Shame, Guilt, and Fear

Recently a friend of mine commented on the way that the church and American society use shame, guilt and fear to influence behaviour. He suggested that there might be other more positive means of encouraging people to do what is right and avoid what is wrong.

His comments jogged my own thinking to consider more fully the place of shame, honour, and fear in our own culture as well as in the church. I am not a psychologist nor an anthropologist, so I set these thoughts down well aware that I go beyond my own expertise. I am confident that those who know better than I can correct and overstatements or misstatements I make here.

First thought: Shame, honour, and fear have both negative and positive uses. Second thought: Different societies use these forms of social control in different ways. Third thought: Scripture has examples of all three, both in their positive and in their negative manifestation.

Positive and Negative Forms of Shame, Guilt, and Fear

I have heard many discussions of shame that label it as a purely negative process. Brené Brown, for example, has some excellent descriptions of negative shame, and I commend her work for the way that she has given us ways to avoid toxic shame. Her web page contains the statement, “Dr. Brené Brown is a research professor who has spent the past two decades studying courage, vulnerability, shame, and empathy.”

At the same time, shame functions positively to help us avoid actions that would be destructive of our own identity or of our family’s honour. Shame and honour correlate: The appeal to honour is in fact a positive form of the use of shame. If we describe someone as shameless, we are not complimenting them. To be shameless is also to be without honour.

In our culture (I write as a North American), we have seen an awareness of guilt as a better quality than shame. A thought experiment: If you found a wad of money lying on the ground – obviously someone has lost it, do we pick it up and keep it or do we look for the owner. Someone with a shame-orientation is more likely to look for the owner if others are watching. Someone with a strong guilt-orientation is more likely to look for the owner if he/she believes that’s the right thing to do.

But guilt is not always a positive force in our lives. People can be wracked with guilt when they have no good reason to be. I know people who have felt guilty for “telling a lie” when in fact they simply gave out the wrong information, believing it to be true. Being wrong is not something we need to feel guilty for; it is an opportunity to learn, not a sin to be confessed.

In our culture, fear is probably held to be worse than either shame or guilt. Fear often goes with superstition: One avoids the number 13, or walking under a ladder, or some other behaviour because it is thought to lead to bad luck. In this respect, fear is a more spiritual orientation, suspecting that bad things outside of our control lurk around the corner.

But fear can be a healthy approach to life. Fear of contracting the coronavirus (as I write these words in April 2020) is rational and helps us to make good choices about our behaviour. Irrational “courage” is a worse basis for behaviour than rational fear.

Shame, Guilt, and Fear in Culture

My field is the study of Christian missions. In my studies, I have found a Christian website on shame and honour to be helpful in understanding guilt, shame, and fear in cultural perspective. This website includes a culture test to help one determine which of these three orientations – shame and honour, guilt and innocence, fear and power – is most active in our lives. When I took the test, I was about 80% guilt and innocence, 10% shame and honour, and 10% fear and power. I am a good North American of my age and background!

I have had a number of South Americans from a German background in my classes. When they take the test, they tend have a significantly higher score on the shame and honour. I have had several people from Southeast Asia and from Africa, who tend to have a higher score on fear and power. Asians in general are more tuned in to shame and honour than North Americans and North Europeans.

All of this is to say that the way these dynamics operate in our lives is largely a function of our cultural background. As I observe this simple truth (a straightforward given for students of culture), I realise some of the strengths and weaknesses that go with each orientation. Those attuned to guilt and innocence are often strongly inner-directed to do what is right; they are also highly individualistic and resist the authority of community. Those attuned to shame and honour value community highly and seek social harmony: the good of all. They are also more likely to act in ways that violate the more individualistic person’s sense of right and wrong. Those attuned to fear and power are sensitive to the spiritual realities of the world around us; they can also be afraid of those realities and use power to benefit their own social group unfairly.

Some cautions. These are all generalizations and prove false if taken too far. Further, everyone has some mixture of all three orientations at work in their lives. Besides, generational changes can shift the balance of orientations in any given society. For example, younger people in North America (those who might say to me, “OK, Boomer”) have a stronger orientation towards shame and honour than people in our society of my age do. Witness the phenomenon of shaming on social media – carried to an extent that children of the 60s simply don’t do.

There are also conundrums that I don’t understand in the way our culture works. Younger people – millennials, if you prefer the term – use shame more than previous generations; they are also more individualistic than previous generations. Perhaps their use of shame and honour is actually a move to reclaim a sense of belonging in community. (See the work of Jean Twenge on the phenomenon of hyper-individualism in our society, for example, in Generation Me.)

These Orientations and Scripture

It is tempting to lift up one of these orientations as better than the others, or to say that only one side of the pairings is good. In fact, Scripture uses all of them and I give only a few examples as illustrations. One can develop a worthwhile Bible study by examining each pairing in turn to see how Scripture has used them.

Fear and Power:

Romans 1:16, I am not ashamed of the gospel, for it is the power of God for all who believe. We might think that Romans stresses guilt and innocence, since many have tended to read the letter through a forensic lens, but we see in the introduction Paul’s awareness that Sin is a power and that God’s power released in the gospel is greater.

1 John 4: 17f, In this way, love has been perfected among us, so that we may have confidence on the day of judgment; for in this world we are just like Him. There is no fear in love, but perfect love drives out fear, because fear involves punishment. The one who fears has not been perfected in love. Here, John links fear with judgment, and gives God’s love as the greatest power of all.

Shame and Honour:

Romans 1:16, I am not ashamed of the gospel, for it is the power of God for all who believe. We see again that Paul, so far from thinking primarily in terms of guilt and innocence, combined a fear-power orientation with a shame-honour orientation.

The Lord’s Prayer: Your name … Your kingdom … Your will … For the kingdom and the power and the glory are yours … This is profoundly honour-oriented language. The Psalms are full of such language. The Heavens declare the glory of God … Jesus says that at the judgment he will be ashamed of those who in this life are ashamed of him.

Guilt and Innocence:

The first eight chapters of Romans are an extended discussion of every person’s failure to live by God’s standards. For all have sinned and fall short of God’s glory. Yet even here, one notes that the language of glory belongs more fully to shame and honour than to guilt and innocence.

I find that this orientation, which is fully present in Scripture, is less present than we think. The Bible uses all three orientations and thus speaks to people in every culture.

Conclusion

Where am I going with all of this? Partly, I just find it interesting. Partly, I want to encourage us to use all three orientations appropriately where we live. Partly, I want to say that the use of these categories – shame, guilt, and fear – has a proper place in our lives. Their best use is found in the quote above from 1 John 4: “Perfect love casts out fear.” Their best use is to draw us to God’s love, where true life and health is found for every person in every culture.