{"id":5464,"date":"2026-05-27T08:24:35","date_gmt":"2026-05-27T12:24:35","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/?p=5464"},"modified":"2026-05-27T08:24:35","modified_gmt":"2026-05-27T12:24:35","slug":"clean-bodies-and-clean-hearts","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/2026\/05\/27\/clean-bodies-and-clean-hearts\/","title":{"rendered":"Clean Bodies and Clean Hearts"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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To listen to today’s reflection as a podcast<\/em>,\u00a0click here<\/a>

About 100 years ago, advertisers introduced Americans to a problem they didn\u2019t know they had.

It was a catastrophe that could cost someone a potential friendship or a new job \u2013 maybe even the chance to link up with the true love of their life.

More ominously, social politeness prevented others from coming right out and saying, \u201cYou have this problem that is ruining all of your relationships, and you don\u2019t even realize it.\u201d

Medical professionals called it halitosis. They didn\u2019t think it was a particularly big deal.

The makers of an antiseptic mouthwash called Listerine called it \u201cbad breath\u201d \u2013 and they assured the public it was a very big deal, indeed. After advertisers successfully planted the looming specter of relational abandonment, sales of Listerine exploded.

It was an astonishingly successful ploy: Invent a problem, then sell the solution.

Advertising executives eager to sell other personal hygiene products quickly followed suit. \u00a0

As journalist Jim Stovall notes in his book Seven Things You Should Know About Soap<\/em>, few people doubted that cleanliness was a good idea. And soap was widely known to be effective in removing dirt, sweat, and grime. The new factor was the notion that apart from using a particular product, something awful might happen.

And others would notice your heartbreaking predicament long before you did.

In the 1920s and 30s, Lifebuoy Soap built its entire advertising strategy around fear. People have always been aware of body odor. But when marketers began to call it \u201cB.O.,\u201d it was as if society had discovered a secret, shameful reality that could only be identified with initials \u2013 the Social Catastrophe that Must Not Be Named.

BO became \u201cthe smell that you yourself can\u2019t smell.\u201d Ads strongly implied that those who didn\u2019t pursue appropriate hygiene were societal and moral failures. How dare you not care enough about others to prevent them from being offended.

Children would be mocked on the playground. Men would flunk job interviews. Women would never get that all-important second date.

During the 1960s, Wisk detergent targeted \u201cring around the collar\u201d \u2013 the discoloration that typically appears on the inside of dress shirts. \u00a0

Housewives were singled out for public humiliation. If she couldn\u2019t succeed at the simple task of keeping her husband\u2019s shirts clean, what kind of spouse was she? In the original advertisement above, notice the wife\u2019s joy and relief that she was wise enough to use Wisk.

Hopefully it occurred to a number of people that there was another solution to this social emergency: Her husband could always choose to wash his neck.

Stovall points out that there was nothing new here with regard to American cleanliness. It\u2019s just that marketers decided to catastrophize and moralize ordinary grime.

It may seem hard to believe, but the human body doesn\u2019t actually need daily washing for someone to be healthy and socially acceptable. But we\u2019ve long been told a different story. Advertising in the 20th<\/sup> century almost singlehandedly planted the idea that \u201ca clean person is a good person\u201d \u2013 and that those who fall short of certain hygienic standards should be regarded as pitiable failures.

When it comes to soap, fear works.

That brings us to one of the most common critiques of organized religion.

Pastors and priests and televangelists can seem a lot like people who are trying to sell soap. They have invented a problem \u2013 the sinfulness of the human race \u2013 and \u2013 surprise, surprise<\/em> \u2013 they just happen to have the solution.

The story goes like this: You may not know it, but humanity is afflicted by a terrible disease. You should be afraid. Very afraid<\/em>.

Fortunately, Jesus is the cure. All you need to do is (fill in the blank): believe or repent or read the Bible or go to church or stop sinning or do something good or do a whole lot of good things or turn in a pledge card for the biggest gift you have ever given to world missions.

But what if people stop believing the premise that we\u2019re all afflicted with a spiritual disease that should leave us shaking in our spiritual shoes?

In contemporary Western culture, fear seems to have little motivating effect. A billboard emblazoned with the words \u201cPrepare to Meet Thy God\u201d may have stirred previous generations to serious self-reflection. These days, more often than not, those passing by shrug their shoulders and wonder what in the world such words might mean. \u00a0

Followers of Jesus should not be dismissive of one of the Bible\u2019s central claims:

Humanity really is afflicted with the terrible disease of estrangement from God. And entering a relationship with Jesus really is the only solution that Scripture proposes.

We can even affirm the proposition that \u201ca clean person is a good person\u201d \u2013 as long as we understand that the cleanliness we\u2019re talking about has to do with the heart, and that we can never accomplish a spiritual housecleaning on our own. As God says in Jeremiah 2:22, \u201cThough you wash yourself with lye and use much soap, the stain of your guilt is still before me.\u201d

That stain can be fully removed, however \u2013 not through what we might do but what Jesus has already done for us on the cross.

What we seem to have learned is that stoking a sense of fear (\u201cYou\u2019d better do this or else\u201d) rarely brings about the desired effect of helping someone else find new life in Christ.

God\u2019s love, after all, is always persuasive and never coercive.

Which just happens to be a message you can preach from a soapbox with a truly clean conscience.

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To listen to today’s reflection as a podcast,\u00a0click here About 100 years ago, advertisers introduced Americans to a problem they didn\u2019t know they had. It was a catastrophe that could cost someone a potential friendship or a new job \u2013 maybe even the chance to link up with the true love of their life. More ominously, social politeness prevented others… Read more »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":5465,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[1121,1122,76],"class_list":["post-5464","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-advertising","tag-cleanliness","tag-forgiveness"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5464","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5464"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5464\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5466,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5464\/revisions\/5466"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/5465"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5464"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5464"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5464"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}