In a society run by feelings, there is one feeling that is ruthlessly suppressed. While anger, lust, greed, hate, and every other emotion under the sun is allowed to run wild, this one feeling is shunned, and any attempt to invoke it is met with a storm of vitriol. That feeling is shame, and a permissive, anything-goes culture cannot tolerate it. To fat-shame or slut-shame someone who is fat or promiscuous is one of the few taboos remaining in the West, along with shaming any other form of immoral or degenerate behavior.
Shame, however, is a good and necessary thing, as unpleasant as it feels. In Lamentations 3:64-65, the prophet Jeremiah bemoans a loss of shame as part of God’s judgment on wayward Israel. Obviously, if this were a good thing, Jeremiah would have been celebrating. But why is shame such an important thing, and why is a loss a shame so terrible?
Much like how pain is important for our physical well-being, shame is important for our spiritual well-being. Think what would happen if you could not feel pain. You could touch a hot stove and not feel it, even as it burned your skin. You could break a bone and never even feel it. Appendicitis and any number of internal injuries or infections would go untreated until it was too late. The ability to feel pain was given by God as an indicator that something is wrong with your body.
In the same way, shame is meant to be a sign that something is wrong with your behavior, and drive you to correct it. The proper response to shame is repentance. Can shame be misplaced? Of course, the world tries to shame Christians into silence with accusations of ‘homophobia’ and ‘transphobia’ all the time. That, however, doesn’t mean that shame itself is a bad thing; any more than being sucker punched by a bully means pain is a bad thing. To feel shame for doing shameful things is right and proper, and should drive us to repentance.
Shame is the pain response of the conscience. It is what happens when you have done what you know you should not do. It is not a learned response, but rather built into us as a part of our nature, as Paul says in Romans 1:18-19. Much like we do not need to learn what is painful, we know deep down what we ought to be ashamed of. This is why people who act immorally advocate for their lifestyles so vociferously; they’re not just trying to convince you that their lifestyle is acceptable, they’re trying to convince themselves. Take for example pride parades; the alphabet people know deep down that what they’re doing is immoral and unnatural so they celebrate it in hopes of silencing their consciences.
People who reject shame reject the goading of their conscience to repent, instead choosing to continue on a path that will heap God’s judgment upon them. The last thing Christians should be doing is fighting against shaming. Rather, we should offer those feeling shame the only way out: repentance. Only once someone has turned from immorality and to Christ can they be free from shame. Without that repentance, trying to take away the sting of shame is treating the symptom, but ignoring the disease that will ultimately destroy them forever.
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Applied Christianity 