"UNCLEANNESS" IN CHRISTIAN SPIRITUALITY.

Ng., Edward E.

Beck, R. (2012).

Unclean: Meditations on purity, hospitality, and mortality. Eugene, OR: Cascade Books. Paper. 197 pp. $23.00. ISBN. 978-1-60899-242-3.

Richard Beck (Ph.D., Southern Methodist University) is Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of Psychology at Abilene Christian University.

We expect to be repelled by things like rotten food, suppurating wounds, and day-old road kill. Indeed, the involuntary rising of the gorge and wrinkling of the nose have all been posited by evolutionary psychologists as genetically predisposed responses that were retained for their helpfulness in keeping us from poisonous, dangerous, and even lethal substances. However, this theory may also be unhelpful in that the very mechanism meant to keep us from harm also may keep us from each other, affecting both Christian orthodoxy and orthopraxy. This is Richard Beck's focus for Unclean (2011): the "psychology of disgust and contamination regulates how many Christians reason with and experience notions of holiness, atonement, and sin ... [and] also regulates social boundaries and notions of hospitality within the church" (p. 4).

Beck lays the groundwork for the rest of the book in Part 1 by drawing heavily on the research of Rozin et al. (Rozin, Haidt, & McCauley, 2008). He summarizes this research into categories of disgust that he uses as a guiding element for each following part: Core (what we put in our mouth), Sociomoral (moral or social group offense), and Animal-Reminder (gore, deformity, death). In the first section he outlines how unconsciously-held ideas of contamination seem to "play by their own rules" and how "these rules are very often contrary and impervious to logic and reason" (p. 23). It is also here that Beck cites Rozin's four principles of contagion: Contact (impurity is transferred by touch), Dose Insensitivity (a little impurity spoils the pure whole), Permanence (the impure cannot be cleansed), and Negativity Dominance (negative information is given more credence than positive information). Beck then takes these as sub-themes for the rest of his study.

In Part 2, Beck explores the links between disgust and morality, beginning with Lakoff and Johnson's (1980) observation that humans tend to live by metaphors for good and evil based on their physical location (up, down, north, south, etc.). Beck connects this to the idea that even though churches tend to teach that all sins are equally bad, only a few sins violate the metaphor of purity--most notably, sexual sin--because of how the possibility of rehabilitation seems more likely for sins where nothing is "lost." As a loss of purity is psychologically "permanent," certain types of sin seem more disgusting than others because their associated metaphors--and therefore how we deal with certain sins and the people who commit them--are not. He then links Haidt and Graham's (2007) five moral foundations with Shweder et al.'s (1997) work on cultural values being structured around "autonomy, community, and divinity" (p.53) to show that not all violations are perceived as equal by the culture. The consequence for the Church is that when the divinity or Purity/Sanctity boundaries are crossed, we tend to engage in what Haidt calls moral dumbfounding: an irrational, affectively-based judgment about which we may only say we "feel offended" without really knowing why. When we use purely emotional appraisals, we not only lose a common language for deciding what constitutes a purity violation, but we also tend to knock purity violators down a few pegs on Shweder's divinity dimension, essentially seeing them as lesser creatures than those who remain "pure

This is problematic because as Beck outlines in Part 3, the social effects of stratification are significant as boundaries are erected

to separate clean from unclean at the expense of intimate relationships. Beck argues that the opposite of love is not hate, but disgust, because love, he avers, is a matter of tearing down boundaries, while disgust is a matter of erecting them. Thus our psychological predilection towards excluding those who violate purity boundaries also keeps us from embracing one another. In our refusal to embrace, however, "the engine of social scapegoating" (p. 91) continues to grind its gears. In order to scapegoat those we should consider family, Beck contends that we "infrahumanize" (i.e., view other humans as sub-human) people outside our Kantian moral circles, the result ofwhich is that we fail to treat others as "ends" and instead see them as mere "means? This leads to contempt of others who do not belong to our ingroups, a problem that historically has been a pitfall for the communal aspirations of the Church. In order to combat our natural but excluding tribal mentality, the response that Beck advocates (after Vol", 1996) is the practice of a "will to purity" to defeat our community-destroying impulses. That is, if our desire is truly for inclusive congregations that can over-come disgust of the stranger, "the practice of hospitality is the antithesis of sociomoral disgust." (p. 124). Although one could make a case for the exclusion of an outsider based on real danger to the self or the community, Beck takes the time to point out that boundaries are best exercised for individuals suffering in abusive relationships and that church discipline is necessary for sustaining congregational commitments to holiness. Yet instead of focusing on the use of boundaries, Beck would rather members of a community learn a healthy skepticism towards their impulses and then create space within themselves for others to quash our natural incurvatus in se.

In Part 4, Beck delves into Rozin's Animal-Reminder category of disgust that includes aversions towards "gore, deformity, animals, hygiene, [and] death" (p. 144). Beck follows Becker's Denial of Death (1973) when he states that we naturally draw away from these stimuli because having our animal natures called to mind offends our sensibilities of being "more" than just animals. This reluctance to mingle reminders of our animal nature and mortality--including topics such as sex and defecation--with spaces that we consider sacred is pertinent for the Church because, according to Beck, this psychological "hitch" also keeps us from fully engaging the world. This is what Beck calls "incarnational ambivalence: the worry, denial, or offense at a fully human Jesus" (p. 167). The desire to sanitize a Jesus who gets dirty with humanity is a phenomenon that well-meaning believers have always fallen into, beginning with the Gnostic Docetists in the 1st C. What is new, perhaps, is the way Beck reframes the offense of the Incarnation not only with assertions that we ought to be awed by a God who takes on flesh, but reasons why we are when we take a moment to consider the lengths God goes to redeem all.

If there ever is an exemplary way of integrating psychology and theology, Beck has shown us how. Although one could argue that Unclean is somewhat brief on research from a psychological perspective and short on reflection from a theological one, given that the target audience is likely not the academy alone but also church leaders and lay people, Beck brings helpful and current psychological research into the life of North American Christianity. What is particularly interesting is how Beck puts a new spin on an old argument against congregational "Pharisaism" by drawing attention to the psychological processes underlying our rationalization of exclusion instead of merely making appeals to try harder to include those who disgust us. By carefully showing what goes on at a mostly unconscious level, Beck reveals how far we are from achieving an ideal kind of love.

However, Beck's critique of church culture seems a little on the thin side even though he poignantly offers a re-imagining of the Eucharist as a "regulating ritual" that "pushes against a purity collapse" (p. 194) because of the way it presses our core disgust buttons. And yet, even though he advocates for a high view of the Lord's Supper, there is no acknowledgement that other Sacraments can also be occasions for gathering and recognizing the Presence of Christ with his people. In particular, baptism does not warrant much of a mention in Unclean, an odd omission given how naturally a ritual cleansing by water acts as an event for the re-inclusion of a person into the community of God. Instead, Beck proposes that because of the difficulty in handling purity and holiness categories in congregational life, we ought to "restrict or eliminate their use in the faith community" (p. 184). What might have been better said is that we ought to be keenly aware of our predilection for sinful exclusion and, by the Spirit's prompting and empowering, to invite and include against our instincts that scream otherwise.

Indeed, Beck does not address enough from a communal perspective how belonging to a community itself may encourage purity and focuses mostly on how Jesus was "positivity dominant" and thus was able to render the unclean "clean" by virtue of his cleansing power. He leaves out mention of the importance Jesus placed on being reconciled with the community (Matt. 8:1-4) and also with how reconciliation with God necessarily entails reconciliation with Christ's Body itself. By this, one begins to see that a potential weakness of Unclean is that it espouses a view of the Christian faith in largely individualistic terms. Although Beck does address ways in which churches can apply the lessons of Unclean and avoid a state of liberal humanistic "disenchantment" (cf. Charles Taylor's Secular Age, 2007), he remains opaque on how congregations may accomplish this other than with a faint echo of "try harder not to."

As a whole, Unclean is the kind of book that all who have vested interest in community building should read. Beck's enjoyable prose and seamless merging of theology and psychology would benefit everyone from those just starting on their way as followers of Christ to those who seek some explanation for wounds caused by the vagaries of congregational life. Yet as much as Unclean is a work that sits well between the worlds of the academy and the church, its thrust may not be deep enough for either academician or theologian, and therefore, stands as a significant first volley across the bow of churchgoers to embrace those both within and without the wounded Body of Christ.

References

Beck, R. A. (2011). Unclean: meditations on purity, hospitality, and morality. Eugene, OR: Cascade Books.

Becker, E. (1973). The denial of death. New York: Free Press.

Haidt, J. & Graham, J. (2007). When morality opposes justice: Conservatives have moral intuitions that liberals may not recognize. Sodal Justice Research, 20, 98-116.

Lakoff, G. & Johnson, M. (1980). Metaphors we live by. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Rozin, P., Haidt, J., & McCauley, C. R. (2008). Disgust. In M. Lewis, J. M. Haviland-Jones, &

L. F. Barrett (Eds.), Handbook of emotions (3rd ed.). (pp. 757-776). New York, NY: Guilford Press.

Shweder, R. A., Much, N. C., Mahapatra, M., & Park, L. (1997). The 'big three' of morality (autonomy, community, divinity) and the 'big three' explanations of suffering. In A. M. Brandt & P. Rozin (Eds.), Morality and health. (pp. 119-169). Florence, KY US: Taylor & Frances.

Taylor, C. (2007). A secular age. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.

Volf, M. (1996). Exclusion and embrace: a theological exploration of identity, otherness, and reconciliation. Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press.

Reviewer for This Issue

EDWARD E. NG. (M.Div., Regent College '08) is a Psy. D. student at Fuller Theological Seminary's Graduate School of Psychology.

Reviewed by: Edward E. Ng.