The Metamorphosis of Guilt

One of the most insidious teachings in the world is the doctrine of original sin. I do not know how it functioned or affected Christian believers and practitioners in prior centuries, but from what I have observed of its affect on my generation and those of my elders, it has borne nothing but rotten fruit.¹

“I’m not mad, just disappointed. No wait, I’m mad, too.” - God, probably. Illustration: The Judgment of Adam and Eve by William Blake (from an illustration of Milton’s Paradise Lost)

If your first, foundational belief is that you are undeserving of love, acceptance, understanding, social standing—that your very existence is the most offensive anathema to the god that brought your world into being unless you acquiesce to the belief that your only value is found when you accept a ‘gift of salvation’ with very specific terms and conditions from the god who would hate you and damn you otherwise—then it stands to reason that it might be difficult to offer compassion to your self or others.

If you believe you are terrible because you believe your god thinks you’re terrible, it makes sense that you would think everyone else is terrible, too. A pessimistic pall is cast over the entire world—a world tinted by fire and brimstone instead of roses. A personal worldview determined by guilt.

Most of my intellectual history has been motivated by a desire to understand, and perhaps legitimize, my own heavy sense of guilt. My first sense of guilt was developed by the evangelical Christian tradition my family was part of. There are plenty of sources, from the scriptures (all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God; there is no one righteous; the heart is deceitful above all things; no one comes to the father except through me; for I know my transgressions, my sin is always before me, and so on), to the logic of altar calls and penal substitutionary atonement, to the belief in the rapture and that the world will get progressively worse.

There is no shortage of ways that I, my elders, and their elders were convinced of our own sinfulness and lowliness, that we should despise who we are apart from Christ. In fact, most of us are who are raised in this religion are introduced to the idea of the need to be forgiven and to ‘invite the holy spirit’ into our hearts at such an early age that we develop a sort of bifurcated self. What we call the Holy Spirit acts as a type of inner narc, telling us we do not measure up to the impossible standard God has set, that we failed the test before we were even conscious, and we learn to distrust to our intuition and ‘lean not on our own understanding.’

Despite learning that the two greatest commandments are to love God and love our neighbors as our selves, the very notion of loving our selves is preposterous: “I’m supposed to love myself, the worst person I know, that terrible sinner? GTFO (and forgive me for using an acronym with a swear).”

I know, mentally, that this perspective is harmful to myself and to the world at large. Mentally, I have rejected it. But the heart can go on believing things long after the head has disavowed them.

In that same manner, even as I have moved farther away from white evangelicalism, my guilt (and the accompanying shame) has stayed with me. After I distanced myself from conservative evangelicalism, I still sought to find my place on a different branch of Christianity, and through my graduate studies discovered the Creation Care movement.

It was then that my guilt changed shape. Instead of being a general belief about my lack of worthiness, I developed guilt around my carbon footprint. I felt terrible about participating in destructive commerce. I considered becoming an environmental lawyer.² I’m not sure if that guilt has ever subsided, even if it doesn’t occupy all of my mind.

A few years later, as greater social awareness was building around the rampant racial injustice in contemporary America (and the centuries of injustice that has preceded it), my guilt changed shape again and became a form of white fragility and guilt. All of the horrendous acts that were done to develop and preserve something as vacuous as whiteness—that required generations of European settlers to cut themselves off from their specific ancestry for a general whiteness that demanded they dehumanize others—it was and is all such a tragedy that has led to such enmity and suffering.

My guilt took on a male contour as well—men, and white men in particular, have been so harmful it is undeniable. I’m not even particularly enamored with concepts of masculinity—I’ve always felt a distance from the concept, and I don’t ascribe qualities like strength or intelligence or kindness to a gender (the very idea seems preposterous). But I know I look male and am seen as male.

There’s a reason I used the term “metamorphosis” to describe this process: I want you to think of the geologic process. All these sediments of shame and guilt have been built up over time, and while their qualities have changed, the pressure I’ve put on myself has been constant and has precipitated those changes.

Over the last few months I’ve felt something similar happening again. I can’t name or articulate it just yet—it has taken me years to be able to identify and describe what I’ve done above—but the process is familiar by now. I think it’s around feeling an anticipated change in my creative work, and also a sense of guilt that I haven’t done enough to help my book/podcast/podcast network/facebook group succeed and thrive, and a sense of overall helplessness about resisting the fascistic turn in our federal politics in the United States.

But what’s different this time is I’m now aware of the process and this predilection I have toward guilt & shame (which I’ve long known but felt helpless to stop). I’ve been having amazingly fruitful conversations with my wife Emily, who has helped me to develop a greater sense of optimism and an acceptance of my self. If I can help direct the process instead of being merely subject to it, if I can integrate some of the knowledge I already have to reframe things, perhaps I can yield a better outcome.

I was already thinking about this piece over the last month. Then I came across a skeet that I quoted, below:

Guilt has, in some ways, also functioned as an excuse. Just as fundamentalists don’t think that taking action on climate change matters because “it’s all gonna burn, anyway,” the belief that I am terrible and deserve bad things is also defeating and limiting. It hinders the ability to see possible presents and futures, for our selves and for the world at large. It denies change even as change is occurring, because fundamentalism at its core is a refusal to engage with a world that changes and insists instead that it is unchanging and eternal.

We are not immutable platonic ideals. We (I!) must be open to change, and find a different catalyst than guilt and shame. Hope can be a catalyst, too. So can love, and care.

That is part of my work now, too.

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1. If I wanted to drudge up intellectual history and dilute the seriousness of this topic, I’d talk about how Augustine was made uncomfortable by the strength of his libido and ruined western civilization as a result. But I’m trying to be serious, so this is relegated to a footnote.

2. I am glad I did not pursue this path; I’m not sure I would have been an effective lawyer, which would have made those student loans harder to pay back.