Abstract
Eugene Nida’s distinction between “shame cultures,” “fear cultures,” and “guilt cultures” has become a foundational assumption of the “global Gospel” / “honor-shame” streams of missiology. It is periodically necessary to test such assumptions, particularly in the light of later developments within the disciplines of anthropology and sociology and the availability of empirical evidence. I argue here that the shame/guilt division is not clearly demarcated and that subsequent critique has cast doubt on its validity as a categorical concept. Missiology operating under its assumptions needs to reflect both the conceptual complexity and the limited empirical evidence for such a distinction.
Recent years have seen a renaissance of the concept of shame as a missiological category. 1 One of the core assumptions of practitioners operating in this area is that the world can be divided into three basic cultural orientations, as defined by their primary social sanction: shame, guilt, or fear. A subsequent expansion of this distinction 2 pairs each orientation with an opposing value: shame/honor, guilt/innocence, fear/power. 3
If this tripartite cultural division is to be an operating assumption for missiologists, then it seems wise to examine the evidence in its favor. To put it another way, to what degree is this phenomenon empirically attested, or to what degree is it a missiological just-so story? In particular, we seek to answer here the question: to what extent can we say with any level of confidence that a certain culture is a “shame culture” or a “guilt culture”?
Origins of the categories
The division of the world into shame cultures, fear cultures, and guilt cultures is generally traced to the writing of Eugene Nida and in particular to his anthropological textbook Customs and Cultures (1954). What Nida actually says about the division is quite brief and is worth quoting in full:
We have to reckon with three different types of reactions to transgressions of religiously sanctioned codes: fear, shame and guilt. It seems that for the most part people are afraid of being punished or of being caught in the act by some person or deity. Often there is a sense of shame, expressed as “I’d feel terrible if anyone saw me doing this.” A sense of guilt expresses itself as an inner feeling of failure for not having lived up to what the society or deity expects, irrespective of whether one is caught or seen. This sentiment of guilt is far less common than might be supposed. Except for those neurotic persons who magnify their self-importance by self-incrimination, regarding oneself as guilty is not in keeping with man’s egocentric way of life. Fear and shame are much more convenient attitudes for self-centered people.
4
We can see from this description that the fear/shame/guilt division is an undeveloped, unsourced, and essentially offhand remark. Even throughout the remainder of book, very few concrete examples are given.
It is also important to note that Nida is specifically referring to religious, rather than generalized social, transgressions. In short, what Nida says about fear, shame, and guilt is considerably limited in scope, and it is difficult to see how it provides sufficient warrant for expansion into a foundational framework of culture.
The fear orientation appears to be original to Nida, and one struggles to find sociological discussion of it outside of anecdotal accounts. 5 We will therefore restrict our analysis in this section to the much more established 6 shame/guilt distinction.
It is likely that Nida developed his tripartite division from the work of Ruth Benedict, whose book The Chrysanthemum and the Sword (1946) is credited with introducing the terms “shame culture” and “guilt culture” into sociological discourse. 7 Benedict wrote this book over the course of three months as a study of Japanese culture commissioned to help the United States Army’s occupation forces understand the behavior of the Japanese. 8 In his foreword to the 1989 edition, Ezra Vogel describes The Chrysanthemum and the Sword as “an effort to apply the approach she worked out in Patterns of Culture to Japan.” In other words, it was an attempt to overlay Benedict’s preexisting framework of cultural difference in a new setting.
Benedict neither visited Japan nor spoke Japanese. Her main informant was a Japanese-American man (Robert Hashima) who had come to Japan for the first time in his teenage years, when the Japanese nation had just undergone a shaming experience on a massive scale through its humbling loss in the Second World War; this is the context in which her terms “guilt culture” and “shame culture” should be understood. 9 Clifford Geertz argues that The Chrysanthemum and the Sword should be read as a political fiction, a morality play both justifying the occupation and speaking by means of contrast to American society, rather than as an objective work of anthropology. 10
The book set off a vigorous debate among scholars inside Japan as to whether Japan was indeed a shame culture in Benedict’s definition. 11 An entire edition of the Japanese Journal of Ethnology was devoted to its review. In particular, Kunio Yanagita argued that Benedict glossed over the many terms for guilt in Japanese and the importance of guilt as a partner to shame in the arena of social conditioning, 12 while Takeo Doi claimed that “the Japanese sense of guilt . . . represents the very prototype of the sense of guilt, and Benedict’s failure to see this can only be attributed to her cultural prejudice.” 13 Benedict’s distinction that shame relies on external sanctions while guilt is a sense of internal consciousness was questioned by Keichi Sakuta, 14 while Mikisaburo Mori argued that “in traditional Japanese thought guilt is associated with an external threat of punishment while shame comes from the internal consciousness of ethic nurtured through custom and etiquette.” 15 Given that Benedict interpreted guilt as an internal process and shame as a manifestation of external social pressure, Creighton concludes that Mori and Sakuta “effectively reverse Benedict’s definitions of internality and externality.” 16
In contrast, Hiromi Shimada and Pauline Kent have pointed out that the distinction between shame culture and guilt culture was a minor portion of Benedict’s argument. 17 Indeed, Benedict herself was careful to downplay the distinction, pointing out that the Japanese “are also overcome by guilt when other people know nothing of their mis-step” and that people in so-called guilt cultures such as “in the United States, suffer in addition from shame.” 18
In summary, Benedict’s shame/guilt distinction has come under significant criticism from the culture to which it was applied, and she herself admitted the complexity of the interplay between the two orientations.
Jayson Georges’s Culture Test
It is difficult to find clear empirical evidence in favor of the shame/guilt/fear theory. Despite its popularity, few direct substantive tests have been done, and so we must examine secondary evidence. Jayson Georges, a missiologist who has written widely on the honor-shame axis, 19 created the Culture Test diagnostic. 20 This test is a web-based survey consisting of twenty-five multiple-choice questions; for example:
Where a guest sits at a meal:
may affect what happens tomorrow.
indicates their status and age.
is randomly chosen.
The latest set of results (as of August 2017) from the survey consists of thirteen thousand respondents. Georges provides a breakdown of the orientation percentages for global regions based on the initial 1,000 results 21 and also references a plot by GMI of the results by country, which I have replicated as figure 1.
Shame, Fear, and Guilt Orientations, according to The Culture Test.
It is immediately evident from the data that there is an apparent correlation between areas labeled “guilt” and areas where Christianity, particularly Western European Protestant Christianity, 22 has had significant influence. 23 Indeed, all except two of the cultures designated “guilt cultures” in this definition are found in majority Christian or Jewish countries.
What are we to do with this correlation? The fact that no non–Judeo-Christian countries are considered guilt cultures (however defined by this survey) should raise critical questions about the nature of so-called guilt orientation. Is it possible that Christianity has really taken root only in cultures that understand guilt? If so, then we have a significant missiological challenge: what form of Christianity makes sense for the rest of the world? Proponents of shame-based models of salvation have been following this reasoning, which has prompted their search for alternative forms of Gospel presentation. 24
But we must also consider the possibility that the causation runs the other way around: that Christianity itself has produced something that is labeled as a guilt orientation, overlaying the default orientation of shame with one of guilt.
25
An explanation that fits this hypothesis could be as follows: what people in Judeo-Christian societies call guilt is their way of describing the shame felt on knowing that God is watching their actions. As they practice reflecting introspectively on what God feels about their behavior, this internalization obviates the need to have their behavior assessed by those around them. This view was certainly held by Japanese psychologist Takeo Doi as he reflected on Ruth Benedict’s writing:
What is characteristic about the Japanese sense of guilt, though, is that it shows itself most sharply when the individual suspects that his action will result in betraying the group to which he belongs. Even with the Western sense of guilt one might, in fact, postulate a deep-lying psychology of betrayal, but the Westerner is not normally conscious of it. What probably happened is that in the course of centuries of exposure to Christian teachings, the group—which almost certainly played an important part in his moral outlook at first—was gradually replaced by God, who in turn faded away with the advent of the modern age, leaving the individual awareness to carry on by itself.
26
Neither Georges’s data nor his methodology is available for analysis at the time of writing, although an expanded version is forthcoming. It is also important to remember that the test was intended as “a training/learning tool; research is a secondary purpose.” 27 On the one hand, we should not expect too much from this survey; on the other, it is a significant collection of data that is being presented in favor of evidence for a particular viewpoint, and therefore it is legitimately subject to analysis. That said, certain methodological constraints restrict its validity as evidence in favor of the shame/guilt/fear theory.
First, the test was available only in English and Spanish, which necessarily limited the potential respondents to those competent in those languages. Furthermore, there was no requirement that the respondents be native to the culture they were responding on behalf of; although respondents were asked the length of time they had spent in the culture, it is unclear how this data was used. The lower bound on the number of respondents to determine the orientation of a particular country was four. No confidence values or levels of statistical significance were given.
Most crucially, while Georges notes that “a more accurate model of culture measures the influence of each dynamic upon a group, like a triangle with each corner representing guilt, shame, or fear” and “no culture can be completely characterized by only one,” 28 the results he presents do not reflect these qualifications. Countries are classified into discrete category determinations between guilt, shame, fear, and a fear/shame mix, rather than as a continuum. The interpretation of the data, then, is predetermined by the assumed categories. Even if the Culture Test does not purport to be a rigorous study, proponents of honor/shame missiology must be careful not to inadvertently promote it as providing evidence for a narrative that its methodology implicitly assumes.
Other empirical measures
As part of his ethnology of Japanese religious values, David Lewis conducted a survey of Japanese feelings of shame and guilt. 29 Questionnaires were issued to members of a Japanese community, with preaddressed response envelopes provided to ensure confidentiality; there were 660 respondents. The survey presented a number of hypothetical situations and asked, “In which of the following circumstances would you feel ashamed, if the deed were known to others?” and “In which of the following circumstances would you experience a feeling of guilt, even if the act were not known to anyone else?” Note that these questions do not necessarily compare like for like, as the feeling being tested and the public nature of the situation are simultaneously varied. Lewis notes, as a caveat to his survey, that “in characterizing a society as predominantly motivated by shame rather than guilt or sin, we are dealing with an aspect of culture that is not easily amenable to direct observation or testing. It is extremely difficult to penetrate the mind and feelings of other people when dealing with deep-seated emotions such as guilt, which makes any hypothesis such as Benedict’s essentially untestable. We are left with indirect clues and reported feelings as the only basis for inference.” 30 His results are summarized in table 1. 31
Lewis’s survey of Japanese attitudes.
As can be seen from the results, there is a numerical similarity between the figures for shame and those for guilt; the “shame” figure is, on average, three percentage points higher. While this result is admittedly just sufficient to establish statistical significance at the p < 0.05 level, the evidence that Japan is a shame but not a guilt society is scant. Lewis also cites a nationwide Japanese study 32 (n=2741) with similar results.
Reflecting on this outcome, Lewis concludes, “In general, it can be seen that most people report feelings [of] shame and guilt for each of these items. If they feel shame, then they also feel guilt, and vice-versa. There are relatively few people who feel shame but not guilt. These figures indicate that it is misleading to characterise Japan as a shame society, with the implication that guilt is not so strongly present. Instead, Japan appears to be both a guilt and a shame society.” 33
Clyde Kluckhohn and Leighton cite psychometric data comparing shame and guilt responses of five American Indian tribes with those of a white Midwestern community. 34 The data, gathered by the Indian Education Project, use a standardized psychological test (Stewart’s Emotional Response Test) to determine the incidences of shame and guilt reaction to various situations. For Kluckhohn and Leighton, the data show that white children are motivated by “internal” conscience, whereas Navaho react more strongly to external sanctions.
Milton Singer, however, points out a number of methodological errors with the study. 35 First, the data regarding the Navaho are not consistent with those of other tribal groups. And then, tests to elicit “moral responsibility” and “cultural values” are shown to be culturally conditioned by the researchers’ own interpretations of these criteria. In particular, the interpretation of a “shame” response is ambiguous, as the definition of “shame” itself is contested. 36 For Kluckhohn and Leighton, “personal failure and inadequacy” is a source of guilt, but Piers considers it a source of shame. 37
More generally, Singer argues against the compatibility of (usually Western-derived) psychometrics with ethnographic cultural analysis, 38 and he questions the ideological basis of both anthropologists such as Mead and Benedict and psychologists such as Sigmund Freud, who assumed that the distinction between shame and guilt orientations was the cause of the distinction between “static,” “primitive” societies and “dynamic” developed societies. 39
Singer concludes his study with a number of important observations that bear repeating here:
There are sufficient reasons for doubting the prevailing assumption that most cultures of the world are shame cultures, and that Western culture is one of the rare guilt cultures, to warrant a careful reconsideration of the distinction between shame cultures and guilt cultures, and of the presumed correlation between guilt cultures and moral and technical progress.
Neither the distinction between internal and external sanctions, nor the additional criteria of reference to an audience and internalized past threat, suffice to differentiate shame from guilt. . . .
A tendency of some recent studies to find more guilt cultures than formerly does not depend on new direct evidence but on inferences drawn with the help of psychoanthropological theories. . . .
Whether, then, we consider the criterion of internal and external sanctions, or the cross-cultural psychometric data, or the psychoanalytic interpretations of cultures, we cannot find sufficient evidence to justify the theory that most cultures of the world are shame cultures. . . . What evidence there is, tends to support the conclusion that the sense of guilt and the sense of shame are found in most cultures. 40
Conclusions
At the end of her multidisciplinary study on the distinction between shame and guilt cultures, Rita Werden also concludes that there is insufficient empirical data to declare that the theory is in fact justified in reality: “Thus it has been shown that the theory studied here as a whole requires modifications and a higher degree of complexity. Once again, it seems impossible to identify this or that cultural context as a guilt culture or shame culture per se. The theoretical frameworks that have been presented here must also prove themselves to be true in real phenomena. Whether or not this is actually the case must be determined through future empirical research.” 41 Similarly, for Millie Creighton, “to label Japan a ‘shame culture’ or the United States a ‘guilt culture’ may merely be caricature.” 42
How, then, should missiologists proceed in their investigations into the nature of shame and guilt without slipping into this kind of caricature? First, it needs to be recognized that the distinction between shame orientation and guilt orientation is considerably less clear-cut and more complex than simple tripartite models allow. Dividing cultures at the nation-state level into one of three categories is at best clumsy reductionism and at worst cultural stereotyping.
Second, more prominence needs to be given to the interwoven relationship between guilt and shame. It may be preferable to see guilt and shame as orthogonal rather than opposed. While missiologists would generally agree in theory that both feelings exist within a culture but one is more prominent as the driver of social sanctions, in practice they often fall into prioritizing one aspect to the exclusion of the other. 43 Instead of this approach, Gospel presentations for “shame cultures” will need to also include elements of freedom from guilt, and vice versa.
Third, there is a pressing need for missiologists to become more empirically grounded in their research and to keep pace with the developments in the sociological and anthropological models that they appropriate for their own use. Nida’s brief comments over sixty years ago do not serve as an adequate justification for a missiological framework, particularly as other disciplines have tested and refined the concepts in the meanwhile. 44
At the same time, there needs to be greater theological investigation into the nature of shame and guilt. It is my contention, developed further in a forthcoming article, 45 that shame is the default primary orientation, as experienced by Adam in Genesis 3, while—theologically speaking—guilt is produced by the experience of transgressing against a divine code, as Paul describes the law in Romans 7. 46 From this theological standpoint, it is shame that is the universal human experience; to then categorize the world—particularly the unevangelized world—into shame, fear, and guilt cultures represents an unnecessary complication.
Footnotes
For online readers, read these two related IBMR articles online:
Notes
Author biography