Unclean: Meditations on Purity, Hospitality, and Mortality

by Richard Beck

there was something intrinsic to the relationship between mercy and sacrifice that inexorably and reliably brought them into conflict. Mercy and sacrifice, I suspected, were mirror images, two impulses pulling in different directions.

Few of us feel disgust swallowing the saliva within our mouths. We do it all the time. But the second the saliva is expelled from the body it becomes something foreign and alien. It is no longer saliva—it is spit.

In short, disgust is a boundary psychology. Disgust marks objects as exterior and alien.

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. Thus the tension. One impulse—holiness and purity—erects boundaries, while the other impulse—mercy and hospitality—crosses and ignores those boundaries.

theological or spiritual recommendations aimed at reconciling the competing demands of mercy and sacrifice might be psychological nonstarters.

Applied to the old adage 'Lobe the sinmer, hate the sin"

The central argument of this book is that the psychology of disgust and contamination regulates how many Christians reason with and experience notions of holiness, atonement, and sin.

Too often, as we all know, the “feeling of rightness” trumps sober reflection and moral discernment.

In the absence of advanced theological training or the daily immersion in critical give-and-take, the church will tend to drift toward theological positions that psychologically resonate, that “feel,” intuitively speaking, true and right.

Striving after good theology is similar to managing a sweet tooth. Psychological dynamics will always make certain theological systems more or less appealing. And yet psychologically appealing and intuitive theological systems are not always healthy. In short, these psychological dynamics function as a sweet tooth, a kind of cognitive temptation that pulls the intellectually lazy or unreflective (because we are busy folk with day jobs) into theological orbits that hamper the mission of the church. As with managing the sweet tooth, vigilance and care are needed to keep us on a healthy path.

Disgust motivates us to avoid and push away reminders of vulnerability and death, in both others and ourselves. What is needed to combat this illusion is a church willing to embrace need, decay, and vulnerability.

All humans make the same face when experiencing disgust. Disgust, it appears, is an innate feature of a shared and universal human psychology.

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.

Similar to core disgust, social disgust is triggered when the “unclean,” sociologically speaking, crosses a boundary and comes into contact with a group identified as “clean.”

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.

Given the range of habitats humans can find themselves in, a degree of flexibility is warranted to sync tastes with available foodstuffs. So when a child is born she doesn’t have any innate food preferences. She will, as we said, eat just about anything.

Disgust, as we have just seen, has a degree of plasticity; it is molded to fit a given culture. We don’t see this feature in other emotions. The core triggers for happiness, fear, sadness, or anger appear to be fairly stable and consistent across cultures. But disgust stimuli can be highly variable from culture to culture.

Eucharist, providentially so, is engaged in shaping and reshaping how we think about purity, hospitality, and mortality: the three domains, as we have seen, deeply affected by disgust psychology.

disgust is more than simple distaste. Many things taste bad but are not disgusting, like coffee or lemons. Generally speaking, disgust involves the feeling of revulsion, a visceral, almost nauseous, response. And this revulsion is very often triggered by a judgment or appraisal of contamination or pollution.

Disgust and contamination are powerfully aversive experiences and we should be wary when these experiences are directed toward others or the self.

judgments of contamination play by their own rules. And these rules are very often contrary and impervious to logic and reason.

What studies like this reveal is that people tend to think about evil as if it were a virus, a disease, or a contagion.

If sin is “contagious,” extending hospitality becomes impossible.

The judgment of negativity dominance places all the power on the side of the pollutant.

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.

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.

In the biblical witness, purity metaphors are rooted in the Levitical purity codes that governed the communal and cultic life of Israel.

purity is a central way Christians, both ancient and modern, have come to understand the experience of sin and grace. Sin is dirt, being morally unclean. Salvation is being pure, washed as “white as snow.”

one reason penal substitutionary atonement might be so popular is that it is sticky; it activates an emotional system that makes its metaphors highly memorable and, thus, more likely to be shared in the activities of evangelism, testimony, or catechesis. Penal substitutionary atonement might be a theological sweet tooth.

Building on our sweet tooth metaphor we might say that the metaphors of penal substitutionary atonement make it a kind of theological “junk food”: appealing and alluring, but problematic if overindulged. One needs a balanced theological diet.

Fantastic criticim of the recent elevation in some circles of penal substitution.

many, if not most, sin categories are governed by performance and ambulatory metaphors. Sins are “failures,” “mistakes,” “falling short,” “getting lost,” or “falling down.”

the rehabilitative entailments of these metaphors make the emotional and behavioral movement toward repentance and confession easy and intuitive. Just make the choice to “try again.”

the “all sins are equal” formulation only makes sense given the background entailments of purity logic. Specifically, “all sins are equal” is the purity entailment of dose insensitivity, the notion that just a drop of urine ruins the barrel of wine.

sexual sins are often experienced in faith communities as being a class unto themselves, as a particular location of stigma and shame.

when sins are structured by purity metaphors there is no obvious route to repentance.

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.

religious populations can examine the same moral or social situation and come to radically different judgments depending upon the metaphor they are using to understand the situation.

The divinity ethic is sensitive to disrespect for or degradation of the sacred found in God, human dignity, or the order of creation. Core values of the divinity ethic are purity, sanctity, propriety, and dignity. It is important to note that even secular cultures honor a divinity ethic. Outside of the religious sphere there are sacred moments, symbols, places, and rituals.

the holy and sacred becomes desecrated or profane if it comes into contact with something base and lowly. 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.

Recall that disgust is a boundary psychology. Consequently, holiness is at root an issue of boundary monitoring, the separation of the sacred and the profane. The goal is to monitor this boundary and to prevent illicit contact, to keep the holy segregated from the profane.

Holiness, then, is a conflation of two metaphors, a purity metaphor (pure/polluted) mapped onto a spatial metaphor (up/down). What is holy is not only pure but higher, an object of the “heavens.” What is profane is dirty and of the “earth.”

Haidt and Graham have accumulated evidence that liberals tend to restrict their normative judgment to the Harm/Care and the Fairness/Reciprocity foundations. That is, liberals will tend to cry “That’s wrong!” when someone is being harmed/not-cared-for or when something is unfair/unjust.

Unless the conservative agrees to restrict her normative judgments to the foundations Harm/Care and Fairness/Reciprocity she will not be able to appreciate the view of the liberal. Conversely, until the liberal agrees to admit warrants from all five moral foundations he will not be able to appreciate the outrage of the conservative.

Moral dumbfounding occurs when we have a feeling of wrongness but have difficulty articulating coherent moral warrants for those feelings and judgments.

the experience of the sacred, holy, and divine is inherently a dumbfounding experience.

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.

if our judgments of the sacred and holy are, at root, felt experiences, then there is little we can point to in the world to build consensus. I simply feel offended. That’s the beginning and end of my warrant: my subjective experience. So if the felt experiences of the sacred, holy, and divine (and, by definition, the profane, vulgar, and perverse) differ within the church, then groups on different sides of these experiences will be at an impasse, literally dumbfounded by their inability to find common ground.

If you moralize something like smoking, it is hard to respect smokers. Mild feelings of disgust and contempt begin to emerge. These feelings are focused on both the behavior (e.g., smoking) and on the person engaging in the behavior (i.e., the smoker). Although the behavior itself might not elicit disgust, the person engaging in the behavior is felt to be a fly—a pollutant—in the communal ointment.

In the end, the real problem in 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.

sociomoral disgust can apply to entire populations. Racists tend to view the despised group as a source of contamination.

the expected sequence would be initial purification followed by contact. Jesus, surprisingly for the onlookers, does the opposite. Contact occurs first. Purification follows solidarity. And one can only wonder how various Christian communities approach this sequence in their own missional endeavors.