Purity and Pollution
When my cat, Mithy, leaps on the kitchen counter, he sometimes leaves black paw prints everywhere I place my spice bottles. This less-than-appetising situation seems somewhat grotesque. The idea of food and traces of grey cat litter lingering amidst bottles of pepper, Oregano leaves, garlic and chillies, and paprika hardly titillates my tastebuds. I tell myself not to think too hard about this unfortunate circumstance to avoid imagining what else the combination entails. Still, my anxious mind wanders into the realm of the horrendous - cat urine, faecal matter, dirt from the floor mixed with human sweat, dandruff, and skin flakes.
This brings me to my next point: why am I so disgusted with the mundane and the everyday? Even kings, queens, and gorgeous celebrities fart, belch, and defecate. Why do I cringe when I discuss the nature of my stools with a doctor querying my intestinal health? What about such matters makes the contents of my stomach whirl like a washing machine?
It is easy to categorise life and manage its ambiguities in binaries: good/bad, God/devil, saint/sinner, pure/polluted. It is natural to strive to make our worlds as neat and precise as possible. This explains why a trip to IKEA, its pretty furniture, adorable plastic boxes, and cute lampshades is so appealing.
Neat and precise categorisations are not merely an IKEA phenomenon. They dominate conservative religion. A purity-pollution worldview pervades Evangelical Christianity, where disorder, pollution, and dirt are out of place, and impurity and nonconformity must be eradicated (Douglas, 1966, p. 5). Heterosexual marriage, for instance, is associated with holiness, purity, and sanctity. To accept homosexuality, on the other hand, is to reject God, a form of defilement. Non-Christian religions are sometimes aligned with superstition and idolatry, as is the scheme of colonial Christianity (Sang, 2010, p. 106), and sex solely designed for reproductive reasons where agapic love and eros are placed in opposition to each other (Althaus Reid, 2000, p. 210). Mental illnesses and homosexuality are aligned with spiritual warfare, where God and the devil constantly battle each other. All we need to do is pray depression and the gay spirit away (Llyod, 2023, p.2). Spiritual reductionism downplays the need for secular medicine and deprives Christians who do not experience instantaneous healing of the agency and dignity they deserve (Lloyd, 2023, p. 14).
We fear the foreign and unfamiliar in a world of polar opposites, so we feel the right to remove and eliminate impurities. It is unsurprising to hear of someone's removal from church ministry due to his/her status as a divorcee or as someone who married a 'non-Christian'. Mentally ill individuals receive further stigmatisation in the church due to perceptions that such ailments are a product of sin or lack of faith (Lloyd, 2023, p. 14). Non-heterosexuals undergo conversion therapy where they are purged of the gay spirit (Richman, 2020, pp. 249-250). Those who engage in premarital sex are asked to confess publicly before the church congregation that they are truly sorry and repentant for what they have done (McSkimming, 2014, p. 163).
I tell all of this not from a position of superiority, for I too, am a former Evangelical. Many things have deeply disturbed me as someone profoundly conservative in her former views. Non-Christian religions, Catholic Christianity, LGBT, divorce, sex, foul language, ghost stories, Harry Potter, and the list continues. Absurd, I know. But this past is a part of me, one I embody and sometimes recoil at, this past that I sometimes feel ashamed of. There is also a foreigner within me (Kristeva, 1991, p. 192).
References
Althaus-Reid, M. (2000). Indecent theology: Theological perversions in sex, gender and politics. Abingdon, Oxon : Routledge.
Douglas, M. (1966). Purity and danger: An analysis of concepts of pollution and taboo. https://doi.org/10.1177/003803856700100211
Kristeva,
J. (1991). Strangers to ourselves. New York : Columbia University Press.
Lloyd,
C. E. M. (2023). “Prayer Is Fine, but Don’t Then Quickly Move on, as If You’re
Done and Dusted”: How Can the Evangelical Church Better Support Those with
Mental Illness? Journal of Disability & Religion, 1–22. https://doi.org/10.1080/23312521.2023.2173712
McSkimming,
J. (2014). Identity formation and re-formation within and beyond Christian
Fundamentalism: A post-structural narrative analysis of power and resistance.
Richman,
N. (2020). Homosexuality, Created Bodies, and Queer Fantasies in a Nigerian
Deliverance Church. Journal of Religion in Africa, 50(3–4), 249–277.
https://doi.org/10.1163/15700666-12340192
Sang,
H. L. (2010). From a liminal place: An Asian American theology.
https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1748-0922.2010.01484_15.x
