SHOULD WE BRING BACK SHAME?

The Suicide of Lucretia by Albrecht Dürer

Abortion at five months for whatever reason you like!

Sleeping with a thousand men for money.

A price on sperm and eggs.

Blending people in petri dishes.

Slap a price on the miscarriage that your surrogate might experience.

Yes, we can hide the identity of the biological father from the child you commissioned.

It’s YOURS after all. You paid for it.

Fair and square.

Men competing against women in sports.

Why not use AI to doctor images of women to pleasure yourself?

You’re free.

And we’re here.

This is our norm, and it’s making many of us feel a little wonky, a little shaky, a little sea-sick.

So…should we bring back SHAME?

That is the question.

“It worked well for the WOKE,” I hear some folk say.

“Let’s beat them at their own game.”

As I’ve been poked, prodded, dropped, and cancelled for not toeing the “progressive” party line …a part of me screams, “Yes!”

We need some rules. We need some common sense. We need some good old-fashioned red-hot shame.

I’m going to explain why I think it’s toxic shame that got us here in the first place, and it won’t be toxic shame that will pull us out. But please stay calm and kind. I can already feel folks sharpening their shame in response to my “stupidity”.

It would make people laugh to think that it was the forgiveness and love in Christianity that moved me to the old church doors, as well as its stable stance on certain things. But funnily enough, it wasn’t shame. We do need to draw a line sometimes, and drawing a line is not the same as whipping someone with a way of thinking.

As I’ve expressed in other posts, it was a deep dive into environmentalism that landed me in Christianity. I did not expect to find myself here, but here I am.

My main reason for not getting on the toxic shame-train is…I’ve tried it. I gave it a good, long, and very hard go. The environmental movement, to its detriment, has been full of endless shaming…

“How many times do you fly in a year?”

“Where is that meat from?”

“Why are you even eating meat?”

“Do you need that car?”

“Is that a new dress? All my clothes are second-hand, made from natural fibres that Mother Earth herself wove together with gentle winds.”

“Was your great-grandfather a colonialist?”

“Have you decolonised…your mind?”

After years of shaming myself and others dressed up as motivational content, I realised to my horrible surprise….

Toxic shame doesn’t work.

People now know their newborns have plastic in their first mouth of breastmilk and are still unmoved.

It became clear to me that we have a spiritual sickness, an epic and existential loss of meaning that is far deeper than the disaster taking place in our natural world. My thought is that the eroding of everything we need to survive is simply a manifestation of the malady in our minds. We have lost connection to ourselves, to the next generations, to our ancestors, and in my eyes…God.

If you don’t like that word, God, replace it with whatever word you do like, because you know what I mean.

You know exactly what I’m talking about.

Toxic shame worked for the Woke temporarily, and that ugly era is coming to an end exactly because it doesn’t create lasting, meaningful transformation that outlives current trends.

“Yes, a man is a woman. Of course. My pronouns are she/her/they/them/what you will…are we still friends? Do I still have a job? “

This didn’t work.

The changes to our social norms that will bring the meaning, warmth, and unity we crave must come from our free will.

And toxic, relentless shame moves someone to change from the outside, not from an internal transformation.

Love is what moves a man to change.

Love is not fluffy or “anything goes”.

Love is…I trust that you will find your way. I trust that my example, the example of others finding deep meaning, beauty, and Truth will inspire others to follow.

I trust that I am not the one who knows.

Having faith means having faith, after all.

I believe the LGBTQ movement has gone way too far, and I was hurt when gay friends of mine suggested that my child was part of overpopulation.

It stung to think that the miracle of life and the sacrificial and sacred role of mother were frowned upon by a community of people I’d always defended and will continue to defend.

My reaction to this “going too far”, this ignorant ingratitude for Life, and this sting won’t be toxic shaming.

I’ll be spending my time and art highlighting the beauty found in family and men and women overcoming their epic but complementary differences to make meaning and life itself together—our most divine union.

This is powerful.

This will work.

That’s how much I believe in God.

That’s how much I respect a scripture that asks us to gently move forward together with forgiveness and hope.

Letting go of toxic shame doesn’t mean letting go of standards.

We have moved from “follow these rigid rules or you will be sent straight to hell.”

To…

“There are no rules, and anyone who has any kind of preference is a fascist.”

There is an in-between, a place where we say, “Here are the wonderful guidelines. I would recommend following them.”

As Jameela Jamil points out, shaming someone, being outraged, gives them a kind of power over you. Jamil refused to give away this power when responding to men who had used AI to create pornographic images of her to pleasure themselves.

I don’t usually agree with Jamil, but I think she’s onto something here. She explained how this was not about sex but about power. So instead of being outraged, she was going to pity these people. And from this pity as a tactic, she began to feel genuine pity and sadness for these men who were living such tiny lives.

Fury, shame, and anger morphed into genuine love.

And we should remember that it was people being so ready to respond to shaming that had them so quickly bow down to the Woke. It was those of us who could stand the epic shaming who stood our ground and insisted on feeling proud of, and loving toward, our ancestors, beautiful culture, and biological truth.

In Spain, there is an expression, “I have healthy envy.” We say this to people when we want to mean, “I want what you have, and it’s kind of a good thing to know, and it doesn’t make me any less thrilled for you.”

What if we created the concept of healthy shame? “I don’t think that’s a great idea. These are my stances on these issues. They are pretty solid in my mind. I feel confident speaking these publicly.”

And….

“I’m going to let myself feel the emotion of shame sometimes. I’m going to listen to it, hear it out, and try to understand what it has to say. Am I being selfish? Am I considering anyone else’s needs outside of my immediate desires?

Toxic shame wants people to fear a God, or a God conscience, that they don’t believe in or haven’t developed. They must know this God first before they will feel compelled to follow these guides, e.g., respecting mother and father, the miracle of life, our own bodies, and our beautiful home.

As I’ve stated, if we hadn’t been so susceptible to toxic shame, Woke wouldn’t have won many of us over in the first place. We would have recognised it immediately for what it is…a shameful and illegal overreach into the world of our free will and common understanding.

What changes people is example, and from there they do their own introspection. And there is also just the simple fact that we copy each other - we buy what others buy. We are deeply complex but also terrifyingly simplistic creatures.

I arrived at Christianity and changed my mind on many of my fundamental beliefs, not because of toxic shame but timeless warmth and welcome.

People will forget what you said, but people will never forget how you made them feel.

- Maya Angelou

We have forgotten the wise words of scripture because of how some people in the past used these words to make others feel. The last generations ran from this feeling and would not listen to the wisdom, the common sense, because the feeling was overbearing and insulting to their free will.

When people feel love, they change. When they feel fear, they hide.

And let’s not forget that toxic shame can confuse us and can ask us to create our hierarchy of truth that suits our poltics, “It’s okay that a billionaire is 5000 times richer than the average American by engaging in an industry that is ploughing the planet, but I don’t know why this girl is taking nude photos of herself and making money. Doesn’t she know that it’s a sin? Doesn’t she know it’s shameful?”

Or “My body, my choice….but these rich are going to hell for their outright abuse of the developing world and its citizens.”

My point is that the finger-pointing will never end, and it’s why Jesus was like, “Yeah, don’t do that.”

Toxic shame will silence people into not saying what they truly think, which will never help us reach a collective understanding.

Round and round in circles we will go.

Like I said, I’m getting a little seasick, so I’m stepping off the shame-train.

And if you, too, are sick of sharpening your shame and spearing a Godless world and feeling no results other than a stressful sense of self righteousness, there is another way; we can always remember that, “As iron sharpens iron, so one person sharpens another.”

Maybe instead of shaming one another, we could be satisfied sharpening each other instead…through conversation, experience, art that says the thing without saying it, that thing that has always made the secular world find Christians impossible to defeat….Love.

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