Theology in the Raw - S2 Ep1083: What Living in an Honor/Shame Culture Taught Me About the Gospel: Dr. Brad Vaughn

Episode Date: June 8, 2023

Brad Vaughn is a theologian in residence with Global Training Network and marketing manager for William Carey Publishing. He lived and worked in East Asia for almost two decades, teaching theology and missiology for Chinese pastors. He serves on the Asian/Asian-American Theology steering committee of the Evangelical Theological Society and is the author of Saving God's Face, One Gospel for All Nations, Reading Romans with Eastern Eyes, Seeking God's Face, and The Cross in Context. You can find his articles and resources at savinggodsface.com.

Hello, friends. Welcome back to another episode of Theology in the Raw. My guest today is Dr. Brad Vaughn, formerly called Jackson Wu. He does explain why he went by that pen name for a couple decades. We get into that towards the middle end of the podcast. Brad has a PhD in Applied Theology from Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary, earned his MDiv from Gordon-Conwell Seminary, an MA in Philosophy from Texas A&M. He's the author of a few books, Saving God's Face, Reading Romans with Eastern Eyes, Seeking God's Face and the Cross in Context. And Brad has become kind of an expert in understanding honor-shame cultures and how that influences our reading of the Bible, how it affects our ecclesiology, and so on and so forth.

So that becomes the bulk of our conversation. We do get into some controversies that he found himself pulled into recently. So I don't need to give a warning for that, whatever. We just know that's kind of where we end up going toward the end of the podcast. So I really enjoyed getting to know Brad. So please welcome to the show the one and only Dr. Brad Mullen. Brad, thanks so much for coming on the podcast. It's funny because we recently got in touch, but a mutual really good friend of ours, Spencer McCush, has told me for years that I need to have you on the podcast. So this is, uh, yeah, long overdue. I'm super glad we got reconnected. Yeah, I did. Absolutely. I've been told that you and I are kindred spirits. And so, uh, yeah, I'll take that as a compliment. Yeah. We could both be, we could both be idiots. So you were, uh, ministering. Do you, do you like the term

missionary? I just had a conversation with another guy who says, I think we need to determine missionary, but you were... It's fine. Because I'm less American than I used to be, I'm not into some of the word policing that I'm seeing in American culture. So yeah, I'm a cross-cultural worker, missionary, whatever. Okay. Cross-cultural worker. I like that a lot better. So you were a cross-cultural worker in China for how long? A couple of decades? So you were a cross-cultural worker in China for how long? A couple of decades or? Yeah, 2003 to 2019. What led you to that kind of ministry?

Honestly, it was one day I felt the Lord saying, go to China. And I turned to my wife, I go, you know, as weird as it sounds, I think we're supposed to go to China. And she goes, all right, let's do it. Just like that. Yeah, it was right after I'd finished my master's in philosophy. And I decided then, yeah, I don't want to be a PhD in philosophy. And I was looking at some different things. And that was back when the church planning movement was like really big and like, you know, emergent stuff.

So I was thinking that. But then God just said, no, no, no, you're going to go be high, be in obscurity in China. Did you do a lot of kind of cross-cultural research before you got there? Or, cause I mean, you're, we're going to end up talking a lot about just cross-cultural ministry, honor, shame, cultures versus American power. Is it power, fear, whatever the, um, did you know a lot of that going in or did you learn on the ground kind of what cross-cultural ministry looked like? On the ground, but you'd be surprised actually at how much my background prepared me in a very weird way. I grew up in East Texas, a poor family. A lot of my family members call themselves white trash or trailer trash. So like that's very honor shame oriented there. And so when we went to China,

I'm seeing these honor shame dynamics and I'm going, wait a minute, there's, it's different, but there's some similarities here. And so I just got really curious and started digging into everything I could. Cultural adjustment's always hard. But but also at the time, that was when John Piper was kind of at his like everybody was listening to John Piper and he was talking about the glory of God. And I thought, wait a minute, they're talking about face and honor and my background and glory to God. Okay, I really got to dive into this and figure out how all this works together with the Bible and Chinese culture. Interesting. What kind of ministry were you involved in?

Like when you went over like church planting? Initially, it was teaching English and evangelism. But then it moved pretty quickly into church planting, helping with that. And then most of the time was spent, I was part of a founding team that started an accredited seminary for the Underground House Church. That's where I spent the most of our time doing. For people that maybe don't know anything about the church in China or Christianity in China, give us a kind of a one-on-one overview. You go over there and what is Christianity like? Everything you've heard go over there. What is Christianity like? Sure. Everything you've heard is true somewhere.

You know? Yeah. So it really is. And so in the, you know, China's kind of face looks like a chicken if you look at a map. And kind of at the belly of the chicken is where most believers are on the East Coast. That's where a lot of population is. Very organized. They don't work in terms of denominations. They work in relational networks, very large church,

but increasingly, you know, increasingly they're facing more and more opposition and persecution because of the government. And so, yes, there's an openness more in the South, but the more closer to Beijing you get, and of course, religious persecution is very, very severe, the more west you go. So it's a little of everything. Okay. So we all hear, I mean, I don't want to assume too much knowledge from my audience, but most people have heard there's just this massive growth in Christianity, largely through underground house churches.

There is a state-recognized church that tends to be maybe a little more nominal, but the real vibrancy is happening with the underground persecuted house church. That's at least kind of the narrative I hear. Is that largely correct? Does it depend on the region? In general, I'm going to err on more vibrancy, more zeal and evangelism and concern for scripture and so forth and so on in the house church. But the truth is there in a lot of places, a lot more overlap. I've done a lot of my training in the back rooms of three self churches, the public churches, uh, you know, because they had protection. And so a lot of the kind of reforms,

the socialist Christianity that's being put out, that's all through the public church. So, uh, there's health and dishealth everywhere, but in the whole, that's a fair, fairish characterization. Okay. What percentage would you say are Christians in China? Do we have data on that? It's all estimation. I mean, you're dealing with...

I won't go into numbers, but I would say you're dealing with something like 7%. It depends on the number. Because some people look at $150 million, you're somewhere dealing with $60 million. So it depends on the range and what you count. So I would say somewhere around 100 million is about the middle of where everybody guesses. So I heard in the little research I did. So like, like in 1948, is it when Christianity became illegal? Or was there some kind of shift right after World War II?

Yeah, 49 is when there was the big push for the missionaries to get out yeah okay and there was a maybe how many like a few hundred thousand christians at that time or something and it's grown to at least a hundred million in 60 plus years that's insane i mean so so yeah i mean from almost i mean very little to what i don't actually want to say like five percent i'm doing math right now but yeah uh especially especially if you count house church and and the hidden network that can't be counted the public church so it's really it's really blown up and it came about in all the persecution especially in the 60s and 70s it came so the persecution the blood of the martyrs is the seat of the church kind of thing like the more as absolutely grew a lot of outsiders thought well there's probably not gonna be much left of the church and then in 19 around 1980 when the church

china opened up again all of a sudden they saw this massive group of christians and they're like blown away and so when you see this tightening and restriction now in the chinese church uh far a lot of us are less worried in the sense of like, will the church survives sort of thing because they thrive in tough situations. They are very connected. They're very communal oriented. They know how to evangelize. And, and some, I know some believers think this is a good thing. The more recent kind of wave of persecution resistance, because they see it as a purging because being a Christian got a little too

comfortable. Oh, really? It just, it just became more like, Oh, you could do it. And purging because being a Christian got a little too comfortable. Oh, really? It just became more like, oh, you could do it. And so anybody could be a Christian because it wasn't looked down upon as much by the government. But now the government's jumping in, people will go, oh, never mind. So there's a recent kind of growing persecution of the church in China? Yeah. The current president, Xi Jinping, basically has no term limits. He kind of has given the same power as Mao Zedong had back in the 60s and 70s and clamping down on anything that's deemed as foreign. And basically all religion is deemed foreign because of Marxist socialism, which ironically is foreign. Yeah. Yeah. So China, would you say it's more

agnostic, atheistic as a whole, as a culture, not necessarily because it has what Buddhist roots or what's the. It's extremely nominal cultural Buddhism, you know, like, you know, burning money to ancestors. It's just different ways of honoring, you. A form of religion is just not a really big deal. It's more like folk religion at best, honoring ancestors. Buddhism isn't technically a religion anyway, right? Yeah, it depends on which researcher you talk to, I guess. Okay. It has religious life, but there's not like a single deity or deities that it worships?

Of course, that's going to depend on what kind of thread of Buddhism, Theravada Buddhism, Mahayana Buddhism, so forth and so on. But for us, in our work, we didn't have to deal with, it's actually a lot easier to do ministry in China than in India, because in India, you have to deconstruct a whole lot and then build back up. But in China, there's no religion religion no anything for a whole lot of people and you're starting from kind of nothing it's actually that's actually kind of convenient

i've been to katmandu a few times where i think buddha's from there right isn't he the buddha um they have the whole um i forget what it's called the main kind of um temple or whatever yeah yeah yeah yeah you know it's it's a country. And so I'm sure people who are from China are going to object to something I say, but as I said, something's true everywhere. Right. Right. Right. Right. And I spent most of my time working with that house church. Okay. Okay. Okay. So let's talk to us about the different cultural dynamics specifically. Like I would love to get dive, do a deep dive into, um, how an honor shame culture operates,

how that kind of reconfigures maybe how they approach Christianity, and how that compares with the U.S. context in particular. I guess you can say a Western country. Well, you'll have to cut me off because this is a big question, right? So first off, when we talk about honor talk about honor shame cultures it's kind of a misnomer because the truth is all cultures uh are honor shame culture so to speak all care about honor all care about shame the only difference is that these traditional cultures are far more aware of it okay more explicitly aware of it whereas in the states and a lot of western countries it's kind of more hidden and we hide it under different ways.

But honor, just to put it simply, honor is a person's right to respect. You know, so it's qualities that are deemed praiseworthy. In Chinese, they talk about face. You know, it talks about your kind of your status, your position. And that could be because of something you did or somebody you know, right? And then shame, especially from a Chinese perspective, is this sense of propriety or you're being sensitive to the opinions of others. And we get this.

This is not just a Chinese thing because if I said to you, hey, Preston, you're shameless, I don't think you'd probably take that as a compliment, right? And the Chinese are just simply far more aware of that. Whereas I think in the West, we've hidden it in all sorts of different ways. And so a lot of my dissertation work and all books I've written are constantly exploring how does this stuff, these dynamics, since these are human dynamics, how they play out in scripture. And since they're human dynamics, how do they play out in other contexts? Maybe give us an example of a social situation that kind of illustrates

really strong kind of interface honor-shame dynamics. Sure. So let's just think about in the West. I mean, first off, honor and shame can be achieved or what we call ascribed. So based on what you do, you're a really good runner or you get all A's you, you get honored, right? If you do commit some kind of crime or say something negative, you know, you be shamed. Right. And if you, uh, the same thing with position, if my last name were Trump, Obama, Bush, or something like that, I would get certain amount of honor or shame just because I walk into a room, depending on your kind of political persuasion, right?

The CEO of an organization will get a certain amount of respect regardless of their moral failings because they're in a certain position. Regardless of who's a president, I'm going to walk in, I'm going to respect the office, right? a president i'm going to walk in i'm going to respect the office right i think a lot of confusion though around this whole conversation of honor and shame is because a lot of scholars can pass each other like uh you have like bernie brown talking about psychological shame which is more like low self-esteem right but then you also have like social shame which is like what anthropologists talk about that's like uh you know when you're publicly shaming somebody or you're bullying somebody, okay. Jesus is dying on the cross. He was shamed on the cross. Okay. And so people tend to, and there's moral shame, this idea, like the sensitivity to what's proper, what's right. Okay. So these are all interconnected,

but they also have a certain amount of independence. So I could do something that gets the score and shame of my community, but they're not feel, you know, shameful myself. So that's one of the reasons I think people sometimes have a lot of half truths when they think about shame is, oh, it's just bad, or it's just psychological. And the truth is that shame and guilt are both objective and subjective you know it's not like one is like real and the bible stuff and this other stuff is just mere cultural stuff because you could feel guilt or you could be guilty right right subjective objective i could feel ashamed and i could be shamed like by others objective so and they're and all of these are in scripture. So one of my big goals of the past few years has been to help people see that it's not a matter of guilt is the Bible and shame is culture, is that shame is actually a broader concept than guilt. And it's all throughout the Bible. Interesting. Oh, you see the language of shame all over the place. Do you like the distinction that most people have heard, you know, that guilt is the

feeling you get when he did something wrong, whereas shame is the feeling you get for who you are, you know, so that it's not, you did something wrong. It's, you've been made to feel like you are a bad person. Yeah. You're talking about like guilt about what you do and shame about who you are. Yeah. Is that too? Yeah. What do you think? I mean, it's certainly a simplification. There's a lot more that could be said, but I don't mind it in the sense that shame deals with not only what you do, because I could do something shameful, right? But it also is who I'm associated with, right?

I mean, you think about, we don't want to be associated with those people, right? All right. Right. You know, because shame by association association not really guilt by association right um you know but but guilt is more about you know the things you do and about transgressing boundaries and guilt doesn't move you to do things positively but a sense of shame does because i want to be a certain type of person and so it moves me forward to do right. And so I actually find it helpful because shame is more about identity. And that's about as Christian of an issue as you get. When you first started kind of maybe seeing the different cultural dynamics, I'm sure it was early on in your time in China. How did that kind of reconfigure your approach to ministry? Like, did it have a radical effect on just your, yeah, your ecclesiology and evangelism

and all this stuff? And what did that shift look like? I mean, I've really, I've made a writing career out of just teasing out the implications. And my whole dissertation was on the doctrine of salvation in terms of honor and shame. It started off because as we were trying to share the gospel with people, the word for sin in China is crime. And so you say, hey, you're a sinner. You say you're a criminal. And they'd be like, what are you talking about? I mean, just no idea. Because remember, they don't have a Christianized idea of sin. You're literally telling them you're a criminal. And it's like, okay, whatever, guys, Peace out, right? And so I realized that, okay, if we can't get sin right, well, there's a whole lot of other stuff that we can't get right, right?

And so I started using kind of this word picture of sin is like publicly spitting in your father's face. And you see them, oh, oh, okay. That makes sense. And we didn't spend like five conversations trying to get through what sin was they go oh that makes sense and then we could keep going right it's far more relational they understand this whole idea of face right uh which is one reason why my first book was titled saving god's face because giving this dynamics to god's honor right and so that's what got me into it and then again the listen a lot of John Piper,

I realized that if he's right, that glory is such a big deal in the Bible, it should permeate so much more of our scripture than our theology, than it actually practically does for most people. And so that's where I dived into all sorts of issues of salvation. And it led me to talk about,

understand faith and all, basically any concept you have, there's some kind of honor shame dynamic involved. How would you, when you talk about salvation, like how would you describe what salvation is in a more honor shame context? Yeah, well, and I will say this is important to say in an honor shame context, because I don't think that we pick, we can pick and choose because honor and shame is in the Bible, just like guilt is and just like uncleanness and all these other metaphors.

So it's not an either or. But I think first off, you start off with this idea of understanding sin. And so sin, Paul defines in Romans, by the way, as dishonoring God. We can delve into that as you want, rather than this breaking of just a crime abstractly. And so we become shameful. Romans 1 comes to mind, right? Salvation is the removing of that shame and the receiving of glory, right? One of my favorite passages that, funny enough, no one talks about, even though it's more

explicit than righteousness imputation that people talk about, but is in John 17, 22, where Jesus prays to the father saying the glory that you have given me, I have given to them. Yeah. What does that mean? Well, yeah, that's, isn't that, isn't that worth the discussion? But I mean, just think about that. No one talks about that. And that's explicit.

If I came in this podcast to say, Hey, Preston, by the way, I got Jesus' glory. He'd be like, okay, we're stopping this right now. So what does it mean? How would you explain that? Well, I mean, at a broad stroke, I think it does have to do with the fact that we are able to use Paul's language. We are able to use Paul's language. We're conformed to his likeness, and we're able to manifest his worth in our lives. So we have the glory of the Father by virtue of association and union with him. I mean, that's a broad, broad overview, but I think that's getting at the same basic idea that you're getting at in Romans 8, 28 to 30,

which is conformed to image of Christ, you know, leading to glorification. So all of a sudden and falling short of the glory of God, meaning we don't live up to. We lack the glory of God. And then the glory of God in Romans, a little bit nuanced as you know, you've studied Romans a lot,

but this idea of ultimate manifestation of who God is and his character and how we're designed to be. All right. So having the identity that we are supposed to be in that vocation that we're supposed to be in, we lack that. We've basically muddied ourselves up so that we can't image that. And so that's what we lack. And how have we done that? so that we can't image that. And so that's what we lack. And how have we done that? Romans 2, 23 is so explicit where Paul directly defines sin as dishonoring God.

And he cites Isaiah 4, as it's written, the name of God is blasphemed among Gentiles because of you. Making it very clear, the big problem here is not merely that you've broken an abstract law. It's that you've dishonored God. And you see that as how unrighteousness is described in chapter one. People are oftentimes shocked when they read Romans 1 to 3, that Paul consistently is defining sin in terms of honor, shame, glory, not merely law code breaking.

So you've dishonored the father by misrepresenting who he is in how we're acting? Is that, would that be? I mean, you know, and as a colonel, yeah. Basically not reflecting who he is, not showing his worth, right? And that comes out in all sorts of ways so whose pleasure do you seek you know uh who do you want to receive praise or give face so like jesus actually we're talking about romans a lot in faith well jesus actually defines faith in terms of face okay or glory so john 5, he says, how can you believe when you receive glory for one another

and do not seek the glory that comes from the only God? He's saying, you can't believe if you're not seeking the glory that comes from God. Romans 2, Paul actually says the righteous will seek after glory and honor. I mean, these are things that are in very popular books. We're not talking about Habakkuk and third Hezekiah or these other books that people haven't heard of, right? Like John and Romans, it's overtly seek glory and honor. The issue is,

what kind of honor are you seeking? What kind of glory are you seeking? And that's why Jesus says in John 12, if anyone seeks me, the Father will honor him. I mean, that's an enticement. Yeah, yeah. And do you find that like honor, shame cultures just have a better handle on the Bible?

I mean, because these categories, like, yeah, I remember being exposed to kind of honor-shame ways of thinking. And again, we all think that way on some level, but cultures are very dominant. And going back and just seeing how pervasive the language is in the Bible, I'm like, I just glossed right over this. I mean, I'm despising the shame, you know, Hebrews 12 and even the cross. You know, we think of, man, that's such a painful way to die, which obviously it is. But the language most often used is not pain. In fact, I don't. Is there ever pain language used?

I mean, it's mainly shame and that that's the design. I mean, the, you know, the Romans really developed crucifixion as a way of shaming the person, his family, anybody who was associated with them, which when the, when the disciples scatter, it's like, yeah, they didn't want to be connected with this publicly shamed person. Cause then they received that, you know? Yeah. So there's a few points and what you said first your first question what do honor shame cultures get the bible better and i would say

no but they're they had the tools to get more of the bible than we get okay and what i mean by this is that i found again and again that people from so-called honor shame cultures their honor shame perspective actually prevents them from developing an honor shame theology. I know that sounds backwards, but honor shame culture is really valued tradition. Right. If there's hierarchy, there's, you know, an appreciation for history. OK. And so what does that mean? Well, a lot of the theology has been developed in the West. And so you'll have a hey, this is what we've always believed and then they will at first i found say i'm not sure i haven't heard this in my reading of sproll or whoever calvin that

they'll read you know i've been these many of these conversations where they'll say that but then i'll start pointing verses out like i've been talking to you and then every time you see this go this is so chinese this like where'd you find this i'm like it's just there in the bible right because it's not just where the words honor and shame are but think about uh language like the poor the deaf you know gentiles was was a shameful term, you know, you know, you're an outsider, right? You're not, you're not one of us barren, right? Those are all shame laden words to be welcomed, to be adopted, reconciled, you know, blessed clothed. Those are honorific terms, right?

So it's, it's in far more than just where you see a word pop up. I will say this when I was trying to show people that this concept was a very thoroughly biblical concept, they would want to argue Romans and the law and so forth and so on. And so I said, okay, well, I'm going to write about how honor and shame influences the Bible. And I'm going to take on Romans. Okay. Because if I can show you that honor and shame are pervasive and important in Romans, well, then I win the whole argument because that's the most so-called legal book

in the New Testament because they'll give me Habakkuk or Jonah or some other, again, some other minor prophet that they never read. And sure enough, I mean, it's there perpetually. And I think misreadings actually perpetuate shame. Like misreadings of Romans 7 actually, you know, perpetuate shame. I kept finding that people didn't notice things like in nine Romans nine 33 and 10, 11 or 10, 12, Paul repeats the exact same verse about those who believe will not be put to shame. Right. You know, he's talking about justification, justification terms of not being put to shame. I'm like, why are we not talking about this more pervasively? Because this is going to help us contextualize

also for the whole world, right? And so talking to Chinese, when they saw these, they got so excited because they actually had something that made sense to friends and family because they said, this is super Chinese. Yeah. Oh, here's my question. So you kind of said in passing, I just want to make sure I heard you right. That the Chinese you're working with

didn't naturally have these categories. Is it because they had just been, they've had, we've had so much exported kind of American theology and that's where they got their kind of like Christian understanding? Yes. Because if this is what the church is traditionally believed in, so should we. But as soon as you showed them, they really care about the scripture. If you can show them scripture, they're okay. And so once you showed them this and you show it thoroughly, I mean, they just ran with it. It was so exciting. And that's one reason why I used to have my Chinese pse pseudonym you know some people found it offensive

i understand that but the part of the reason was is that all this research came out of uh conversations with these house church believers who didn't have any voice and i thought one of the things that was a concern i was like i need to honor them with reflecting that this is these are their ideas actually it. It's their lens. And the conversation with them, when they helped me to see scripture with the honor-shame lens, that, wow, that's there. And that's there. And that's there. And so once the Chinese felt like they could expand beyond tradition, legal categories, then it became natural to them.

Interesting. stories then it became natural to them interesting that's yeah i found that yeah as i travel travel the world a bit like yeah i'm kind of shocked at how american or like how the theology is is much more american than or western shouldn't say american but western yeah i've been in many sermons listened to many preachers in china that preach in chinese uh because everything we did was in chinese and it sounded like a sermon I would hear in an Alabama Baptist church. I was just blown away at the lack of Chineseness of the theology, because we're not talking about the academic guild here. We're talking about on the ground pastors. And so that was what was so exciting was when you help say, hey hey you know how you see the world

this way yeah now what would happen if you remember that as you're reading this and they would notice these things and it became so exciting because their evangelism just took off and they had and they had language to describe you know their experience and whatnot one of the reasons why this matters really a big deal is because in China, it was felt that you had to be to be Chinese or Christian. And I had a, I've had multiple people say, you know what? I feel like I can finally be a Chinese Christian because they didn't feel like they had to be a Western Christian, but then a Chinese in the rest of their life. So that's a huge deal.

So is it starting to change? Is there now more like theological works and things that are coming from from Chinese leaders? Are they still drinking from the Western cup of theology? Yeah. And I don't want to throw Western theology on the bus because all all cultures have their benefits and limitations. But it really comes down to money and training. OK. You know, so like what gets published, money and training. Okay. You know, so like what gets published, what gets translated, right? I mean, so yes, there is an increase, but when you're dealing with a persecuted church,

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Well, okay, let's talk about your pseudonym then, because I know that, I mean, most people aren't going to, it was something that kind of flared up on social media fairly recently. So you have gone by Jackson Wu for up until, you said like a month ago or something. And can you explain the reason why you took on that name? Yeah. I need this pseudonym because I,

somebody asked me to publish an article. And so we need a pseudonym, but at the same time, because these thoughts were coming out from these conversations, it just felt like I was stealing to just have a name that didn't honor my Chinese brothers and sisters, especially the house church who didn't honor my chinese brothers and sisters especially the house church who didn't have any kind of public voice my wife and i decided okay let's do this is you know like i said a long time ago where we decided okay let's do a chinese name so it's jackson wu so it honors them and i didn't think anything of it's a one-off article and then i

ended up publishing something else and then my dissertation drew a lot of attention. And then all of a sudden, now I had like a little bit of a paper trail. And so the name just kept going on for security reasons and basically to honor the Chinese culture as well. Because to them, in the mainland Chinese context, it's honoring to take a Chinese name. When Chinese, mainland Chinese, heard this, they said, oh, you love China so much. You have a Chinese name. So it's not, they don't see it as cultural appropriation? Oh, that's a non-category to them.

Absolutely not. When I've talked to Chinese about this concept, it's utterly confusing to them. No, this is a really a Western and more North American type conversation that's going on. So when I came back to the States, I was completely caught off guard by these dynamics because i mean mainland chinese culture and asian american cultures are not the same and but sometimes you're expected to to i don't know

they hold you by the rules of asian american culture when i was like i've always been thinking mainland culture and honor them so So anyways, it was, it was a big, it was a big whiplash for me. So did you experience from Asian American culture, Asian Americans that they felt like it was appropriation, but mainland, not until the Twitter stuff happened. Okay. I mean, my biggest supporters have been mainland Chinese and Asian Americans. I've been invited to Asian American churches and talks.

I was invited to be a part of the Asian American theology committee for ETS, Evangelical Theological Society. They knew I was white, but they felt like what I was writing was helpful and whatnot. So those have always been my biggest supporters. It wasn't until the Twitter storm last month that I really got any kind of significant pushback from Asian Americans. I guess, well, since we're here,

we do need to, yeah, maybe fill us in on the gist. I didn't have you on the talk. I wanted to talk about Honor Shame. It's something I've been wanting to do for many years now. But it's not completely unrelated, I think, because I just said there, your whiplash experience, I think is actually super interesting to me. You know, here you are living in China for a couple of decades coming back and now facing this really kind of different cultural context where you're being

accused of some things that I don't know. It's just, it was, it was interesting to me. That's the only where I can bizarre, maybe better term. So yeah. Can you maybe explain what you're talking about? Yeah. There's a whole, I mean, it's a little bit confusing when you think about this solidarity among a collective identity that you share as a church in China. And then you come back to the States and there's such fragmentation and everybody's so angry.

That was one of the biggest things that caught me off guard was how angry just in general, people have been in America. And you understand about loyalty to your group and, and being family in China. And then here, uh, it uh it was like oh the family is so fragmented uh and so that that was a big thing that kind of threw me off there's a lot of silos you know like you know i was talking about america being an honor shame culture we still have our honor shame groups but we think we call it we think we're individuals when really they're just our tribes and our silos we think we're individuals when really they're just our tribes and our silos and whatever names we want to put to it.

And the truth is that we can't please, we can't get honor from all the groups. And the thing is that Twitter tends to represent just a few subcultures, not necessarily the broader subculture and so you're it's weird because it's like there's this value for being an individual but yet you are still being judged by the collective it's it's this weird tension that america is in right now can you explain what happened just so people are yeah yeah so i uh there are people who are upset that i had the pseudonym jackson woo because they were saying it was cultural appropriation that I was being disrespectful or hurting Asian Americans because I had a Wu surname. At the same time, I had critiqued a book written by a Black woman. I'm not sure if she's African American or African because she's originally from Ethiopia. I'm not sure if she became an American. And so putting those two together caused a real big firestorm

to where it was came across as me pretending to be an Asian man to critique a black woman's book as, and as if I was trying to get one over and it was just basically a perfect storm. It was just not, none of that was my intent. And so I had to give up the pseudonym. So I just go by Brad now. And now my books have been switched to Brad Vaughn and not Jackson Wu. Why did you give it up? Do you think it's wise to give it up? Or was it, did you didn't want to put up with the storm anymore?

Or do you think there was like... Well, for one thing, it was forced on me. Because some believers or some people online put my face and my name together. Which for me was frankly, really heartbreaking because people didn't realize the security concerns that could be linked to my ongoing work. Because I mean, that's a threat to the Chinese church because people don't know how much I'm in intertied. And so that was just kind of forced on me at that point. And so I didn't, in that sense, I didn't have a choice, but on the other hand i'm like i'd also want to be a distraction to the message that i'm trying to get out in the future so if that's what

i need to do then that's what i need to do i want to be loving and i'm trying to contextualize on in both directions coming back yeah yeah yeah it's it's been really hard on me personally uh not me personally in in in the sense of like i offended. It's I feel hurt at how much misunderstanding there is about the Chinese church and missions and the persecution there and not having concern for the possible danger that people could be in because people don't know the links that I have or don't have. So there's that. but it's also, it's been really helpful for me as just personally, because you remember how fragile your public platform is. And I've had to ask myself if I ever lose my platform publicly and they take

away all my books, am I okay with who I am and how I'm living? So that's been a really constructive thing that Laura's done in my heart through this. So they put your name and your picture on they publicize that yeah and did they realize that that's hindering the work among this persecuted church i mean that that's you would think that that's like did the chinese government do that you're like no did a christian was it a christian that did that the christians were were recycling were you know cycling and spreading it i mean yeah, yeah, it was, it got pretty nasty. People don't even get that as nasty as it got online as it did like in the Chinese church.

Even people disagree, they wouldn't be like that. But I mean, it's one thing to hate me, but to do that and take out the Chinese church on the, you know, get them in trouble, possibly, that's what was heartbreaking. Were your Chinese brothers and sisters, they didn't know about all this? And were they confused? Like Were your Chinese brothers and sisters, they didn't know about all this and were they confused? Like why are our brothers and sisters in America doing this to us? I had Chinese reach out to me and basically express anger that what is going on? This is ridiculous, you know? And so just basically being an encouragement.

They just don't get American culture in these dynamics. Yeah. Does it make you want to go back to China? We never wanted to leave. We left because of security concerns. You know, we were hoping to eventually go back, but that's not, now that can't happen. Okay. Now, now with this, because it's just too public now, I, now my name is Brad on all the books. So now I can't. Yeah. And that, that's saddening as well, because it also means other security sensitive countries that now I could be a threat to somebody all because they made that link. So that so it's a double whammy. It not only is put the Chinese church under threat, but now it's prevented you from doing any ongoing or the kind of ongoing work you. you wow yeah yeah and so that that's what the grieving so it's been like a death you know because you're kind of forever separated from them in a certain sense you know has anybody

reached out enough i mean the people that maybe were part of stirring all this up whatever have they reached out and said oh my gosh i didn't realize that this is going to happen have anybody apologized or anything or no no no not at all and in fact a lot of them have doubled down and said and basically like you're making excuses and you know they'll try to find contradictions what i'm saying and basically i stopped trying to explain things online because nuance that you have to explain on that and then there's only so many words you could say and i'm like you know what i can't explain to everybody to where they like it. I'm just going to take the actions I need to and then move on. I mean, I was I was called everything. At one point, I collected the insults thrown at me as I was a misogynist, racist, dehumanizing yellow face who was attacking and trying to silence a black woman's worth.

That's it. I strung together a whole thing that were said of me. And so that's it's sad to me that the American church are so much of that. It's all in public. And in Chinese church, you just don't get that. It's dealt with more relationally. So you being gone for almost two decades, coming back, have you seen a shift in American culture?

So you, wait, so when you went over there, the internet was barely taken off. There was no social media. And now you come back where that's kind of all consuming aspect of our culture. Is that. Yeah. Have you seen a radical thing? Gay marriage wasn't even a thing then. And so a lot of these dynamics and kind of social cues in terms of how you have conversation and whatnot have just so completely changed. There's only so much that you can glean this from the internet right a lot of the word placing and so like i'll say something like oh you can't say this i'm like oh i didn't know i couldn't say that right uh it's just you don't know what

things convey you know because people don't understand that living a long time across cultures changes who you are i mean we are cross-cultural beings if you think about if you grew up in rural arkansas and then obviously you moved to New York city, you're going to be a hybrid, right. Of, of cultures. It works the same thing for people like myself. And, and so, I mean, it is what it is, but I'm, I'm growing from it and I'm learning from it. I'm hoping to love people through this. Yeah. How's your wife done through it? It's been hard on her, uh, particularly because to appeal to one of your former guests, uh, Josh Butler, who released the beautiful union,

he's one of the pastors at our church and he had a firestorm that was going on as about two weeks in, it was a height of it. And then all of a sudden my stuff broke out. Oh wow. And so you had both of those things going on because she's on staff at the church. Your wife? Yeah, she's on staff at the church. Okay. And so you had that going on, they had my stuff going on. And then our kids, for them, it was really sad because they're also tied to me and will their ability to ever minister in China be affected? You know, you just don't know. What do you uh so what do you

do for work now what's your ministry or i am the publishing marketing uh director for william kerry publishing okay uh i i came back to when i came back to the states i worked with a mission organization but covid hurt the funding i was unemployed for nine months and we really and so i don't get to do a lot of the theologian missiology type stuff that i've done in the past at this point but i'm hoping yeah you know that i get to do more of that but that's what i'm doing now and and so it's an adjacent field so missions is pretty much for the foreseeable future not um in the plan i mean yeah no it's not so i mean i'll use my training and my skill sets hopefully to equip missions and equip the american church because like i said there's i'm seeing so many

ways that shame is affecting the american church unhealthy ways that people deal with shame in the west and so i'll administer here as well yeah what are some yeah what are some big what are some big picture things that you see as major blind spots? Well, for example, one way that people try to avoid shame is by removing responsibility, casting blame on genetics or the environment or political systems or whatever else. And that's one thing. Blame shifting? A lot of blame shifting.

But the problem with that is that it perpetuates the lie that our work still depends on minimizing our flaws and failures. Well, you're like, you know what? Yeah, you have this genetic issue or this environment or whatever the systemic issue. But you know what? Simple, flawed, weak people still have worth. You know, another thing is is identity people idolize identity so they absolutize it as if they centralize it and so if you attack any aspect of identity and then you get a whole virtual holy war right yeah yeah um yeah people changing identities left and right you know just what however they want and so if because that i was shamed here so i take on this identity you know and so i mean i'm speaking really really big picture um and of

course the the one that's most popular these days is just being shameless you know you can't shame me and you're like okay that's actually not a good thing you know because to be shameless is to be a dangerous person to not care about what other people you know because to be shameless is to be a dangerous person to not care about what other people you know shame can be a healthy deterrent is that or how would you oh it's absolutely a healthy thing i mean paul used shame but there's healthy ways and not healthy ways of using uh using shame um you know for example paul he talks spoken shameful about shameful actions not shameful people you know and because it's about do you want to be this kind of person yeah i do okay so that's a healthy use of shame not a you

suck you're terrible you're awful that's a bad use of shame you know the only way you can really deal with shame though well is to expose it to talk about it to embrace weakness and still affirm people's worth. There was a book I got sent. It's an academic book. I think it was a dissertation called Defending Shame. Have you come across this? Yeah. Tully Lau. It's an excellent book. Really? Yeah.

That's a bold title. In the culture today, post-Brené Brown, where shame is just such a... To have shame is like the worst thing. I was like, oh, wow, this is going to be. And the fact that I think he's, is he, I mean, Asian American on some. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. He is. Uh, I think he, I think he's Malaysian Chinese, uh, but he's American, uh, and excellent book is academic, but a really solid treatment showing how Paul constructively uses shame to help construct and edify the church. Yeah. And so we're missing out on a whole big resource in scripture, honor and shame.

That's a big deal everywhere. And so I'm so glad to see more and more books on this topic coming out. I remember I was in Nepal several years ago and talking to one of our, we have a bunch of pastor friends over there and stuff. I'm talking to one pastor. We're talking about like, you know, sex outside of marriage and stuff. And, you know, they have a lot of the same,

they're wrestling with a lot of the same stuff the American church is, you know. And I, you know, I remember asking him like, so what would you do if you have a member that's, you know, is caught, you know, in a sexually immoral relationship? And without hesitation, he says, well, we would shame him.

Like we would publicly shame him and hopefully that would bring him back to repentance you know without even i'm like i was like almost like yeah poked my coffee i was like whoa you just publicly shame him but yeah but but it's not in the way it is here because here in individualism to shame somebody is to utterly isolate them without hope because you don't have this group tied but if somebody if you're really tied to somebody like a good buddy good brothers good you know close and someone shames you then but you know they fundamentally love you they're for you you receive a different and this is one reason why you can't just use these shame taxes in the church without having a really healthy sense of we are family. We are a we are a people together because honor and shame are inherently collective group identity oriented. And so that's why they can say that, because you can still shame somebody.

And yet they understand that you're still part of the group. Whereas it went the way she is individualistic cultures. It's seen as like cast utter casting out, like, you know, without any hope because there's not these strong ties. And the communal, yeah. And I think what he was getting at was, you know, this as part of this body, you know, and it's a Hindu country, the church is small. So, I mean, it's, you know, very stark difference between being a Christian, not being a Christian. So when this person commits this sin, it brings shame shame on the community which also brings shame on the god they're trying to represent so i almost heard him so he didn't quite wear it like this but

if i am hearing him right he's kind of like we would publicly expose the shame that he has brought on us so that we can relieve that like you know yeah what it wasn't this dehumanizing twitter shame or something you know i mean yeah there's a protection that's that's meant to happen protecting of the community as well right yeah and so it's not just a uh we got to take them down and destroy them it's not like uh like cancel culture is today i mean that's that's like the unhealthy form of uh shame in amer. There's no relationship. There's, they're at a distance. There's no context, but you know, inside that relationship, it's, it can be a really, really helpful thing because you're, you're basically saying, Hey,

do you want to be this kind of person? Yeah. You're not, you know what? You're right. And it brings them back in. You know, Brad, cancel culture doesn't actually exist. It's, it's made up. Tell me and Josh about it. But you know what? As weird as it sounds, uh, the Lord was very encouraging to me because I just kept saying, you know, they can't cancel me because Jesus doesn't cancel me. And so it was really a sweet time of drawing near to the Lord, trying to be teachable. You realize that we don't always agree, but just trying to go, you know, in the end, the Lord is better than his people are acting.

You mentioned it kind of a passing, just kind of the disconnect between kind of these different like social worlds we live in, our like neighborhood city church you know where we're our bodies actually are you know then you have various online spaces and even those can be very different i mean twitter is very different from like instagram and and facebook facebook and twitter are kind of similar in some ways but still kind of different but then you look at like how representative these kind of worlds are and you enter into this, say you enter into like Twitter and you're like, Oh my gosh,

is this representative? Then you, there's a study that was done that said, you know, 7% of people are responsible for 97% of all tweets. So we're dealing with a really, this is a Gallup. It was a Gallup poll that I think 25% of Americans have a Twitter account.

Most of them aren't really using it much. I might once a month, maybe a lot of them are just kind of sitting there. But there's a small percentage of that. I think it's, or it's a quarter of the 25%, whatever. So about 7% that are responsible for 97% of all the tweets. So, so you can think that this is like representative but it really is this cloistered kind of like you know group of people then you go to facebook and it's like all people like you know our age and older typically you know random raving

and and then instagram is like people you know um i wish i had that life you know or you know it's just and then all of that put together is like all oh, that's kind of just, just part of our humanity is kind of expressing these spheres. And it's just, it's just not. Because identity is far more complex than Americans are making it out to be. We, Americans tend to be like, this sphere of my life is my identity. Where the truth is identity is how we're the same as some people and how we're different than other people. You know, my, you know, my identity is a compilation of various relationships. Honor and shame cultures grasp this. But what I think a lot of vitriol that you see online comes from people take one sliver

of their identity, absolutize it. And then if it's made sacred, now it's a holy war. It has to be because you're challenging my sacred identity. And because we've lost all kinds of nuance about how relationships work in collective identity because when i talk about honor shame i'm talking about collective identity you know and collective identity is a much more complex thing than americans grasp because we have so little practice at thinking about it but it's not hard to grasp sports culture, the military, the American South. These are all honor chain cultures.

Yeah. Sports culture for sure. I didn't think about that. Yeah. I mean, look at just watching SEC game, you know, and you know, a football game, you know, or March madness. Right. I mean, in what people say that we won the championship and you're like, uh, you weren't out there, but, or it's like, they really stunk last night, you know, because we intuitively grasp this contagious shame on her thing.

I often be my buddy. So I'm a huge Dodger fan, a baseball fan in general. And, I catch myself saying we won last night. Yeah. Oh my word. And I'm very aware of kind of the,

we like, I don't i never there's a whole nother conversation like i rarely if ever use the plural pronoun to refer to my american identity like so i don't it's i'll i'm trying to get in the habit of using it as my global christian identity so i would never say like our troops like because the global church doesn't have a military but then it's funny when I, when it comes to baseball, we won. I'm like, Oh,

crud. Like I'm doing it. Yeah, absolutely. I, so I think that when you start grasping how these things affect us, normally this collective identity, honor,

shame, you not only realize stuff like that, but you reclaim the church because Because from individualistic perspective, the individualistic lens wipes out the need for the church. What's the point? Me and Jesus were cool. The church is just a bonus, right? But conversion becomes not just a, I was in this bad category now with Jesus,

but it's a conversion from one group to another. I was fundamentally saw myself as part of some identity in the world but now i'm fundamentally aligned with christ i'm part of this group the people of god the church right and so we don't have that in america i mean right that's just you get saved and then you go to a church and i mean it's fairly rare i think i mean it is what it is but i mean i think it's fairly rare to have that conversion to this. Like I get it all like in a, you know, I do a lot of work in faith and sexuality and I'm always going to see,

you know, people were like, how do we reach the LGBTQ community? You know, the community that's not, you know, inside the church. And I'm like, well, I'm almost a little worried about that. Like that's a really strong multi-layered community that has a history of mistreatment and abuse and especially the church hurt, shame, and all that stuff. If an individual from that tight community actually gets saved, what's the new community? Are they going to experience the same kind of community especially if they're still you know they're still attracted to the same sex or still you know have a sexuality that's very different than many people in the church and and i'm like what it questions like

this are one of the very first questions that you'll hear from chinese or arabs or people from indian people from different collectivist cultures is they want to know what community will I be going to? Like, what does this mean for my belonging to this community? And literally first things are thinking of. And, and I heard a Muslim woman say like, she was like reluctant to become a believer because you're like, she didn't see any kind of church around. She was like, cause you're asking me to leave my community for what?

So they saw this as a convergence from one community to another. It doesn't mean that you give up being female or black or a Dodger fan or whatever else. It just means that those are absolute ties because Jesus is absolute. You know, the people of God, those who are loyal to him, become your fundamental collective identity. And so not just because I think most Christians in the West would say, yeah, I get converted to Christ and now Christ is on the throne of my life. But it still is very individualistic. The vertical kind of one-on-one identity might be reoriented maybe. But the communal identity shift is...

That's the most individualistic thing you could possibly say. I don't make Jesus the Lord of my life. Jesus is Lord, whether or not I recognize it or not. Yeah, yeah. Right? I mean, you see how even our language betrays this. You don't need the church when we're talking like that, right? And if we don't have the church, so many other things get messed up.

How do you become disciples outside of the community of faith? I would imagine the whole idea that you can be kind of a Christian and not be in community with other believers would just be so foreign in the Chinese. That doesn't make sense. No, no, absolutely not. It's just nonsense school. It's like a contradiction. They focus on who are we, you know, not just have I done something, you know, right or wrong. You know, we tend to think what's the most minimal thing,

which is what, think about that, a guilt culture is all about transgression. Have I transgressed or not transgressed, right? And we kind of take that same mentality with faith. What's that boundary line where I've done just enough or not done enough, right. To be in, right. Whereas, uh, our non-Western majority world friends are thinking about more, who are we? That's a whole different kind of a whole different orientation. Yeah. Interesting. Well, Brad, it's, this is great getting to know you. Um, do you still, I mean, Oh, you go by Brad now, not, is that, is that hard to get used to now for 20 years being Jackson? I mean, or. It has been weird or it has been weird

it has been weird uh and other people told me it's weirder who talked to me because i i mean i just went by jackson you know people and so yeah it has been an adjustment and we're seeing my name on my books as brad vaughn now is it's hard it feels like i'm exposed because you've lived 20 years trying to keep everything secret that's wild well thank Well, thank you, man. And love your rawness and your realness. And yeah, thanks for the work you're doing. And it was great getting to know you. Hey, thanks. I appreciate that. And if anybody wants to, you know, look me up online to stay up on this stuff, my website is savinggodsface.com savinggodsface.com.

And so they can follow up on some of these things if they want. Awesome. Cool, man. Thank you. Appreciate it. This show is part of the Converge Podcast Network.