What Bacterial Genetics Taught Me About Shame

The final heartbeat right before the lid came off was always the worst. I fought every instinct telling me to take a deep breath, and kept my breathing shallow and imperceptible. The audience had shuffled into the room just 20 seconds ago, and I heard their muffled whispers and, every once in a while a sharp ‘yelp.’ Then a wave of gasps and a few startled shrieks were the signal that the lights had had been turned on.

“OPEN the box,” came the command. I heard the lid come off of the wooden coffin and saw the blaring lights through my eyelids.

“ARISE.” That was my signal to come back to life, still in my burial dress. I sat up in the box, presumably the coffin I had been buried in, and sat up to see father, dressed in glittering white and silver, his face covered in a thick layer of white and silver makeup, with a cheap dollar-store bedazzled crown on his head. He looked ridiculous, but I didn’t see his costume. I only saw his eyes and the stern look of judgment that I knew so well. We related well to each other in the roles of ‘judge’ and ‘judged.’

We exchanged a series of lines where he told me my name was not written in the Book of Life and I pleaded with him to not send me to Hell because I had done the best I could. I used different pleas each time:

“I went to church EVERY Sunday!”

“I gave money to charity!”

“I never lied!”

And I always ended with the fan favorite, swinging around and pointing to a girl in the audience: “I was JUST LIKE HER!”

No matter what I said and how I plead, it ended the same way: my Dad would say “depart from me; I never knew you!” and slam the Book of Life closed. Strobe lights came on, death metal blared through the speakers and youth group kids in black hoods and capes came out of the corners to drag me off to eternal torture. The audience would shuffle along as I wiggled through a secret passage to finish my performance, chained to a wall on stage next to Satan. Well, my volleyball coach dressed in a black cape with red face paint and horns. He would freak out the audience for a couple minutes, throw me around on the stage, give me a few stage-stabs with his pitchfork, then the audience shuffled on and I wiggled through the passageway back to the judgment room for my next performance.

Night after night I was congratulated and praised for my performance. “You’re such a good actress!” I would hear. “You really make it seem real!” No one ever seemed to wonder if it actually was real. And no one ever seemed to think twice about the repercussions of a 12-year-old’s Dad sending her to Hell 50 times in a row every weekend night for the entire month of October. This was just acting, after all and it was for a good cause. This was a Christian haunted house. In fact, my mother logged my performance nights as “school time,” part of my homeschool Bible curriculum. The praise was addictive. I loved the attention, and I loved hearing what a good job I was doing and what a good cause I was assisting.

Now, in my late twenties, I cringe at my memories of acting in this Christian haunted house during my youth group years. This was just one manifestation of the system of shame, self-loathing and manipulation I was born into; a system all too familiar to kids of evangelicals. I don’t know if it was college, graduate school, marriage or simply leaving my homeschooled, conservative Christian sphere but I eventually disavowed the “ticket to heaven” model of Christianity. Once I had some breathing room away from the doctrines I was taught, I decided that any God who could be this cruel, this harsh, this swift to torture billions upon billions of humans for eternity isn’t a God I’m interested in worshipping. Now, I look at the system and it’s so obviously horrific. On the basis of an abstract belief system, a judging God determines whether we live in eternal bliss or suffer in eternal torment. The punishment so vastly outweighs the crime that the model starts to rapidly lose its plausibility.

Even though I claim to have left this intellectual belief system behind, I still find myself reciting sin-prohibiting Bible verses to myself. Shame is a very familiar feeling. I find myself lying in bed tallying up my calorie intake for the day, trying to determine if I was “gluttonous” that day. Gluttons go to Hell, after all. How much money did I spend? Was that frivolous? What about the story about my coworker that I told to my husband? Was that gossip? Any one of these sins would be punishable by Hell. I find myself pleading with the God I don’t believe in to rescue me from the Hell I don’t believe in. The beliefs are still there, regardless of the fact that the logical process is gone. The thought patterns are deeply embedded in my personality. The boundary separating me from the belief system I was taught has been erased.

Our empirical sense of identity is most succinctly defined as our DNA. This powerful molecule, found in each cell of our bodies, summarizes every possibility for every trait and feature we have. While we’re familiar with the typical mode of genetic heredity, which is gene inheritance from our parents, this is not the only way a cell acquires genetic information (1). First discovered in bacterial cells, but now understood to apply to eukaryotic cells as well, genes can be transferred “horizontally,” from one gene to another (2). In fact, this is the way that bacterial populations rapidly develop resistance to antibiotics (3). The resistance gene is passed between cells, without waiting for the time required for a gene to be passed to a new generation. These products of “horizontal gene transfer” become incorporated into the genome of the acceptor cell, and function in the same way as a naturally inherited gene. The protein it encodes is expressed in the acceptor bacterial cell, just as if that gene had been inherited in the standard way, through heredity.

Even our DNA, our most tangible, empirical sense of identity is porous. We are physically impressionable, and we take fragments of our surroundings with us. We incorporate our environment into ourselves in a literal sense. So why would I be surprised when I find that eighteen years of intense religious teaching has deeply impressed itself on my mind? Why would my psychological experience be any different from my physical, bodily experience?

Our cells, with their communal identity and environmental incorporation, reflect our own attributes back to us. We do not have singular monolithic identities; we have living, breathing, expanding, contracting, merging identities. Truly, our identities are communal.

But I’m still lying awake, still wracked with shame, still looking for approval from the God I don’t believe in. It’s true that my shame is disarmed a bit by the acknowledgement that it’s merely a remnant of my childhood. I can stand at a distance from my self-hatred and observe it as an outsider, not a participator. But is there any chance that I will be fully free from it?

Just as genes are accepted from neighboring cells, a cell is able to delete a gene from its genome. The requirement for this to occur is simple: when the trait a gene encodes is no longer of use to the cell, that gene is deleted (4). So could this be a hope for me as well? When the self-loathing no longer serves me, I’ll leave it behind? This is the pattern within our very bodies: when we no longer need a trait, when the trait is no longer part of who we are, the mechanism that produces it will be eliminated.

This model of dynamic identity, revealed so plainly and ubiquitously in nature, gives me the strength to abandon my reliance on shame. If instead of self-loathing I rely on self-friendliness and love, these are the traits that will be made larger in my personality. I trust this pattern deeply because it’s deeply reflected in nature; in my own nature. If my physical identity is capable of wholly transforming, I can trust that my psychological identity is capable of transformation as well.

1. Boto L (2010). Horizontal gene transfer in evolution: facts and challenges. 277, 819–827.

2. Lacroix B & Citovsky V (2016). Transfer of DNA from Bacteria to Eukaryotes. 7, e00863–00816.

3. Dunning Hotopp JC (2011). Horizontal gene transfer between bacteria and animals. 27, 157–163.

4. Ochman H, Lawrence JG & Groisman EA (2000). Lateral gene transfer and the nature of bacterial innovation. 405, 299–304.