As a white person, I cannot really know how a person of color feels in a white supremacist country like the U.S. As a man, I cannot really know how a woman feels in a patriarchal society.
As a gay white man, I do share at least this much in common with many women and people of color: a deeply embedded sense of bodily shame. Perhaps together we can deepen our collective hope for healing.
I’m tempted to insist that everyone lives with some degree of alienating shame (I think that’s a useful way to read the biblical story of the “fall” in Genesis 3), but the more modest scope suffices to make this point: far too many of us internalize hateful messages and quickly find ourselves awash in self-loathing. Left unaddressed, shame can lead to isolation and depression, or it can spiral outward in gestures of aggression, hostility, and even violence.
Witness Omar Mateen, the man who shot and killed 49 people in a gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida, this past Sunday morning. In addition to being a Muslim, he was perhaps secretly gay. If so, what he did still qualifies as a “hate crime” – a crime rooted in his own hatred of himself. Shame, in other words.
LGBT people confront toxic comments at nearly every turn; many of these are hard simply to shrug off and forget. Some of them linger, tempting us to believe their poisonous lies and be ashamed of who we are. We’ve heard some choice ones over the last few days, which are just particularly virulent illustrations of a daily reality. Consider these:
- The Lt. Governor of Texas apparently believes people like me actually deserve to be shot and killed with an AR-15 semi-automatic rifle. He tweeted a Bible verse shortly after the massacre in Orlando: “Do not be deceived; God cannot be mocked. A man reaps what he sows” (Gal. 6:7).
- A supposedly Christian pastor in Arizona rejoiced that there were “50 less pedophiles in the world” but then added this: “The bad news is a lot of the homos in the bar are still alive, so they’re going to continue to molest children and recruit children into their filthy homosexual lifestyle.”
- Another supposedly Christian pastor in Sacramento, California, preached the very morning of the massacre that he was sorry more of us didn’t die. He later added this: “I wish the government would round them all up, put them up against a firing wall, put a firing squad in front of them, and blow their brains out.”
- And here’s just one international example: a popular meme on Russian social media this week declared that “50 faggots were killed in a bar in the United States. Fortunately no human beings were hurt.”
It’s not that each of these absurdist, nearly melodramatic outbursts or even all of them together are too much for any of us to take; we’ve learned how to be strong and we’ve cultivated a good deal of resilience over the years. No, it is rather how each of these can trigger a lifetime of painful memories that start to build up like plaque in the arteries of our souls – all those times of being called a sissy in grade school, or “devil’s spawn” by a pastor, or a cocksucker in high school, or a fucking faggot on vacation in a gay resort, of all places.
I’m describing here what people of color keep trying to get white people to understand about racist microaggressions, and what women keep trying to get men to understand about sexist objectification, patriarchal dominance, and the cumulative effect of being leered at for years and decades. Jessica Valenti wrote about those leers just recently in the New York Times. She describes their lasting imprint rather poignantly:
For me, it’s not one particular message or adolescent incident that bothers me; it’s the weight of years of multiple messages and multiple incidents. It’s the knowledge that this will never be just one day, just one message, just one hateful person. It’s a chipping away of my sense of safety and my sense of self.
All of these moments and incidents and stray comments burrow deeply into our psyches and sit there, festering in a toxic soup of internalized revulsion and bodily shame. Most of us scarcely realize how many of our daily interactions and even dearest relationships wind up coated with layers of that acrid brew.
No one can heal from all this shame alone since isolation is itself a symptom of shame’s corrosive effects. Only by sustaining deep relationships of mutual love and respect can any of us hope to retrieve for ourselves and among others the joy and dignity for which God makes us all. This is what makes churches and gay nightclubs alike so terribly important. No, these have never been perfect social spaces, not by far, but they have been vital venues where we can start to forge relational foundations for healing.
In this age of increasing religious and cultural pluralism, we need to work across old boundaries and in new communities far more diverse than we have yet seen or perhaps even imagined. The diversity itself will contribute to the healing we seek. Indeed, we must create spaces where women, people of color, the sexually queer and the queerly gendered, and white, straight, men can all do the hard work together of building a different kind of world — a world in which no one need turn to violence, not as a first nor even a last resort to find some relief from the debilitating weight of bodily shame.
Yes, easy access to guns was the proximate cause of the Orlando massacre. But I suspect and I am quite convinced that its deeper source was Omar Mateen’s unbearable alienation from his own bodily goodness, a spiritual malady from which far too many of the rest of us still suffer.
Thankfully, we don’t have to wait for Congress to do something about that.
[I have written more extensively on the difference between guilt and shame, and how this matters for Christian faith and social transformation, in my book Divine Communion: A Eucharistic Theology of Sexual Intimacy. Portions of the commentary above are adapted from that book.]
