Review: Richard Beck's 'Unclean'

In recent years, I have grown more and more skeptical of "short-term mission trips." First of all, I wonder just how much good news we can presume to share in a week? I cannot help but think that such week-long sharing necessarily boils down to Constantinianism in one form or another. And, with fears of acting as Constantinian conquerors in mind, my second concern revolves around a mindset that I have never been able to fully articulate before. This mindset has manifested itself several times in my experience, but the most obvious example of this mindset appeared on a mission trip to Mexico. The trip had as its telos the construction of a second-story onto a church building in Nuevo Laredo. We spent five days at the church working with concrete and rebar, but no one spent any time talking to the congregants there. Our only exposure to any Mexican Christians was when they served us lunch. Why did no one take time to get to know the people there? What was at work in us?

I suspect that Richard Beck's new book Unclean: Meditations on Purity, Hospitality, and Mortality can answer these questions. Beck's thesis centers on the notion of disgust psychology, and he claims that when Christians concern themselves with purity, they lose the ability to show mercy and thereby necessarily marginalize and withdraw from the Other.

Beck begins his book with an examination of how notions of disgust function: fundamentally, disgust is a "boundary psychology" that separates clean from unclean. Starting with Paul Rozin's Dixie cup research (in which participants were asked to spit into a Dixie cup and then drink the spit), Beck explains how the body's boundaries often are the primary boundary that separates clean from unclean. Saliva is clean; spit is unclean. Thus things external to our body are met by our disgust reflex. In the same way, Beck shows that this works corporately; "my tribe" constitutes a body, and those who are beyond the boundary of my tribe are met with disgust. But Jesus' claim that God "desires mercy not sacrifice" in Matthew 9 stands in tension with our disgusts.

There are, according to Beck, three types of disgust at work in us: core disgust, sociomoral disgust, and animal-reminder disgust. Core disgust involves the person and focuses on food and the taboos that are associated with food (as well as the natural gag-reflex that rejects dangerous foods from our bodies). Sociomoral disgust involves notions of rightness and appropriateness and the feelings of violation when these notions have been violated; it is based on emotions and feelings not on objectively discernible rules. Animal-reminder disgust involves those things which remind us we are mortal, namely: bodies, sexuality, and death. These three types of disgust -- core (purity), sociomoral (hospitality), and animal-reminder (mortality) -- provide an outline for the remainder of the book.

Beck begins the section on purity with a discussion of metaphors, saying that "the experiences of sin and grace within Christianity are often framed by purity/pollution and clean/unclean metaphors. These are embodied metaphors that help us understand sin and grace by appealing to the experience of disgust, our daily experiences with dirt, filth, water, hygiene, food, feces, contamination, pollution, and washing" (36). Beck claims that such metaphors provide a broad range of ways to think about the Christian life, but problems appear if one purity metaphor is given priority over the others. Using penal substitutionary atonement as an example of single-metaphor-focus run amuck, Beck claims that notions of salvation become centered on staying unpolluted and thus withdrawn from the dirt, filth, etc. Following this argument, Beck concludes that penal substitution became the dominant view of atonement, despite its late arrival on the theological scene, because it is "sticky," being "more memorable, intuitive, evocative, and, thus, more likely to be transmitted on to others. The metaphors 'fit' the mind, so to speak" (42). Beck attributes this stickiness to "The Macbeth Effect."

Named for Lady Macbeth, who famously cries "Out, damned spot!" while washing blood off her hands, the Macbeth Effect is the notion that physical washing creates a moral cleansing. Thus penal substitution provides the washing (i.e., washed in the blood of the lamb) that appeals to most churchgoers in these late centuries. But the Macbeth Effect has its problems: Beck concludes, "In sum, although the experience of purity helps us understand morality, the metaphorical connection between the two is so deep that the experience of physical purity can come to replace moral action. And, given that the church is awash in purity metaphors, particularly those churches who privilege penal substitutionary thinking, there exists a constant danger that the church will exchange the private experience of salvation... for passionate missional engagement with the world" (47).

For Beck, the difficulty with allowing "purity" to regulate morality is that purity leads to moral dumbfounding. That is, things that feel wrong because the violate a feeling are wrong. Echoing what MacIntyre calls emotivism, Beck identifies the tendency of Christians to put a lot of stock in what they perceive to be proper. Thus he uses an example of saying the word "crap" in a sermon and causing a row over the uncouth use of such a word in such a sacred place. When he asked why the world was so offensive to folks, the response he got was "because it's wrong." According to Beck, this type of dichotomy is rooted in what Richard Shweder identifies as "the divinity ethic, the ethic that regulates our interaction with the sacred" (53). Beck then shows two problems that come from the divinity ethic: first, the notion of contaminating the holy causes us to quarantine God from the dirt of the world; and second, the world is viewed through the lens of an Up/Down dynamic in which up is good and down is bad. Therefore, concern over the divinity ethic can cause the church to think it needs to protect God from the dirt of the world while at the same time viewing the dirt of the world as bad because it is far from God. Mission thus becomes challenged on a communal level as well.

Having shown how notions of purity can be toxic to Christians both individually and communally, Beck moves to his discussion of hospitality. Hospitality, according to Beck, is challenged by sociomoral disgust. Thus the call to "love the sinner but hate the sin" is incredibly difficult because "mercy is impossible when sociomoral disgust is operative" (82). Yet Beck suggests that sociomoral disgust can be overcome with love -- or what Volf calls "the will to embrace" (78ff). According to Beck, love also regulates boundaries much like disgust. But love distinguishes those people and things that are inside my self and my tribe. Thus, "love involves a suspension of disgust and contamination sensitivity" (87).

Beck uses the example of Paul's letter to the Corinthians as an example of sociomoral disgust at work. In 1 Corinthians Paul, tells the church in Corinth that their celebration of the Eucharist was causing more harm than good. Fundamentally, the Eucharist makes all people equal, but the upper class of Corinth were still lording their status over the poorer church members. Beck notes, "That the Lord's Supper had become an instrument of exclusion was a sign that something had gone terribly wrong" (112). As we shall see later, the Eucharist is the church's response to disgust, and here Beck is correct to say that it "is not simply a symbolic expansion of the moral circle [i.e., one's tribe]. The Lord's Supper becomes a profoundly subversive political event in the lives of the participants. The sacrament brings real people -- divided in the larger world -- into a sweaty, intimate, flesh-and-blood embrace where 'there shall be no difference between them and the rest'" (114). Thus lessons learned from the proper celebration of the Eucharist allows the church to embrace the other in hospitality.

The third part of the book deals with animal-reminder disgust. In it, Beck argues that disgust has an existential component because we retreat from things that remind us we are animals (bodies, sex, and mortality). Right away, we can see the treat to theology that this retreat causes: namely Gnostic retreat from earthly existence. Thus, Beck suggests that bodies give us humans trouble because it is seen as lower (recall the divinity ethic). In the same way, Beck shows how sex is "existentially complicated" because it mixes the spiritual and animalistic (159). However, the most worrisome effect of this tendency toward Gnostic retreat is denial of the Incarnation of Christ: what Beck calls "Incarnational ambivalence" (167).

Beck claims that all these Gnostic tendencies in general, and Incarnational ambivalence specifically, is caused by the denial of neediness (both our own and God's). The problem, as Beck notes, is that "inherent in this impulse is a flight from our own need, a refusal to exist in a state of need. The Church Fathers have always claimed that the primal human sin is the desire to become 'God-like.' ...In short, a denial of the Incarnation is an attempt to flee from our need and... this undermines our capacity to love" (170). And for Beck, the mercy of Matthew 9 requires active love. He writes, "True love moves me into need. Which is, admittedly, a scary prospect. It is an act of faith and it requires a community, a 'fellowship of neediness'... In this, the life of the Trinity creates the life of the church or, rather, the life of the church participates in the life of the triune God" (178).

To review: Beck claims that disgust is detrimental to the church. Core disgust causes the church, individually and corporately, to focus on purity and to withdraw from perceived pollutants. Sociomoral disgust causes the church to withdraw from things that are seen as profane (low, down, base) and move toward things that are considered sacred (high, piousness, clean). Animal-reminder disgust causes the church to ignore the things of this word (bodies, sex, and death) in favor of things that are otherworldly. Thus disgust moves the church toward sacrifice and away from mercy to use Matthew 9's categories. Which is to say, the church is always in danger of removing itself from the world, where it is called to be a witness to God's Kingdom -- a Kingdom that is concerned with the world and all its dirt and grime. Thus Beck provides a meditation on the Eucharist as a way to prioritize a mercy that embraces over sacrifice that excludes.

Beck concludes by asserting that "regulation" is the key. He writes, "If disgust isn't removed from the faith community it needs vigilant regulation" (192). And, for Beck, the Eucharist provides that regulation over each of the three types of disgust that tempt the church to prioritize purity and sacrifice. An extended quote:

I find it intriguing and suggestive that the three disgust domains map onto, almost perfectly, the dominant images and metaphors of the Lord's Supper:

1. Core Disgust: Food -- oral incorporation -- is at the center of both the psychology of disgust and the Eucharist.

2. Sociomoral: Socially, the Eucharist echoes and reenacts Jesus's ministry of table fellowship. Coming to the Lord's Table we are to "welcome each other, as Christ has welcomed us." Morally, the Eucharist echoes the Day of Atonement, the ritual where the sins of Israel were "cleansed." In a similar way, Christians remember that the blood of Jesus "continually washes us."

3. Animal-Reminder: The Eucharist has strong, even scandalous, cannibalistic overtones the emblems -- bread and wine -- represent the body and blood of Jesus. Consequently, the gritty, Incarnational and embodied aspects of the life of Jesus (and the church) are graphically confronted in the Lord's Supper (19).

Thus the Eucharist allows the church to be the church. Beck ends the book by saying, "In the Eucharist, the swirling images of purity, hospitality, and body are continually refreshing the imagination of the church, week by week, generation by generation. Images that remind us, even when we are unaware, that God desires mercy, not sacrifice" (197).

Overall, Unclean is an eye-opening read. I have never found a book that identifies the core beliefs of the church, but this book does that, and at the core, the church is formed by notions of disgust (as are individuals). The church must take the implications of core, sociomoral, and animal-reminder disgust seriously. Thankfully, the church's thanksgiving meal -- the Eucharist -- provides the church with a way to counter the toxic theology that disgust creates. This book will be a welcome resource in ministry and theology classes, as well as psychology classes, in all contexts (undergraduate, graduate, and church). It is a must read for all Christians.

And so, to return to my introductory thoughts about mission trips. I fear that the second mindset that had given me difficulty in articulating above is in fact a mindset shaped by disgust. I fear that notions that those who we visited in Mexico were beneath us and therefore needed to be keep at arm's length were at play there. May God have mercy on us.