disgusting thoughts

I mentioned earlier that I've started reading Richard Beck's, book, Unclean: Meditations on Purity, Hospitality, and Mortality (Wipf & Stock, 2011). Chapter 2 focuses on purity and continues Beck's fascinating discussion of the psychology of disgust. I heartily recommend the book, if only because it puts a new perspective on so many things that many of us (myself included) regularly say about Jesus and the gospels. However, I have to admit I really struggled with this chapter. Let me explain.

Beck draws—or rather, Beck uncovers the fact that we draw—a connection between the way we think of physical revulsion (a drop of urine in a bottle of wine, food coming into contact with fecal matter, etc.) and the way we think of social and/or moral revulsion. He mentions four principles of disgust at work in all three dimensions (pp. 26–27; all italics in the original):

1. A Boundary Psychology: Disgust is a system that monitors boundaries. Disgust regulates the act of incorporation and inclusion.
2. Expulsive: Disgust is a violently expulsive mechanism. In mild forms disgust simply prompts withdrawal and avoidance. In stronger forms disgust involves violent rejection, expulsion, or elimination.
3. Promiscuous: Due to disgust's developmental peculiarities (i.e., its sensitive period [Beck is referring to the way disgust reactions are learned rather than innate; babies will put anything into their mouths and only later learn that some things should never come into contact with the mouth or tongue; -RR]), culture can link disgust to a variety of stimuli, many unrelated to food. Consequently, disgust is often found regulating moral, social, and religious experiences.
4. Magical Thinking: The contamination appraisals involved in disgust are characterized by magical thinking, which over-rides reason and logic. Consequently, when disgust regulates moral, social, or religious experience magical thinking is unwittingly imported into the life of the church.

These are all helpful principles to identify and think about. Beck accepts certain triggers of a disgust reaction as appropriate or useful for maintaining good health and/or survival: "Many of these stimuli are legitimate vectors for disease (e.g., feces) while others are the product of our learning histories (e.g., food aversions due to food poisoning)" (22). But when disgust reactions are transferred from the physical realm to the social or moral realm, Beck leaves little if any room for ever accepting this transferral: "However, many sources of contamination are driven by culture and have little or nothing to do with food. . . . although contamination monitoring is at root healthy and adaptive, we should worry when judgments of contamination are extended into the religious, moral, and social domains" (22; my emphasis).

Here's my question: Is it n/ever appropriate to protect the boundaries and/or the internal well-being of the religious, moral, or social organism? I don't have an answer, although I admit that I'm uncomfortable saying that disgust reactions are always inappropriate in the moral and social domains. Rather, given how powerful these reactions are—how viscerally we feel them, down deep in our bowels—Christians have to take special care to be self-critical and self-reflective to ensure that we deploy the evaluative and expulsive functions of disgust in ways that work with rather than against the redemptive and transformative core of the gospel. Paul did, at least once, enjoin a church to expel an immoral member, and Jesus himself excoriated those whom he judged harmful for the people and kingdom of God.

I have so much more to say about the book thus far, but this post is long enough. If you're curious, I recommend you get the book!

Disgusting Communion

At the recommendation of a colleague, I've started reading Richard Beck's book, Unclean: Meditations on Purity, Hospitality, and Mortality (Cascade Books, 2011). Beck, an experimental psychologist (= social scientist, not a theologian or biblical scholar), brings the psychology of disgust to bear on questions of purity (food, sex), hospitality (social acceptability), and mortality (death).

My interest in the topic is primarily sexual. A few years ago I read Donna Freitas's book, Sex and the Soul (Oxford University Press, 2008), which aroused in me a deep concern that we are raising a/nother generation without providing any guidance or wisdom regarding the connection between one of our most basic physical urges (sex) and one of our most basic spiritual urges (communion with God/the divine). In a profession such as mine (equipping, training, educating people for ministry), that lack of guidance and wisdom is scandalous, or it would be if we weren't so used to it.

Chapter 1 presents some basic thoughts on the psychology of disgust. Beck reproduces a three-fold typology of disgust (p. 19):

1. core disgust: revulsion centered on eating and oral incorporation;
2. sociomoral disgust: revulsion centered on moral and social judgments;
3. animal-reminder disgust: revulsion centered on stimuli that function as death/mortality reminders.

Beck also suggestively maps this typology onto the Eucharist, an intriguing move that he will return to in his final chapter.

I'm enjoying the book already, but I'm not quite sure what to think. On the one hand, I want to defend "disgust" as a physical and even social concept. The expulsive impulse triggered by disgust is healthy, even life-preserving, as when we eat rancid meat or encounter a pedophile on a school yard. On the other hand, there are things that are not, intrinsically, disgusting that still curl my stomach. I eat the flesh of dead cows, pigs, chickens, turkeys, etc., but never no never of dogs, pigs, cats, rats, or horses. I accept that every person in church on Sunday is a sinner, but if I find out about their sin (especially if it's sexual in nature) I am driven to passages such as 1 Corinthians 5 ("Remove the evil person from among you").

If I accept that disgust, as an emotion, is culturally determined in a way not true of other emotions (Beck, pp. 16–18), how do we distinguish between healthy and proper manifestations of disgust and those that block and run counter to the redemptive work of Christ? I do not have an answer. But I do have a suspicion. Some things, people, and ideas genuinely and urgently need expulsion from the body physical, political, ecclesial. Those things represent real and present dangers to life and health. But this is the scandal of the gospel, of a Jesus who not only heals the leper but touches him, of a God who not only redeems humanity but becomes her. That which is disgusting, which needs expulsion, is not expelled but redeemed. This is the shocking story of Ezekiel 16 (warning: this chapter is NOT.FOR.CHILDREN, but you absolutely must read all the way to the end of this long chapter). This is the good news (= gospel) of God: I was disgusting and revolting, but God called me to his table, offered me his own flesh ("Disgusting!"), and invited me, saying, "Take, eat. This is my body, broken for you."

Disgust is real. Revulsion is appropriate. If we truly believe in the gospel, disgust leads not to ejection (vomiting, shunning, excommunication) but to gratitude and humility. I once was filthy but now am cleansed. Who am I, then, to push you away in your noxious, grungy, stained rags. I know the One who clothes others like kings and queens, and he has asked me to bring you to him. He offers you the Cup that sates, but be careful. This is His Blood, poured out for you, too. Please don't be disgusted.