Eucontamination: Eucontamination: Disgust Theology and Psychoanalysis in Practice

This conversation explores Eucontamination as a theological framework for understanding how disgust shapes our inner lives, communities, and responses to difference. Building from their book, Eucontamination: Disgust Theology and the Christian Life, Dr. Paul Hoard and Billie Hoard argue that disgust is not merely an emotional reflex but a formative moment that reveals what we fear, what we exclude, and what we imagine holiness to be.

Eucontamination names a counter-movement—an openness to what unsettles—that mirrors the pattern found in the life of Jesus, who consistently inverted the logic of disgust. Rather than reinforcing boundaries between clean and unclean, pure and impure, Jesus moved toward lepers, the bleeding woman, sinners, and the marginalized, contaminating the very categories meant to keep him separate. His ministry reveals that transformation often occurs precisely where disgust would have us withdraw. Watch this webinar to explore theory and practical application, offering ways leaders and communities can work with disgust as it arises around bodies, stories, social difference, and conflict.

 

Event Transcript:

Lauren Peiser: Hello, everyone! Welcome! Welcome to our, faculty webinar today. As you’re logging in, we’d love to hear, where you’re calling in from. So in the chat, go ahead and put, where you’re located, where are you calling in from today? We’ll, we’ll do that for just a minute as, folks are, are logging in, and then we’ll get started in just, in just a minute. Awesome. Welcome, it’s good to see people from all over the country. 

Awesome. Great. Okay. Well, we’ll go ahead and get started. So today is our fourth webinar in our faculty webinar series. If you’ve missed the first three, you can view those for free on our YouTube channel. And today I’m super excited to welcome Paul and Billie Hoard. They are talking on eucontamination, which I am sure some of you are curious what that is. But I am super excited to talk about it because it’s a topic that is personally close to my interest, and I’m sure you all will be very interested in it, too. And, they wrote an amazing book, Eucontamination: Disgust Theology and Christian Life, and this will give you an opportunity to hear a little bit more about some of those ideas.

So this is a part of a webinar series that we’ve been doing at The Seattle School and the focus of these webinars have been to talk to our current challenges of our times, using the lenses of theology and psychology. So at The Seattle School we offer graduate degrees and certificates studying the intersection of theology, psychology, and culture. But these webinars are meant to expand on that and use interdisciplinary frames to address current issues. So here, we’re looking to listen to God moving beyond certainty and stability. So these short conversations, we are focusing on formation without fixing, curiosity over control, and being with rather than solving uncertainty. 

So, what you can expect from each of these webinars is a short conversation where we can slow down and ask questions differently, leaning in with curiosity rather than certainty; and these are designed to be for all walks of life. So we believe that everyone is a theologian and you all have things to bring and we want to have these conversations beyond just ministers and psychologists – but for everyone working in different disciplines. So, before we get started, some Zoom etiquette. You can use the chat throughout the time if you’re responding to a prompt and/or if something’s coming up for you that’s interesting, the chat is a place to talk with one another. Also, if the chat feels overwhelming, you can close that at any time. So, I know some people want to chat alongside the conversation, other people want to just listen to the lecture, and you are welcome to do either of those. 

And then the Q&A feature is for asking questions. So if you want something to be answered at the end of the conversation, then use the Q&A feature, and we will use that at the end of our call. And if something comes up during the talk, feel free to jot it down then, and we’ll keep note of it. And then, please don’t send any links in the chat, just for security purposes. So, I’m super excited to introduce Paul and Billie. So, Dr. Paul Hoard is Associate Professor of Counseling Psychology at The Seattle School and is a licensed counselor who holds a doctoral degree in counselor education and supervision from Regent University. He’s provided mental health counseling and clinical supervision in the United States, Ukraine, and Turkey. His research and scholarly work draw on Lacanian Psychoanalysis and focus on the intersection of perpetration trauma, sexuality. White Body Supremacy and adolescent mental health. An interdisciplinary thinker, he works at the convergence of psychoanalysis, theology, and cultural formation. And I’m excited to welcome Billie Hoard. Billie Hoard is a trans woman, a high school history teacher and author, and something of an Anabaptist radical. A consummate generalist, she holds an MA in Liberal Arts from St. John’s College in Annapolis, Maryland and she writes on topics ranging from fairy tales and C.S. Lewis to theology and philosophy. So, Paul and Billie, co-authored a book, Eucontamination Disgust Theology and the Christian Life, together, and I’m super excited that we get to hear more from them today. 

So, before we jump in, we have a few questions for you all. First, we’re going to be talking about disgust, which is probably not everyone’s first thought of something to talk about on a Thursday morning. But, we wanted to hear from people who are here online today – you can use the chat – What is the first word that comes to mind for you when you hear the word “disgust”. What comes to mind for you? Anyone is welcome to put that in the chat. “Othering”. Okay, “Gut reaction.” That’s great. “Deterring, rejecting, contempt, vomit.” Yeah, those are good words, that’s great. “Ew”, that’s perfect. Awesome. And as y’all are putting that in the chat and thinking of different words, “Yuck”, that’s great. “Gross”. Awesome. I’d love to ask you, Paul and Billie, what drew you to wanting to explore disgust and this idea of disgust. Like, could you share some of why this became an interesting subject to you?

Billie Hoard: Yes, Paul, what drew us to wanting to study disgust?

Dr. Paul Hoard: I can’t say that it was something I woke up one day and was like, you know what, I want to study? I want to study gross things. But for me, it was, I mean, it was our long, long conversations we were having, and I think I was heavily influenced initially by Jonathan Haidt’s book, The Righteous Mind, and the way that his research on disgust and some of the past disgust research was beginning to give him a foundation for understanding some of the… some of the rifts and divides in our society. He has this whole moral foundations theory that he develops from that. And what I found really fascinating from that was disgust is this one emotion that we don’t talk about very often. You know, I’m a therapist, and so we talk a lot about shame, and we’ll talk a lot about guilt, and we’ll talk a lot about depression, or anxiety, or fear, or joy. But, you know, even thinking about the movie, Inside Out, like, Disgust was, like, what’s she doing there? Like, what is Disgust – why is Disgust there? That’s always been really interesting to me, and as someone who’s a bit more of a psychoanalytic thinker, the thing we don’t talk about often is the thing that becomes more significant. And I think that’s part of what’s… what’s drawn me to it, is the fact that disgust is present, is prevalent, yet is often under valued, I think, in a lot of our analyses. What about you, Billie?

Billie Hoard: Yeah, I’m pretty similar, just coming at it from a kind of historical and sociological approach, and this is in talking with Paul. You know, Paul’s going on about, you know, having read Haidt, and he’s telling me to read Haidt, and so I’m reading it, and, you know, reading him, and I’m thinking about all the ways that in our standard and sort of given sociology and history texts and analysis, there’s a lot of analysis around the role that some of those other emotions, fear, anger, sometimes things like ostracization or division have played, but disgust is almost never named in the literature, and yet sort of the further we go dug, because, you know, once you start pulling on that thread, you know, you gotta unravel the sweater as far as you can. The more that I was finding that actually disgust has been pretty central to a lot of developments in shaping the contemporary world and the world that we live in, both religiously and, you know, politically, socially.

Lauren Peiser: Great, thanks for sharing that, and I’m excited to hand it over to y’all, to lead us in learning more about that.

Dr. Paul Hoard: Alright, thank you, Lauren. Okay, well, welcome everybody, and thank you so much for taking some time this morning, or I guess early afternoon, if you’re on the East Coast, or whenever it is. I saw there was somebody coming in from Finland, so I, whatever time of day, appreciate you’re here, thank you for being here. So we’re gonna talk about eucontamination, and this is a word that Billie and I developed because we’re nerds, and we’re really excited about the idea of being able to come up with a word, so that was kind of fun for us, but we’ll talk about that in a second. But eucontamination being an idea that we developed off of Tolkien – but we’ll talk about that later – but Disgust Theology then is this approach to looking at disgust and theology and looking at the way the emotion of disgust impacts the way we appreciate God and understand what it is And who we are. So, to get started, let’s say a little bit of who we are, and Billie, I’ll pass it off to you to get us going.

Billie Hoard: Sure, just to kind of locate ourselves from the beginning, so, Lauren was talking about us, which is lovely. So I’m a trans woman, I’m a lesbian, I am a, you know, I imagine myself as a white person, I am an able-bodied person, I am sort of post-evangelical, that’s, that’s my historic, my, my religious historical background. And I am now an Anabaptist, a teacher, and a writer, and so that’s kind of hopefully sort of situates me in where I come from and what my thinking is on the subject.

Dr. Paul Hoard: And I’m probably most significantly Billie’s little brother. So, one of the joys of this whole experience has been to work with my sibling on, in all of this. I think it’s… it’s somehow actually not been something – often people say if you write a book with someone you care a lot about, that you will hate them by the end. But Billie and I actually still get along quite well. But I’m a cisgender man, straight, white, able-bodied, post-evangelical, still generally Anabaptist. I’ll put a little star there as I don’t do great with those sorts of labels as much, but it’s a good enough one that I will take. And then, as Lauren mentioned, I’m an associate professor at The Seattle School as well as a mental health counselor. So a lot of what I bring, and sort of my experience coming into this, is going to be from the therapy space, and then from my own background, studying psychoanalytic theory, psychoanalytic thought, and sort of applying that to disgust. So I, especially when we start talking about theology, I’m not the one that has much formal training in that, but I do have a lot of, that’s been my background, my life experience. 

So, as we get started, there’s one thing that I do like to note. We’ve already sort of, hopefully, teased this a little bit for you all, but that is that we’re going to be talking about disgust. Which may be disgust-inducing at different times. We will do our best to keep this something that we’re at a place where we’re able to stay in a thinking space, but disgust is quite visceral. It is embodied, it is a part of who we are, and as we talk about different topics, just be kind to yourself, be aware of what’s happening. It may not be the best time to be reaching for a sandwich during some of our lecture slides, so maybe pay attention to where you – to what you’re eating, at this time, but just, pay attention to that. Also, as we’re gonna talk about, disgust is not just about kind of the gross, but it also gets into some of the ways that we other one another, some of the ways that we cause a lot of harm, and the ways that divisions have happened, which are all things that are happening right now in our real world. And so, mainly be kind to yourself. As Lauren mentioned, this will be recorded, you could watch it later. If something is coming up for you in the moment, and you’re like, I don’t need to be listening to this right now, maybe I can come back later. Please, please, please, first and foremost, take care of yourself, over that. Billy, anything you want to add there?

Billie Hoard: No, I think you covered it.

Dr. Paul Hoard: Alright, so let’s dive into this. Here we go. Disgust. So, Disgust, as I mentioned, one of the least, I guess, explored or expected, at least in my experience, of those little emotions in, in, in the Inside Out movies. But there’s… there’s a lot to it when we start scratching below the surface. So, disgust has actually… there’s a lot of different theories around what it is, but at a base level, disgust is a visceral boundary-protecting mechanism. 

So, disgust is very embodied. In fact, when we think about, like, the various facial expressions that tend to kind of span across different cultural backgrounds, it’s generally the facial expression of disgust is that of being close to vomiting, like that. Because what disgust is about is about this differentiating that which can become me and that which can’t. So, oftentimes, we kind of, people talk about something around, like, called the omnivore’s dilemma, where as humans, we can eat almost anything. Yet, some things are poisonous. And disgust is one of those mechanisms that we have to help us differentiate between poison. And if it gets in, we literally expel it from our bodies. It is not able to become us, versus things like berries that we want to consume and allow them to actually be metabolized, which actually means to become us. So disgust is this boundary enforcement mechanism that helps differentiate what can become me. and what can’t. And it operates very visceral, it’s very somatic, it’s right there, we often feel it right in our guts. But it also operates on multiple different levels, and these are some of the things we’re going to get into. It operates on… on an individual emotional level of, we find certain ideas disgusting, we can find certain other people disgusting, and when we do, it’s not simply a, I don’t want that near me. 

Often, when we have this and when we have a disgust reaction, it’s something where it’s so strong that we don’t even want to be near it. I don’t even want to look at it, I don’t want to see it, I want it completely out, I want it completely gone from me. And I’ll talk about that in a second, but it pulls us there on an affective level. But then it also operates on a sociological level, and so it becomes not just what is me and what’s not me, but it becomes also, what can become us and what can’t? And so disgust is this, fascinating, and I do want to underscore this as a therapist, really important emotion. It’s a way for us to, it keeps us safe in a lot of ways. It helps us recognize what is dangerous, and we first, we published our first article on this topic in the height of COVID-19. And, so, obviously, during that time, disgust was pretty prevalent, and in many ways, was doing a lot to help people stay safe, socially distance, wash our hands, right? Disgust was sort of fueling a lot of these really important practices. So, we are going to problematize some of the ways disgust gets used. But, I do want to make sure we say this at the outset and multiple times: Disgust is not a bad thing. Disgust is an important, healthy human experience. It is an important part of how we live our lives. 

What we want to encourage us to do is to be a little bit more reflective and thoughtful about the presence of disgust, and then also the way it’s operating, so that instead of it controlling us, we have a way of understanding our own experience better, like we would with all other emotions. So, Lauren, can we go to the next slide, talk a little bit about the functions of it? So these are some of the things I’ve already hit on a little bit, but I wanna… I wanna spend some time on each one. It helps to differentiate between the self. and others, or between yourself and a group. 

So, disgust is actually quite present when we start thinking about what is me and what isn’t me. And this gets really fascinating, because when we really dive into, kind of, the psychology behind what is the self and what is the subject, I’ll try not to go too far down that rabbit hole, but I get excited. Billie, stop me if I go too far, but who you think you are is actually a far more nebulous concept than we often think about. We sort of imagine that, like, aha, here I am, see, I have skin, so I start at the point where my finger is, at the edge of my skin, and that’s where, you know, as long as within the skin, that’s me, skin, outside of skin, not me. And yet, when we dive a little bit closer, it gets really fascinating, because hair is this one example, 

Jerry Seinfeld has a great little stand-up on this, how hair on somebody’s head, we often are… find beautiful, or kind of fascinating, it can be lovely. We, you know, hair is kind of the way we express ourselves, there’s a lot happening with hair. And yet, as soon as a hair leaves somebody’s head. Oh, ew, gross, hair. Yet nothing about the hair itself. has changed. The hair has simply gone from being attached to a scalp or a head, to not. And yet our relationship to it. And what it means changes a lot, because what’s happening, I would argue, on a psychological level, is currently the hair on my head is very clearly me. As soon as it leaves, is that hair still you? Is the hair still me, or is it not? It becomes this space of ambiguity, of what’s me and what’s not me, and so disgust helps us differentiate. No, the hair is no longer you, the hair is not a person anymore. We’re grossed out by it. And so that’s where disgust starts operating, and it’s… it’s fascinating because we tell ourselves a story. 

We try to logically understand what’s going on. We say, well, you know, the hair could carry germs, or it might have this. Yet, what researchers time and again show us is that, actually, first we have a disgust reaction, prior to any conscious thinking. And then we tell ourselves a story about why that reaction was justified. So, again, this is one of those, like, hey, if you’re drinking something, maybe put it down for a second. I’m just gonna give another little example that’s slightly less tame than the hair, but, one of these famous hypothetical, sort of thought experiments people do is to say, imagine you have a perfectly sterile cup and you were invited to spit into that cup. And then you were asked to drink your saliva directly back in from a sterile cup. Now. Most people’s reaction, and I can’t see you, so I don’t know how y’all are doing, but hopefully you’re doing alright, but most people’s reaction to that thought is one of revulsion, is one of, ew, no, or no, I would never do that, or that’s gross. Now, that’s not everybody’s response, but the bell curve of people responding to that tends to be, – not gonna do it. Disgust. 

And yet, the fascinating thing is that you have saliva in your mouth right now. If you are drinking any coffee or water, every time you swallow, saliva is going from your mouth in… further inside your body. And yet, as soon as it leaves your mouth its relationship to you changes. In fact, we often use different words. We would call it saliva in your mouth, and we call it spit when it leaves, because it’s now… now it’s entered this nebulous space of… this kind of ambiguous space of, is it me or isn’t it me? And so disgust steps in to clarify. No, as soon as the spit leaves your mouth, that’s gross, don’t drink it. No. Hopefully, your minds are already being like, well, but maybe it could get, it could be dirty, or something could happen. We’re already quickly justifying our reaction of why you wouldn’t want to drink the saliva. It tastes bad, it’d be gross. But it’s important to recognize your reaction actually happened prior to any justification of it. And I think that’s this really, really important part of the function of disgust that we’re going to spend a lot of time on, continuing to unpack, particularly as that starts relating to theology in a moment. 

But the last thing I want to hit on before we move on from this slide is that embodied response. And this is to say that disgust is not simply a conscious thought. You don’t just think, this is disgusting, and that isn’t. Like, you would think about when did, you know, when did the period we call modernity start? What was the official start of the Enlightenment? You know, those are conscious ideas you may have thoughts about. Disgust happens on a visceral body level. It happens in your gut. And that means it’s happening at a level that is impacting the way we think. It’s not just changing what we think, it’s impacting our capacity to think, and so it’s really important that we move away from, you know, sort of that Cartesian split of sort of mind, body, and separate them all, because disgust is one of those emotions that, like many of the others, happy to talk about that if we want to, more the therapy side, actually are far more interconnected, and it’s really important to recognize what’s happening in our bodies. If we want to be more wise about the way we are, the way disgust impacts our lives, the way it’s interacting with who we are. I bounced around there a little bit. Billie, I’m looking at you. Is there anything that I didn’t hit on there that you think we should before we move on?

Billie Hoard: No, I think that just about covers it. The, you know, disgust is we do post-hoc justification, and we are physically disgusted before we recognize ourselves as experiencing disgust.

Dr. Paul Hoard: So, it’s happening prior to your awareness. Okay. So there’s a little bit of theory I’m gonna jump into here. This is Lacan –  he was a French psychoanalytic thinker. He’s somebody who, if you spend more than 5 minutes with me, I will probably say his name. He’s just one of those that’s heavily impacted me. He would have been a generation of psychoanalysts that came after Freud, and so a lot of his writing and speaking was happening from the late 40s until he died in the 80s. And I’m not gonna get into the depth of what he talks about here, but one of his ideas that I think touches on my work on disgust that’s been really helpful for me is that he said, he argued that reality as we experience it. Is actually can be, is best understood if we separate it into these three different registers of how we experience reality. And so he said we have our imaginary register, our symbolic register, and then what he calls the real. I’m gonna try not to go too far down this rabbit hole, but the imaginary, as you see there, is the register of images, it’s what you think of when you see the world. It’s the pictures that you see when you imagine who you are – it’s this whole, complete self that you see. 

The symbolic, on the other hand, is what provides meaning to those images, to those ideas. One way to think of it, and this is imperfect, but one way to think of it would be, like, the imaginary are, like, the words we use, the symbolic is the grammar. So that provides, then, meaning for a sentence. The fact that you put the word not before happy, suddenly changes what the meaning of not happy means, even though not and happy have their own meaning on their own. So imaginary are just sort of individual ideas, and then the symbolic is how those ideas come together to form a sense of meaning, and this is related to language and law, social order, it’s how things come together. 

The philosopher Slavo Zizek often uses the metaphor of chess to explain this, to say what makes a game chess are the rules, right? That you have 16 pieces, you line them up in a certain way, the pieces each move in their own particular predefined manner. And, So what makes it chess is the rules, that you’re trying to capture each other’s king. You could imagine chess as it’s like, classic chess, in the West is imagined as medieval combat, with, you know, two lines of infantrymen, and then you have your horses and all that. But you can reimagine chess as a peanuts game, as it has been done, or chess as Star Wars characters. You can reimagine chess in a lot of different ways. So the imaginary of chess is quite plastic, is quite mobile, as our imaginary is. We can reimagine the world, because the meaning of those images, those symbols, is based in the symbolic, on what are the rules of the game that we’re playing. Billie, I don’t know that I said that all well. Anything you’d say you’d encourage me to help make that clear?

Billie Hoard: No, I think that was… I think that was good. I think just maybe bring in the real, to tie it all together.

Dr. Paul Hoard: So, okay, the real, then, is everything that doesn’t fit in that picture. So if the imaginary and the symbolic work together to give you what we might call, like, your worldview, your understanding of the world, how things operate, right? When you see somebody’s face, and they’re your partner, your romantic partner, and you get excited, that’s because you have an image of them, and then the relationship that the symbolic gives you tells you how to make sense of them. The real, then, is everything that’s unimaginable, or as I have on the slide there, what resists symbolization. It’s what’s beyond words, what’s beyond images. In Lacanian theory, this imaginary and symbolic is deeply tied to language, and so what the real is, to go into musical theater, for those of you who are interested, is when we’re looking at something like a grief that can’t be spoken, or it’s that which you can’t talk about. 

And it’s why, in musicals, we often, you know, when the emotions are calm, people are talking. When emotions reach a certain height, they start singing, and then when they reach a certain peak of intensity, actually, in musicals, they stop singing, and it’s just dancing. Because there’s a point at which Words fail us, and that’s where we’re in the realm of the real. We don’t have words, it’s… often overwhelming, because we don’t know how to make sense of it. Because meaning, sense, language, organization, those are all in the imaginary symbolic, and then the real is everything that’s left out. An important caveat here, a note to keep in mind, is the real is not what we would normally think of as, like, what’s really real. It’s just that which can’t be spoken about. This isn’t a thing about epistemology. 

Okay. So, those have become important, because when we start understanding disgust. Actually, it’s related to how the real interacts with our lives, and this is really fun. First off, it is not a typo, it is meant to be an irruption of the real, not eruption of the real, because irruption is a breaking into. And so, the way I have been using Lacan to make sense of sort of how disgust works is to say that the imaginary and symbolic, the worlds we live in, our ideas of how the world works, those are really important. 

You have to have an idea of who you are and a way the world works to operate. The problem is, we so often forget, or protect ourselves, or psychologically defend ourselves from the fact that the world is bigger than that. That our ideas of reality are actually limited, and so the real, in that sense, is always pushing in kind of gnawing at us, saying, yeah, “But what if there’s more going on? What if there’s another side to this?” I hear this clinically a lot when a patient uses the word “just”. I had a bad week. I couldn’t sleep well last night. Yeah, it’s just the… it’s just the… it was just what I watched on TV. It was just that. And you hear in that just, it’s like, no, it’s only that. 

Don’t think that there could be any other explanation as to why I’m not sleeping well. It’s definitely not my nightmares, it’s definitely not my anxiety. It’s definitely not my, right, all the other things that I would gently, as a therapist, try to help us bring into the room. And so disgust in that sense is actually when the real breaks in. It’s very disturbing. It’s, Lacan uses the, like, is often translated as saying, it’s uncanny, there’s a disturbance in it. And I would argue that disturbance is often discussed. It’s not just, I don’t like that. It’s, no, that can’t be true, get it away. And the clinical significance of this, where this starts really starting, like, I think really starts to matter, is that disgust can’t simply be talked away. It’s not something that you say, oh, you’re right, I’m disgusted, I’ll be fine, now let’s have a spot of tea. 

Disgust, as I mentioned, it’s visceral. It’s in the body. It’s happening. It’s not simply something that you’re thinking about. but is actually impacting the way that your capacity to think is. And so it’s when something of the real breaks into your world, our reaction is disgust to try to patch up the hole. All right. I think that’s enough of my psychoanalytic theory. I’m gonna pass it off to Billie to talk a little bit about what the impact of disgust might be, then.

Billie Hoard: Yeah, there’s a lot here. Okay, so, here’s the problem. Like, Paul said earlier… well, THE problem… okay, slow down, Billie. Like Paul said earlier, disgust operates both at that personal, biological level, but also at these sort of, what we would think of as higher or more complex levels. So the levels of society, at the levels of politics, at the levels of who we imagine ourselves to be as a corporate body, as a nation, for instance, right? Benedict Anderson famously defined nationalism as an imagined community, right? So, what does and does not constitute and define our imagined community? And disgust, then, helps us to both define our imagined communities, whether that community is the church, or a small group, or a country, or a state, or a polity of some sort, right? It helps us to define it, but also to maintain a particular vision of that community, of that group. 

You know, of the church, who we are. And because it helps to maintain it, one of those functions that it serves is the rapid ejection of anything, even anything or anyone who develops from within, who violates those characteristics that we think are necessary to that identity, right? So we’re seeing a whole lot going on in the country, in our nation right now, in the United States, for those of us who are in the United States, wherein we are having a battle over who does and does not get to be part of, or to exist even, within our nation-state, within this nation-state, who gets to define it. 

And you see disgust being, you know, operating in the attempts to rapidly eject or quarantine or isolate, and often punish those who seem to define the nation in ways that those with power don’t want it defined. And I would argue that that is a disgust reaction operating at a social level. Like Paul said, remember that disgust comes before the decision to be disgusted, right? We don’t make a choice to be disgusted, we are disgusted first, and then we justify that, right? So when we look around and we see people being rapidly othered, rapidly kicked out, rapidly ostracized and defined as “not us” and having their capacity to belong and their access to their rights taken away. And we see people who want to justify doing that to people – what we need to recognize is that disgust is at work in that situation, and that it’s actually quite hard to have those kinds of arguments, because they’re already telling themselves a story about why disgust was the right reaction, right? 

They’re doing justification, not reasoned debate, right? And I would often say, like, as a queer person who grew up in the church and is now post-evangelical, the experience of many queer people of finding themselves, you know, you come out and all of a sudden you are pushed outside of an anti- or non-affirming religious community.  Because, again, disgust operates first and has to push you out so that the community can continue to define itself as straight, as cis, as allo, and so forth. And all of this is rooted in – I feel like I went a little bit backwards on our slides here – but all of this is rooted in the logic of disgust and stigma, which I’m going to use as a shorthand today. I’m going to use stigma as sort of disgust operating at the social level, at the larger corporate level. So when a thing is disgusting, it has, it is stigmatized and it, and it follows a lot of the same…same rules and patterns that stigma does.

Dr. Paul Hoard: Can I jump in for a second?

Billie Hoard: Yeah, jump in.

Dr. Paul Hoard: Yeah, so what I was… I realized something I skipped over is, the word contamination and part of the way that disgust operates, which is something that the formal term is we call docent sensitivity, and that when something’s disgusting, it’s not just by itself sitting there as a threat, but why do we then want to stay completely away from it? Why do we need to keep it out of our vision, don’t even want to think about it, get it out of here, kill it, burn it with fire? The reason is because disgust does a really fascinating thing with power. And, disgust threatens you, not through an overwhelming force, but through contamination. Through the way that germs work. 

So if you imagine, right, that if you, and you have a cup of coffee here, and you found out that somebody else had spat in your coffee, you don’t ask the question typically, well, how much? Was it just a little sneeze, or was it a big ol’ spit? Because that’s irrelevant information. The very idea that somebody may have spat in my coffee is probably enough for me to – I’ll just get another cup, that’s fine, that’s fine, I’ll just get something else, right? Just the idea itself is enough to contaminate the whole of the rest of it. And this is where disgust and fear are helpful to kind of differentiate them. 

Because when disgust is present, it’s not just that, oh, something here is dangerous, we should be careful. When disgust is present, the reaction is one of, this is going to contaminate, this is going to spread, this can’t be controlled, because even though there’s a tiny amount of it, or a miniscule amount of it, or even the threat of the risk of a tiny amount of it, we need to quarantine it off. Which, again, when we’re dealing with germs, to take us back to the COVID-19 pandemic, it’s really wise, that’s why we all socially distanced, that’s why we stayed in place, that’s why we did lockdown. Because one sneeze could spread a whole lot. The problem is, when we’re attributing that now to other people, or to other things, we operate at this all sorts of quarantining is justified, even if that object that we’re looking at isn’t actually dangerous in that sense. 

And so what we start justifying all sorts of measures. And this is one of the ways you can tell disgust is operant over fear, is this all-or-nothing thinking. So, when you drive a car, for those of you that drive cars, there is inherent risk in driving a car. There is just an inherent risk. If you get on the road, you are taking a risk, because accidents happen no matter how safe of a driver you are, there’s so many things that you can’t fully control. Knowing that, and having studied it, one of the things society’s done is implement rules of the driver’s licenses, and laws, and organizing the way we go into roads, and really importantly, seat belts. We put on seat belts because we believe that’s going to minimize the risk. And so, because we’ve taken steps to help lower the risk, there’s a degree of risk tolerance most of us have in driving – willing to take on a little bit of risk. 

Disgust, on the other hand. Can’t tolerate this idea of risk management in the same way we do with fear, like driving a car. To say, well, don’t worry, there’s just a little bit of feces, and we’ve done a lot to, like, mitigate it, we’ve cooked it out, we’ve cooked out the bad parts. I’m still not going to be anywhere near the food. I don’t want to be anywhere near that. When something disgusting’s there, there’s the idea of risk management is,is laughable; is silly. And so that’s one of the ways we can begin to peel back the layers of what we’re telling ourselves, the stories we’re telling ourselves, to say, okay, what’s actually operating here? When I’m in a place where no amount of it is at all tolerable, disgust is one of the more operating, operant things. Now, of course, it’s not that, it’s not that, feelings or emotions like this operate solely, it’s not like a gear in a car where you’re just in disgust mode or you’re just in fear mode. They obviously interact with each other. But to understand, to begin to recognize where disgust is operating is to listen for, am I reacting to a contamination logic where the miniscule, the tiny, has the power to overtake, to spread, to contaminate, to germinate throughout the whole. Okay, sorry, I meant to say that earlier, Billie, I apologize for jumping in.

Billie Hoard: No, you’re good, you’re good. Let’s actually just go ahead and jump on to the next slide. I’ll take that as our little blue check there. Green check. Colorblind girl. Okay, so, because I want to get into the theology of all of this, right? And I would say that Paul and I use the phrase Disgust Theology really to talk about any of the theologies that are influenced by disgust, and the way, and actually more specifically, the way in which disgust has shaped our historical theology and practice within, you know, the church and within the world. Throughout… throughout history. So, when Disgust is in play. You start to have certain effects, that, you know, are sort of manifesting in your theology, in your religion, in your spirituality, overall. And I would locate a lot of this, especially as Christians, in what we call over-applied purity metaphors, right? 

So within Christianity, we have this long tradition of associating purity with holiness and corruption or contamination with sinfulness. And I want to actually say that as far as that, I think, properly should go, that’s fine. Right? So, purity has a lot of properties that overlap quite nicely with holiness, and that make for a solid metaphor, right? Purity is generally considered good and healthy. Holiness is generally considered good and healthy. Purity is sort of simple. Holiness is, you know, is simple. There is holiness, right? So, there are ways in which that metaphor can be appropriate. I’m not saying that all the purity metaphors in the Bible are wrong. 

The problem comes in when we over-apply a metaphor, right? So in the book, we talk about how, you know, Jesus uses the metaphor of a sheep to talk about himself, and nobody has ever, to my knowledge, suggested that that means that we ought to be making sweaters out of Jesus’ hair. Alright, this is, you know, there is a degree to which a metaphor goes, and then you can over-apply a metaphor, and it becomes ridiculous. You know, Jesus is, Jesus describes himself as a mother hen, but nobody went to try to find eggs from Jesus, to eat Jesus’ eggs for Sunday breakfast, right? 

Again, you can over-apply a metaphor, and when we over-apply the purity and disgust metaphor, what ends up happening is we apply that logic that Paul was just talking about to our understanding of holiness and sin. And it puts us in the, I think we can just say from even, you know, the most conservative Orthodox position in the world, it’s an theologically intolerable position to start suggesting that any amount of sin is more powerful than God’s love, and God’s goodness, and God’s holiness. But that’s what the logic of disgust would demand that we conclude. And of course, while nobody, that I know of, is willing to say that out loud, right? You don’t have people saying, yes, I think that sin is more powerful than holiness. That’s not, you know, a position that Christian leaders take, to my knowledge. They do act as though it were often true. We do often act as though we believe it were true. That is to say that the logic of it shapes our behavior. 

We act as though we are threatened if we see ourselves or we see our community as the holy, pure community. We act as though we are threatened by contamination with anything that we think is sinful. And I want to go back to this; Paul was talking about how we experience, you know, sort of… we experience contaminants as dangerous, because, and I want to argue that one of the reasons for that is that we experience contaminants as dangerous because we are kind of aware or believe that they will change who we are. Right? If it’s a poison, we think it will change us from an alive person to a dead person. That’s not a change we want. Right? But at the same time, when it comes to another individual being part of our community, their inclusion changes the definition, the makeup, the way our community thinks about itself and is thought of by the rest of the world. And this is, sort of, I would argue, at the root of many of the church’s historic exclusionary practices. Right? This inability to tolerate the presence of somebody who changes, or of an idea, by the way, of something that changes the kind of internal and external definition of who we are and what we… the way we think of ourselves. 

I think the – and Paul and I have actually argued in a separate paper – that the kind of apotheosis of this is bounded set theology, right? A theology that is obsessed not with focusing on what are we oriented towards as Christians, as followers of Christ, as people who love God. It’s not focused on what are we oriented towards, it’s focused on what do we need to keep out? What are the boundaries? What is the definitional external boundary that separates us from them? And that is a discussed motivated or disgust-fueled attitude to take towards thinking about ourselves and thinking about the world, right? Because it is, again, preoccupied with making sure that whatever “them” is can’t get mixed up with whatever “we are”. Alright, I think we need to move along here. I’m trying to watch the clock. 

And now we finally get to the big word that Paul teased at the beginning, Paul and I coined, and that we haven’t talked about yet. And that term is, so, eucontamination. This is the Greek prefix EU, or U, which just means good. So what Paul and I realized is that, while we were doing all of our research and study on this, was that we don’t really have a word for contamination when contamination is a good thing, right? We do have a kind of neutral word, it’s influence, and I would actually recommend the work of Julia Serrano, she’s continued to do really good work around this. So when we just talk about influence, when, you know, one thing influences another thing, and changes it, if… we have a kind of neutral word, just influence. 

We have a negative word, contamination. It’s really the same process, only we think that the thing is being corrupted and made worse. But we didn’t have a positive word, and so we coined one, following in the example of Tolkien, who coined the term eucatastrophe for a good catastrophe. We came up with eucontamination for a good contamination. Because, going back to that purity metaphor, right? What we actually noticed is it’s not just the case, theologically, historically, orthodox theologically, that sin is not more powerful than good. They’re also not equally powerful. Right? Jesus didn’t say, you know, Take comfort, I’m just as powerful as the world. Right? He says, be comforted, I have overcome the world, right? In fact, we believe that God’s love, God’s holiness, God’s goodness, is more powerful than that which distorts and harms the world and harms people. 

So we needed a word for this thing that Jesus does, where he takes the logic of disgust, and rather than just saying, it’s bad, put it away. Jesus, in his life, in his example, in his death and resurrection essentially communicates, actually, the logic is sound, only the thing is you have mislocated which is good and which is bad. The way the world really works, we want to suggest, and that we would suggest that Jesus teaches and shows and embodies, is that what is good, holy, and pure, and love overcomes what is weak, sorry, what is sinful, what is harmful, what is cruel, right? That spite is overcome by kindness. That hatred can be overcome by love. Right? And so, and this process we would call eucontamination. Contamination by, you know, by the good. Contamination of what is harmful and bad by what is good, beautiful, and true. Alright, Paul, you want to jump in here? I feel like I’ve sort of…

Dr. Paul Hoard: Yeah. And so, just to land this on a couple places. One, if you look at, like, the specific examples that I love, Jesus touches people with disease. Jesus goes out and makes contact. Jesus spits in the mud and wipes it on somebody’s eyes. Jesus does things that, in his culture, and ours today, we would find disgusting. And yet, he doesn’t, he does so not in a with no fear of him being contaminated by the ones that he’s hurting. Jesus does not walk around in the world acting as if only holy people should be near him for fear that other people’s sin would get him. No, in fact, Jesus says, like, you send a doctor to the sick, I’m going to go out and is accused often of partying too much, of spending time with sinners, of eating with the people he wasn’t supposed to. 

Jesus went to the places that his society would consider gross or contaminating, because he said, actually, you misunderstand, I’m the contaminant. It’s not that love needs to be protected. For fear of it being overwhelmed. No, no, no, no. You don’t get it. A little bit of, like, love actually spreads out. I go out into the world, and it’s, I mean, it’s like light and darkness. It’s like darkness has nothing over light. You turn a little bit of a light on, and it’s everywhere, and that’s… the… that’s the kind of metaphor Jesus uses, even for himself, about salt, and light, and yeast, as these… these germs, essentially, that spread out. And the… the hard part for us, I would argue, is going back to all that Lacanian stuff I was talking about before, is that often, we will experience the very thing that is moving us towards health as a contaminant that’s dangerous. Because it’s going to ask us to change, or to shatter, or to rework our worldview, our understanding of ourselves. 

And so, Jesus did things that, to the religious individuals in his time, they thought, that’s gross, you can’t do that. There was a visceral reaction to the things Jesus was saying and what He was doing. And similar today, I think we tend to fall into a visceral reaction to the things Jesus is asking us to do when he says to love other people, When he encourages us to go out and care for others, when he says, love your enemies. That’s not a simple thing. And I think if we’re going to take that seriously, we actually have to start learning how to not throw our disgust reactions away, not deny that they happen; but start wrestling with, “What’s going on inside me, and how does my disgust sometimes get in the way of my capacity to love?” Because if you’re disgusted by something, you’re actually incapable of loving them in that moment. Love is gonna require some form of interaction. To love someone and to be loved by somebody is gonna change both of you, which means that boundary that your disgust is holding, that’s gonna be this, like, nobody can cross here because I’m gonna protect myself from all the contaminants, that boundary itself is gonna… it gets in the way of being able to love. 

And yet. If we live in a world where sin could overwhelm us, where we’re going to be contaminated by all the bad things, then you need that boundary. But that is, I would… we would argue, and this is what contamination… eucontamination points to, is the scandal of the cross: is that God came down and mixed with humanity, and God didn’t get infected by our sin. God came down and infected us with God’s love further. Normally, when the pure thing touches the impure thing, when the saliva touches the water, the water is contaminated. Right? But God, as the pure thing came in and interacted with us. This is like having a swimming pool full of water… a swimming pool full, excuse me, a swimming pool full of spit, sorry for the analogy, and dropping a thimble of water in there and saying, “Look! We have made the pool clean!” And that’s the ridiculous scandal of Jesus, is that Jesus came in, and through His presence and love and actions, actually spread – it was a contaminant, but was a contaminant for love. Overturned the entire Roman Empire eventually. Alright, I’ll stop… I can get on my horse here, Billie, but you can keep going.

Billie Hoard: No, this is phenomenal. That was good. I think we can actually probably move on to the next slide, because I think what it sets us up for, that last bullet point, is that it requires a risk, right? This is scary. This is scandalous stuff that Jesus has called us to, that Jesus modeled and lived, and again, calls us into. And so one of the questions we started getting very early on when we started doing anything public about this topic was, “What do we do about our disgust? What do we do about this?” Disgust seems overwhelming, right? The fact that it, the fact that it happens first and that we justify afterwards makes it feel like it’s a really hard thing to combat. And there’s legitimacy to that. I mean, at the same time, first up, I want to start with our standard disclaimer: disgust is not always bad, right? Like, being disgusted by something that will actually poison you is one of your body’s ways of keeping you safe and healthy, right? So, putting that one up front. 

With that said, we do think that the church actually has a lot, the historic church, the theological tradition has a lot of really strong resources for combating and managing our capacity to be controlled by disgust, right? It’s that we want to be able to drive that bus when it needs driving. We don’t want to be ruled by our disgust. It’s fine as a check, maybe, but we don’t want to be ruled by disgust. So what do we do about this? And the first thing we want to point to is the Eucharist. We’re going to get all sacramental theological here. But the first thing we want to point to is the Eucharist. All three elements of the traditional Anabapt… we’re both Anabaptists, you know, have some Anabaptist history. The traditional Anabaptist Eucharist involves the foot washing, and a love feast, and communion, and I understand that most Christians just sort of focus on the communion part of that, the actual Eucharistic part of it. But for us, the threefold communion practice is actually all profoundly useful when it comes to mitigating and taking control and engaging our disgust faculty. Because… what we have found, what we have read, from what we have read, one of the most effective ways to, to, to achieve any kind of control over our disgust reactions, is to kind of focus on mindfulness, right? Like, train yourself to notice when you are focusing on experiencing disgust. Notice that, and then sort of work from there, especially in a context of vulnerability and safety and relative safety. Right? 

And so, in a church service, where hopefully, and I know that there’s a lot of church hurt out there, but hopefully in a church service, we are with a community that celebrates us, and with whom we are together celebrating God. and we take communion. (I’m gonna skip some of these just for time) that, you know, we take communion. We sit in each other’s presence, we eat, which is a very vulnerable thing. When we eat, we are transformed by what we eat, physically, just literally, right? We eat together with just the… with everybody who is there. Right? People show up, we are here, we eat together, and we are transformed. And depending on your theology, we are transformed variously spiritually, religiously, or even just physically. Eating together, the love feast itself is a wonderful eucontaminated practice that many, many cultures have as kind of deep embedded wisdom that peacemaking happens around a table, right? That either the first or last, or both first and last process in peacemaking is sitting down and eating together. Right? Because it opens up that space of vulnerability, it’s a place where we are transformed in the presence of one another, and yet it is a nonviolent, non-threatening space – it’s necessary for our nourishment. 

And then, of course, foot washing is a process that invites us to be confronted by our own disgust and by our own fear of being disgusting, right? I actually really love the passage where Peter is really worried about Jesus washing his feet because he’s aware of his feet as disgusting, and Jesus says, no, like, this needs to happen. I get to interact with this, and in fact, it is through my interaction with this that, with what you perceive as your own disgustingness, that salvation is coming to the world and to you and to your body. Right? 

The practice of Christian confession, where we take what we experience to be spiritually or morally disgusting about ourselves, and we present it to somebody else in faith and in trust. Again, when done in a healthy way, in a place, in a context of safety and security and love and assured ongoing, ongoing community can help us to gain some degree, some measure of control, or at least awareness of our disgust reactions. 

And then, fundamentally, joy, and especially joy in community, become these beautiful eucontaminated practices, in which we bring ourselves and the joy of who we are itself, we can experience as eucontaminating the presence, by showing up and being fully myself being fully joyful in my own body, in my own person, in my own identity, transforms my space, and I can see that happening in real time, and begin to recognize the ways in which I am changing and powerfully changing the world to something closer to God’s vision of the beloved community. Paul, you want to take the last couple of these?

Dr. Paul Hoard: Yeah, a couple things just to hit on here, that when we’re talking about it, again, to reiterate, disgust isn’t bad, but one of the first things we need to do is slow down to recognize, oh, I am being disgusted. And I think, at least how I was raised, I was raised that, I should not let my… I mean, I’m not supposed to be disgusted by people. Like, there’s a lot of things I don’t want to be disgusted by, you know? I want to be open, and I want to be accepting, and I want to be loving, and I was taught that I’m supposed to love people. But there’s a big difference between recognizing that I was disgusted, and working through that to move into a space where I can love, and jumping to the end and telling myself, I guess I know I’m just gonna be loving, and I’m gonna pretend I’m not disgusted. Which is hiding my emotions and actually putting myself further in denial, which is what most of my life was about. It’s, it’s the idea of, like, well, I have an idea of who I think I’m supposed to be, so I’m gonna push out all the parts that don’t affirm that, and then pretend I’m that person. And what ends up happening there is that we end up tricking ourselves more than anyone else. 

I go around believing I’m being loving, believing I’m being kind, and yet actually enacting my disgust all over the place, and the person who can see it the least is me. I become the least connected. And so that’s why eucontamination starts with, Billie mentioned, mindfulness and awareness, you are going to be disgusted by people. There are… there are disgust reactions that happen. It’s similar to, like, and I would say as a therapist, similar to how we deal with anger and fear and other emotions that we don’t necessarily want to have in that moment, pretending they’re not happening is not a wise strategy most of the time. 

First, slowing down to recognize, oh no, I’m getting really angry right now. I wish I weren’t. Yes. I don’t… maybe this isn’t a situation where I wish I was getting angry. I’m getting angry, and I’m talking to my 7-year-old. I wish I wasn’t getting angry talking to my 7-year-old right now, but if I pretend I’m not angry, I’m actually going to do more things that are going to be… that are going to be more, perhaps, harmful, if not, like, scary, or do things that I regret. As opposed to, if I slow down, recognize I’m angry. Now I can begin taking steps to say, what do I want to do with that anger? How can I listen to what that anger’s telling me? How is my body involved, invested in that anger? And it’s the same thing with disgust. 

If we slow down to recognize we’re disgusted, that doesn’t mean we’re doing something bad, it’s just a react… it’s an awareness of how our bodies are reacting to our current situation. And so, when we slow down and we allow ourselves to be in a place where it’s safe enough, you know, like Billie mentioned, like, if we’re in church community, actually noticing you’re disgusted at the idea of drinking blood and eating someone’s flesh. and then slowing down to say, actually, this is what Jesus directly invited me to engage my disgust, to face it, in a place that is, where I can allow that to be transformed, instead of allowing that to shape my reality. 

And so yuck walks were actually somebody who had listened to Billie and I’s, podcast before, actually reached out and talked about something she did with her daughter, and I share this just to sort of… she’s given us permission to share this story, but she would take her daughter outside after it rained barefoot, and they would go on what they called yuck walks, where together a mother and daughter walked through, kind of walked down the street together, and would feel the gross feelings of kind of some mud, some slime, or kind of see the little, little worms that would come out after a rain. So that… some of the things that otherwise would discuss them, they were able to move towards with curiosity and wonder, because they knew that they had created a space where it was safe enough. Where the mother was there with the daughter to help make sure she wasn’t doing something that actually would be dangerous to her, and where they were able to wonder together. And so it became a moment of where mindfulness mixed with community allowed for the disgust reaction to allows it to happen, but instead of saying, you’re right, oh my goodness, this is terrible, we need to run away, ah, ah, burn it with fire – we can move towards it with curiosity and wonder. And yes, walking around muddy barefoot is not always the thing I want to do, nor is it always a wise thing to do, but there can be a place for it. Just because something is muddy and squishy doesn’t mean it’s always dangerous, but also now that doesn’t mean it’s something we should do all the time. 

And so it’s creating the spaces where we can notice our disgust, and it starts, I think, with the humility to recognize you are disgusted. All of us are disgusted at different times. And the first thing we need to do is slow down to recognize we’re disgusted, so that we can then be curious about what that might mean in us right now. 

And that last verse that’s sort of, like, confronting what is true in us, and I think this connects to what Billie was saying with confession, you know, 1 John 1:8 states, “If we claim to be without sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us.” The first step is recognizing, of course, there are things… parts about ourselves we’re disgusted by. And often, the things that we’re disgusted by about ourselves, instead of working in ourselves, we go and we find that elsewhere. This is, you know, Jesus’ famous comments about finding specks in other people’s eyes and ignoring the logs within our own. Often, the things that we are most disgusted by in others are the very things about ourselves we don’t want to face. And so if we are willing to engage in sort of a process of confession that’s not just, let me go kind of like robotically down a list of things I’m supposed to tell you I did that were naughty, but actually listen for the ways that we are… there are parts of ourselves that we’re disgusted by in the community – that becomes a way for us to experience disgust. And then be curious about it, and allow ourselves to be transformed by vulnerability, instead of leaning back into armor up, shield up, burn it, kill it with fire, all of that stuff – that often disgust makes us do. But we do it, and we convince ourselves we aren’t. 

So eucontamination practices that are already built into the church calendar, into the way that we do community, our encouragement is to, don’t sanitize the Eucharist, actually. Like, it’s unnerving to wash someone’s feet. There’s a grossness to eating with a bunch of other people. There’s a part of communion that is actually… Jesus says, “no, no, drink blood”. I think some of the invitation there is actually to allow yourself to be disgusted so that you can wrestle with, sit with, and be curious and move towards wonder about your own disgust reaction. 

Okay, we have at least, I think, one more slide here, that’s just sort of a last thing to… couple things to remember before we let you go. And one is that eucontamination is… and what we’re talking about here, is not a magic bullet. And this is probably the therapist part of me coming out to sort of, like, here’s the, all the warnings at the end of a, you know, of a drug commercial for… on TV, is like, hey, this is not something that’s going to magically transform everything. This is an invitation to be more curious about the way disgust has already been shaping us. 

And so, a couple things to keep in mind, because this is some of the ways that I’m always nervous people will hear what we’re saying and take it too far. We are not saying every instance of disgust is bad. We are not saying that every instance of disgust means that you’re being tricked, and you should go do the thing you’re disgusted by. Not at all. Those are not things we’re saying. There are absolutely places where you are disgusted, and where that is a really wise way to protect yourself and to care for yourself, and that that’s telling you something. Please do not say, “Disgust is only lying to me.” However, it is a way for us to say, hey, not every time that you feel disgust is going to be… that is actually threatening to you. And sometimes that disgust can point you towards something about you that could be changed. The only way to be able to discern that is going to be in a safe enough community in trust and vulnerability. That doesn’t mean every time you feel disgust, run towards it. That is not what we’re doing. That’s what middle school boys do with farts. That is not what I think Jesus is inviting us to do in community. So it needs to be individualized, and there also are… there are power dynamics to pay attention to. If somebody with more institutional or social power is telling somebody with less to do a thing they’re disgusted by, that’s probably actually a more dangerous situation than otherwise. But we can talk about that at another time. But Billie, what last thing you wanted to say on this?

Billie Hoard: No, I just kind of want to emphasize some of what you said. I thought it was all really good. I, again, this is… I want to emphasize… I want to say again that, like, this is about, over-applying that purity metaphor, it’s not about negating… you know, and we want to stop over-applying it, not that we want to get rid of it altogether. We don’t like throwing babies out with bath water. And then on top of that, I just underline that thing that you were talking about, Paul, with the power dynamics, the personal histories, right? Is that being able to locate where you are. And being able to make decisions accordingly, right? It is a popular game of those with more power who want to use that power to oppress others to tell others that they need to suppress their disgust reaction, right? If somebody is telling you, “You need to get over your disgust reaction”. That is actually something that’s protecting you… don’t just assume they’re right, you know? 

And when we think about acting as eucontaminants, again, keep in mind where we are and what we are called to do. I think the… I love the term vocation when it comes to this. Know what your vocation is when it comes to acting as a eucontaminant, because for me, to have to sit down and have a meal with somebody who wants me no longer to exist is a lot more dangerous than it is for you to sit down and have a meal with someone who wants ME not to exist, right? So knowing where you are and what role that might mean you have in an overall power structure is, I think, really critical in all of this. And yeah, that’s… that’s what I wanted to add, Paul.

Dr. Paul Hoard: Yeah, no, and so, I know that’s a lot. We covered some psychoanalysis, we covered some theology, covered a lot on disgust, and what I’m… hoping, kind of, for me, where all this has been going to is I’d love to hear from you all. So what questions have been popping up in the chat? Lauren, if we can invite you back, to kind of, yeah, guide us through maybe some of the Q&A time here at the end.

Lauren Peiser: Yeah, I’d love to do that. Thank y’all so much. Yeah, there are actually a few comments… in the, in the chat, that I’d love for y’all to, add a little bit to. So, Will was saying that, are… the… what you all are talking about is resonating, because… with the election results, and that they weren’t just leading towards a feeling of fear, but disgust. And, seeing the things that this administration is doing is disgusting, in a way, and feels disgusting. So… how all… how would you all speak to that in, like, recognizing, the disgust in that, like. Is that good? Is that bad? Is it mixed? Like, what… what would you all add to that… that comment?

Billie Hoard: I love this one, because it’s kind of a deep cut into, like, the later chapters of our book. And I’m going to put a little plug in for, like, someday y’all need to get Paul on just to do his own thing on shame and personal shame, because I think it’s really deeply relevant here. I had a similar experience, right, with the last election. I think there’s a thing that a lot of communities do  after… having a… making a decision or having an action take place that they are ashamed of, and that is they will say, “This is not who we are”. Right? And I think that needs to be corrected. I think that actually is… that is betraying a level of disgust that actually can cause us to become blind to what is necessary to fix the problem. Instead, I think we need to say, like, I’m having a disgust reaction to this because it means that we have become that who we are is not who I want us to be, and I’m experiencing dissonance, and that’s where this disgust feeling is coming from. And that needs to wake us up to the actions we need to take to help us become who we do want to be. 

So I think the first thing is to not say, and I… well, I don’t think you said this, right? But to not say, “This isn’t who we are”. Instead, say, “I am… I am grieved. I’m ashamed of who we have become, and therefore, I am going to lament that, and I’m going to take every action that is appropriate to me to fix it, to change it, to help us, to eucontaminate our society, our culture, our, you know, our world, so that it can move closer to who we ought to become, and who I do want us to be”. Right? So rather than saying, like, this isn’t who we are, let’s violently expel every person who is involved in that, right? We need to sit and say, “What has happened that has caused us to become this… this nation that, of which I cannot be proud? Right now. And then what actions do I need to take that are commensurate, are appropriate to who and how I want us to be?” Paul, do you have any thoughts on that one?

Dr. Paul Hoard: Yeah, I think… there’s a way in which sometimes I think we… you hear a sense of, like, some call to love people who are doing horrible things. And sometimes I think that gets heard as, so I have to… move towards some form of indifference towards the harm they’re causing in order to love them. I’ve gotta, like, pretend it doesn’t matter so that I can get close to them. And I actually think what Jesus is inviting us to do is something far more radical. Jesus in no way pretends our sin is not horrible and causing all sorts of harm. And He loves us anyway. And I think that is actually a far more disturbing and uncomfortable thing that we’re being called to do. So I think… when we recognize harm, when we see harm being done, when we see people hurting other people, whether that be interpersonal, in our lives, or at the state level, on the government, I… I am not… I am not at all advocating that we pretend we don’t… we’re okay with it, or we pretend we don’t see it. I think we actually have to look and face it completely, and recognize I’m having a disgust reaction, and sit with what that might mean, and where do I want to go with that. The easy road, right, the easy road, I think, is to either say, oh, it’s not that bad, or I’m going to look away. Or is to say, because they are monsters, and so I’m going to spit those people. They’re not really us, like you were saying, Billie, or that I’m gonna now make those subhumans, and if we could just get rid of these, less than. I think both of those are the easier, I’ll put that in the easier road that actually keeps us dehumanizing and being controlled by it. 

There’s a philosopher, Todd McGowan, who talks about the difference between an enemy and an adversary, and we riff on this a little bit in the book when we talk about love, and… he argues that, like, actually, anytime you’ve developed a world in which you have enemies, you’re already in this othering, scapegoating, objectifying, disgust-fueled kind of approach to others. That doesn’t mean you don’t have adversaries. There are absolutely people who are adversarially working against the things that you think are good for the world. Let’s not be naive about that. But when you see them as adversaries, you are perhaps stubbornly refusing to dehumanize them – you’re going to continue to see them. The goal would be for them to… to repent. The goal would be for them to actually move into… to join the community, for them to actually see it. And so, I think the… frustratingly difficult, and why we need each other to help us maintain that space when we’re facing this kind of harm is never to pretend the harm isn’t real, is never to deny it, but is also not to play into the lie that it’s just a bad… it’s a bad person, or objectifying, or dehumanizing the people. And that, I think, is something I don’t hear as much. You know, we often… it’s not just… yeah, anyway, I’m repeating myself now, but holding both of those is sort of where my mind goes, and how disturbing that can be.

Billie Hoard: Absolutely.

Lauren Peiser: Something I want to add to that, I think you all talked about that, churches that have, you know, theological statements that are us versus them. But then also in the inverse way, there’s institutions that have really inclusive messaging on their website, or have stated values of inclusion and often do not live up to those things. Like, would you say… disgust has a bigger role to play in that than we might realize?

Billie Hoard: I suspect so. And I will say, as a… as a queer person who has been in some of those churches where they have beautiful, loving statements, and you find that action… that at home here, like, I’m still a little bit othered, right? I think this is… our disgust runs deeper than our cognitive, right, than what we want to believe. There’s… when we’re in a situation where we want to believe one thing about ourselves. I think this happens a whole lot, I’m just gonna call out as white people, we want to believe that we are not racist. But we’re not willing to confront internalized racism, and so we create these spaces where all of the signage, all of the messaging is inclusive, and can even be, like, militantly inclusive, radically inclusive. But we haven’t done the work to actually, like, do anything about any internalized racism. In fact, we’re not even willing to recognize it because we’re so disgusted by the fact of our own racism. We end up creating spaces that are not actually hospitable to people who aren’t white. And I will certainly say I’ve experienced that as a queer person in spaces that might advertise themselves as, you know, importantly, inclusive of queer people, but where that is not, in fact, the way that they operate, because these are people who have not been… these are spaces, communities, institutions that have not done the work of confronting the the fact of their cis-hetero-allonormativity.

Dr. Paul Hoard: Yeah, I think… I mean, just amen to what Billie said. There’s a… that it is sort of… what I was trying to say earlier around, we have an image of who we wish we were, and then we’re often disgusted by finding out that we aren’t that. And so often, instead of taking that message as, oh my goodness, you’re right, I have work to do, and changing, and sitting with the disturbance of what that might mean, we shoot the messenger. We want to get rid of the idea of whoever would tell us we’re not that. And I think this happens no matter what your political alignment is, and there’s… we create an image of who we wish we were, and we can be an individual human, can be a group, can be a family, can be an institution, an organization, a nation. And then we resist any ideas that would say we aren’t that. And… I think if we aren’t curious about our disgust reaction, that’s going to encourage us to prop up an image. An idea of ourselves over becoming how we actually are. 

When I teach a class at the school sometimes on intercultural credibility and sort of multicultural counseling, things like that, and one of the questions I like to ask is my students, if, particularly around questions of race, gender, power dynamics: If you’ve never been told that you were offensive, that you offended somebody, is that because you’ve never offended anybody, or you’re not the kind of person that hears that message well? And I think too many of us walk around, well, no one’s told me I was racist, so I must not be racist, instead of wondering, like, maybe I’m not the kind… maybe I don’t actually hear the subtle messages, and I’m not a safe enough person to be told that. How could I hear that? If that were true, how would I even know it? 

I think those are the kinds of questions that we want to encourage both institutions and individuals to begin asking. Like, hey, if we weren’t who we wish we were, how would we know that? Where would we need to listen? And too often, instead, we take those mess… we hear somebody say something to it, and we hear that as an attack, as opposed to a corrective, or critical, or something helpful, constructive.

Lauren Peiser: Thanks, that’s really helpful. And yeah, if anyone else has questions, feel free to start adding those to the Q&A. We have one there that is asking, “Can you say a little bit more about how your book explores the way, truth, and life, in connection with Disgust Theology?”

Dr. Paul Hoard: Yeah, this is a… I appreciate the question. So our book, we ended up writing it, first, it introduces disgust, and then this idea of eucontamination, and then we spend most of the book actually walking through, unpacking our understanding of that verse in John, where Jesus says, I am the way, the truth, and the life. And part of what we do is say, those three ideas, you know, the way of Jesus, life, and truth, of course, on a, like, a conscious level, I think those are all good things that I would love. And I imagine them to be, like, warm, fuzzy, like, when I’m in truth. I’m gonna feel courageous and happy and good. And actually, what we explore is. On the contrary, most of the time, truth is quite disturbing. We don’t, you know, it’s more of that, like, courtroom scene, you can’t handle the truth, has been my experience of life, both as a therapist, working with my clients, and then also in my own development of, like, oh, actually, when I have… face truth, it’s often been more disturbing to me, as opposed to affirming of who I wish I were. 

And so, we explore what if, actually, the way of Jesus invites us to face our own disgust? What if life, moving towards life, is going to be engaging with a form of disgust because often the truth in a small t that I think I like, my truth, what I think the world is, is actually my own imagination, is my illusion. And not the real. And Jesus is constantly, I think, inviting us into that disturbance that actually opens us up to more. 

And there’s a whole thing that Billie teased with joy, but actually, when we push against something, when we allow our worlds to crumble, I think popular, you know, this is sometimes what people are talking about with deconstruction, not all the time, there’s actually an enjoyment that comes about. There’s actually a life that can be found. If you pursue, and think about it this way, if you pursue only the comfort in your life, if you only do things that are comfortable, your world actually gets smaller. and smaller, because your comfort zone starts shrinking, because the things you’re used to and feel comfortable. And what happens is, a simple way to think of it is that that differentiation between what’s novel and what’s threatening starts to blur. So, new simply becomes scary itself, and we start losing the… being able to differentiate as wisely between, oh, this is just a new situation, I’m safe, or this is good, this is actually good for me, I should be uncomfortable, I should travel, I should try new foods, I should go other places, but it’s going to be uncomfortable. When you try a new flavor, you usually… your first reaction is typically, for most of us, is going to be some form of, like, I don’t know if I like it, and kind of defensive, and you actually have to try it a couple times to know if you actually like it. If you simply stick to, like, no, no, I don’t like it, we would all just be eating dino nuggets still. Because, like, that’s what feels safe. So, I would argue that… so in the book, we talk about how the way, the truth, and the life actually are vectors of you contamination. Like, what if truth is a contaminant? What if the way of Jesus actually is a contaminant that’s going to continue to change who you think you are, and open you up to more? And this is where some of Lewis’s eschatology gets into the book quite a bit, with his vision of heaven as further up and further in, that it’s this continual movement, as opposed to finding it. and then just staying, it’s this constant movement towards. I’ll stop there. But Billie, anything you want to add?

Billie Hoard: I’m just sitting here and noticing that, like, Lauren’s in the chat with us, and everybody needs to pay attention to what she has to say about food, because, yeah, I… the way, like, having that posture of wanting to embrace and finding joy in new experiences, this is, like, this is life, and I think in the book we say that life the pursuit of life, the way towards life, involves a thousand small deaths, each one the death of who we thought we were, and turns out we never were, into the truer and deeper version of actually who we actually are becoming. And we are forever becoming towards this larger and more expansive, this further up and further in way of being in the world. And I think it’s really beautiful, but I think it is hard. And disgust is what will always be there at my right hand, telling me, you don’t need to be uncomfortable to experience joy. You don’t need to embrace truth to experience joy. You can fudge, you can hedge. You can just, you know, it’s where we have to put comfort somewhat frequently in opposition to joy, flourishing, and liberation.

Lauren Peiser: Yeah, I’m curious if you all have suggestions about, like, groups of people who want to build, like, a value statement, or, like, have, like, who do we want to be in the world? like, could there be a way to incorporate and have disgust in mind as they’re doing that, of like, we say this, but we should be aware of this. They’re like, how do you imagine us as we’re constructing, communities of mutual care and, like, not communities that are exclusive, like. Adding that into the practices as we’re developing and talking through what this could look like.

Billie Hoard: So I think that that is a beautiful and complex question, and I’m jumping on it early because I’m gonna make a… because I am not employed by The Seattle School, and I’m about to make a plug for them. I think a lot of the faculty at The Seattle School are actually doing amazing work thinking about exactly this question, and I have benefited from talking not just to my brother and to Lauren, but to many of the other, especially Dwight, but many of the other faculty, and Lauren at The Seattle School, so just the stuff they’re putting out is exactly addressing this question in beautiful ways. And I think that it is nuanced, it is complicated, and it is messy, and… because I’m here with Paul, and because I think it’s true, and because I’m a proud daughter, I want to point to our father, to my dad, Paul’s dad, who was part of building a limited but very real ecumenical, church in Ankara, Turkey, for many years. 

And, one of the rules that they had, one of the principles they had, the values they had, and that he would enunciate from the front fairly regularly, he was an elder. He would say we had… there were people from all different denominations. This is a, again. Multi-decade-long church that lasted for quite a while. And one of the things he would say from the front frequently is he said, “If you are here with us, we love that you’re here with us, and you find every single thing about this service comfortable and wonderful, please come and tell us so that we can change something.” Because I think in a true and healthy, community. people should be, and Paul used this phrase earlier, safe enough. but not fully comfortable, because we are all different, and we all still have these disgust reactions, so we should… if we’re not banging up against some things that make us have to say, oh, I’m a little bit uncomfortable with that, and I want… I need to explore it, I want to see what I can learn, then we’re not in a place where we can grow. We’re not in a place where good things can happen to us. 

And so I would say, to make as a value, like, to really say that diversity is our value, and we recognize that that is uncomfortable, needs to be part of a value statement. The only other thing I think I have to offer right now, is just to reaffirm that I think coming up with a value statement is much better than coming up with a statement of faith. Right? Instead of saying, this is the boundary, and these are the four walls, and we’re going to spend a lot of time lawyering the meaning of every word that we’re using to build those walls, saying, this is what we are trying to grow towards, and we invite everybody who wants to be part of that project. Maybe they don’t even want to grow towards every… they don’t agree on every part of what we’re growing towards, but they do want to be part of a community that is growing in that direction. I think that’s at least where I would say people would do well to start.

Dr. Paul Hoard: Yeah, I think I would just add on the little bit in there. Well, one, thanks for the comments about The Seattle school. And Amen to the comments about our dad as well, because I think there’s a fantasy that community is always happy, right? It’s just like the Care Bears, right? And I think actually, no, that doesn’t exist. Community’s always messy, and so if we’re not open to the disturbance that others will have on us, because we’re pretending we’re not disturbed, because, look, I’m so good, and I just love everybody, so I would never be disturbed by the fact that people are different. 

Or, or because, I’m gonna, like, push it all out, then we’ve missed the whole point: community is going to disturb us. And that actually is beautiful, but it is something we should be aware of. If you’re going to try to build a community like that, you’re opening… you are inviting a level of disturbance and discomfort, and of course, then all the complexities of, like, when does something move from being… from being disturbing but helpful, all the way to, like, now this is someone’s causing harm, and how do we do that? Absolutely, these are complicated. And I don’t think there’s a, like, oh, this is the three steps to do it, buy my book, and then you’ll solve the problems. There is no standardized version of it. It’s messy, and I think it involves the real humans that are in your room that are with you. And I think the other thing I would say is sometimes we always imagine the humans we wish were in the room, and then how do we get them together, as opposed to dealing with, yeah, but Bob’s here. But you’re gonna have to deal with Bob. Bob’s there, Bob is one of the people in your community, and you have to deal with Bob. And if you don’t… if you aren’t willing to welcome or wrestle with the nuances of what you do with Bob, and whatever Bob’s bringing. Sorry if someone in this… named Bob, we’re so glad you’re here.

Billie Hoard: Robert.

Dr. Paul Hoard: Then I think you’re dealing more with an illusion of who you wish you were than the reality of what… of the place God has put you in. So… and, yeah, it’s quite complicated, so any simple answer is wrong.

Lauren Peiser: Someone asked in the chat, too, would you say, then, that eucontamination is the process of cleansing? And I guess I would add to that, too, like, and it seems like you all are maybe hinting at this, you’ll never get over disgust, but you might get better at it, or be able to be… not disgusted as much, like, and how would you relate that to the idea of being cleansed?

Billie Hoard: Paul, I look forward to your thoughts on this one, but I would say that in terms of eucontamination as cleansing, I’m gonna put it as a modified yes. Like, let’s… I think that can work as a metaphor, I don’t want to over-apply it. I think if we over-apply the metaphor of eucontamination as cleansing, we actually get back to a kind of over-applied purity metaphor again. But I would say what eucontamination is, is it is transformation, right? When we are contaminated or eucontaminated, when something new that will change us is introduced to our system. Right? A cleansing agent is a thing that does that. When you add a cleansing agent to a system and make it clean, you take it from being dirty to clean. You change it. And generally, we consider that to be a positive change, right? There are contexts in which it might not be. Lauren, again, can say things about sterilization that are really quite cool. But generally, we think of that as a positive change, right? So, eucontamination is any changing of who and what we are, or of the system that we have concern for that is actually good. 

One of the things that Paul and I sort of decided too late is that it, we could have taken our bad title for our book, because that uses a word that nobody knows, and made it even more esoteric and unapproachable, by, but we kind of wish we had, by adding parentheses around the EU in front of contamination, which we did use that formulation in the book a couple of places. Because one of the things that makes all of this, and I think it’s at the core of the… why we keep kind of coming back to, like, it’s nuanced, and there’s discernment necessary, is because often, we don’t know beforehand whether the change that is on offer will be good or bad, positive or negative, right? We don’t know whether it will be a eucontamination or contamination. And that’s where things like trust, and following Jesus, and discernment, and paying attention to the power structures involved and in the moment, where all of that has to come into play, because we don’t always know. So, by putting those parentheses, we think it’s actually useful to communicate that we don’t always know. It might be eucontamination. It might just be contamination. What will we do? What will our posture be towards the introduction of some new element that might feel disconcerting, that might be arousing a disgust reaction in us? We have to be mindful, and we have to, we have to pay attention, and we have to make sure that we live lives in community where intimacy is present in our lives.

Dr. Paul Hoard: I’ll… I’ll just throw in the, the example that comes to my mind is from Narnia, and I think it’s the beavers talking about Aslan, the god character, and one of the… the main character children ask, “Is Aslan safe?”. And they laugh and say, “Safe? Of course he isn’t safe, he’s a lion! But he’s good.”. 

And I think this idea that, like, eucontamination was particularly… if you know how it’s going to end, you’re actually… you’re still controlling it. It’s a process you’re controlling, and there’s a, like, actually letting go. I don’t know where this will take me. I don’t know what happens if I… if I… if I really love this person. I don’t know what happens if I open myself up to this. I don’t know what’s going to happen. But I am gonna trust that it’s good, and that actually, even if it ends up poorly, that it’s not going to overwhelm me, because what is greater than me? Because I will make wrong choices, and I think it’s that… you’re… no one’s… no one’s going to… be… recognize everything is good all the time. And some of the things you welcome will probably end up turning out having been a foolish thing to welcome. But you can’t know, and what’s the… what’s the error that is… you’re willing to make? Is maybe another question. And again, that’s why we situate it as not a, like, therefore, go out and do everything disgusting. No, disgust is actually a really important thing that’s kept you alive, and is a really helpful part of becoming a person. And, like every other emotion, it can steer us into places where we’re causing harm and doing the very things we wish we weren’t. And so it’s something that we need to be willing to question and to be curious about, and then to wrestle with vulnerably in community with those we trust.

Billie Hoard: Just, sorry, one more comment I wanted to….the question about cleansing. No, sorry, this is a… I was like, you know, forgot I hadn’t said it. The question of, is eucontamination a form of cleansing? I think, to re-emphasize, like, the yes, like, there’s a way in which that metaphor works really well. I would just say another synonym for eucontamination… a theological synonym for eucontamination would actually just be sanctification, right? the becoming who we are actually in the process of becoming. We are all becoming. So becoming towards who God knows us to be, the glorification that is, that we are working in the direction of.

Lauren Peiser: Thanks, y’all. Thank you so much for today, this is great. And if anyone has not purchased Paul and Billie’s book, we’ll put it in the chat here. You can purchase it here, or at any other bookstore that, that you’d like to purchase it at. 

And we also have a survey that’s coming out, it’ll be in the follow-up email. If you’re watching this on YouTube, it will be in the description, and we’ll do a raffle with this survey to win a copy of Paul and Billie’s book. So please go ahead and fill out that survey. We are developing more, non-degree learning opportunities at The Seattle School: short courses. webinars like this, and we want to hear from you, what are you interested in hearing more about? So that survey will come out, after this in your email. 

And, next month, we have another webinar, with Paul and another of our faculty, Dr. Ron Ruthruff, and it is called From Aspiration Action: Anti-Racist Practices for White Folks. So, really building off of some of the things that we’ve even talked about, today. So thank you all so much for being here, thank you for your time, thank you to Paul and Billie for being a part of this. And, we look forward to having more conversations soon. Thank you all.

Dr. Paul Hoard: Thank you, thanks for having us Lauren.

Billie Hoard: Thank you for everything.

Dr. Paul Hoard: Thank you, everybody, for attending.