Americans on both sides of the aisle resoundingly agree on one thing: this is the moment for courage. Throughout the first year of President Donald Trump’s second administration, Republican and Democratic leaders have invoked messages that are strikingly consistent in this one respect. Though they differ on the wider range of virtues—whether and when compassion or charity, for example, should drive a decision—they all agree that courage is the virtue urgently required. 

After chastising European leaders at the Munich Security Conference and admonishing Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy in the White House, Vice President J.D. Vance advised his supporters to “have the courage” to “live . . . and speak the truth.” Around the same time, New York representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez advised a rally crowd in Arizona to elect individuals with “the courage to brawl for the working classes,” and former Vice President Kamala Harris encouraged an audience in California to believe that “courage is contagious.” 

Despite their agreement that our current moment demands this virtue in particular, these leaders seem to disagree on just about everything else, facing off over immigration, foreign policy, global trade, environmental protections, and even health and safety regulations. The weightiness of those issues and the profundity of the unfolding disputes over them make one wonder where exactly the respective visions for virtue overlap. These calls for courage from stridently opposed partisan camps seem to suggest that courage is not just common but a virtue universally held across the political spectrum. But does courage, when it’s named by Vice President Vance or by former Vice President Harris, mean the same thing? 

I’d like to suggest that a meaningful difference between the courage called for by each leader reflects their postures toward shame. I have argued elsewhere in this magazine that bearing the burden of non-innocent histories is a task we remain ill-equipped to do well. Shame has long been enlisted in this endeavour, serving a national agenda of cultural reform that aims to address the contemporary legacy of these histories. This agenda has been led largely by uneven coalitions that have emerged between elites, middle-class academics, and organic intellectuals, those individuals whom Antonio Gramsci identifies as essential to social change, serving the interests of the social groups from which they have emerged. But significant moments of moral reflection and reckoning tend to be schismatic in the short term, with aftershocks that ripple far into the future. The schisms opening before us now trace exactly the fault lines of shame running through our non-innocent histories. Policy clashes over immigration, education, inclusion initiatives, global trade, humanitarian aid, and foreign policy directly concern the moral implications for the United States’ wealth, its influence, and its embeddedness in the lives of people inside its own borders and around the globe. 

For Aristotle, courage is the “mother” of virtues; for C.S. Lewis, their “testing point”; and for Maya Angelou, the “most important” virtue of all. If they’re right—if courage indeed undergirds or proves the other virtues—then shame may be the crucible in which our understandings of courage are formed. Across the United States and Western Europe, what we do with the collective shame implied in our own people’s history of violence and discrimination tends to gather force around two primary positions. On the one hand, there are those who label these histories as shameful and tend to call on courage to commit to repentance and transformation; this is shame’s acceptance. On the other hand, there are those who resist the shame implied in our history. Here, courage is not called on to bring about change, but rather to assert an innocent victory. In its denial of shame, courage is reimagined as defensive bravado. 

In each camp, courage has become the call to man the fault lines, to pursue a painful moral reckoning but also to refuse its first premises. While we may all cherish courage, when the virtue is refracted through these opposed orientations to shame, calls to courage from the other camp appear less like common ground and more like alien terrain. If we are to learn to speak a common language of virtue once more, we will need to better understand the workings of shame in and through our societies, to consider the roles we have each played, and to imagine a new distribution of this burden among the people. The way to mutual intelligibility is not clear, but US and European history offer some lights for the labour of path-making. 

A View from Appalachia

For the past year my family and I have lived in Appalachia, where rolling hills and wooded mountains are home to communities that I have found to be warm and brimful of humour, with a spirit of innovation and an instinct for loyalty. But Appalachia, not unlike the urban communities that have nurtured my sensibilities, is often represented by the worst things about it. As a result, the region’s bestselling portraits make it out to be something shameful: a racially white cul-de-sac of drug addiction and government reliance, with an unhealthy suspicion of outsiders and a fetish for violence. Almost as soon as I learned the correct pronunciation of the region (it’s App-a-latch-a, not App-a-lay-sha), I heard the expressions of frustration from my new neighbours, who wanted to be sure I was not bringing any elegiac expectations. Instead, they introduced me to an Appalachia that was more ethnically, racially, and socio-economically diverse than its popular representations, whose great potential lay in its resourceful people and an ethic of looking out for one another, seasoned by a natural beauty at once breathtaking and common (almost) to the point of ordinariness. But as the external narratives of Appalachia’s shame have continued to lurk around the corners of this bright place, I have learned to listen carefully, not to the shaming practices, but rather to the making of meaning that proceeds in their wake. 

Most of us probably have instinctive reactions to shame, both as an individual emotion and as a social practice. We may be surprised to learn that the broad but uneven research on shame undertaken in societies around the globe—from the social sciences and humanities to business and organizational studies—has produced results not merely complex but also contested. Shame has been attributed as the cause motivating a range of behaviours, from violent crimes to effective social rehabilitation following those crimes, from alienation to reconciliation. It defies easy moral valuation. 

Anthropologist Ruth Benedict, in her 1946 cultural analysis of Japan, contrasts shame, which she describes as the feeling experienced when one is revealed as transgressing cultural or social norms, with guilt, the feeling of having violated one’s individual values. Generations of social-scientific research have softened Benedict’s binary distinction between shame and guilt, as well as her assignment of them, respectively, to collectivist and individualist societies. But studies have continued to find distinctions between shame and guilt in most societies, affirming the fundamentally relational nature of shame. Though guilt can have a relational component as well, shame implies an other, someone capable of judging us for our socially transgressive behaviour. That judgment is communicated in shaming practices, which have been shown to be an effective instrument of socialization and moral formation in a wide range of cultural contexts, with applications both preventative and punitive. 

Even where shaming practices invoke principles and identities that are presumed, however, the refusal of shame is always an option. For many in Appalachia, for instance, the distant imposition of shameful regional caricatures has made refusal the only morally justified posture. For decades, Appalachians have been on the receiving end of attempts at cultural reform that have tried to change practices related to things as culturally charged as food, family, and fuel, not to mention language. As the diverse literature on shame suggests, shame is at best uneven and at worst unpredictable when harnessed for any reforming goals. As a wave of such refusals crashes around us now, across the nation and across the globe, the difficulties of that task are painfully apparent. To make matters worse, when leaders call on courage-as-defiance to refuse shame, that invocation reverberates through Western Christian theology in complicated ways. To forge any new paths for Christian public witness on shame, these connections require careful examination and perhaps a surgical extraction. 

Shame, Sin, and Repentance

Most Western Christian teaching on shame is not too concerned with the upsides of social conformity. Instead, Romans 1:16 sets the tone, where Paul proclaims that he is “not ashamed of the gospel, for it is the power of salvation for all who believe.” 

Throughout Christian popular media and music, “unashamed” is a proud marker of Christian identity. I’ve even seen it displayed on a few car windows around town. To follow Christ to the full, an observer could conclude, will require us to refuse shame. 

Shame is first noted in Scripture as the emotion produced by Adam and Eve’s sin, which seems to confirm an unsavoury association between shame and sin. But on closer inspection, shame is the emotion that points Adam and Eve back to God, that precedes repentance. And for Paul’s boast about being unashamed of the gospel, he himself uses shame to try to bring about repentance and transformation in the Corinthian church. In 1 Corinthians 6:5 and 15:34 he frames his report of their transgressions with the phrase “I say this to your shame.” 

Shame in these instances is an instrument that is used to produce the right kind of conformity, alignment with God and his teachings. Today, church communities that have been formed around these teachings continue to use the power of shame to produce social conformity, for both good (discouraging a member from stealing) and evil (discouraging a member from reporting sexual abuse). One of the characteristic problems with shame is that it easily serves both masters. 

But all these examples have to do with the shame accrued by individual actions. Scripture affords us another reckoning of shame, one that is perhaps more relevant to the press of our own non-innocent histories. 

The gathering global gravity of Christian traditions in the Majority World, where local cultures tend to maintain strong senses of collective identity, has facilitated readings of the Bible that highlight the collective reckoning of sin and transgression in ancient Hebrew culture. Shame, in this Hebrew theology, is shared between the individual transgressors and their people. For example, the prophet Ezra prays for his people Israel, who have committed sins of which he himself is innocent, entreating, “O my God, I am utterly ashamed; I blush to lift up my face to you. For our sins are piled higher than our heads, and our guilt has reached to the heavens” (Ezra 9:6). 

For Ezra and other Hebrew prophets, the Messiah would not only assuage the personal guilt of the sinners but also restore the honour of Israel, a reflection of God’s honour himself. Shame in this model reflects the shared responsibility of the people, each for the other, such that the sin of one implicates all the others. Refusing personal guilt would be simply wrong-headed here; it would miss the point of that mutual accountability and would have little bearing on any reckoning of courage. 

In the twenty-first-century West, as inheritors of a historical focus on the moral agency of the individual, we might be tempted to read our obligations solely through Romans 1:16 and conclude that the primary task of the Christian is to resist any shame imposed on us. Or we could look to 1 Corinthians and allow that shame might be useful on a limited basis, within the bounds of a healthy church’s disciplinary and restorative procedures. 

The fault lines of shame opening across the world, however, should direct us to consider more closely the concerns of the ancient Hebrews. Like Ezra, we find ourselves looking on the actions of a whole host of our brothers and sisters that we feel we would not have chosen. Yet we understand that in some real way those past actions bear on us and call us to prayer and action. 

If we look to the Hebrew prophets for guidance, however, we must also note that they failed, ultimately, to produce long-lasting repentance and the restoration of Israel. Even when we embrace the collective shame of our non-innocent histories, like the prophets, we can never be certain that others will do the same. Shame relies on persuasion, and especially when that persuasion—shaming—is attempted by those relationally distant from us, we tend to respond not with repentance but with refusal. American history illustrates one such example of shame’s vulnerability to populist rebuke, which managed to redirect a historical moment of critical moral reflection to the recasting of moral transgression as cultural pride. 

The Bravado of Populist Refusal: Making Over Confederate Shame

Perhaps the longest-running and best-known symbol of shame’s refusal in the United States is the Confederate flag. Its significance derives from the aftermath of the Civil War, when the men and women who had treasonously pursued secession of the Southern states from the Union had to be brought back into the national fold. The price demanded by the South for its post–Civil War reintegration was its public denial of shame, a reimagining of Southerners as tragic heroes rather than American traitors. So relieved was the North for the reunion that they willingly paid that price. The campaign that came to be known as the Lost Cause movement quickly unfurled across the reunited country, energetically and nostalgically reinterpreting life in the slaveholding states and the war itself. 

The Lost Cause movement reclassified Confederate military officers as heroes—to the dismay of contemporaries like abolitionist, intellectual, and former slave Frederick Douglass, who condemned the movement’s “nauseating flatteries” of its chief Confederate saint, Robert E. Lee. It also repurposed the Confederate flag, which had flown over so many bloody battles against their Union brothers, as a cultural icon of Southern pride. As it placed hundreds of Confederate statues throughout Southern cities between 1890 and the mid-1920s, the Lost Cause movement rejected the shame of the Confederacy’s defeat, especially any shame that could be foisted on Southerners over their defence of slavery. It insisted that the war was fought over states’ rights (to uphold and extend slavery, of course) and not over slavery—a lesson that was drilled into me as a schoolgirl in Texas. 

So effective has been the cultural reimagining of the Confederacy that in many places today American flags are flown alongside Confederate flags with no apparent sense of contradiction. Even the increasingly popular alignment of Gadsden and Confederate flags is incongruous, the former banner a Revolutionary War emblem of the United States brandished against an external threat, and the latter the flag raised against the United States Army in the bloodiest war fought on the nation’s soil. That the Confederate flag flies in so many Southern yards today, adorning car bumpers and snapping along windy highway verges, testifies to the durability of that symbol of cultural defiance in the face of defeat.

Unveiling of the statue of Robert E. Lee in Richmond, Virginia, May 29, 1890. Photo from “History of the United States” by E. Benjamin Andrews, 1912

The Lost Cause movement’s refusal of the South’s shame exchanges a collective moment of moral self-examination for the bravado of the underdog. I say “bravado” rather than “courage” deliberately, for the tenets of the traditionally Christian virtue of courage, which philosopher Rebecca Konyndyk DeYoung describes in her work on virtue and vice, are absent: enduring humiliation, degradation, even death for the love of others. In refusing the imposition of shame for the South’s actions, the Lost Cause movement distorts courage into the kind of willful defiance more reflective of a culturally American posture of self-serving obstinance than any Christian heritage. 

The Reformer’s Temptation: Manipulating the Language of Shame 

The national consciousness of the United States today has been enlarged by growing awareness of the diversity of voices and experiences in our own communities, even as it is challenged to make sense of the shame implied by an array of decidedly non-innocent histories. Over the last three decades, an agenda of cultural reform has taken forward many attempts to change once-presumed norms. A primary—and controversial—arena for this cultural reform has been popular and official speech. Campaigns to change shared language norms have, for instance, sought to reckon with a governmental history littered with insincere treaties and attempted genocides of Native American peoples by renaming sports-team mascots. Awareness of the pervasiveness of discrimination of all sorts has led to more careful naming of racial and ethnic groups. Even our epithets have been revised with a growing sensitivity to the pain of discrimination and othering. 

But why have these reforms proved so controversial? In 2018 a survey found that 80 percent of the population viewed “political correctness,” the derisive characterization of a cultural landscape in which reformist language norms are imposed, as a problem in the United States. 

Language reform is intended to identify and transform collective patterns of language use that are discriminatory, in this sense a collective transgression in which all or most of us may share some implication. In other words, we ought to bear the burden of the shame—along with repentance and restoration—together. But while language-reform campaigns may grow from the research of scholars and organic intellectuals, they are quickly translated by unappointed agents of popular enforcement. 

Much can be lost in translation, because arguments supporting language reforms are often technical—and careful—with their prescriptions. Consider, for instance, “mock Spanish”: adding el/los and an ending of –o/os to English words, exaggeratedly anglicizing pronunciations of Spanish words, or using English words in the broken grammar and heavy Spanish accents stereotyped of Mexican immigrants (think Speedy Gonzales). Such talk relies on and reinforces dominant English speech patterns. It holds at arm’s length a language known but more rarely respected, much like the native Spanish-speaking immigrants themselves. Anthropologist Jane Hill argues that the use of mock Spanish is especially hard to root out, because native English speakers who use it are typically not doing so with a conscious desire to discriminate against native Spanish speakers. Instead, mock Spanish expressions associate the person who uses them with a down-to-earth familiarity, as a mildly humorous means to build rapport. For this reason, although mock Spanish is a discriminatory language practice, the people who use it rarely recognize it as such. Attempts to reform mock Spanish that fail to address the intentions of its users, instead portraying the talk as deliberately disparaging native Spanish speakers, are less persuasive and therefore less effective at generating the desired language reforms. Such nuances are therefore not merely academic, but they shrivel in translation to policy and news reporting, and they can scarcely be found in the impatient generalizations of popular talk. On social media, nuanced analyses like these are quickly metabolized and emerge, barely recognizable, as pithy takedowns of the offenders. 

As a result, shame that is meant to be shared upon realizing the discriminatory effects of a widespread linguistic practice may be offloaded to, pinned on, others. Even though we may start by talking about systems and structures that implicate us, we all face many temptations to remove the shame from ourselves by pinpointing instead the transgressions of others, ostensibly using the shame of that transgression to persuade these others to reform. We have all seen the perfect adaptability of social media to the deeply unfun game of language policing. 

While transforming our collective shame into your individual guilt may seem merely miserable and mean-spirited, it has an even more disturbing effect on the ability of shame to persuade us to accept the demands of language reform. When shame is meted out by those who refuse to accept their own place within the group implicated in the discrimination, the persuasive appeal of language reform—which was already dependent on unstable communication practices in popular media—decisively breaks down. 

In the United States, this breakdown has generated a defiant partisan counter-impulse to police language according to different linguistic orthodoxies, by which a position of resistance is staked out. On the right, the language of patriotism, family values, and law and order constitutes the measuring stick. The wording of specific issues follows (“illegal” rather than “undocumented” immigrants, “reverse discrimination” as the condemnatory summary of diversity, equity, and inclusion policies), along with the renaming of geographic features (Denali becomes Mount McKinley, and the Gulf of Mexico is the Gulf of America) and military bases (notably, Fort Liberty becomes once again the namesake of a Confederate general, as Fort Bragg). Rather than wholesale, collective language reform, we have ended up with hard-walled language camps, their respective boundaries maintained by calls to courage like those that opened this article. 

German Fissures and Fatigue: Cracking Under the Burden of Collective Shame

Even where collective shame is widely embraced by a national public, for some the burden of a shameful history may eventually become unbearable. Consider Germany, for decades determined to become an exemplar in handling the shame of the atrocities committed under the Third Reich’s democratically elected rule. Over the past seventy-five years, Germany has reckoned with the morally culpable actions of ordinary people who did terrible things, through school curricula, monuments, and memory projects that have enabled individuals to process, record, and share their own experiences. Though some of these memorialization programs, such as education, were mandated by the terms of postwar sanctions, the German public and governmental leaders pursued agendas of social and legal reforms alongside the groundswell of memory work, showing the world that the country had made a dramatic about-face in its moral reckoning. 

Despite—and perhaps equally because of—a sophisticated and expansive body of work reckoning with its shameful past, in recent years a countermovement of resentment has shocked German leaders by its rapid ascent. In February 2025 the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party gained enough seats to become the second-largest party in the national parliament, its popular support fuelled in part by its criticism of the “guilt cult” of Germany’s official remembrance policies. AfD politician (and former history teacher) Björn Höcke, who ran afoul of those policies when he used a Nazi slogan in a political rally (twice), resulting in court convictions and fines in 2024, has declared Berlin’s Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe a “monument of shame.” Echoing the Lost Cause supporters who succeeded in installing a broad slate of Jim Crow laws across Southern states in imitation of Confederate norms, Höcke and the most extreme right of the AfD call for revolutions in immigration policy and multiculturalism that bear striking similarities to agendas pursued by Germany’s National Socialist Party in the 1930s. 

But the tangle of shame and reimagined histories is tricky to navigate. Has mounting resentment for a collective shame that feels imposed by distant leaders spurred AfD supporters to question the very basis of that shame, the social policies of the Nazis themselves? Or have those policies long seemed attractive to the (future) AfD supporters, but governmentally enforced shame has until this point prevented their serious consideration? Though Höcke’s rhetoric may suggest the latter, comments from other AfD leaders suggest that, for some at least, the former argument applies. At an AfD youth meeting in 2018, former party leader Alexander Gauland declared that Germany “had a glorious history and one that lasted a lot longer than those damned 12 years. Hitler and the Nazis are just a speck of bird shit in over 1,000 years of successful German history.” 

Here, most notably, is the chord that has resonated with the current US administration. When in May 2025 the German Foreign Office designated the AfD an extremist party, Secretary of State Marco Rubio weighed in, condemning the action as “tyranny in disguise.” Vice President Vance, who had already indicated his support for the AfD at the Munich Security Conference, reprimanded the “German establishment” for, as he characterized it, rebuilding the Berlin Wall. Months previous, then–Department of Government Efficiency head Elon Musk streamed in to an AfD rally and offered his own sweeping characterization of Germany’s “past guilt,” and the “sins” of “parents [and] great-grand-parents,” and urged the people to reclaim their pride for “German culture and German values.” The impulse of the AfD to reject the collective shaming of the German nation, it seems, has touched a nerve. 

Taking Courage

The calls to courage from US political leaders share more than just conviction, it seems. The burden of bearing non-innocent histories has forced the nation into a confrontation with its shame. As the Lost Cause movement and the AfD in Germany have shown, the appeal of rejecting this shame, especially when it seems to be imposed from afar, is strong. Would-be cultural reformers, however, should learn from the overwhelming opposition that the language-reform movement has generated—despite a great deal of success in changing language norms in popular and official speech. The externalization and weaponization of shame for social transformation is a recipe for social splintering, not solidarity. 

The collective bearing of shame that was modelled by the Hebrew prophets never becomes easy—as indicated by Germany’s current political turmoil. But that task appears much easier to commend from a traditionally Christian reckoning of courage. Bearing the possibility of humiliation in love, risking reputation and respect, even to the point of bodily harm and death, all for the sake of that love: that is the way of Christ, whose victory was accomplished in willing weakness. The work of admitting shame, wrestling with it, shouldering it, and finally learning from it requires so much more of us than adopting the defiant posture of its refusal. But it will be good to recall, as we embark on this work, that we have all been marked by shame, whether we have drawn it close or pushed it away. 

I’ll close with a reflection from my own vocation. As a professor of anthropology at a Christian liberal arts college in the Midwest, I heard many stories of students who had gone home for a holiday, churning with the troubling insight that they were somehow implicated in a larger pattern of discrimination and injustice. At a few of those holiday meals, I am sorry to report, the students released a little of the pressure of their own shame by laying the blame for their social or economic privilege at the feet of their bewildered parents. In the wake of some of these conversations, I have listened to parents complain about their children’s “woke” education, which they perceived to have “turned” their children against them and their efforts to love and provide. When the students heard their parents dismiss what they felt to be weighty and troubling insights, the students concluded that they and their parents must be opposed in their views of the world, an unhappy determination that left both sides feeling both righteous and misunderstood. Shame drove a wedge between them all. 

But just as often, the family meal unfolded differently. These are the stories that give me hope. In sharing the insights that were troubling them, the students invited their parents to share the shame with them. Crucially, the parents opened themselves to receive the shame of the histories their children told. The invitation and the response produced a moment of mutual self-examination, and through their shared reckoning with a painful history, the children and parents drew together and discussed what to do about it, together. Shame was not externalized, off-loaded, or exchanged for an anemic tale of triumph. These students and their families bore out the truth that shame can only be carried well together, that in our attempts at self-exoneration we do not succeed in refuting shame but only release it to fly unchecked, a weapon of social destruction. 

I am convinced that we need, like these families, to press on both fronts, issuing personal invitations and opening larger discussions. The work requires families, but it also needs institutions to model and practice courageous repentance and transformation. If these examples of shame’s invocation for moral transformation leave us with any insight, it is the highly indeterminate outcome of such an effort. Renewal is not guaranteed. But as we survey an increasingly dystopian landscape rent with social fractures, working toward the mutual intelligibility of virtue seems to demand that we learn to shoulder the shame.