The culture war has made so many people combatants that we sometimes forget that all of us are human beings who can also feel vulnerability. It’s important to remember this, especially for Christians. Because Jesus is a vulnerable God who triumphs with love.
Jason Arday was an academic at Cambridge who got exposed for lying about his past and plagiarizing his papers. Some conservatives are blaming Arday’s death on DEI, while the left says he was undone by racism. While it is important that frauds get called to account, it’s also possible to recognize that the “shame storm” of modern witch hunts can also be too much for some people to bear — and that sometimes the shame storm is out of proportion to the actual crime. (Some shame storms are also entirely created by the media.)
While everyone has been dissecting Arday’s academic career and past, I kept thinking of him in those last moments when he decided to take his own life. When he fell terrified and abandoned. He deserved the blowback from his actions, but did not deserve to die. There is a way through these valleys, although suicidal ideation is a hard cross to bear. And the frenzy of commentary following Arday's death is a little too gleeful. Perhaps the wisdom of Pat Buchanan should apply here: “When God puts his hand on a man, I take mine off.”
The journalist Helen Andrews called the phenomenon of the media swarming a target a “shame storm.” In 2019 Andrews was publicly embarrassed on television when an old boyfriend began insulting her about how their relationship ended. Her shame was debilitating: “Everyone at work was supportive, but no amount of support could counteract the paranoia that settled in over the next weeks and months. My colleagues probably didn’t believe the woman they worked alongside was secretly a comic-book villain—but surely the suspicion had been planted? I never knew whether someone on the subway was giving me a second glance because he knew me, or because he recognized me from the video. Fellow journalists reported back to me from conferences where [my ex-boyfriend] Todd expatiated on my depravity at length—in one case, before an audience that included my boss.”
Andrews insightfully sums up the new digital world of shame:
No one has yet figured out what rules should govern the new frontiers of public shaming that the Internet has opened. New rules are obviously required. Shame is now both global and permanent, to a degree unprecedented in human history. No more moving to the next town to escape your bad name. However far you go and however long you wait, your disgrace is only ever a Google search away. Getting a humiliating story into the papers used to require convincing an editor to run it, which meant passing their standards of newsworthiness and corroborating evidence. Those gatekeepers are now gone. Most attempts so far to devise new rules have taken ideology as their starting point: Shaming is okay as long as it’s directed at men by women, the powerless against the powerful. But that doesn’t address what to do afterward, if someone is found to have been wrongfully shamed, or when someone rightfully shamed wants to put his life back together.
Again, I’m not saying that Jason Arday shouldn’t have been called out. I am saying that Christians should remember that Jason Arday was a human person created by and loved by God, and that his vulnerability, like the vulnerability of all of us, is also the vulnerability of Jesus. In his wonderful forthcoming book Vulnerable God: How Jesus Upends Our Assumptions About God — and Shows Us How to Be Human, Kenneth Tanner explores how the vulnerability of Christ is essential to his being God:
Some speak of the cross in ways we can and should forget, a cross that is a brief stop of surrender and selflessness on a violent crusade toward a “greatness” that makes Jesus a kind of forever Caesar. In this scenario, Christ’s “humility” leads to an eternal tyranny, to world domination without end. Jesus dies precisely as God in God’s fullness, as the first of us to become fully and finally human, not as a tyrant but as an afflicted servant-king, for only the wounded God can save and rule the world. It takes the whole dangerous road to and through death to become human; surviving isn’t part of the equation for this kind of love—resurrection is. Self-defense doesn’t come into it, not even when the moment of truth comes. God’s self-giving love will not be and need not be shielded from our violence. Bearing wounds in powerlessness is the very nature of this human God—the nature of any greatness.
In his recent book The Moral Life, the priest James Keenan, SJ. argues that vulnerability is crucial to a Christian life. We are not meant to ever fully recover from grief. Keenan writes, because grief is a sign of deep and abiding love. It keeps alive our love for the person we have lost: “Entrance into grief is not solely an encounter with absence but with presence as well.”
Grief makes us vulnerable, which is the opening to Christ. When Mark and the disciples were grieving in the Upper Room over the death of Jesus, it was their vulnerability that the Lord chose as the time to return to them. Jesus arrived when they were at their most defenseless and open. Grief, Fr. Keenan observes, also “opens the door” for us to minister to others and share the love of Jesus with them. When the disciples went to the Upper Room to mourn Jesus, their tears and stories and pain were not a hindrance to their connection to God, but a vital doorway through which Jesus could enter. Keenan puts it this way: “Their grief was not an obstacle to their capacity to see Jesus but rather the passageway itself.”
Keenan argues that there are three steps to a Christian moral life: grief, vulnerability and recognition. When we grieve we are vulnerable, Jesus enters our lives, and we then recognize the suffering of others.
James Arday messed up. He did not deserve to die. Maybe imperious takes from the sinless commentariat could have waited a couple of days.
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