Religions historically start with division of the world into things that are impure and things that are pure.
Jesus went to a lot of trouble to help us around this basic impulse. So did Paul. It caused problems, is why, and it ran, as they both pointed out, counter to basic scripture.
But people have done it, this pure-versus-impure thing, for as long as there have been people. It’s something we seem to like to do, down on an anthropological level. If we’re not frightened of Sadducees or eaters of shellfish, we’re afraid of terrorists, or Liberals, or Communists, or people in MAGA hats. They’re impure, and we know that by shunning them, we ourselves will be better, purer, people.
We express this in our religious lives as a need to be righteous. Evangelicals want proof that they are Saved, Mormons have protocols for being Worthy, Catholics fret over being Absolved. All denominations do it. Is there an intrinsic sense of shame in us? That we’re just not good enough as we are (distinct from what we do)? Is this what drives so many of us to church (or drives us away)?
Maybe shame is the very point at which we can dismantle this polarising, oppositional Purity habit we all seem to have.
God told us, in the allegorical story of Adam and Eve, that we were without shame as he made us. Shame is an invention of our own. Far from thinking we’re shameworthy himself, God was outright cross with first this couple in Eden for feeling somehow shamed by themselves.
And yet we do what they did. Every human I’ve ever met (and that includes me) feels a foundational inadequacy, a sort of dirtiness – a basic default setting of being Unworthy. This exists in religious settings and in our lives in general, when we aren’t speaking (knowingly) about religion.
It isn’t necessarily shame over things we’ve done, either. It’s an ontological understanding of ourselves as bad. We are by definition wrong, just kind of out of step with the Universe, as even the spiritual-but-not-religious people like to say. For the religiously-inclined, resigned talk about being part of a fallen world makes this seem all the more correct.
It’s a circular argument, if you think about it. We see bad things in ourselves, as individuals and as a race. We think this confirms a basic badness. Being bad people, of course we do bad things. And so on.
Our habitual remedy for this is to imagine that if we behave correctly, we will be better people – our definition will change, as it were, and we’ll be free of the shame of being bad. Those of us who are religious have it that we’ll ‘get right with God.’ Right behavior leads to mystical union and transformation.
The Bible has it the other way ‘round. Mystical union in fact makes us behave better. More accurately, it shows us the truth about ourselves: that we are not by definition bad.
For there is an antecedent goodness implied in this scripturally-warranted reality – an assumption that we are, by definition, not at all bad (though, yes, we may do bad things). To put it another way, the shame that we think distances us from God, and that seems so natural to us as part of being human, is an artefact solely of our own construction.