Western Guilt

Put on your Social Science reading cap.

Perhaps you recognize that a cultural bias can steer genetics. A social milieu creates a bias that offers better survival rates and transference of genes for those who match the dominant social mythology. It is widely recognized that Anglo-Saxons belonged to a cluster of similar cultures that survived well in the harsh northern climes. It is also recognized that said northern cultures are also saddled a powerful element of guilt. That is, our natural sense of empathy carries the added heavy emotional burden not noticeably present outside the cluster of northern European cultures. (Other cultures have their own brands of weirdness.)

It’s only a side note that said social mythology and selective breeding also makes us more ripe for manipulation by psychopaths with some talent. It’s part of a complex of factors that we take for granted from inside the culture, but is notably different when you get outside of it. Thank God for very talented social scientists arising from other cultures, helping us to see this. Their psychopaths, by the way, have a much rougher time of it. Still, it’s important to note that so very much of what I fuss about in American Christian religion arises from the powerful emotive power of false guilt and how it makes us vulnerable to manipulation. Take a moment and think about the emotion-wrenching “altar call” so common in American evangelical worship. It’s bullshit.

In North America generally, and in the US particularly, this cultural and genetic conditioning for guilt-ridden sensitivity has reached a fever peak. Think about it long enough and you see it’s part of what makes us wacko about how we treat the rest of the world, in that we unilaterally demand they feel that guilt or suffer serious abusive treatment. “What the Hell is wrong with you?” It is part of what made us so obsessively productive in past decades (fearing failure), but its fundamental falsity is part of why the whole thing is collapsing. Meanwhile, we have managed to infect a large part of the rest of the world with varying degrees of artificial guilt.

So we Westerners struggle mightily with this false guilt, and it’s not at all what folks in the Bible felt. It’s a little hard to explain because our guilt reflex is screaming so damned loud in our ears. It’s a much higher fever pitch of what others feel, but it’s also a different kind of thing entirely. The main problem is the vast oceanic depth of emotion with which we invest this whole thing. It takes some serious time in prayer and contemplation to recognize there is something very wrong with the hyper-guilt that was so artfully institutionalized in the Victorian Age. While that cultural mythos still rides us hard in later generations, you’ll find the epitome of what Victorian social mythology meant to do in the Baby Boomer generation. The conflict between implacable guilt and total inability to perform good enough has made us wacko.

And our Christian missionaries carried that filthy rot everywhere they went. We have infected the world with our weird religious nonsense and a lot of folks who should know better are highly Americanized in their Christian beliefs.

While cynicism is not precisely the opposite, it does serve as an intellectual antidote to false guilt. You really have to start being cynical about the person in the mirror first. Once you stop taking yourself so seriously, it’s easier to recognize what biblical repentance is all about.

We get the word “repent” from the idea of turning around. It hardly matters what direction you were going, it wasn’t the right one. It wasn’t the path God laid out for you. The farther you went, the tougher and longer the path back in the right direction. The one true test of moral awareness is a sense of morality and justice weighed against you. The problem is that the depth of emotional guilt can be so utterly crippling. It makes you want to stop and grovel long after God is ready for you to get up and get back to work. A genuine sense of guilt makes you take yourself less seriously. You easily fess up to your weakness and failure, but genuine repentance is the resolve and power to turn around and find the right path.

God doesn’t have the precise same path for any two of us. There is a broad area of overlap, but even under Moses there was a dire need for prophets who could get a word from God about contextual and individual variations that the Law couldn’t answer. Jesus made it clear that the Law of Moses was both weaker and more restrictive than would apply outside of the context of early Israeli history. The moral justice of God is not about rules but character — His character. Not some objective body of propositional statements about His character, but God the Living Person has all the dynamism you would expect from a real person. You can’t know all there is to know about Him, so you can only know what little your feeble existence can experience of Him.

We are supposed to build spiritual families based on sufficient similarities in experience that we don’t rub each other raw with our uniqueness. It’s not some kind of conformity, but harmony. We seek to harmonize ourselves with whatever we can grasp of His justice in our context and this sets free the moral character of God in our lives to activate all those blessings summed up in the word shalom. Those blessings have been there all along, waiting for you to recognize them. That includes recovering some measure of things we lost in all that time we chased the wrong path. There is nothing inappropriate about trading some false emotional guilt for a sense of disappointment at what you could have had and didn’t get.

Our biggest problem in the West is that massive ocean of emotional sewage connected with false guilt. This is a critical part of what keeps yanking us back into the particularist model of rote obedience, of literal-minded processing of imponderable moral drives, and all the other things that disembowel our obedience to the Holy Spirit. We keep trying to assuage the emotional guilt by acts meant to balance out our karma, as it were. The false guilt is a major distraction from the real issue in our sin.

That deep affliction of emotion is a lie.

(Thanks to Sister Wildcucumber for asking probing questions. Sometimes the smartest person in the room isn’t the one with all the answers, but the one who asks the right questions.)