One reason I’m so eager to defend "shame culture" is that I think there are spiritual goods to be gained by courting shame. An early Christian story in support of that idea:
As Thecla listens to Paul’s preaching through a window of her home, her virginal chastity is already threatened by her impending shamelessness, as her mother recognizes when she questions "how a maiden of such modesty" can be so strongly affected by the words of a strange man . . .As defenses of shame go, there’s also Jean Bethke Elshtain’s idea that "a sense of shame is what safeguards the bodily privacy necessary to civility," but no rush; the Messiah seems to be tarrying yet.
She shamelessly kisses Paul’s chains, the sign of his own humiliation, now also hers. When morning dawns, she is scandalously exposed in Paul’s prison cell, "so to speak, bound with him in affection."
At this point, even her mother calls for Thecla’s death: "Burn the lawless one! Burn her that is no bride in the midst of the theater, that all the women who have been taught by this man may be afraid."
[Here there are lions.]
. . . shortly after exiting the arena, she performs an explicit act of self-refashioning, modifying her cloak to conform to a more manly style. Like Perpetua’s transgendering, Thecla’s transvestitism marks her as both woman and man: shamed like a woman (shamed as a woman), she is now able to display shamelessly the perverse virility of a woman "who is no bride."
