While today's culture denies it, the Bible assumes human defilement and uncleaness before God and addresses it through the sacrificial system culminating in the sacrifice of Jesus Christ, according to Eric L. Johnson

THE HUMAN STAIN

Europeans and indigenous Americans being judged at the court of Nature for modifying their bodies, from the frontispiece to John Bulwer’s Anthropometamorphosiss, London, 1656.

Indigenous religions around the world collectively recognize taboos

Cannibalism, Brazil. Engraving by Theodor de Bry for Hans Staden's account of his 1557 captivity.

According to international surveys, most people in the world report a positive sense of subjective wellbeing (Deiner, 2000). At the same time, there is also evidence that human beings sense, way deep down, that there’s something wrong with them. To begin with, indigenous religions around the world collectively recognize a state of contamination that humans can contract after violating a cosmic norm, a belief that anthropologists have called a taboo. Usually one becomes contaminated by physical contact with something associated with badness, like something dead, or by breaking a social norm, like incest. If the impurity is not removed, the “cosmic order” will bring about “disastrous results” (Young, 1995, p. 44). One might interpret this as a primordial kind of displacement.


The cleansing rites of religions point to moral unworthiness

Woman's Bath, 1496, by Albrecht Dürer

The world’s major religions generally have a more sophisticated understanding of the awareness that “something is wrong,” and they typically address it through a more elaborate and systematic set of procedures, using various "cleansing rites”—perhaps washing rituals; sacrifices of rice, flowers, or animals; or prayers—which are necessary to “purify” the worshippers and placate the gods. Why do humans from different cultures around the world experience themselves, at least at times, as unclean and desecrated and therefore needing cleansing? After reviewing the classical evidence of this in the West, Ricoeur suggested that it “points toward a quasi-moral unworthiness” (Ricoeur, 1967, p. 35), reflecting a primordial sense of ontological shame and guilt.

The Bible assumes this sense of defilement and uncleaness before God and addresses it through the sacrificial system in which the sinner's guilt is transferred to a sacrificial animal

Zurbarán Lamb of God, Prado Museum, c. 1635-1640.

The cultic religion revealed by God through Moses (found in the Torah, the first five books of the OT) assumed this sense of defilement, and seems intended to make it more salient, and to shape and refine it, in its stories and rules (Vos, 1949), especially in the detailed rituals of the Levitical sacrificial system. God was teaching the Jews that humans really are unclean—before God—those negative emotions are not mere subjective feelings, but, at their root, are valid signs that something is objectively wrong with us, ethically and spiritually, since he himself is offended. The Torah teaches, further, that humans cannot have a positive relationship with their Creator apart from a system of restoration that he has initiated, involving the bloody death of a substitute, in which the objective shame and guilt is transferred from the shameful/guilty one (or people) to a sacrificial animal (signified by laying hands on it), which was then either killed and burned or sent away, symbolizing the divinely sanctioned destruction or carrying away of “the badness” (cf. Lev. 16:15 22; Lev 17:11; Dempster, 2004; Vos, 1949). Christians realized that these cultic practices were a divine preparation for a much more radical and personal therapeutic intervention: the sacrificial death of God’s Son. “Behold, the lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world” (Jo 1:29; see 1Pe 1:18-19).

THE MODERN "ABSENCE" OF DEFILEMENT

Jackson Pollock, Blue Poles, 1952, National Gallery of Australia

Today's culture denies humans are good or evil, denies defilement, and attributes shame and guilt to socialization and evolution


Pablo Picasso, Portrait of Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, 1910, Art Institute of Chicago

Things of course are more complicated in our post-Christian, increasingly secular culture. At the risk of overgeneralizing, contemporary culture holds together uneasily a few contrasting secular views of the sense of morality and the spiritual realm. Hard-core naturalists believe that there is no moral or spiritual order at all. The sense that there is one is simply a result of evolutionary adaptation; believing that there are “transcendent” values promotes solidarity and cooperation, so it has helped humans survive. Humans are neither good nor evil; they just are. Humanists hold some additional values, affirming some sense of human goodness and arguing for the self’s rights to self-expression and self-realization, that may trump biological norms, hence the celebration of gay marriage, which produces no children. Officially skeptical of the modern self, postmodernists uphold the diverse values of selves-in-communities, but end up affirming most of the same values as the humanists, with a generally greater appreciation of their social situatedness. As we have seen, in this late-modern sociocultural context, without a truly transcendent standard, the Self has become the implicit, religious center of our culture. Consequently, modern, secular culture teaches that humans are either morally neutral or innately good, in either case, without evil or alienation from God, and this has led, in turn, to the relative absence of a conscious awareness of a sense of defilement. Most Western intellectuals understand shame and guilt feelings to be the result of ancient evolutionary dynamics and contemporary socialization, and therefore have no ontological truth-value, other than promoting healthy social relations.


Humans become depressed or anxious, feel shame and guilt, and experience disorders

Eve covers herself and lowers her head in shame in Rodin's Eve after the Fall.  Éve, bronze, Auguste Rodin, 1881-ca.1899, Jardin des Tuilleries, Paris

At the same time, in spite of decades of promoting an autocentric orientation in schools and media, a significant number of Westerners remain haunted by a sense of “badness.” Millions are diagnosed with clinical depression (which usually includes feelings of shame and guilt) or anxiety (which often includes a foreboding that something bad will happen to them). Some people have disorders that would seem to symbolize self-punishment, most obviously “cutting,” but also eating disorders and aspects of some personality disorders. Some think OCD (Obsessive Compulsive Disorder) may be related to “a perceived violation of moral standards, guilt, and inflated responsibility” (Doron, Sar-El, Mikulincer, & Kyrios, 2012, p. 293). Substance abuse would seem to reduce shame and guilt feelings, whereas aggressive behavior, violence, prejudice, and even an undue interest in the failings of others may indicate the projection of repressed feelings of shame and guilt.


Our negative reaction to valid criticism indicates unresolved shame and alienation

The Dunce (1886) by Harold Copping (1863–1932).

Yet such individuals are admittedly exceptional and the extent of their sense of badness is often due, at least in part, to high levels of shame they internalized in their families-of-origin. More universal is the automatic reaction of even relatively healthy people to valid criticism, perhaps more subtly indicating the repressed remnants of a primordial, unresolved shame, and signifying simultaneously the inner conflict between a sense of original goodness and the shame of alienation from one’s Creator, lying on the boundaries of human awareness. One also wonders about the underlying significance of our culture’s interest in evildoers who are different from us: “monsters” like pedophiles, serial killers, and mothers who murder their children. Even so, it must be conceded that, analogous to its reduction in cases of polio, modern culture has done a fairly effective job of undermining and minimizing conscious experience of shame and guilt.


The Implicit Religious Agenda of Modern Psychiatry and Psychology

Dr. Philippe Pinel at the Salpêtrière, 1795 by Tony Robert-Fleury. Pinel ordering the removal of chains from patients at the Paris Asylum for insane women.

Modern psychiatry and psychology have played a critical role in this reduction by radically reconceptualizing what is wrong with human beings. In the premodern West, the soul’s worst problems were understood to be ethical and spiritual. However, the replacement of theism with naturalism as the worldview underlying the care of souls in the West necessitated that psychic problems be understood solely in terms of natural dynamics (i.e., biological and psychosocial). Consequently, as a secular version of psychopathology developed, its practitioners very consciously restricted themselves to the observation of natural events and processes and observable symptoms, voided of their ethicospiritual significance. Relevant ethical terms—like envy, hatred, bitterness, adultery, and pride—were studiously avoided. Similarly, the religious and spiritual significance and remediation of shame and guilt, as well as self-hatred, loneliness, meaninglessness, and unforgiveness, were rarely considered—except their influence on psychopathology (though thankfully that has changed remarkably in recent years). As a result, the sense of defilement manifest in shame and guilt came to be considered as either the illusory legacy of maladaptive upbringing or, at best, the socially adaptive effects of evolutionary selection. Secular treatment for these negative self-conscious emotions, when needed, is medication and talk therapy, in which counselees are encouraged to reinterpret their shame and guilt feelings as merely subjective experiences that are either entirely maladaptive (Rogers, 1961), or at best, useful guides in one’s social relations (Dearing & Tangney, 2011; Harter, 2012), but in neither case do they bear any transcendent ethical or spiritual meaning.

Source: Johnson, Eric L. God and Soul Care: The Therapeutic Resources of the Christian Faith. Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, manuscript submitted for publication, chapter 8 on Sin.