The Two Shames

An objection worth honoring

Here is an honest reader's problem with the Law of the church. Section 42 says things like: he that sins "shall be brought before the church" and dealt with according to scripture; the offender rebuked, in certain cases openly, "that he or she may be ashamed" (42:90–91). And an honest reader, who has watched what shame does to people — the hiding, the despair, the way it brands identity and prevents the very repair it claims to want — reads those verses and recoils. Shame has never once made anyone holy. God may have built the capacity for it into us, but that cannot mean we are licensed to manufacture it for each other. Doesn't Jacob say the disciples bear the shame of the world — take it away, not deal it out?

That objection deserves honor, not management, because the instinct behind it is correct: the world's shame-machinery is the accuser's native technology — "the accuser of our brethren... which accused them before our God day and night" (Revelation 12:10) — and no chapter of scripture, rightly read, will ever turn out to be a manual for it. But the resolution is not to throw the chapter out. It is to discover that Section 42, read closely, is anti-shame legislation — a containment protocol written against the very machinery the objection fears — and that the scriptures distinguish two things our language collapses into one word, whose difference is the difference between repentance and death.

Read the protocol, not the proof-text

Walk Section 42's actual procedure, clause by clause, and watch what it is engineering. "If thy brother or sister offend thee, thou shalt take him or her between him or her and thee alone; and if he or she confess thou shalt be reconciled" (42:88). Private first — Matthew 18's own protocol — with the goal stated in the same verse: not punishment; reconciliation. If escalation is needed, the matter goes "unto the church, not to the members, but to the elders. And it shall be done in a meeting, and that not before the world" (42:89) — discipline deliberately walled away from the public, twice over: not the membership, and never the world. Then the verse that should settle the question of intent forever: "if any shall offend in secret, he or she shall be rebuked in secret, that he or she may have opportunity to confess in secret" (42:92) — secrecy honored with secrecy, three times in a single sentence. And only "if any shall offend openly" shall they "be rebuked openly, that he or she may be ashamed" (42:91).

Now name the design principle: the scope of the correction is matched to the scope of the offense — and never exceeds it. Minimum possible audience at every step. Privacy protected wherever privacy existed. Openness reserved for the one case where the offense had already made itself open — and for a reason the objection itself, thought through, will endorse: a public wound cannot be healed by a private repair. If I defame you before the whole ward, my quiet apology to you leaves the ward still poisoned against you; the repair must travel everywhere the injury traveled, or the injury wins. Open rebuke for open offense is not shame-manufacture; it is the restitution principle applied to information — the same law as returning what was stolen, at the scope it was stolen from. Set the protocol against the actual shame-technologies of its day — the stocks, the scarlet letters, the sinner made to stand before the congregation — or of ours: the pile-on, the screenshot, the permanent searchable record, exposure amplified far beyond the offense for the audience's entertainment. The world's machine runs maximum exposure for the crowd's satisfaction. Section 42 runs minimum exposure for the offender's repair. They are not the same machine with different settings. They are opposite machines.

The word in 1832

And before leaving the text, weigh its one loaded word in the vernacular of its first readers — because the revelation says "that he or she may be ashamed," and in 1832 that word choice was doing precise work that our modern ear misses.

Open the dictionary those readers owned — Webster's American Dictionary, published four years before the revelation. Ashamed, Webster says, is an adjective of state: "Affected by shame; abashed or confused by guilt or a conviction of some criminal action or indecorous conduct... which the person is conscious must be wrong." Read his operative words: conviction — conscious — must be wrong. The state arises from the person's own conscience ratifying the verdict; Webster's illustrating scripture is pure self-recognition — "Thou shalt remember thy ways, and be ashamed" (Ezekiel 16:61): memory doing the work, not a mob. To be ashamed, in that English, is something that happens in you when you see your act truly. Shamed, by contrast, is the passive of a transitive verb — something done to you: Webster's shame, v.t.: "To make ashamed; to excite a consciousness of guilt... to cause to blush," shading into "to disgrace" — an external agent operating on a person. And the distinction was live in the period's ear: Webster's own citation for the verb is Paul disclaiming it mid-correction — "I write not these things to shame you" (1 Corinthians 4:14) — the apostle refusing the transitive act in the very letter where he rebukes.

Now the clincher: the era had a ready-made idiom for the inflicted, public kind — "to put to shame." The King James Bible every 1832 reader knew reserves it for the ugly thing: apostates "crucify to themselves the Son of God afresh, and put him to an open shame" (Hebrews 6:6) — public disgrace-infliction, as the crucifiers' act. And Isaiah separates the two shames in a single verse of the covenant's great tent chapter: "thou shalt not be ashamed: neither be thou confounded; for thou shalt not be put to shame" (Isaiah 54:4) — the inner state and the inflicted disgrace, named apart, both abolished. If Section 42 had meant the church to inflict disgrace, the phrase was sitting in the common tongue: rebuked openly, that he may be put to open shame. The revelation does not use it. It uses the state-word, the conscience-word — which in 1832 grammar assigns the entire production of the shame to the offender's own moral recognition. The church's role in the sentence is only the rebuke, scoped to the offense; the being-ashamed is what a conscience does when a true mirror is held at the right distance. The verse doesn't commission a shaming. It predicts a conscience.

Paul's fork

But the deeper resolution is in the purpose-clause — "that he or she may be ashamed" — because the scriptures know something our vocabulary has forgotten: there are two shames, and they are not two intensities of one thing; they are opposites, running in opposite directions, with opposite fruits. Paul names the fork in a single verse: "godly sorrow worketh repentance to salvation not to be repented of: but the sorrow of the world worketh death" (2 Corinthians 7:10).

The sorrow of the world — what we would now call toxic shame — is an identity verdict: you are the bad thing. Its fruits are diagnostic and ancient: it drives hiding — the fig leaves and the bushes were its first harvest, minutes old in the world ("I was afraid, because I was naked; and I hid myself"); it drives isolation, despair, and the bitter spiral of sinning to numb the shame of having sinned. It brands; it does not repair; it prevents repair, because a person convinced he is the offense can only conceal, never confess. It worketh death — and it is the accuser's whole rhetoric, day and night.

Godly sorrow is an act verdict: you did a wrong thing — and you are loved, and it can be repaired. Its fruit runs the other way entirely: toward the light, toward the offended brother, toward confession and restitution — "what carefulness it wrought in you, yea, what clearing of yourselves" (2 Corinthians 7:11) — and then, its work done, it evaporates: "I could remember my pains no more," said the man who had felt them most (Alma 36:19). Godly sorrow is the weight that moves; the world's sorrow is the weight that crushes. And Section 42's "ashamed" is the first kind by its own context, because every track of the protocol terminates in the same two words: reconciled, confess — the momentary, productive weight of seeing what one has done, inside a container engineered to keep the world's death-dealing version out. The revelations even install a validity test on every rebuke: reproof only "when moved upon by the Holy Ghost; and then showing forth afterwards an increase of love toward him whom thou hast reproved, lest he esteem thee to be his enemy" (D&C 121:43). A rebuke not followed by demonstrated love is, by the church's own law, void. The accuser never follows up with love. That is how you tell whose machinery is running.

The prophet who wept first

And the canon supplies a worked example — the anatomy of a righteous open rebuke, performed by a man who hated every second of it — and it comes from the very prophet the objection cites.

Jacob 1:8 is the doctrine: that all would "believe in Christ, and view his death, and suffer his cross and bear the shame of the world." Read it precisely: not remove shame by decree, and certainly not deal it — bear it: absorb it, as their Lord did, who "endured the cross, despising the shame" (Hebrews 12:2) — and despise, in that idiom, means to refuse the verdict: the world pours contempt on Christ and his people; Christ takes it in and declines to honor it, returns none of it, lets it die in him. His disciples inherit the assignment: "they... have endured the crosses of the world, and despised the shame of it" (2 Nephi 9:18). The covenant people are shame-absorbers, not shame-producers — contempt goes into them and is not passed along; the accuser's ammunition is swallowed and neutralized, one refused verdict at a time.

Then chapter 2, and the exception that proves every rule: Jacob is commanded to rebuke openly — the men of his people were justifying their sins publicly, and the justifications were wounding wives and children throughout the community: an open offense, requiring open repair, by Section 42's own principle. And watch how the shame-absorber performs the commission. He spends the opening of the sermon grieving: "it burdeneth my soul that I should be constrained, because of the strict commandment which I have received from God, to admonish you according to your crimes, to enlarge the wounds of those who are already wounded, instead of consoling and healing their wounds; and those who have not been wounded, instead of feasting upon the pleasing word of God have daggers placed to pierce their souls" (Jacob 2:9). There is the entire theology of open rebuke in one sentence: done only under constraint, done rarely, done with visible sorrow, done with full awareness of collateral wounds, aimed wholly at repair — the exact photographic negative of the world's rebuke, which is done gladly, recreationally, for the crowd, and aimed at destruction. Jacob 1:8 and Jacob 2 were never in tension with Section 42. They are its commentary: bear the world's shame yourself; administer godly sorrow only under commission; and weep while you do it.

The abolition

And where is all of it going? The covenant states its endpoint on shame outright, and the endpoint is abolition. To the restored bride, in the very chapter of the tent and the stakes: "Fear not; for thou shalt not be ashamed: neither be thou confounded; for thou shalt not be put to shame... and shalt not remember the reproach of thy widowhood any more" (Isaiah 54:4). Not managed shame, not moderated shame — forgotten shame. A chapter later in the same prophetic sweep, compensation: "for your shame ye shall have double; and for confusion they shall rejoice in their portion" (Isaiah 61:7) — the ledger not just zeroed but reversed. And the target state of the whole covenant psychology, in the Liberty Jail summit: "let virtue garnish thy thoughts unceasingly; then shall thy confidence wax strong in the presence of God" (D&C 121:45). Confidence — in the presence — which is Eden's opening condition restored: "they were both naked... and were not ashamed." Nothing hidden, therefore nothing exposable, therefore nothing shameable: the transparent city, the people of the sanctuary of truth, where fig leaves are obsolete because the truth about every person in the room is that they are loved and mid-rescue.

So here is the reconciliation, whole. God built the capacity for shame as an alarm — it has exactly one legitimate function: to signal a breach and trigger repair, briefly, and then go silent forever. The world built an industry on the alarm: perpetual, public, identity-branding, repair-preventing — the accuser's technology, running day and night. And Section 42 is the Lord's counter-machinery: a containment protocol that keeps the alarm short, keeps it as private as the offense permits, terminates every use of it in reconciliation and an increase of love, and hands it only to people under covenant to absorb the world's shame and never deal in it. The chapter you were tempted to throw out is the restraining order against the thing you feared it was. Keep the whole Law — and keep your instinct too, because your instinct was the Law's own: the day is coming when the alarm never sounds again, because a people finally exists with nothing to hide and no one willing to accuse — fear not; thou shalt not be ashamed — and every verse in Section 42 was engineering toward that silence all along.

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Godly sorrow worketh repentance to salvation not to be repented of: but the sorrow of the world worketh death.