Love trumps shame

I'm not sure if sticking one's 15-year-old on a busy street corner and forcing him to hold up a sign announcing his failing grades is effective parenting. This is what an exasperated Virginia couple did after working with their son on his homework and testing him for learning disabilities yielded no fruit. School is boring, reports the boy, and he is almost certainly correct, though nowhere in our expanded sense of constitutional rights is there a provision for perpetual entertainment. Most schools are boring, as are a good many jobs and more than a few churches. The fact that boring institutions abound doesn't excuse their overseers from poor performance, but the attitude that boredom exempts a man from doing his job is likely to land him on, well, a street corner.

Still, I don't know if I buy the notion that the way to spur a boy's performance is to publicly humiliate him. There's an interesting discussion among some writers I like on the topic of shame. Rod Dreher argues that it has significant social benefits, which Adam Serwer misapplies to the individual being shamed, as opposed to the community members who witness the shaming. Stitching a scarlet "A" to the chest of a woman who has already borne a child out of wedlock, in other words, isn't going to make that baby crawl back into her womb and dissolve himself. But it is likely to make other young girls think twice about co-ed skinny-dipping.

Megan McArdle tries to balance the two, noting that while the potential for being shamed deters some bad behaviors, the penalty of shame on top of the bad consequences of one's stupid choice seems like rubbing salt in the wound. In other words, how can we deter bad behavior without being cruel to those who fall shorter of the glory of God than the rest of us?

And there's the real rub, which is that we are only really talking about drawing lines of social distinction. We shame the scared boy who runs away from the child he helped conceive, but we applaud the puffed-up pastor. We decry the girl who contracts HPV, while we bless the woman who runs the Bible study and spills gossip like a leaky bucket. Public shaming of the misfortunate few can deter onlookers from doing things that incur the wrath of the majority, but the public's standard---even (or perhaps especially) in most churches---will never get anyone very close to the gates of heaven.

Which is where we long to be. We sin because we are a sick and broken people, and sin feels good. Anyone who tells you otherwise just hasn't been doing it right. Sin feels good, except that it makes you sicker and more broken, and so soon you need another dose of it, and another, until one day you wake up and you are so far gone that you can't remember what it felt like not to hate yourself. All the street-corner humiliations and lectures about God's righteousness that man can hurl at you won't fix that.

In other words, shame that isn't married to love will never serve us well. I suspect I fall shorter of the glory of God than most people reading this, and I am ashamed of that. But that shame doesn't make me want to draw near to them or their churches. It's the living, healing water that draws me to the Church, and to the God who humiliated Himself that I might be saved from myself. I am ashamed because He treats me like a son while I treat Him like an embarrassing spectacle, and because no matter how deep a pit I dig, there is no clawing past the depths of His love.

Maybe what that boy on the street corner needs is a bond of love that is strong enough to make him not want to let his father down. The thing is, every time we humiliate our children, we harden their hearts just a little more. And while a hardened heart may propel a man toward many accomplishments, it will never be the force that brings him to his true place in the world, and certainly not to the home where he belongs. Shame may make men behave better, but only love makes them whole.