Unclean: Meditations on Purity, Hospitality, and Mortality

by Richard Beck

Go and learn what this means: “I desire mercy, not sacrifice.” —Matt 9:13

We don’t mind swallowing what is on the “inside.” But we are disgusted by swallowing something that is “outside,” even if that something was on the “inside” only a second ago.

Yes, I read this while I was on my dinner break, eating my supper. ;)

Sacrifice—the purity impulse—marks off a zone of holiness, admitting the “clean” and expelling the “unclean.” Mercy, by contrast, crosses those purity boundaries. Mercy blurs the distinction, bringing clean and unclean into contact.

In short, theological or spiritual recommendations aimed at reconciling the competing demands of mercy and sacrifice might be psychological nonstarters. Spiritual formation efforts, while perfectly fine from a theological perspective, can flounder because the directives offered are psychologically naïve, incoherent, or impossible to put into practice.

Psychological dynamics will always make certain theological systems more or less appealing. And yet psychologically appealing and intuitive theological systems are not always healthy.

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 illicit, craven, pornographic. Such body-related disgust is found to serve an existential function: it enables us to repress our fears of death.

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.

Following the grooves of core disgust, we experience feelings of revulsion and degradation when the profane crosses a boundary and comes into contact with the holy.

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.

"So, because you are lukewarm, and neither hot nor cold, I will spit you out of my mouth." Rev. 3:16

The worry, obviously, comes when people are the objects of expulsion, when social groups (religious or political) seek “purity” by purging themselves through social scapegoating. 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.

The implications of this practice still impacting society today with not just the rejection of "unclean", but the disabled as well.

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.

This is the psychological dynamic at the heart of the conflict in Matthew 9. What worries the Pharisees is Jesus’ contact with sinners. This worry over proximity is symptomatic of the magical thinking imported into the religious domain through the psychology of disgust.

Negativity dominance is problematic in the life of the church because, in the missional moment, when the church makes contact with the world, the power sits firmly with the world as the location of impurity. According to the logic of negativity dominance, contact with the world defiles the church. Given this logic the only move open to the church is withdrawal and quarantine, separation from the world. In short, many missional failures are simply the product of the church following the intuitive logic of disgust psychology. What is striking about the gospel accounts is how Jesus reverses negativity dominance. Jesus is, to coin a term, positivity dominant. Contact with Jesus purifies. A missional church embraces this reversal, following Jesus into the world without fears of contamination. But it is important to note that this is a deeply counterintuitive position to take. Nothing in our experience suggests that this should be the case. The missional church will always be swimming against the tide of disgust psychology, always tempted to separate, withdraw, and quarantine.

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.

The central concern of penal substitutionary atonement is standing “washed” and “justified” before God. No doubt there is an individual aspect to salvation—every metaphor has a bit of the truth —but restricting our view to the legal and purity metaphors blinds us to the fact that atonement has developmental, social, political, and ecological implications.

Feeling “saved” and “clean” we lose missional motivation and downplay the biblical injunctions that suggest that salvation is an ongoing process of sanctification and, following the Greek Orthodox tradition, theosis: The gradual process of being formed into the image of Christ.

The physical act of washing made people feel less guilty and reduced their willingness to engage in an altruistic act. Physical cleansing replaced morality, both emotionally and behaviorally. Physical washing makes people feel morally cleaner and, seemingly, morally self-satisfied to the point of unhelpfulness. You already feel like a good person so why do more good?

This is the pietistic temptation, seeking a personal experience of “cleansing” at the expense of social and political engagement. The spiritual experience of being pure replaces passionate moral effort.

In sum, although the experience of purity helps us understand morality, the metaphorical connection between the two is so deep that the experience of physical purity can come to replace moral action. And, given that the church is awash in purity metaphors, particularly those churches who privilege penal substitutionary thinking, there exists a constant danger that the church will exchange the private experience of salvation, being washed in the blood of the Lamb, for passionate missional engagement with the world.

Performance metaphors often entail anger. Frustration, failing to meet a goal, is a universal trigger for anger. And anger, righteously focused, can often be put to good use. By contrast, purity metaphors trigger disgust. When directed at the self this produces self-loathing, shame, and guilt. These emotions are much more difficult to get moving in a positive direction, mainly because they prompt social concealment that thwarts transparency and confession.

All sins might be equal, but all metaphors are not. And many of these metaphors create thorny pastoral problems as we engage in spiritual formation efforts within the church.

The purity violation here, the trigger for the feeling of disgust, is associated with the divinity ethic. Metaphorically, we experience these “uncivilized” acts as a form of desecration, as a form of contamination via a movement away from the angels and toward the animalistic. This is how notions of propriety and dignity become associated with disgust psychology. Failures of dignity and propriety are divinity ethic violations, which are regulated by the compound metaphor of purity and verticality.

the divinity ethic is deployed unevenly by individuals leading to communal dispute and conflict.

what is or is not proper, respectful, or sacred is largely in the eye of the beholder. And given that these are felt experiences, rather then rationally derived and publically available arguments, there will be problems in bridging these largely emotional differences.

Given that Purity/Sanctity judgments are largely affective (rather than rational), groups of people within the church can find themselves with different felt experiences. These differing experiences create conflicting normative judgments about what God may or may not find acceptable or praiseworthy. And, due to moral dumbfounding, little by way of conversation or discussion can rescue the situation.

Unfortunately for religious populations, groups deeply committed to the sacred and holy, all this means that large portions of the religious experience will be extraordinarily frustrating, communally speaking. Given that the experience of the divine is often regulated by disgust psychology, conversations about God, sin, and holiness are often being torpedoed at some deep level. A dumbfounding is occurring. These dynamics make conversations about God inherently difficult because our experience of the divine is being regulated by emotion rather than logic, affect rather than theology.

Jesus encounters a man with leprosy. The leper asks to be made “clean.” Jesus touches the man and responds, “Be clean!” As we have already observed, in this healing Jesus reverses the directionality and power of pollution (the attribution of 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, a positive contamination. Contact cleanses rather than pollutes.

Jesus wants to remove notions of “purity” from the social sphere to, in effect, eliminate sociomoral disgust from the life of Israel. For mercy is impossible when sociomoral disgust is operative.

The solution wasn’t a simple switch from “either/or” to “both/and.” 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.

As churches explore missional living, they routinely come into conflict over the tensions inherent in mercy and sacrifice. Churches have to make choices, often walking what seems to be a razor edge, trying to balance the imperatives of holy living and missional engagement.

Embrace, as a manifestation of love, involves boundary transgression. Exclusion, by contrast, erects sociomoral boundaries. Unfortunately, as we have discussed, notions of purity and holiness require sociomoral boundaries to be erected. Holiness and purity are expulsive practices. Consequently, it is difficult to reconcile notions of holiness and purity with acts of solidarity, embrace, and inclusion.

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. In short, calls for embrace, hospitality, or solidarity will flounder if churches are not attentive to the psychological dynamics governing these experiences. Calls for love and community are all well and good, but churches often undermine these efforts by failing to help their members understand and navigate their psychological experiences of purity and holiness.

Whenever the church speaks of love or holiness, the psychology of disgust is present and operative, often affecting the experience of the church in ways that lead to befuddlement, conflict, and missional failure.

During times of social stress or chaos, those persons or populations already associated with disgust properties will provide the community a location of blame, fear, and paranoia. In short, sociomoral disgust is implicated in the creation of monsters and scapegoats, where outgroup members are demonized and selected for exclusion or elimination.

The “monster” tends to be the nadir of sociomoral disgust, the final outworking of its logic in which people are dehumanized to the point of being ontologically Other. Worse, monsters are sub-human and malevolent, a source of social threat and danger. This is important to note as the category of “monster” tends to mask the mechanisms of social scapegoating.

The word “monster” has its origins in the Latin monstrum meaning “omen” or “warning.”

As noted earlier, the “logic” of the scapegoat works if the scapegoat is seen as an object of defilement. This attribution activates disgust psychology which, in turn, makes scapegoating seem reasonable, intuitive, and right. Somehow, purification is accomplished by an act of expulsion.

Scapegoating is the religious and social analogue of the vomit response in disgust, a violent rejection of a contaminant from the body.

The “monster” is sociomoral disgust at its most severe, and it illustrates, in the extreme, the associations between purity/sacrifice and expulsive violence. These associations are important to note due to the fact that, while scapegoating has become more transparent, the monstrous has not. This is largely a consequence of the fact that the monstrous is an attribution fueled by the passions, very often the emotions of disgust and revulsion. Monsters are transgressive hybrids, objects of desecration and degradation. Consequently, sociomoral disgust makes it difficult for us to step back from monster-hunting crusades to expose the scapegoating mechanisms at work within our own hearts and minds.

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.

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. We treat those inside the moral circle with love, affection, and mercy, and those outside the moral circle with indifference, hostility, or pragmatism.

Historically, infrahumanization occurs when one group of people comes to believe that another group of people does not possess some vital and defining human quality such as intellect or certain moral sensibilities.

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.

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.

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 infrahumanization may vary from milliseconds in labs to the gas chambers at Auschwitz. But the fissures exist in every human heart.

Kinship language is extended to non-relatives, where the “brothers” and “sisters” in Christ share a “supper” as members of God’s “family.” The Lord’s Supper universalizes the language of family and kinship. People dislocated by race, blood ties, and socioeconomic class are embraced and included through their participation in the Lord’s Supper. Consequently, this ritual dramatically symbolizes and reenacts (in flesh and blood) the ministry of Jesus in the gospels. More, the practice of the Lord’s Supper prepares the Christian community for mission. After practicing welcoming others (and being welcomed in return) to the “Lord’s Table” Christians leave the ritual to practice embrace at every table.

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 Lord’s Supper, through its metaphors and the missional practices it promotes, is a ritual that is fundamentally altering and remaking the psyche. The Lord’s Supper reconfigures the way we experience otherness. More specifically, the Lord’s Supper is a practice that dismantles the psychic fissures within the heart that create otherness.

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.”

Welcoming sinners to table fellowship was a central, distinctive, and perhaps the most inflammatory aspect of Jesus’ ministry and teaching. Further, the gospel writers often create an identity relationship between Jesus and strangers.