Subverting the Honor-and-Shame System: Weekly Summary
Sunday
Jesus was a radical reformer of religion, in large part because he showed no interest in maintaining purity systems or closed systems of any kind. They only appeal to the ego and lead no one to God.
—Richard Rohr
Monday
Jesus refuses to live up to what is considered honorable and refuses to shame what people consider shameful. This does not gain him many friends.
—Richard Rohr
Tuesday
I grieve that a place that loved me and propelled me to a rich, full life has been a space of condemnation and castigation for others.
—Yolanda Pierce
Wednesday
We need to name toxic silence as the silence that causes harm, shame, minimization, and damage to our world. And we need to name loving silence as the silence that is generative and creative, a silence that deepens our unity with self and others—the kind of silence that cultivates a more expansive and loving world.
—Cassidy Hall
Thursday
Jesus frequently and publicly showed respect to “sinners” and even ate with them. In doing so, he was openly dismissing the ego-made honor-and-shame system of his time—and ours.
—Richard Rohr
Friday
The sole measure of God’s love for us is the measureless expanse of God’s merciful love, permeating us and taking us to itself in the midst of our faltering and wayward ways.
—James Finley
Choosing Relationship
Week Eleven Practice
Public theologian Rachel Held Evans (1981–2019) encouraged people who had been shamed by their families and churches for moving beyond the strict confines of faith, sexuality, or gender norms:
I remember the young woman in Nashville who pulled me aside, tears brimming in her blue eyes, to tell me about how her mother worried about her, argued with her, and was deeply disappointed in her … for going to seminary and becoming a pastor (when “the Bible clearly teaches” women cannot serve in such a way)…. I’ve listened as a whole group of twenty-somethings exchanged stories of awkward interventions and emotional meltdowns and dramatic lines-in-the-sand, all over differences of opinion regarding theology or politics or ecclesiology.
There are parents who refused to attend their grandkids’ baptism (because they didn’t approve of the method), parents who scheduled pastoral counseling sessions on behalf of their kids (because they were afraid Biology 101 had convinced them to accept evolution)…. And of course there is the gut-wrenching story of the young man who worked up the courage to come out to his parents only to be told by his father, “This is worse than if you had died.”
Lord, have mercy.
Held Evans honors her own parents’ commitment to her well-being and inclusion, despite differences in faith and practice:
When I hear these stories, I empathize, but I can’t relate. Because my parents have been wonderful. We don’t always agree on theology or politics … but my parents have always prioritized maintaining our relationship over maintaining ideological uniformity….
They were, and are, proud of me…. When I blustered, and fulminated, and foolishly rocked the boat for the sake of rocking it, they refused to treat me as a problem or an embarrassment or something to fear. They loved me unconditionally.
I’m pretty sure their response helped preserve my faith. I’m certain it preserved our relationship….
One of the most destructive mistakes we Christians make is to prioritize shared beliefs over shared relationship, which is deeply ironic considering we worship a God who would rather die than lose relationship with us….
God does not demand that we all agree. God only asks that we love one another well.
Reference:
Excerpted from BRAVING THE TRUTH: Essential Essays for Reckoning with and Reimagining Faith, 328–330. Reprinted with the permission of the publisher, HarperOne, an imprint of HarperCollins. Copyrighted © 2026 by Rachel Held Evans and by Sarah Bessey.
Image Credit and Inspiration: Elianna Gill, untitled (detail), 2023, photo, Unsplash. Click here to enlarge image. A group of people, regardless of background, welcome each other into community.
