SHAME has come into focus in recent years, forced to the surface by social media, identity politics, concern about mental health, the prevalence of narcissism, and awareness that we human beings really aren’t very good at handling our power or responsibilities — for instance, as stewards of the natural world.
Gros’s short book, A Philosophy of Shame, offers a wonderfully helpful overview, showing that shame takes many forms and can be part of a healthy personality — problematic sometimes but, none the less, a genuinely valid and useful emotion. Hopkins, in contrast, in Toxic Shame in the Church: LGBT+ Christians at the edges of belonging, focuses on shame that is undeserved, diminishing, and imposed by others. Gros is a French philosopher offering wide-ranging objective reflections; Hopkins is a priest turned psychotherapist who offers an “autoethnography” that purposefully embraces vulnerability.
Shame is of our time, but, more than this, it is fundamental to who we are. Contrary to what is often believed and taught, shame is a more fundamental problem to us than guilt. Our trouble, that from which we need to be saved, lies not in the detail of what we have done or not done, but in something much deeper: something, perhaps, that the Prayer Book words “and there is no health in us” are awkwardly and not entirely accurately articulating. That’s shame’s territory. It is deep and difficult to put your finger on.
Hopkins is less interested in the shame that derives from our inadequacy in the face of our relational and ethical challenges than she is in the “toxic shame” inflicted by those who look on us with eyes of judgement. Her book is at its saddest when she relates experiences of being deliberately and cruelly shamed by Christians acting out of their faith convictions, and by the clumsiness of the institutional Church. It is at its brightest where she talks about person-centred therapy and the healing power of unconditional positive regard.
When others shame us, whether to belittle and condemn, or to encourage us to change in their approved way, they tap into our sense of inadequacy and encourage us to self-blame and even self-hate. It is effective as a form of diminishment and control precisely because it leverages our vulnerability. Shaming others really is a very nasty tactic of control.
The Church is an arena in which shaming is used manipulatively, and Hopkins gives excruciating examples from her own experience of being on the receiving end of both intentional and unintentional shaming. But the secular world is surely catching up.
It is very difficult not, for instance, to mis-speak. When you say the wrong thing, you are not guilty of something that you can apologise for and be forgiven for, but exposed in all your shame as the wrong sort of person — unacceptable. Such dynamics make relationships, never mind reconciliation, extraordinarily difficult.
Toxic shame is the shadow side of identity politics and the related morality of integrity, which supposes that each of us has a simple and reliable ethical and spiritual core. If only we could admit to being muddled in our views and multiple in our motivations (as those who know us intimately know us to be), we might find it easier to accept one another across difference. But, for those of an anxious disposition, especially those convinced of their own moral or spiritual superiority, this is too much to ask. The shame of being uncertain or wrong or unsound would be overwhelming.
And yet Pope Francis often spoke of “the grace of feeling ashamed”. This isn’t the toxic experience of being shamed by others, but part of the process of giving up on the image of our own perfection and omniscience. To be truly human is to know shame, but to be wise is to be ashamed of those aspects of ourselves which are actually shame-worthy, for instance, “foolishness and vulgarity of the mind” and a “know-it-all attitude”.
Hopkins’s struggle with toxic shame finds a therapeutic rather than an ecclesiological path to well-being and fulfilment; her problem wasn’t her denial of truth about herself, but the reaction of others to that truth. The cover blurb says that she now “dances at the edges of Church”, and she shows us both how painful and creative such edgelands can be, sharing with us the contents of her sacramental confession that concludes: “most of all my shame which causes me to hide and turn away from your heart of love”.
One of the many problems with shame, as Brenda Hopkins mentions early on, is that it is ashamed of itself. Uncomfortable and distressing, it is an experience that leads to silence and alienation; it tends to make us hide from others, from God, and from shame itself. These two very different books are much to be welcomed as worthy essays in this tricky territory of the soul as they encourage and enable the reader to look the realities of shame in the eye.
The Revd Dr Stephen Cherry is the Dean of Chapel at King’s College, Cambridge.
Toxic Shame in the Church: LGBT+ Christians at the edges of belonging
Brenda Hopkins
SCM Press £75
(978-0-334-06373-5)
Church Times Bookshop £60
A Philosophy of Shame: A revolutionary emotion
Frédéric Gros
Verso £16.99
(978-1-80429-415-4)
Church Times Bookshop £15.29
