Is All Shame Toxic?

Speaker 1:
Welcome to The Table podcast, where we discuss issues of God and culture, brought to you by Dallas Theological Seminary.

Bill Hendricks:
Hello, I'm Bill Hendricks, Executive Director for Christian Leadership at the Hendricks Center. And it's my privilege to welcome you to The Table podcast, where we discuss issues of God and culture. Mark Twain wrote, "Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it's time to reform or to pause and reflect." A similar sentiment, sometimes attributed to Twain, is, "It ain't what you don't know that gets you into trouble, it's what you know for sure that just ain't so." And there's a growing body of voices now bolstered by purportedly unassailable scientific research that claims with great certainty that the human emotion of shame can no longer be tolerated and should be cast into the waste bin of history. I can think of no one better qualified to speak into this issue than my guest at The Table today, Dr. Gregg Ten Elshof, whose Professor of Philosophy at Biola University and Founding Director of Biola Center for Christian Thought, whose purpose is to advance Christian scholarship on the big questions of human life. So we're going to discuss one of those big questions, shame. Gregg, welcome to The Table podcast.

Gregg Ten Elshof:
Thank you. It's an honor to be here.

Bill Hendricks:
And let me just point out, we're particularly going to be looking at your book, For Shame: Rediscovering the Virtues of a Maligned Emotion. I'm curious, you're a philosophy professor. How in the world did you get into writing about shame? That seems like something a psychologist would-

Gregg Ten Elshof:
Yeah, right. All of my training in philosophy has come to me through the analytic tradition, but I took a first trip to China back in 2005. And as a consequence of that trip, I found myself interested in classical Chinese wisdom traditions, and Confucianism in particular. So I started thinking and writing about Confucianism, where the shame honored dynamic looms large.

Bill Hendricks:
Very pronounced.

Gregg Ten Elshof:
And so having steeped in that tradition for some time, it caught my eye when this growing chorus of voices that you talked about started denigrating shame and describing it as an inherently toxic emotion, a suggestion which, to the Confucian mind, is just absurd on its face. And that got me curious, what's going on? Why is shame being maligned in the way that it is?

Bill Hendricks:
And what conclusion did you come to on that point, why it's being maligned?

Gregg Ten Elshof:
Yeah, the simple answer, I think, is that it's being maligned because it's being confused with other painful, negative, self-directed attitudes like failures of self-respect, self-loathing, low self-esteem, and the like. If you've been taught that shame is toxic, that shame is bad for you, that you should try not to feel shame anymore, it's almost certainly because you've been taught that shame is just the same thing as low self-esteem. And so much of what I've tried to do is draw clear, conceptual categories, distinguishing shame from low self-esteem, self-loathing, embarrassment, guilt, and other attitudes of the sort.

Bill Hendricks:
Well, and at the popular level, it has become inherently problematic, really not allowed, to feel badly about yourself anymore. And certainly not to make somebody feel badly about themself. That's the height of indecency and you don't deserve to be part of civilization at that point, right?

Gregg Ten Elshof:
Yeah, yeah. Yeah, what's so interesting about the social science is that it is permitted. In fact, it's thought to be a healthy thing that you should feel badly about your behavior. So the feeling of guilt, the dominant voices are still lauding guilt as a helpful, even if painful, moral emotion. So it's okay to feel badly about your behavior, but it's not okay to have negative feelings directed toward yourself.

Bill Hendricks:
So you raised the point about guilt, and I'm sure you get asked this a lot. I know you covered it extensively in the book, the difference between shame versus guilt. Let's be clear on our terminology.

Gregg Ten Elshof:
Yeah. So for both shame and guilt, it's important to distinguish between the objective condition and then the emotional response that often accompanies the condition. So on the guilt side, to be guilty is to have violated a standard. So you can be legally guilty if you violate a legal standard. You can be guilty of cheating in a game if you violate the standards of the game. You can be morally guilty if you violate the moral standard. But to be guilty is just to violate a standard. And then the feeling of guilt is just that painful, emotional experience that you have when you violate a standard that you care about. So if you care about moral purity and you know yourself to have violated the moral law, that'll hurt, that'll sting.

Bill Hendricks:
Yeah, you can feel that.

Gregg Ten Elshof:
And that particular sting is what we call a guilty feeling or feeling guilty. On the shame side, the objective condition is being socially diminished in a community of other people. So to be shamed is to be rendered a person of lesser consequence, lesser weight, lesser significance in a community. The opposite of shame is honor. To be honored is to be elevated in a community of other people, to be rendered a person of greater consequence, greater significance, and so forth. So that's the shame, honor condition. And then felt shame and felt honor, well felt shame is just that sting that you feel when you're diminished in communities that you care about. If you are rendered a person of lesser significance in a community that you care about, that hurts, that stings, and that particular sting is felt shame. And if you're elevated in that community, there'll be a pleasant emotion that accompanies that elevation, and that's the emotion we call feeling honored.

Bill Hendricks:
As you say, this whole discussion of what's the legitimacy or lack thereof in regards to shame, it's fairly recent in the world's history. What's produced it? Is this some function of social media? Is it some change in our culture that's come about? What are the historical roots of this particular movement?

Gregg Ten Elshof:
Yeah, I think much of the maligning of shame, the anti-shame zeitgeist that animates contemporary Western culture, can be traced back to studies in the social sciences over the last few decades. There's been a lot of work on human emotion, and on shame and guilt in particular, and the most important and influential studies of shame strongly correlate the tendency to feel shame with all kinds of dysfunction. Eating disorders, violence, rage, the lack of empathy-

Bill Hendricks:
Low self-esteem.

Gregg Ten Elshof:
Yeah, low self-esteem. And so if shame correlates with all of this dysfunction, and guilt doesn't, then you could see why someone would conclude, "Well, we should lean into guilt so far as we need some negative emotion to get us acting well, and we should eliminate shame." So I think much of the anti-shame zeitgeist can be traced back to this damning evidence from the social sciences, suggesting that shame correlates with all kinds of human dysfunction.

Bill Hendricks:
And you actually go to work on trying to look at that body of research and ask how valid is it?

Gregg Ten Elshof:
Yeah, yeah.

Bill Hendricks:
Tell us more about that.

Gregg Ten Elshof:
Yeah. So if you're going to suggest that shame correlates with dysfunction and guilt doesn't, the first thing you've got to do is you've got to somehow isolate shame prone populations and guilt prone populations. And so then the question is well, how do you do that? You could just ask people. You could say, "How frequently do you feel shame? How frequently do you feel guilt? What about remorse? What about regret?" And the early studies did exactly that, they just asked people. But the problem with those early studies was that you can only get useful data from people with a really advanced moral vocabulary. How many people really know the difference between guilt, regret, remorse, shame, humiliation, embarrassment?

Bill Hendricks:
Or shame and guilt, for that matter.

Gregg Ten Elshof:
Or shame and guilt for that matter.

Bill Hendricks:
It's synonyms for most people.

Gregg Ten Elshof:
And then try translating those studies into other languages. It was just impossible to gather wide data sets. And so those early studies were replaced with what are called scenario-based studies. And in scenario-based studies, what we do is we give you a short little vignette. We say something like, "You were out with friends, and you discovered that the conversation turned to making fun of a friend who isn't there." And then you're given several different responses. "How would you respond to that?" And you're given several responses and some of the responses are coded to indicate felt shame, and other responses are coded to indicate felt guilt. So in the example that I just gave, in the most influential study, one of the options is, "If you were in that conversation, you would feel small, like a rat."

Gregg Ten Elshof:
And another option is, "You would feel like you needed to apologize, or you would feel like you needed to say good things about the person who wasn't there." And if you give that latter response, you'll be flagged as a guilt prone person. And if you give the former response, you'll be flagged as a shame prone person. And so these scenario based studies are great because they don't require any special vocabulary, they can be translated into all different languages, they can be modified to fit younger audiences, older audiences. And so the result is there's this massive and growing body of data measuring guilt proneness and shame proneness. And in those studies, shame proneness correlates with dysfunction and guilt proneness doesn't. But now what I've tried to argue in the book is that once you switch to those scenario based studies and you look at the language that they use to code for shame proneness, much of it could just as easily be indicative of low self-esteem, self-loathing, failures of self respect.

Bill Hendricks:
Somebody who came in to begin with and just volunteered that answer.

Gregg Ten Elshof:
That's right. And we've always known that low self-esteem is bad for you, that it's going to correlate with poor mental health. So if our attempt to isolate shame prone audiences is actually picking up people with low self-esteem and persistent self-loathing, well of course that population is going to be loaded up with dysfunction. And so what I've tried to argue in the book is that the studies shouldn't be trusted because what they're picking up is low self-esteem, self-loathing, failures of self respect, and not the effective experience of shame, per se.

Bill Hendricks:
Well, you titled your book For Shame, and in the introduction, you sort of explain it's a bit of an apologetic, in a sense arguing for some benefits of shame. And you end up by saying, "This is a book about human flourishing." Which is odd. You wouldn't think of shame as somehow contributing, especially in the current climate, contributing to human flourishing. So two part question. First, what's so important about human flourishing? And secondly, how could shame possibly contribute to that important vision?

Gregg Ten Elshof:
Yeah, good. The first part, that's a good question. I haven't been asked to think about that. I've just been taking it as a sort of datum, a starting point.

Bill Hendricks:
Well, I hear a lot of people, this isn't against you, this is just my own experience because I also speak a lot about human flourishing, and I hear many people using the phrase human flourishing. But when a phrase like that gets used enough, you, at some point, have to step back and say, "Well, what do we mean by that, and why is that so important if it's lifted up as everybody's for human flourishing?"

Gregg Ten Elshof:
Yeah. Just very crudely, what I mean is just doing well.

Bill Hendricks:
Yeah, the good life.

Gregg Ten Elshof:
Living well. Yeah, the good life. And I take it that valuing a life well lived is something that goes without defense. If you don't care about people living well, then I don't know that we have enough common ground to have a real discussion. So I don't mean anything really deep or controversial by human flourishing, I just mean people living well, not loaded up with dysfunction in various ways.

Bill Hendricks:
So how does shame contribute to living well?

Gregg Ten Elshof:
So what does shame contribute? Yeah, so shame contributes to living well in the same way that other painful emotions do. It's weird to talk about healthy, painful experiences. But it's not that weird. If you think about loneliness, for example, and suppose we asked, "What does the feeling of loneliness contribute to living well?" Well, we'd say something like this. The feeling of loneliness, that pain, is a kind of alarm bell because we all need companionship. We need companions. And if you find yourself alone without companions, you've been built in such a way that your self alerts you to that fact with a painful experience. You feel lonely. And that felt loneliness motivates the pursuit of companionship. If you're completely alone and you don't feel lonely, something's broken. Something isn't going well. Or if you're betrayed and you don't feel betrayed, something's broken. Felt betrayal is an alarm bell.

Gregg Ten Elshof:
It tells you something's missing. Fidelity is missing in your partnerships, and you've got to fix that problem. Shame is like that. Felt shame is a kind of alarm system. We need to belong and to have standing in communities. We're not built to be alone. We're built to live life together.

Bill Hendricks:
Social creatures.

Gregg Ten Elshof:
That's right, we're social creatures. And so the life lived well is a life of social existence. And when you are diminished, when you lose face, when you lose standing in your community, you're built in such a way that an alarm bell goes off. That stings. That hurts. And what that sting contributes to the life well lived is it motivates belonging. It motivates you to do what needs to be done to find your way back into a communal existence.

Bill Hendricks:
I like the image that you develop in the book about a warning light or an alarm that goes off, and people end up disarming the alarm rather than looking at the deeper issue.

Gregg Ten Elshof:
Yeah, yeah. I owe that metaphor to Allen Downs. So I wish I had thought of it. But Allen Downs is a psychologist and an author, and I think it's a really helpful metaphor for thinking about how these negative emotions work. Now, he argues that this particular warning system, shame, is something we can safely disable.

Bill Hendricks:
We can disarm.

Gregg Ten Elshof:
We need it for a time when we're developing as kids. But once you develop into adulthood, you should grow into the ability to validate yourself, to be self validating. And once you have the ability to self validate, he argues, there's no more need for this particular warning system.

Bill Hendricks:
Which is, in a way, saying, "I'm self validating. I don't need your approval."

Gregg Ten Elshof:
That's right. It's an expression of-

Bill Hendricks:
I'm distancing myself socially from you.

Gregg Ten Elshof:
Yeah, and it's an expression of the kind of radical and rugged individualism that so characterizes the American west, I think.

Bill Hendricks:
Well, absolutely. And I love your use of the phrase radical individualism because I think that's kind of what we're into now. You talk about this in the book, and it touched off a thought for me. You said, "Why would I keep a painful warning system in place to alert me to social discrediting if I don't care about social credit? Radical individualism teaches, wrongly, that human health and flourishing can be had regardless of our inclusion or exclusion in community. Someone enamored of radical self-sufficiency may still have an interest in moral purity. He may want to do what's right and avoid doing what's wrong." So the radical individualist, "I don't need other people," it's a core of that. But then if I look around me at many who are behaving in what I would think is a radically individualistic way, frequently through their choices, they end up becoming part of another group of people who had similar behavior, and then that group as a group now not only identifies as a group, but then turns around and shames the old culture that they maybe used to be a part of. Is that a fair observation?

Gregg Ten Elshof:
Yeah. I think the impulse to belong is inescapable.

Bill Hendricks:
Irresistible.

Gregg Ten Elshof:
Yeah, it's irresistible. So however strongly you might identify as an individual or idealize rugged individualism, you're going to seek belonging in a group. It's not a question of whether you're going to do that, it's a question of how reflective you're going to be about it, how self conscious you're going to be about the choice of the group to which you belong. My own view is that the call of Jesus is to, in some ways, to identify or direct our impulse to belong to the community of Jesus loyalists, to the community of Jesus following. So whereas you're natural impulse might have been to direct that impulse to belong on your family of origin or something like that, the call of Jesus is yes, that's an important belonging environment, but your primary environment for belonging is the community of Jesus followers.

Bill Hendricks:
Now that's a dangerous statement. That has huge implications for evangelism, as we've known it in our Christian subculture for generations. Because what I hear you suggesting is it's not just about Jesus is my personal savior and he's going to give me my salvation and my happiness and my meaning, you're saying, well, all that's true or somewhat true, but you're now a part of a larger community, the body of Christ. You're a called out one into this new community.

Gregg Ten Elshof:
Yeah, and my own view is-

Bill Hendricks:
And if you don't think that way, then there's something wrong with your understanding of the gospel.

Gregg Ten Elshof:
Yeah. And it's not something wrong out at the edges. I think it's something wrong right at the core. I think only somebody reading the scriptures through the lens of individualism training could come to the conclusion that the gospel is primarily about me and my personal relationship to God or anything like that. It's communal right from the word go, I think.

Bill Hendricks:
So let's talk about that. You're part of a community of faith, body of Christ followers. How does shame help a Christian live into that role well, or help that community foster Christ likeness among its members?

Gregg Ten Elshof:
Yeah. Well, part of the way that it contributes has to do with the fact that shame is contagious. So we haven't talked about this yet. But guilt, I think, is not a contagious phenomenon. If you have violated a standard and I come to be in association with you, your guilt doesn't rub off on me. Not only do I not feel guilty, but I don't become guilty. I don't become a person who violated the standard just because I've moved in close with you in relationship. It's you that violated the standard. But shame isn't like that. Shame is contagious. If you have lost social credit and I come relationally close to you, I will lose social credit as a consequence of your having lost social credit and my being close to.

Bill Hendricks:
So like the parents whose son has been convicted of a crime and they're like, "Oh my gosh, where did we go wrong?"

Gregg Ten Elshof:
That's right. And not only do they think, "Where did we go wrong," they will become people of lesser consequence, lesser weight in their communities because of what their kid has done, or the other way around. I'll become a person of lesser weight if my father is discovered to have done something shameful. So shame is contagious. And that means if we belong in a community and the shame and honor dynamic is at work, I'm invested in your moral standing in a way that I'm not invested if we're only talking about guilt and innocence. Because as much as I care about you being innocent because I care about you and I want you to be innocent and so forth, I don't get guilty because you're guilty. But I do fall into shame if you fall into shame. And so I'm really invested in you not falling into shame. So part of what the guilt honor dynamic does in communities where it's alive is it creates a community of mutual investment in one another's lives because we're all vulnerable to one another in a way that we aren't vulnerable to one another's guilt.

Bill Hendricks:
So I'm thinking of the apostle Paul, particularly in his letters to say the Corinthians, and this theme that you're describing maybe gives some insight into why he is so exercised over some of the sins and the egregious sins and the toleration of those sins among that community. It's not simply a, "Oh, you are doing a morally bad thing." There is that. But it's more, "You're disgracing the name of Jesus. I'm feeling disgraced. I can't even talk about what you're doing."

Gregg Ten Elshof:
Yeah, that's shameless.

Bill Hendricks:
Shame, yeah.

Gregg Ten Elshof:
He was accusing them of being shameless. The prophet Jeremiah has this really nice image of people who've lost their ability to blush, and that's a really nice picture of shamelessness, when you don't even blush anymore when you're discovered doing what you're doing. And I think Paul was worried that folks in some of his churches had lost their ability to blush, and so he was saying these things, as he says, "To your shame. You should be ashamed of yourselves." And they weren't.

Bill Hendricks:
And then that raises a current day question, I suppose, and it's one that probably deserves a whole podcast at some point on The Table. What do churches, what do Christians do with their disgraced leaders? Where we have not only moral wrongs or we violated the code of conduct that the New Testament prescribes for us, but the person having been, like you said, they have this social capital, they have this position, this power, this authority, this name, whatever, recognition, and because of their sin, suddenly they fall within that social grew group that was so important to them. And just as you said, the shame is contagious. So their wife, their family, now the whole... We've lost this position with these standing with these people. And we could talk about repentance in that, but it's more what happens for those people? Do we just put them on the shelf? Do we banish them? Do we put them out in the desert? Or is there some way that we recover?

Gregg Ten Elshof:
Yeah. It's a great question, and you'll understand my hesitancy to say anything in general. So many of these things, the details matter.

Bill Hendricks:
The details matter.

Gregg Ten Elshof:
And so it's hard to say in a perfectly general way what we should do. It's easier for me to say what we should not do. It seems to me what we should not do is what you were saying at the end there, cutting them off, putting them in a desert, and treating them as though they're a monster, a pariah, what have you? That certainly is not the model of God toward us so far as we have fallen into shame, and we have fallen into shame. The model of God toward us is to condescend, to lower himself to our position, to identify strongly with us. And so honor us and try to rescue us from the shame that we've fallen into. And so many of the stories of Jesus, I think of the prodigal son, for example, communicate this image of someone who's fallen into shame and deserves to be in the shameful condition that they're in. And the father running to them, risking his own dishonor by embracing his son, identifying his son, throwing a feast in honor of his son and so forth.

Bill Hendricks:
And actually, he is shamed by his other son.

Gregg Ten Elshof:
That's right. So I think in the kinds of situations you're describing, we will almost certainly risk our own shame, risk being dishonored, if we do for the person what God has done for us. So it's vulnerable.

Bill Hendricks:
And yet, it reminds me of the parable of the guy that owes a sum of money and the guy says, "We'll pay up." And he finally says, "I can't pay." And, "Okay, I'll forget the debt." And then he goes out and finds some guy that reports to him who just owes a pittance and just grabs a guy and throttles him to get his money back.

Gregg Ten Elshof:
Yeah, it's easy to forget just how-

Bill Hendricks:
What we've been given.

Gregg Ten Elshof:
What we've been given and how deeply we ourselves have fallen into shame. We just haven't blown up on Twitter, and this other person maybe has.

Bill Hendricks:
Yeah. Well, and I can see why Jesus telling that parable of the prodigal son would invoke the shaming of his detractors. This would be unthinkable in that culture.

Gregg Ten Elshof:
Yeah, yeah. Right. Exactly.

Bill Hendricks:
Interesting. You've used the word shaming, let's jump from shame to shaming, and A, what that is, and then why that seems so toxic.

Gregg Ten Elshof:
Yeah, so part of what I want to say is that contemporary culture has things exactly backwards in this respect. We've come to be increasingly suspicious of shame as an emotion, thinking that it's toxic, it's unhealthy and so forth.

Bill Hendricks:
And moving towards shamelessness.

Gregg Ten Elshof:
And moving toward shameless... But at the same time, we seem to be increasingly embracing of the activity of shaming. And social media has just given this activity a kind of power boost. We can shame people now in a much bigger audience than we could have 20 years ago. And I think that's exactly backwards. I think we should be less suspicious of felt shame because it is an important warning signal for us, and we should be more suspicious of shaming. And so not that there's never an occasion where shaming is appropriately done, but I think it's a really dangerous activity. It's like anger. We don't want to say you should never get angry. But man, you get got to be careful with anger. I think shaming is like that. I don't think it's quite right to say that it's never okay to shame anybody, but man, it's easy to do it badly, and it's done badly much more frequently than it's done well.

Bill Hendricks:
Oh, absolutely. Twitter, much of social media, it amounts to a form of road rage. Because I don't really see you as a person, but I talk about you and I denigrate you and I I say all these terrible things. I shame you.

Gregg Ten Elshof:
Yeah. And it's just uncontrollable. There's such a thing as causing someone to feel a little bit of shame when they're being shameless in their environment in a controlled conversation where it's just you and that other person or it's you and in a few people or whatever. But Twitter is a completely uncontrollable environment. As soon as you shame someone in social media, you risk their becoming just a monster in the global community of other human beings. And I think it's just impossible to do that as an act of love. And so I think that's the good test question. If you're thinking about shaming someone because you think that what they need, the question you always have to ask is, "Can I do what I'm about to do as an act of love for this person, not as an act of love for other people, although that's important too, but can I love this person by doing what I'm about to do?" And I think it's just impossible to love someone by making them a monster in the larger community of human beings.

Bill Hendricks:
But it may not be impossible to facilitate, I'll use that word, enable them to feel that little bit of bad. Like, "Oh, I've done something or I've-"

Gregg Ten Elshof:
"I've become something."

Bill Hendricks:
"Become something that I really don't want to become." And it's okay.

Gregg Ten Elshof:
Yeah. It's just Twitter's not the place to do it.

Bill Hendricks:
Well, the Puritans, I guess they'd put people in the stocks.

Gregg Ten Elshof:
Yeah, that's right.

Bill Hendricks:
And everybody'd come by all day and-

Gregg Ten Elshof:
Yeah. I think it's very difficult to justify that, it seems to me.

Bill Hendricks:
Yeah. You touched on it, let's talk about shaming in our political discourse today. You've made the point it's difficult to love someone by shaming them. And so when we talk about trying to formulate policy, if our politic discourse descends into lots of shaming, then we're not really talking, we're not really discussing anything. It's a brutal combat.

Gregg Ten Elshof:
Yeah, it's a power play. Yeah, yeah. Oftentimes in political discourse, just too often in political discourse, the primary goal is not heightened understanding. We don't have a political debate in order that we might both come a little closer to seeing the truth. Maybe you and I would, but that's just the very rare political conversation that's aimed at something like that. It's aimed at winning. "We're engaged in this political discussion because I've got a side and you've got a side and I want my side to win in this discussion and you want your side to win in this discussion." And one very powerful resource for winning in conversation is silencing. "If I can just render your voice unhearable, then I will have won."

Bill Hendricks:
So we just keep ramping up the volume.

Gregg Ten Elshof:
Yeah, so we just keep ramping up the volume or-

Bill Hendricks:
Or the frequency.

Gregg Ten Elshof:
Or diminishing the volume of the other.

Bill Hendricks:
Right. There you go.

Gregg Ten Elshof:
And that's where shame comes in. "You've got a voice now, but if I can shame you-"

Bill Hendricks:
"If I can cancel you."

Gregg Ten Elshof:
Yeah. "If I can cancel you," which is a manifestation of shaming. "If I can shame you and give your person less weight, less significance, less consequence in community, that's a way of silencing your voice. And if I can silence your voice, then my side wins." And so it's sort of a competition who can shame the other side more effectively. And that just doesn't get anybody any closer to the truth, it seems to me.

Bill Hendricks:
So I believe Philippians II, elsewhere probably in the New Testament, the flip side of this is given. Honor one another. Esteem one another. Which I think in our context, we tend to read as, "Oh, let me tell Gregg what a nice person he is. Let me make him feel good by telling him some flattering things." What I'm hearing you say is, and I don't have the Greek in front of me, but that's not the sentiment Paul's trying to get at there. Honor means the flip side of shame. This person is your brother or sister in Christ, made in the image of God, for whom Christ died. Start there and love on this person so that they experience the good.

Gregg Ten Elshof:
Yeah. And if you want to honor me, the first thing to say is, if you want to honor me, don't talk to me. Don't tell me how good you think I am. Talk to everybody else about how good I am.

Bill Hendricks:
There you go. Right.

Gregg Ten Elshof:
When you're talking to everybody else about how good I am, then I'm elevated social in community. Then I get that social capital. So I think all of this language aimed at honoring one another, esteeming one another, invites us to think about who it is in our communities who've been dishonored. Who is it in our communities that have little voice, little significance? I think, for example, that people with visible impairments and disabilities tragically are thought of as people of lesser consequence in our communities. Nobody wants to do that. Nobody says, "Yeah, that's what I think. I think people who have visible impairments are of lesser consequence." Nobody consciously does this, but they are treated-

Bill Hendricks:
There's a thousand nonverbal ways of communicating.

Gregg Ten Elshof:
That's right. And they're treated as people of lesser consequence. So what does it mean to honor them? What it means to honor them is to find ways as people who have social capital to identify with and get a voice to those people, give them the seat of authoritative voice at our tables. And when we do that, we're lifting people out of shame. We're honoring them.

Bill Hendricks:
We actually have a beautiful example of that here in Dallas. You probably haven't heard of this guy, but Tom Landis is an entrepreneur, restaurateur. He's owned several restaurants, but he's always had a heart for special needs people. He's always employed at least one or two special needs people in his restaurant. And then the thought came to him, special needs people, they do grow up, they need to be employed, and there's actually certain kinds of jobs that are quite appropriate for them and they can do extremely well. So he's created, it's really an ice cream shop, a store, Howdy Homemade Ice Cream. The entire staff, including the management, and he's working on making somebody the owner, is staffed by special needs people. And he's beginning to franchise that model, and so forth. But the whole heart behind it is these are people who lack that sort of social standing, but they're people made in the image of God and they need employment. I want them to have that dignity. And it's an expression of what you're talking about. I'm going to honor these people.

Gregg Ten Elshof:
That's right. And once you start moving in that direction, it's easy to identify communities of people who have little voice and little standing. Homeless folks are paradigm examples of... So how can we go beyond caring for their sustenance needs and into honor? Can we be creative about generating opportunities to give them voice, to give them significance in weight, or people with gender dysphoria or who are same sex attracted in our churches? In many of our churches, they're thought of as people of lesser consequence for these reasons. What kind of voice can we give them that would honor them? And that one's tricky because we want to do that without compromising our theological commitments and the like of that, but still we're to honor one another.

Bill Hendricks:
Well, and the phrase that comes to my mind when heard through the honor, shame dichotomy, in as much as you have done it to the least of these, least is a ranking term, right?

Gregg Ten Elshof:
That's right, yeah.

Bill Hendricks:
And so we're somewhere on this honor, shame continuum. He's saying, well, what about the folks down toward the bottom?

Gregg Ten Elshof:
That's right.

Bill Hendricks:
Yep. Even a cup of cold water in my name, it's as if you've done it to me.

Gregg Ten Elshof:
Yeah, yeah. I think it's an explicit invitation to honor the dishonored.

Bill Hendricks:
Now, we live in a performance oriented culture. So those of us who have privilege, who've had access, who've had opportunities and options, we tend to think of honor as, "I'm going to make something of myself. I'm going to be a big deal in whatever deal I want to be big in." Is that going against this whole way of thinking?

Gregg Ten Elshof:
Yeah. Part of what's going on there has to do with the hubris and esteem dynamics. So I want to think well of myself, but usually when people want be a big deal, it's not just that they want to succeed and they want to think well of themselves, they want to be thought well of by others too. I don't want to just do well in secret. I want to be seen doing really well in the communities that matter to me. And when that happens, I think it's an expression of this very natural impulse to seek honor. And in the Escaton, we are destined for glorious right honor, for a place of work and responsibility in God's great kingdom. So this impulse to be honored in a community that matters is an expression of where we're headed, at least according to the Christian vision, it seems to me.

Bill Hendricks:
You make a point in the book, and I've delayed in asking about it. I think many of our listeners would tend to say, "Well Gregg, this honor shame thing, I guess you picked that up when you were in China because here in the west, we're guilt innocence." I'll just give the punchline, you knock that down in your book.

Gregg Ten Elshof:
Yeah, there's a kernel of truth in it, which is that the recent Western ethos, the Anglo Western ethos anyway, is, as we were talking about earlier, an individualistic ethos. And insofar as it is individualistic in its ideals, it's harder to find a home for the shame honor dynamic. Because if you don't care about your standing in community, you're not going to care about shame and honor. But the bigger truth is that both in the east and in the west, all of the main wisdom traditions that have shaped culture, starting from the Greeks, informing the Western canon and starting from Confucius and the Dallas traditions, all of these traditions have valued the shame honor dynamic, and that's because they've been and communal traditions, they've been traditions that recognize the importance of belonging in community for flourishing or for living well. We're sort of an anomaly in the contemporary Western ideals, insofar as we can't find a home for shame and honor.

Bill Hendricks:
And so with all of this recent push to toss shame off the ship, as it were, you're saying you might want to tap the brakes on that?

Gregg Ten Elshof:
Yeah, I think it's-

Bill Hendricks:
You may be giving something away you didn't want to give away.

Gregg Ten Elshof:
That's right. And I don't think we're so far gone that we can't see that we're giving away something that we don't want to give away. One way to catch a glimpse of that is I'll often ask people, "What do you think of shamelessness? If somebody called you shameless, would you receive that as a compliment?" And most people still today, as steeped as we are in individualism, most people would not count it a compliment if someone called them shameless. But if shamelessness is a vice, it's the vice of not feeling shame where shame is apt. And if not feeling shame where shame is apt is a vice, then there are conditions where shame is apt. And then the question is just what are those conditions?

Bill Hendricks:
Well, it seems like when somebody is young, they do a lot of things that then later when they grow up and get a different perspective on life, they look back and they'll say, "I'm so ashamed of what I did back there."

Gregg Ten Elshof:
"I'm so ashamed." Yeah. Yeah, right.

Bill Hendricks:
And what I'm hearing you say is, "Well, that might not be all bad."

Gregg Ten Elshof:
Yeah, it might not be all bad. Like all other human emotions, it can run amuck. And there is such a thing as chronic shame, just as there's such a thing as chronic guilt and chronic loneliness, chronos having to do with time. So to experience chronic shame is to be all the time feeling what you were just describing. I'm just persistently feeling ashamed of myself. And if you're experiencing chronic shame, that'll wreak havoc on your emotional life and on your mental health, and you'll need to be rescued. You need help. So I don't want to be heard to say that there's no such thing as unhealthy shame, shame can go off the rails like any human emotion. And when it does, it's powerfully destructive. There are a lot of people who, for whom, shame has just undone them and they need to be rescued from the destructive effects of shame in their life.

Bill Hendricks:
Well, I know you're a philosopher, not a psychologist. But while you're on that point, from your perspective, and having thought deeply about this, what do you say to the person who really is wrapped up in sense of shame? "I'm ashamed of myself. I live with this deep sense that I'm not worthy."

Gregg Ten Elshof:
Yeah, and this is somebody who's off the rails, as it were. They're persistently having this experience. It'd be a little bit like if somebody was feeling lonely all the time, they just couldn't escape that feeling of loneliness, even when they were surrounded with companions who cared for them, we wouldn't say to that person, "Well, loneliness is a toxic emotion. You got to stop feeling that altogether." Because loneliness is an important warning signal. What we would say is we'd try to help them to appreciate the companionship that's around them. We'd say, "Look at Fred over here. Fred loves you. Look, he just brought you dinner. This is great." We'd try to highlight for them the companionship that they enjoy in order to get their feelings in line with what's real. When a person is just persistently and chronically in shame, what we often need to do is just remind them of their glorious nature as an image bearer of the creator of the universe. You are magnificently made.

Bill Hendricks:
We take them to the honor side of the equation.

Gregg Ten Elshof:
That's right. That's right. So what we don't say is, "Oh, that painful feeling you're having, that's toxic."

Bill Hendricks:
"Let's get rid of that."

Gregg Ten Elshof:
"Let's get rid of that." What we say is, "There's another side to this."

Bill Hendricks:
And that bad feeling should drive you to your knees to be in the presence of God, as well as other believers, to pay attention to that.

Gregg Ten Elshof:
Yeah. I use the example in my book, if you've got a warning light in your car that's gone haywire, for me it's the light that tells you got to change your oil, if it's just always on even when you don't need an oil change, it's really tempting just to cut the wire, just disable that warning system. But we can all see that'd be a mistake.

Bill Hendricks:
That'd be a big mistake.

Gregg Ten Elshof:
That'd be a big mistake. We need that warning light. What we want is for the warning light to be sensitive to the condition of your car. And what on is for our emotions to be regulated. We want them to be sensitive to what's actually going on.

Bill Hendricks:
Well, speaking of warning lights, we are now out of time. I hate to cut this short. I feel like we've just gotten started. But I want to thank you, Gregg, for being with us. The book, again, For Shame: Rediscovering the Virtues of a Maligned Emotion. Thank you very much for writing it.

Gregg Ten Elshof:
Thank you.

Bill Hendricks:
And I want to thank you for joining us on The Table podcast. Again, we discuss issues of God and culture. We invite you to subscribe to The Table on your favorite podcasting site. I'm Bill Hendricks, come back and see us.