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ABSTRACT
Philosophical views defending shame as a catalyst for moral virtue are at odds with empirical data indicating that shame often yields psychologically unhealthy responses for those who feel it, and often motivates in them morally worse action than whatever occasioned the initial shame experience. Our interdisciplinary ethnographic study analyzes the shame experiences of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) conservative Christians and the church members who once shamed them but are now allies. In this context, shame, humility, and proper pride work together amid hierarchies of social power to influence peoples’ motivation, ability, or lack thereof to love and care for others. Shame may catalyze virtue, but not where it has been imposed as a chronic disposition.
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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Notes
1. LGBT is an abbreviation for a number of categories often invoked together because of the similar challenges their existence poses to complementarian thought, but people do not always talk about all of these categories and sometimes they include others. The reader is most likely familiar with the terms lesbian and gay. Bisexual refers to people who have the capacity to be attracted to another person regardless of that person’s sex or gender. Transgender refers to people whose gender identity does not match the sex they were assigned at birth; it includes those who are of the other binary sex category as well as those who identify with no sex/gender or in between sexes/genders. Our analysis here focuses primarily on lesbians and gay men, as they are talked about the most. Bisexual, trans, and intersex people face similar dynamics, complicated by evangelicalism’s general lack of discourse around them.
In addition to those referenced in LGBT, this movement also sometimes includes people who for a variety of reasons identify as queer (Q), but since most people who identify as queer also identify as something else on the list, and because queer has so many meanings, we omit it from our analysis. Intersex (I) refers to people whose bodies are born not conforming to binary ideas about sex, and intersex people are often misgendered from birth. This movement sometimes embraces asexuals (A; experiencing no sexual desires) and/or Native American two-spirit people (2S; embracing traditional third and fourth sex categories/roles). We do not have enough data to speak to these categories. The refusal to acknowledge the existence of all of these categories causes much of the harm discussed here.
2. Cisgender means agreeing with the sex assignment given at birth; not transgender.
3. We leave open the possibility that anger may be a morally appropriate and psychologically healthy response in extreme conditions of structural injustice or oppression that routinely assault their personhood and psyche (hooks, Citation1995; Lugones, Citation2003).
4. Alicia Crosby, of CFI, assisted us by interviewing LGBTQI people of color who might not have wished to be interviewed by white women. After being briefed on our interviewing methods by Moon, she conducted 40 of our 113 interviews, averaging 60 minutes.
5. As a qualitative sociologist, Moon trained Tobin in these methods.
6. Guilt stops the action and can reset the agent on a different, better course of action to redress the transgression; shame freezes agency, signaling that the self is bad and not just its activities—that the self one is threatens the social bond (see Lewis, Citation1992, p. 35).
7. Some psychological studies of shame measure what they call dispositional shame, by which they mean the degree to which a person is shame-prone or disposed to feel shame, which seems to lead to poor psychological and behavioral outcomes (see summary of this work in Deonna, Raffaele, & Teroni, Citation2012, especially pp. 42–67). We speak of ‘dispositional shame’ slightly differently, to indicate situations in which shame has become instilled in the person as an enduring emotional outlook.
8. Lewis (Citation1992, pp. 164–173) reports that chronic shame often becomes pathological and can in severe cases result in psychological disorders including narcissism and multiple personality disorders.
9. ‘Ex-gay’ therapies often suggest that homosexuality or gender variance can be healed. Many conservative Christians started to accept that these did not work in 2013, when the president of the ex-gay umbrella organization, Exodus, shuttered the organization and went on US cable television to issue an apology to all he and the ministries had harmed.
10. Similarly, Mason (Citation2010) argues that the shameless person makes their self-concept definitive of who they are and places no other-regarding constraints on what they will allow themselves to be. The shameless aren’t vulnerable to experiencing a gap between their self-concept and the moral identity their actions or other people expose them to be.
11. Thomason’s argument rests on a distinction between morally good outcomes and moral value independent of outcomes. Her point is that even in cases where feeling shame leads to morally bad outcomes, the liability to feel it retains moral value independent of those outcomes because it indicates the presence of humility: a person’s self-understanding responding to others’ experiences of them.
12. Roberts (Citation2016) says, ‘If you are a white supremacist, we will deny that you are overall virtuous; your fundamental project, after all, is despicable despite [being egoistically disinterested]. But I think we have to admit that you have the virtue of humility’ (p. 187).
13. Arrogance also closes people off to others as a source of self-knowledge and mutuality, but in a different way. Shamelessness means a person is invulnerable to feeling shame. By contrast, the arrogant are highly vulnerable to feeling shame but also highly likely to deny that vulnerability and to bypass their shame, which is another reason to doubt the inference from a liability to feel shame to humility.
14. See, for instance Baldock (Citation2014), Gritter (Citation2014;) and Marin (Citation2012).
15. Narvaez (Citation2014) gives a neurobiological explanation and defense of the argument that the balanced, ethically virtuous self is buoyed by two sides of a single virtuous disposition—humility (healthy vulnerability to/love of others) and virtuous pride (healthy forms of self-love) (pp. 302–305).
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Notes on contributors
Theresa W. Tobin
Theresa W. Tobin is an Associate Professor of Philosophy and Associate Dean in the Graduate School at Marquette University. She researches topics on the emotions and moral virtue under conditions of gender-based and related forms of oppression with a special focus on questions that arise at the intersections of gender, sexuality, and religion. Her recent work examines the nature and moral significance of spiritual violence.
Dawne Moon
Dawne Moon is an Associate Professor of Sociology at Marquette University who studies emotions, gender, sexuality, and religion. She is author of God, Sex, and Politics: Homosexuality and Everyday Theologies(University of Chicago 2004) and has published articles in such journals as the American Journal of Sociology, Hypatia, Theory and Society, and the Annual Review of Sociology.