In the hands of unhealthy religion the Gospel of Fear and Shame is provided the perfect toxic environment to fester and spread, turning “us” into “them,” guilt into shame, and fear into hatred. Then, we build massive systems of fear and oppression and call them “salvation” and “freedom” programs for our souls, which really only cause spiritual trauma, isolation, and…additional shame…because these programs are not truly for our souls. They do not resonate with, as Howard Thurman calls it, the “sound of the genuine.” They do not offer us freedom. These programs, instead, only offer us confusion and illusions that ultimately lead us to selfishness, and selfishness is always a prison because it doesn’t involve any giving away to others. 

Selfishness is a dense core at the center of the planet I call ME, and it has a very powerful gravitational pull. It pulls me down and keeps me close to the surface of ME. This isn’t freedom even though I believe that it is because I’ve been told my whole life that doing what I want when I want is actually freedom. The only thing that can break this gravitational pull is my surrender to another by becoming other-oriented. Selfishness can’t offer me this kind of freedom because it’s the opposite of being other-oriented and the opposite of  any surrender, any inter-dependence on God or anyone else. This can never be true freedom because true freedom can only ever be found in absolute surrender. 

Surrender is what every religious tradition teaches us, but the message of the Gospel of Fear and Shame is that we are unworthy (worthless), covered in shame. This is not a healthy message of surrender to love and compassion. This is not an invitation into freedom. 

Within toxic forms of religion, many of us are given violent messages of sacrifice and salvation, and this is what we call “good news.” But, there is nothing good about this news, and more to the point, we are promised a way out of this system of self-reinforcing and self-generating pain, suffering, confusion, and delusion by the very things that continue to manifest our pain and suffering – purity, imitation, and magic. 

Nothing creates fear and shame more than a culture of purity codes and false piety (a terrifying and impossible perfectionism through purification). Purity, imitation, and magic are the three ways we attempt to manifest the illusions of esteem and affection, safety and security, and power and control in our lives. These happen to be the three illusions of our “emotional programs for happiness” created by our false self that Thomas Keating lays out, and they also parallel Jesus’s teachings on the three temptations in the desert as well as the Buddhist teaching on the three lords of materialism: 

1. Purity: We try to escape shame by attempting to prove our worth through purity and purification (rules to keep us safe and hiding) – “If I can just be good enough and do everything right, then God will love me and everyone will tell me I’m good.”
   1. Esteem and Affection
   2. This is our heart center

2. Imitation: We try to escape fear by attempting to find our worth outside of ourselves through mimicry and imitation (another system of possession in the form of idolatry) – “If I can just be like them, God and my friends will love me.”
   1. Safety and Security
   2. This is our head center 

3. Magic: And, we try to control it all – our goodness, our rightness, our image, our masks – through magic – “If I can just say the right words at the right time in the right way about the right beliefs within the right prayers so that I can be right, right, right, then everything will be okay and I’ll be okay.”
   1. Power and Control 
   2. This is our body/gut center 

Do you know? Are you certain? Are you good? 

These are the deep and lurking fears that drive our shame, and we believe that to escape these fears we must be right, ALWAYS. Whether it’s through magical thinking, magical language, or the perfect imitation of spiritual perfection, we have convinced ourselves that we must know, we must be right, we must be good. The real danger is when we combine all three together – purity, imitation, and magic – in the ultimate trinity of ME…ME-victorious…and it kills us, it kills our spirit, and it kills our aliveness and connection to God’s Spirit. 

What’s interesting and paradoxical is that we are constantly using purity, imitation, and magic in the hope of proving something about ourselves to ourselves and to everyone else even though they consistently never work (and make things worse). It is this poisonous mixture of hope and fear that seems to be our way to “magically” control or avoid or ignore our fear and shame. It may even give us something to hide behind for a while – something like unhealthy peace or the illusion of calmness – but in the end, we are still just clinging desperately to magic potions, magic thinking, magic wishes, and magic words. If I can just magically fix this or magically do this or magically accomplish that. If I can just magically be somebody else or live somewhere else or have a different job…then everything will be okay. If I can just be perfect, then I will be invulnerable and everything will be okay and I will be okay.

We just keep believing that we must prove ourselves in some way, and we use purity, imitation, and magic to do this. We can’t just be ordinary, vulnerable people. We have to be special. We fear we aren’t enough, so we have to be MORE than enough. We are all just ordinary human beings living ordinary lives as ordinary people who make ordinary mistakes, but we can’t believe it about ourselves because fear and shame tell us that we have to be EXTRA, so God will love us and so others will love us and need us and admire us.

We demand from ourselves that we are superhuman somehow so we are never “just ordinary,” and so we end up being less than human instead of an actual whole human being who is very ordinary and does ordinary things and makes mistakes and fails sometimes and succeeds sometimes, and scariest of all, who is entirely accepted for exactly who they are in this very ordinary moment. 

The lie of spiritual perfectionism based in purity, imitation, and magic is a toxic poison for our souls. This is the toxic (anti)Gospel of Fear and Shame, and our reward for trying to be “good” will always be depression, isolation, and alienation. Yet, God doesn’t want us to be “good.” That is actually not the deep meaning of most religions. God doesn’t actually seem to care much for our systems of right and wrong, good and bad. We came up with those domination systems of morality, judgment, and punishment on our own. You know the ones…where we get presents if we behave like nice, docile little children and we get coal in our stockings if we misbehave. 

Based on the sacred texts of most religions, God actually seems fairly disinterested in all of these judgment and punishment blaming systems we’ve come up with. God seems actually to be quite opposed to our systems…because they are unjust and unfair. Instead, God appears to simply want us to feel accepted and loved within a gentle but fierce movement of Justice and Compassion. God seems to just want us to be who God created us to be, to be our True Self, connected to the divine flow of God’s Spirit and love. 

And it’s always easy to talk about perfectionism, but it’s very difficult to feel it, experience it, and live it. It’s easy to talk about fear and shame, but how do they feel? In my life?

So there I was, just stuck in the illusion of perfectionism…trying to escape my fear and my shame by being the “best” Christian I could be, the best son I could be, the best brother I could be, the best student I could be, and I was killing myself. Even while I was right in the middle of seminary, I was losing myself inside all of the morality (purity) codes, all the rules and regulations, all the demands and expectations. I was lost in the tormented field of perfectionism where I had unimaginable and impossible expectations and demands for myself. 

So I tried imitation. I tried to “be like” those Christian leaders I always admired, those speakers and preachers I thought were “perfectly” amazing. I read about Christian martyrs and great theologians, and I tried to use their lives as inspiration for my own life. But, the strangest thing happened when I did this…I just started beating myself up because I was comparing myself to them…and judging myself harshly for not being enough, for never being enough, never being good enough, never measuring up. So even through imitation I could never live up to the future idealized version of myself…that superhuman superhero way out there in the distance, and at some point, all of the self-sacrifice and heroism I thought I’d been doing started imploding. I imploded. 

So I tried magic. I tried magical, wishful thinking. I tried praying…and looking for affirmation in my words to God (or a message from above). I tried wishing upon a star…and looking for control in my wishful thinking. I tried saying the right words so I could prove to myself (and to the world) that I wasn’t lost, that I was really on the right path…and I searched endlessly for the “right” system, the right structure, the right beliefs, the right theology, the right church…THE right answer. Oh, if I could just find THE right answer…then I would be okay. Surely, oh God, I would be okay. 

But this is the problem with magical thinking…it’s always an illusion, a wisp of vapor. We always think it will give us some control or some power over our lives – if I just find the right incantation, “in Jesus’s name I pray,” then everything will be okay – but the magic thinking and the magical words always failed. THE right answer always seemed so certain…until it was gone. It never stayed. Something always happened. The ground that I would find would only last a moment and then it would always disappear, and there I would be…still trying to build something on ground that didn’t exist anymore (and had never existed).

And so, the dense core of selfishness at the core of my planet ME just started sucking me down further and further…pulling me down to the surface and through the planet’s crust into the singularity of a black hole of depression, into meaninglessness and purposelessness, into isolation and fear. I stopped talking to friends. I stopped engaging the world. I stopped nurturing relationships. I just numbed out and stopped living life. I felt trapped within a living death where my ME-focus just seemed enormous and all-consuming. I simply could not see a way through, I could not focus on anyone but ME…in this moment, in this magnitude of ME – the weight and gravity of it was tactile, I could taste and smell it – and caught within this pull, I simply could not see anyone else on my planet…and this heaped shame upon shame onto me. 

And I knew I was trapped (sort of), and I tried to get out of my prison through these strategies of purity, imitation, and magic that never work but I thought they might work even though I definitely knew they did NOT work – I just kept thinking, maybe this time…because it’s all I have, it’s all I have, it’s all I have. And I kept thinking that surely this was the antidote to it all, to all the shame and fear, but all it ever really was was a mask, an illusion, a cheap trick that we call perfectionism, a poison that I kept swallowing everyday…and the real hell of it is that it’s never enough, it’s never enough, it’s never enough, I’M never enough. 

And this is the BIG LIE…this language of fear and shame. Fear says, “I’m afraid IT’S never enough, nothing you do is ever enough,” and shame says, “I’M never enough.” The combination of these two messages is debilitating and paralyzing. They bypass my neocortex and my higher cognitive functions and plunge me directly into my fight, flight, or freeze reactionary brain. 

These strategies were originally functioning as survival mechanisms within us, but these strategies are born out of the fear that we’re not okay, we’re not safe, we’re not enough…and they produce additional suffering and misery for us the more we do them. We just keep trying to prove we’re okay…over and over and over again. And that is what I was trying to do as I sunk lower and lower into deep depression, worthlessness, and shame. I was right in the middle of it…this cycle of fear and shame. 

But, all of this is precisely part of the point. We are noticing the cycle, maybe for the first time in our lives, but we are noticing the cycle. We SEE it, and now we know that THIS IS WHERE WE ARE…in this moment…and it takes enormous courage…and this is the moment when we acknowledge and accept our reality and begin to heal…and we begin to stop the cycle. This moment when we begin to heal, and the fact that we can experience the reality of healing at all, is a miracle. There is nothing magic about it. It is a deep and true miracle for us. 

Amazingly, religions themselves have story after story about moving beyond these prisons of fear, shame, and blame that we create for ourselves. For example, right within the gospel stories themselves are stories about leaving behind the games and traps of fear and shame. Time and time again Jesus is at pains to open our eyes and hearts to the illusions we are swallowing as reality. 

Perhaps the most powerful and intense story about our prisons of illusion is shown to us by a man Jesus meets one day outside the city. When Jesus finds him, he is actually more like an animal in a cave than he is like a human being. Many of us know him as the “demon-possessed man.” Is he possessed by a demon? Well…in a sense, because he is possessed by something demonically destructive that has taken his humanity and turned him into an animal. Like all of us, he is afraid, and in his fear, he has determined that a spirit of possessiveness will save him. In doing this, he has dehumanized himself. 

This possessiveness has never healed his isolation or his disconnection. In fact, it has only exacerbated it because he is possessed and bound by demonic shame, which he calls Legion. Yet, he clings to it, grasps it, and craves it…he clings to his own suffering even as he spreads his pain and blame all around and will not release it though it is like a poisonous snake that continues to bite him over and over again. 

Shame teaches us to believe we are flawed. Shame teaches us to believe we are unworthy of love, belonging, and acceptance. Shame is always about our perceptions and expectations that are put onto us – who we should be, how we should be, why we should be. Shame is never about reality. 

This man that Jesus meets has come to believe his perception over reality, and in his shame and fear he no longer feels worthy or that he belongs. He is alienated and alone. He feels no emotions. He is numb to the world. His walls are high. His armor is thick. He hides behind his barriers. His life has no meaning. He feels disconnected from everyone, including God. 

This existence for him is a living death because disconnection is always a living death. Truly, he is possessed by the spirit of diabalo that “casts about and tears apart,” a destructive force in our lives that destroys us and our relationships. Truly he is trapped within his own prison, his own psychological hell of self-punishment and torment. 

Sadly, we are all this man at one or many points in our lives. He is a synecdoche for us all because the possessiveness of demonic shame is Legion. It’s everywhere. We are saturated with it, and we punish ourselves with our self-talk: “We are never good enough when it comes to”…appearance, body image, parenting, sex, money, work, mental health, physical health, spirituality, religion, aging, on and on it goes. This is the lie. 

For Jesus, the healing of this man is a simple and gentle invitation into belonging. It is an invitation into wholeness, an invitation into the undivided life, an invitation into vulnerability, an invitation to become a human being. The healing offered was a deep connection of empathy and compassion. This invitation into wholeness, this healing, this empathy and compassion offered with gentleness and acceptance is a miracle, and it is what we can all offer ourselves…and each other. 

What Jesus offers this man who is living death is a miracle. It is a cutting through of all the perceptions, interpretations, assumptions, and delusions. Jesus tells him to stop living under all the shame and fear, to give up, to surrender. Jesus tells him that he is free and that his fear and shame are keeping him trapped within a prison of illusion. 

I can almost see Jesus in my mind approach this very aggressive man in a very gentle way and just touch his hand, and I can almost hear Jesus whisper to him, “Be brave…you are okay…you are loved…remember, remember who you are…be brave.” In powerful imagery, we then see Jesus “casting out” this man’s demonic shame into some pigs nearby, and because even the pigs cannot bear the weight of this demonic shame, they throw themselves over a cliff. 

This is a very powerful image because nothing in Creation wants to be shame-based or shame-bound. Nothing can bear it. It turns human beings into animals, and not even animals will live with it inside of them. It is not our human nature to be bound by shame. It is not our True Self.

Only deep surrender can bring healing. Purity, imitation, and magic will not save anyone. They will only keep me bound to planet ME fighting for ME-victorious at all costs. Only acceptance of ourselves with compassion and vulnerability will release us from the bonds of fear and shame and wake us up and bring true and deep inter-connection and healing. It is courage that will save us.