I just discovered an organization called Honorshame: Resources for Majority World Ministry and had to share. Essentially, they are about framing Christianity in honor terms to make the religion more palatable to “shame” cultures. Here’s a video they produced:

They have a culture test (to determine your cultural type, according to their guilt-culture, shame-cultures, fear-culture model) and a theology guide that summarizes their approach.

Although I’m still perusing, it seems like they understand honor-shame cultures in a very Middle-Eastern/Asian way, and they contrast it with the African sort of tribal culture they see as “fear” based (even though those tribespeople would insist they are very concerned with honor themselves). Essentially, it seems to me, they are understanding authority and purity as honorable, not agonism and agonistic success (which is aristocratic or “tribal” apparently in their taxonomy).

Nonetheless, this is pretty advanced stuff, not too far behind the best research on cultural/moral psychology of honor, shame, etc., and clearly born of firsthand experience in these cultures. Thoughts?