Shame is one of the core sources of our misery. Shame is especially core for those who were raised in fundamentalist churches. If you were the child of an elder then multiply that by two. If you were the child of a preacher, then multiply by ten. Any situation where you have to look good is a situation that is rife with potential shame.

Shame is illustrated in the wonderful story of Eve, the serpent and Adam. After they had eaten of the fruit, they made clothing and hid themselves from God. They wanted to disappear. When you feel you want to disappear, or are angry that others are making you want to disappear, you are dealing with that age old issue of shame.

The apostle Paul, who claimed he had been one of the most obsessive Jewish leaders, keeping all of the strictest traditions, and who must have struggled with major shame, was the first to say Jesus took all our shame upon the cross, and shared with us his glory (the opposite of shame).

Each tradition has strengths and weaknesses.

In Pentecostal churches the strength is in physically feeling the love of God, rather than just having an intellectual understanding of God. But there is a strong temptation to hear special words from God. There is the feeling that if I have a special communion with God, then surely my shame has been diminished. I am important.

In Calvinist churches there is an emphasis on having been chosen. God reveals to you if you are one of the chosen. If you are, then all your shame is taken away. God is worshiped as all powerful. Nothing can resist the power of God.

In Churches of Christ there is an emphasis on discovering all the laws for the church today. If the early worship services can be reproduced today, then we have passed the test that God has set before us. We have deciphered the code and we are the true children of God. All others are imposters.

In the Catholic tradition there are two avenues of dealing with shame. Either one relies on the fact that the Mother Church will preserve us, or one relies on the holiness of dedicating oneself to a discipline. If I can keep a vow or perform difficult rituals on a regular basis, then I must be holy and free of shame.

In the more liberal churches, there is an emphasis on doing good, and defending the defenseless, depending on which group is in vogue at the time.

In the more upper class churches there is an emphasis on being respectable.

But the great emphasis in almost all churches (especially the holiness churches) is in doing good, which can hardly be argued with. My only argument is that we tend to get the strong message to do good in order to deal with our shame. It doesn’t work. No matter how much good we do, we will still have our shame that we carry around.

This is one reason I don’t like the phrase: “Find peace inside yourself.” No. Inside myself I find shame. I am no different from Adam and Eve and all the others on the face of the earth. The apostle Paul appealed to God to take away his shame. If only we heard that from the pulpit.

Native Americans in the east, who had become Europeanized and owned farms, had been stripped of their land in 1830 by Congress and President Andrew Jackson, and had been moved on the Trail of Tears to be settled in the west, only to be attacked again after the Civil War, when their land in the west was wanted by white pioneers. Alexander Campbell wrote one article against the relocation of the Cherokees, Barton Stone wrote some sermons in the Cherokee language, and one preacher, James Trott, who was married to a Cherokee, spoke out against the Trail of Tears. Other denominations spoke out, but the Restoration Movement remained mostly silent (or openly hostile) as the Cherokee land was stolen and thousands died on the Trail of Tears.

The Civil War (1860-1864) was the result of economic power shifting from the plantation South to the factory North. The North felt that slavery was wrong, though the North had their own version of slavery: factory labor. Factory labor was not based on race, but was based on ethnicity: mostly immigrants from Europe working 12-14 hours per day in unhealthy conditions, including children. A few preachers in the Churches of Christ spoke out against slavery: Alexander Campbell, Barton W. Stone and others. The Restoration Movement split along North-South lines, initially over instrumental music in worship, the richer north becoming the Disciples of Christ/Christian Church, and the poorer south becoming the Churches of Christ worshipping a cappella. (The Baptist Church split along slave lines: the north becoming the American Baptist Church, and the south becoming the Southern Baptist Church.) The Civil War today is depicted as a war about slavery, which was only one of the points of contention.

After the Civil War the North attempted to reform the South. The South felt that their communities were no longer safe, and started an underground vigilante justice system, the Ku Klux Klan. The Ku Klux Klan survives today as a white supremacy group that claims to practice a form of Christianity (singing The Old Rugged Cross at most of their rallies).

After the Civil War  soldiers who wanted to continue killing were used to commit genocide against Native American tribes.

Very little was said about the genocide of the Native Americans. Christians of all stripes moved in and took over Native American land as fast as the soldiers could kill the tribes off, the preachers establishing congregations and building church buildings on conquered Native American land, congratulating themselves on their Bible knowledge, prayers and baptisms. The Bible was not read as a God-breathed record of people’s discovery of and relationship with God throughout the ages, but as an authoritative chronicle delivered by an autocratic God word for word to be followed uncritically and unthinkingly.

The thing that made Jesus the angriest was when religion served to preserve a corrupt thieving system. The Roman Catholic Church in the Middle Ages demanded that everyone obey the kings and lords and pay a tithe to the Catholic Church. Reformers like Saint Francis of Assissi, who defended the poor, were marginalized by the Catholic Church.

Just so today you can find churches that support health and wealth theology, right wing politics, left wing politics, no politics, gay rights, no gay rights, hating gays, civil rights, authoritarianism, women’s rights, no women’s rights, etc. We choose the church that suits our politics and our family background.

Or perhaps we just don’t listen to the sermons. One sociology research project in 1989 found that members of conservative churches differed little in authoritarianism levels from liberal churches and non-Christians. The only difference in the churches was found in the ministers. So the ministers were congratulating themselves in holding together their liberal or conservative constituencies, but their members were no different from each other or the world.

So how are fundamentalist churches similar to the Ku Klux Klan?
1. Myopic view of the world. They see the world from their own viewpoint, not from the viewpoint of any other group. They cannot understand why Moslems in Iraq do not appreciate American troops in their country.
2. Our group is the in-group, all other groups are the out-group, leading to racism, and ethnocentrism. Martin Luther King was once referred to as “Martin Lucifer Coon” in a church of Christ sermon in Arkansas in the 1960s.
3. Simple answers and extreme thinking, uncomfortable with ambiguity and gray areas. An example of this is the inability of people to see why a criminal needs to have a lawyer in court.
4. Stereotyped views of roles, e.g. the roles of men and women.
5. Loyalty to family, troop and country, regardless of how much wrong they are doing. Torture is okay as long as it is used on non-Americans. Nuclear bombs are okay as long as they are pointed at Russia.

When you go down the list of what we are tempted to believe when we think of honoring our parents it becomes more clear what it must mean:

1. Does honoring one’s parents mean to never argue with them? Jesus argued with his mother at the Wedding of Cana, and his parents at age 12.
2. Always agree with them? Jesus did not agree with his mother.
3. Go to church where they want you to?
4. Believe what they believe? What about people who have atheist parents?
5. Be their best friend? Now we are getting into the real meat of the issue.
6. Keep them from being lonely? This is what most people who feel guilty about not honoring their parents are often the most guilty about. Yet those who are lonely generally create their own loneliness, and those who create community have worked hard at it.
7. Show up at Thanksgiving and Christmas? (And be depressed for however many weeks afterwards.)
8. Let them verbally, physically or sexually abuse their grandkids?
9. Let them spiritually abuse their grandkids?

Some people say you should honor your parents with the truth:

1. The truth about the lies they told you,
2. the truth about how you feel about them,
3. the truth about the manipulating they do,
4. the truth about the spiritual abuse that has gone on in the family.

Jesus was blunt with his family, and blunt with his apostles.

Competitive churches are inherently shame based. The most famous example of shame based churches within the general circle of Churches of Christ groups is the International Churches of Christ. Until the last ten years every interaction with the ICC was one of shaming and competitiveness. If you told someone at the ICC you attended a Church of Christ, they would immediately ask: How big is your church? Second question: How many people have you baptized in the last year? If you are not bearing fruit then Christ has cut you off from the tree, was their thinking.

But they were only the regular Churches of Christ with the volume turned up. All of the hardline Churches of Christ have a competitive attitude, similar to a hierarchical attitude. Shame based hierarchies are more obvious in caste societies like in India in the past: You were not permitted to marry someone of lower caste or your family would disown you. Shaming was used to enforce the caste rules. Watching BBC series about the class system in England a century ago illustrate how pride and shame are intrinsic to a hierarchical system. Here in the United States during the slave era and after, shaming was used to enforce the racial rules. I lived in South Africa during apartheid in the 1970s and I remember clearly how important social rules were, and how ashamed people would be if they violated those social rules. Our pompous headmaster repeatedly talked about school pride, and insisted the heads of the departments wear diploma robes at assemblies. My teachers disciplined me with shame–a factor that ruled all South Africans during those hierarchical years. Their humor revolved around violating social rules.

The corporate world of cubicles is intensely competitive and equally shaming. The principles of looking good on the outside and hiding what’s on the inside are paramount in the business world. The military operates exactly like an alcoholic shame based family, until the mid-1980s promoted alcohol on base by allowing 18-year-olds to drink and giving them half price beer. When a scandal erupts, everyone denies everything, and a scapegoat is offered up: 11 soldiers went to jail for all of the abuses in Abu Ghraib.

And speaking of scapegoats, very few insider trading is punished, a scapegoat being found (again a female) in Martha Stewart. Scapegoating rather than justice is one of the marks of a shame based community.

Interestingly, the nativity story turns hierarchy on its head: a homeless teen bears a baby. It is announced by God to the lowest levels of society: shepherds, and to foreigners with a foreign religion (the Magi).

On a side note: one of the biggest complaints against the Occupy Wall Street movement is that they don’t take showers and smell bad, being shamed not for the quality of their politics, but for their personal habits. This is how we Americans hold people in line–with shame.

And so the Churches of Christ rising up out of the lower echelons of American society: uneducated frontier farmers, journeying west in the hopes of climbing the hierarchy ladder, the United States government rewarding anyone for killing unwanted Native
Americans (who somehow thought they owned the land). As the Restoration Movement grew, the upper classes wanted to be accepted by the other churches, and the lower class members of the Restoration Movement split off and insisted on remaining sectarian and competitive.

The Churches of Christ have the highest per capita number of journals, publications and magazines defending the faith of any religious group.

The apostle Paul taught that Jesus took our shame upon himself, exchanging it for glory–a gift, relieving us of the motivation to be hierarchical or competitive.

1. The first rule is to control everything. If life is scary and unpredictable, and important people could stop loving you and could leave you, then control, control, control.

2. Be perfect. And of course no one can ever meet the rule, so you are constantly judged as wanting by this rule. This rule also begets the principle of never admitting you are wrong.

3. Blame and shame when things get uncomfortable and control (rule #1) didn’t work. And if you get blamed you should wish that the earth had opened up and swallowed you rather than to receive the shame you receive.

4. Don’t think, don’t feel, don’t want and don’t dream. If you do, keep it to yourself (and be ashamed of it).

5. Rule number five is reminiscent of The Fight Club: Don’t talk about it. If you have a feeling, need or want, don’t talk about it, hide it, because that is something truly to be ashamed of.

6. Never admit you are wrong. Cover up, lie, hide your mistake, but if someone else makes a mistake, shame her.

7.  Never trust anyone, because if you do, they will shame you in the end.From John Bradshaw’s book: Healing the Shame that Binds You

These rules emotionally cripple people as they grow up. (The gospel of forgiveness is the opposite of these principles.) Although many supervisors are shame based, the ones who are not tend to rise in the ranks farther than those who are shame based, thus keeping the shame based fundamentalists in lower paying jobs.

Psychoanalytic psychologists call these families obsessive. These are the families that lose sight of the big picture and focus on the rules instead. They are constantly catching their children doing something wrong, blaming and shaming them until the children are convinced no-one would really like them if they knew who they really are. Classically set up to be either obsessive as an adult, or an addict. (The Apostle Paul describes the feeling at the end of Romans 7: “I do what I don’t want to do. Who will rescue me from the body of this death?”)

Fundamentalist churches (and other fundamentalist religions) are based on several shame-based issues:

1. Unquestioning obedience to the rules of the church.
2. The church holds my faith.
3. Obedience to one’s husband, father, the elders and the preacher.
4. Rigid rules about family hierarchy and family roles.
5. Lack of introspection, making fun of looking inward at one’s own emotions and motivations, a preference for simple explanations and black and white answers.
6. Poor communication styles.
7. Lack of openness to outside ideas.
8. Openness to propaganda in favor of one’s own group.
9. Harshness and shaming towards lower status individuals in the group: especially women and children, but anyone of lower status.
10. Competitive with other religious groups, competitiveness between ministers.
11. People are held in line by shaming them.
12. The Bible is seen as a rule book (rather than as a record of various peoples seeking relationships with God).

Pros: These attitudes help couples stay together in that there is a group consensus not to commit adultery, not to use porn, not to get a divorce and not to look to separation as a solution to marital problems. Some churches do better than others in that they focus on forgiveness and grace. If they do more than lip service, then they work hard to help people figure out the difference between forgiving someone and trusting someone.

More progressive churches assign a young married couple to an older mentor couple.
The mentor couple invites the younger couple over for meals once a month.

Cons: However just knowing the rules is not really all that helpful. All of the listed attitudes of fundamentalists are counterproductive in helping a couple weather the storms of life and communicate through disagreements. There seems to be a basic theme: Don’t think for yourself, just grit your teeth, keep your head down and barrel through. Seldom do fundamentalist churches do the hard work of respectfully talking disagreements out. The rules above carry the day, until they don’t work, in which case there is no fall back position. The relationship becomes irreparably broken.

Juxtapose that with the prevailing attitude of evangelicals: if you obey Focus on the Family, Family Life Today and all the other Christian family radio programs, books and videos, you will have a wonderful Christian family and wonderful children and grandchildren. But if the kids use porn or have sex outside of marriage, or hate church, then this emphasis on the ideal family becomes more of a disillusioning experience than a help.

Some divorce statistics are skewed by interviewing frequent attending born-again Christians vs. non-attending born-again Christians. The non-attenders had much higher divorce rates. But this does not prove anything. It may prove that when born-agains divorce, they stop attending church, especially in churches that frown on divorce, or where their minister has told them not to divorce.   I know of some Churches of Christ that have no divorced people attending, because they are not welcome (unless they are willing to be celibate for the rest of their lives).

In the hardline Churches of Christ debates were held up as the premiere way to champion the truth, Alexander Campbell having been a consummate debater.   The debates I attended were nasty affairs, with the Church of Christ debaters making fun of (shaming) the other side. Imagine how that works between a husband and wife. They have a disagreement over the checkbook and one partner makes fun of and shames the other one. They do not have gentleness and forgiveness modeled from the pulpit, so, fueled by shame, the other one responds in a competitive way, escalating the conflict. Then out come the hierarchy rules: wife must obey husband, and you have a stew that is ready to explode into a divorce in a few years. Even if this couple doesn’t divorce, they are not going to be sharing any loving sex.

Primitive faith breaks down in the face of real life problems. Either faith grows into a more mature faith (not fundamentalist), or something snaps, often the marriage.

But fundamentalist parents never accept that their teens are ordinary teens, who experiment with independence, figure out their own beliefs, read material that expands and challenges their beliefs. Teens prove to themselves that they can make their own decisions, by going against parental advice in the way they dress, the language they use, the substances they experiment with, and the way they explore their sexuality.

A fundamentalist parent cannot handle being disillusioned by their children. Fundamentalist parents do not have the maturity and equipment to accept ambiguity and imperfection in their children. The fundamentalist believes in the perfect church, perfect worship, the perfect life and the perfect Bible. Their church cannot be an imperfect attempt at serving God, their Bible must be a perfect representation of God’s Word, and their lives must be perfect or they have to have a quick and easy method to renew forgiveness of their wrongs.

Fundamentalist parents usually approach their teens from an authoritarian stance: “Do what I tell you or I will punish you.” Fundamentalists are usually limited to escalating their threats and punishments. They seldom have other options in their skill arsenal to deal with teen misbehavior. This is when the children of fundamentalists become the most traumatized, and the teen realizes that the parents are unable to encompass the normal explorations of teenhood.

Threats and punishments are rarely effective with teens. Teens respond better to relationship approaches to changing their behavior: “Please don’t speak to me like that–do I speak to you like that?”

Fundamentalists are also shame based. So if their teen gets into trouble at school or is arrested by the police, the parent is horrified: “Do you realize what you are doing to our family? You have humiliated us. No-one in our family has ever been arrested!”

The parents who have accepted that their teen is going to make mistakes in life, might say to their teen: “Oh! You must be so upset to have been arrested! Can I buy you a milkshake to cheer you up?” The police have already yelled at the teen, the parents don’t have to do it this time, they can play the good guys by comforting the teen. Most teens quickly get tired of interacting with the police, especially if the teen has a warm place to process his/her decisions. The mature parent accepts that they ultimately have no control over their teen, but they do have influence. Much like the apostle Paul told Timothy to be an example, and how the elders are supposed to rule by example.

James Fowler explains it in his book The Stages of Faith. People in Stage 3 Faith trust in their faith community to hold their faith. They do not feel strong enough yet to hold their faith inside themselves. Therefore they remain fiercely loyal to the church and its beliefs and doctrines. They will tell you to ask so-and-so and they will quote Big Name Preacher. The majority of the population has Stage 3 Faith, regardless of what they believe in.

The person who gets kicked out of the church, or who leaves, is almost always in Stage 4 Faith. Stage 4 is a questioning stage, an individuating stage. It is like a teenager or young adult constantly picking at his/her parents or society for inconsistencies. The Stage 4 person wants things to make sense for him- or herself. They want to hold their faith inside themselves and be convinced of each doctrine, without relying on others. But the person in Stage 4 cannot hold their faith without convincing someone else or checking with other people. This creates arguments, and sometimes the person in Stage 4 welcomes the arguments because this tests and strengthens the individuating process inside the Stage 4′s heart. Just as teenagers like to argue with their parents about values and ethics to test their own ability to make moral decisions.

The Stage 3s who see someone entering Stage 4 find the attitude of the Stage 4 person to be irritating, and they label it: rebellious, prideful, backsliding or bitter, or they just shake their heads.

The Stage 4 person has great difficulty wrestling with their newly internal faith, and they make everyone around them uncomfortable as they wrestle. But the train wreck is inevitable. There is no room in a Stage 3 church for someone in Stage 4. They have to leave.

So there really is no point in going back and reliving in one’s head all the painful arguments that led to the breakup. No matter what you could have said, no matter how tactful or confrontational you could have been, the end result would still be the same: the Stage 4 person leaves, and the Stage 3 people stay, and nobody can understand what happened.

Fowler says that in healthy development, Stage 4 is begun in the young adult years. Stage 5 is entered into into by middle aged adults: No longer does the person want to argue, because they have more questions than answers. What they want to do is listen, and hear about others’ faith. They want to share the wonder they have for the deep meaning behind the rituals they practice. They want to wonder at the mystery of faith. And they want everyone to be loved equally.

When a church is run by Stage 5 people instead of Stage 3 people, then there is room for the other stages in the church. The Stage 5 people calm the Stage 3 people down and reassure them that their faith is safe in the church, even when the Stage 4 people question and stir things up.

But that is something that is rare in the hardline Churches of Christ, the Stage 4s all having been kicked out, so there are no Stage 5s left to lead the church, only Stage 3s.

So don’t spend time thinking about how it could have been avoided. It could not. Just as Jesus was banned from the synagogues in Judea, it was unavoidable, it was necessary.

[If you like this post, please subscribe.]

A friend of mine, who is active in local politics, took me aside and let me know that I should use caution when talking about this, that these were respectable, intelligent, humble people who had leveled these accusations, and this was not a simple case. I said that since the stock market crash and finding out their pension fund was short several million, they had scapegoated the previous City Manager for not warning them, and couldn’t view anything he had done in a positive light. Nothing he said would they believe. They were sure he had been sneaky and underhanded in everything he did, especially his own benefits, which they contested and refused to pay him. She replied that that could not be so, and these things were very complicated, and if respectable people believed he had done all these things, and if intelligent people read the contracts and minutes and came to these conclusions, then there must be some substance to it.

Finally I decided to stop arguing with her. It reminded me of how painful leaving our church had been, and how many rumors and stories went around that we could not address. And ultimately we could not have persuaded our church friends unless we went back in time and persuaded the people who baptized them. Their loyalty was to the people they had grown to admire and respect. The security of their faith rested in these relationships.

I remember once an elderly woman was arguing a scripture with me. I showed her a passage that directly contradicted what she believed. She replied: “That which proves too much cannot be true.”

Losing one’s reputation is the most powerful tool the sect has to keep you inside, toeing the party line. If you want all the people you love and depend on for emotional support to love and support you, then you have to stay in the church, and you have to believe and teach the party line.

When you lose your reputation, and those people–the ones you depended on for emotional support–you go through the valley of the shadow of death. It is a painful journey and one that causes many to retreat into addictions, take antidepressants, go to therapy, get a divorce, have children who act out, and lose their jobs; which gives the nay-sayers more ammunition to cluck their tongues.

Of some comfort is the story of Jesus, who identified with our helplessness, having been kicked out of all the synagogues, wrongly accused and killed in a humiliating way, we can know that he took the side of the wrongly accused, took the humiliation that we are tasting now. He went through it before we had to.

We can also know that the pain doesn’t last forever. It gets easier year by year. And you don’t stop growing in maturity.

When I was a minister I composed sermons and preached them aimed at all of the false doctrines in all of the denominations around us. (My father still preaches about the Church of Christ split in the 1950s.) But those sermons did not convert people. So I tried to figure out what would convert people. I had heard of a mass mailing campaign that enrolled people in a Bible correspondence course that converted people. So I went to intern in a new church that was using that method. And we baptized people! It was exhilarating. The only problem was they wouldn’t come to church. And coming to church was the whole point, wasn’t it? I mean, besides baptism.

So I studied in their homes week after week. This was in a white suburb of Detroit, during a previous downturn in the economy, with an unemployment rate of 17%. Sound familiar? The people, although they had enough food, were struggling to survive emotionally. The people who would study the Bible with us were sometimes drunk when we showed up for Bible study. Many were unemployed. Most were divorced or going through a divorce. The TV stayed on for the children throughout the Bible study.

I slowly realized that studying about the evils of denominationalism, Catholicism and saved by faith alone, was not what these people needed right then. They needed faith that God cared, and that there was a better way to survive. Baptism for the forgiveness of all their sins was a good start, but they needed more. So my lessons started to change. We studied through the life of Christ.

The more I looked at the reality of what Jesus was saying to these people, hunkered down in their homes, TV blaring, beer soothing, barricaded against a hostile world, the more I realized that the issues we were championing in our lessons at church were more like the issues that Jesus rebuked the Pharisees for championing. And so my preaching changed. I had found a new audience. No more was I preaching for those who had grown up in the non-institutional a cappella Churches of Christ (though we usually spelled churches with a little “c”), now I was preaching for a different audience, and after about a year was asked to leave. And why not? I wasn’t preaching for them any more, was I?

Eventually I left the Restoration Movement altogether, and my problems really began. Who were these preachers in these denominations preaching to? One preacher insisted that his religious heritage was neither Catholic, nor Reformation, but a Third Way, the correct way. Another was a caricature of knee-jerk conservatism without any Christian thoughtfulness. He was against abortion, homosexuality, and masturbation, and definitely for the Iraq war. But he never referred to a single teaching from the Bible about any one of those subjects.

Finally we decided we would start our own church, but this time we would aim it at non-Christian young people. Only one problem: we forgot to ask non-Christian young people if they wanted a church. They did not. Yes, we addressed world issues and ethical problems from a postmodern perspective. Yes, we focussed on experiencing God and prayer and worship over doctrine. No, we did not regress into easy answers.

Now I find sermons irritating. They are addressed to people who have grown up evangelical. They assume acceptance of basic doctrines that our world does not accept. The sermons do not address issues and questions that non-Christians ask today in ways that are meaningful to non-Christians. And why should they? Very few non-Christians ever wander into one of our services. Our services are filled with 95% people who grew up evangelical and need a place to go every Sunday to hear the same sermons and sing the same songs we grew up with.

Our culture is not looking to churches for answers, especially where I live in the United States. Only 14% of the population of my state is a conservative Christian, a figure that continues to decline. So why would they pay attention to our sermons? Across the border in Canada there are so few people going to church they are selling some of the Catholic church buildings. Leonard Sweet, past dean of Duke Divinity School, in his book Soul Tsunami, said that our culture cannot fathom why we go to church or why we believe. It makes no sense to them. Nothing we believe addresses their painful needs.

There are ways that our culture wrestles with morality and spirituality, in movies, in blogs, in books, at school, but it is not by visiting our churches. I fear our sermons are for the diehards, not for anyone out there. The more I open my eyes to the questions the greater community is asking, and the basic beliefs the community is starting from, the more I realize we have been shouting from across the room, instead of doing what the Holy Spirit was designed to do: come alongside.

[If you like this blog, click SIGN ME UP in the navigation bar on the side-->]