Shame/Honor,Guilt/Innocence,Fear/Power: A Missiological Response to Simon Cozens and Geoff Beech

Summary of Cozens and Beech

Simon Cozens’s “Shame Cultures, Fear Cultures, and Guilt Cultures: Reviewing the Evidence” concludes that Benedict got it wrong in calling Japan a shame culture. He cites a brief comment in Eugene Nida’s influential Customs and Cultures (1954) as the beginning of the idea of shame, fear, and guilt cultures. ² Cozens is correct in noting that Nida never intended these three different types of reactions to wrongdoing to characterize entire cultures, nor did Nida attempt to divide the world into three distinct cultural categories.

Cozens notes the lack of empirical evidence to substantiate the categorical difference between shame/honor and guilt/innocence cultures. It is perhaps better to think in terms of differences of degree rather than categorical differences of kind. He has unearthed important research in Japan that casts doubt on Ruth Benedict’s conclusion, including doubt that guilt functions as an internal conscience and shame as an external sanction to control social behavior and avoid deviance. He rightly questions whether whole societies can be accurately characterized as shame, guilt, or fear cultures.

The evidence that Cozens cites supports his conclusion that rather than type-cast entire cultures as oriented around shame, guilt, or fear, every society manifests much variety and complexity, with individuals experiencing all three modes of social control, not simply one. One form may be dominant, but the other two forms of social control also have an impact.

Cozen’s is critical of Jayson Georges’s work and his popular culture test discussed below, but he draws more critical inferences than are warranted. Georges’s concern is practical—what works—more than it is theoretical and research oriented. The infographic in figure 1 is not helpful, especially for research purposes. Such a figure is an attempt to simplify a large amount of information, but it can be easily misleading, which it is in Cozen’s article. Infographics are designed to give the observer a quick understanding of vast amounts of information rather than a precise tool for reporting research data, but this one communicates such gross generalizations that it is more misleading than helpful. It is no substitute for the more difficult work of ethnographic research and learning from the people among whom one is living and serving to determine whether the dominant mechanism for social control is shame, guilt, or fear—or more likely some combination of the three. I notice, for example, that the map presents New Guinea as a shame culture and the rest of Melanesia as a guilt culture. My own ethnographic research in the Solomon Islands and Papua New Guinea, however, showed me that fear of evil spirits and discontented ancestors was far more significant than guilt as a mechanism of social control.

I concur with Cozens’s three conclusions, which I summarize as follows:

In his article “Shame/Honor, Guilt/Innocence, Fear/Power in Relationship Contexts,” Geoff Beech presents an empirical study (such as Cozens here calls for) from Cochabamba, Bolivia. Beech contrasts the religious culture of urban Hispanic Catholics and evangelicals with that of the rural mestizo Quechua communities in villages lying outside the city and further away from its urbanizing and globalizing influence. He does not use, nor does he critique, the notion of whole societies being characterized and sometimes stereotyped as shame cultures, guilt cultures, or fear cultures. Rather, he introduces the universal concept of avoidance and pursuit. In terms of the three culture types, people avoid shame and pursue honor, they avoid guilt and pursue innocence, and to overcome their fear they pursue power.

Beech notes that “the difference in the worldview assumptions on which these pairs are based became for some missionaries a significant key for how to present the Gospel in different cultural settings.” ³ This is a most valuable insight. Cross-cultural witnesses can benefit from study of these cultural differences, which can help them become more aware of their own worldview, which unconsciously shapes their own lives and ministry. Many North American missionaries come to their field of service with a predominantly guilt/innocence perspective, but they often minister among those with a different cultural orientation. For example, in contrast to Western missionaries who served in Papua New Guinea and the Solomon Islands, the local people admitted that it was the fear of ghost, ancestors, and sorcery that drove them to Christianity and not remorse about sin. God always starts with where we are, embedded in our own culture and worldview, in order to transform us into what God intends us to become. We should take the same approach as we minister among others who are different from ourselves.

In his research Beech discovered that, among the mestizos (Hispanic Bolivians) in both urban and rural communities, avoiding shame and pursuing honor were more important than avoiding guilt and pursuing innocence. Among Quechua campesinos in rural areas, however, fear and the power to overcome fear were more important. Beech concluded that the single most important factor in determining a people’s orientation to one of the three avoidance/pursuit pairs is their interpersonal relationships. He found that trust, as a key ingredient in their relationships, decreased as one moved further away socially and geographically from one’s family of origin.

Beech draws some modest implications from his study, noting that when one enters a culture different from one’s own, priority should be given to studying the structures of the relationships within the culture, which will help in understanding the context in which the Gospel can best be lived out and presented. This is a thoughtful and more precise approach to cultural understanding that can enable one to discover reliable data on which to base one’s cross-cultural ministry.

Weakness of the three paradigms

As noted above, early in the development of the discipline of anthropology there was an effort to simplify and categorize the vast human experience. From today’s vantage point some of those efforts now seem ridiculous, and some of the favored vocabulary (e.g., mention of “primitive tribes and chiefs”) has now—thankfully—fallen out of favor. In postmodern anthropology today the cardinal sin is to essentialize cultures—that is, to assume that all people in a presumed bounded culture perceive the world and behave similarly, as compared with people from other cultures. The idea of “adopting a people group,” which is currently popular in mission circles and in mission committees in certain local churches, is an example of essentializing cultures. My concern is that cross-cultural witnesses will do the same thing by thinking of an entire culture as shame based, guilt based, or fear based. Such a view is inaccurate and inadequate for describing today’s global realities. With expanding urbanization and the increasing effects of globalization, along with massive migration, growing numbers of refugees, and the growth of diaspora communities, there is such a flow of ideas and material that we simply cannot maintain any notion of a neatly bounded culture that could be described as oriented exclusively toward guilt, shame, or fear. It is far more helpful to recognize that there are tendencies and patterns in societies when it comes to mechanisms of social control such as avoiding shame and pursuing honor, avoiding guilt and craving innocence and avoiding fear and pursuing power to overcome those fears—and that these three pairs are present to some degree in every culture.

This is the thesis of Jayson Georges’s writing and research. In The 3D Gospel, Georges shows how these three orientations shape the culture in which cross-cultural witnesses minister and develop theology. He notes, “A 3D gospel affects both the content of the gospel and the means of Christian witness. . . . How we understand God’s mission (i.e., pardoning the guilty, welcoming the shamed, or delivering the fearful) shapes our strategy for Christian ministry.” ⁴ Georges has developed a twenty-five-item questionnaire he calls the Culture Test, which he uses to gather data on the degree to which the cultural context in which a person was raised and/or ministering can be identified as shame, guilt, or fear oriented. He doesn’t claim scientific accuracy for this instrument, but it does indicate tendencies. As of April 2018 he had gathered data from over 25,000 completed questionnaires. Georges hosts a website in which he offers helpful posts demonstrating the value of recognizing the shame/guilt/fear paradigm. ⁵ To date, his research is the most significant in investigating this topic in mission practice.

Not infrequently those in mission practice, and to a lesser extent academic missiologists, embrace a concept that seems to explain vast areas of human activity, cutting through the complexity of cultures with simple explanations and ready-made solutions. The concept of Unreached People Groups (UPGs) in the 10/40 Window is one such example. Local churches in North America are urged to adopt a UPG in the 10/40 Window as a basis for their mission strategy. Ironically, the largest Muslim nation in the world, Indonesia, lies outside the 10/40 Window. ⁶ Could it be that shame-honor discussions and strategies represent a similar attempt to simplify complex issues in world Christianity? Anthropologist Michael Rynkiewich certainly thinks so. He notes, “What is needed instead is ethnography, the skills that allow missionaries to discover the world around them without trying to fit everything into old categories or even any permanent categories. The world is complex, complicated, fuzzy, overlapping, swirling, shifting, political, and always in tension. Leave it that way. Missiology need not be captive to the social sciences, but neither can missiology afford to be naïve about its research and writing.” ⁷

“I have another concern and caution in using the English terms shame/honor, guilt/innocence, and fear/power to describe whole cultures. Unless we understand these various perspectives from within the language of the people among whom we are living, we can easily be misled and draw wrong conclusions. For example, according to the Al-Manar English-Arabic Dictionary, in Arabic there are many words that correspond to English “shame” and “honor,” but few words that correspond to English “guilt” and “shame.” ⁸

In summary, the primary weakness in using the shame/honor, guilt/innocence, fear/power paradigm in the practice of mission is to try to use it without being aware of our own presuppositions, which can easily keep us from seeing clearly. We are liable to stereotyping and collapsing important human differences into categories that may be more manageable but are far less accurate. Christopher Flanders notes, “Since both shame and guilt seem to be ubiquitous, the strong dichotomy indicated by the conventional terms of ‘shame-culture’ and ‘guilt-culture’ is naïve and simplistic. To label a given culture in these ways is thus analytically unhelpful and potentially detrimental to empathetic understanding of other people and cultures.” ⁹

Strengths and applications of the three paradigms

Despite the criticism noted above, there are nevertheless some strengths in making these distinctions between shame, guilt, and fear, for they can be very helpful categories in cross-cultural ministry. We need to discover the emic (i.e., the insider’s) meaning of these terms in the language of our ministry, versus using the meaning and implication of the terms in our own language. Many mission practitioners from the West have noted that when they began to understand the primary social-control mechanism among people in their host society, they became far more effective in communicating and living out the Gospel. For example, cross-cultural witnesses who assume that guilt is the operating mechanism of social control have noted the difficulties they have experienced when attempting to live out and tell the story of Jesus among a people who are more shame oriented than guilt driven. Jeff Hayes has written a very helpful article, “The Gospel: More Than We Thought,” in which he notes, “We often present the Gospel simply as forgiveness for our sins, but Jesus died not just to take away our sins, but to take away our shame, our fear, our estrangement, our uncleanness, our blindness.” ¹⁰ Hayes has worked among Arab Muslims for twenty-five years, and in this short article he helps us see how an Arab Muslim would perceive a guilt/innocence Gospel, which does not connect with them well, whereas a Gospel that focuses more on their understanding of shame and honor clearly does. In a personal email he wrote, “One practical example [of the difference between shame/honor and guilt/innocence] is that when I have shared the gospel with Arab Muslims using the guilt-innocence paradigm, I run up against walls on every point. But when I have shared it with an honor-shame paradigm it really clicks with them. These are Arab Muslims.” ¹¹ This approach to connecting with Arab Muslims from a perspective more in line with shame and honor is the theme of the entire January–February 2015 issue of Mission Frontiers, entitled The Power of Honor.

Roland Muller’s Honor and Shame: Unlocking the Door is a helpful primer for introducing the concepts of honor and shame and the practical implications for ministry, especially among Muslims. ¹² He demonstrates how so many of our North American theological categories and popular evangelistic tools that assume a guilt orientation, such as “The Roman Road” and “The Four Spiritual Laws,” simply do not connect with Muslims. Unfortunately, unless we are aware of these significant worldview differences, we are likely to plow ahead anyway, using the methods familiar to us but with very limited results. We may end up complaining that “these people” are so resistant to the Gospel, when actually it is the communicator of the Gospel, not the receptor, who is resistant to different perspectives and ways of thinking.

Missiologists and mission practitioners have also found these concepts to be helpful for ministry in parts of Asia. For example, Paul deNeui has recently edited a volume Restored to Freedom from Guilt, Shame, and Fear. In the introduction he notes:

For many cultures, fear-orientation, guilt-orientation, and/or shame-orientation are major impacts upon the shaping and expression of individual and communal-held worldview(s). While all are present to a certain extent in every culture, this volume draws from the expressions and insights found from within the context of the Buddhist world. . . . It was written primarily for western practitioners and intercultural communicators of the Christian faith who desire to understand more of cultures that are less guilt-oriented that their own. . . . Each one [of the authors] is committed to making the restoration of freedom from fear, guilt, and shame found in Jesus Christ a reality for all the world’s contexts including the Buddhist world. Freedom ‘from’ brings with it the positive side of these three orientations: the freedom ‘to’ empowerment, honor, and innocence. We use the word ‘restoration’ believing that it is God’s intention to restore all that were lost through fear, guilt, and shame back to the original freedom to power, honor, and innocence of relationships with the Creator, with humanity, with self, and with all of creation. ¹³

In a sophisticated study based on ethnographic research and ten years of ministry in Thailand, Christopher Flanders explores the issue of shame/honor in the context of “saving face.” He notes that one of the reasons Christianity continues to be perceived as a foreign religion in Thailand is that Western missionaries and Thai Christians alike have not understood and dealt with the crucial issues surrounding the positive notions of saving face in Thai society. He critiques much of the missiological literature on shame and guilt (56–74), noting that too much of it is “heavily dependent upon Benedict’s inadequate definitions of shame as external (social opinion) and guilt as internal (conscience). . . . The definitions present in most contemporary missiological literature rest upon the unfortunate perpetuation of deficient notions regarding shame and guilt. Thus, the conventional notion of shame as other-directed and guilt as originating from an internal conscience continue to hold sway.” ¹⁴

Another well-researched example from Asia that draws on insights regarding honor and shame is Jackson Wu’s Saving God’s Face: A Chinese Contextualization of Salvation through Honor and Shame (2012). Wu notes that anthropologists have done research and discussed the sociocultural dimensions of honor and shame but that theologians have largely used legal metaphors and missed the importance of understanding honor and shame. He asks an important question, “Theologically, why have Christians favored law-language when so much of the Bible emphasizes God’s glory and his people not being put to shame? How could I reconcile the gap between these two metaphors, not choosing one over the other? Why did people get nervous whenever I would talk about honor-shame, as if I were denying what the Bible said about law and absolute truth?” ¹⁵ Wu brilliantly answers these questions.

Conclusion

Simon Cozens and Geoff Beech have made a helpful contribution to the burgeoning literature on the concepts of shame/honor, guilt/innocence, and fear/power in missiology and cross-cultural ministry. They have raised some important questions regarding the research or lack thereof that undergirds these concepts and their use in mission. My concern is that this seemingly sudden interest and discovery of the importance of shame/honor versus guilt/innocence can run the risk of becoming another “missiological bandwagon,” which merely contributes to the North American penchant for quick results with minimum life investment. Too many practitioners are looking for the latest “evangelistic tool” to get our Gospel message across to the most people in the shortest amount of time with the greatest return on our investment of time and money. Instead, what if we used the information on shame/honor and guilt/innocence to examine ourselves and our interpretation of Scripture? We might ask, for example, why our theologies typically reflect a strong guilt/innocence perspective that is closely tied to a legal framework.

In their book Misreading Scripture with Western Eyes, Randolph Richards and Brandon O’Brien have helped us see how much our own culture and worldview shape the way we engage Scripture and how much we miss when we don’t incorporate the perspectives of those from other cultures. ¹⁶ What if we listened more and talked less with those with whom we live who have an orientation different from ours? What if we were willing to relinquish a need for certainty in exchange for a quest for understanding?