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In short, although a church might claim that all sins are “equal” (in their offensiveness to God), sins have different psychological experiences. This is largely due to the fact that sin categories are regulated by different metaphors, each activating different psychological processes. Sins might indeed be equal, theologically speaking, but the experience of a given sin can be very, very different depending upon the psychology regulating the experience.
There are many disgust stimuli that have little to do with food, morality, or social exclusion. For example, corpses, gore, deformity, and bodily fluids are reliable disgust triggers. Researchers have noted that these stimuli share a common core: each functions as a mortality reminder. We are existentially unsettled by the fact that we have a physical body that bleeds, oozes, and defecates. We are shocked to find that we are vulnerable to injury, illness, and death. Historically speaking, the physical body has always been a source of scandal within the Christian tradition. The physical body is
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First, disgust is a boundary psychology. Disgust monitors the borders of the body, particularly the openings of the body, with the aim of preventing something dangerous from entering. This is why, as seen in Matthew 9, disgust (the psychology beneath notions of purity and defilement) often regulates how we think about social borders and barriers.
Beyond functioning as a boundary psychology we have also noted that disgust is an expulsive psychology. Not only does disgust create and monitor boundaries, disgust also motivates physical and behavioral responses aimed at pushing away, avoiding, or forcefully expelling an offensive object. We avoid the object. Shove the object away. Spit it out. Vomit.
The scapegoat is, to use the language of disgust, spit or vomited out, forcefully expelling the sins of the people. In this, the Day of Atonement, as a purification ritual, precisely follows the logic of disgust. The scapegoating ritual “makes sense” as it is built atop an innate and shared psychology. The expulsive aspect of the ritual would be nonsensical, to either ancient or modern cultures, if disgust were not regulating how we reason about purity and “cleansing.”
This dynamic—purity via expulsion—goes to the heart of the problem in Matthew 9. The Pharisees attain their purity through an expulsive mechanism: expelling “tax collectors and sinners” from the life of Israel. Jesus rejects this form of “holiness.” Jesus, citing mercy as his rule, refuses to “sacrifice” these people to become clean.
What studies like this reveal is that people tend to think about evil as if it were a virus, a disease, or a contagion. Evil is an object that can seep out of Hitler, into the sweater, and, by implication, into you if you try the sweater on. Evil is sticky and contagious. So we stay away.
A more missional worry is that the metaphors behind penal substitutionary atonement reduce salvation to a binary status: Justified versus Condemned and Pure versus Impure. The concern is that when salvation reduces to avoiding the judgment of God (Jesus accepting our “death sentence”) and accepting Christ’s righteousness as our own (being “washed” and made “holy” for the presence of God), we can ignore the biblical teachings that suggest that salvation is communal, cosmic in scope, and is an ongoing developmental process.
First, if participants were allowed to use an antiseptic wipe after recalling a moral failure they were less helpful. Where 74 percent of the control participants agreed to help out the graduate student, only 41 percent of those who used a wipe agreed to assist. Second, when compared to controls, those using the antiseptic wipe reported fewer negative moral emotions (e.g., less shame, less guilt) after recalling their moral failure. In short, the Macbeth Effect was in force. The physical act of washing made people feel less guilty and reduced their willingness to engage in an altruistic act.
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In short, although sin is, generically speaking, understood to be a purity violation, few sins are specifically regulated by purity metaphors. In fact, in my experience only one sin category—sexual sin—is almost uniquely and universally regulated by purity metaphors, often with toxic effect.
Once a foodstuff is judged to be polluted or contaminated nothing can be done to rehabilitate the situation. The fly in the soup ruins it. Consequently, when sins are structured by purity metaphors there is no obvious route to repentance. The metaphor only entails permanent defilement and ruin. And this is, incidentally, the experience of sexual sin. The feeling of a loss that can never be recovered.
The ethic of autonomy is sensitive to violations of independence and self-determination. Very often these are limitations upon freedom, the violation of individual rights or harm. Core values of the ethic of autonomy are freedom, choice, safety, and rights. The ethic of community is sensitive to failures of duty, cooperation, or solidarity with the group. Core values of the ethic of community are duty, role-obligation, loyalty, preservation of community, and compliance with authority and norms. Generally speaking, according to Shweder, the ethics of community and autonomy regulate the plane of
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With purity being the regulating metaphor, holiness requires quarantine.
Something holy and sacred (the worship moment) had been debased by being brought (metaphorically) into contact with something defiling and vulgar (“gutter” language).
What all this means is that liberals and conservatives will frequently come into conflict in how they deploy the divinity ethic. And, given that each group is playing by different sets of “rules,” each deploying the moral foundations in an idiosyncratic manner, liberals and conservatives will often disagree on normative issues.
Jonathan Haidt calls this phenomenon moral dumbfounding. Moral dumbfounding occurs when we have a feeling of wrongness but have difficulty articulating coherent moral warrants for those feelings and judgments.
All this is worrisome as it implies that the experience of the sacred, holy, and divine is inherently a dumbfounding experience. This is due to the fact that, as the moral dumfounding research shows, the judgments of Purity/Sanctity are driven by an emotional system: specifically, disgust psychology.
Given that the congregation was working with a Purity/Sanctity violation, offended and unoffended parties had difficulty articulating rational and consensus-building warrants for their respective judgments regarding this situation and what norms should govern future conduct in the pulpit. Imagine one of the younger members trying to find common ground with one of the older members. Why, the younger member might ask, did the older member find the language offensive?
In a similar way the younger member will have difficultly articulating why a person shouldn’t be offended. He or she, personally, didn’t feel offended and thus expects that others should feel the same way.
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, a positive contamination. 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.
Further, such a solution misses the breathtaking teaching of Jesus. Jesus doesn’t need to be so radical. He could have simply said: God desires mercy and sacrifice. Instead, Jesus echoes Hosea’s more radical claim: God desires mercy, not sacrifice. Phrased another way, given how Jesus deconstructs sacrifice in the gospels, God demands mercy as sacrifice.
In short, the Pharisees were not making a logical error in Matthew 9. They were living within a coherent moral and social paradigm. Unfortunately, that paradigm was producing noxious social and moral outcomes. Consequently, this purity paradigm had to be jettisoned: not for any logical problem, but due to the fact that the holiness impulse reliably produces such immoral outcomes.
In core disgust the boundary being monitored is the body envelope and its orifices. In core disgust “selfhood” is defined at the edge of the body. But humans are symbolic creatures, and “selfhood” extends well past the edges of the body. Selfhood is a symbolic identification that reaches into the world to “own” and identify with people, places, objects, events, communities, and ideas.
We also describe relationships in terms of proximity 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. In sum, love is inherently experienced as a boundary issue. Love is on the inside of the symbolic self.
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
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What we discover in all this is that disgust and love are reciprocal processes. Disgust erects boundaries while love dismantles boundaries. This was the conclusion of St. Catherine noted in the quote at the start of the chapter: sound hygiene was incompatible with charity. One also thinks of St. Francis rushing up to kiss the leper. Love is, at root, the suspension of disgust, the psychic fusion of selves.
By activating notions of purity, holiness, and sanctity along with notions of mercy, love, and hospitality, the church activates a host of metaphors, images, and psychological impulses that are, experientially speaking, conflicting, contradictory, and confusing. Again, this conflict isn’t logical. This is an experiential conflict, a disjoint within the lived experience.
Bland “both/and” recommendations tend to fail because they underestimate the reciprocal nature of love and disgust. This is the reason that bromides like “love the sinner but hate the sin” are often so ineffective. Empathy and moral outrage, for reasons we have been discussing, tend to function at cross purposes. These psychological responses tend to be reciprocally related—more of one means less of the other.
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 claiming that gay men eat human feces and drink human blood.
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 brings it into contact with something low and base, in this example an insect.
The odd, lonely, and weak on the playground become the “smelly,” the “creepy,” and the “disgusting.”
We observe how the sacrifice of Jesus does its job by restoring a real, if tenuous, peace between the mob and the religious and political authorities during the socially volatile Passover celebrations in Jerusalem. The gospels do tell us that the key religious and political players—Herod and Pilate—became friends in the aftermath of Jesus’ death. As Heim noted, the sacrifice “worked”: it restored the “peace.” But for readers of the gospel, the violent mechanism of this “peace” is exposed and discredited. The “peace” of sacrifice is no peace at all. We know the scapegoat was innocent.
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.” As we know, “kindness” and “kin” share the same semantic root. We extend “kindness” to those of the same “kind.” Altruism follows our ontology.
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.
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.6 For example, when we contrast humans with 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 (e.g., humans have souls and animals do not). Obviously, education and critical thinking can override these essentialist accounts. But essentialist
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In short, when we think about groups—white vs. black, gay vs. straight, Christian vs. Muslim, rich vs. the poor—our natural instinct is to find some essential property that separates the groups, a quality that one group has that the other lacks. For example, one often hears in discussions about the welfare state that the poor might lack the “discipline” or “moral character” that characterizes productive citizens. We can see in this how essentialist reasoning is shaping how group differences are understood, and not helpfully
The difference between “monsters” and infrahumans is only a matter of degree. And the truly scary part of this dynamic is that it is a regular feature of how we reason about social life. In sum, the dynamics of sociomoral disgust apply to us all, everyday. Sociomoral disgust isn’t limited to cases of homophobia, racism, or genocide. As we noted at the start of the chapter, the social dynamics of sociomoral disgust—scapegoating, exclusion, and violence—emerge on the playground and we never fully escape them. True, the intensity of the social exclusion may vary. And the degree of
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while sociomoral disgust may be a relatively rare experience for many of us, the emotions of disdain, superiority, and contempt are fairly common. Who can avoid feeling smug around certain sorts of people? Thus, the contempt/disgust link will allow us to extend our analysis even deeper into everyday existence.
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.
“superior” groups experience both disgust and contempt in response to “inferior” groups.
Importantly for our purposes, the negative emotions that most strongly predict subsequent divorce are the emotions of contempt and disgust.
Given that both contempt and disgust are implicated in hierarchy (feelings of superiority) and infrahumanization (judgments that a person is sub-human), it should be clear how disgust and contempt would signal the severest kind of relational distress. No doubt anger is problematic in relationships, but anger is not hierarchal nor is it inherently dehumanizing.
But feeling superior towards one’s spouse or feeling disgusted by a spouse are clear signs of relational distress.
By sharing bread with one another around the Lord’s Table, Christians learn to live in peace with those with whom they share other tables—breakfast, shop-floor, office, checkout. They develop the skills of distribution, of the poor sharing their bread with the rich, and the rich with the poor. They develop the skills of equality, of the valued place of the differently abled, differently gendered and oriented people, those of assorted races and classes and medical, criminal and social histories.5
The Eucharist, therefore, is not simply a symbolic expansion of the moral circle. The Lord’s Supper becomes a profoundly subversive political event in the lives of the participants. The sacrament brings real people—divided in the larger world—into a sweaty, intimate, flesh-and-blood embrace where “there shall be no difference between them and the rest.”
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.1
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.2
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
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as the infrahumanization research revealed, disgust processes affect us all, regulating how we reason about and experience group membership in everyday interactions. We all have a moral hitch in our hearts, a slight hesitancy to grant out-group members full human status. Too often, humanity, even if only subtly, ends at the border of our tribe. For the most part, these tendencies can only be detected in reaction time tests, but their mere existence allows hate, discrimination, scapegoating, and paranoia to take hold in a population during times of communal stress.
In all of this we see how our notions of selfhood become intertwined and fused with the other to the point where the well-being of the other is how I define my selfhood! Anyone who loves understands this. What is radical about the call of Jesus is that he extends this love not just to children and family but to the entire world, friends and enemies alike.
