Shame, Deserved and Undeserved

Whereas guilt reveals that we have morally transgressed, shame pertains more to who we are, not just what we have done. And so shame can be particularly damaging if we allow it to detract from recognizing the value we have in God, which it can all too easily do. If we become convinced that we are useless, that our lives are pointless, that we as people lack value, it becomes exponentially harder to see ourselves as creations of God with infinite dignity and value and worth. The topic of shame is thus vitally important for moral apologists to think about and understand.

A temptation is to think that all shame is bad—nothing but a toxic emotion. Whereas guilt might be fine, shame is thought to just saddle us with needless negative emotional baggage. Victims of abuse may feel great shame over what happened to them, even though they did nothing wrong. That is undeserved shame, and the problem is not theirs. It’s all of ours; we need to listen to such victims, not sideline them, nor silence them, but give them a voice and really hear them. There is also deserved shame, however. If I do something shameful, I should feel shame—if I were the abuser of that victims we just discussed, for example. Not that anyone should let shame decimate their sense of self or think of themselves as unredeemable, nor should engage in the practice of shaming. That is different, and little compatible with loving our neighbors as ourselves. To get a better understanding of shame, both undeserved and deserved, let’s consider an example of both.

If you have the time, watch the first half of the following clip.

It is a 1981 YouTube clip of Mister Rogers hosting a ten-year-old wheelchair-bound Jeffrey Erlanger. They had originally met five years before, and Rogers remembered him and invited him to his Neighborhood. Fred would later say that these unscripted ten minutes were his most memorable moment on television. The scene is deeply moving, and if there’s any doubt as to why, I might suggest it has to do, at least in part, with this matter of shame. Ours is sadly a society in which certain people—those who have been sexually abused, those with visible disabilities—carry a stigma and are often, for no fault of their own, riddled with a sense of shame—a loss of social standing, and a resultant tendency to shrink and hide. It threatens their sense of humanity. The solution has to be communal—usually involving someone with social capital to spare conferring honor upon them.

And that is exactly what makes those ten minutes of television so undeniably magical. It is a simply profound microcosm of the divine love that deigns and condescends to broken and marginalized people and, in the process, exalts them, replacing shame with honor, beauty for ashes. Mister Rogers gets eye level with Jeff, asks him about his experiences, gives the boy a chance to share about his condition and feelings, and talks to him like a friend. Like Mister Rogers did for Jeffrey—who was on the stage years later to confer on Rogers his Lifetime Achievement Award—this is a means by which to make goodness attractive, which is sort of part of our job description as Christians. It’s an important way to love God and our neighbor.

And now an example of deserved shame. The pages of scripture are replete with narratives of honor and shame, from Adam and Eve to the story of the prodigal son and lots in between. You know the story of the prodigal son. He insists on his inheritance ahead of time and engages in profligate spending and living, bringing shame on himself and an almost complete loss of social standing as a result. Finally, he repents and comes home, and the father, seeing him far off, comes running to him with a kiss and embrace. Here is a young man who did shame-worthy things. He felt shame, and he deserved to, and he couldn’t fix it on his own. He needed someone to confer on him the honor he had lost.

And this gives us as believers a simply wonderful opportunity. As Gregg Ten Elshof puts it in his forthcoming excellent book For Shame, “All of us, whether we have social capital to spare or not, are in a position to remind those around us that each and every person is loved and pursued by the God of the universe. The maker of heaven and earth is in a full sprint—robes and all—to embrace you, kiss you, put a ring on your finger, and throw a feast in your honor. Whatever the opinion of the company you keep, you are of immeasurable value to the One who matters most. You are so valuable that the God of the universe suffered the indignity of limited human form, betrayal, public humiliation, and naked crucifixion to rescue you not just from guilt, but also from the shame of your condition, all to enjoy an eternal life of friendship and communion with you.”

If there is any doubt that this is what the life and work of Jesus was all about, recall the OT passage that inaugurated his public ministry in Luke, from Isaiah 61: “The Spirit of the Lord GOD is on Me, because the LORD has anointed Me to preach good news to the poor. He has sent Me to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives and freedom to the prisoners, to proclaim the year of the LORD’s favor and the day of our God’s vengeance, to comfort all who mourn, to console the mourners in Zion—to give them a crown of beauty for ashes, the oil of joy for mourning, and a garment of praise for a spirit of despair.”

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David Baggett is professor of philosophy and Director of the Center for Moral Apologetics at Houston Baptist University.

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Moral Apologetics and Biography, Part II

In the second installment of this series, I want to talk about two other childhood experiences that shaped me as a moral apologist. Last time I talked about being a child of camp meetings. Experience number two was this: One of my earliest memories as a child was watching Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood. Fred Rogers had a saying, and it went like this: he wanted to “make goodness attractive.” I still remember a few years ago when a documentary was released about his life and work, and how grown men could be seen openly weeping as they watched and remembered. I have read, and from my experience as both students and teacher I suspect it is true, that students won’t always remember what a teacher says, but won’t forget how teachers make them feel. Fred Rogers was, for many of us, one of our first teachers, and he had an uncanny knack for making people feel better about themselves, for making people feel loved, respected, and appreciated. He most definitely made goodness attractive, and the documentary was so powerful, in part, because it was a reminder that moral goodness isn’t vacuous sentimentality, but something real and solid. Rather than a sign of weakness, it’s a sign of strength. Fred gave viewers, young and old alike, an experience of goodness, and especially to give a child such an experience is truly a gift of great value.

I bring up Fred Rogers in the context of moral apologetics because when I think of morality, I think of one like him. I don’t think of rules and regulations; burdensome, onerous requirements; projections of piety and suffocating sanctimony; goody two shoes; or someone afraid of living life to the full for fear of offending the heavens. I do not think of moralism, legalism, holier-than-thou attitudes, fear of sex, avoiding tobacco or alcohol, or never getting angry. Nor does morality invoke the specter of weakness or carry connotations of something effete or enervating. Rather it is about strength and character, integrity and fidelity, and an abundant, rich, creative life. It is about excellence and living as we were intended to live, and it is about loving our neighbor as ourselves, and seeing the infinite dignity and value and worth of every human being we encounter as creatures made in the very image of God, the sort of thing Auden had experienced with his fellow teachers on that one occasion. A man like Fred Rogers, though anathema to Nietzsche, was, contra Friedrich, a man of incredible strength, willing to do the hard work of loving even his unlovely neighbors, a man who strove to make goodness attractive—not in a mousy, Pollyannaish way, but in a genuine, transparent, risk-taking, courageous way. Mention of morality doesn’t make me cringe or turn sheepish, nor tempt me to engage in derision and derogation. It rather inspires and ennobles. When I think of morality, I think of Fred Rogers.

Now, experience number three: When I was very young, maybe six or seven, I saw a television advertisement. The commercial was designed to raise money for a relief agency helping needy people in a different country. One image struck me as particularly poignant, and it was this: A relief worker handed a piece of food to an obviously hungry child. I still remember vividly how visceral my reaction was. There was something about the scene that struck me as remarkable, and in a quite specific sense. It seemed to me at the time morally remarkable—it was more than merely proper or appropriate, nice or kind; it was those things, for sure, but it was more than that. I may not have had all the vocabulary at the time, but I had at least the cursory concepts, and it was beautiful and right; it was altogether lovely and good. Although I was very young, I remember what seemed for all the world to me at the time as an apprehension of sorts. It was nothing less than an epiphanous moral experience for me, and one that would exert a quite long-term effect. It was as if in that moment I became deeply convinced that morality is something real. A thought occurred to me at the time that I have never forgotten, and of which I remain convinced, namely, that I will never be surer of anything else than I was that what I had seen was a morally good action. Of course there were other formative childhood experiences, including ones that shaped my eventual vocation, but this was certainly an important one.

Children of course can be mistaken, and they often are. In fact, on some models of childhood development children are morally immature and often predominantly egoistic at least early on. But former University of Massachusetts philosopher Gary Matthews some years ago challenged that idea by suggesting that there are numerous ways to measure moral maturity, of which descriptions of moral theory are but one. It is true children are not good at doing that, but there’s another important measure, something like empathy, and he wrote that children often put adults to shame on this score. They often display great capacity for recognizing and empathizing with suffering. So he thought children have much to teach adults about ethics, contra those who in condescending fashion look down on children as morally stunted. I think I can honestly say that I have spent much of my professional career trying to get a better grasp on what I took that day to be a rock solid foundation on which to build. I don’t pretend for a moment to think this establishes the thesis of moral realism. A variety of challenges to moral realism are on offer and in need of careful assessment. Nevertheless, much of what moves me about the moral argument is a sturdy commitment to moral realism that none of my work in philosophy ever since has undermined. In fact, it has strengthened it.

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David Baggett is professor of philosophy and Director of the Center for Moral Apologetics at Houston Baptist University.