“Eucontamination: Disgust Theology and the Christian Life” with Paul Hoard, PhD, and Billie Hoard

by on February 27, 2026

How often do we think about disgust? Yet it shapes our choices, relationships, and even our faith every day in ways we rarely notice. 

In this episode of the Allender Center Podcast, Dr. Paul Hoard and Billie Hoard discuss their new book, “Eucontamination: Disgust Theory and the Christian Life,” exploring how this powerful, often overlooked force influences us.

Drawing from theology and psychology, they examine how disgust—originally designed to protect us—can become a tool for exclusion when applied to people rather than pathogens. From purity culture to nationalism to everyday relational divides, they consider how “contamination logic” forms the world around us.

But the heart of their work is hopeful: Jesus doesn’t abolish disgust—he inverts it. In Christ, holiness is not fragile. Love is stronger than sin. What looks contaminating does not defile him; instead, his presence transforms from within.

This conversation invites us to reflect on where disgust may be shaping our reactions, relationships, and theology—and to imagine a discipleship formed by more courageous, more transformative love.

About Our Guests:

Paul Hoard, PhD, is a licensed counselor, psychoanalytic psychotherapist, and associate professor of counseling psychology at The Seattle School of Theology and Psychology. His scholarship focuses on Lacanian psychoanalytic theory, sexuality, white-body supremacy, perpetration-induced traumatic stress, and the theological logic of disgust. He has spoken and published internationally on topics including purity culture, trauma, eucontamination, and the intersections of theology and psychoanalysis. In addition to his academic work, Dr. Hoard maintains a private counseling practice and provides clinical supervision and consultation. He is the co-author, with his sister Billie Hoard, of the book Eucontamination: Disgust Theology and the Christian Life.

Billie Hoard is a trans woman, a high school history teacher, and something of an Anabaptist radical.

Recommended Resources:

About the Allender Center Podcast:

For over a decade, the Allender Center Podcast has offered honest, thoughtful conversations about the deep work of healing and transformation. Hosted by Dr. Dan Allender and Rachael Clinton Chen, MDiv, this weekly podcast explores the complexities of trauma, abuse recovery, story, relationships, and spiritual formation. Through questions submitted by listeners, stories, interviews, and conversations, we engage the deep places of heartache and hope that are rarely addressed so candidly in our culture today. Join the Allender Center Podcast to uncover meaningful perspectives and support for your path to healing and growth.

At the Allender Center, we value thoughtful dialogue across a wide range of voices, stories, and lived experiences. In that spirit, our podcast features guests and hosts who may hold differing perspectives. The perspectives shared on this podcast by guests and hosts reflect their own experiences and viewpoints and do not necessarily represent the views, positions, or endorsements of the Allender Center and/or The Seattle School of Theology & Psychology.

Episode Transcript:

Rachael: Good people with good bodies. In a day where it’s actually quite easy to move away from others with violence, with fear, and we desperately need more imagination for a way back toward or a way back together. I am thrilled today to be joined by my colleague, Dan Allender and Paul and Billie Hoard. I’m going to just pause to welcome you before I jump into a bio. So thanks for joining us.

Paul: Thank you. Thanks for having us.

Billie: Thank you for having us.

Rachael: We rarely get to just nerd out on theology and I think we’re going to get to do that a little bit today, but Paul and Billie Hord are thought leaders, educators, writers, siblings, and followers of Jesus wrestling thoughtfully at the intersection of theology, psychology, and sociology. Paul is an associate professor of counseling psychology at the Seattle School.

Dan: Yay.

Rachael: And Billie is a …Yay. And Billie is a trans woman, high school teacher and something of an Anabaptist radical, which I love that language because I think at my core, I’m also something of an Anabaptist radical.

Paul: Solidarity.

Rachael: And in their latest book, Eucontamination: Disgust Theology and the Christian Life, they seek to expose how the purity/disgust binary has distorted Christian witness and to offer an imagination of Christ as a good infection, a transformative force that spreads healing, redemption, and radical love. So welcome and thank you for this good labor.

Billie: Wow. Thank you so much for having us. Thank you so much.

Dan: Yeah. I love the word something. Right there is the playfulness of, it’s a complex world to use that word. It’s delight to have you both. And I wanted to just read a section. When I read the book the first time, you mark sections and you like big question mark or whoa or NB, Nota Bene, et cetera, et cetera. But here’s one. And this is speaking of Jesus. “By consistently violating the accepted social norms of his day and moving towards making contact with the outcast, contaminants, the disgust inducing others, Jesus inverts the power of contamination and dares us to trust and the power of love.” I just remember underlining and then circling it and then going, I don’t know if I want that to be true. True, true. God, where’s that going to take me if that’s true? So again, for both of you, I’d love for you to play with that and to invite us into why the title of a book Eucontamination. For most people, even the word Eu is not clear. So let’s just be a bit pedantic and just say, it’s the reversal of what contamination usually implies. Good contamination in and of itself, the quote’s deeply troubling, but invite us into the book, what you have hoped to accomplish. I know it’s impossible. And this is one of those incredibly rich, complex, thoughtful books that 40 some minutes of conversation can’t even come close to doing all that we would wish, but take us into that quote and far more.

Paul: Billie, you want to start?

Billie: Sure. Yeah. No, I love that you picked up on that quote and I love that the reaction was like, this is a dangerous quote. I absolutely agree. One of my, I don’t know if the listeners can see, but I have quite a few tattoos on my arm. And one of my favorites is a quote by Joy Davidman Lewis, which goes, “If we should ever grow brave, what on earth should become of us?” That sense that there are dangerous truths out there, and if we embrace them, we know that the things will change, that our world will change, that living into the kingdom of God means transformation of our world into a world that is frightening to significant parts of us. And I do think, I hope that this book has at least one of those many truths that do change the world in that way. In terms of our title, I am, as you might have already heard, a giant C.S. Lewis nerd.

Rachael: Love that, by the way.

Billie: Oh my gosh.

Rachael: Was really excited about all the C.L. Lewis quotes in the book.

Billie: Side note, it was a year ago, I finally finished my project of collecting every single published word of C.S. Lewis. So that was a big milestone for me. But so Eucontamination though comes from, we coined that word off of following the example of Tolkien, Lewis’s friend, who coined the term Eucatastrophe because he needed a way to talk about a catastrophe, that sudden change of everything, but he wanted one that was good rather than traditionally we think of catastrophe as something bad. So he wanted a good catastrophe. So the Greek prefix Eu in front of catastrophe. And we found ourselves, and we can get into this, actually with the quote you brought up, it very much brings us into it, and I think Paul can probably riff really well on it. We needed a term that contained all of the denotation of contamination, all the way that contamination works, the logic of contamination, but utterly inverted the connotation away from a bad thing and into a good thing. So contamination for good. And so we thought, well, Tolkien’s probably a decent model to follow on this. I hear he was good with the English language. So yeah, so we coined the phrase you contamination, following that concept. And Paul, do you want to talk a little bit about why and how the logic works and all that?

Paul: Sure. Happy to say a little bit here. Part of it though is also because we’re not great marketers. And so having a word that no one’s seen or knows how to pronounce turns out may not be the smartest move, but…

Billie: Also that. Oh, and that when you say it, people spell it wrong when they’re looking for the book, even if they like what you say about the book.

Paul: Yeah. We get that too, but I do also like the playing with the word you, like you’re contaminated, you are a contaminant. So the idea here is we came to this through our mutual interest in a lot of, predominantly it was Richard Beck’s work, I think, that sort of sparked our thinking. And we’d also read, I think, The Righteous Mind by Jonathan Haidt and some of his earlier stuff around Moral Foundation’s theory. And then just lots and lots of conversations, but it really started on kind of this foundational look at like, well, what does disgust actually do? How does it operate within us? And part of for my own curiosity is why don’t we talk more about it? When Inside Out came out, it was like, oh, it makes sense that there’s joy there, that there’s fear there. Okay, anger. Yeah, we all feel that. Why is disgust a major character?That’s not one that’s talked about in therapy circles, it’s not talked about mental health circles, doesn’t get … And so part of my curiosity sort of led me there. And so with this idea of keeping the, as Billie’s mentioning, all the denotations of contamination is keeping the full weight of disgust present. Because I think a lot of times when people hear, “Oh, it’s good for you. ” We want to shift our brilliant posture to it as if something, “Oh, now this is going to be something I’m drawn towards. Now this is going to be something I’m going to be happy about. ” But we’re still letting happiness and our comfort and what we’re drawn towards be the primary thing that’s leading us. Whereas when we keep the sting, the discomfort or disturbance of contamination forefront, we’re trying to remind you that no, you will feel a sense of like, “Oh, this is threatening. There’s a potential risk here.” And that’s that liminal space that I think you contamination invites us into to say, love is going to be risky. Love is going to change you. If you love somebody or you think you love somebody and you aren’t changed by that love, I think it’s a good question of is that love or are you using them to help you feel better about yourself? I think love requires that the lover and the beloved are both changed, transformed. And so there’s that sense of maybe trying to un-Hallmark it or resist the pull into just happy pastel colors as opposed to like, no, there’s something kind of gritty. I think it’s beautiful. And actually I think that’s where life we really find. So it’s not that it’s all negative, but that it does require contending with something. Regularly.

Dan: Well, the simplest word for me would be to say that for most people when they hear the notion of contamination, the word disgust comes incredibly clear. So we’re talking into the realm and you use the illustration that’s just brilliant of, we have saliva that we swallow constantly, but if somebody were to ask us to spit into a cup and then drink those remnants, that there’s a very quick response of like, “Ugh, no.” But I’m doing it all the time. And yet the notion that something gets externalized that then holds a judgment, a process of turning away and yet using the concept of disgust, often I talk about contempt, but disgust takes contempt even to a more visceral stomach oriented process versus contempt can be a very almost theoretical and intellectual category. Doesn’t have to involve stomach, smell, revulsion in the same way that what you have named in terms of disgust. So I’m sure for most of our listeners, the question of what could be profitable, Eu, that word Eu, what could be profitable about the experience of nausea, of being triggered of having that revulsion?

Billie: Oh, that sounds like a Paul question. Yeah,

Paul: I’ll dive in here a little bit, but Billie, steer me back if I skip too, go too far down a rabbit hole. And I love that question because I think where actually Billie and I were tempted when we first started getting into this is to almost put disgust as the bad guy as like, well, we need to just get rid of our disgust because that’s bad. But one of perhaps the tiny aspects of having written this during the pandemic in 2020 was that actually disgust was keeping a lot of people alive. It was helping us remember to wash our hands and to socially distance and to protect ourselves because that’s actually what disgust is for, is to in many ways protect us from there are diseases and there is poison out there. As humans, we can eat a lot of things and some of them will kill us. And so disgust helps us differentiate what can be taken and what can physically become me from what actually can’t and will actually kind of kill me and if not make me very, very ill. And so disgust isn’t negative. In fact, it’s really helpful. The problem is the overapplication of disgust and what happens is it moves from the individual into collective spaces and then it starts operating on people. And one of the really important things that I try to note is that when you’re disgusted by something, it says much more about you as the one who is disgusted than it does about the one who’s the object of disgust. And the trick it often plays on us is to think, “Oh, I’m disgusted because there’s something inherently disgusting about this thing.” As opposed to, “No, my relationship to that thing is now mediated through disgust because my disgust reaction saying that, I can’t take that in. I cannot take that in to be a part of me.” And me here can be me as an organism, as an individual, as Paul, me as sort of my conception of myself, who I think I am. I can’t hear that. I don’t want to go there, don’t let me go there or me as a collective us. And if we think about the body of Christ or we think about ourselves as institutions or as organizations, we can’t be a part of that. One of the examples we give in the book is when something horrific happens, often a leader of a community will get up and say, “This isn’t who we are.” When actually this is exactly who we are, we just actually demonstrated that this was who we are, but by saying this isn’t who we are, we’re actually taking the person who did the whatever horrific offense it is and saying they were never part of us. There’s this ejection happening. So I know I’m going in a couple different directions, so I’m trying to find my way back here. But you mentioned, Dan, how visceral, how bodily it is. And I think that’s so important part of why I was drawn to it because again, it helps me as someone who’s drawn towards the intellect a little bit and can kind of play there, have a lot of fun there, but then also sometimes hide there myself, disgust. I mean, even the face of disgust, is that being close to vomiting, it keeps you grounded in your body, in your gut. So it’s helpful to keep us from germs, but at the same time, it often can lure us into believing something is disgusting, something is a threat when it actually is more a disturbance, when it more is maybe in our language is maybe in an invitation to maybe you aren’t who you think you are, and maybe that’s actually an opportunity for growth, but there to be more. But that growth, that transformation, I think if it just feels good, it’s often, and I want to be careful not to say like always, but often if it simply feels good, you’re often simply protecting yourself and your own image as opposed to an invitation with something more, with the divine. I think Lewis always comes to my mind here in the Narnia stories with Aslan being not a tame animal. Aslan is not tame and interaction with a giant lion, you’re not safe, but he’s good. And that like being able to hold … And I think that’s always messed with me personally of like, but if something’s good, shouldn’t it be safe? Shouldn’t it be comfortable? Shouldn’t it just be affirming of me? When no, no, God is good. Absolutely. But the problem is your, my understanding of the world, my understanding of me, my understanding of what needs to be protected, that is actually distorted. And an interaction with the good is an invitation for that to be shifted and be uncomfortable. And I don’t think there’s a simple solution here, but there isn’t, but that’s why I think the answer is love. As that early quote start with, it’s learning to love. I’ve gone in a bunch of different directions and I don’t know that I answered anything too directly. So I’m going to pause and let Billie say something.

Dan: Yes, Billie.

Billie: Okay. Say some things. I always have things to say. Well, I’m going to sort of pick up where Paul left off in terms of what we were noticing and that need to do something that both incorporated disgust as an affect that has positive and in fact necessary dimensions to it, and that can be overplayed, overused, and can lead to really harmful things. And in a lot of the book, we spend time chronicling a lot of the harms that overplayed, overrealized, disgust and underreflected upon disgust has had. We looked at those things. And also, as Paul was saying, when we first started doing our research into this, we started thinking about Jesus and our first sort of hypothesis, if you will, was that Jesus was going to just say, “Well, disgust is bad.” Thinking back to Jonathan Haight and disgust as a moral framework or as a moral and saying, well, that’s probably one that we shouldn’t have. We’re moving beyond disgust as a moral imperative or as a moral structure. That was our first impression. That was our assumption going into it. And we found that actually reading the gospels with this question in mind did not allow for that reading because Jesus does in fact kind of recognize the legitimacy of disgust logic and the way that it operates in the world, the way that contaminants and so forth and pure structures all operate in the world. And obviously the Bible is full of purity type language. And that was sort of troubling because at the same time, going back to that quote that we started with, it’s also incredibly evident that Jesus is constantly walking into context and engaging with people who would be coded as contaminants and experienced as disgusting. And so we were sort of sitting with trying what to do with this. And this is where we realized that negating was the wrong idea of what to do with disgust. Instead of negation, what we needed was inversion. What Jesus does is that he inverts the disgust mechanism, right? So in standard disgust logic, the way it sort of functions in the world, disgust follows this very binary me or not me, like can be incorporated into me, cannot be incorporated into me and how I understand myself dynamic. And it also… Go ahead, Paul.

Paul: Also- There’s a quick example of that, just to kind of hopefully. If you found out that somebody had perhaps accidentally or purposely spat in your water, you don’t ask the question, “Well, how much?” Right. And that’s that sort of thing. When disgust is present, the question of how much is irrelevant, right? Even the thought of it is like, “I can get another glass of water.” Because even the association can contaminate, even the idea that that might … And that’s what Billie’s talking about. It’s this idea that when disgust is present, it’s not a question of quantities. It’s any amount, and that’s why it’s binary. It’s any amount of the contaminant has now made the entire thing unclean and pure disgusting.

Billie: And so yeah, the technical term for this one is dose insensitivity, right? It does not matter how much, but the consequence, the sort of logical consequence of dose insensitivity is that it means that any substance that has been identified or person who has been identified as contaminating becomes the more powerful in the relationship between the contaminating and the pure. The pure is fragile and subject to contamination, but it never works the other way around. If you’ll excuse me, if I handed you a glass full to the brim of saliva and I said, “Don’t worry, there’s a dropper full of pure water in there.” That doesn’t make it okay. That doesn’t solve the problem so that the power dynamic doesn’t go in both directions. But when we have what we call in the book an overrealized purity metaphor functioning, which we would suggest has tragically been overly present in much of the Christian history of interpreting the text, what ends up happening is you have this impossible to orthodoxy conclusion that sin is more powerful than holiness, that hate is more powerful than love. And that can’t stand.This is a theologically impossible conclusion. Right? So what do we do? Well, what that does mean though is that if you reverse it, the theology becomes accurate again. Love is in fact more powerful than sin. Holiness is more powerful than sin. Christ says, “I have overcome the world.” So in fact, what we find is that Jesus has inverted the logic of disgust such that what is good and right and holy and justifying and glorifying and sanctifying has come into the world and is itself transforming the world, even though it came into the world in this tiny amount, in the manger, in one peasant in the Middle East through one Middle Eastern baby child, love has come into the world, holiness has come into the world, God has entered into the material reality and is transforming all of it. And so this is the core Eucontamination event in our understanding, in our reading of this text, is that Jesus is inverting. He said, “Yeah, all the logic works.” You just have to switch which one is the good one and which one is the bad one. So you invert the kind of moral polarity of it in the case of Eucontamination. And we got very excited about this.

Dan: It is. So again, it’s deeply disturbing and yet there’s something from my standpoint that it echoes the reality of what we all know to be true. When that leader stands up with regard to any particular harm that has been done with the statement of, “This is not who we are. ” And you go, “I understand the logic of that, ” but the reality is, what would it be like to say, “This is so tragic because this reveals so much of who we are.” And that playground of how Paul in 1 Timothy 1 excoriates, gives this rather rabid list of significant sinners and then turns the table with that framework of, “Here’s a statement worthy of your full acceptance. Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners of whom I am the most contaminated.” So when you begin to have that playground of reversal is the turning of things from what appears to be upside down to actually right side up. So given all of what you’re inviting us to re-imagine with regard to our experience of disgust, our experience of revulsion, but also what seems to be cultural revulsion that seems higher than I remember, I mean, I’m the heart, I don’t think 20 years ago was a particular idealistic period, but it feels like the intensity of revulsion of disgust feels culturally heightened. Is that something that you would concur with or where does that take you both?

Billie: Absolutely. Paul, go ahead.

Paul: I concur. I mean, caveat, I’m not that kind of … I’m not a sociologist, so I don’t have the data beyond, I think the PRI, some of those surveys to say that. And then my own anecdotal experience of watching politics, of being a person in this world and trying to navigate interactions with friends who seem to be in very different places than I did, and even just noting my own bodily reaction to somebody who believes differently than me and noticing, wow, that feels harder for me to stay in relationship and even just noticing this in myself than it has in the past and being curious about how this might not just be a me thing, that maybe this is an us thing. Where it takes me, and Billie, let me know if you want to go back to analyzing that a little bit more, actually is to … The flip side of disgust is actually relationship and intimacy, because those very things of the other that are really … We’ve mentioned saliva and things like that, within a healthy, consensual, beautiful, romantic relationship, those are wonderful aspects of the other person if you think about just kissing as ways that we connect. And those very things that are offensive and disgusting in one aspect are a wonderful part of union and communion and connection in another. And what that points to is that the big inversion there is a relationship. And I think part of what this points to is how we may have more parasocial relationships, but we have a lot, we seem to be having fewer bodily, smell each other, like person to person relationships with those who are different than us. And I think that makes it hard, that tends to further insulate us, I think, is part of what happens. But I think that the answer is also within there is not just go be in proximity to people who are different, but go form relationships, listen to and actually be around others in a way where you’re able to let yourself love them. And I love the Orthodox Christian tradition that love is so much more than what I think contemporary American culture has turned it into.

Billie: Yes.

Paul: Hallmark gives us one view of a sacred love. I don’t mean to just hate on Hallmark today, but I guess-

Rachael: Go ahead.

Paul: I don’t particularly have strong feelings about Hallmark in general, but they’re a great example of sort of taking something that is incredibly deep. Love your enemies, love the people who are currently crucifying you. What does that look like? That doesn’t mean we pretend they aren’t crucifying me. And I think there’s something around, but when we can love them, what we’re doing, I think on one level, and I don’t want to minimize it here, but we’re refusing to let them become objects.

Billie: Yes.

Paul: Refusing to let them become simply enemies. There’s a philosopher, Todd McGowan we cite a few times, and he argues that actually as soon as you have an enemy, you’ve already slipped into this sort of disgust, almost scapegoating Girardian, Us vs. Them, objectify. And he argues for like, don’t pretend they aren’t adversaries. They are those who are working against that which you’re working towards. And Jesus never pretended that the entire world was trying to do the thing he was, but what he did do is he continued to love them. And so instead of letting them become enemies where now their destruction is the goal, actually their salvation is the goal. You want them to join your cause, you want to learn from them, you want to let them contaminate you in ways where you can continue to see their humanity. And I think that is sort of maybe the hopeful thing that I get when we were finishing the book, that’s where I’d get all excited trying to type it out because I’d be like, “This is the really exciting part.”

Rachael: I was just going to say, and then Billie, I’ll turn it to you for sure. Just it’s making me think, I got to preach on January 4th, which was crazy, crazy time in art world. The liturgy was John 1, but also Ephesians. And I think you guys just capture this so well in your book. It’s just so beautiful as you move into this sense of like, how do we be formed in this transformative Eucontamination way of the truth and the life and the way. But something that caught me when I was preaching that again, it’s not like this is new to me, but this language in Ephesians of this mission of God to gather all things, including the cosmos into God’s self toward restoration. And yeah, I think I was raised in a more Southern Baptist, but even extremely fundamentalist Southern Baptist context in the ’90s. And yeah, the formation, I’m just still so unlearning the visceral impulse towards disgust and the ways in which I lack curiosity and I’ve maybe adopted new dogmatism where I’m like, “Well, these people are not my enemies and it’s okay to hate them.” And I’m really struggling because there’s a lot of power dynamics that shifted too in the pendulum swing, so that makes it more complicated. But I just think that sense of like, yeah, if we understand the mission of God to be gathering all things into God’s self, Eucontamination makes a lot of sense that it’s like the transformation and redemption of all things, not just the people that we like or who are like us or who get it right or who fit a kind of sanctification that’s been given to us. So sorry, I digress.

Billie: No, absolutely. I want to just kind of pull some things together on this one because I started getting excited. Going back to even the original question about this kind of moment we’re in, but tying in some of what Paul was saying is that, so one, I think the church actually, the Christian tradition, the rituals that God has given us, that Jesus left us, or we get into this in the book about how we talk about the threefold communion service as having actually incredibly deep power to help us reimagine and relearn and reposture ourselves in terms of disgust and seeing the other, especially the other person as contaminant, as a contaminant and trying to undo that learning, undo that habit. I want to juxtapose that though for a moment with why is and what’s going on in the moment right now, sort of where we are, because I think what I would want to point to is the growth of nationalism as the kind of driving disgust politics of our day because at its core, nationalism is a politic, whether it’s one that you like or not, it is one that is deeply concerned with purity, right? The core question of nationalism is who is truly part of the nation? What gets to define our nation? And that is a question that invites, in fact, depends on disgust, right? Disgust is that boundary enforcement mechanism that we use to decide what can and cannot become me. And so when any polity, any group of people become engrossed in a nationalist project, it’s kind of inevitable that disgust is going to be on the rise, that like this disgust affect is going to grow. It’s doing the opposite of what we suggest these liturgies of the church, that these ceremonies and traditions of the church can and do have the power to do, right? Where taking communion together, eating together in intimacy, being in a shared physical space of vulnerability, open to disgust, taking food in, being transformed, literally physically transformed by the food that we’re taking in by the same substance. We are all becoming the same thing, this thing that regardless of the Christian tradition, to some extent, we also recognize to be representative of Christ. That’s deeply anti sort of disgust-forming in us. Whereas to sit in a space with a group of people that feel very like-minded, where the likeness is the key thing and to have discussions about why other people don’t belong as part of us, that is going to form us to be more sensitive to disgust, to be more likely to project disgust onto others. That is going to train us and teach us to believe that the other is a threat to the way that we understand and see ourselves. So I think it all ties together.

Dan: Well, that framework of Jesus ate with sinners, that you can feel the lavish disgust that you would pass bread, you would drink essentially from something of the same container, et cetera. But to step into the complexity of this, particularly as a trans woman, you have had to have known, Billie, such heartbreaking disgust from evangelical or better said, from a nationalist world. Just how, as you engaged your own sexuality, as you engage this particular material, I just want to make sure there’s ground for you to put words to that.

Billie: No, thank you. Yeah, no, it’s been profound as profoundly powerful. I mean, starting with, I had to confront in myself this, you have this dawning realization of, oh my gosh, I think this is who I am. And there’s a freedom in that and there’s also a profound fear in that. This is going to mean that I have to be in the world in ways that are very different and deeply uncomfortable. So there’s like at that personal level, even self-discussed. We generally talk about this using the phrase like internalized transphobia. So I had to overcome that. And then there’s the disgust of the world, because of course, one of the tricks that politicians, and I would argue people who generally operate in bad faith, which is not all politicians just have gotten onto in the ways that they use disgust almost intuitively is that when disgust is operating, then we don’t have to come up with reasons in advance for why to exclude the other. The exclusion happens at that visceral heuristic level as a heuristic, and then justification comes behind saying this is why that was already the right thing to do. Which means that if you want to exclude a population, and we see this operating absolutely in terms of sort of transphobia and queer phobia, but we also have seen this historically in the white church operating towards people of color in the church. Anytime you can make people feel that such and such a person is a threat to the purity of who they are, you don’t have to really do the work of making that argument in any kind of rigorous orthodox theological way because people will do that for you. They’ll exclude first and then tell themselves a story about why that exclusion was the right choice after they’ve already done the excluding. And as a Christian queer person on the internet, it is de rigueur to encounter people who are completely uninterested in the multiple thousand word essay I have on using classic evangelical hermeneutics about why I believe the Bible leads to an affirming conclusion. They are not interested in that, right? Whether I’m right or whether I’m wrong about that argument-

Dan: No curiosity.

Billie: The argument isn’t relevant. The curiosity isn’t there because disgust has crowded it out, right? Once disgust colonizes somebody’s sort of imagination of a particular type of other person, then there’s no space from having reasoned discussions. I can’t sit down at them and break bread and talk about my experience and let them and listen to their experience and see where things mesh and where do we connect and where do we not connect? There isn’t space for that anymore. I have to be got out. And we see this all over the place now, right? The ways in which people talk about just the existence of transgender people as a threatening contaminant to the space, to the community, it’s heartbreaking and it’s of course very scary on my end because I know how people who are seen as disgusting or treated, right? So we talk about stigma as the social term for when disgust is applied to a person or a category of person. But yeah, so no, thank you for asking. And it’s difficult.

Dan: Well, again, you can see this across so many different realms in terms of how, and you both address the issue of how the Nazi regime created a category of vermin, disgust, the other that literally is bringing disease into our body politic. And with that, then the movement from, in some sense, nausea. And you go through a brilliant, shall we say, structure here from nausea to being triggered to the vomit expelling. But in that expelling, really, it’s a form of annihilation. It is. It justifies murder and its soul or body. And then the structure of rationalization comes. And you do both of such good work in terms of looking at the interplay of the left and right hemisphere, that we don’t take into account often how the right hemisphere holds the power of image, sensation, disgust and that the power of the left hemisphere is in so many ways to provide a rationalization for what we have not actually allowed our body to experience with curiosity. So from my standpoint, when I see disgust in myself or others, I know it’s a movement ultimately to a kind of binary dogmatism. And then inevitably into self-righteousness so that what Paul’s doing again in 1 Timothy 1 seems to be, again, the exposure of what can we do in facing the contamination within ourselves that we project and assume to be in the presence of the other? I think that’s for me, but that’s sort of a gospel, y’all. What am I missing here when we might differ on a thousand issues, but are we back to, I’m the one who’s got to deal with the log in my own eye, and that feels like one of the great gifts of what you’re inviting us to begin to feel. What do we feel disgust? Where, to whom against what? And that involuntary, because most times disgust feels significantly involuntary, it just is. And yet the power of love … So before we, again, make much move, what would you hope for, particularly in an evangelical audience? Likely, this book will not change certain people’s views of LGBTQIA, et cetera. Nonetheless, what are you hoping for with regard to a broad population addressing these issues of Eucontamination?

Paul: As you were speaking, Dan, actually, my mind went … I know we’d asked you for a recommendation for your little blurb on the back of the book. And I loved your blurb because you were the only one who mentioned it just in there, you may differ with some of the conclusions. I love that you put that in there because in my mind, that’s exactly what this book is inviting. And we even put in there, Billie and I are writing from our experiences and our research and our locations and our history work. We’re writing from our stories, and that is particular to us. And we hope that this resonates with others and that we’ve done good work and that we’ve thought it out in ways that are going to be helpful. But of course, we’re not the last word on anything. That somebody would read this book and agree with everything is actually in many ways far scarier to me.

Billie: Yeah, that would be terrifying.

Paul: But I think the question is, going back to what Billie said, where that idea of I would read a book that I disagree with, I can’t even do that. Why would I even pick up this book if it’s written by a trans woman, if it’s written by somebody who I disagree with, if it’s written by somebody, whatever label it is that now has excluded us as others, but if we can’t even engage with the ideas that obviously there’s something more at work. And I think that’s that invitation that if big picture, my hope would be that this book invites people to reflect a little bit more on the cost of love and that Jesus says, take up, there’s a cross and there’s a burden and my yoke is easy, my burden is like, but it is there and that if we are to follow Jesus, it’s not an identity label that gets me in the club.This is something that’s going to cost me to actually love the world and that loving the world is not just a platitude that we put on bumper stickers. It’s something that is going to have to transform the way I move through the bus stop. It’s going to change my reaction to the unhoused person that smells terrible, to the person that might be playing their music too loud. And in many ways, I think it’s those micro interactions that are going to have much more of these long-term shifts. The person that reads this book whose life has changed, I think amen, that may it be so. But oftentimes, and when I look back in my own life, those wonderful aha moments and books that changed my life, took about 20 years actually for the change to go beyond a surface level, I now have something fun to say at parties to, oh, this has cost me my … I talk to my children differently. I interact with people I don’t know at an intersection differently now. And I think maybe that’s my hope is that this is an invitation, whether you agree with our conclusions or not, that you allow a reflection on how disgust is shaping your world and shaping before you even think. It shaped your reaction to somebody before you got there. And can you be curious about that? Before you’ve even made sense of that reality, something has gone ahead of you. And that would be my hope, that we allow Jesus to start forming us through … I’ll pause here in a second, but through violating the cannibalism taboo at church when we take communion, right? That’s gross. Drinking blood is gross. Eating somebody’s bodies gross. And the early church was accused of breaking the cannibalism taboo.

Rachael: I had a four-year-old one time ask me like, “So are we vampires?” And I was like, “Why?” And it was like, “Because they’re saying we’re drinking Jesus’ blood. And if Jesus is still alive, then are we vampires?” That’s such great question.

Billie: No, it is. What I love about that question is that it reminds us, it should remind all of us that I don’t think it was an accident that Jesus chose something that was, at least at a symbolic level, a violation of the cannibalism taboo as the like, this is the thing that the church should do in perpetuity to remember in remembrance of me. And when we sanitize it, which we do often just by repetition, but one of the practices that I’ve adopted since we started working on this book is every time that I do take a communion and that I take the Eucharist, I actually take a moment to focus on how gross this is and how blessed I am to be united with God in this way and to let those two thoughts sit in tension because I believe that because of my love for God and because of God’s love for me and the intimacy that’s created there, that will actually have the transformative, sanctifying work of helping me to manage more effectively my disgust reaction towards others, that in loving God in that way, I am being formed to more ably love others.

Dan: Well, you’ve got John 6 where the statement of body and blood, and it says, “And many departed from him.” And that’s the context where the remark to Peter of, “Who do you say I am?” And it’s like, dude, I don’t know who you are, but you’re the only one who seems to have the words of life. So the playground here of being able to notice how the power of love does not officiate standards, it doesn’t officiate boundaries, but it creates a kind of freedom to pass by certain boundaries that would have been the limiting of my own sense of who am I? And I think, again, to underscore, you both do such a brilliant job inviting us to think about how identity gets formed, not only in terms of our own imagination, but how the markings of our culture, our particular world, define who we are in that both inner, outer process. So there’s much in this labor. But I think for all of us, I was talking with Rachael about early on in my marriage, probably in the first two months, Becky got significantly ill. I have not been good with vomit. Let’s just say I’d rather just be very sick for a long time than seeing relief through that means. And remember, holding her hair while she’s vomiting and her shock that I would do so and realizing that I’m not enjoying the moment, but holding her hair, being able to care for and protect one whom I love. It really did early on in our marriage almost bring that sense of surprise that I’m not bound by disgust, I am actually bound by love. And that’s what I would hope for, for those who encounter your book, that there would be a sense in which the compelling presence of the wild love of God would begin to help reengage the issue of, what do you most want on behalf of this world? So we thank you both. Thank you for the gift you’ve given us.

Paul: Yes. Thank you so much.

Billie: Thanks for engaging with it and for your recommendation of it.