Doesn’t it boil down to free-agency? Are your sins an inherent and unavoidable tragedy, like Oedipus’ unwitting killing his father and marrying his mother, shameful but no guilt? Or are your sins avoidable, based on choices to do wickedly, so you should feel guilty for it?

There is a fair amount of pre-destination type thinking in the Bible, “who sinned this man or his parents that he was born blind?” There are “chosen” people. Grace is unmerited. Adam’s transgression curses all mankind. God “hardened” Pharaoh’s heart. God “shuts their eyes and stops their ears.” “I will curse them up to the seventh generation.”

So when did the idea of free-agency enter civilization? It is clearly in the Book of Mormon, because that was translated by Joseph Smith, who had a strong sense of free-agency. So I would say the Book of Mormon is extremely guilt-based. But is there any free-agency in the Bible, along with accompanying guilt? I don’t know the history of the idea of free-will, and would be interested for any insights you might have as to when and where exactly guilt entered the Western Christian mindset.

If we see “guilt” vs. “shame” less as “I did bad” vs. “I am bad,” and more as “I harmed God and/or another and must privately atone to them” vs. “I transgressed society’s code and must publicly atone to it,” then the vs. almost goes away and is replaced by an and. Perhaps that’s another angle at reconciling the two viewpoints, or perhaps I’m paraphrasing or extending what Nate was getting at.

It seems to me that once we break the Brene paradigm, so to speak (and that’s still a speedbump in my brain), at some level “guilt” implies private recognition and repair, and “shame” implies public recognition and repair. Both are possible and perhaps necessary, and Psalm 51 may (subject to my cultural context) be something of an example – as Nate explains from the book, David met the public requirements, but also felt a personal responsibility toward God after having fulfilled those requirements.

Parenthetically, David’s actions in the Bathsheba situation remind me of practices like ancient Germanic weregild and, for that matter, the relatively-recent practice of shotgun weddings in the case of unintended pregnancies (he done right by the gal, after all). Is it possible that the Western move to a guilt-based society is fairly recent, and that effective and widely-available birth control contributed to the transformation? :)

Another example that comes to mind in the NT is the woman caught in adultery (John 8:1-11). Ignoring its suspect authorship, we have the Pharisees enquiring of the Savior whether or not the woman should be reconciled to the community by paying the shame price (death by stoning); he does not condemn her after establishing that no one is willing to witness against her, thus squaring the shame account. Finally he says, “Go and sin no more,” in effect admonishing her to reconcile her own guilt account. (This has often been misread, of course, by the “sola gratia” crowd as him forgiving her.)

Am I on something like the right track? This is an attempt to structure some developing thinking, so I beg your forgiveness for the unintended incoherence.

I think that while these proposed mental health definitions are indeed quite new, the phenomena have been central to psychotherapy since Freud. And while there is a significant difference in focus when describing cultures, I have a hunch the two are actually very closely related.

Nathaniel,

I want to believe that the two can be reconciled. I’m starting to get an idea of how I might do so, but trying to work it out all the way and get it into words can be tricky. I realized how under-developed the last sentence of my second post is. I like the connection you made with the Savior’s personal life. It helped me expand the thought more. It got me wondering about the intersection of cultures. In other words, what happens when someone living in a shame-based community, joins a guilt-based church? Or the other way around. Or if someone from a guilt-based culture immigrates to an area where shame-based culture is dominant? In these cases, multi-cultural theory proposes stages of acculturation in which, to some degree or another, individuals adopt parts of the new culture while retaining parts of the old. Would it matter what parts of each were adopted?

If there are beneficial and detrimental aspects of both shame-based and guilt-based approaches, couldn’t some combinations of the two be especially helpful and some combinations especially harmful?

A fellow in Elder’s quorum yesterday made the comment (about styles of member missionary work) that “God uses both types. Very effectively.” I think that comment is applicable here as well. Sometimes, God uses very stern and terrifying language to prompt repentance. Other times He issues a loving plea. Both approaches have been mis-used. Some individuals carry the stern approach to condemning or even hating “sinners.” Others promote love and tolerance to the point that no repentance or change is necessary. But if a leader, parent, or friend is in tune with the Spirit, they can be prompted to balance the two approaches in an optimal way for each individual.

The thing that really intrigues me is that God seems to understand that neither approach is really, truly, accurate. D&C 19 suggests that God uses language to touch hearts rather than to define Truth. It may depend on the situation and the person.

(Luk 12:2-3 NRS) ” 2 Nothing is covered up that will not be uncovered, and nothing secret that will not become known.
3 Therefore whatever you have said in the dark will be heard in the light, and what you have whispered behind closed doors will be proclaimed from the housetops.”

Couldn’t you consider New Testament teachings as encouraging people to at least consider a guilt-based perspective?

Well, just to be clear, I’m not saying that shame-based is superior to guilt-based. If I’m right and the two can be reconciled, then the Gospel ends up being the same in both cases, although it might be approached differently.

To your exact question: Christ certainly does seem to be moving towards an internal perspective from the purely external perspective. But I guess it’s not clear that internal is always guilt vs. shame. As I pointed out in the article, if people are self-regulating (which is internal) but they are doing so based on self-image (which is closely related to external), then it’s kind of a hybrid guilt/shame approach. And that might be what Christ was getting at.

In any case, however, it seems clear that the Paul and Peter (based on what Richardson and O’Brien write in their book) were still speaking firmly from shame-based cultural perspective in their epistles. This would indicate that, even if Christ emphasized internal asepcts more, the early Christian disciples were still living a form of Christianity that was natively shame-based instead of guilt-based. This would suggest that, at a minimum, Christ’s teachings were still compatible with shame-based culture and He didn’t actually require his disciples to transition from shame-based to guilt-based. I’m not actually sure that would have been possible.

I would also hazard that, as Christ had to learn what He learned in the flesh, He himself would likely have had a shame-based cultural outlook, at least initially. My guess would be that by the time His ministry was concluded he had transcended the either/or distinction, but that earlier in His life He would have taught and thought in a shame-based cultural outlook for the same reason that he taught and thought in Aramaic: it’s what He had learned.

That would seem to indicate that collectivist/shame culture is superior in a communal sense, but that it must be buttressed by individualist/guilt culture in order to possess true integrity.

The mental health definitions of shame and guilt seem to be a much more recent phenomenon. (Recent being the last 20-30 years, at least based on my reading.) Those mental health definitions also depend on English as a primary language. I would suggest looking more into collectivist vs individualist cultures and their sociological and anthropological definitions to better understand where the OP is coming from.

I’m definitely not trying to say the authors, or you, are wrong. I do get the impression that “shame” and “guilt” are being used differently in the context of a cultural vs. a more intrapersonal level. There’s nothing wrong with that, it is just hard when two (potentially overlapping) fields use the same words to describe different constructs.

From a mental health perspective, the trend seems to be moving toward encouraging people to reject shame while continuing to experience and honor feelings of guilt. We say that guilt moves people toward change, where shame is paralyzing. Shame moves us to hide from others and isolate, believing that if they knew the truth about us, they would reject us. Guilt moves us to connect with others through reconciliation and restoration. When integrating the gospel, shame is seen as a tool of the Devil to manipulate/coerce people. Guilt is more like “Godly sorrow.” So I often talk about a “shame-based culture” within some parts of the Church, where leaders or parents, often with the best of intentions, say things that make others feel that unless they meet a certain level of goodness, they are not acceptable. Individuals with perfectionistic tendencies tend to be more vulnerable to interpret these messages as shame-inducing.

So maybe that does relate to the idea of shame being external, or at least an internal prediction of external judgments. Where as the idea of guilt=bad action focuses on any action that violates an individual’s internal value system. If that is the case, I would argue that while guilt-based cultures may not be morally superior to shame-based cultures-in terms of ability to lead to virtue; perhaps the utility of shame/guilt based cultures depends largely on the nature of the individual. Maybe guilt-based cultures run a high risk of individuals developing self-serving values, while shame-based cultures run a higher risk of discouraging individuals who are striving, but not yet perfect.

I’m curious how you think this Shame-Guilt paradigm fits with the one that says Guilt=”I did bad” and Shame=”I am bad.” This is the general idea Brene Brown confronts in her popular work on shame and vulnerability.

I did a little reading this morning in some of the academic literature about shame vs. guilt, and there is no one, single, accepted definition. The guilt = event = did bad and shame = person = am bad is one of the common ways of looking at it, but that’s different from the concept of guilt-based and shame-based cultures. There, the emphasis is on the idea that guilt is (1) private/internal and (2) individualistic whereas shame is (1) public/external and (2) social.

I’m honestly not sure what the relationship between those two perspectives on shame / guilt may be. In some ways, they are almost opposite because shame = external seems to be the antithesis of shame = “I am bad.” In any case, in my piece I was focusing on the second category (internal vs. external and individualistic vs. social).

There’s definitely more to dig into here, however. This post is really just my initial reaction to something I listened to yesterday.