing impulse, folding the transcendent into the immanent. Such a church would define its ethical life as the impulse for justice and equity. These churches will see in Matthew 9 a biblical warrant to favor mercy over sacrifice. The benefit of this approach is a greater capacity for inclusion and love. With the marginalization of disgust psychology sociomoral boundaries are dismantled and hospitality is more easily extended.

Such are the positive benefits of moving the life of the church into the immanent frame. But Taylor's analysis also highlights the negative consequences of such a move. Specifically, with the collapse of the sacred the immanent church will appear to function as a liberal, humanitarian social action group. No doubt many liberal Christians prefer this to the alternatives, a stigmatizing church that carves the world into "clean" and "unclean." But the immanent church may struggle with a sense of "flatness." The ritual life of the church, lacking a sacred dimension, may seem incongruous, vacuous and irrelevant. In short, the entire existence and purpose of the church as a church is called into question.

Such is the path of elimination, the costs and benefits of removing disgust psychology from the life of the church. But is there another path? Is there a way to keep the sacred dimension of faith while tightly controlling disgust psychology?

I want to conclude these posts with a sketch of such a path. In contrast to the path of elimination this is a path of regulation. Common to both is the shared recognition that disgust psychology is inherently problematic and disruptive. We've documented these problems in great detail. So it seems clear that prophylactic action in necessary. If disgust isn't removed from the faith community it needs vigilant regulation. How might this regulation be accomplished?

Recall the broad contours of the disgust domains, the various groupings of disgust stimuli:


At the center is core disgust, the adaptive nexus of the disgust response. All disgust responses build upon the innate psychology of core disgust. Thus, all disgust domains function as a boundary psychology. In core disgust the boundary is the physical body. Core disgust prevents the ingestion of harmful foodstuffs. In moral disgust purity metaphors monitor moral "contaminants" that make a person "unclean." In social disgust stigmatized groups are pushed out of the moral circle. And, finally, in animal-reminder disgust the sacred and holy are separated from the animal and profane. Across these posts we've pondered the dynamics in each domain, orienting our conversation around the issues of purity, hospitality and mortality:


One way to summarize the problem of disgust is that when the moral domain is governed by a purity psychology the pull becomes so overwhelming that the desire to be "clean," "pure," or "holy" begins to trump other considerations, the need to welcome others or the importance of facing our own need and vulnerability. The pursuit of purity begins to dominate the faith experience. As see in Matthew 9 and 12 the pursuit of purity impairs the ability of the Pharisees to welcome others into table fellowship or to recognize their own need reflected in the needs of others.


We might call this dynamic "the purity collapse," the natural impulse to privilege purity over hospitality or a confrontation with human need. This is simply another way of explaining the dangers of disgust psychology. That is, when religious life comes to be dominated by holiness or purity categories two things happen. First, social stigmas are created to protect our purity, pushing away people (e.g., "sinners") who are threats to our holiness. Second, the purity emphasis creates a hyper-focus on the spiritual, eventually privileging the spiritual life over the life of the body. Religious life becomes "too spiritual" and begins to deny human need which compromises empathy and mercy.


What is needed is a regulating ritual that pushes against the purity collapse, a ritual that keeps purity in tension with hospitality and an awareness of our biological vulnerability. For example, whenever hospitality is in danger of collapsing into a pursuit of purity this regulating ritual would keep the "will to embrace" firmly in view, functioning as a constant critique against the pursuit of isolation and purity. Further, whenever the pursuit of purity begins taking a Gnostic turn, bifurcating the physical and the spiritual, a ritual is required to remind us that the gritty and oozy realities of body cannot be left behind.


It is my belief that the Eucharist functions as this regulating ritual in the life of the church. I find it startling that major metaphors of the Lord's Supper correspond, almost perfectly, with the disgust domains:


The core act of the Lord's Supper is food, placing the Eucharist squarely in the center with core disgust issues. The psychology of food and core disgust regulates the ritual. That is, Christian understandings of purity, hospitality and the relationship between the spirit and the body are regulated by food, by activating the psychology at the root of the disgust response. Built atop this ritual meal are the dominant metaphors of the Eucharist, each corresponding to a disgust domain. Purity psychology is activated in the Lord's Supper as this meal is an echo of the Day of Atonement, the ritual cleansing sacrifice of the Hebrews. As Christians participate in the Lord's Supper they remember that they are "washed in the blood of the Lamb" and made "white as snow." At the same time, the Lord's Supper is the ritual enactment of Jesus' ministry of table fellowship. The Lord's Supper is a corporate ritual where members practice welcome and hospitality. When we fail to "wait of each other," as we saw in the Corinthian church, something essential to the ritual has been lost and distorted. The Lord's Supper activates the call to hospitality along with the purity metaphors. By doing so the Eucharist functions as a regulating ritual, keeping purity psychology harnessed to and in tension with the call to hospitality. Finally, the Lord's Supper explicitly employs animal-reminder disgust stimuli. Believers drink the blood of Jesus and eat the body of Jesus. This cannibalistic metaphor was a shock to outsiders during the first centuries of the church. It remains so. Why is this disgusting metaphor used? Again, I think the issue is one of regulation. It is difficult to flee the body of Jesus and the implications of the Incarnation when the central Christian ritual brutally reminds us of the body and the blood of Christ. Again, when purity psychology is activated we begin to privilege the spiritual over the physical and can come to pretend that the body can be left behind. The Eucharist, as a regulating ritual, pushes against this Gnostic temptation by keeping the disgusting aspects of the body linked with the purity metaphors in the ritual. The Eucharist keeps the body firmly, if revoltingly, in view.

The correspondences between the Eucharist and the disgust domains match so well one is tempted to think it intentional. But I would be hesitant to say that the ritual and meanings of the Lord's Supper were developed with the goal of using core disgust (food) to regulate the religious problems inherent in the other disgust domains. Regardless, I think it clear that the Eucharist can function as a disgust regulating ritual. The Lord's Supper holds each facet of disgust in tension, preventing the pull of the purity collapse. Consequently, the Lord's Supper allows the faith community to use purity metaphors by keeping those metaphors yoked with both hospitality and the body, regulating against the two problems of the purity collapse: Stigmatizing groups and fleeing from the implications of the Incarnation.

Of course, recognizing the regulative function of the Eucharist doesn't mean it actually functions in this manner in a given faith community. Nor does it solve all the problems of disgust in the life of the church. Consequently, many churches may take the liberal route, dismissing purity categories from its life and practice. Regardless, I think it remarkable that even when the purity collapse has occurred within a given faith community the metaphors of Eucharist are regularly activated, even if ignored. That is, even if a church is characterized by exclusion and hateful inhospitality the ritual of Eucharist regularly activates stories such as Matthew 9. One cannot help but wonder how the association of the Lord's Supper with Jesus' table ministry might be shaping the imagination within that church. How might the image of Jesus eating with sinners be affecting the minds of the next generation with that church? Or of the one individual who, pricked by the image, can no longer participate in hurtful practices of the church? In short, deep in the Eucharist these countervailing images mix and swirl constantly refreshing the imagination of the church and reminding us, even unconsciously, of Jesus' call "to desire mercy, not sacrifice."

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Purity and Defilement: Part 21, The Fellowship of Neediness

In the past few posts we have been discussing the existential facets of disgust. Specifically, disgust researchers have noted that certain disgust triggers appear to function as “animal reminders.” That is, events and experience that remind us of our physical, animal “nature” are found to be degrading, demeaning and disgusting. Generally speaking, these reminders cluster around the human body, particularly its oozier and metabolic aspects. The body is a continual reminder that we are biologically contingent creatures, animals captured by the cycles of death and decay, eating and excreting, sex and reproduction.

But why is disgust implicated in confronting death and mortality? Anxiety would seem to be the more appropriate response. Death should scare us rather than disgust us.

The links between death and disgust are twofold. First, all disgust responses are built atop core disgust, the adaptive response that monitors oral incorporation protecting us from ingesting harmful foodstuffs. Given that many of the animal reminder stimuli are, in themselves, potential disease vectors our existential worries in the face of these experience are easily folded into the core disgust response.

The critical clue regarding the second link between disgust and death is noting how the body is often experienced as degrading and illicit, spiritually speaking. That is, there is a recurring impulse within Christianity (but not only in Christianity) to separate the physical from the spiritual. Any connection between the body and the spirit is often regarded as offensive. This feeling is due to the fact that humans often make judgments based upon a “divinity ethic,” where certain aspects of life are considered to be “elevated” (e.g., sacred ideals, values, spaces, and symbols). For instance, it is offensive to many if the national flag is mishandled, touches the ground or is burned. The flag is “high” on the divinity dimension representing sacred and transcendent ideals and values. We also see the divinity ethic at work in expectations surrounding decorum and dress associated with sacred activities such as church, wedding or funeral attendance. In fact, the divinity ethic infuses human existence. Modern, Western societies expect that our “private parts” be covered in public. This is a mark of “civilization.” Recall, in an earlier post, Darwin’s revulsion at a “naked savage.” Nudity is associated with savagery. Clothing separates us from a bestial, animal existence. A lack of clothing signals a “decent” into an atavistic and savage life.

In short, the experience of being “human” involves the notion that we are “above” the animals. We are between the angels and the beasts. And this isn’t simply a Christian notion. As can be seen in Aristotle’s Great Chain of Being, many cultures use notions of spiritual elevation and degradation to make contrasts between humans and the animal kingdom. Of course, in the wake of Darwin’s revolution the distinctions between humanity and animals have become blurred, biologically speaking. But spiritually, aesthetically and emotionally we intuitively place human experience “above” the life of animals.

So the experience of “divinity” is a ubiquitous phenomenon, even in secular cultures. And we have noted that disgust regulates many divinity judgments. When something “high” on the divinity dimension is “lowered” we often experience disgust, offense and revulsion. Of course, disgust isn’t the only emotion implicated in divinity judgments. We often feel anger, along with disgust, at people who are engaging in sacrilegious, profane or indecent activities. Regardless, disgust works to monitor the contact between the holy and the profane, the high and the low, the human and the animal. Once again we see disgust function as a boundary psychology where the separation of the physical and the spiritual is closely monitored and maintained.

In short, the body, as a manifestation of our “animal nature,” is often experienced as a divinity violation. The dual nature of human experience—the feeling that we are both body and soul—seems paradoxical and contradictory. Worse, beyond a mere Cartesian befuddlement (e.g., the mind/body problem) the union of physical and spiritual, due to their respective locations on the divinity dimension, seems illicit and pornographic. It is offensive to have spiritual existence connected to metabolic functions (e.g., urine) and reproduction (e.g., genitalia).

This, then, is the second link between disgust and death. The body itself is experienced as degrading, as a divinity violation. Given that disgust maintains the boundary between physical and spiritual human existence feels inherently problematic and often illicit. The potential for disgust is built into the fabric of our dual nature. A disgust-monitored fissure between body and soul runs through the center of the human psyche. More strongly, humanity is defined by disgust. The very act of becoming human implies that a spiritual separation has been achieved between us and the animals. That separation is achieved by disgust, by erecting an emotional boundary between “civilization” and a savage, naked existence. Humanity is created by these disgust boundaries. Without these boundaries nothing prevents us from descending into an animalistic existence.

In short, there are many reasons why the body, as an animal reminder, might elicit disgust. But there is one more layer to this association. Specifically, why is animal existence so offensive? Why privilege the spiritual over the physical? Why is the body so bad?

The answer given by the existential psychologists is that the body functions as a death reminder. The body is ultimately offensive because it dies. The body fails us. The scandal of the body isn’t that it is oozy and smelly. It is that the oozy fluids and offensive smells are signs of death at work in the body. The fluids and smells implicate the body in metabolic dependencies that, ultimately, cannot be maintained. I am constantly hungry, driven by my metabolic need. But eating will not confer immortality. Eating only reminds me of my biological dependency.

Thus disgust is revealed to be an existential emotion. Disgust related to the body fends off existential worries and fears. Reminders of death, triggered by daily experiences with the body, are pushed out of consciousness.

Ample psychological research has established the link between the body, disgust and death. In our selective review of this literature we’ve noted how the physical aspects of sex trigger thoughts of death. We’ve also observed how death anxiety is predictive of offense at body-related profanity. Most importantly, we noted that those most anxious about death are the most offended by the scandal of the Incarnation. Even the body of Jesus is problematic.

All this discussion concerning the body, sex, offensive artwork, excrement, profanity and the Incarnation might be very interesting but what does it have to do with the life and mission of the church? Do our mortality fears, which cluster around the body, affect our capacity to live lives of welcome, inclusion and embrace? How, exactly, does body ambivalence connect with the events in Matthew 9? And how does any of this relate to the notion of “I desire mercy, not sacrifice”?

In the gospel of Matthew the refrain from Hosea—“I desire mercy, not sacrifice”—occurs on two different occasions. The first, as we have been discussing, occurs in Matthew 9 in the context of table fellowship. In Matthew 9 Jesus attacks notions of purity (“sacrifice”) that trump the “will to embrace.” But there seems to be little in Matthew 9 that speaks to the feelings of body ambivalence that we have been discussing here in Part 4.

The second occurrence of “I desire mercy, not sacrifice” occurs in Matthew 12. Interestingly, the events in Matthew 12 have nothing to do with issues of table fellowship and hospitality. Rather, the events of Matthew 12 circle around the body and its physical dependencies, needs and vulnerabilities. The triggering event in the narrative is hunger. Jesus’ disciples pick grain to eat on the Sabbath violating the injunctions to refrain from work. Thus, the disciples become ritually “unclean.” In the face of this critique from the Pharisees Jesus recalls another story of hunger trumping purity codes. Jesus reminds the Pharisees that David and his men once ate the temple bread when they were desperately hungry. Having pointed out this story Jesus cites, for the second time in Matthew, the refrain that God “desires mercy, not sacrifice.” This exchange is quickly followed by another conflict with the Pharisees. This second confrontation concerns healing a man with a withered hand on the Sabbath. Is it lawful to do good on the Sabbath? Jesus defends the healing he is about to perform by asking the Pharisees if they would pull out an ox they owned if it had fallen into a ditch on the Sabbath. The ox is, obviously, a critical source of family food and income. So, yes, of course the Pharisees would pull the ox from the ditch. Their ability to feed themselves demands the action. The Pharisees, just like the disciples and David, need to eat.

What we find in Matthew 12 is less a conflict over hospitality than a debate over the recognition of human biological need. Human need and biological vulnerability fill Matthew 12. The issues swirl around hunger, an animal in a ditch, and a deformed hand. These are, as we have seen, disgust triggers. Animals, our metabolic functions and physical malformation are all disgust stimuli. And these stimuli are disgusting because they remind us of human need, vulnerability and, ultimately, death. Thus it is very interesting to observe how Jesus connects, with the refrain of “I desire mercy, not sacrifice”, this conversation concerning human need with his own ministry of table fellowship. Mercy, for Jesus, seems to be more than social affiliation and contact. For Jesus mercy seems implicated in the recognition of human neediness. As seen in Matthew 12 humans go hungry and our ability to meet our basic biological needs can become catastrophically compromised (e.g., your beast of burden falls into a ditch, unemployment, physical injury or disability). In short, the problem for the Pharisees was not just their unwillingness to associate with the “unclean.” The Pharisees were also blinded to signs of human need. This seems to be due to the fact that they were blind to their own need. The Pharisees do not notice their economic and biological vulnerability until Jesus points out that they would quickly pull their beast of burden from a ditch. Even if it was on the Sabbath. The Pharisees cannot see how needy they are, how vulnerable they are as biological creatures. Denying this about themselves the Pharisees deny need in others, damning the hungry disciples when they feed themselves. By pointing out how quickly life can change Jesus forces the Pharisees to confront their own vulnerability.

But embracing our vulnerability is extraordinarily difficult to do. As we have noted, the denial of death is, inherently, a denial of our neediness. Disgust pushes away all reminders of our biological need, contingency, vulnerability and dependency.

This repression of death and need is particularly acute in America and other modern, technologically advanced nations. The reason for this is that our material wealth and technological success hide our need and vulnerability. Never suffering want or poverty and trusting in modern medicine Americans can live (and pretend) as if they were immortal. This creates a cultural worldview that is characterized by what Ernest Becker called “the denial of death,” the refusal to admit death into our lives and consciousness. Arthur C. McGill gives a cogent analysis of American death repression and its consequences in his wonderful book Death and Life: An American Theology. In Death and Life McGill notes that “Americans like to appear as if they give death hardly any thought of all.” The American ethic is, thus, “for people to create a living world where death seems abnormal and accidental. [Americans] must create a living world where life is so full, so secure, and so rich with possibilities that it gives no hint of death and deprivation.”

We can see in this death repression a denial of our own vulnerability and need. The American duty, according to McGill, is to be “fine,” to take up “the duty to look well, to seem fine, to exclude from of the fabric of [our] normal life any evidence of decay and death and helplessness.” This social pressure to be “fine,” to hide from others our vulnerability and failure, is the dark and pathological side of the American success ethos. It is the drive to become so materially successful as to eliminate all trace of need. It is the quest, as noted in the last post, to be god-like: separate, autonomous, self-contained and without need.

Aspiring to be god-like Americans live with “the conviction that the lives we live are not essentially and intrinsically mortal.” But this, says McGill, this is a “dream” an “illusory realm of success.” “Refusing to be lacerated by the horrors of life, [Americans] create [a] world of life-affirming buoyancy.” Americans accomplish this illusion by devoting themselves “to expunging from their lives every appearance, every intimation of death…All traces of weakness, debility, ugliness and helplessness must be kept away from every part of a person’s life. The task must be done every single day if such persons really are to convince us that they do not carry the smell of death within them.” As we have seen, disgust aids in this death repression. Feeling revulsion and contempt in the face of physical failure and decay, in both ourselves and others, we push death and need out of consciousness.

But so what? What is so important about recognizing our need and mortality? Why dwell on these morbid topics? Why face death and decay?

There are many answers to these questions. For example, many cultures and faiths have recognized the spiritual benefits in squarely confronting death. Humans can waste life, acting as if time was a replenishable and inexhaustible resource. We live, practically speaking, as if we were immortal and god-like, as if we had “all the time in the world.” Consequently, many religious traditions encourage meditation on morbid subjects. The goal is to recognize the transitory nature and the preciousness of life.

Recognizing the gift of life and puncturing delusional aspirations toward immortality are certainly worthy goals. But that is not why, for our purposes, facing up to death and need are important in the life of the church. Our cue is taken from Jesus in Matthew 12, the recognition that embracing our need is critical for a life of mercy.

Why is the recognition of need associated with mercy? First, as we observed with the Pharisees, blindness to our need blinds us to the need in others. It is a matter of empathy, compassion and solidarity. Never experiencing, let’s say, poverty we fail to understand why the poor (“those people on welfare”) just don’t go out and get a job. Our smug self-contained success creates gaps of understanding and compassion. Once again, we find disgust creating boundaries between people. In this case disgust hides our need, allowing us to pretend we are gods, self-determined agents, who cannot understand the unwashed masses given our Olympian vantage. Recall the events in the Corinthian church where the wealthy Christians, secure in their material existence, ate and drank to excess, never realizing that their poorer brothers and sisters were going hungry in the outer rooms of the house. Blind to their own need the rich Christians in Corinth could not see the need in others.

But this goes deeper than empathy. As hinted at in the last post, love is not possible without need. As the Church Fathers asserted, a self-contained God without need is sterile. For God to be love there had to be a Son, a needy, receiving component within the Godhead. God the Father empties himself into the Son and the Son gives that glory back to the Father. The love, nature and life of God is revealed in this dynamic cycle of emptying and receiving between Father and Son.

And so it is for Christians seeking to step into the life and love of God. Love cannot be from our excess. Love is not giving away the leftovers after we have taken care of our material needs and secured our creature comforts. Recall the observation of Jesus as he watched the people making their temple offerings. Jesus praises the widow who gave two mites because it was all she had. The wealthy, however, gave from their excess. The contrast, for Jesus, concerns self-giving to the point of neediness. The widow, giving all she had, moves into a state of need with her gift. The wealthy give a greater sum but remain self-sustaining and self-determined. They don’t give to the point where, we might say, it hurts. McGill’s powerful analysis on this point is worth quoting at length:

The love which is proclaimed in many churches that worship the [American] dream carefully disregards the outcome of love. These churches speak of love as helping others, but they ignore what helping others does to the person who loves. They ignore the fact that love is self-expenditure, a real expending, a real losing, a real deterioration of the self. They speak as if love the person who is loving had not problems, had no needs…They say to people: “Since you have not unanswered needs, why don’t you go and help the other people who are in need?” But they never go on to add “If you do this, you too will be driven into need.” By not stating the outcome of love they give the childish impression that Christian love is some kind of cornucopia where we can meet everyone’s needs and problems and still have everything we need for ourselves! And believe me, there are grown-up people who speak this kind of nonsense…[all this is the] illusion that some people can give without receiving, can nourish others without thereby becoming impoverished themselves—in short the illusion of perpetual affluence…the dreadfulness of this illusion lies in the fact that it is so inauthentic; it is so phony…If ever you approach a needy person with the illusion that you are a creature of purely bestowing love, then to that needy person you will seem totally alien, totally superior…Active love occurs within the fellowship of neediness, within the neediness of the one who serves and leads, and the one who serves in neediness…Too often we hear the lie that to love is to help others without this help having any effect upon ourselves.

This is the deep reason blindness to our own need undermines a life of mercy. The issue does begin with empathy, seeing my need reflected in the lives of others. But it doesn't stop there. Mercy is costly. True love moves me into need. Which is, admittedly, a scary prospect. It is an act of faith and it requires a community, a “fellowship of neediness” to use McGill’s phrase. And it is within the giving and receiving of this “fellowship of neediness” where the life and love of God is fully expressed and experienced. In this, the life of the Trinity creates the life of the church or, rather, the life of the church participates in the life of God.

But none of this can happen if disgust continues to foster a “denial of death” by pushing away all reminders of decay and biological need. Once again we see the need to dismantle disgust psychology, to move into areas we initially experience as morbid, demeaning, and disgusting. We do so not only to embrace the needs of others but also to embrace the need in our own lives. Despite appearances and protestations to the contrary, we are not “fine.” And by admitting as much we embrace, without disgust, our fragile humanity. We join the fellowship of neediness and move into a life of grace, mercy and love.

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Purity and Defilement: Part 20, Piss Christ, Need and the Incarnation

In 1987 the photographer Andres Serrano unveiled his controversial work Piss Christ. Piss Christ was a photograph of a crucifix submerged in a mixture of blood and urine. The work broke into public consciousness in 1989 when members of the US Senate expressed outrage that Serrano had received $15,000 from the American National Endowment for the Arts. Senators called the work "filth," blasphemous," and "abhorrent." One Senator said, "In naming it, [Serrano] was taunting the American people. He was seeking to create indignation. That is all right for him to be a jerk but let him be a jerk on his own time and with his own resources. Do not dishonor our Lord." Later, in 1997, the National Gallery in Melbourne, Australia was closed when members of a Christian group attacked and damaged Piss Christ.

If Serrano was seeking to shock, offend or gain notoriety with Piss Christ he certainly succeeded. The knee jerk response of many Christians to Piss Christ is revulsion, disgust and anger. It is deeply offensive that the cross of Jesus, the most sacred symbol within the Christian faith, is submerged in fluids, urine and blood, that we find disgusting. The contact between Christ and urine is transgressive, degrading and vile.

Or is it? The Christian response to Piss Christ has, actually, been a bit more complex. Far and away, the main responses have been outrage and disgust. But some Christian thinkers have paused in the face of Piss Christ and have walked away with a very different set of reactions. Take, as one example, the analysis of Ben Williamson in his book Christian Art: A Very Short Introduction. Williamson's analysis is worth quoting in full:

What are we to make of this work: what are we to understand by it, and how can we interpret it? Most obviously were enraged by the combination of the most iconic image of Christianity--the Crucified Christ--with human bodily fluid, and felt that this work set out deliberately to provoke viewers to outrage. The artist almost certainly aimed to provoke a reaction, but what reaction? The fact that urine is involved is crucial here. But was the use of urine simply intended, as some of Serrano's detractors have claimed, to cause offense? Had the artist deliberately set out to show disrespect to this religious image, by placing it in urine? Some felt this was tantamount to urinating on the crucifix. I would suggest that, even if some viewers and commentators feel that it was the artist's intention, or part of his intention, to be offensive, there are also other ways to interpret this work. Let us acknowledge that if Serrano had only used blood here this image might not have caused such huge outrage. It is, after all, much more common to associate Christ and his body with blood, because of his shedding of blood on the cross. We are used to seeing crucifixes running with blood, and the wounds of Christ spurting blood. While blood may be a bodily fluid that can cause unease, it is not reviled in the same way as a bodily waste product such as urine. The use of the slang or offensive word "piss" in the title of Serrano's work reminds us that this fluid is wholly undesirable. The artist plays upon the viewer's discomfort, even outrage, at seeing the image of Christ crucified, suspended in a mixture of blood and urine, and almost certainly intends to shock, but to what end? I would suggest that the use of urine here is intended to introduce, or in fact restore, some shock to the image of the Crucifixion. After seeing countless reproductions of hundreds of year's worth of Crucifixion images, a modern viewer's reactions to the Crucifixion of Christ might become dulled. A shock such as the one provided by Serrano's Piss Christ might remind a modern viewer what the image of the Crucified Christ really means. The process of viewing the Crucified Christ through the filter of human bodily fluids requires the observer to consider all the ways in which Christ, as both fully divine and full human, really shared in the base physicality of human beings. As a real human being Christ took on all the characteristics of the human body, including its fluids and secretions. The use of urine here can therefore force the viewer to rethink what it meant for Christ to be really and fully human.

It is very unlikely that Serrano had Williamson's take in mind when he photographed Piss Christ. The intentions of the artist are not available to us. And yet, we shouldn't think that the intentions of the artist should trump as the final verdict regarding the "true meaning" of Piss Christ. Each of us is free to interact with the piece as we choose, walking away with interpretations unique to our own perspective. In short, even if Serrano intended Piss Christ to be a subversive commentary upon Christianity I think it perfectly appropriate that the gospel be allowed to read Piss Christ subversively, robbing the artwork of its transgressive goal and harnessing it as a deep theological commentary regarding the Incarnation. If transgressive modern artists seek to offend and subvert the status quo, so can the gospel. Two can play at that game.

Let us follow, then, Williamson's suggestion that Piss Christ reveals something shocking, illicit and disgusting about the Incarnation. The connection between Christ and bodily fluids is found to be offensive. Not only in this artwork, but also in our imaginations. Christians throughout history have resisted the notion of the Incarnation, that Jesus was physically vulnerable, experienced erections, vomited when ill or experienced diarrhea. Connecting Jesus with the body has always seemed blasphemous and degrading. It is Luther's privy all over again, the offensive combination of the spiritual with the disgustingly physical. The title of Serrano's work--Piss Christ--brutally demonstrates our offense at the connection. The two worlds, the life of the body and the life of Christ, should be separated.

In my own research I've called this squeamishness Incarnational ambivalence, the worry, denial or offense at a fully human Jesus. We often see Incarnational ambivalence on display when outrage is directed toward robust depictions of the humanity of Jesus. One example was the Christian outrage and protests surrounding the Martin Scorsese film The Last Temptation of Christ based upon the novel by Nikos Kazantzakis. In the film Jesus is tempted on the cross (the last temptation he faces) to come down off the cross and pursue a normal human life, full of the joys of marriage and family life. In picturing this temptation Jesus is shown marrying Mary Magdalene followed by a scene of the married couple making love. The outrage surrounding this imagining of a "last temptation" is a tacit admission that Jesus would never have been tempted by sexual desire and that the life of the body held no appeal to him.

But Incarnational ambivalence is not a new or recent phenomenon. Throughout Christian history believers have resisted the notion of the Incarnation. In fact, the central doctrinal debate of the early church centered on the humanity of Jesus. Was Jesus both fully divine and fully human? The tensions here, as we've seen, are almost unbearable. Consequently, there are strong pressures to break one way or the other. For example, the Gnostics and Docetics leaned one way, seeking to deny Jesus' full participation in the human condition. Leaning the other way were the followers of Arius who, in light of Jesus' physical body, denied the fully pre-existent divinity of Christ. The early church eventually navigated between these two views, strongly asserting both the full humanity and the full divinity of Christ. But this view if full of psychological tension, tensions that still exist. The union of the spiritual and physical has always been problematic.

But why is the notion of a fully human Jesus so scandalous? One answer comes from an analysis of history. What were the concerns of Arius and his followers? What where they trying to accomplish in denying the pre-existent divinity of Jesus?

Arthur C. McGill in his book Suffering: A Test of Theological Method describes the goals of Arius in his debates with Athanasius regarding the divinity of Jesus. Specifically, Arius was trying to uphold the honor of God:

In all the history of Christianity there has hardly been so sophisticated, so Biblically grounded, and so thoroughgoing a theology of God's transcendence as developed by Arius and his followers. Their whole concern was to honor God by setting him above and in contrast to his creatures. They sought to preserve the glory of God by divesting his reality of all those weaknesses and deficiencies which mark his creatures, and by giving him the most absolute kind of mastery over his creatures.

Wanting to protect the absolute Otherness of God, a worthy goal, Arius and his followers insisted that any physical, created ("begotten") thing could not, by definition, fully partake of the divine nature. The debates surrounding the doctrine of the Trinity, therefore, were not about the paradoxes of the math (i.e., How can God be three in One?). Rather, admission of Jesus into the Trinity was a debate about the qualities and nature of God. McGill summarizes,

The issue between Arius and Athanasius, then, has nothing to do with whether God is one or two or three. It has to do with what quality makes God divine, what quality constitutes his perfection. From the perspective of self-contained absoluteness and transcendent supremacy, Arius can only look upon God's begetting as Son as a grotesque blasphemy.

The problem with Arius's view of God, according to Athanasius, is that Arius's self-contained and perfect God is sterile. Arius's God needs nothing. Consequently, Arius's God cannot love. Love, according to McGill, presupposes need. The Son needs the Father and the Father, to be love, needs the Son. By placing need and dependency (the Son) within the Godhead the dynamic, mutual and self-giving nature of love is now found to characterize the life of God. Love, via the need of the Son, is deified in the interactions of the Trinity. As McGill summarizes, "Love and not transcendence, giving and not being superior, are the qualities that mark God's divinity." Thus, "since giving entails receiving, there must be a receptive, dependent pole within the being of God."

Why is the Incarnation so shocking? Why do we resist the notion of a fully human Jesus? Following McGill, it appears that we are deeply ambivalence about our neediness. We feel that our neediness, our physical vulnerabilities and dependencies, are disgusting, degrading, and offensive. And nothing signifies this neediness more strongly than the human body. Feeling this degradation we seek to protect God from need, to create quarantines around God. God, thus, is self-contained, perfect and holy. But inherent in this impulses is a flight from our own need. A refusal to exist in a state of need. The Church Fathers have always claimed that the primal human sin is the desire to become "God-like." We tend to think of this as some sort of "pride." But it is a conceit of a particular sort. Specifically, we posit a self-contained God, a God that needs nothing. We then seek to become like this God, self-contained and self-sufficient, needing nothing to sustain ourselves. In short, a denial of the Incarnation is an attempt to flee from our need and, as we will see, our capacity to love. Here is McGill once again,

It is very common for men within the satanic frame of reference to identify need as the great "flaw" in things. Therefore, they picture God as one who lacks this flaw, who as no needs, who stands independently and immutably within the circle of his own identity. What they feel compelled to remove from their picture of God is that which they most fear and most despair; their own condition of need.

Is this analysis correct? Is our ambivalence concerning the Incarnation a flight from our own need, dependency and vulnerability? Our discussions over the last few posts seem to answer in the affirmative. Our utter dependency is nowhere more manifest than in our vulnerability to death. In fact, death is what defines human need. The forces of death are always at work in my body. For example, to fend off death, I must eat. I am always moving into hunger, always in need. And if I eat, I must defecate and urinate. The whole metabolic cycle is driven by the forces of death and decay and my daily efforts to fend them off.

In short, as we have been discussing over the last few posts, our feelings of disgust, revulsion and offense at the body are rooted in mortality fears. Our squeamishness concerning the Incarnation is driven by an impulse to deny our need, to deny the role of death in our lives. A latent death anxiety sits behind our reactions to Piss Christ.

But is this true? Is there evidence that death anxiety is implicated in Incarnational ambivalence? A recent study of mine is illuminating on this point.

It seems clear, given our review of the psychological research, that the body functions as a death reminder. Thus, it seems reasonable to expect that the people most fearful of death would be the most resistant to Incarnational images. That is, people reporting greater death anxiety should be the most offended by images of Jesus' physical and metabolic neediness and dependency. In the study I conducted I examined this association. Specifically, I asked Christian participants to complete measures, among others, of death anxiety and Incarnation ambivalence to examine the relationship between the two variables.

The Incarnation ambivalence measure was created to assess four broad body scenarios that had been shown in previous research (Goldenberg, et al., 2001) to function as death/mortality reminders: Body fluids, body flaws, hygiene, and physical vulnerability. Respondents were asked to read examples of various body scenarios under each category and to imagine Jesus experiencing (or affected by) that particular physical condition. Under the category of body fluids there were three scenarios: Diarrhea, nocturnal emissions, and vomit. Under the body flaws category there were four scenarios: Scarring, tooth decay, near-sightedness, and malformation. Under the hygiene category there were three scenarios: Bad breath, body odor, and dandruff. Finally, under the physical vulnerability category there were two scenarios: Chronic back pain and chronic headaches. After imagining Jesus in each scenario respondents were asked rate their reactions across four dimensions. These were:

This image makes me uncomfortable.
This image is demeaning to Jesus.
This image is unrealistic.
This image is unbiblical.

The first two prompts were drafted to capture an emotional response to each scenario (i.e., discomfort, offense) while the last two prompts were drafted to capture a more intellectual, perhaps theological, response. All the ratings for each scenario were highly correlated. That is, those who found a particular image demeaning were also likely to report the image as uncomfortable, unbliblical and unrealistic. The measure of Incarnational ambivalence was the sum of the four ratings across all the body scenarios.

As predicted, death anxiety was positively correlated with Incarnational ambivalence. The participants most fearful of death were the ones most likely to reject the body scenarios. Those participants less fearful of death were more comfortable with the images.

This result, tentative as it is, appears to support the notion that our offense at the Incarnation is driven by a denial of our own neediness, particularly as those needs cluster around the recognition of our own mortality. Death is the great demonstration of our need. Thus, the body, as the constant witness of both our need and death, is experienced as disgusting and degrading. For us, and for Jesus.

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A Father and a Son

I found this to be extraordinarily moving. It was a part of testimony given for and against Maine's marriage equality bill on April 22, 2009. Hat Tip to Andrew Sullivan.

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Purity and Defilement, Part 19: Death, Sex and The Seven Words You Cannot Say on Television

[Note to regular readers: This post reworks some previously published material on this blog. But there is lots of new stuff as well.]

The whole problem with this idea of obscenity and indecency, and all of these things--bad language and whatever--it's all caused by one basic thing, and that is: religious superstition…that the human body is somehow evil and bad and there are parts of it that are especially evil and bad, and we should be ashamed. Fear, guilt and shame are built into the attitude toward sex and the body.

--George Carlin (Interview with Associated Press, 2004)

In the last post we continued to observe how disgust protects the sacred and the holy from descending into the vulgar and profane. A peculiar aspect of this phenomenon is how the body becomes identified as unclean and illicit. But why should the body be experienced as degrading? We all have bodies, so the experiences of sex, urination and defecation are universal and shared experiences. So why pretend, particularly in public and sacred spaces, that such experiences do not exist?

Consider the case of Martin Luther. One of the joys of reading Luther is his refreshing honesty about the life of the body. Consequently, it comes as no surprise that as Luther recounted the experience when he first grasped the doctrine of "justification by faith" he adds some candid detail about the location of this revelation:

These words 'just' and 'justice of God' were a thunderbolt to my conscience. They soon struck terror in me who heard them. He is just, therefore, He punishes. But once when in this tower I was meditating on these words, "the just lives by faith," "justice of God," I soon had the thought whether we ought to live justified by faith, and God's justice ought to be the salvation of every believer, and soon my soul was revived. Therefore it is God's justice which justifies us and saves us. And these words became a sweeter message for me. This knowledge the Holy Spirit gave me on the privy in the tower.

Luther had his great insight, this theological thunderbolt, while taking a dump. In the years after Luther many Lutheran historians worked to "clean up" this image. It seemed scandalous that the great insight of the Protestant faith occurred during a bowel movement. Should not this insight have occurred to Luther as he sat hunched over the book of Romans in his study? Isn't that a more appropriate location and posture for such a wondrous spiritual revelation?

This impulse to sanitize Luther is, as we noted in the last chapter, the scandal of anality. Something high, spiritual and holy is scandalously connected with a body that shits. Thus, efforts are taken, as seen in some of Luther's biographers, to separate and quarantine the spiritual from the physical. The connection between the privy and spirituality disgusts us. And motivated by that disgust we move away from the world hoping to become "clean" and more "spiritual." To be "holy" is to deny the privy.

As Freud noted, we are "born between urine and feces." These are the "brass tacks" of human existence. But humans, aspiring to be like the angels, find this situation uncomfortable, inappropriate and scandalous. At root, the scandal has to do with the existential predicament presented to us by the human body. The worry comes not from the more elevated and lofty aspects of the body. These experiences with the body, such as human tears, strike us as elevating, deep, sublime and beautiful. Rather, we are troubled by aspects of the body that link us to our animal nature, the aspects of our bodily existence that remind us of our need, dependency, vulnerability and mortality. As the psychological research has shown us, death is the worm at the core of body ambivalence.

This dynamic creates problems for the church and her mission in the world. The church, propelled by disgust, flees and abandons the world. Or, if the church remains in the world, it erects purity quarantines around its life and consciousness. Stanley Hauerwas has remarked that the spiritual life of Christianity is very often "too spiritual." In the rush toward spirituality the body and the physical world is left behind. Much of this flight from the gritty physicality of life is motivated by existential fears. Thus, Norman O. Brown concludes in Life Against Death that "in the last analysis Christian theology must either accept death as a part of life or abandon the body."

In the coming posts we will wrestle with the issue of death repression and its affect upon Christian mission. But before we get to that discussion I'd like to pause and return to Luther's privy. That is, I have been claiming that the vulgarity and indecency surrounding the human body is due to the body functioning as a death reminder. That might seem to be a wild claim. A person could object and simply assert that they find references to feces, sex and urine to be intrinsically disgusting and vulgar. Death has nothing to do with it. Recall a few posts ago when I discussed the outrage in my church when I used the word "crap" during a worship service. This was, in a mild way, another example of the sandal of anality. The purity quarantine of the sanctuary had been violated. The anger at my word choice was overtly centered on issues of decorum and propriety. But the deeper issue, following the existential psychologists, is death anxiety. No doubt I would be hard pressed to convince the angry parishioner that death anxiety was implicated in his offense at the word "crap." But the link exists, even if unrecognized. In this post and the next I want to make that case. The importance of this analysis is that it is an attempt to come to grips with our feelings surrounding indecency and vulgarity. Those feelings are not always what we take them to be. That is, until we fully analyze our feelings surrounding the illicit and taboo we may, in our effort to sanitize our spiritual lives, refuse God full access to the world. We become "too spiritual" and deny the Incarnation. For if God cannot be at work in the privy then where else has God been banished? What other dirty, disgusting places are quarantined off from the divine? Note that this is not a call to throw open the doors to the church to every worldly, degrading influence. Again, disgust is a protective emotion alerting us to potential danger. But we cannot follow disgust blindly. Our emotional reactions concerning degradation are complicated and require careful discernment. And to perform that discernment we need to explore the psychology of the profane and the vulgar.

The great American philosopher regarding obscenity and vulgarity was the late comedian George Carlin. As seen in the quote above, Carlin links notions of indecency to religious views of the body, "that the human body is somehow evil and bad and there are parts of it that are especially evil and bad, and we should be ashamed." More, "fear, guilt and shame are built into the attitude toward sex and the body."

But Carlin's analysis is incomplete. If certain body parts are "especially evil" no account is given as to why this should be the case. Sex and other bodily functions are natural and universal. Why set these functions and body parts apart? If the existential psychologists are to be believed, these are the body parts that function as mortality reminders. But is this true? Do sex and defecation function as death reminders? The answer, surprisingly, is yes.

To illustrate the links between the body and death I'd like to discuss two pieces of research involving attitudes about sex and taboo language. The two cases are related. For example, as the strongest expletive in American English--the f-word--is a reference to sex. And sex is often considered to be "dirty" and "vulgar."

Let's begin with sex. Is mortality awareness linked with sex?

The Freudian psychodynamic tradition certainly felt there was an association between sex and death, with Freud famously positing the sex and death instincts. A survey of death attitudes and imagery also supports the naturalness of this association. For example, during the 16th-18th centuries death imagery became increasingly erotic. Philippe Aries in his book Western Attitudes Toward Death describes these associations:

At the end of the fifteenth century, we see the themes concerning death begin to take on an erotic meaning. In the oldest dances of death, Death scarcely touched the living to warn him and designate him. In the new iconography of the sixteenth century, Death raped the living. From the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries, countless scenes or motifs in art and literature associate death with love, Thanatos with Eros. These are eroticomacabre themes...

These associations have carried into the modern period, largely through the work of Freud. The sex/death association is graphically on display in modern media. With the rise of extremely violent films we now recognize the genre of "torture porn," where we watch implacable killers, the embodiment of Death, chase screaming, scantily clad girls. In his famous essay The Pornography of Death Geoffrey Gorer compares sexual pornography with the modern horror media (film, graphic novels and books):

Neither type of fantasy can have any real development, for once the protagonist has done something, he or she much proceed to do something else, with or to someone else, more refined, more complicated, or more sensational than what occurs before. This somebody else is not a person; it is either a set of genitals, with or without secondary sexual characteristics, or a body, perhaps capable of suffering pain as well as death...[both involve] sighs, gasps, groans, screams, and rattles concomitant to the described actions...Both types of fantasy are completely unrealistic, since they ignore all physical, social, or legal limitations, and both types have complete hallucination of the reader or viewer as their object.

Sociologically, it seems that sex and death are often intermingled and reinforcing obsessions. Why might this be? As discussed in the last post, sex may function as an animal reminder. As a biological activity sex is ubiquitous throughout the animal kingdom. We both recognize this fact and are scandalized by it. What parent has not been embarrassed with his children at the zoo when two animals are caught in the act of reproduction? It seems indecent to watch, but these are just animals. It's just a natural biological activity. Nothing pornographic about it. But we stand, embarrassed, and quickly try to move the kids on to the next exhibit.

But the biological, animal function of sex isn't all there is to human sexuality. Sex, in contrast to animals, can be experienced by humans as a deeply spiritual activity. Sex is often linked to spiritual exultation and transcendence. Further, the deepest feelings of love and union are experienced within the sex act.

In short, sex is dual. Some aspects of sex are reminders of our connection with the animals. We even speak of "animialistic sex" or refer to sexual positions as "doggy style." And yet, these animal reminders are connected with an act associated with love and spiritual transcendence. Thus, sex brings us back to Luther's privy: the scandal of anality, the union of the sacred and the profane, the divine with the body.

In sum, sex is no simple death reminder. The dual nature of sex implies that some aspects of sex are elevating while others are degrading and disgusting. Sex is existentially complicated.

An illuminating laboratory study conducted by Goldenburg, Pyszcynski, McCoy, Greenburg, and Solomon (1999) explored the existential complications of sex. Specifically, in the Goldenburg et al. study participants were separated into one of two imagery groups. The first group was asked to imagine the spiritual/romantic aspects of sexual intercourse (e.g., being loved by the partner, connecting spiritually with the partner). Again, these are the aspects of sex that do not function as animal reminders. These are the aspects of sex, like human tears, that are spiritual and, thus, high on the divinity dimension, closer to heaven. In contrast, the second group was asked to imagine the physical/bodily aspects of the sexual encounter (e.g., tasting bodily fluids, skin rubbing). These are the animal reminders of sex, the aspects of sex closely associated with the body. These animal-reminder stimuli, being lower on the divinity dimension, trigger feelings of disgust or degradation.

After the imagery exercise the two groups were asked to engage in a word-fragment completion task where the word-fragments (e.g., sk_ll, coff _ _) could be completed in either a death (e.g., skull, coffin) or non-death (e.g., skill, coffee) related manner. The results indicated that thinking about the physical/bodily aspects of sex created greater death thought accessibility (i.e., those in the physical imagery condition were significantly more likely to complete the words as skull or coffin than as skill or coffee). In short, the physical, animal-reminder aspects of sex do indeed function as mortality awareness triggers. These are, as we noted, the same stimuli that make sex revolting, disgusting, or animalistic.

Let's pause and soak this in a bit. The Goldenburg et al. study suggests that Christian attitudes concerning sex cannot be simplistically attributed to the puritanical impulses within religious populations. No, something more is going on. Sex is existentially worrisome. Sex reminds us of our bodies and their associated needs and vulnerabilities. Sex isn't just "wrong," there is something "unclean" and often disgusting about the activity. Sex isn't just "naughty," it can also be "dirty." The potential for degradation inherent in sex is due to the fact that this spiritually transcendence activity is scandalously linked with a bodily function shared with brute animals. The connection--soul and spirit with semen and sweat--is offensive.

The dynamics surrounding attitudes toward sex are very similar to the dynamics surrounding obscene language. This is not surprising in that obscene language, as Carlin noted, is often centered around the body. Take, for example, the paradigmatic inventory of profanity George Carlin’s famous list of “The Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television.” Commenting on Carlin’s list, the psychologist Steven Pinker in his book The Stuff of Thought has noted the following:

The seven words you can never say on television refer to sexuality and excretion: they are names for feces, urine, intercourse, the vagina, breasts, a person who engages in fellatio, and a person who acts out an Oedipal desire.

But it’s not only sexuality and excretion that are implicated in profanity. Pinker goes on:

But the capital crime in the Ten Commandments comes from a different subject, theology, and the taboo words in many languages refer to perdition, deities, messiahs, and their associated relics and body parts. Another semantic field that spawns taboo words across the world’s languages is death and disease, and still another is disfavored classes of people such as infidels, enemies, and subordinate ethnic groups. But what could these concepts—from mammaries to messiahs to maladies to minorities—possibly have in common?

Pinker suggests that these semantic clusters can be united by noting that profanity generally creates a strong negative emotion. More specifically, many profanities appear to be associated with the psychology of disgust and contamination. Urine, feces, blood, and other bodily effluvia are routinely referenced in obscene speech as well as being reliable disgust elicitors. But the profanity/disgust link is incomplete as it fails to capture facets of religious cursing (e.g., damn, hell), references to sexual intercourse (e.g., the f-word), or references to body parts (e.g., breasts, genitalia). What can link these sources of profanity?

Our existential analysis provides one answer. Profanity functions as a morality reminder. As we have noted, mortality concerns seem to be implicated in animal-reminder, body references. This explains why references to sex, genitalia, and other scatological references are offensive. In a similar way, religious cursing (e.g., "Damn you!", "You can go to hell!'') often refers to death and the Final Judgment.

To understand the logic of this conclusion, notice how the f-word functions as a body/animal reference. The f-word exploits the fissure between the physical and the spiritual aspects of sex. Again, sex should be a dual act, a union of both the physical and the spiritual. Stripped of its spiritual significance and meaning sex is reduced to its animal function. This is the f-word’s power. It strips sex of its spiritual significance, reducing the act to physical manipulations. It short, the f-word functions, literally, as a profanity. Something that is considered to be sacred and high on the divinity dimension is stripped of its spiritual content and rendered profane.

(This is not to say that the f-word cannot be playful exploited by sexual partners. Saying “Let’s f***” in contrast to “Let’s make love” is a request for a sexual encounter that is more physical than sentimental. That is, the f-word is picking out the body, as opposed to the spirit, as the locus of pleasure. "Dirty" sex can be enjoyed in a healthy, loving, and spiritual union. But the illicit nature of "dirty sex" is mitigated by the spiritual bond shared by the partners. That is, "dirty sex," although highlighting physical pleasure and erotic abandon, remains dual, a physical and spiritual act. It is a way to indulge the body without moving into degradation, religiously speaking.)

The links between anality, animals, divinity and degradation are clearly seen in how we describe taboo language. For example, the word "vulgarity" has its origin of the word vulgar which is rooted in the historical attempts of social elites to distinguishing their speech and habits from the lower, poorer classes. As with profanity, vulgarity is speech that takes something that is lofty and civilized and renders it as base and common. Profanity and vulgarity are “gutter,” “bathroom,” or “barnyard” speech. It is “low” speech and, thus, given how we understand the divinity dimension (High = Good and Low = Bad), speech that is immoral, sinful, improper, filthy, and dirty.

So it seems clear that profanity and vulgarity are associated with animals ("barnyard speech"), degradation ("gutter speech") and the scandal of anality ("bathroom speech"). But does profanity function, as we observed in the case of sex, as a mortality reminder? Even if the f-word does pick out the body, does the f-word remind us of death?

A recent study of mine is suggestive in this regard. Specifically, in this study I had Christian participants complete measures of orthodox Christian belief, animal reminder disgust and death anxiety. The orthodoxy measure asked the participants to report the degree to which they believed core Christian doctrine (e.g., "I believe Jesus is the Divine Son of God."). The animal reminder disgust measure asked participants to rate their disgust regarding the animal reminder disgust stimuli noted by Rozin and colleagues (e.g., disgust in response to gore, deformity, corpses). The death anxiety measure assessed how anxious a person feels in contemplating his or her death (e.g., "I am very much afraid to die.").

After completing these measures the participants were asked to consider the words shit, piss and fuck, rating how offended they become when they hear someone using these words in everyday conversation. These ratings were summed to create a total score for profanity offense.

The findings were consistent with the notion that profanity, like sex, has an existential component. First, orthodoxy ratings were unrelated to the profanity offense ratings. That is, the trends we will discuss do not appear to be due to differences in the sentiments of liberal versus conservatives Christians. In contrast, both animal reminder disgust ratings as well as death anxiety ratings were associated with profanity offense. Specifically, participants most disgusted by the animal-reminder stimuli reported being the most offended by profanity. Similarly, participants reporting the most death anxiety were also the most offended by profanity. Although not conclusive (due to the design of the study and size of the trends), the results of this study are consistent with the notion that profanity can function as a mortality reminder. That is, if profanity functions as a mortality reminder via body references, then we should expect to see the people most anxious about death and most disgusted by animal reminder stimuli to be the most offended by profanity. Those were the trends observed in the research. By underlining the oozy and disgusting aspects of our bodies, profanity highlights our animal nature mocking any spiritual pretensions that humans might escape, avoid, or minimize their physical existence. Profanity is a shock to a creature aspiring to be like the angels.

It is time to take stock. What can we take away from all this?

The goal of analyzing our reactions to sex and taboo language is to probe deeper into the psychology of degradation and disgust. What we find, following Carlin, is that what is considered to be taboo, illicit, vulgar, indecent, profane and obscene often clusters around the body. More specifically, the vulgar and profane tend to cluster around aspects of physical existence that remind us of our physical vulnerabilities, dependencies and death. In short, emotions of degradation are often repressing or hiding deep existential anxieties. Disgust fends off and pushes death anxiety out of consciousness. I will argue in the chapters to come that this existential repression and denial is undermining the Christian mission in the world. Just how that is occurring will take a bit more explaining. The first step, taken in the next post, will be to consider how feelings of disgust and degradation affect views of the Incarnation. For the mission of the church will be, in great measure, determined by how we either flee or embrace the body of Jesus.

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Purity and Defilement: Part 18, Disgust & The Brass Tacks

We now enter Part 4--Mortality--the final posts in this series. Check out the sidebar to see the overall flow and structure of the series.

Recall that in post no. 6 of this series we discussed the promiscuous nature of disgust. That is, beyond revulsion toward foodstuffs a wide range of stimuli can elicit disgust. Very often these stimuli are consistent and reliable disgust-triggers within a given culture (i.e., there is a broad consensus on what is or is not disgusting). For North Americans Paul Rozin and colleagues have noted that the following stimuli are reliable disgust stimuli:

1. Food

2. Body products (e.g., feces, vomit)

3. Animals (e.g., insects, rats)

4. Sexual behaviors (e.g., incest, homosexuality)

5. Contact with the dead or corpses

6. Violations of the exterior envelope of the body (e.g., gore, deformity)

7. Poor hygiene

8. Interpersonal contamination (e.g., contact with unsavory persons)

9. Moral offenses

As noted earlier, Rozin has grouped these stimuli into three broad disgust domains:

1. Core Disgust: Food

Revulsion centered around eating and oral incorporation. The adaptive core of disgust.

2. Sociomoral Disgust: Moral offenses, people

Revulsion centered around moral and social judgments. The aspect of disgust related hospitality in Matthew 9.

3. Animal-Reminder Disgust: Gore, deformity, animals, hygiene, death

Revulsion centered around stimuli that function as death/mortality reminders. The existential aspect of disgust.

We began these posts by considering the first domain, core disgust. Specifically, we described the unique psychology associated with disgust with a particular focus on the contamination "logic" associated with the disgust response. This analysis was important because it illuminates, given the associations between disgust and purity, how many of us think about moral and social issues. Consequently, we spent Parts 2 and 3 examining how disgust psychology is implicated in moral judgments and social exclusion. Reviewing the posts in Part 2, we discussed a variety of consequences that occur when moral issues are framed by purity metaphors. A quick survey of those consequences:

1. Purity metaphors activate disgust psychology and the associated contamination logic.

2. Given various features of contamination logic our reasoning about "purity violations" is governed by various appraisals. For example, contact and proximity become important considerations. Dose insensitivity frames the violation in catastrophic terms. And purity violations are felt to be permanent and beyond rehabilitation.

3. The Macbeth Effect. Given the strong psychological association between physical cleansing and spiritual purity laboratory studies have shown how acts of physical cleansing--ritual or real--can replace and substitute moral effort and repentance. Hand washing literally substitutes for acts of justice.

4. Although all sins are generally considered to be purity violations (given understandings of God's holiness in both the Old and New Testaments) some sin categories are uniquely characterized by purity metaphors. Specifically, sexual sins are often structure by the metaphor of "sexual purity." This uneven use of purity metaphors across the domain of sin behaviors may be one explanation for why certain sin categories are felt to be more toxic and severe within certain faith communities. Purity sins tend to be unfairly and unreasonably stigmatized by the group. This creates greater shame and self-loathing for certain classes of sins.

5. Purity logic is often incompatible with impulses toward justice and love. Efforts toward purity tends to, given the contamination logic in play, employ quarantines. Obviously, a quarantine strategy impedes efforts aimed at inclusion, welcome and hospitality. This quarantine logic also affects notions of decorum, dignity and propriety in the life of the church. For example, what can legitimately be discussed within the church? What kind of language and cultural references are taboo? What norms govern dress and behavior within the church? In short, the quarantine strategy seeks to create a space of holiness where vulgar, profane or worldly modes of conduct are prohibited.

6. Finally, the disgust reaction in the face of purity violations is largely an irrational and emotional response. Thus, debates about purity violations are often immune to rational conversation or discussion. Rather, people tend to sit with their felt experiences regarding what is or is not improper, degrading or illicit. These judgments are not produced through calm deliberation but tend to be the product of differences in individual and cultural sensibilities. Consequently, conversations regarding purity categories tend to leave us communally dumbfounded. A "feeling of wrongness" is the only warrant deployed and we are stuck if people don't share those feelings. This dumbfounding often occurs when conservatives and liberals discuss moral issues.

The list above are just some of the effects we noted in Part 2 regarding the influence of disgust upon the moral reasoning and the experience of sin within the life of the church. In Part 3 we turned to the social side of sociomoral disgust, where disgust properties are applied to individuals and populations. In Part 3 we made the following observations about sociomoral disgust:

1. Although we all recognize extreme cases of sociomoral disgust in incidents of genocide and hate we often fail to recognize that sociomoral disgust is affecting all of us and is an everyday affair. Examples of "everyday disgust" are scapegoating, Singer's moral circle, the psychology of infrahumanization, and contempt.

2. Disgust and love are reciprocal processes. Disgust erects and monitors boundaries of the self and love, as a secondary process, allows those boundaries to be crossed. We see this in sexual intimacy, where access to the body is granted, but we also see it in allowing people access to the sacred spaces of life: Home, church, nation. The reciprocal nature of disgust and love greatly complicates simplistic formula such as "love the sinner but hate the sin." That is, if disgust is implicated in the response to the sin love of the sinner is psychologically compromised. Love and revulsion work against each other.

3. Unless sociomoral disgust is addressed in the heart efforts toward justice, hospitality or charity will be, in the end, ineffective and distancing. The "will to embrace" must proceed any judgments of the Other. Embrace must be deep and should not be reduced to social or political rearrangements and accommodations.

Having investigated the core, moral and social disgust we now turn to the third and final disgust domain, animal-reminder disgust.

Beyond disgust centered on food, morality or people, Rozin and colleagues have noted that disgust is often elicited by stimuli that seem to function as death/mortality reminders. That is, events or stimuli that highlight the weakness, decay or vulnerability of the body often activate disgust responses. For example, people often feel disgusted when they encounter the handicapped, the elderly, poor hygiene, body fluids, deformity, corpses, gore or animals. Although many of these stimuli are implicated as legitimate disease vectors there seems to be more going on than an simple adaptive impulse to avoid eating something harmful.

In short, disgust appears to have an existential component. Our body-related disgust is not simply about cleanliness. Rather, disgust seems to be fending off some deeper anxieties and ambivalences we have about even having a body. Something about the body seems improper, illicit, pornographic, degrading and disgusting.

The body is disgusting because we experience it an existential predicament. Although we relish in the body we know that it will, one day, fail us. Thus, animal-reminder stimuli are pushed away as revolting and inappropriate for contemplation.

The locus of this offense is that fact that humans feel that they are dual creatures, both physical and spiritual. Body and soul. Putting aside objections to this Cartesian bifurcation, this feeling of duality appears to be a universal human experience, most likely the product of how we reason about minds and objects (see Paul Bloom's Descartes Baby). In the face of this bifurcated experience fears cluster around the body as it is subject to the forces of entropy, death and decay. No matter what my mind might will or want the body will fail me in the end. The body is a vessel that carries me, inexorably, to the grave.

Ernest Becker in this book The Denial of Death describes the physical/spiritual paradox of human existence:

...the essence of man is really its paradoxical nature, the fact that he is half animal and half symbolic...This is the paradox: he is out of nature and hopelessly in it; he is dual, up in the stars and yet housed in a heart-pumping, breath-gasping body...His body is a material and fleshy casing that is alien to him in many ways--the strangest and most repugnant way being that it aches and bleeds and will decay and die. Man is literally split in two: he has an awareness of his own splendid uniqueness in that he sticks out of nature with a towering majesty, and yet he goes back into the ground a few feet in order blindly and dumbly to rot and disappear forever. It is a terrifying dilemma to be in and have to live with...The knowledge of death is reflective and conceptual, and animals are spared it. They live and they disappear with the same thoughtlessness: a few minutes of fear, a few seconds of anguish, and it is over. But to live a whole lifetime with the fate of death haunting one's dreams and even the most sun-filled days--that's something else.

This offensive union--the attachment of our symbolic/spiritual selves with a body--is also implicated in what we might call, following the psychodynamic psychologists, the "scandal of anality." That is, if humans feel like (or at least desire to be) spiritual, angelic, god-like and immortal beings then participation in basic metabolic acts--eating and excreting--is experienced as offensive and illicit. Becker elaborates:

Excreting is the curse that threatens madness because it shows man in his abject finitude, his physicalness, the likely unreality of his hopes and dreams. But even more immediately, it represents man's utter bafflement at the sheer non-sense of creation: to fashion the sublime miracle of the human face, the mysterium tremendum of radiant feminine beauty, the veritable goddess that beautiful women are; to bring this out of nothing, out of the void, and make it shine in noonday; to take such a miracle and put miracles again within it, deep in the mystery of eyes that peer out--the eye that gave even the dry Darwin a chill: to do all this, and to combine it with an anus that shits! It is too much. Nature mocks us...

A wonderful example of the animal-reminder facet of disgust and how it relates to human degradation and mortality is found an account from the Puritan leader Cotton Mather. Mather was urinating outside when a dog came up beside him and lifted his leg. Man and dog taking a piss together, side-by-side. Mather contemplates the scene he's in:

I was once emptying the Cistern of Nature, and making Water at the Wall. At the same Time, there came a Dog, who did so too, before me. Thought I; “What mean and vile Things are the Children of Men, in this mortal State! How much do our natural Necessities abase us and place us in some regard, on the Level with the very Dogs!”…Accordingly, I resolved, that it should be my ordinary Practice, whenever I step to answer the one or other Necessity of Nature, to make it an Opportunity of shaping in my Mind some noble, divine Thought.

In short, disgust seems to be protecting us from an existential confrontation. We resist reminders that we are, indeed, animals, vulnerable bodies prone to illness, injury, age and, eventually, death. As Martha Nussbaum writes:

...disgust pertains to our problematic relationship with our own animality. Its core idea is the belief that if we take in the animalness of animal secretions we will ourselves be reduced to the status of animals. Similarly, if we absorb or are mingled with the decaying, we will ourselves be mortal and decaying. Disgust thus wards off both animality in general and the mortality that is so prominent in our loathing of our animality.

Given that "human disgust reactions are typically mediated very powerfully by the awareness of death and decay" Nussbaum notes, along with Becker, that "human beings cannot bear to live with the constant awareness of mortality and of their frail animal bodies." Thus, "self-deception may be essential in getting us through a life which is soon bound for death." Disgust aids in the self-deception by prompting us to push the stimuli away creating a quick restoration of our existential equanimity.

It might be surprising to find in all this that disgust is an existential emotion. We tend to think that a confrontation with death would lead to either anxiety or anger. So why is disgust implicated in the confrontation with death? First, as seen above, many of the reminders of our mortal, animal natures (e.g., feces, corpses) are, in themselves, stimuli for core disgust. As vectors of disease these stimuli are already disgust triggers. Due to this preexisting mapping existential concerns related to these same stimuli are easily folded into the emotion of disgust.

But the connection between disgust and death goes deeper. Recall that disgust regulates the divinity dimension in human experience. Feelings of disgust are triggered when something "high" or "holy" is degraded or profaned. Generally speaking, we tend to place the spiritual aspects of existence "high" on the divinity dimension. Conversely, things that are physical and animal are seen as "low" on the divinity dimension. Man is "over" the animals. We don't want people to "descend to the level of animals." This is the dynamic at the root of Becker's claim that humans are paradoxical. The spiritual, elevated and "higher" aspects of experience are intertwined with our "lower" animal nature. Given that disgust regulates and monitors the movements of elevation and degradation on the divinity dimension it is not surprising that reminders of our animal nature are often seen as vulgar, inappropriate, illicit and revolting.

Evidence in support this notion is seen in an interesting exception to disgust responses regarding bodily fluids. Specifically, all bodily fluids, except one, are reliable disgust stimuli. Blood, vomit, urine, semen, sweat, puss. All are found, generally speaking, to be disgusting. The one exception is the bodily fluid that seems quintessentially human and spiritual: Tears. Given that tears are associated with the deepest and most profound human experiences tears are considered to be a kind of spiritual fluid, a fluid that separates us from the animals rather than identifies us with them. Consequently, tears do not produce disgust. As a spiritual fluid unique to humans tears are "high" on the divinity dimension. Urine, by contrast, is "low" on the divinity dimension as it is a fluid shared with all animals.

Before going on I'd like to note that the disgust/death/body associations were have been discussing are not hypothetical. Over the last ten years an impressive body of empirical work has established these associations across a variety of laboratory tests. For example, empirical work has strongly linked body ambivalence to death concerns (see Goldenberg et al., 2000, for a review of much of this research). Further, sensitivity to animal-reminder disgust has also been linked to mortality concerns (Goldenberg et al., 2001).

In sum, disgust appears to be an existential emotion. More specifically, body-related stimuli appear to function as mortality reminders. Wanting to protect ourselves from these reminders we experience disgust and revulsion and seek to push the stimuli away as inappropriate, indecent, illicit or nauseating.

I would like to pause here to clarify that disgust cannot be reduced to existential worries. People find stimuli disgusting for a wide variety of reasons. The claim is simply that existential anxiety concerning the vulnerabilities of our bodies can be implicated in disgust responses, that disgust can act as an existential buffer. It is also important to stress that body-related anxiety and ambivalence are not solely due to mortality concerns. Nor is death anxiety the strongest factor in body ambivalence. Culture is by far the more important influence in how we feel about our bodies. It is important to note that the body is not universally experienced as a existential predicament or conundrum. Many persons, cultures and religious groups have very positive views of the body. While some religious groups might find the body to be a location of temptation, depravity and bestial impulses, other groups might find the body to be holy, good and a location for spiritual exultation.

Those clarifications made, it does seem clear that the body is a regular locus of spiritual and existential befuddlement. Our existential analysis offers one explanation for why body ambivalence is so pervasive in religious traditions. If the body functions as an animal-reminder a spiritually-minded people could easily fall into the temptation of seeing routine bodily activities (defecating, farting, burping) as degrading and vulgar. These activities act as an affront to our aspirations to climb spiritually "upward." The body is holding us back, spiritually speaking. It seems pornographic to drag our feces, sweat, and urine into the Holy of Holies. Should we not, then, try to leave these things behind? And if we can't, should we not create a quarantine around our animal-nature refusing it access to holy and sacred spaces? For example, issues of propriety, hygiene and dress are important affairs in many churches. Generally, the rationale offered for this fussiness and fastidiousness is that we are to offer God our "best", in dress, hygiene and decorum. But our analysis here suggests that something else might be going on. Behind the impulse to "clean up" is an attempt to deny our animal nature access to the sacred space. Following Freud, we call this fussy fastidiousness anal-retentive. It's the scandal of anality noted by Becker. A collective pretending that the people sitting in the sanctuary are people who never have to take a shit.

Having begun to introduce the psychology of animal-reminder disgust we can now ask, Why is any of this of concern for the church?

In the posts to come I want to build up to an answer to that question. But we can sketch the outline of the answer now. If disgust is activated in the face of the sweat, grime and blood of human existence then our tendency will be to pull back from those aspects of human experience. More, this pulling back from the gritty physicality of life feels to us to be a divine movement, the directive of God. Psychologically, we feel that purity and holiness is achieved by removing ourselves from the gutter and waste. This impulse also makes us want to protect God from the disgusting aspects of our bodies and existence. God needs to be quarantined.

But this movement is worrisome. In the impulse to become holy we try to move away from the human predicament. And yet, given the movement of the Incarnation, this natural impulse seems to be pulling us in the wrong direction. We are being pulled away from life rather than toward a deeper participation. Shockingly, and contrary to human expectation, God is born in barn, covered in sweat, blood and amniotic fluid. Everything about the scene is a disgust trigger. God is squeezed out into the world through a woman's birth canal, attached to her by an umbilical cord. In the Incarnation God crashes through the quarantine of holiness and purity erected around Him.

T.S. Eliot wrote in Sweeney Agonistes:

'Birth, and copulation, and death.
That's all the facts when you come to brass tacks;
Birth, and copulation, and death.'

Birth, sex and death. Each graphically displays our animal nature and physical dependencies. Each is associated, as we will see, with disgust psychology, a psychology activated to protect us from the illicit and pornographic nature of the human predicament. And yet, humanity revolves around these experiences. Birth, sex and death, "that's all the facts" of our life. The scandal of the Incarnation and the church is the movement down into the "brass tacks" of life. To refuse to flee from life and to resist our instinctive revulsions. To meet God in the middle of 'birth, copulation and death.'

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Purity and Defilement: Part 17, Hospitality, Danger and the Will to Embrace

In our extended examination of sociomoral disgust we have been exploring the psychological dynamics of social exclusion, rejection and expulsion. The key observation was the recognition that disgust and love are reciprocal processes. Disgust is the primary process erecting boundaries between the self and the world. Love is a secondary process that allows others access to the "territory of the self." This access is physical (allowing kinds of physical touch, intimacy, or proximity), social (creating intimate webs of friends and family), behavioral (allowing people inside one's moral circle and granting them special claims on our time, effort and resources) and emotional (granting access to warmth and acceptance within our hearts and minds).

Opposed to these forces of exclusion are the impulses of inclusion, welcome and embrace. In the Christian tradition these are the practices of hospitality. Having considered the psychological dynamics that undermine the practice of welcome I would like to end Part 3 by examining hospitality as a positive action and to address objections that might be leveled at the analyses offered across the last few posts.

It could be argued that hospitality--the welcoming of strangers--is the quintessential Christian practice. As we have noted, welcoming sinners to table fellowship was the central, distinctive and inflammatory aspect of Jesus' ministry and teaching. More than this, pulling from Old Testament traditions, the gospel writers create an identity relationship between Jesus and strangers. Jesus is the stranger. Strangers are Jesus. Again, this impulse--God is the stranger on the doorstep--goes back to the story told in Genesis 18 where Abraham extends hospitality to three strangers collectively identified as God. This story resonated with the early church as Hebrews 13.2 reminds the community to "not forget to entertain strangers, for by so doing some people have entertained angels without knowing it."

Continuing the theme of God on the doorstep, the gospel accounts begin with the story of Joseph and the pregnant Mary seeking room at the inn and failing to find hospitality. Later in the gospels Jesus explicitly identifies himself with the stranger and, thus, links the ethic of the Kingdom with acts of hospitality:

Matthew 25

Then the King will say to those on his right, 'Come, you who are blessed by my Father; take your inheritance, the kingdom prepared for you since the creation of the world. For I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you invited me in, I needed clothes and you clothed me, I was sick and you looked after me, I was in prison and you came to visit me.'

"Then the righteous will answer him, 'Lord, when did we see you hungry and feed you, or thirsty and give you something to drink? When did we see you a stranger and invite you in, or needing clothes and clothe you? When did we see you sick or in prison and go to visit you?'

"The King will reply, 'I tell you the truth, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers of mine, you did for me.'

Elsewhere in the gospels welcoming children is considered to be an act of welcoming Jesus (cf. Matthew 18.5). The Parable of the Good Samaritan, one of the clearest articulations of Jesus' ethic, is also a story about hospitality.

The resurrection narratives also explore the theme of Jesus as stranger. The Resurrected Lord is consistently unrecognized in the resurrection narratives. The most striking example is found in the road to Emmaus narrative (Luke 24) where two followers of Jesus encounter the resurrected Christ but fail to recognize him. Christ is recognized by the followers only after an act of hospitality.

Given all this, and combined with the central place of table fellowship in Jesus' ministry, it is not surprising that hospitality was a defining feature and virtue of the early church (cf. Acts 2.42-47, 4.32-37; 1 Tim. 3.2, 5.10; 1 Peter 4.9; Tit. 1.8; Rom. 12.13, 15.7). As Christine Pohl notes in her book Making Room these practices continued to be a Christian distinctive throughout the first centuries of the church:

Hospitality to needy strangers distinguished the early church from its surrounding environment. Noted as exceptional by Christians and non-Christians alike, offering care to strangers became one of the distinguishing marks of the authenticity of the Christian gospel and of the church. Writing from the first five centuries demonstrate the importance of hospitality in defining the church as a universal community, in denying the significance of the status boundaries and distinctions of the larger society, in recognizing the value of every person, and in providing practical care for the poor, stranger, and sick.

If hospitality is a defining, central and quintessential Christian practice then we learn something about the shape and character of sin in human affairs. Specifically, what is so special about extending welcome? What wound is being attended to in the act of hospitality? What sin is being challenged and redeemed?

Our analysis of sociomoral disgust suggests that sin is characterized by the forces of dehumanization. These forces may be subtle or shockingly brutal. But they all share a common core, the stratification of humanity along a divinity dimension with superior groups (defined as "my tribe") elevated over other (“outside”) groups. This dynamic of dehumanization affects how we treat others (e.g., the moral circle), how we select scapegoats, and how we choose who is worthy of love and affection.

Given the impact of sociomoral disgust upon human affairs it is not surprising that the act of hospitality is fundamentally an act of human recognition. If exclusion is fundamentally dehumanizing hospitality acts to restore full human status to the marginalized and outcast. As Pohl writes:

For much of church history, Christians addressed concerns about recognition and human dignity within their discussion and practices of hospitality. Especially in relation to strangers, hospitality was a basic category for dealing with the importance of transcending social differences and breaking social boundaries that excluded certain categories or kinds of persons...Hospitality resists boundaries that endanger persons by denying their humanness.

This process is socially subversive. We witness this in controversy surrounding Jesus' ministry. By welcoming the outcast oppressive social arrangements are challenged. Pohl quotes the Catholic Worker who claimed that "hospitality is resistance." Pohl elaborates:

Because the practice of hospitality is so significant in establishing and reinforcing social relationships and moral bonds, we notice its more subversive character only when socially undervalued persons are welcomed. In contrast to a more tame hospitality that welcomes persons already well situated in a community, hospitality that welcomes "the least" and recognizes their equal value can be an act of resistance and defiance, a challenge to the values and expectations of the larger community.

More than resistance, hospitality also has a remedial function. Where people are abandoned, socially or economically, hospitality seeks to provide human affection and material care. In extreme cases, hospitality provides refuge for the victims of society. During WWII German citizens and entire towns provided sanctuary and refuge for their Jewish neighbors. In America the hosts of the Underground Railroad provided haven and care for slaves seeking freedom.

In all of this we see how the practice of hospitality is the antithesis of sociomoral disgust. Where the dynamics of disgust and dehumanization foster exclusion and expulsion the practice of hospitality welcomes the outcast and stranger as a full member of the human community. Hospitality seeks to expand the moral circle, to push back against the innate impulse that assumes "humanity ends at the border of the tribe." A final word from Pohl:

Strangers, in the strict sense, are those who are disconnected from basic relationships that give persons a secure place in the world. The most vulnerable strangers are detached from family, community, church, work, and polity. This condition is most clearly seen in the state of homeless people and refugees. Others experience detachment and exclusion to lesser degrees.

When we offer hospitality to strangers, we welcome them into a place to which we are somehow connected--a space that has meaning and value to us. This is often our home, but it also includes church, community, nation, and various other institutions. In hospitality, the stranger is welcomed into a safe, personal, and comfortable place, a place of respect and acceptance and friendship. Even if only briefly, the stranger is included in a life-giving and life-sustaining network of relations.

Given this call to hospitality it is time, here at the end of Part 3, to face objections to the argument being offered. Specifically, if love involves the eradication of boundaries are we not left, psychologically and socially, in a very dangerous situation? Boundaries of selfhood and community are vital to maintaining psychological and communal integrity. In short, disgust isn't all bad. It exists for a very good reason. Disgust is a protective mechanism. Thus, any assault on disgust needs to face those dangers honestly and candidly. Core disgust protects us from ingesting foodstuffs that can kill us. Sociomoral disgust is an attempt to protect the group from toxic membership.

In a prior post I introduced the notion of monsters in human relations. At the time that conversation might have seemed a bit off topic and esoteric. But I wanted to raise the question of monsters because it helps us, now, to frame the challenge of hospitality in very stark terms. Recall, monsters are "warnings." In our previous discussion, following Rene Girard, we deconstructed this warning by noting how monster stories are often ambivalent about the scapegoating inherent in the notion of "monsters." That is, monster stories often warn us that monsters might be innocent people. But that is a subversive reading of monster stories. The more overt meaning of monster stories is that monsters are sources of legitimate danger. Given this danger the question can be posed, Should we extend hospitality to monsters?

The dangers here swirl around the integrity of the group. Monsters, by their nature, are disruptive, chaotic, parasitical and violent. Some of these concerns involve the physical safety and integrity of the group. Should, for example, churches extend hospitality to pedophiles in light of their responsibilities to the children and parents of the faith community? Less dramatic but still important are concerns over the moral and spiritual integrity of the group.

In Part 2 of this series we worried a great deal about the use of purity metaphors when those metaphors structure aspects of church life. We noted how purity metaphors activate a contamination logic that is often irrational (a form of magical thinking) and emotional. But in this post we can see why purity metaphors are often deployed. The notion of purity speaks to concerns over communal integrity, morally and spiritually speaking. That is, a purity psychology is used to help monitor and evaluate the spiritual integrity of the faith community. For example, we often speak of "doctrinal purity" or "ideological purity" to assess deviance regarding the core beliefs and commitments of a group. The troublesome aspect of these purity metaphors is that they often lead to "witch hunts," scapegoating and expulsion. But we can see the core concern behind the purity metaphor. If we open ourselves to outsiders how can we maintain communal integrity? If we extend hospitality to "monsters"--disruptive Otherness--will the community survive?

This tension is not new and is seen throughout the biblical witness. As discussed in earlier posts, there is an inherent tension between purity and justice. Above I discussed biblical texts that point the Christian community toward a life of radical hospitality and inclusion. And yet, we also find in expulsive elements in the New Testament church. For example, in I Corinthians, a book we've been examining, notice how Paul deals with a case of sexual immorality (along with other moral infractions) within the church:

I Corinthians 5

It is actually reported that there is sexual immorality among you, and of a kind that does not occur even among pagans: A man has his father's wife. And you are proud! Shouldn't you rather have been filled with grief and have put out of your fellowship the man who did this? Even though I am not physically present, I am with you in spirit. And I have already passed judgment on the one who did this, just as if I were present. When you are assembled in the name of our Lord Jesus and I am with you in spirit, and the power of our Lord Jesus is present, hand this man over to Satan, so that the sinful nature may be destroyed and his spirit saved on the day of the Lord.

Your boasting is not good. Don't you know that a little yeast works through the whole batch of dough? Get rid of the old yeast that you may be a new batch without yeast—as you really are. For Christ, our Passover lamb, has been sacrificed. Therefore let us keep the Festival, not with the old yeast, the yeast of malice and wickedness, but with bread without yeast, the bread of sincerity and truth.

I have written you in my letter not to associate with sexually immoral people—not at all meaning the people of this world who are immoral, or the greedy and swindlers, or idolaters. In that case you would have to leave this world. But now I am writing you that you must not associate with anyone who calls himself a brother but is sexually immoral or greedy, an idolater or a slanderer, a drunkard or a swindler. With such a man do not even eat.

We can see the purity logic at work in Paul's discussion. Paul is dealing with something "monstrous" in the Corinthian church. He fears for the moral and spiritual integrity of the church. Given this, his recommendation is expulsive: expel the brother and do not associate with immoral believers.

This is a difficult text and Christian communities have varied in how they embody these directives (e.g., closed communion, shunning, excommunication). Regardless, I think most can see Paul's concern regarding the integrity of the church and gospel. Consequently, how are we to understand Paul's directives in light of the call to hospitality?

I'd like to make three observations. First, it seems clear that Paul is making a distinction between hospitality and discipline. Notice how Paul is very explicit, lest he be misunderstood, that he is not asking the church to avoid contact with the "tax collectors and sinners" of the world. Paul isn't talking about hospitality at all. He's talking about the moral and spiritual integrity of the church membership. In short, I think it clear that churches should expect members to mutually submit to each other in light of their shared and defining commitments. Of course, faith communities can be unjust and immoral in their demands upon members. So this is no simple call for submission. There are times when prophets need to stand up and correct the errors of the group. So what kinds of “sins” should be treated in this manner of I Cor. 5 within the church? I think it noteworthy that the sin Paul is criticizing is shocking even within the surrounding pagan culture. In short, Paul is speaking about immorality within the church is that universally condemned by those both inside and outside the church. In such cases the faith community should seek to preserve its moral integrity and witness.

This leads me to my second point. The disciplinary activity of the church is not punitive, it is rehabilitative. Expulsion is not the end. It is a means toward salvation. The faith group stands ready to welcome. The doors are not forever closed.

This last point brings me to what I think is the most crucial issue in the call to hospitality. Our analysis across these posts has been thoroughgoingly psychological. We have been examining some familiar theological ground from an unusual vantage point. I think the value of this approach can be seen in the issue of hospitality. Specifically, I have been at some pains in the last few posts to argue that sociomoral disgust is a matter of the heart and that exclusion and dehumanization are everyday affairs. I made my case by discussing the psychology of the moral circle, infrahumanization and contempt. Given this analysis it seems clear that welcome and hospitality are not simply physical rearrangements. There is a vast difference in receiving welcome, refuge or table fellowship from chilly, begrudging hosts versus warm and large-hearted hosts. One can literally feel the difference. In short, the call to hospitality is not simply a call to charity but is, rather, a call to remake the heart. That is, I Corinthians 5 cannot be understood if we simply look at Paul's directives from a behavioral standpoint. What is missing in that account is the heart. Simply stated, I Corinthians 5 cannot be understood without understanding I Corinthians 13.

In short, the critical issue isn't about moral or doctrinal purity. The critical issue concerns one's fundamental stance toward the Other, the erring brother or stranger on the doorstep. It seems clear that church discipline is needed at times to preserve the integrity of the group. But there is no way to fully understand the logic of Paul's directives until the matters of the heart are confronted. Acts of charity can be dehumanizing. Church discipline can be dehumanizing. The outcome of the action pivots off the status of the heart.

How should the heart of hospitality be characterized? What kind of heart can eliminate sociomoral fissures? The best description I know of comes from Miroslav Volf's book Exclusion and Embrace. In his book Volf takes up the question of the heart, contrasting the nature of the human agent with the physical arrangements (e.g., hospitality, justice) we make for others (italics his):

I want to concentrate on social agents. Instead of reflecting on the kind of society we ought to create in order to accommodate individual or communal heterogeneity, I will explore what kind of selves we need to be in order to live in harmony with others.

Volf characterizes this self by the "will to embrace." For Volf the will to embrace is a stance prior to any judgment of the Other. The will to embrace is the default stance, the foundational position of the Christian person. All judgments and actions flow from this will to embrace. It is both prior to and persisting alongside any actions done for the sake of the Kingdom. Volf describes this critical feature:

...the will to give ourselves to others and "welcome" them, to readjust our identities to make space for them, is prior to any judgment about others, except that of identifying them in their humanity. The will to embrace precedes any "truth" about others and any construction of their "justice." This will is absolutely indiscriminate and strictly immutable; it transcends the moral mapping of the social world into "good" and "evil."

It seems clear that Volf's will to embrace is addressing the psychological issues we have been discussing. Embrace must be deep. Further, it must be prior to any judgments, moral or otherwise, we make of persons. Only then will the fundamental humanity of the person be protected from the psychology of disgust and dehumanization. It is true that questions of welcome and inclusion pose hard questions of discernment for the faith community. But before those arrangements are contemplated the will to embrace must be the communal starting point. No discussion of hospitality or church discipline can commence until the will to embrace the dignity of others is firmly in place. That is the root lesson from Matthew 9. The issue of "sin" could not be discussed by Jesus and the Pharisees, a worthy and vital conversation, until the Pharisees were willing to recognize the dignity of those sitting at table with Jesus. Discussions of purity and sin cannot be primary discussions. The primary conversation must be the recognition that God "desires mercy, not sacrifice." Only in light of that recognition can issues of purity and sacrifice be discussed in a way that will not scapegoat, dehumanize or harm. In short, no actions can be taken within the faith community before the issue of sociomoral disgust is confronted and mastered within the heart.

This might seem like an invitation for disaster. If embrace precedes conversations concerning truth or morality we seem to run back up against the problem of monstrous intrusion and disruption. Heresy and immorality seem only a slippery slope away. But Volf is clear that truth and goodness cannot be discerned prior to embrace. Love will dictate the shape of truth. Not the other way around. There is no Christian truth, no "right belief," outside of embrace. But that does not mean that truth, morality and justice are denied:

As I stress the priority of the "will to embrace," my assumption is that the struggle against deception, injustice, and violence is indispensable. But how should that struggle take place? How should "truth" and "justice" be identified? Negatively, my argument is almost a Nietzschean one: there is far too much dishonesty in the singleminded search for truth, too much injustice in the uncompromising struggle for justice. The Nietzschean feel of the negative argument is, however, but the flip side of my positive argument, which rests squarely on the "wisdom of the cross": within social contexts, truth and justice are unavailable outside the will to embrace the other. I immediately continue to argue, however, that the embrace itself--full reconciliation--cannot take place until the truth has been said and justice done. There is an asymmetrical dialectic between the "grace" of self-donation and the "demand" of truth and justice. Grace has primacy: even if the will to embrace is indiscriminate, the embrace itself is conditional.

To conclude Part 3 we might summarize our work as follows. Boundaries are not evil. Disgust has protective functions. Real dangers exist. But history shows us that the greatest evils committed by humanity involved sociomoral disgust, where entire populations were considered to be vermin. Worse, these same dynamics are seen in everyday encounters. We find people "disgusting" and treat people with distain and contempt. Psychologists have shown that these small forms of exclusion are, indeed, the first steps along the path of dehumanization.

So how are we to balance the tension between purity and hospitality? How are we to live given Jesus' call of "mercy, not sacrifice"? The way forward is into a life of hospitality. And not simply a hospitality that focuses on charity and mere social rearrangement. Good deeds can be dehumanizing if sociomoral fissures continue to exist within the Christian soul. What is needed is a deep hospitality characterized by the will to embrace. A stance where the dignity of every human person is vouchsafed, embraced and protected deep within the heart of the church

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Weddings: Real, Imagined, and Yet to Come

Jim and Pam got married this week on The Office.

Some thoughts on the wedding.

If you saw the episode you know what is coming. Jim and Pam's Office mates hijack their wedding by imitating Jill and Kevin's wedding which became, and remains, a YouTube sensation.

Here is that real life video:



This is what I love about that video. The eschaton is often compared to a wedding, the wedding of the Lamb with the church. And if you are like me, and have been to a few weddings, that metaphor is kind of depressing. Our modern American ceremonies don't seem to capture the eschatological joy the biblical writers were aiming for. But I think Jill and Kevin's wedding comes very close. That is an eschatological wedding!

Following suit, here's what The Office did with their wedding:



Theologically, I love The Office take on this. First, it captures the eschatological joy of Kevin and Jill's wedding. But more than this, I love how it's full of freaks. All these odd, strange and weird people from the lives of Jim and Pam. I love the messy, inclusive vision it presents. It's joyous but a bit, well, unruly given the kinds of people involved. I think Jesus had this vision in mind:

Matthew 22
Jesus spoke to them again in parables, saying: "The kingdom of heaven is like a king who prepared a wedding banquet for his son. He sent his servants to those who had been invited to the banquet to tell them to come, but they refused to come...

"Then he said to his servants, 'The wedding banquet is ready, but those I invited did not deserve to come. Go to the street corners and invite to the banquet anyone you find.' So the servants went out into the streets and gathered all the people they could find, both good and bad, and the wedding hall was filled with guests.

The most important point, for me, about The Office wedding is how Jim and Pam figure out a way to give it away to their friends. The wedding is no longer for them, but for their friends, for those invited to the wedding as guests. Secure in their marriage on the boat Pam and Jim are free to give the ceremony away.

I think there is an important lesson here for the church. Too often the ceremony, ritual and life of the church is for us. And, as a consequence, the life of the church is often dry, uninspired and lacking spontaneous joy. Worse, it is inhospitable. The church doesn't give itself away to welcome others. The life of the church is for the church, not for the world. But it is not supposed to be that way. As Dietrich Bonhoeffer has said, "The church is the church only when it exists for others."

So what might it mean if the church, like Pam and Jim, gave her life and ceremony away for the sake of the world?

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Purity and Defilement: Part 16, Contempt and Heresy at Corinth

In this post I want to continue to explore how sociomoral disgust affects everyday interactions. Along the way we will talk about contempt, marriage and the church in first century Corinth. We will also revisit the moral circle in light of Eucharist.

At noted at the start of the last post, many of us do not feel strong feelings of disgust or revulsion in our day to day encounters with people. Thus, we might conclude that sociomoral disgust, and this entire treatise of mine, has little implication for our moral development. In the last few posts I've tried to push back on that assumption. In this post I will to continue to push back by noting the close association between disgust and contempt. Although it may be true that we don't experience strong revulsion around people we are all very much affected by contempt.

Recall that the modern scientific study of disgust began with Darwin. And it was Darwin who first described the close association between disgust and contempt. Here, again, is Plate V from Darwin's book Expressions of the Emotions in Man and Animals:


These illustrations come from Chapter 11 of Expressions where Darwin discusses the association between disgust, contempt and disdain. Darwin notes that contempt and disgust share common facial expressions, most notably the wrinkling of the nose. Darwin writes:

The most common method of expressing contempt is by movements about the nose, or round the mouth; but the latter movements, when strongly pronounced, indicate disgust. The nose may be slightly turned up, which apparently follows from the turning up of the upper lip; or the movement may be abbreviated into the mere wrinkling of the nose...We seem thus to say to the despised person that he smells offensively, in nearly the same manner as we express to him by half-closing our eyelids, or turning away our faces, that he is not worth looking at.

You can see the association, particularly the wrinkling of the nose, between the face of contempt and the face of disgust by comparing the face of the young woman in Plate V (contempt) with faces of the men (disgust). Darwin also goes on to note another association between disgust and contempt, the act of spitting:

Spitting seems an almost universal sign of contempt or disgust; and spitting obviously represents the rejection of anything offensive from the mouth. Shakspeare makes the Duke of Norfolk say, "I spit at him— call him a slanderous coward and a villain." So, again, Falstaff says, "Tell thee what, Hal,--if I tell thee a lie, spit in my face." Leichhardt remarks that the Australians "interrupted their speeches by spitting, and uttering a noise like pooh! pooh! apparently expressive of their disgust." And Captain Burton speaks of certain negroes "spitting with disgust upon the ground." Captain Speedy informs me that this is likewise the case with the Abyssinians. Mr. Geach says that with the Malays of Malacca the expression of disgust "answers to spitting from the mouth;" and with the Fuegians, according to Mr. Bridges "to spit at one is the highest mark of contempt."

Finally, Darwin notes how both disgust and contempt serve the same expulsive and boundary-monitoring function:

We have now seen that scorn, disdain, contempt, and disgust are expressed in many different ways, by movements of the features, and by various gestures; and that these are the same throughout the world. They all consist of actions representing the rejection or exclusion of some real object which we dislike or abhor...

Contempt is generally distinguished from disgust in that it introduces a hierarchical component. Not only do we wrinkle our noses in contempt, we "look down our nose" at the people offending us. That contempt is a hierarchical emotion shouldn't be surprising. Recall that disgust regulates the divinity ethic which is metaphorically understood to be a vertical--"higher" versus "lower"--dimension. What is lower and closer to the animals is "looked down on" from the more elevated human perspective. Thus, it is no surprise that "superior" groups experience both disgust and contempt in response to "inferior" groups.

The close association between disgust and contempt is also seen in our analysis of love and intimacy. Recall, disgust is a prerequisite for love. Prior to love there must be a sense of Otherness and separateness. The act of love, when two fleshes become one, follows as a boundary transgression, where the Other is incorporated and granted access to psychological and physical spaces. If this analysis is accurate then it stands to reason that when the intimacy of the marital bond beings to erode we should see a reemergence of disgust and contempt. That is, as spouses drift apart we begin to reexperience sociomoral distance and separation. The "one flesh" begins to separate into two. Otherness reemerges and with it, disgust. The once intimate and erotic touch of the spouse is now experienced as an intrusion, a violation. Physical intimacies such as sex are no longer relished but experienced as disgusting and revolting. With the collapse of love disgust reemerges to erect and monitor a boundary between the self and the other.

This is no idle speculation. For example, John Gottman and colleagues have shown that future divorce can be predicted for newlyweds by watching a brief three minute interaction. In these studies Gottman and colleagues have newlywed couples discuss for three minutes an aspect of their marriage that is a point of conflict. During the three minutes the researchers code the emotions of husband and wife as they discuss the conflict. Gottman has shown that divorce can be successfully predicted for newlywed couples (after just three minutes!) if negative emotions dominate over positive emotions in the exchange. Importantly for our purposes, the leading negative emotions that predict subsequent divorce are contempt and disgust.

This result is not surprising. Given that both contempt and disgust are implicated in infrahumanization it should be obvious that these feelings produce divorce. Looking down upon one's spouse or feeling revolted by a spouse are clear signs of relational distress. The emergence of disgust and contempt signal that "one flesh" has separated into Otherness. The sociomoral barriers have been reerected.

This examination of marriage is important because it demonstrates, as a kind of case study, how disgust and contempt function as forms of exclusion. In short, although we might not experience strong revulsion around people all of us experience contempt, scorn or distain for others. And as we see in marriage, these feelings function as barriers, failures of intimacy and acts of infrahumanization. Once again we find that sociomoral disgust is an everyday obstacle to love, mercy and hospitality.

Revisiting Matthew 9 it seems clear that contempt (as well as disgust) was implicated in the attitude of the Pharisees. Another case study in contempt comes from I Corinthians. The conflicts experienced in the church of Corinth are of particular interest in that they involve failures of hospitality around the experience of the Lord's Supper.

Before visiting the church in Corinth let's pause and examine the Lord's Supper in light of the last few posts. Specifically, I want to examine the relationship of the Lord's Supper to Peter Singer's notion of the moral circle. Recall from last post that humans have an innate and instinctive moral calculus: Extend kindness to kin. Those we identify as "kin" or "family" are treated differently from people who are strangers. "Family" is, thus, inside my moral circle. Given this moral psychology Singer suggests that moral advancement occurs through the expansion of the moral circle. That is, love, goodness and altruism demands that a greater and growing number of people are to be included within my moral circle. This is the universalizing of the notion of "family," living in a world without strangers.

Pause to consider how the Lord's Supper relates to the expansion of the moral circle. It is striking that the central act of Christian worship is a family meal around a table. Ritually and symbolically the Eucharist expands the moral circle. Non-relatives are considered "brothers" and "sisters" in Christ. In short, through the Eucharist family affection is extended to all.

This dynamic goes a fair way in explaining Jesus’ curiously harsh comments about biological families. Time after time in the gospels Jesus refuses to reduce the moral circle to blood relatives. Rather, Jesus seeks to expand the moral circle, including within that space non-relatives, Gentiles, tax collectors and sinners. Jesus universalizes the notion of family. In this, Jesus co-opts the innate and restrictive psychology of the moral circle to create the expansive, inclusive vision of the Kingdom of God. So when the expert in the Law asks Jesus “Who is my neighbor?” Jesus answers with the clearest account of his Kingdom ethic, the parable of the Good Samaritan. Everyone is neighbor. All of humanity is inside your moral circle.

In short, Eucharist is the ritual reenactment of Jesus' ministry of table fellowship. It allows the church to immerse herself into the experience of Matthew 9. In Eucharist "tax collectors and sinners" are welcomed by Christ to table fellowship. And this ritual reenactment is an inherently moral act. In the first century church Christians who would never have associated with each other in society sat as equals around the Table of the Lord. The Eucharist was not just a symbolic expansion of the moral circle. The Eucharist brought real people, divided outside of the church by sociomoral barriers, into sweaty, intimate, flesh and blood contact.

Which brings us back to contempt and the church at Corinth. Following the work of Ben Witherington in his Conflict and Community in Corinth it seems clear that one of the problems in Corinth was the rift between the rich and the poor within the church. In various ways the wealthy and privileged patrons of the church of Corinth were causing problems for both Paul and the poorer members of the church. This can be seen in a variety of places in 1 Corinthians. For example, it seems clear that some of the wealthier members were offended that Paul refused their patronage and, instead, supported himself by working with his hands. No doubt this was intentional on Paul's part, an attempt to identify with the poor in the city and the church. As Witherington writes:

Well-to-do or aristocratic Romans, like Greeks, often had a low opinion of those who practiced a trade, and many of Paul's problems in Corinth seem to have been caused by the wealthy and the social climbers among Corinthian Christians who were upset at him for not meeting their expectations for a great orator and teacher...In a city where social climbing was a major preoccupation, Paul's deliberate stepping down in apparent status would have been seen by many as disturbing, disgusting, and even provocative.

Another instance of the rich Christians causing problems for the poorer members is seen in how the Corinthian Christians were taking each other to court over legal disputes. Generally, only the rich and privileged could expect justice from the Roman court system. Thus, we can assume that rich Christians were taking poor fellow Christians to court in the expectation of a favorable verdict.

Additional rich/poor fissures in the Corinthian church occurred over eating meat sacrificed to idols. Most poor Christians did not have regular access to meat. The meat they did eat was the meat made available to the public during pagan religious festivals. Thus, for poor Christians meat was strongly associated with pagan religion, the life they renounced when they became a Christian. By contrast, the rich ate meat more regularly, being able to buy and prepare meat in their own homes. Thus, for the rich the meat/temple association was weakened over time. This created the clash of "consciences" in the Corinthian church. As Witherington notes:

Probably, as Theissen suggests, "the weak" in Corinth are poor Christians for whom eidolothuta [idol food] was especially likely to have religious associations, because they had eaten it before only at some public temple feast for on a holiday in the temple. This would explain their strong scruples.

But the rich/poor fissure that particularly interests us was the behavior of the Corinthian church during the Lord's Supper. Again, the Lord's Supper was to be the lived reenactment of Jesus' inclusive fellowship. In the life of church the rich and the poor in Corinth were to welcome each other as equals around the Lord's Table. But something, as we have seen, was amiss in Corinth. The wealthy members were, in various ways, expressing contempt for the poor in the church. Thus, it comes as no surprise that the experience of the Lord's Supper became exclusive rather than inclusive. Paul describes the situation in chapter 11:

In the following directives I have no praise for you, for your meetings do more harm than good. In the first place, I hear that when you come together as a church, there are divisions among you, and to some extent I believe it. No doubt there have to be differences among you to show which of you have God's approval. When you come together, it is not the Lord's Supper you eat, for as you eat, each of you goes ahead without waiting for anybody else. One remains hungry, another gets drunk. Don't you have homes to eat and drink in? Or do you despise the church of God and humiliate those who have nothing? What shall I say to you? Shall I praise you for this? Certainly not! ... So then, my brothers, when you come together to eat, wait for each other.

What, exactly, was going on in Corinth during the Lord's Supper? It seems clear that the rich/poor “divisions” were causing a failure to "wait for each other" during the Lord's Supper. This "failing to wait" was causing some Christians to become well fed and drunk while others were going hungry.

This situation is clarified if we come to some understanding regarding Roman dining practices. As Witherington discusses it appears that the Corinthian church was treating the agape meal prior to the celebration of the Lord's Supper as a private dinner party followed by a convivium (i.e., drinking party). It was normal practice in Roman dinner and drinking parties to rank guests according to social status. Generally, high status guests ate with the host in the living room and were served better food and drink. Lower status guest were seated elsewhere in the house and served poorer food.

It appears that the wealthy patrons of the Corinthian church adopted these practices for gatherings of the church. The agape meal seems to have come first, followed by the Lord's Supper. During the agape meal the church was segregated with the wealthy Christians gathered in the living room with the host. There food was served with after-dinner drinking with little regard as to the situation elsewhere in the house where the poorer Christians were served lesser quality food and drink. Although the notion of "wait for" could apply to the order of food service, Witherington notes that the word ekdechomai often has the sense of "welcome" and "hospitality." That is, what was bothering Paul was less the issue of who was served first but the separation, segregation, privileging and hierarchical nature of the gathering. This is clear in Paul's concern over "differences." The word for "differences" is haireseis, from which we get our word heresy. The later technical definition of heresy was a difference of belief, but the original more primitive notion of heresy was sociological division and exclusion. The Corinthian Christians were heretical in how they were erecting divisions between themselves.

It seems clear that contempt was driving the divisions in the Corinthian church because Paul explicitly takes up the issues of honor and shame in chapter 12. In chapter 12 Paul offers up his famous "body metaphor" of the church illustrating the shared relationship of the various "members" to the "one body." Importantly for our purposes, Paul's interest in using this metaphor is not only to highlight the diversity of gifts in the church but how we are to treat "body parts" (i.e., people, most likely the poor members of the church) that are considered to be more shameful, dishonorable or unpresentable (italics mine):

Now the body is not made up of one part but of many. If the foot should say, "Because I am not a hand, I do not belong to the body," it would not for that reason cease to be part of the body. And if the ear should say, "Because I am not an eye, I do not belong to the body," it would not for that reason cease to be part of the body. If the whole body were an eye, where would the sense of hearing be? If the whole body were an ear, where would the sense of smell be? But in fact God has arranged the parts in the body, every one of them, just as he wanted them to be. If they were all one part, where would the body be? As it is, there are many parts, but one body.

The eye cannot say to the hand, "I don't need you!" And the head cannot say to the feet, "I don't need you!" On the contrary, those parts of the body that seem to be weaker are indispensable, and the parts that we think are less honorable we treat with special honor. And the parts that are unpresentable are treated with special modesty, while our presentable parts need no special treatment. But God has combined the members of the body and has given greater honor to the parts that lacked it, so that there should be no division in the body, but that its parts should have equal concern for each other.

In short, it seems clear that, for Paul, the divisions in the church were being caused by contempt and disgust. Some members of the Corinthian church were not "honorable" or "presentable." Paul's reference to genitalia is striking. That is, the genitalia, being "not presentable" are covered up in public out of modesty. Yet, Paul flips the meaning of this in a powerful way. If some members were, via the metaphor, akin to to genitalia they should not be treated with shame, disgust or contempt. Rather, is not our covering up of our "private parts" a sign that these parts require special attention, care, and treatment? Paul is arguing that, rather than expelling, hiding or marginalizing these "less presentable" members, special attention should be given to care for and include these members into the body. Only then will there be "no divisions in the body." Once again we see how inclusion occurs when sociomoral disgust boundaries are dismantled.

We are exploring the case of the Corinthian Christians because it pulls together a variety of the threads we have been considering. In the fissure between rich and poor we see contempt emerging within the Church as a hierarchy based on class and economics was erected. And with the advent of this hierarchy the experience of the Lord's Supper, the ritual act of inclusion, was compromised. With the rise of contempt the sociological barriers within the culture--the heresies--reemerged within the Corinthian church. Paul was strongly pushing back against this development. Here is Witherington once more on how Paul was trying to reshape Roman dining customs and their notions of hospitality in light of the Kingdom of God:

In many ways [a Roman] meal was an occasion for gaining or showing social status. And it might be in many regards a microcosm of the aspirations and aims of the culture as a whole. Paul's attempt to deconstruct the social stratification that was happening in the Lord's Supper goes directly against the tendency of such meals...the sacred tradition concerning the Lord's Supper is recited specifically to encourage social leveling, to overcome factionalism created by stratification and its expression at meals, and to create unity and harmony in the congregation.

In conclusion, we have been mediating in this post upon contempt, the hierarchical cousin of disgust. Specifically, like disgust, contempt is a boundary psychology. More, it is an infrahumanization psychology where "superiors" "look down on" their "inferiors." Consequently, when contempt emerges sociomoral barriers, sociological and psychological fissures, are erected. We see this in marriages. We see this in the church at Corinth.

But we also saw how the Eucharist itself is pushing back against the psychology of disgust and contempt. Where disgust and contempt shrink the moral circle the ritual of the Lord's Supper symbolically and practically expands the circle. And not only do I symbolically extend kinship language to my "brothers" and "sisters" in Christ but I engage in that difficult and intimate practice of "waiting for each other" around the Table of the Lord.

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Purity and Defilement: Part 15, The Moral Circle and Infrahumanization

"Humankind ceases at the border of the tribe."

--Levi-Strauss

In the last post we began a journey trying to follow sociomoral disgust into every human heart. Still, even after the last post, it can appear to many that sociomoral disgust has little effect upon how we feel about and treat the people around us. That is, how often do we really feel the emotions of disgust around people? How many people do we actively exclude from our tables? In short, it can feel that the events of Matthew 9 don't apply to my life. The behavior of the Pharisees seems alien and superstitious to folks living in modern, liberal democratic states. Sure, we can all be a little more kind and inclusive, but is it really necessary to confront sociomoral when I assess my moral and social behavior? Yes, of course, sociomoral disgust is observed in racism, antisemitism or virulent homophobia but few of us feel like we participate in those social evils.

Given these concerns I want to continue our journey and stay with the argument begun in the last post, that each and every one of us is affected by sociomoral disgust. More, I'll argue that our failure to see sociomoral disgust at work in our lives is reason for worry and concern, morally speaking.

Let's begin with an analysis of human moral psychology. Specifically, the ethicist Peter Singer has noted in his book The Expanding Circle that human moral psychology is built atop a basic biological foundation, a rudimentary moral instinct all humans share. Cultures take this raw moral instinct and shape it in various ways, but, at root, humans tend to use and recognize a simple moral calculus shared across cultures.

This innate moral instinct is characterized by a simple two-stage process. The first process is a classification mechanism that identifies "kin" or "family" from "non-kin." We see this instinct emerge with the onset of stranger anxiety in young children. Infants don't show anxiety around strangers. A baby can be passed around among friends, family and strangers without the child minding very much. But toddlers, after the onset of stranger anxiety, are much more reticent at being left with or held by strangers. And with the onset of the stranger anxiety we see the human person beginning to carve the world into two groups, family versus strangers.

Once we identify our "family" the second mechanism of the moral instinct emerges. It follows a simple rule: Extend "kindness" toward our "kin." That is, familial affection is instinctively extended to members of our "tribe." In fact, "kindness" and "kin" share the same semantic root. We extend "kindness" to those of the same "kind." Altruism follows our ontology.

These two instinctive processes create our moral circle. That is, we psychologically draw a circle around a group of people whom I identify as "my kind," "my tribe," "my clan," "my family." This circle is initially populated with family members, but as we grow the circle includes more and more non-biological relations, "friends" who are "like family to us." Once you are admitted into this moral space affection and warmth flow naturally and instinctively. I don't have to work at feeling affection for my wife, mother, sons, or best friends. Inside the moral circle affection is like breathing, it's just a natural part of being human.

But what about those people on the outside of the moral circle? Those we identify as strangers? People on the outside of the moral circle are treated instrumentally, as tools to accomplish our goals in the world. In Kantian language, people inside the moral circle are treated as ends in themselves while people on the outside of the moral circle are treated as means to our ends. In short, we treat those inside the moral circle with love, affection and mercy and those outside the moral circle with indifference, hostility, or pragmatism. And it all flows naturally from a simple psychological mechanism: Are you identified as "family"? Once the identification is made (or not), life inside and outside the circle flows easily and reflexively.

I use the following scenario in my classes to illustrate the nature of the moral circle. Imagine, I ask my students, that your best friend just got a job waiting tables at a restaurant. To celebrate with her you arrange with friends to go to the restaurant to eat dinner on her first night. You ask to be seated in her section and look forward to surprising her and, later, leaving her a big tip. Soon your friend arrives at your table, sweating and stressed out. She is having a terrible night. Things are going badly and she is behind getting food and drinks out. So, I ask my students, what do you do? Easily and naturally the students respond, "We'd say, 'Don't worry about us. Take care of everyone else first.'" I point out to the students that this response is no great moral struggle. It's a simple and easy response. Like breathing. It is just natural to extend grace to a suffering friend. Why? Because she is inside your moral circle.

But imagine, I continue with the students, that you go out to eat tonight with some friends. And your server, whom you vaguely notice seems stressed out, performs poorly. You don't get good service. What do you do in that situation? Well, since this stranger is not a part of our moral circle, we get frustrated and angry. The server is a tool and she is not performing properly. She is inconveniencing us. So, we complain to the manager and refuse to tip. In the end, we fail to treat another human being with mercy and dignity. Why? Because in a deep psychological sense, this server wasn't really "human" to us. She was a part of the "backdrop" of our lives. Part of the teeming anonymous masses toward whom I feel indifference, fear, or frustration. The server is on the "outside" of my moral circle.

Now you might be wondering, am I being too harsh? Is this server really seen as "not fully human"?

The answer might surprise you. The famous anthropologist Levi-Strauss once wrote that "Humankind ceases at the border of the tribe." We've already seen, given Singer's notion of the moral circle, how we might treat people differently depending upon if they are a part of my "tribe." But Levi-Strauss's comment is stronger. Does humanity end at the edge of the moral circle? That is, is the way we treat people outside the moral circle symptomatic of something more dark and sinister? That we see people as less than human?

The phenomenon of seeing people as less than human is called infrahumanization. Historically, infrahumanization occurs when one group of people come to believe that another group of people do not possess some vital and defining human quality such as intellect or moral sensibilities. These infrahumans might be human from a biological perspective but they are believed to lack some moral or psychological attribute that makes them fully human, on par with the "superior" group. And as we have seen in earlier posts, sociomoral disgust is critically involved in the process of infrahumanization.

In America the classic case of infrahumanization is found in the first U.S. Constitution (Article 1. Section 2) where slaves were considered, for the purposes of the census, to be 3/5ths of a person. Along with this state-sanctioned infrahumanization disgust properties were also attributed to the slaves: Bad smell, filthiness, animal-like attributes. The two processes, disgust and infrahumanization, often go hand in hand.

But again, this seems like an example of extreme behavior. Does it apply to me? Yes it does.

Specifically, social psychologists studying the mental dynamics of group psychology have shown infrahumanization to be an inherent feature of how we reason about group membership. This is largely due to the fact that humans tend to reason about categories in terms of essences. That is, when we make distinctions of kind we tend to think that some essential property distinguishes the two groups being classified. For example, when we contrast humans versus animals we tend to not see the difference as one of degree. Rather, we speculate that some intrinsic and essential property is possessed by humans that is lacking in animals. Obviously, education and critical thinking can override these essentialist accounts. But essentialist reasoning seems to be our natural, unconscious and default way of thinking about group membership. It is a mode of thinking at emerges in childhood and persists throughout the lifespan.

In short, when we think about groups--white vs. black, gay vs. straight, Christians vs. Muslims, the industrious vs. the poor--our natural instinct is to find some essential property that separates the groups, a quality that one group has and the other lacks. For example, it might (illegitimately) be reasoned that black NFL quarterbacks might have physical talent but lack the "intelligence" of the white quarterback. Or the poor might lack the "discipline" or "moral character" that characterizes productive citizens. I was once approached by a university colleague who asked me, "You are a psychologist, so let me ask you this. Is it true that gay sex is just all about the sex?" The question reveals the essentialist logic at work. There is something inherently different in gay sex that distinguishes it in kind from heterosexual sex. Specifically, the question reveals the assumption that gay sex is lacking truly human love, affection and spirituality.

Infrahumanization occurs, then, when we, as a member of a group, begin to apply essentialist reasoning to out-group members. My in-group is considered to be the model, the standard of being fully human. Thus, almost by definition, the out-group must lack some quality that marks the fully human standard. This denial of a defining human characteristic begins the process of infrahumanization. But the important thing to note is how infrahumanization occurs naturally as we reason about group membership. Infrahumanization isn't just the extreme behavior of racists. Our essentialist mode of thinking makes it an everyday affair.

Take, for example, the work of Jacques-Philippe Leyens and colleagues. In a study published in 2000 Leyens and colleagues observed how normal persons, like you and me, unconsciously engage in infrahumanization when we think about in-group and out-group members. The researchers examined how we make associations regarding people perceived to be in my "tribe" (which can be defined by race, gender, or any other grouping characteristic) versus those perceived to be on the outside my "tribe." The question was, does humanity, as Levi-Strauss suggested, end at the edge of the tribe?

Again, infrahumanization occurs when we begin to deny some essential human characteristic to an out-group member. Often, this characteristic is intelligence or some other moral or emotional quality. Leyens et al. focused on the attribution of primary and secondary emotions to in-group and out-group members. To understand this, we need to stop for a moment and talk about emotions.

Primary emotions are considered to be common across animal species, mammals in particular. Primary emotions include pain, pleasure, fear, joy, surprise, and anger. Primary emotions are not uniquely human. For instance, a dog can experience pain, fear or joy.

Secondary emotions are subtler shades of emotions. They are often blends of the more basic primary emotions. Examples of secondary emotions include love, hope, admiration, pride, conceit, nostalgia, remorse, and rancor. Compared to the primary emotions the secondary emotions are quintessentially human, they are felt to be more cognitive, moral, internally caused, and mature. These are the higher, more exquisite emotions.

Generally speaking, Leyens et al. suggest this simple test to determine if the emotion is primary or secondary: "Would I apply this emotional term to an animal such as a rabbit or a fish?" We expect that we could surprise a fish or that a fish might be fearful. But we don't tend to think of fish as being nostalgic.

Let us return to infrahumanization. Given the animal/human distinction between primary and secondary emotions one symptom of infrahumanization would be denying secondary emotions to a human population or individual. Take the example of slavery in the American South. Slaveholders had no hesitance in attributing primary emotions to the slaves. Like dogs (and the slaveholders themselves), slaves could be happy, afraid, or angry. But slaveholders hesitated in attributing secondary emotions to the slaves. Again, these are the emotions that are unique to and quintessentially human. If a slave woman were separated from her children at auction could she really feel that separation as acutely as white mothers? The answer, unsurprisingly, was no, she could not. The slave women was not fully human. She lacked secondary emotions.

Again, these behaviors are extreme, but across many studies, many conducted by Leyens, it has been demonstrated that while we easily attribute both primary and secondary emotions to in-group members (my "tribe") we are much more reticent about attributing secondary emotions to out-group members. These effects are subtle, but they can be measured in reaction-time tests (i.e., how quickly you attribute an emotion to an in-group and out-group target). These effects have been shown to apply to race, nationality, and even to if someone worked in your office (in-group) or not (out-group). We are members of many kinds of "tribes" and we, due to essentialist reasoning, tend to see those on the "inside" as more human than those on the outside.

But should we be concerned about infrahumanization measured in millisecond differentials in reaction-time tests? I believe we should. Psychologists have long known that these slight biases and associations often have measurable behavioral effects. Effects we are often unaware of. As we interview people for jobs we are rarely aware of how their skin color, gender, weight, or accent is affecting us. We feel our final hiring choice is objective and impartial. And yet, churning beneath the surface, are biases and prejudices that are affecting our decisions. Biases we never notice or evaluate.

In short, the behavior of the Pharisees in Matthew 9 seems crude and obvious. Who excludes others so brazenly and rudely? Yet are we unaware of the many forms of exclusion we engage in day after day. These are micro-exclusions, not obvious to ourselves or others. But they exist. A lunch group of "friends" that fails to invite others. Inside jokes that carve the workspace into insiders and outsiders. A smile offered to John, but not to Joe.

Further, racism and hate just don't emerge out of the blue. The research concerning infrahumanization suggests that fissures run through every human heart. In good times and with good people these fissures might not amount to much. But the effects are scalable and can add up. When we aggregate the effects we see discrimination in hiring practices, pay differences, epidemic loneliness, and votes to deny marginalized groups access to basic freedoms. These macro-level forms of exclusion are difficult to trace back to a single individual act. When I make a hiring choice I don't notice how group bias is affecting my judgment. The effects are only noticed when all those micro-level decisions are examined in aggregate and over time.

In addition, these in-group/out-group fissures within our heats provide the dry kindling for the Girardian scapegoating mechanism. In times of plenty and peace we don't feel the need to locate a scapegoat. The fissures in our hearts remains small. But during times of stress and panic these fissure begin to crack open. The search for a scapegoat commences. Take, for example, how America treated citizens of Japanese decent after the bombing of Pearl Harbor. Or how American Muslims were regarded after 9/11. Consider how Americans became more tolerant of torture during the Bush Administration.

In short, we all live in tribes. We all have moral circles. And our acts of hospitality--who we see as human--are affected by those tribes and circles. And, as we have repeatedly seen, sociomoral disgust monitors these boundaries. Infrahumanization, the psychology of groups, is the product of ranking people along the divinity dimension, with infrahumans placed between the "higher" (humans) and the "lower" (animals).

In sum, the issues of Matthew 9, the dynamics of sociomoral disgust, apply to us all, everyday. The intensity of the exclusion may vary. And the degree of infrahumanization may vary from milliseconds in labs to the gas chambers at Auschwitz. But the fissure exists in every human heart.

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The Varieties of Conservatism

To give you all a break from disgust psychology I thought I'd just jot a note trying to gather together some stuff I've been reading on the Internet over the last few months.

I think the general consensus is that, currently, the conservative movement it trying to sort itself out. But conservatives are clearly energized. And as long as Obama is in office the conservatives will remain energized. The interesting question is the form conservatism will take post-Obama.

Before, during and after Obama's election a variety of fissure lines have emerged in the conservative movement exposing sub-factions that, at times, make odd bedfellows. Borrowing heavily from a variety of essays online about this topic, analysts tend make the following cuts:

The fiscal conservatives:
These are the small government conservatives, many are libertarian. Ron Paul is a representative figure.
Signs at Tea Party: No Taxation Without Representation.

The social conservatives:
These are the religious conservatives who care deeply about family-values, prayer in school, abortion, evolution and gay marriage issues. James Dobson and Sarah Palin are representative figures.
Signs at Tea Party: Abortion is Murder.

The security conservatives:
These are the conservatives that promote the military and favor nation-building efforts (often with an apocalyptic, pro-Israel twist). Dick Cheney is a representative figure.
Signs at Tea Party: I'd Rather Be Waterboarding.

Mixed in with these conservative groups we might also throw in:

Southern populism:
These are the anti-government conservatives. Glenn Beck is a representative figure.
Signs at Tea Party: Support the Economy. Buy Ammo.

This is a strange brew that often leads to tension. Currently, given our economic troubles, the fiscal conservatives and populists seem to have taken center stage. The main charge against Obama is socialism or Hitler-like fascism. This is a change from the social conservatism that has tended the dominate the Republican Party since Reagan. That is, right now the most vocal conservatives are those riled up about fiscal overreaching rather than about abortion or gay marriage. Interestingly, these libertarian-leaning conservatives often side with liberals on some of these social issues, wanting the government to butt out of bedrooms and other life decisions.

Beyond the libertarian-social conservative split, there is also the inherent contradiction in the conservative base about wanting a small government (fiscal conservatism) yet being, historically, in favor of supporting the massive military-industrial complex (security conservatism). Billions in military spending is okay, but not for health care reform. It's odd.

Add into this mix an angry Southern populism (xenophobic and gun carrying) and, well, it's quite a scene.

I wonder what the future holds.

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Purity and Defilement: Part 14, Disgust and Love

In the last post we considered extreme forms of sociomoral disgust. Consequently, although we might recognize sociomoral disgust at work in genocide, hate and ethnic cleansing most decent people feel unaffected, on a personal level, by this analysis. The behaviors are too extreme, too hateful.

So in this post I want to follow sociomoral disgust into every human heart, to show how disgust in deeply involved in human intimacy, relationality and love. Toward the end of the post we'll gather up these insights and revisit the events in Matthew 9.

To begin, recall that disgust is, inherently, a boundary psychology. Consider a common example from the disgust literature. It's a test you can conduct with friends and family. Ask people to swallow the saliva they currently have in their mouth. Have them rate from 0% to 100% how disgusting that action was. Next, have them spit the saliva in their mouth into a cup. After spiting ask them to drink the spit (or at least contemplate drinking the spit). Have them rate this act (real or imagined) using the same disgust rating.

Obviously, few people find swallowing their own saliva disgusting. But disgust emerges when the saliva is expelled from the body and we are asked to reincorporate it into the body. But what's the difference? Why this sudden and distinct squeamishness in the face of two very similar actions?

The answer, of course, pivots off of notions of interiority and exteriority. The saliva in my mouth is inside, it is a part of me. Thus, I feel no disgust in swallowing. By contrast, the saliva I expel from my body is now, suddenly, on the outside, not a part of me. We even have different words to signify the difference. Saliva versus spit. One disgusts us, the other does not.

It is, perhaps, no exaggeration to suggest that this simple demonstration illustrates, both psychologically and metaphorically, the core dynamic of sociomoral disgust. The self is defined by a boundary. That which is inside this boundary is embraced as a part of the self. That which is outside of this boundary is rejected as alien, other and not-me. And this distinction is emotionally marked by the disgust response.

Of course, the saliva/spit example focuses on core disgust, revulsion centered on the act of oral incorporation. In core disgust the boundary being monitored is the body envelope and its orifices. In core disgust "self" is defined at the edge of the body.

But humans are symbolic creatures and "selfhood" extends past the edges of the body. Selfhood reaches into the world to "own" and identify with people, places, objects, events, communities and ideas. Marriage provides an example of this extension and fusion. In the language of Genesis two people become "one flesh." The boundary of the self extends to include the partner. As Ernest Becker has observed:

The body is one of the things in which our true feelings are located, but it is not the only one, and it may not even be the principal one...Least of all is the self limited to the body. A person literally projects or throws himself out of the body, and anywhere at all. As the great William James put it almost 80 years ago: A man's "Me" is the sum total of all that he can call his, not only his body and his mind, but his clothes and house, his wife and children, his ancestors and friends, his reputation and works, his lands and horses, his yacht and his bank-account. In other words, the human animal can be symbolically located wherever he feels a part of him really exists or belongs...You get a good feeling for what the self "looks like" in it extensions if you imagine the person to be a cylinder with a hollow inside, in which is lodged his self. Out of this cylinder the self overflows and extends into the surroundings, as a kind of huge amoeba, pushing its pseudopods to a wife, a car, a flag, a crushed flower in a secret book. The picture you get is of a huge invisible amoeba spread out over the landscape, with boundaries very far from its own center or home base.

The image of the self extended and spread over the world like a huge amoeba is striking and apt. Cognitively, this extended self is represented as a set enclosed by a border. The world is thus divided into the "Me" and the "Not-Me."

As the self gets symbolically extended so does disgust psychology, the primal psychology that monitors the boundary of the body. Disgust accompanies the self as it reaches into the world and it continues to provide emotional markers denoting "inside" versus "outside", the boundary points of the extended symbolic self.

With this understanding of the self in hand we are well positioned to understand human love, intimacy and relationality. Specifically, as the notion of "one flesh" highlights, love is a form of inclusion. The boundary of the self is extended to include the other. The very word intimacy conjures the sense of small, shared space. We also describe relationships in terms of inclusion and distance. Those we love are "close" to us. When love cools we grow "distant." We tell "inside" jokes that speak of shared experiences. We have a "circle of friends." "Outsiders" are told to "stop butting in." We ask people to "give us space" when we want to "pull back" from a relationship.

Given that disgust monitors the boundaries of selfhood and intimacy it should come as no surprise that love involves a suspension of disgust and contamination sensitivity. More strongly, disgust is a prerequisite for certain types of physical or emotional intimacy. That is, disgust establishes boundaries of contact and intimacy and love, as a secondary mechanism, allows those boundaries to be blurred or dismantled. As William Miller, in his excellent book, The Anatomy of Disgust, describes:

One way of describing intimacy (and/or love) is as that state in which various disgust rules are relaxed or suspended…Changing diapers, overcoming the disgust inherent in contaminating substances, is emblematic of the unconditional quality of nurturing parental love. Without such overcoming, the act would have no emblematic significance. Love means a kind of self-overcoming in this context, the overcoming of powerful aversions, and the suspension of purity rules that hold you in their grip. It means that your fastidiousness, your own purity of being, must be subordinated to the well-being of the next generation.

Further, Miller contends that sexual love and pleasure is only possible when disgust rules are suspended:

A person’s tongue in your mouth could be experienced as a pleasure or as the most repulsive and nauseating intrusion depending on the state of relations that exist or are being negotiated between you and the person. But someone else’s tongue in your mouth can be a sign of intimacy because it can also be a disgusting assault. The marks of intimacy depend upon the violability of Goffman’s “territories of the self.” Without such territory over which you vigilantly patrol the borders there can be nothing special in allowing or gaining access to it…Consensual sex means the mutual transgression of the disgust-defending boundaries.

In all of this we continue to see how disgust functions as a boundary psychology. Implicated in all this is how love involves the dismantling of these boundaries. For example, early on in romantic love we grant access to our personal and sociomoral space through permission, like accepting that tentative request for a first kiss. Eventually, as love progresses, this boundary-transgression is less a matter of permission and more one of psychic fusing. As Miller summarizes:

One might hazard the idea that in their early stages relations of intimacy and love seem more governed by the regime of rights and grants, but with the passage of time and the routinization of permitted boundary transgressions, the loved one passes eventually from an intimate autonomous other to something more akin to one’s own vital organ…So in the end two fleshes are made one.

What we discover in all this is that disgust and love are reciprocal processes. Disgust erects boundaries while love dismantles boundaries.

This realization is important in that it complicates some spiritual bromides. Take, for instance, the notion that one is to "hate the sin but love the sinner." The assumption here is that we can easily and cleanly separate the action from the actor when we make moral judgments. But our knowledge of the reciprocal nature of disgust and love suggests that this separation is difficult if not impossible. Love and disgust cannot exist at the same time. As one increases the other decreases. Consequently, where disgust and purity metaphors are operative we cannot, psychologically speaking, "hate the sin and love the sinner." This dynamic is clearly illustrated in Matthew 9. The Pharisees erect a sociomoral boundary between themselves and the "sinners." This, obviously, ends their ability to love in any real or intimate manner.

Let me hasten to say that these observations are not the final word concerning moral discernment, making a call for radical inclusion in the name of love. Of course, such a claim could be made, but I think there are more issues we will need to consider. Boundaries are not inherently evil. In fact, they are vital and necessary. We will take up these tensions in coming posts.

The goal for this post is to highlight the intimate connection between disgust, love and exclusion. In the previous post we contemplated exclusion at its genocidal worst. But in this post we've encountered the fact that disgust and love are at work in every encounter that requires intimacy and fellowship. Acts of inclusion and exclusion are everyday affairs.

This analysis allows us to reframe sin and righteousness as issues of inclusion and exclusion. Such a move parallels theological formulations that see the movement of God as one of solidarity (Jurgen Moltmann) or embrace (Miroslav Volf). For example, Volf writes in Exclusion and Embrace:

An advantage of conceiving sin as the practice of exclusion is that it names as sin what often passes as virtue, aseptically in religious circles. In the Palestine of Jesus' day, "sinners" were not simply "the wicked" who were therefore religiously bankrupt, but also social outcasts, people who practiced despised trades, Gentiles and Samaritans, those who failed to keep the Law as interpreted by a particular sect. A "righteous" person had to separate herself from the latter; their presence defiled because they were defiled. Jesus' table fellowship with "tax collectors and sinners", a fellowship that indisputably belonged to the central features of his ministry, offset this conception of sin. Since he who was innocent, sinless, and fully within God's camp transgressed social boundaries that excluded outcasts, these boundaries themselves were evil, sinful, and outside God's will. By embracing the "outcast," Jesus understood the "sinfulness" of the persons and systems that cast them out.

In short, Jesus was radically rethinking the notion of sin in the life of Israel. Up until Jesus' ministry sin was primarily understood to be a purity violation. Again, this was driven by the Levitical and priestly traditions. But another impulse existed in the life of Israel. This impulse was expressed by the prophets who were increasingly skeptical of the purity tradition. For the prophets God demanded justice over purity, mercy over sacrifice:

Amos 5. 21-24
I hate, I despise your religious feasts;
I cannot stand your assemblies.

Even though you bring me burnt offerings and grain offerings,
I will not accept them.
Though you bring choice fellowship offerings,
I will have no regard for them.

Away with the noise of your songs!
I will not listen to the music of your harps.

But let justice roll on like a river,
righteousness like a never-failing stream!

Hosea 6.6
"For I desire mercy, not sacrifice,
and acknowledgment of God rather than burnt offerings."

How are we to define sin and holiness? The justice and purity traditions often offered competing and conflicting visions to Israel. As Walter Brueggemann summarizes (italics are mine):

[The purity and justice] trajectories of command serve very different sensibilities and live in profound tension with each other. The tradition of justice concerns the political-economic life of the community and urges drastic transformative and rehabilitative activity. The tradition of holiness focuses on the cultic life of the community and seeks a restoration of a lost holiness, whereby the presence of God can again be counted on and enjoyed.

Jesus' ministry of table fellowship enters into this tension in the life of Israel. As he does so Jesus explicitly connects his acts of table fellowship with the voice of the justice tradition. As seen in Matthew 9 Jesus echoes Hosea: "I desire mercy, not sacrifice."

In short, it seems that Jesus is formally addressing the tension between purity and justice in the life of Israel, in the end siding with the prophets. This is the conclusion argued for by Fernando Belo in his A Materialist Reading of the Gospel of Mark . Belo calls the tensions in Mark contagion/pollution (i.e., purity) and debt (i.e., justice). As Jesus enters the world of Mark he finds a world dominated by two competing conceptions of “sin.” The first is the purity tradition, what Belo describes as the contagion view of sin (all italics that follow are Belo's):

In Israel, then, as in other human societies, the symbolic system is organized first and foremost as a defense against the violence of contagion, the impurity of the confused and formless…The rational organization of productive work and everyday life therefore requires taboos relating to pollution and warding off the threatened danger which pollution represents. The focal points of the symbolic systems are centers of purity from which is excluded the impure, the misshapen, the undifferentiated, anything that breaks down forms…Pollution means confusion and the dissolution of the elements involved; it is a curse. People reject it to the point of avoiding even simple contact or touching, since impure is so violent as to be contagious.

These “centers of purity” were, as Belo describes, “centers of consumption”:

In Israel the symbolic field was organized around three centers, each of which corresponds to one of the three instances of social formation. All three were centers or foci of consumption: the table, the “house” (in the sense of a group of kinspeople; that is what the quotation marks around the word indicate), and the sanctuary; this means the consumption of food at meals, consumption of bodies in sexual activity, and ideological consumption in religious sacrifice.

Once again we see the intermingling of core and sociomoral disgust where food aversions are generalized to sociomoral spaces such as table-fellowship, familial affection, and religious participation. Consequently, certain persons, based upon appraisals of contagion, were excluded from these sociomoral spaces: Table, house, and sanctuary. These “unclean” people were denied table-fellowship and access to sacred spaces. Into this milieu Jesus enters preaching a subversive message that undermines the contagion view of sin by allowing the “unclean” entrance into the “family space” of table fellowship.

Similar to Volf's analysis, Belo argues that Jesus inverts the contagion view of sin by viewing table fellowship through the lens of the justice tradition. Belo calls this tradition debt and defines it as violence:

The violence takes the form of human aggression; the system of prohibitions I shall call the debt system (the word “debt” usually being translated sin). [The debt impulse] operates in everything that attacks the body: theft, murder, aggression, hostility, desolation.

Belo argues, as we have been arguing, that the systems of contagion and debt were fighting for the hearts and minds of Israel. Contagion separated the pure from the contaminated drawing a boundary around the pure and regulating the unclean to the “outside.” And if one transgressed the sociomoral barriers in the name of love the purity codes would be violated. The two systems were at an impasse.

To break the impasse Belo argues that the writer of Mark sets out to show that Jesus has the power and authority to overturn and reinterpret the purity tradition. For example, in the first chapter of Mark Jesus triumphs over the contagion system on two occasions. First, in verse 23 a man with an “unclean” spirit is found in a sociomoral space, the synagogue. Jesus heals this man. Later, in verse 40, as we observed in a prior post, Jesus encounters a man with leprosy. The leper asks to be made “clean.” Jesus touches the man and responds, “Be clean!” As we have observed, in this healing Jesus reverses the directionality and power of pollution (the attribution called negativity dominance). Rather than the unclean polluting the clean, we see, in Jesus’ touch, the clean making the polluted pure. Here, in Jesus, we see a reversal, the rare positive contagion. Contact cleanses rather than pollutes. In short, in these two early episodes in Mark we see a demonstration of Jesus’ power over the contagion system.

Soon after these events, in a parallel to Matthew 9, Jesus is found admitting “unclean” persons—tax collectors and sinners—to the sociomoral space of table-fellowship. This trajectory of events reaches a culmination in Mark 7 where Jesus and the Pharisees explicitly debate issues of purity and contamination. The issue, again, is a conflation of food (core disgust) and holiness (sociomoral disgust): Eating with "unclean" hands. Jesus declares that what makes a person “unclean” is what flows out of the heart of person and has nothing to do with what they eat. The sins that Jesus lists as “pollutants” of the heart Belo situates squarely within the debt system of sin:

[It] is the heart (inside) and the evil machinations (outside), [which are] the things that really pollute humanity. The list of the evils belongs to the debt system (theft, murder, adultery, and avarice; the others are variants that can be easily inscribed in these four), a fact already indicated by the seat assigned to them, namely, the heart. The key to the opposition of the two circuits in which the components are not directly equivalent (foods and evil machinations) is to be found in the inside/outside scheme. The inside is the stomach in one case, the heart in the other. What comes from the stomach goes into the privy (a place of pollution and filth); what comes from the heart are practices involving debt (aggression).

Volf joins Belo at this point:

Central to both strategies for fighting exclusion is the belief that the source of evil does not lie outside of a person, in impure things, but inside a person, in the impure heart (Mark 7:15). Against the background of the two strategies, the pursuit of false purity emerges as a central aspect of sin--the enforced purity of a person or a community that set itself apart from the defiled world in a hypocritical sinlessness and excludes the boundary breaking other from its heart and its world. Sin is here the kind of purity that wants the world cleansed of the other rather the heart cleansed of the evil that drives people out by calling those who are clean "unclean" and refusing to help make clean those who are unclean. Put more formally, sin is "the will to purity" turned away from the "spiritual" life of the self to the cultural world of the other...

In sum, on way of reading the gospels is to see Jesus entering into the great debate of Israel concerning the notion of sin and righteousness. Which tradition--purity or justice--should regulate the life of Israel? What, in the end, does God demand? According to Volf and Belo Jesus effects a redefinition of the purity traditon. Unrighteousness is the failure of love rather than as sociomoral pollution. What makes you unclean is the heart. Thus, Belo concludes that Jesus gives “the debt system a privileged place over the pollution system." A verdict on the Great Debate has been handed down.

To conclude, our psychological analysis has been subterranously tracking these theological formulations. Specfically, our analysis of disgust and love mirrors the ethical and moral tensions in the life of the Israel. More stronlgy, we could claim that our analysis explains these tensions. That is, if love and disgust are reciprocal psychological processes--one erecting boundaries, one dismantling boundaries--then of course a "profound tension" exists between the traditions of purity and juctice. The theological and moral tensions exist atop some psychological scaffolding. Futher, given that this tension is an innate feature of the human psyche it cannot be easily shaken off. Wherever relationships exist the dynamics of disgust, love and exclusion are at work, for good or ill. Consequently, it comes as no suprise that the gospel narratives cut deep into the human psyche to address the psychological impluses and temptations that create social stigma, exclusion, and violence.

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Purity and Defilement: Part 13, Monsters, Scapegoats and Atonement

[Note to regular readers. With some additions, this post is a remix of some previously posted material.]

In the last post we discussed sociomoral disgust, when feelings of revulsion or contamination attach to individuals and communities. Sociomoral disgust emerges at an early age, as Martha Nussbaum writes:

From the time (perhaps around age seven or eight) when children somehow learn to play with those ubiquitous paper devices known as "cootie-catchers," pretending to catch foul bugs from the skin of children who are disliked or viewed as an out-group, children practice a form of disgust-based social subordination known to all societies, creating groups of humans who allegedly bear the disgust-properties of foulness, smelliness, contamination.

Consequently, it is not surprising that disgust is "used to target vulnerable people and groups" and to create "group-based prejudice and exclusion."

In short, sociomoral disgust is implicated in the creation of monsters and scapegoats, where outgroup members are demonized and selected for exclusion or elimination. As David Gilmore writes in his book Monsters, a monster is "the demonization of the 'Other' in the image of the monster as a political device for scapegoating those whom the rules of society deem impure or unworthy--the transgressors and deviants." These deviants are considered to be "[d]eformed, amoral, [and] unsocialized to the point of inhumanness." Take, for an example, the Nazi propaganda film The Eternal Jew where an early shot in the film showed rats emerging from a sewer juxtaposed with a crowd of Jewish persons in a Polish city. In America, as another example, proponents of anti-gay legislation have circulated pamphlets that gay men eat human feces and drink human blood.

In short, the psychology of sociomoral disgust is closely associated with the creation of monsters and scapegoats. We will examine each--monsters and scapegoats--in turn.

The word "monster" has its origins in the Latin monstrum meaning "omen" or "warning." What, then, are monsters warning us about?

A start on an answer comes from the anthropological literature. David Gilmore notes that monsters are cultural universals. All peoples have their monsters. More, across all cultures monsters appear to share some universal characteristics. Gilmore lists many of these characteristics:

Aggressive

Gigantic

Man-eating

Malevolent

Hybrids

Gruesome

Atavistic

Powerful

Violent

Fear dominates this list. Fears of predation. Fears of destruction. Fears of impotence. But, as noted above, disgust also seems implicated in the monster schema. In Gilmore's list I'd like to analyze how purity and disgust are implicated in the feature of hybridization.

Monsters are often ontological mixtures, blends, and composites. A quick tour through the world of mythology and legend shows us this: Minotaurs, centaurs, fauns, mermaids, Pegasus, unicorns.

Many of these hybrids are monsters-lite. They are strange, otherworldly, and uncanny. But unicorns and centaurs don't seem to be monsters, strongly understood. In short, monsters are not simply hybrids. They are a certain kind of hybrid. If so, what kind?

Generally speaking, the hybrid must be transgressive, illicit and taboo. The question then becomes, what makes a mixture illicit? Why am I not repulsed by angels (i.e., the depiction of winged people) but find a man with a bug-head monstrous?

I believe the illicit mixing seen in monsters is the same mixing we have been considering in the previous posts. Recall how disgust regulates the divinity dimension, monitoring the mixing of the holy and the profane. Given that sociomoral disgust is implicated in the creation of monsters (e.g., stigmatized groups like the Jews in Nazi Germany) it should come as no surprise that monsters are divinity violations. Something "high" on the divinity dimension is being mixed with something "low." A man with a bug-head is taboo as it mixes something sacred (the human person created in the Imago Dei) and mixes it with something low and base, an insect. By contrast, in Western traditions wings are symbols of the heavenly and the angelic. Thus, when wings are seen in depictions of angels we find the human/wing hybrid elevating rather than monstrous. In the propaganda art of Nazi Germany the Jew was hybridized with rodents. This rat/human hybrid allowed the Nazis to create a monster out of the Jew and, as a consequence, create widespread sociomoral disgust within the German population.

In short, the monster is a symbol of degradation and contamination. Consequently, the monster must be expelled or eliminated. This means that, once created, the monster becomes a scapegoat. Again, this was clearly illustrated in Nazi Germany. Not only were the Jews made out to be monsters they were also blamed and scapegoated for the German defeat in WWI and its subsequent humiliation.

The notion of the scapegoat, as most are aware, originates from the Day of Atonement ritual in Leviticus 16:

When Aaron has finished making atonement for the Most Holy Place, the Tent of Meeting and the altar, he shall bring forward the live goat. He is to lay both hands on the head of the live goat and confess over it all the wickedness and rebellion of the Israelites—all their sins—and put them on the goat's head. He shall send the goat away into the desert in the care of a man appointed for the task. The goat will carry on itself all their sins to a solitary place; and the man shall release it in the desert.

In the Day of Atonement we see, once again, the connection between holiness and disgust. Atonement is an act of cleansing. Leviticus 16.30: "Because on this day atonement will be made for you, to cleanse you. Then, before the LORD, you will be clean from all your sins." Curiously, this purification is accomplished by an act of expulsion. Something on the "inside" is forced "out." It is the religious analogue of the vomit response in disgust, a violent rejection of a contaminant from the body. This is the same dynamic seen with the expulsion of monsters from the community. Monsters, representing degradation and defilement, must be expelled from the community to secure a "cleansing." Thus, it is no coincidence that the rodent-like Jew (the monstrous hybrid) fit nicely with the Nazi notion of national, blood and ethnic purity setting up the logic of what Daniel Goldhagen has called the eliminationist anti-Semitism of the Final Solution. Disgust, purity, and elimination. These are the engines of genocide and ethnic "cleansing."

The great expositor of the link between salvation and scapegoating is Rene Girard. In his book Violence and the Sacred Girard describes how scapegoating was transformed into religious sacrifice and, as a consequence, became a powerful tool of social cohesion. Specifically, scapegoating occurs when the community is undergoing stress (e.g., famine, epidemic, war). During these times of fear people grow anxious, distrustful, and paranoid. And this fear propagates through the community until the entire group is facing massive outbreaks of violence. At this juncture, one of two things will occur. If the group doesn't find a way to vet its paranoia and aggression violence breaks out and, given the imitative facet of human nature, the violence will escalate in reciprocal bouts of revenge killing. Eventually, due to the unchecked violence, the society will disintegrate and be lost to history.

But at the height of communal violence Girard suggests that many cultures took an alternative route. A tragic but effective route. For some reason, different at different times and places, the ire of the group fell upon a certain person or subgroup. A scapegoat for the collective misfortune is identified. And in the moment of identification group solidarity, miraculously, reappears. Once fractured individuals now stand together against the scapegoat. The violence of the group is brought to bear upon the One to save the Many. And the sacrifice occurs. And in the wake of the sacrifice the blood lust of the now unified group is sated. Peace returns.

This is the theory of the origin of primitive religion offered by Girard in Violence and the Sacred. In short, Girard contends that scapegoating sacrifice emerged in human history as the solution to a very real problem, the management of communal violence. Human societies are volatile, ready, at a moment's notice, to burst into violence. Sacrifice was the cultural innovation that aided humans in managing this violence. More, the scapegoat unites the once divided group. Thus, after the sacrifice of the scapegoat a violent mob is both pacified and united. This communal catharsis appears "magical" and, according to Girard, became associated with supernatural power and significance. Over time the scapegoat and the sacrifice became incorporated into the mythic structures of the group's metaphysical worldview. The sacrifice becomes necessary, eternal, and sanctioned by the gods. Scapegoating creates religion, the experience of the sacred. The theologian S. Mark Heim nicely summarizes the scapegoating mechanism and its subsequent association with the sacred:

The sad good in this bad thing is that it actually works. In the train of the murder [of the scapegoat] the community finds that this sudden war of all against one delivers it from the war of each against all. The sacrifice of one person as a scapegoat discharges the pending acts of retribution between members of the group. It 'clears the air.' The contagion of reciprocal violence is suspended, a circuit breaker has been thrown. The collective violence is reconciling because it reestablishes peace. This benefit seems a startling, even magical result, an outcome much greater than could be expected from a simple mob execution...The one mobbed as the most reprehensible criminal now is revered as the bringer of peace, one with a divine vocation to die and restore order for the people. So the victim becomes a god, memorialized in myth, and the killing becomes a feature of a foreordained plan, a pattern and a model. In the face of future threats, similar response will be required. Rituals of sacrifice originated in this way, tools to fend off social crisis. And in varied forms they are with us still.

I have been creating a link between monsters and scapegoats. The reason for this is to highlight the connection between purity and violence. In this our analysis supplements the Girardian account. That is, why, exactly, is scapegoating, as seen in Leviticus 16, associated with notions of atonement, cleansing and holiness? Why is the communal act of violence associated with purity? What Girard leaves unspecified is how the scapegoat is selected in the first place. Our analysis suggests that sociomoral disgust is often implicated in scapegoat selection. Recall Nussbaum's quote above. From childhood humans are adept in sorting people according to purported disgust properties. The odd, lonely and weak on the playground become the "smelly," the "creepy" and the "disgusting." Consequently, these children are singled out for peer violence. These kids, selected by sociomoral disgust, become the scapegoats and, via the Girardian mechanism, unite their peers by focusing and channeling the violence. In a similar way, sociomoral disgust guides the selection of scapegoats at the communal level during times of crisis and stress.

Of course, the scapegoats are often innocent. This is clearly seen in the gospel narratives where Jesus is declared to be innocent while being scapegoated. Thus, the violence motivated by religion or disgust psychology is immoral, despite its effectiveness in channeling communal violence. This observation also converges upon the monster myths. Monsters are, strangely, both victims and victimizers. This imbues monster stories with a complicated ambivalence. Often, the monster is discovered to be kind, charitable, and human. We come to identify with the monster over against those who seek to kill him. The story of Frankenstein and Disney's Beauty and the Beast come to mind. Embedded in the monster myth is the Girardian fear that perhaps we, seeking to kill monsters, have become the monster. We begin to wonder if the scapegoat might be innocent. For Girard, that is what becomes revealed in the gospel narratives. In the gospels the evil of the scapegoating mechanism is unmasked. In short, the irony is that in seeking purity we commit violence and, thus, become contaminated. In Matthew 9 the Pharisees, seeking purity, seek to expel the sinners from their communal life. It's the scapegoating mechanism, the monster dynamic. Purification through the act of expulsion. And the sad irony is that, as Girard's analysis highlights, the Pharisees become unclean through the very act of cleansing. Or, to pick back up the monster thread, it is as Nietzsche wrote:

Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster.

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Purity and Defilement: Part 12, Sociomoral Disgust

In the previous posts we've been focusing on notions of purity with a particular focus on how disgust psychology regulates facets of moral reasoning, for good or ill. In the coming posts we turn to consider the way disgust properties become attached to human beings.

Recall, the adaptive nexus of disgust is called core disgust, the psychology of oral incorporation. More specifically, core disgust monitors the body envelope protecting us from ingesting contaminated or toxic foodstuffs.

But we have noted that disgust is promiscuous and can attach to many different kinds of stimuli. When disgust attaches to human beings this is called sociomoral disgust.

As noted early on in these posts, the modern study of disgust began with Charles Darwin. Interestingly, Darwin also provides us, unwittingly, with a classic example of sociomoral disgust. Specifically, while on his voyage with HMS Beagle Darwin reported this experience:

In Tierra del Fuego a native touched with his finger some cold preserved meat which I was eating at our bivouac, and plainly showed disgust at its softness; whilst I felt utter disgust at my food being touched by a naked savage, though his hands did not appear dirty. (p. 256)

Both core and sociomoral disgust intermingle in this narrative. Core disgust is plainly seen in how both Darwin and the native center their disgust on food. However, sociomoral disgust is evidenced in Darwin’s disgust at a “naked savage” touching his food. That is, in sociomoral disgust people and entire populations can be seen as sources of contamination. Thus, contact with these persons can elicit the strong revulsion of the disgust response. Note how the divinity ethic is also implicated. The person touching Darwin's meat is "naked" and a "savage." Although Darwin was fairly enlightened for his day when it came to race, we get the sense from Darwin that the British gentleman is higher up the scale of human cultural evolution. Closer, presumably, to God and further, presumably, from the beasts. The focus on nudity is diagnostic. There is something base and undignified about the lack of clothing. It is animalistic. Again we see disgust mingle with notions of the divine and profane.

Sociomoral disgust can extend, on a case-by-case basis, to individuals we deem “disgusting,” “revolting,” or “creepy.” We make these attributions for a variety of reasons (e.g., poor hygiene, moral failures). Regardless of the source of the attribution, we experience strong feelings of revulsion in proximity to these people.

Further, sociomoral disgust can apply not just to individuals but to entire populations. Racists tend to view the despised group as a source of contamination. This happened in America with the African-American population and in Nazi Germany with the Jewish population. But these are hardly the only examples. Wherever hate, racism, or genocidal impulses exist, sociomoral contamination and disgust take center stage. As the philosopher Martha Nussbaum (2001) observes:

Thus, throughout history, certain disgust properties—sliminess, bad smell, stickiness, decay, foulness—have repeatedly and monotonously been associated with, indeed projected onto, groups by reference to whom privileged groups seek to define their superior human status. (p. 347)

This picture is even more troubling when we remember that religious systems often institutionalize, overtly or tacitly, sociomoral disgust. The most obvious example of this is the Hindu caste system where many people are born into the “Untouchable” caste of society. But Hinduism is by no means atypical in this regard. In the Old Testament, the people of Israel viewed Gentiles as a source of potential defilement. In Christianity, distinctions are made between the “Saved” and the “Lost” and the “Church” and the “World” where the World and its Sin is considered to be a potential pollutant to the church.

Sociomoral disgust sits at the heart of the conflict in Matthew 9. The problem was that a class of people, "tax collectors and sinners," were understood to be, intrinsically, a form of pollution. Strongly, these people were waste, contaminants, vectors of contagion. Thus, contact with these persons was prohibited.

And Matthew 9 is by no means the only example of this in the gospels. Jesus routinely moves into the domain of sociomoral disgust. Two examples:

Luke 7
Now one of the Pharisees invited Jesus to have dinner with him, so he went to the Pharisee's house and reclined at the table. When a woman who had lived a sinful life in that town learned that Jesus was eating at the Pharisee's house, she brought an alabaster jar of perfume, and as she stood behind him at his feet weeping, she began to wet his feet with her tears. Then she wiped them with her hair, kissed them and poured perfume on them.

When the Pharisee who had invited him saw this, he said to himself, "If this man were a prophet, he would know who is touching him and what kind of woman she is—that she is a sinner."

Again, the issue here is the notion of contact. The complaint is, specifically, about the person "who is touching him" combined with "the kind of woman she is."

Matthew 8
When he came down from the mountainside, large crowds followed him. A man with leprosy came and knelt before him and said, "Lord, if you are willing, you can make me clean."

Jesus reached out his hand and touched the man. "I am willing," he said. "Be clean!"

What is intriguing about this story is the sequence. Jesus touches the leper first. Then the command "Be clean!" is offered. That is, Jesus's first move is into ritual defilement. By touching the leper first Jesus intentionally and willfully seeks contamination. This is striking because the expected sequence would be purification first and then contact. Jesus, surprisingly for the onlookers, does the opposite. Contact followed by purification. In is worth reflecting upon how various Chistian communities approach this sequence. Purification then contact? Or contact then purification?

What is curious is that, despite the example of Jesus, sociomoral disgust continues to plague and hamper the early church. Specifically, in the book of Acts the early church was failing to take the message of Jesus "into the world." In the early chapters of Acts the church was still orbiting the Temple and its cleansing rituals. The gospel was not being taken to the Gentiles. And the reason for this was sociomoral disgust.

We know this to be the case because of the events recounted in Acts 10. It is clear in Acts 10 that the gospel message was not making its way into the larger Gentile world because uncircumcised Gentiles were regarded as a source of sociomoral contamination. Given this crisis God moves decisively in Acts 10, arranging a meeting between Peter, the Jew, and Cornelius, the Gentile. In a vision to Peter, God decisively dismantles Peter’s sociomoral disgust psychology. Peter is in prayer upon a housetop. While in prayer a vision of “unclean” animals in a sheet is lowered from heaven. A voice prompts Peter to rise, kill, and then eat the animals. Given that the purity tradition of Leviticus has declared these animals to be “unclean” and not fit for consumption, Peter rejects the offer of food, stating that he should not eat anything “unclean” that would risk his sociomoral purity. The voice from heaven then retorts, “Do not call anything impure that God has made clean.” This sequence happens three times. After the final sequence, Cornelius’s messengers arrive and Peter, deeply puzzled, accompanies them to Cornelius’s house. At the house, after Peter and Cornelius exchange stories recounting their visions, Peter proceeds to proclaim the good news of Jesus. While Peter is speaking, the Holy Spirit descends on Cornelius’s household much as it descended on Peter at Pentecost. Given this powerful endorsement from God, Peter proclaims, “Can anyone keep these people from being baptized with water?” Peter then baptizes Cornelius and his household.

Peter’s vision of unclean animals is an excellent illustration of the psychology of disgust and nicely illustrates how core and sociomoral disgust fuse and mix, just as we saw in Darwin's story. When asked to eat the “unclean” animals core disgust is the presenting problem for Peter. That is, issues of food and food-aversions are being discussed. But, symbolically, the issue is not about contaminated food, it’s about contaminated people. Core disgust is the surface level problem, but sociomoral disgust is the deeper issue. Thus, God explicitly dismantles the contamination boundary between Jew and Gentile so that the gospel message could break forth into the entire world.

In the coming posts we are going to dig deeper into the psychology of sociomoral disgust and try to unpack the implications for the church.

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Purity and Defilement: Part 11, Warrants, Dumbfounding and Moralization

A few week ago you'll recall that I discussed four "moral situations" from a study conducted by Haidt, Koller & Dias (1993):

1) A woman is cleaning out her closet, and she finds her old American flag. She doesn’t want the flag anymore, so she cuts it up into pieces and uses the rags to clean her bathroom.

2) A family’s dog was killed by a car in front of their house. They had heard that dog meat was delicious, so they cut up the dog’s body and cooked it and ate it for dinner.

3) A brother and sister like to kiss each other on the mouth. When nobody is around, they find a secret hiding place and kiss each other on the mouth.

4) A man goes to the supermarket once a week and buys a dead chicken. But before cooking the chicken, he has sexual intercourse with it. Then he thoroughly cooks it and eats it.

In the study Haidt et al. asked subjects if they felt anything wrong in these scenarios The answer was a strong yes. Participants had very clear feelings that a moral principle was being violated in each of these four scenarios.

And yet, when asked by the researchers to provide the exact principle being violated in a given scenario, the participants struggled to produce an answer. The participants had strong judgments of wrongness but had difficulty describing the reasons behind their feelings.

Haidt et al. calls this phenomenon moral dumbfounding. Moral dumbfounding occurs when we have a feeling of wrongness but have difficulty articulating coherent moral warrants for our feelings and judgments. The phenomenon of moral dumbfounding suggests that a great deal of moral judgment is affective and emotional rather than cognitive and rational.

The moral dumbfounding research is important for our purposes because it is associated with disgust psychology. In the last post we discussed how disgust psychology is involved with attributions of holiness, sacredness and divinity. Our focus was on the notion of dirt--taboo mixing--where the holy is desecrated by contact with the profane. This activates a contamination logic that monitors boundaries and creates spaces of quarantine, a Holy of Holies in the midst of a sinful world.

In that discussion we also noted that the movement of desecration is downward. Something high and heavenly is "brought down." This suggests that as we move through life we move up and down through a vertical dimension, sorting things into higher or lower categories and moving closer to or farther from the divine. Judgments of propriety, sanctity, and holiness, the feelings of spiritual elevation and decent, monitor this vertical dimension warning of situations when the "high" and the "low" are in danger of coming into contact.

Movement along this vertical dimension is captured by the moral foundation of Purity/Sanctity in Haidt and Graham's research. A related analysis is Richard Shweder's notion of three moral grammars called autonomy, community, and divinity:

1) Ethic of Autonomy

Violations to autonomy and agency. Limitations of freedom or violations of rights. Core values are freedom, choice, harm, individualism, and rights.

2) Ethic of Community

Failures of duty and solidarity with the group. Core values are duty, role-obligation, respect, loyalty, preservation of community, compliance with authority and norms.

3) Ethic of Divinity

Disrespect for or degradation of the sacred found in God, human dignity or the Order of Creation. Core values are purity, sanctity, propriety and dignity.

As we noted in the last two posts, disgust psychology regulates the emotions associated with the ethic of divinity. For example, cross cultural research conducted by Rozin, Lowery, Imada and Haidt (1999) observed that disgust is uniquely associated with violations of the divinity ethic as opposed to autonomy and community violations. Specifically, violations of autonomy (e.g., your rights are violated) or community (e.g., someone fails to do their duty) are generally met with anger, indignation and scorn. Righteous indignation, in short, regulates most of the moral domain. However, violations of the divine are met with disgust rather than anger.

Why is this important? The answer goes back to Haidt's research on moral dumbfounding. You'll note, if you read back through the scenarios above, that the ethic of divinity is implicated in each scenario. The issues tend to revolve around degradation or a violation of the proper order of things. Thus, our feelings of wrongness in each case are closely aligned with feelings of revulsion, disgust and impropriety.

So why are we dumbfounded? We are dumbfounded because the ethic of divinity is driven by an emotional system, disgust psychology. This means that our ability to talk reasonably about the divine is horribly compromised. Take, for example, the situation I discussed in the last post: My use of the word "crap" from the pulpit during a sermon. Many people were offended. But why? The situation is similar to the moral dumbfounding scenarios. My action was deemed inappropriate and improper by some. Yet there were those, myself included, who felt no offense. We didn't experience the situation as "wrong," as a divinity violation. How, then, to reconcile the two viewpoints? Each group is working with a felt emotion and if those felt emotions are at odds there is little that can be done to foster mutual understanding. Nor can we provide warrants for which feeling is "in the right." Rightness and wrongness, in the divinity ethic, is the emotion. The emotion, the feeling of offense, is the moral warrant, the judge and the jury regarding a purity violation.

This is deeply problematic. It means that moral dumbfounding scales up to affect the community. This complicates how moral and spiritual adjudication is to be accomplished in the church. Two groups of people sit with different felt experiences and little by way of conversation or discussion can rescue the situation. This is the problem noted by Martha Nussbaum in her book Hiding from Humanity. In Hiding Nussbaum discusses why disgust, unlike anger, cannot form the basis of law:

Because the notion of harm or damage lies at the core of anger's cognitive content, it is clear that it rests on reasoning that can be publicly articulated and publicly shaped. Damages and harms are a central part of what any public culture, and in any system of law, must deal with; they are therefore a staple of public persuasion and public argument...anger (and nonanger) may be misguided, but if all the relevant thoughts stand up to scrutiny, we can expect our friends and fellow citizens to share them and to share our anger...

Disgust is very different from anger...You can teach a young child to feel disgust at a substance--by strong parental reactions and other forms of psychological influence. Imagine, however, trying to convince someone who is not disgusted by a bat that bats are in fact disgusting. There are no publicly articulable reasons to be given that would make the dialogue a real piece of persuasion. All you could do would be to depict at some length the alleged properties of bats, trying to bring out some connection, some echo with what the interlocutor already finds disgusting: the wet greedy mouth, the rodentlike body. But if the person didn't find those things disgusting, that's that.

A similar analysis holds in the church. If the felt experiences of the divine (and, by definition, the profane) differs within the church then these groups will be at an impasse, literally dumbfounded by their inability to find common ground. One group finds the word "crap" intensely offensive. Others don't. And, as Nussbaum notes, that's that.

What I'm saying, in a strong form, is that if our experience of the divine is regulated by disgust psychology then our conversations about God, sin and holiness are being torpedoed at some deep level. A dumbfounding is occurring. Consequently, conversations about God are inherently difficult because our experience of the divine is being regulated by emotion rather than logic. I think people in the churches have always known this. I'm just trying to illuminate the mechanics or, rather, identifying the monkeywrench that keeps jamming up the gears.

But the problems only begin here. It get much worse. In a prior post we discussed the promiscuity of disgust, how a wide variety of stimuli can elicit disgust reactions. This is often seen in what is called moralization. For example, you might find smoking to be a "disgusting habit." Thus, when you see someone smoking you can't help but experience slight feelings of disgust, revulsion, contempt or superiority toward the person smoking. Moralization occurs when these feelings of mild disgust or disapproval attach to behaviors or social issues. Notoriously, these feelings wax and wane. What was moralized in one generation is no longer a problem for this generation. And visa versa. Steven Pinker, in his book The Blank Slate, offers the following list of things that have become moralized in our generation (with some additions/edits of my own)

advertising to children - automobile safety - Barbie dolls - "big box" chain stores - cheesecake photos - clothing from Third World factories - consumer product safety - corporate-owned farms - defense-funded research - disposable diapers - disposable packaging - ethnic jokes - executive salaries - fast food - flirtation in the workplace - food additives - fur - hydroelectric dams - IQ tests - logging - mining - nuclear power - oil drilling - owning certain stocks - poultry farms - public holidays (e.g., MLK day) - research on stem cells - research on breast cancer - spanking - suburbia ("sprawl") - sugar - tax cuts - big government - toy guns - violence on television - weight of fashion models

Conversely, there are many behaviors that that are becoming amoralized in relation to the feelings of previous generations. As examples Pinker lists divorce, illegitimacy, working motherhood, marijuana use, homosexuality, masturbation, sodomy, oral sex, atheism, and the practice of non-Western culture.

To be sure, may of the issues listed above involve issues of harm, danger and fairness. But we are less interested in the moral issues involved in a particular behavior than in the way a particular issue takes on a moral tone or feel. Of particular interest is how that moral tone or feel attaches to people who engage in these moralized activities. Specifically, it feels to us that these people move lower on the divinity dimension. The people come to represent moral and spiritual contaminants. As we noted above, if you moralize smoking it is hard to respect smokers. Mild feelings of disgust and contempt begin to emerge.

This, then, is the real problem with disgust. It is not simply that disgust psychology greatly complicates moral reasoning due to emotionally driven magical thinking. It is, rather, that disgust properties become attached to the people engaging in what we perceive to be immoral actions. As Nussbaum writes,

If disgust is problematic in principle, we have all the more reason to regard it with suspicion when we observe that it has throughout history been used as a powerful weapon in social efforts to exclude certain groups and persons...[disgust] often doesn't stop at feces, cockroaches, and slimy animals. We need a group of humans to bound ourselves against, who will come to exemplify the boundary between the truly human and the basely animal.

To summarize the last ten posts, we have been approaching the events in Matthew 9 from the stance of morality. We've discussed disgust psychology, the magical thinking involved in contamination appraisals and the entailments of purity metaphors. We've discussed how notions of sin and holiness are regulated by disgust psychology and, thus, create communal dumbfounding. And yet all this isn't the most disturbing aspect of Matthew 9. The problem of Matthew 9 isn't in the moral reasoning of the Pharisees, that they shouldn't have framed the situation using a purity metaphor. No, the real problem in Matthew 9 is that the Pharisees saw human beings as vectors of contamination and pollution.

In the coming posts we will examine these social forms of pollution.

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Purity and Defilement: Part 10, Dirt, Divinity and Degradation

In the last post we noted how disgust regulates the moral foundation of Purity/Sanctity. We mainly focused on purity violations. In this post I'd like to examine the role of disgust in notions of sanctity, holiness and the divine.

In the prior posts we suggested that notions of holiness are similar to notions of purity. The reason of this is that both work with notions of contamination. Something holy and sacred can become desecrated or profane if it comes into contact with something base and lowly. In a similar way, something pure can become dirty, messy, disordered or polluted. One distinction between holiness and purity is that holiness implies movement along a vertical dimension. Implicit in notions of holiness is that the holy is "higher" and "heavenly", separated from what is "earthly" and "common." Some common mappings for this vertical dimension can be seen in the following picture:

Desecration occurs when something "high" is brought "low." Desecration involves a movement downward. This is often triggered, via a contamination appraisal, when contact is made between heaven and earth. Thus, in many religious traditions great care is taken to keep the holy and the profane separated. Hence the notion that what is holy is that which is "set apart" from the common things of the world. This creates the sacred spaces, objects, persons and rituals of religious life. Locations where the transcendent dimension, what is "higher", is privileged and protected from the profane.

In effect, holiness creates a sort of quarantine. The sacred is separated from the profane and the boundary between them is monitored. This is often accomplished through prohibition and taboo. Mary Douglas, in her book Purity and Danger, sees this as the natural coping mechanism of all cultures, a means to keep the categories of existence clear and certain. Thus, Douglas writes, "taboo [is] a spontaneous device for protecting the distinctive categories of the universe. Taboo protects the local consensus on how the world is organized." Our interest is on the distinctive categories of the holy and the profane. Many taboos cluster along this border warning of mixing, what we call dirt. That is, dirt isn't an intrinsic feature of the world. It is a communal judgment that a taboo mixing has occurred. Take our houses. We don't want mud tracked into the house. Mud and house should not come into contact. In many cultures this is enforced by leaving one's shoes at the door. The residual of "the world" upon the shoes is not to come into contact with the sacred space of "the home." Obviously, much of this is driven by simple needs for hygiene and cleanliness, but notions of social convention and propriety are also in play. As Douglas writes, "Our idea of dirt is compounded of two things, care for hygiene and respect for convention." Here, then, is the link between purity, disgust, morality and holiness. "For us sacred things and places are to be protected from defilement. Holiness and impurity are at opposite poles." The notion of dirt--taboo mixing--links them both. More, notions of morality are implicated. Douglas writes, "ideas about separating, purifying, demarcating and punishing transgressions have as their main function to impose system on an inherently untidy experience."

This impulse is clearly seen in the Old Testament purity codes, where segments of life were kept separate. For example, in Leviticus Yahweh outlines procedures for handling a variety of potential contaminants in the life of Israel: food (Leviticus 11), infectious skin diseases (Leviticus 13-14), mildew (Leviticus 13-14), childbirth (Leviticus 12), menstrual blood and bodily discharges (Leviticus 15), hygiene (Leviticus 13-14), and sexual activity (Leviticus 18). However, the most severe forms of pollution are moral in nature, sins against Yahweh. Although many of the purity codes have a hygienic logic we see once again the conflation of morality and cleanliness. Consequently, Yahweh outlines purification procedures through sacrifices, washings, and offerings to manage and “clean up” social, moral and physical "contaminants." Importantly, we see in Israel the need to create and quarantine zones of purity and holiness. As the Old Testament scholar Walter Brueggemann summarizes:

The focus of this tradition of holiness, which we may find rooted in the first three commands of the Decalogue, is that those zones of life that are inhabited by Yahweh in an intense way must be kept pure and uncontaminated. Thus this material is instructional and has a status not unlike canon law to protect such zones of holiness and, in a more general way, to prevent the disordering power of impurity from disrupting the life of Israel. The great threat to holiness that can jeopardize the presence of Yahweh in the community of Israel is to create a disorder by mixing things in a way that confuse and distort. The antidote to such confusion is to sort out and make distinctions, so that nothing is wrongly mixed that will disturb the order that belongs to the holiness of the Creator…it is the work of priestly instruction to maintain orderly distinctions.

The notion of dirt, then, helps us understand the link between holiness and disgust psychology, the link between purity and sanctity. It suggests that disgust and contamination psychology, the psychology of dirt and hygiene, is employed to monitor the boundary between the sacred and the profane. And this boundary is regulated by notions of sanctity, convention and propriety. To ask a child to be "proper" in a church building is to impose a kind of quarantine, an attempt to keep dirt out of the sacred space. And, as we have seen, this dirt isn't just physical (although it is that, we tend to clean up, comb our hair and wear nice cloths to church), it's also moral and behavioral. Being "proper" is largely an issue of deference, respect and attention.

Let me give a concrete example. I recently gave a sermon at my church. During the sermon I used the word "crap." Afterward, there was a pretty significant outcry that I had said "crap" from the pulpit. The psychology at work is Douglas's notion of dirt. The word "crap" is base, vulgar and profane. It is earthy. The pulpit, the spiritual center of the sanctuary for Protestants, is the place where the Holy Word of God is proclaimed. Uttering the word "crap" at that location was perceived by many as a Purity/Sanctity violation. A taboo had been violated. My word choice was deemed "improper." The quarantine had been broken.

Much of the concern about my word choice in that sermon centered on the boundary between the language of "the world" and the language of "the church." The concern here is about dirt, the mixing that, according to Douglas, leads to the loss of clear boundaries. If the church starts "talking like the world" then something distinct about the church been lost. The church becomes thoroughly blended and mixed with the world making the two indistinguishable. In short, my language was an invasion. Something from "out there" had come "in here."

The point of all this is to reinforce my contention that disgust psychology is monitoring the boundary between the church and the world. Our fights in the church about what it means to be "in the world but not of the world" are going to be fights about dirt. What exactly will be judged to be an "improper mixing"? As we have noted, notions of convention and propriety are a part of this conversation. When, if at all, should these conventions be released or transgressed?

The trouble here might be summarized like this. Desecration is the movement from heaven to earth. Something holy is made common, profane. It is "brought down." And yet, the movement of the church, following the movement of Jesus in the Incarnation, is the exact same movement: From heaven to earth. Jesus does not consider his holy position with God to be something he should "cling to." Rather, Jesus becomes profane. Jesus becomes dirt. Jesus becomes human.

How, then, are we to adjudicate between the movement of desecration and the movement of the Incarnation which should be the movement of the church? It seems these will often look very similar. This is the confusion and tension that sits at the heart of the dilemma in Matthew 9.

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