Shownotes Transcript
Just a content warning before we begin. This episode might make you feel guilty. Clive White was one of the most celebrated anglers in Britain in the 1990s. He made the cover of Trout Fisherman magazine seven times and appeared in the record books as the man who reeled in the biggest rainbow trout ever landed in Britain.
And then he wrote this letter: Dear Mr Rowe, Mr Rowe was the secretary of the British Fish Record Committee. I would like to take this opportunity to withdraw my claim to the BFRC in connection with the Record Rainbow Trout Court
The record in question was the current British record rainbow trout caught at Dever Springs Trout Fishery on the 4th of April 1995, weighing 36 pounds 14 ounces. That's 16.74 kilograms. I did not catch the fish. It was all set up so there would be a new British record. The fish was not even stocked into the lake. It was actually placed in a bag next to the lake, all ready for me to claim.
I am very sorry and deeply regret what I have done, but I cannot live a lie anymore, as it has destroyed my marriage and it very nearly destroyed me.
As a result, I have now given up fishing altogether. I know a lot of people will take a dim view of what I have done, but now I can sleep at night, knowing that I have nothing to hide. I feel sorry for the people that I have cheated out of a genuine record claim. I only hope people will respect me for coming clean and telling the truth. Yours sincerely, Clive White.
White wrote that letter in 2003, eight years after he'd claimed the record.
A quick shout out to voiceover artist and friend of the pod, Yannick Lowry, for reading that letter for us. So it turns out Clive White didn't catch the biggest rainbow trout ever. He cheated. White says he found the trout dead in waters near his home and put it in a bag, which he took with him on the 4th of April, throwing it into the water and then pretending he'd caught it.
White's letter made headlines across the UK at the time. The story even made it out here to Australia. Some of Clive's words really stuck out to me. I just feel so much better about myself now. It's like a weight's been lifted off me. Clive was weighed down by guilt. Like so many of us who have done something wrong and kept it secret, the guilt ate away at him.
Guilt is a big topic. There is so much to say. And just like the feeling of guilt itself, it is multi-layered. We deal with guilt on an individual level and on a societal level. Guilt is a religious problem, which interests theologians. A social problem, which interests sociologists. A psychological problem, which interests psychologists.
I didn't write that line. It's a quote from psychotherapist and theologian Paul Turnier in his book, Guilt and Grace. And producer Kayleigh found it. People sometimes speak of religious guilt or Catholic guilt or whatever. And it's almost always used negatively. The assumption is that if you're religious, especially those Catholics, you're dealing with much more guilt than the regular person does. And it's not healthy guilt.
But maybe guilt is actually good. And maybe religion, Christianity in particular, is the maestro of listening to, directing, and silencing the guilt we experience in our lives. I'm John Dixon, and this is Undeceptions. Undeceptions
Undeceptions is brought to you by Zondervan's new book, Bullies and Saints, an honest look at the good and evil of Christian history, by me. Every episode here at Undeceptions, we'll be exploring some aspect of life, faith, history, culture or ethics that's either much misunderstood or mostly forgotten. With the help of people who know what they're talking about, we'll be trying to undeceive ourselves and let the truth out.
This episode of Undeceptions is brought to you by Zondervan Academics' new book, ready for it? Mere Christian Hermeneutics, Transfiguring What It Means to Read the Bible Theologically, by the brilliant Kevin Van Hooser. I'll admit that's a really deep-sounding title, but don't let that put you off. Kevin is one of the most respected theological thinkers in the world today.
And he explores why we consider the Bible the word of God, but also how you make sense of it from start to finish. Hermeneutics is just the fancy word for how you interpret something. So if you want to dip your toe into the world of theology, how we know God, what we can know about God, then this book is a great starting point. Looking at how the church has made sense of the Bible through history, but also how you today can make sense of it.
Mere Christian Hermeneutics also offers insights that are valuable to anyone who's interested in literature, philosophy, or history. Kevin doesn't just write about faith. He's also there to hone your interpretative skills. And if you're eager to engage with the Bible, whether as a believer or as a doubter, this might be essential reading.
You can pre-order your copy of Mere Christian Hermeneutics now at Amazon, or you can head to zondervanacademic.com forward slash undeceptions to find out more. Don't forget, zondervanacademic.com forward slash undeceptions. Guilt is a strange topic of interest. Are you a glutton for punishment or something else?
Well, it's one of those topics that sort of put itself under my nose because as a Christian and a psychiatrist, I find it comes at me from two directions. That's Rob Waller, a consultant psychiatrist based in Scotland and honorary senior clinical lecturer in the Division of Psychiatry at the University of Edinburgh.
He wrote a book a while back called The Guilt Book with Pastor Will Vander Hart, who is currently working as a pastoral chaplain at Holy Trinity Brompton in London. So if you look up the diagnostic criteria of depression, one of the words you see there is the word guilt. And then if you look at a sort of understanding of the gospel, guilt and forgiveness are there as well. Mothers are dying when after the other. Matthew, what are you looking for? Forgiveness. For what?
Not doing more? You just said you did everything you could. You're the man I understand you to be, I'm sure that's true. And why do I still feel... Guilt can be a good thing. It's a soul's call to action. The indication that something is wrong. The only way to rid your heart of it is to correct your mistakes and keep going until amends are made. I don't know what you didn't do or what you should have done, but the guilt means your work is not yet finished.
That's a grab from the Netflix series Daredevil, a Marvel character who's been described by the screenwriter, Stephen McKnight, as one of the more religious characters in the Marvel universe. Daredevil is Catholic and guilt, it seems, is a key driver of his often violent vigilante justice. Rob Wallace says guilt usually does drive us towards something, though hopefully not violence.
If you steal an apple, you ought to feel guilty. That's the way that human societies work. And to say that guilt is just a neurosis is unhelpful. But guilt can also be a neurosis. And actually, you haven't done anything wrong. Or if you did do, you know, some people who feel guilty, there's little things like, you know, a lady once who went to the supermarket, she bought something.
19 of the 20 things on her supermarket, on her shopping list. And she got home and she'd forgotten the cheese. And she felt so cross and guilty and stupid because she'd forgotten the cheese. And it's just like, well, that's not a problem that you run to God to ask for forgiveness for. That is something that requires a psychological approach. So there is a time for psychologizing as well. So there's good guilt and bad guilt.
Good guilt, or as Rob says, true guilt, will depend on your moral framework, but arises when you know you've done something wrong. False guilt comes from stuff we think we've done wrong, like when we worry we may have upset someone without any real reason to think we've done so, or feeling guilty about things outside of our responsibility or control.
What are some of the symptoms that one would be able to observe if you were struggling with guilt, if you had a negative guilt problem? And I want to ask this from the perspective of someone who isn't a believer as much as someone who is. Yeah, definitely. So I think there's a full range of right the way through from serious psychiatric illness through to...
what I guess you might call low self-esteem, if that makes sense. So, you know, at one end, you can have this as part of a full blown depressive episode where you're losing weight, you're not sleeping, you're unable to enjoy anything, your cognition is so bad that you can't even follow an episode of your favorite soap opera on television, you can't read a book,
You can barely read a magazine. All of these things that are part of a depressive episode. I mean, this to a psychiatrist would suggest that, you know, you're probably actually beyond the therapy level at this point. You probably need medication. So it can be part of that. And part of that is feeling guilty. And actually, in my work as a psychiatrist, I've even seen it go further beyond that, where people actually have delusions of guilt, where they actually believe a sort of delusional psychotic level that they have have done wrong.
you know ridiculous things wrong you know that they've blown up part of sydney or something like this you know it's something that clearly is not true but they believe that at delusional level so you can see it as part of that you can also see it i think in some of the more more chronic conditions you know and i'll talk about things like low self-esteem or perhaps a
a milder but quite grumbling eating disorder where there is that sort of chronic feeling that you probably have done something wrong and it's probably your fault and it's probably up to you to fix it. It's that very sort of internalizing, I'm responsible for everything type of psychology. You're still functioning, unlike the person who's depressed, but it's actually in some ways more pervasive to every bit of your life because you're living alongside this thing.
Christianity famously thinks that we are not good through and through, that there is a fallenness in every human being.
Indeed, my prayer book here on my desk instructs me each day to say I've left undone what I ought to have done and I have done what I ought not to have done. And there is no health in us. So is Christianity really to blame for a guilt and shame problem in Western society because of its emphasis on the fallenness of the human?
I think it depends where you stay, doesn't it? And this depends slightly which school of theology or which type of church that you've been brought up in. And, you know, there is the sort of extreme sort of ultra-Calvinist, I am a worm. There is nothing I can do to help myself. Hey, a quick apology to my ultra-Calvinist friends. I know exactly what you'd say in reply. Sure, I'm totally depraved, but I'm also totally forgiven. So it's all pretty sweet. Yeah, I get
that. Waller's point, of course, is that some folks can emphasize human depravity at the expense of the good stuff. Don't forget that should immediately be followed by the fact that God has reached out to me and saved me. You know, so it should be a driving force towards a positive identity in Christ. And if it leaves you in that worm state, there's something wrong with how it's being put across. And there are other parts of the church that
do similar but slightly different errors. So, you know, for example, one of the phrases I think you have to use when you're talking about guilt is that phrase, you know, no one does guilt like a Catholic. But you often see them in fictional programs and so on. You know, someone who's in their 40s or 50s and left the Catholic Church a long time ago but talks about that sort of Catholic guilt that hangs over them. Here's one example from Tina Fey's TV show 30 Rock with Alec Baldwin. Hey.
Hey, did you hear the good news, J.D.? I'm Irish Catholic now, like you, Regis, and the Pope. Oh, no, you're not. The church already has enough lawsuits. See, I could screw up now and then just go to confession. No longer do I have to throw my parties in international waters. That's not how it works, Tracy. Even though there is the whole confession thing, that's no free pass.
because there was a crushing guilt that comes with being a Catholic. Whether things are good or bad, or you're simply eating tacos in the park, there is always the crushing guilt. I don't think I want that. - There's obviously fantastic parts of the Catholic Church, but there's some parts of it clearly that seem to sort of generate that lingering feeling of guilt where you haven't moved from guilt into repentance to forgiveness into identity.
That crushing guilt isn't just for television. One of the most insightful essays I've read in the last 10 years was in the Hedgehog Review. It's called The Strange Persistence of Guilt by Wilfred Maclay, Bill.
And it's a kind of history of the concept of guilt. McClay is a history professor at the University of Oklahoma. And ever since I read his long essay, I've wanted to track him down and talk to him. I love that this podcast gives me that excuse. Anyway, it turns out Professor McClay started his research into the history of guilt after seeing a huge bus advertisement for being an atheist. And I came across this...
campaign in the UK that Richard Dawkins, the sort of famous atheist public intellectual scientist of sorts,
It was really behind. It's this thing called the Atheist Bus Campaign. And they had a slogan that just really struck me on the sides of buses, these placards or billboards that sort of saying the following, there's probably no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life.
And the more I thought about that slogan, which seems to me an incredibly lame slogan, I mean, I didn't write about this in the Hedgehog article, but it was something that prompted me and it got me to thinking about why would anyone think that belief in God...
is a source of worrying that is a source of an inability to enjoy your life. What, what, where does that come from? Um, that assumption. And that's what made me start digging back into Nietzsche. And well, that's where I want to, uh, that's where I want to take you.
Let me just interrupt myself interrupting Bill to say that Friedrich Nietzsche was a 19th century German philosopher famous for his uncompromising criticism of Christianity and the European morality that emerged from that. Among many other things, Nietzsche tried to identify what guilt looked like before God entered the picture. You know, before we made him up.
Well, you know, he wrote, this is particularly in his book, The Genealogy of Morality, that morality had a genealogy, it had a sequence by which it had arisen these sort of compulsions and reflexes that make up our moral systems. And ultimately it had to do with...
a kind of cult of the ancestors, that religion cultivated a reverence for the ancestors, a fear of the ancestors, a sense of needing to be approved of the ancestors. And then over time, Nietzsche argued this coalesced, this crystallized into religion.
greater and greater and more and more exalted conceptions of the deity, of a divine supervisory power. And that the Christian God, the God of the Bible, was the ultimate of this, the most powerful. And that all of our sense of unworthiness and guilt and the need to expiate the guilt through
you know, the Christian gospel is traceable back to this misconception about our sort of place in the universe, our place in things, and that it would be necessary to overthrow that notion of a supervisory God. And then,
guilt would disappear. We would be, as you say, a second innocence, a new Eden, a born again. You could use all of the Christian tropes, but apply it to this non-theistic outcome. And of course, that hasn't happened. To put it simply, Nietzsche argued that if you get rid of God, you get rid of guilt, objectively speaking.
Then there's Sigmund Freud, the father of modern psychology, a generation after Nietzsche. He too was no fan of religion, but he thought that getting rid of guilt, at least the subjective feelings of guilt, was not as easy as pointing out that God probably doesn't exist.
In his book, Civilization and its Discontents, Das Unbehagen in der Kultur, literally discomfort in the culture, Freud declared guilt to be, quote, the most important problem in the development of civilization. He said, again, quote, the price we pay for our advance in civilization is a loss of happiness through the heightening of the sense of guilt.
Sigmund Freud, in his book, Civilization and Its Discontents, he says that the problem of guilt, the problem of ever-growing, ever-accumulating and undischargeable guilt, because without any sort of notion of forgiveness, of a structure of expiation,
How can you ever be rid of guilt? Freud offered a therapeutic way out of guilt: psychoanalysis. Guilt was reducible to a kind of emotion.
It was, as you said, you used the term objective guilt. The question of whether or not you are guilty in a forensic sense, you know, I shot the sheriff. That doesn't really enter into psychoanalysis. Psychoanalysis is all about health.
Are you burdened by feelings of guilt? So the emotional component of guilt rather than the forensic culpability factor is really what's foremost for the therapeutic worldview. It's really if you feel all right, if you feel at peace with the world, then guilt is not a problem irrespective of what you've done.
And that, of course, is an inadequate way to think about our moral responsibility in the world, our nature as morally responsible beings. Why is it inadequate? Because there's much to feel guilty about. Guilt arises out of a sense of responsibility, that something has happened because we did it. We were the agent of its happening.
And we live in a world in which we're, because of the advance of technology, because of the advance of our scientific knowledge of the antecedents of events, we can theoretically address ourselves to almost any problem.
human problem that people of 300 years ago would, first of all, not even been aware of because of the lack of communications and would have thought, well, this is just the way things are. The poor are the poor. Disease is disease. There's nothing to be done about it. Now, it seems to me that we see ourselves as potentially responsible for almost anything.
We've mentioned the television show The Good Place on the podcast before. Producer Caelian, director Mark both loved it. I watched it on their recommendation and got all the way up to episode five, I'm pretty sure. Apparently the good bit is still to come. Anyway, if you plan to watch the show, I'm supposed to give you a spoiler alert here. So maybe just skip the next 30 seconds. In the show, the main character, Eleanor, is welcomed into The Good Place after her death.
The Good Place is a heaven-like utopia designed by the afterlife architect, Michael. The Good Place is ostensibly a reward for Eleanor's righteous life, but she thinks she's there by mistake, some flaw in the system, and she tries to hide the fact that her life was far from perfect. Turns out there is a flaw in the afterlife system.
Your Honor, I once stood in front of you and said I thought there was something wrong with the point system. I finally know what it is. Life now is so complicated. It's impossible for anyone to be good enough
for the good place. I know you don't like to learn too much about life on Earth to remain impartial, but these days just buying a tomato at a grocery store means that you are unwittingly supporting toxic pesticides, exploiting labor, contributing to global warming. Humans think that they're making one choice, but they're actually making dozens of choices they don't even know they're making.
Your big revelation is life is complicated? That's not a revelation. That's a divorced woman's throw pillow. I mean, this guy chose this tomato. Those are the consequences. You don't want the consequences? Do the research. Buy another tomato.
The world is more complicated now, and we're told more secular. We've moved on or grown out of such juvenile notions as sin, and therefore the need for forgiveness.
The problem is that even if something is dead, its influence can remain for a very long time. In his essay, Maclay asserts that we've lost the ability to make conscious use of the concept of sin. We don't call it sin unless you still go to church. But we still know that stealing that apple, as Rob talked about earlier, is wrong.
What makes the situation dangerous for us, Maclay writes, is not only the fact that we have lost the ability to make conscious use of the concept of sin, but that we have also lost any semblance of a coherent idea of redemption. The idea that has always been required to accompany the concept of sin in the past and tame its harsh and punitive potential.
The presence of vast amounts of unacknowledged sin in a culture, a culture full to the brim with its own hubristic sense of world-conquering power and agency, but lacking any effectual means of achieving redemption for all the unacknowledged sin that accompanies such power, this is surely a moral crisis in the making. It's powerful stuff.
What happens when that metaphysical framework, when the notion that we live in a world in which we have a dignity that comes from a source beyond ourselves, and that this source is also a forgiving source, a source to which we can bring
in honesty, our faults and the ways in which we have fallen short and the way in which we've done things that are very difficult to forgive within an earthly framework. What do we do when that's gone?
I think part of what we see is there is no forgiveness. It's a terrible thing to live in a moral universe in which there is no forgiveness. There's no reliable forgiveness. There's no statute of limitations. There's no erasure. One thing that happens when we don't have a place to go for redemption is we go searching for other ways to make us feel less guilty. And
And some of the secular strategies for managing guilt are fascinating. 68-year-old Tirat was working as a farmer near his small village on the Punjab-Sindh border in Pakistan when his vision began to fail. Cataracts were causing debilitating pain and his vision impairment meant he couldn't sow crops.
It pushed his family into financial crisis. But thanks to support from Anglican Aid, Tirat was seen by an eye care team sent to his village by the Victoria Memorial Medical Centre. He was referred for crucial surgery. With his vision successfully restored, Tirat is able to work again and provide for his family.
There are dozens of success stories like Tarat's emerging from the outskirts of Pakistan, but Anglican Aid needs your help for this work to continue. Please head to anglicanaid.org.au forward slash undeceptions and make a tax-deductible donation to help this wonderful organisation give people like Tarat a second chance. That's anglicanaid.org.au forward slash undeceptions.
More on that after the break. Over the past summer, especially in America, in the United States, but there was a good deal of it around the world, in the great campaign to destroy the statues of honored figures from the past, and certainly the American past.
It started out with Confederate generals, you know, Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson, Nathan Bedford Forrest, figures like that. There's some kind of a raging need to tear these things down. And I think this may be an example of the craftiness of guilt that it impels people to demonstrate their innocence by tearing down that which is
by either tacitly or explicitly associating themselves with it, associates themselves with the guilt inherent therein. You know, we've seen similar things, people wanting to tear down statues of people who made money out of slave trading. I mean... That's Rob Waller again. I mean, in the middle of Edinburgh, where I live, there's a big statue in the middle of St. Andrew's Square. I mean, quite a lot of the big
beautiful buildings that make Edinburgh the beautiful city it is were funded by the slave trade. And what do we do with that? Do we tear these statues down? Do we try to rewrite history? Now, a historian might have a particular view on whether or not we should try and rewrite history and
and whitewash over what happened and pretend it didn't happen. And of course, certain countries in the world tried to do that with their history after world wars and after revolutions and things like that. And we don't particularly want to go down that route. But I think where guilt comes in
What we like to do is we like to sort of say, well, everyone kind of bumbles along the middle. And over here, there's some people who are like Mother Teresa and there's some people who are like Adolf Hitler. And actually, we all bumble along in the middle and we're all kind of nice people. And humanity essentially is a force for good and science is a force for progress and so on. And we're going to we're going to march along in the middle and progress.
What we need to make that work is we need some Adolf Hitlers. And sometimes I think what we're doing is we're saying, you know, you are like an Adolf Hitler. And that allows me to stay in the middle of the ground. I know I'm not particularly amazing like Mother Teresa. And of course, I'm actually deliberately choosing the example of Mother Teresa, because first of all,
She is someone who a lot of people think is absolutely fantastic, but she's also been someone who's been a victim of cancel culture and perhaps some of her attitudes and this kind of thing have come out in the wash a bit later on. So even your angels end up falling. And when you put people on a pedestal, so I think what people are doing is they're looking to say, ah, that person over there, they're really guilty.
And that means that I'm not particularly guilty. I don't need to look too hard at myself. You might like to go and have a listen to the Undeception single we recorded with Dr. Laurel Moffat on the felling of Confederate statues in the U.S. We'll put a link in the show notes.
This is not the time to go over the arguments about whether Confederate statues or any other statues should be pulled down. Maclay's point here is broader than that. He's using the statues as an example of our growing interest at this time in finding ways to exonerate ourselves, which leads us to perhaps another rather fraught suggestion from Maclay, what he sees as our modern tendency towards victimhood.
Well, if part of the problem of guilt is our ever-expanding range of responsibility in a technologically advanced, scientifically advanced culture, it becomes very difficult to find a way to certify your innocence, especially if there's nowhere to go to confess your sins, to kind of have that washed away.
But one way of doing it is if you can be a victim, if you can identify with victims, if you can somehow see yourself as a victim, then your moral status is ensured. You are innocent by virtue of being a victim. A victim is not an agent. The victim is the acted upon.
So it's a funny kind of way of cleansing yourself. It's important to emphasize that Maclay is talking about those of us who adopt victimhood rather than those who have experienced genuine victimization. Though I guess the problem is that more and more people feel that they have experienced genuine victimization.
He's not the only academic to have observed this. In an article that got a lot of attention back in 2014, sociologists Campbell and Manning argued that we've moved into a victimhood culture, though they acknowledge that that label, victimhood, has a lot of baggage. They argue that society has moved on from an honor culture where one might fight it out or challenge someone to a duel who's offended you,
to a dignity culture in the 19th and 20th century. An example would be teaching your kids that sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never harm me. These authors argue, though, that we're moving into a new moral culture. Here's what they say.
A culture of victimhood is one characterised by concern with status and sensitivity to slight, combined with a heavy reliance on third parties. People are intolerant of insults, even if unintentional, and react by bringing them to the attention of authorities or to the public at large. People increasingly demand help from others and advertise their oppression as evidence that they deserve respect and assistance.
There's a key idea: emphasise innocence.
To get back to Maclay's point, he writes in his essay that what we're seeing from the microaggressions on college campuses to rituals of scapegoating, public humiliation and shaming, of multiplying morally impermissible utterances and sentiments and punishing them with disproportionate severity are visibly on the increase in modern life. It's a sign, he reckons, of a broken moral economy.
We have all this stuff, all this guilt, and nowhere to go for absolution. We have a huge debt, but there's no way to pay it.
So, in other words, we have three secular strategies. One, an obsession with therapeutic measures. We assuage guilt through counselling and self-improvement books and courses. Two, a growing severity in mob shaming. We cope with our own guilt by ferociously projecting worse guilt onto worse people.
And thirdly, a desire to identify with or as victims, because true victims, we feel, are the only truly innocent people among us. So if we ourselves are victims, or we at least are the friends of victims, we must be the righteous. At the root of all these strategies, according to Maclay, is the fact that forgiveness isn't what it used to be.
You say that, you know, really now forgiveness is just this random act of kindness whose chief value lies in the sense of personal relief it gives to me, the forgiver. Tell me about that. Yes, it's remarkable. It's remarkable. If you go to your local bookstore and look at the self-help aisle, you'll see all sorts of books on forgiveness and they all say,
come from the perspective that, John, that you've described, that forgiveness is for me. You don't forgive people as an act of supreme sacrifice. I mean, literally forgiveness, it comes from a monetary transaction. If I forgive somebody,
your debt to me, that means I have a right to that money. I loaned you $100 and I have a right to get it back or with interest. And if I decide to forgive that, it means I let go of any
legitimate claim I have. I treat you in a way that goes beyond justice. Justice would require that I get my just desserts, but I'm suspending justice and instead
relying on the realm of mercy and kind of love and respect for you as a human being over and above the claims of justice.
So it's a sacrifice. It's a sacrifice to forgive. To forgive somebody, you think of people growing up in Belfast during the worst of the Irish Troubles. Americans would say, why can't those people just forgive one another? It's hard to forgive the people who murdered your brothers. It's a huge thing to ask of someone to let go of their righteous anger.
But instead, you know, come back to your question, John, it is that the notion is it's so it's such a waste of energy to hate people, to to hold things against them. So you forgive not because you want to kind of set the moral balance right.
not because you want to adjust the scales of justice, but because you want to feel happy, happier. And you're happier if you just let go of things. Forgive, forget, let it go. Chill out. And that, I think, trivializes the weight of –
of the claims that are being let go, that forgiveness involves giving up something to which you were entitled by the standards of justice.
So I think we've trivialized it as we have so many things, but particularly forgiveness. It's, I think, an easy, you know, Dietrich Bonhoeffer had this term cheap grace. It's an example of cheap grace too. Yeah. And let me just say this one thing. In the Jewish and Christian tradition, guilt is something, sin is something that has to be paid.
You have to pay in some way. And of course, in the earliest understanding, it's a blood sacrifice. But in the Christian understanding, that comes transmuted through the person of Jesus Christ. But same idea, the same fundamental idea that sin must be paid. And to simply say, oh, go ahead. I won't charge you for that one. That's...
That's trivializing the moral weight of what you're carrying around. And my view is that we're carrying it around whether we want to admit it to ourselves or not. The therapeutic approach doesn't ultimately work. We come face to face with our responsibility in the world. Let's press pause. I've got a five-minute Jesus for you. I know it's not everyone's cup of tea.
But one of my favourite prayers in the traditional prayer book, a prayer my wife and I say almost every day together, brings together the Christian promise of release from objective guilt and relief from subjective shame. The prayer goes like this, "'Merciful Lord, grant to your faithful people pardon and peace.'"
This captures the removal of objective guilt and rest from psychological shame.
And Jesus did teach something similar. There's a little noticed phrase where he brings together both this objective and subjective elements of forgiveness. It's in the account of Jesus' interaction with a sinful woman at the home of Simon the Pharisee. It is one of my favorite accounts of Jesus' life in all his biography. Basically, Jesus is invited to the home of a Pharisee, a religious conservative,
No doubt the house is filled with other religious conservatives and a sinful woman, that's how she's described, walks into the house,
And, you know, she's gatecrashing the party and she weeps behind Jesus, wets his feet with her tears and then wipes his feet with her hair and kisses them and pours perfume on them. It's really dramatic. And of course, the Pharisee is outraged and thinks that, you know, Jesus can't be a prophet if he's letting this woman touch him. And then Jesus sort of turns on his host and defends the woman and
by telling a parable. And basically the parable is that there's two people who owed a moneylender different amounts. One owes 500 silver coins, the other 50 silver coins. And the moneylender mercifully forgives the debt of both. And Jesus says to Simon, who do you reckon is going to love the moneylender more? And Simon gets it right. Simon says, yeah, of course, the person who's had the bigger debt forgiven.
Now, so far it seems like a story of relief from objective guilt, and that is surely the principal message, the most important part of the Christian message. I mean, it would be no use to us to feel relief from shame and still actually be guilty before God, and yet it would still be a great benefit to us to be objectively forgiven by God, even if we couldn't find subjective relief from shame.
But this story moves on to speak of this woman's psychological state. She has profound joy and love as a result of the notion that she might be forgiven. See, what Jesus does is he turns to his host and says, when I came in, you didn't greet me with a kiss. You didn't
you know, wash my feet or anything like that. You didn't put oil on my head. But this woman has been doing all those things for me ever since I walked in here. And so you can see that her many sins have been forgiven because she feels such great love. So there's this real sense in the story that the joy and love of relief that comes with forgiveness is a key part of what Jesus wanted the woman to experience.
And then the text says, Jesus said to her, your sins are forgiven. He gives her this sort of dramatic statement of objective forgiveness. The other guests began to say amongst themselves, who is this who forgives sins? You know, they know that only God can forgive sins.
And here is Jesus claiming to forgive sins. And that is, you know, first and foremost, what the account is about. Jesus' extraordinary authority to forgive people's sins, something only God could do. But the woman's joy and relief is definitely part of the story and so part of the promise because the whole thing ends with Jesus saying to the woman, your faith has saved you.
So here is, in the climax of the story, both objective and subjective elements in the Christian faith. His parting words, your faith has saved you, that's the objective element, but also go in peace, that's the subjective element.
I suppose it's possible to interpret the word peace to mean objective reconciliation with the Almighty, but I think that's a mistake. This woman has experienced shame, public shame, even at this dinner party. She was a scandal. But Jesus wants to send her on her way assured of both objective mercy from God, the relief from a debt she couldn't pay, but
but also the blessing of peace, a sense of relief from shame, which produces joy and love. Go in peace. So I think my prayer book gets it right. The message of Christ provides pardon and peace, cleansing from sins and a quiet mind. You can press play now.
How can we exist? How can we exist with this ever-mounding weight of sin? And that actually is a question that Freud asks. He says he sees civilization, you know, his whole view of civilization is that it's this very uneasy thing in which...
repression of our instinctual desires is absolutely necessary. And that repression and the persistence of this instinctual desires mean that we're constantly shoving things down. We're creating new sources of guilt individually, civilizationally. And he says that's one of the big problems is how are we going to deal with this?
Of course, for Freud, the return to religion was a return to childhood, not to be thinkable. One must push on. And the...
the analytic attitude, as Philip Reeve calls it, is inescapable for Freud. Well, I'm not so sure that we can bear the weight of all this sort of no-exit guilt that we're taking on ourselves. And the worst part is we don't even recognize it as such. We no longer have the categories of
to describe, to call things by their real names. And I think it's very important to recover that, whether that means
a full-fledged return to the sort of Christendom of 500 years ago or whatever. That's not for me to say. I'm a historian. I'm certainly not a prophet. But I think there's some way in which the Enlightenment story, the Enlightenment project, as Alistair McIntyre calls it, has clearly hit a barrier that it can't surmount and something else
Some return to an understanding of our culpability, of our need for forgiveness, to come back to your question, our perpetual need for forgiveness. And the humility that we ought to have in the face of that as a sort of fundamental fact of our makeup, that's something I think we can't get away from. We have to contend with somehow or other.
And, you know, for those of you who are skeptics, you know, the religions of the past had their faults, but they at least took a fair account of the nature of sin. Earlier, we spoke to Rob Waller about the difference between true guilt and false guilt. True guilt is when we, say, steal an apple, right? We've actually done something wrong and we know it.
Just like Pinocchio, who wants to become a real boy and is given Jiminy Cricket to be his conscience, Freud saw guilt as a sign that we're taking responsibility for ourselves and our actions. The feeling of guilt helps us recognize that we haven't lived up to our own standards, whatever those standards might be. And that's a good thing. A world without guilt would be like living without Jiminy Cricket, that little voice that tells us
we've gone the wrong way. What religion does, if nothing else, is to take those natural feelings of guilt and dispense with them. We don't have to live with them. We have somewhere to go to erase them. Christianity teaches the importance of asking forgiveness. Forgiveness from those we've wronged and forgiveness from God, the one to whom we are all ultimately responsible.
I want to ask you about forgiveness as a public health issue. This is something that you have claimed. I want to hear about it. Yeah, so over the last 30 years or so, researchers, many of whom come from clinical psychology, have tried to empirically study forgiveness, the consequences of forgiveness, the consequences of lack of forgiveness.
forgiveness and how to promote forgiveness.
That's Tyler Vanderweeler. We met him in the last episode when we explored mental health. Tyler is an epidemiologist and statistician at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. He's been doing some really interesting research into whether religion can actually have a positive impact on both mental and physical health. Go back and have a listen to what he had to say on how religious service attendance can protect against depression.
depression and suicide. Seriously. The evidence has increased over the years that forgiveness certainly contributes to mental health. It lowers depression. It lowers anxiety. It promotes hope. And some indication, though evidence is less clear, that it also contributes to physical health.
And models of forgiveness to promote forgiveness have been developed.
Now, McClay argues that we've cheapened forgiveness. His concern about the therapeutic approach to forgiveness is that it becomes more about the forgiver and their power and well-being. But what if we tried to get back to more of what forgiveness is really about? What if modern-day forgiveness wasn't so cheap? Tyler is trying to figure out whether forgiveness can really make you healthier.
One prominent model that we've looked at is the REACH model, where each letter of REACH stands for part of a process. R, recall the hurt. E, empathize with the offender, try to understand the offender's perspective without justifying their action or denying your feelings, but understand the offender. A, altruistic gift, realizing that forgiveness is something you can give or withhold.
C, commit, make a decision to forgive, if possible do so publicly. And H, hold on to that forgiveness, realizing that the emotions are going to come and go. And these models have been developed into clinical interventions to help people to forgive who are struggling with forgiveness. They've been tested in randomized trials.
and have been found in randomized trials to be effective at reducing depression and anxiety and improving hope in addition to promoting forgiveness.
And right now we're actually testing a workbook intervention of this reach approach to forgiveness in five different countries with several thousand participants to see if even reducing these principles into a do-it-yourself workbook to help people to forgive, who want to forgive and are struggling to do so, might have benefits.
similar effects. And if this is successful, I think there are profound public health implications to the work. Being wronged is an incredibly common experience. Struggles with anger are very common. And that rumination over the hurt is
or the suppression of it, trying to ignore it or pretend it didn't happen.
that has really negative long-term mental health consequences. And forgiveness is a way to become free of that. It's not excusing the wrong. It's not giving up justice. One can forgive and pursue a just outcome. Forgiveness really is just replacing ill will towards the offender with goodwill. And strong evidence now that when that's done, the victim's freed,
They've got better mental health and possibly better physical health as well. So because the experience of being wronged is so common and because we think we've found an intervention that can help relieve these feelings of anger and can promote mental health, can reduce depression and anxiety if this workbook is successful,
then I think we have an intervention that can be disseminated widely to address questions, not just of forgiveness and reconciliation within relationships, but also mental health. And so in that regard, I think an argument can be made that forgiveness is in fact a public health issue.
Thanks for listening today. I hope we haven't made you feel too guilty. Unless, of course, you need to. Without adding to the guilt, can I just say that if you like what we're doing here at Undeceptions, please consider supporting the project. Researching, writing and speaking to let the truth out.
Any amount is appreciated. Just in the last few days, individuals have gone to the underceptions.com website, clicked the big donate button, and they've sent us, seriously, $48. One person sent $43. There's $600. Yikes. $18 and $30. You know who you are, and I'm really grateful.
While you're at the website, send us a question and we'll try and answer it in a later episode. And if you're interested in other good podcasts, check out Salt, Conversations with Jenny Salt, part of the Eternity Podcast Network. Next episode, a topic I have a real interest in, religious freedom. See ya.
Undeceptions is hosted by me, John Dixon, produced by Kayleigh Payne and directed by Mark Hadley. This is where I'd admit my guilt for the way I treat you, if I was somewhere else. Editing by Nathaniel Schumach. Special thanks to our series sponsor, Zondervan, for making this Undeception possible. Undeceptions is part of the Eternity Podcast Network, an audio collection showcasing the seriously good news of faith today. Brought to you by the Eternity Podcast Network.
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