Unclean: Meditations on Purity, Hospitality, and Mortality

by Richard Beck

In seeking answers to those questions I had been thinking a great deal about Jesus’s response to the Pharisees in Matthew 9. In defending his ministry of table fellowship—eating with “tax collectors and sinners”—Jesus tells the Pharisees to go and learn what it means that God desires “mercy, not sacrifice.”

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.

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.

I expect many readers will be surprised at how much of the Christian experience is regulated or influenced by the psychological dynamics of disgust and contamination.

I’ve seen friends of mine, theologians and biblical scholars, wrinkle their nose, as if I forced them to smell rotten meat, when I’ve floated an idea they disagreed with. Theology, one finds, is a deeply emotional and visceral activity.

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.

For example, as we will see, one feature of contamination psychology is the attribution of permanence. Once an object is deemed to be contaminated there is very little that can be done to rehabilitate the object. Consequently, sin categories that are psychologically structured by purity metaphors are experienced as “permanent” and are difficult if not impossible to rehabilitate.

Pastorally speaking, this may be why sexual sins, which are often uniquely structured by the purity metaphor in many churches, elicit more shame and guilt.

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.

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.

Negativity Dominance: When a pollutant and a pure object come into contact the pollutant is “stronger” and ruins the pure object. The pure object doesn’t render the pollutant acceptable or palatable.

In my church tradition small changes to worship practices, seemingly irrelevant, became huge sources of conflict. Like a drop of urine in a bottle of wine the small change—the polluting influence—ruined the acceptability of the worship. Changes to worship were dose insensitive.

When the pure and the polluted come into contact the pollutant is the more powerful force. The negative dominates over the positive.

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.

In short, 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.

The Macbeth Effect, named for Lady Macbeth who tries to wash away her guilt through hand washing, is the psychological tendency to link physical cleansing with moral cleansing. What we see in Lady Macbeth is another form of magical thinking, the belief that physical washing has a causal effect in moral purification. The link here between physical and spiritual washing isn’t simply symbolic (i.e., the physical washing symbolizes the spiritual transformation) but causal (i.e., the physical washing effects the spiritual cleansing).

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. The phenomenon of moral dumbfounding is of interest to psychologists because it suggests that in many cases affect is prior to reason when we make normative judgments

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.

That is, in sociomoral disgust people and entire populations can be seen as sources of contamination. Thus, contact with these persons can elicit the strong revulsion of the disgust response.

The second problem with logical objections is that they fail to understand that life under the priestly and prophetic impulses creates different lived experiences.

In short, the conflict between mercy and sacrifice is not a logical error. Something more is going on. Specifically, there is a psychological conflict between mercy and sacrifice. What makes the tension so real and acute is that mercy and sacrifice create lived experiences that are fundamentally incompatible. Consequently, to achieve coherence we must, in a very real way, “choose” between the two impulses. I’ve made this claim repeatedly throughout these chapters. It’s now time to illuminate the machinery, the dynamic at the heart of this tension.

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.

In short, the category “monster” is a visceral and emotional category that fuels the acts of social scapegoating. By analyzing the monstrous in relation to the scapegoat, we are able to focus upon the social psychology of groups where the real moral battle against scapegoating is to be waged. No one knowingly engages in scapegoating. But crusades against monsters are all too common.

From childhood, humans are adept in sorting people according to purported disgust properties. The odd, lonely, and weak on the playground become the “smelly,” the “creepy,” and the “disgusting.”

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 so.

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

This is the meal pleasantly set . . . this is the meal and drink for natural hunger, It is for the wicked just the same as for the righteous . . . I make appointments with all, I will not have a single person slighted or left away, The keptwoman and sponger and thief are hereby invited . . . the heavy-lipped slave is invited. . . . the venerealee is invited, There shall be no difference between them and the rest.

That is, what was bothering Paul was less the issue of who was served first but the separation, segregation, privileging, and hierarchical nature of the gathering. This is clear in Paul’s concern over “differences.” The word for “differences” is haireseis, from which we get our word heresy. The later technical definition of heresy was a difference of belief, but the original and more primitive notion of heresy was sociological division and exclusion. The Corinthian Christians were heretical in how they were erecting divisions between themselves.

Paul flips the meaning of this metaphor in a powerful way. If some members are “unpresentable” (akin to genitalia) they should not be treated with shame, disgust, or contempt. Rather, is not our covering up of our “private parts” a sign that these parts require special attention, care, and treatment?

To welcome the demon, in whatever form the demon takes, is all but impossible. But through our trying to show hospitality to the demon at our door, the demon may well be transformed by the grace that is shown. Or, we may come to realize that it was not really a demon at all, but just a broken, damaged person like ourselves.9

Profanity is a shock to a creature aspiring to be like the angels.

In the gospel of Matthew the refrain from Hosea—“I desire mercy, not sacrifice”—occurs on two different occasions. The first, as we have been discussing, occurs in Matthew 9 in the context of table fellowship. In Matthew 9 Jesus attacks notions of purity (“sacrifice”) that trump the “will to embrace.” But there seems to be little in Matthew 9 that speaks to the feelings of body ambivalence that we have been discussing here in Part 4.

The second occurrence of “I desire mercy, not sacrifice” occurs in Matthew 12. Interestingly, the events in Matthew 12 have nothing to do with issues of table fellowship and hospitality. But the events of Matthew 12 do circle around the body and its physical dependencies, needs, and vulnerabilities.

What is needed is a regulating ritual in the life of the church that pushes against the purity collapse, a ritual that keeps purity in tension with hospitality and an awareness of our biological vulnerability.

The Eucharist keeps Christian worship connected to the gritty, oozy realties of the human body.

The Eucharist properly observed, I am suggesting, might allow the church to approach the sacred in a way that keeps the “will to embrace” from collapsing into the “will to purity.” Disgust psychology is like a toxic acid. The Eucharist might allow the church to safely handle this hazardous material.