Religion, at its best, is designed to offer us healing and an invitation into wholeness, an undivided life. Religion, at its best, is a program of release to take us out of the prison of fear and the bonds of shame. At its best, all religion is a very specific technology of freedom communicated to us through symbols, rites, liturgies, prayers, and rituals. It is a technology of the soul that is to be implemented within our own lives as an extension of who we are so that we might become more of who we are and are meant to be. 

Religions are technologies of habit formation, de-formation, and re-formation, and at their best, they are intended to be highly disruptive to our normal habitual processes, devastatingly counter-cultural, and powerfully destabilizing forces in the world. They are here to wake us up, to shake us out of auto-pilot, to shock our systems away from the autohypnotic trances that our Ego-Self (our Divided Self) has created for us. In short, religion is a cultivation of courage to be fully oneself, awake and alive, for others, and courage always comes from the heart (kardia). 

Indeed, the root of the word courage comes from the word for heart, and in this sense, courage means “to speak one’s mind by telling all one’s heart.” This is true salvation, true mindful awareness, true awakening – a nurturing of our own Freedom, our Truest Self, our Buddha-nature, our Christ-nature. Courage is the source of our true freedom because courage unleashes our True Self to become what it always already is and to then share the story of our True Self with others in freedom and in truth within a beloved community.

The goal of all healthy forms of religion is that we are deeply connected – to God, to Creation, and to our neighbors. This is the summary of religion:

We are loved, accepted, and connected…we belong. 

And, this summary offers us a deep invitation to experience this connection in our soul and in our heart. The spiritual leaders of all the great traditions always say some version of this phrase – “Come and see. Come and see for yourself. Come experience the goodness that you are, as you are, and the goodness of all of creation, as it is.” 

The fear lurking in the shadows is the fear of disconnection. 

Unhealthy religion plays strongly on this fear, which is an expression of shame. Unhealthy forms of religion have traded a God of wonder, a God of energy and aliveness, a God of healing and wholeness for a transactional, Santa Claus God of fear who shames us when we’re sleeping and shames us when we’re awake because this Santa Claus God is always watching for our mistakes, our failures, and only cares who has been “bad” or “good.” 

But the true God of aliveness, fierce love, and wonder is the God who loves us exactly as we are, right now, and who wants us to feel connected to the infinite flow of love…who wants us to be exactly who we are and to tell that story of our lives.

Not the story of what we think others want us to be or the story of what society and culture tell us to be. The true story of who we truly are, within our hearts…alive and confident, moving within the Spirit of God. For Christians, we call this the kingdom of God, which is the realm of all potentiality (dunamis), the present moment, the infinite flow of love, the electrified grid of the aliveness of God’s Spirit, represented characteristically by the mustard seed – a tiny seed carrying within it the potential to become a quickly spreading, wild and unruly bush, another burning bush, of love and compassion.

Yet, freedom, true freedom, is difficult to experience. We know it is something we have lost, something that is a part of us that is very precious but has been forgotten, covered over, buried, and we search for it all of our lives. The Buddha offers freedom. The Christ offers freedom. The Prophet (PBUH) offers freedom. All religious and non-religious traditions are interested in freedom and trying to attain some type of experience, or state of being, related to freedom, but few of us ever find it. 

Sadly, religion is oftentimes used in the opposite way in which it was intended. Rather than inviting us into practices of freedom and liberation, it brings us assuredly into the demonic realms of fear and shame. That is, for more of us than are probably even aware, the version of our faith tradition that we have been offered is the very source of our imprisonment instead of our freedom. 

From my own Christian perspective, I have experienced very high levels of fear and shame directly related to the ways in which religion was taught to me and then forced onto my spiritual formation. For many Christians, the version of Christianity offered to us is the source of our pain and suffering instead of the freedom that Christ offers so willingly and generously. Rather than a Gospel of Truth and Freedom, we have been given a distorted and confused gospel, the Gospel of Fear and Shame. 

Shame and fear go together. They are bound together. Brene Brown writes, “Shame is all about fear…Shame is about the fear of disconnection. When we are experiencing shame, we are steeped in the fear of being ridiculed, diminished or seen as flawed. We are afraid that we’ve exposed or revealed a part of us that jeopardizes our connection and our worthiness of acceptance” (20). The problem with fear and shame is that we are caught in a double-bind with them. 

The double-bind is that we are stuck in the belief that we are trapped within them, and we are imprisoned in the delusion that we deserve the pain and suffering – the self-punishment – that always accompanies fear and shame. It is a highly paradoxical enterprise to experience shame because shame releases unbridled fear into our lives while simultaneously binding all of our other emotions and burying them in the basement of our souls. Shame is the ring of power in the Lord of the Rings saga. It is the one ring to rule them all…and in the darkness bind them. 

We are afraid of isolation and disconnection, and shame brings out all of our fear about this alienation. Shame also brings us into the very thing that causes all of the shame in the first place…blame. Blame is our first and most ancient defense against all things, but this is especially true about shame. 

We would rather feel anything other than shame. We would prefer to avoid shame at all costs instead of face it head-on, and the most elementary defensive strategy we all have against the onslaught of shame – our go-to escape hatch away from all the pressure – is blame. Yet, blame is the very thing that causes shame. I fear disconnection so I blame you for what I did or didn’t do. We believe judging and blaming will help us escape our own shame, but this is never true. Instead of abandoning this strategy, however, we just keep doing it, over and over again. We blame and blame and blame some more. Stuck. Lost. Confused. 

This is the toxic Gospel of Fear and Shame, which is more accurately termed the anti-gospel because “gospel” means “good news” and fear and shame are not good news. They are the anti-gospel of confusion, oppression, and imprisonment that poison our spiritual formation. Sadly, it is also the “gospel” that is preached in churches around the world on a daily basis.  What is this alleged “gospel,” this “good news” for us? We know it well. We live its paradoxical poisoning every day. “How dare you!” “It’s not my fault.” “They are so selfish.” “I’m so great. I’ve saved so many people. God will love me so much.” “I hate myself.” “I’m such a failure.” “I’m right, and they are going to hell.” These are all phrases and beliefs stuck in fear and shame, but this is the message of much religious language that promotes many devastating and destructive beliefs. 

This is the language of hiding, which is always the language of shame, and the preferred hiding place for all religions is the facade of piety – an illusion and a mask of distorted faith. Interestingly, all great spiritual leaders point out this mask as the destructive hypocrisy that poisons religion. The Buddha, the Christ, Mohammed (PBUH), Moses, Mary, Elizabeth, Elisha, almost all of the prophets…all spoke strongly against hypocrisy in all its forms. Sadly, this mask of piety is never genuine, true, or healing for anyone. 

The Gospel of Fear and Shame affects us and infects us all, which is why religion, at its best, is a technology of freedom. It is designed to counteract this Gospel of Fear and Shame with a Gospel of Truth and Freedom. All healthy forms and versions of religion are inviting us to wake up…not to escape and not to hide…but to wake up to ourselves and to who we truly are. 

This is what we will explore in this blog series. We hope you will join us on the journey.