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Transcript

Gregg Ten Elshof: If you've fallen into deep shame, oftentimes the only way out is for someone with a lot of honor to spare to come and identify with you and say this person is with me. And then what happens is that person loses honor, right? They are shamed because of their identification with you, but you are lifted out of shame and you're able to partake of their honor. So in the incarnation and atonement, we have God running to us, as it were, condescending to the condition of the shameful human race, condescending all the way down to the point of naked and shameful crucifixion on a cross in order to say I'm with them.

Tim Muehlhoff: Welcome to the Winsome Conviction podcast. We broadcast out of the studio of ��ݮ��Ƶ in La Mirada, California. My name is Tim Muehlhoff. I'm a professor of communication here, and I am the spiritual mentor of Dr. Rick Langer. He doesn't talk about it much, but it's true, nonetheless. And he is also my co-host.

Rick Langer: And I am Rick Langer, and Tim often leaves me speechless. I have to admit it. I'm a professor of Biblical studies here, also the Director of the Office of Faith and Learning, and as Tim mentioned, we are both working with the Winsome Conviction podcast. One of the privileges we have is talking to some of our great colleagues, and one of those is Gregg Ten Elshof. And we've been having a series of conversations with him about the issue of honor and shame. It's one of those things we don't, I think, talk a lot about. It isn't a common discussion to have in our culture today, despite the fact that a lot of these things are going on. So it's been really fun. That's why I've taken the time to kind of dive in in depth.

One of the things we were talking about in a previous segment was just the issue of, perhaps as an example, on social media it seems really easy for a teenager to be shamed, but it doesn't seem like the honor part of the honor/shame actually comes back to them that well. And that got me thinking about the question of what does it look like to grant meaningful honor well within your community? We talked a little bit about negative postures towards shame and shaming within a community, and so I think we can develop an imagination for that, but if you were to help fertilize our imagination for what good honoring within a community would look like, it would be really helpful.

Gregg Ten Elshof: It's a good question, Rick. It pushes me past things that I've thought much about, so I'm grateful for it.

Tim Muehlhoff: We do that all the time here. Oh my goodness.

Gregg Ten Elshof: I think the way it goes with emotions sometimes is that they just are natural responses to what's happening. So you can experience shame without anybody shaming you. You can experience honor when you're elevated in a community, without anybody taking the time to honor you or honor you well. But we can sort of supercharge the effect of emotions by drawing attention to them, and by ... think, for example, of a kid who gets honored in his high school for his work in a class or whatever. You can imagine parents just thinking, well, my kid was honored at school. That's great. Honor has done its thing. No need for us to do any explicit honoring.

But even better, you might think, if the parents come home and they say, I know how you feel about your grades, beautiful, you're proud of yourself and so forth. How did it feel to have your name read in front of the whole auditorium? What were you feeling when that happened? And listen to the child try, with maybe some blushed embarrassment, to describe the way they were feeling and how it felt to have everyone looking at him or her and lifting them up in their estimation. So one of the things I think we can do to honor one another well in a society is just to pause long enough to attend to that emotional experience and let it have its full effect.

Rick Langer: Yeah, that's really a good provocative thought, because so often we do rush over those things, oftentimes because I can imagine that situation, your son or daughter feeling kind of embarrassed by the thing, and they don't want to talk about it. But on the other hand, for most of us, we kind of don't want to talk about it, but we kind of do, and there's something honoring about just being able to by creating an environment where that was invited and welcomed, as opposed to oh, you're just blowing your own horn or whatever.

Gregg Ten Elshof: Yeah. That's a parental example, but we can do this in our larger communities. It's a decision how much time you'll take to honor someone that you want honored, and sort of how you'll approach that. We can make decisions that draw more attention to these honoring opportunities.

Tim Muehlhoff: And those honoring opportunities, in the argument culture, are really easy to establish. This came to mind when you were talking. Remember just a month before the 2008 presidential election, Senator John McCain took a risk, because he defended Barack Obama. Remember, he was at a town hall meeting and it was open mic time, and a woman says that she could never trust President Obama, then she called him an Arab. And he stopped right then, and this is literally a quote what he said. He said, "No ma'am, he's a decent family member, he's a decent family man, he's a decent citizen. I just happen to have disagreements with him on fundamental issues, but that is not what this campaign is about, is denigrating another person." What a beautiful moment of saying, conferring honor upon people that might even surprise you that I'm conferring honor upon them. In today's argument culture, we've got to reclaim that in some ways. What a beautiful moment from the late John McCain.

Gregg Ten Elshof: Yeah. I mean, one of the things we learn from that is that honoring is more effective when it's less expected, or something like that. So when we honor people in our own communities in the argument culture, that is honor, but it doesn't have quite the same effect as when we honor people in the opposing culture, and that really packs a punch.

Rick Langer: You know, it strikes me, the analogy you gave earlier with having that conversation with your child to kind of heighten the awareness, it reminds me of a thing that is recommended in positive psychology literature about gratitude. We actually do exercises in expressing gratitude and identifying things for which you're grateful, but otherwise you just miss. So you kind of develop the skill of seeing that which is worthy of being grateful for. And it strikes me the same thing begins to happen, I could imagine people telling you, hey, we should be honoring others, and they say, you know, there's so much vitriol, I don't know what I'd be able to honor anybody for, and it's like that's exactly our challenge. It may be that the disproportionate number's dishonorable. I don't know, but we can find those things worthy of honoring if we're willing to look, and it actually is acquiring a skill where you're not making it up, you're just learning the skill of recognition. That was actually an honorable thing that person did.

Gregg Ten Elshof: Yeah, and so much of our habit of communication, I think, especially in the contemporary American setting, takes us in the opposite direction. It takes us in the direction of not paying attention to what other people think of us, as opposed to pausing and reflecting on how it felt to be looked at and honored in that way. We're constantly encouraged, don't worry about what other people are thinking. Either in a positive sense, don't do it for the praise of the other people, don't worry about what they think. Do it for an audience of one.

Rick Langer: Audience of one.

Gregg Ten Elshof: And when we do that, we move people away from sensitivity to these honor and shame dynamics.

Tim Muehlhoff: That's really good. Hey, I want to move on to one section. Oh, by the way, let me just mention real quick. As you were speaking, remember the podcast we did, Rick, where we took President Trump and we took President Biden and we each spent the entire podcast just alternating positives that we had noticed about both individuals based on our research, because we kind of went in with maybe not the most overly generous view, but then walked away, honestly, with a list that kind of surprised us of, if you look for it, there can be some things that you uncover that are worthy of honor.

Rick Langer: Yeah. Part of our rules were that these were real things.

Tim Muehlhoff: Yes.

Gregg Ten Elshof: That's a good rule.

Rick Langer: I was going to say you can't trump him up in some way. It's a weird phrase, but the point is it only works if you go no, no, upon reflection, this really is a thing that was honorable or worthy of being honored. Let me identify it

Tim Muehlhoff: And that's from positive psychology, is you can train your brain to do that. This is the work of Shawn Achor, all the happiness research that's been out there, gratitude research. You focus on the positives first. You don't ignore the negatives, that would be unhealthy, but what do you go to first is something Shawn Achor says you can actually train your brain to do, and I think that would be a great habit today.

Gregg Ten Elshof: Yeah, and the sensitivity to the shame/honor dynamic is most certainly a trained sensitivity. So if you've come up in a community informed by Confucian culture, you just notice these things. You notice even the slightest elevations and diminishings of social credit as they happen. You're profoundly sensitive to them. If you've come up in a contemporary American context, far less so. You won't be as sensitive to these dynamics.

Tim Muehlhoff: Hey, so I came across this actually in your book that surprised me, but was so grateful that you went in this direction. Race has been a huge issue for our podcast, and our listeners have been very interested in. We live in such a tumultuous time today when it comes to matters of race. So I was very pleasantly surprised when you decided to tackle white shame. You make an interesting point that if we're objective, there are things that have happened in our country that now we know were things that were egregious, the way certain people were treated within our history, and acknowledging that, you have this interesting quote. This is what you say. "Well, how should I feel about that? Guilt seems squarely out of place. I'm not guilty for having the ancestors, the gender or the skin color I have. Diminished self respect of self loathing seem equally out of place. After all, I have worked hard. My education, for example, was not handed to me on a silver platter, but what about shame?" And I thought this is a brave man, and I appreciate that you went there. So finish that statement, and you can set it up more if you want to, but what about shame when it comes to maybe white privilege?

Gregg Ten Elshof: Yeah, so one of the things that distinguishes shame from guilt is that you can't be guilty for anything you haven't done. Just as a conceptual truth, guilt attends to things you've done. You can, though, undergo shame for reasons having nothing to do with anything you've done. You can lose social credit, become a person of lesser consequence because of physical impairments, because you have a family member who's fallen into grievous moral error or whatever. So shame comes to us for a whole bunch of reasons that have nothing to do with what we've done. And then the suggestion is if I undergo shame, if I'm socially diminished and I don't feel the pain of that, then I'm shameless, because shame is the natural and appropriate response, the natural and appropriate affective response to the loss of standing.

And so when it comes to so called white shame, my thought was, well, with increasing recognition of the privilege that has come to white people in the contemporary setting, as people are more and more aware of that, the voices of white people are being diminished, intentionally so, taken down a notice so that voices of people of color can be elevated and can be heard. I think all of that is to be celebrated. But I'd be kidding myself if I said that doesn't hurt a little bit. It hurts to have my voice diminished for reasons having to do with the color of my skin, and that particular hurt that comes with social diminishing is just what has always been called shame. So do I feel some shame for being diminished as a white person, for having my voice taken down a notch? Yes. Am I ashamed of myself for being white? No. So to be ashamed of yourself-

Tim Muehlhoff: What a great distinction.

Gregg Ten Elshof: So to suffer shame is to feel the pain of being socially diminished, and I think anybody who is having their voice taken down a notch ought to feel that if their emotions are tracking reality. To be ashamed of yourself is to feel taken down a notch for reasons that you think can come back to something you've done, or something like that.

Tim Muehlhoff: Then you give a beautiful qualifier to just kind of put it in context. I thought this was just a great quote. "Juxtaposed against the intense shame women and people of color have experienced for generations, my experience of shame as a white male are almost embarrassing to discuss. Just as I suffer shame as a consequence of the disobedience of Adam and Eve," what an interesting insight, "I suffer shame as a consequence of the systemic exclusion and abuse of others that partially explains my station in life as a white man. My shame is not just a function of what I have and have not done." What a great reminder that some of the discomfort we're feeling now, and pain, I'm glad you said that. When you put it in context of how people have felt for a very long time, it does kind of say I need to relax a little.

Gregg Ten Elshof: Yeah, that's right. I wanted to put that in there because ... it wasn't in there at first, and when I read through it for myself, I thought, boy, this sounds like a whiner. I mean, it's true that there's pain associated with being diminished in your voice for being white, but my goodness, as compared to the pain that some of these marginalized groups have suffered, it's almost invisible.

Rick Langer: One of the things I've noticed in, gosh, as I think about it now, actually several classroom exchanges with students this has come up in different ways, is when we label things as white shame or white/black, male/female, whatever those distinctions are, there's a tacit totalizing of the person in question. So you are white, and that somehow describes all of you, and therefore the shame that you feel may be real, as you just described, but it's trivial compared to what black or women or whoever might feel. The rub is this white person, in fact I remember this student vividly saying this, look, I grew up as white trailer trash. And then he began to describe the rest of his life, and then pose a question, I'd like to know where my privilege was. It was one of those aha moments, because I'm looking around the rest of the room, and I would say the disproportionate number of the white students in my classroom would not be able to self describe themselves as having had that experience growing up.

And he's looking at this and saying, you know, there's some of the stuff that I got that really wasn't trivial, Gregg. I know you think I'm a white male, but I'm telling you, it wasn't all it was cracked up to be. Do you want to hear about my homeless phase? Do you want to hear about when my mom and dad, well, I don't even want to tell you the story. So these are these things that I think become problematic with the ... they puzzle me in terms of what to do with all of those dynamics, and I feel like right now we have a way of glossing over those kinds of nuances.

I had another student who was doing a very similar thing. She looked like one of the most put together people you could possibly imagine. She was successful and all that, but she talked about, well, my dad's in prison, he has been in prison for the last seven years, he'll probably be in for another 14 because he molested myself and my sister, and this has been A, an object of profound shame, but again, but I'm like quite successful, so what about me?

Gregg Ten Elshof: Yeah. This is why I just think labels and generalizations are dangerous. We have to make them because we have to talk about these things, but the task for every individual person is to ask the question, have I been elevated or diminished in communities that matter to me because of, for example, the color of my skin and my gender? In my own case, autobiographically, I think as I look back on things, I have to say, yes, I've had inordinate voice in the communities that matter to me, in part because of my gender and because of the color of my skin. That won't be true of everybody who has my color of skin or my gender, of course, but it will be statistically more true of people with my gender and my color of skin than it will be true for people with a different gender. And so we can make those statistical generalities, but very person has to ask this for themselves.

Rick Langer: My sense is one of the corollaries of all this is because shame if so profoundly community-oriented, the labeling issue amps up in importance, because that's how we group the judgments, so to speak. So perhaps we need a particular ability to attend to some of those differences, because otherwise it's easy to mask over them and kind of club people with a label.

Gregg Ten Elshof: Yeah, that's right.

Rick Langer: That become really hurtful on the other end, way beyond what you described. My suffering is minimal. It's like, true enough, and I would say the same for me as well, but on the other hand, I've been struck by some of the things I've heard. Again, just self report from my experience in the classroom with students.

Gregg Ten Elshof: Yeah, yeah.

Tim Muehlhoff: Gregg, you do a wonderful job of taking the concepts in the book and applying it to one of our favorite stories of Jesus, the prodigal son. And I thought your take on it was really helpful and insightful. So why don't you just give, based on your book, your take on the prodigal son, maybe what we're missing a little bit, maybe what we're overplaying.

Gregg Ten Elshof: Yeah. So I came up in settings that emphasized guilt, innocence and forgiveness in theological contexts, certainly in connection with the atonement, but also in connection with other aspects of the Bible, and the prodigal son story was just one of those. So you have a story of the younger son who asks for the inheritance early, goes off, everybody knows the story, engages in all kinds of wild living, and comes back. The way I had been taught to think about the story is that you had a son who comes back, and the father extends to the son undeserved forgiveness for the wrongdoing that he'd done. He was guilty, and he was given undeserved forgiveness and acceptance. And that was presented as a kind of picture of the cross, that God extends to us undeserved forgiveness for the wrongdoing we've done.

And as I read the story thinking about shame and honor, it just didn't come to me that way at all, first because it's not at all clear how, if at all, the son wronged the father. The son didn't steal the money from the father, the father gave it to him. It was his to squander, and he squandered it, and that was unwise, but it's not clear that he'd done anything wrong to the father by squandering it. He'd engaged in all kinds of immoral and impure behavior, but there again, that doesn't look obviously like wronging the father, doing anything wrong to the father. It doesn't look like the father had anything to forgive. And if you read the story carefully, you'll see the father never forgives the son. There's no indication in the story that the father extends forgiveness to the son.

But if you're reading it sensitive to the shame/honor dynamic, you'll see that it just bleeds with shame and honor. The son, by virtue of his wild living, falls into dishonor. He falls into a shameful existence. The story goes out of its way to say that he was living with the pigs, and if you're reading through a shame/honor lens, that just strikes you right away.

Rick Langer: Especially in a Jewish culture.

Gregg Ten Elshof: That's right, as a picture of someone utterly dishonored. And when the son comes back, one of the first things that happens is you see the father run to the son, which dignified men in this culture don't run. So you've got a father, a person of high standing, foregoing his dignity in order to run to the son, embrace the son, and by embracing the son and kissing the son, communicates to everyone around, I'm with him. He's with me, so that the father condescends from a place of honor to identify with the shamed son. And then all of the details of the story, I mean, it just keeps going and going. He gives him a ring, he dresses him in fancy clothes, he throws a feast in his honor. These are all pictures of a person of high standing embracing and identifying with a person of very low standing in such a way as to lift them out of their shame and bring them to a restored place of honor.

When you think of the story that way, and then you think of it as a picture of the cross, I think you get a very different image of at least one dimension of the atonement. Because the way shame works, if you've fallen into shame, usually there's nothing you can do to lift yourself out of it. If something viral has happened on Twitter about you, there's almost nothing you can tweet that'll lift you out of the shame that you're in. If you've fallen into deep shame, oftentimes the only way out is for someone with a lot of honor to spare to come and identify with you, and say this person is with me. Then what happens is that person loses honor, they are shamed because of their identification with you, but you are lifted out of shame, and you're able to partake of their honor. So in the incarnation and atonement, we have God running to us, as it were, condescending to the condition of the shameful human race, condescending all the way down to the point of naked and shameful crucifixion on a cross in order to say I'm with them, they're with me, and to restore the honor that had been lost in the fall.

Tim Muehlhoff: That's great.

Rick Langer: That's a wonderful image. It's an interesting image as well in terms of what it reflects in terms of human sinfulness, the negative part of being human, I guess, let me put it that way, because I don't want to beg the honor/shame question by how I label that. The idea that we in some sense, and this would have been true about the prodigal son parable, it begins actually with him dishonoring his father by this choice to take the inheritance now. It's an act of separation from his father, it's an act of dishonoring him. As you pointed out, he gets then dishonored even more so by the outcome of his decisions, the father re-honors him.

But it is this massive story, and I do think it's interesting to stop and think about the parallel of dishonoring God. And you think about this even in language that's used of the church, that we're to be the bride of Christ. You have this language of garments of white, pureness, and then the sense of our sin is a blemish. It's like a dishonoring of this. And it may be objective guilt, legal guilt as well. It isn't that the two are incompatible, but an awful lot of the narrative seems to resonate with, as you pointed out, the honor/shame language, and it's certainly not exclusively legal guilt and innocence sort of language, and I would think in many ways to preponderance. And this would make sense just given the cultural context, that the honor/shame would actually be a prevailing part of the imagery and sense you get from the narrative.

Gregg Ten Elshof: Yeah, the eternal destiny of every Christian and of Christ's church is to bring glory to God. And if you're in a shameful state, you can't bring glory to anything. Imagine Weinstein, before he died, trying to honor people, bring glory to people. He couldn't do it. He had completely lost his capacity to bring honor or glory to anyone. If Weinstein was going to honor or glorify anyone, he had to first be lifted out of the shameful condition that he was in. So if Christians or the Christian church are eternally going to glorify and honor God-

Rick Langer: We need an honor infusion.

Gregg Ten Elshof: We need an honor infusion. We have to be lifted out of our shame.

Tim Muehlhoff: Yeah. After my freshman year at Eastern Michigan University, I got a job. My dad said, okay, I'll help pay for the first year, but if you want to stay, you've got to pay for everything from here on out. My dad was a factory worker his entire life. He said, I'll get you a job at the factory. I said, okay. So I get a job at a factory. Well, it just so happens my uncle is one of the vice presidents. No one knows it. Absolutely no one knows it. So when you're a college kid in the summer working with factory workers, you're at the lowest possible social status.

Rick Langer: You have no honor.

Tim Muehlhoff: You have no status, no honor, and they were giving you every junky job, and just belittling us, making fun of us. I'm just standing there covered in sweat and junk and grease, and my uncle just so happened to be giving a tour of potential investors. He sees me, peels off, walks up to me, talks to me, and then walks away. And the foreman comes up to me and he goes, what was that? I said, oh, it's my uncle. He wants to have lunch. And the guy just looked at me like, are you serious? I was like, yeah.

Gregg Ten Elshof: Yeah. I mean, imagine the story going even further. Imagine that your foreman had given you sort of the crappiest job to do, and you were right in the middle of doing that when your uncle came buy. Not only did he say hi to you and greet you, but he came down and started doing that job.

Tim Muehlhoff: Oh yeah.

Rick Langer: Oh man.

Gregg Ten Elshof: Imagine the shame that would have come on your foreman.

Tim Muehlhoff: Oh, that's so good, because you write this. It's great to put with this analogy. "To lift the shamed out of their condition, those in positions of social esteem will have to risk the perceived indignity of strong identification with the shamed."

Gregg Ten Elshof: That's right.

Tim Muehlhoff: So that would be my uncle taking off his suit coat, setting it down, and now getting in there and doing it. And this is Jesus saying, I'm a friend of sinners, I'm aligned with them to the point that I'm going to die, and Paul says not just death, but death on a cross. That's a really powerful identification.

Rick Langer: Well, and the Philippians two imagery you're referring to there includes that reference to despising the shame. He did take that on. I mean, we aren't making an analogy, that's just what it says. Yeah, it's a compelling image. And I love your analogy of Harvey Weinstein's inability to grant honor because he has been dishonored. It's really true. You think, who can we accept an award from or something? If the person has been fairly discredited, they are unable to spread that. Honor-wise, they're kind of on a frictionless surface and they can't push off and go anywhere.

Gregg Ten Elshof: Yeah, and if you think of this as somewhere near the center of the gospel is the rescue from shame that befalls the human condition. And then you go on, not just to think about Jesus and the incarnation and the atonement, but you think about what does it mean for us to be ministers of the gospel less understood? What it means for us to be ministers of the gospel less understood goes beyond just extending forgiveness to people for the wrong things that they've done. It goes beyond just saying that Jesus forgives them or I forgive them. What it means is we find people who have fallen into shame. We go out of our way to find the people who have fallen into social discredit and we identify with them. We risk the shame that will be ours when we identify with them. We say this person is with me. This person is with me, and thereby attempt, anyway, to restore their honor. So ministering the gospel, in my view, includes finding your way into close identification with people who have fallen into deep shame.

Rick Langer: I mean, that's so clearly modeled by Jesus in the gospels, where he, be it how he treats prostitutes or how he treats tax collectors, how he treats people with disabilities, this person's blind, this person's lame, this person's a leper. These are all categories of almost complete, abject honor bankruptcy.

Gregg Ten Elshof: So we have to ask ourselves how many of us would have had the courage to throw our arms around Weinstein and say, I'm with him? That's a tough one.

Rick Langer: And should we be despised for doing that because we're somehow endorsing his behavior, because I think that's the thing that so commonly comes up. If we tacitly give that, I mean obviously this is a thing that Jesus got in trouble with. There's no newsflash, it just is one of those things, kind of price of admission for extending that kind of honor is a meaningful sense of losing something of your own.

Tim Muehlhoff: This made me think of an artist that's been here at ��ݮ��Ƶ. He is the creator of something called The Faces of Santa Ana Project, where he goes into the homeless community, and he's an artist, and he asks if he can paint their portrait. Now, think about that just for a second. I mean, who's asking a homeless individual to paint their portrait? So he does it. Then he has them sign it, and he puts it into a gallery and invites the homeless people to come and see their portraits up in this gallery. It is stunning to look at. If any listener wants to take a look at it, just type in Faces of Santa Ana Project. What a great way of conferring this honor to a person.

Gregg Ten Elshof: Yeah, beautiful.

Tim Muehlhoff: I've never had a person say, Tim, can I do a portrait of you?

Gregg Ten Elshof: There are reasons for that.

Tim Muehlhoff: Yeah, there are.

Rick Langer: Well, there you go, Tim.

Tim Muehlhoff: Now, I must say, a lifelong dream has always been, now, this is just audio so you can't see this, I have no hair whatsoever.

Rick Langer: That is true. I will testify.

Tim Muehlhoff: Gregg has very long, glorious hair. I've always just wanted to teach a seminar with Gregg. I just wanted to stand next to him.

Rick Langer: Just sort of run your fingers through his hair.

Tim Muehlhoff: Well, and to make a point, I'd like to one time, during the lecture, just simply say, as Aristotle would say, and then take Gregg's hair and flip it. I think that would be a beautiful moment. I digress. Okay, so if you have enjoyed these three podcasts, my goodness, please check out Dr. Ten Elshof's book, For Shame, Rediscovering the Virtues of Maligned Emotion, and you can get this anywhere, Amazon, or check out Zondervan's website. But Gregg, thank you so much. This has been an absolutely fascinating series of podcasts. Thank you for being with us.

Gregg Ten Elshof: Well, thank you for having me.

Rick Langer: And thanks for joining us on the Winsome Conviction podcast. Again, we encourage you to become a regular subscriber. You can find us on Apple podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. Also, check us out on the winsomeconviction.com website where can find some other resources, articles and things like that that we think might be valuable for you as you seek to have meaningful, rich conversations, and perhaps even bestow honor and grace upon others in your sphere of influence. Thanks for joining us.