Things that Smell Good
When we think of good smells, we imagine things like freshly baked bread. Particular good smells can evoke fond memories. Babies heads have a pleasant smell about them. Perhaps you’ve known a child who didn’t want his or her “blankey” washed, because they didn’t want the comforting smell of it to be erased. Horses smell good. So do dogs—for those who like dogs! As mentioned earlier, we’ve come to associate Christmas with good smells. Jesus’ feet probably smelled better than those of his contemporaries after Mary Magdalene poured expensive perfume on them, as detailed in John 12 and Mark 14. And, Revelation 19 offers images of the “wedding feast of the lamb,” a feast to which all are invited, especially the least of these, the ones at the bottom of the stratified order of dust and human smells. Feasting is celebration amidst good smells. Most of us can identify smells we find particularly alluring.
Analysis: The Smells of Human Dignity
What I have been calling “smells” are closely aligned with the spectrum of human dignity. Bad smells are associated with social dysfunction and disintegration, while good ones underscore order and functionality. The hospitality required of God’s people in both Old and New Testaments necessarily involves inviting in those who, to us, smell bad, or just different.
My departmental colleague Dr. Chris Robinson operates a year-round ministry called Project-52. He raises money and organizes various youth groups, college groups, and others to clean up garbage from the yards of the poor and destitute. In 2023, using 456 volunteers, they moved more than 105 tons of garbage into dumpsters and away from people’s houses, helping them avoid eviction due to noncompliance with community standard codes. They remove dangerous and objectionable smells from people’s lives so that they can maintain a dignified presence in their neighborhoods. Robinson has an unusual approach to ministry in that he does his best to prevent volunteers from ever meeting the people they serve—thus preserving the dignity of those living amidst mold, stench, and debris.
Oddly, a “good smelling church” devoid of bad smells is a dysfunctional church. Robinson relayed an experience where a homeless man wandered into a church he was attending and at the end of the service was left to wander back into the smells from whence he came. I am guilty of such dereliction of Christian duty. I am certain I turn up my nose at others from time to time. Perhaps you do as well. I have failed many times to push further into and inhale deeply the things that smell, in the tradition of Mother Teresa.
Professor Camille Hallstrom, one of my colleagues who teaches art and drama, displayed a Thomas Kinkade painting as part of a lecture she was giving, and critiqued it as a world without sin—or, for our purposes here, one without bad smells. An AI overview of his artwork reads: “Thomas Kinkade’s paintings are characterized by their luminous, idyllic scenes, often featuring cottages gardens, and churches, bathed in a warm, ethereal light and pastel colors, aiming to evoke a sense of peace and inspiration.”
A world so described is an illusion—one where homeless people do not wander into church, where nursing homes smell good (if they exist at all), and where Jesus was born into the pleasant aroma of cinnamon and cloves. That is not our world, and it is not the world to which we are called. Confessing sin is revealing one’s own smells, in effect joining with those whose smells render them undignified and vulnerable. To what lengths do we go in concealing our bad smells?
Economic systems both create and hide smells. In her introductory sociology textbook, Terrible, Magnificent Sociology,” Lisa Wade discusses environmental racism. She writes,
Poor and minority families are more likely to live near industrial mining and agriculture; toxic waste and garbage dumps; power plants; and air, sea, and river ports. These industrial processes make the air, soil, and water more dangerous. As a result of this exposure, people of color are more likely than others to give birth to premature babies and develop asthma, lead poisoning, diabetes, cancer, heart disease, and other debilitating and chronic diseases.1
Bad smells are not benign, and they disproportionately negatively impact the less powerful, more vulnerable members of a society.
Finally, “smell” as I’ve been discussing it, can be pondered in purely sensory “olfactory” ways, but also, and perhaps more importantly, in ideological ways. Around whom do we hold our noses? Who is not welcome in our gated communities, condos, pickleball tournaments, schools, churches, or Christian colleges? To whom do we fail to show hospitality or whom do we even actively block from our fellowship?
Quite a while ago, our elderly White Georgia neighbors recalled that when they were younger, the Southern town in which they lived filled in its public pool with concrete because they couldn’t seem to keep Blacks from swimming in it.2 This seemed a reasonable course of action to them. The ideological smell of racism. Very ugly.
Soap and cleanliness have been employed as metaphors for colonialization. The “civilizing” process includes brightening, whitening, and eradicating the smells of Indigenous peoples and other racial minorities. In a compelling blog post, Lisa Wade examines vintage ads for Pears soap and Ivory soap.3
The text of one Pears ad reads:
The first step towards lightening the White Man’s Burden is through teaching the virtues of cleanliness. Pear’s Soap is a potent factor in brightening the dark corners of the earth as civilization advances, while amongst the cultured of all nations it holds the highest place—it is the ideal toilet soap.
Likewise, an early ad for Ivory Soap, entitled “A New Departure,” reads:
Said Uncle Sam: “I will be wise,
and thus the Indian civilize:
Instead of guns that kill a mile,
Tobacco, lead, and liquor vile,Instead of serving out a meal,
Or sending Agents out to steal,
I’ll give domestic arts to teach,
A cake of IVORY SOAP to each.Before it flies the guilty stain,
The grease and dirt no more remain;
‘Twill change their nature day by day,
And wash their darkest blots away.
They’re turn their bows to fishing-rods,
And bury hatchets under sods,
In wisdom and in worth increase,
And ever smoke the pipe of peace;
For ignorance can never cope
With such a foe as IVORY SOAP.”
In the same post Wade analyzes a “political cartoon, circa 1886, that uses the metaphor of washing to describe the cleansing of the Chinese from the U.S. At the bottom it reads, ‘The Chinese must go.’”
At the end of her post, Wade directs the reader to vintage ads selling soap with depictions of African Americans as dirty. These ads reveal more about their authors and sponsors than about the people they depict. They reveal the deep insecurities and identity anxieties that produce such pathological downward comparison and disdain for those relegated to out-group status. It’s no surprise that the worldwide deodorant industry is projected to generate $27.8 billion U.S. dollars in 2025.4
Deodorant is the perfume of identity crisis. Deodorants are, arguably, one way we distance ourselves from our own humanity, disguising the scent of our humanness, and helping maintain the illusion that we smell better—in both olfactory and ideological ways—than our neighbors.
Identifying with Jesus necessitates that we enter into the lives of those who, to us, smell bad. Arguably, the hungry, thirsty, naked, stranger, sick, or imprisoned for whom Jesus advocated (Matthew 25:35-46) all emanated a smell that repelled those with greater agency who might otherwise have helped them. But Jesus stands with the ones who smell. And he asks that we do the same. In the final analysis, the smells of “their” humanity are not all that different from ours. Jesus absorbs their smells, and yours and mine as well. Welcome to the New Jerusalem; breathe deeply. It smells like neighbors.
As the people of God “for the world,” we would do well to remember that barring from fellowship or otherwise controlling those with a different smell than ours—olfactory or ideological—manifests as stench before God, and therefore raises questions about our commitment to the ways of Jesus.
To conclude, I think that we sociologists and anthropologists, though we fail and are guilty of the very things we labor to address, are some who actively seek out a variety of smells, move toward and into them, try to understand them, and hope to diffuse them in shared spaces. May we live together, appreciate a more diverse complement of smells, and over time manifest the redolence of hospitality, care, welcome, and neighborliness, that aroma which wafts upward and pleases the nostrils of God— “a fragrant offering, a sacrifice acceptable and pleasing to God” (Philippians 4:18).
Footnotes
- Wade, Lisa. Terrible, Magnificent Sociology. (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2022), 212.
- For an excellent pictorial essay on public swimming pools and racism, see Williams, Danielle. 2024. “Third Places We Lost Due to Racism: Public Pools. Melanin Base Camp. Retrieved March 19, 2024. https://www.melaninbasecamp.com/trip-reports/2024/2/26/third-places-that-disappeared-due-to-racism-public-pools.
- Wade, Lisa. “Colonialism, Soap, and the Cleansing Metaphor.” The Society Pages: Sociological Images. Accessed March 17,2025.https://thesocietypages.org/socimages/2010/08/10/colonialism-soap-and-the-cleansing-metaphor/.
- Statista. “Deodorants – Worldwide.” Accessed March 18,025.https://www.statista.com/outlook/cmo/beauty-personal-care/personal-care/deodorants/worldwide.
