Dr. M. Elizabeth Thorpe and Producer Carl Thorpe talk about anger and argue that it isn’t always wrong, harmful, or sinful.
Transcript
DDM – Hello and welcome to The Priest & The Prof. I am your host, the Rev. Deborah Duguid-May.
MET – And I’m Dr. M. Elizabeth Thorpe.
DDM – This podcast is a product of Trinity Episcopal Church in Greece, New York. I’m an Episcopal priest of 26 years, and Elizabeth has been a rhetoric professor since 2010. And so join us as we explore the intersections of faith, community, politics, philosophy, and action.
MET – Hello and welcome. Today, Producer Carl is with me again, so everybody be nice to him. Today we’re talking about something a little different, but is as important to our spiritual lives as just about anything else we’ve covered, and that is anger. Now, it may not seem like it, but anger is just as an important part of our emotional and spiritual development as really anything else.
MET – We learn how to regulate our emotions as part of our emotional and social development, and figuring out what to do with anger is a big part of this. Just as a completely anecdotal and non-academic observation, I see a lot of this in people younger than me right now. Specifically in the struggles of young men. Now, more than at any time in history, men are expected to manage their emotions in an intelligent, empathetic, and sensitive way. Before, they have not really been expected to do this, and now they are not equipped to do this. The result is a huge backlash, and the advent of what is called the ‘manosphere.” Men are convinced they are being held to impossible standards and women are just asking men to be basic humans. The result is a lot of frustration, alienation, and a male loneliness epidemic. Much of this is because of an expectation that people learn to manage their anger and aggression.
MET – But anger is not new to the public. Anger has been an important part of American rhetoric since its founding. In 1741, Jonathan Edwards delivered his famous sermon, “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.” At that point, sermons were very much a part of public discourse. They were the public speaking of the day. The sermon, which is quite long, is based on one single verse. I think I’ve talked about it before. Deuteronomy 32:35: “Their foot shall slide in due time.” So, starting out very positive! And the whole sermon, I mean the entire thing, is about how God has the power to send us to hell.
MET – Have a few tastes: “There is no want of power in God to cast wicked men into hell at any moment. Men’s hands cannot be strong when God rises up. The strongest have no power to resist him, nor can any deliver out of his hands.—He is not only able to cast wicked men into hell, but he can most easily do it.”
MET – Or, my personal favorite: “The God that holds you over the pit of hell, much as one holds a spider, or some loathsome insect over the fire, abhors you, and is dreadfully provoked: his wrath towards you burns like fire; he looks upon you as worthy of nothing else, but to be cast into the fire; he is of purer eyes than to bear to have you in his sight; you are ten thousand times more abominable in his eyes, than the most hateful venomous serpent is in ours.”
MET – Right? Cheerful stuff. Historically, we have been taught that God is angry. It’s a bit of a paradox. God loves us and wants to show us mercy. But the reason we need mercy is because we are so awful.
MET – But Jesus has very different ideas about anger. Jesus does, in fact, get angry. Many people, especially girls and women, have been told it is wrong, sinful, or improper to show anger. Friends, that is a tool by those in power to keep you in line. It’s why women are told over and over again they they are too emotional and they need to keep it together. Because women have things to be angry or sad about and if we let that go on somebody might have to be held accountable.
MET – But anger is not a sin. And I know it’s not because Jesus got very, very angry. Jesus got angry when he called Peter Satan. Jesus got angry when he flipped over tables in the Temple. The difference is that Jesus didn’t get angry at people who were annoying him with their problems – he got angry at the people who were causing problems. He got angry at religious leaders and merchants. He got angry at the rich and the powerful. Jesus got very angry – but not at the everyday people around him. Jesus wasn’t angry at the “sinners” in his midst. He was angry at the people who put them in a position where they were disempowered.
CRT – Often, we try to sanitize his anger. Take the “widow’s mite” story. You know, the one where the rich person gives a large amount of money to the temple followed immediately by a widow who gives all that she can. We often hear this story in the context of stewardship drives where the widow is held up as an example to us all of how we should give all that we can to the church. But that interpretation ignores what immediately precedes and follows the widow depositing her coins. Jesus tells his followers that the scribes “devour widows’ houses for the sake of appearance” and that the temple, “adorned with beautiful stones and gifts dedicated to God” will be destroyed. The widow deposits the last of her coins, and those two coins will do little more than further feed the scribe’s hunger. This is unjust, and Jesus makes that clear. This woman,as a window, has no means to make a “honest” living, yet she gives all that she has to survive on to a system that already has more than it needs. Is the temple system all that different from economists and politicians telling people to give up Starbucks and Avocado Toast so they can afford skyrocketing gas prices and the housing market that hasn’t kept up with inflation since the 1970s? Who is benefiting from those ever increasing costs? Surely not the people who need the most help.
CRT – So we’ve talked about God being angry with us and Jesus being angry with the institutions that promote injustice, but what about us being angry with God? I remember talking to a religious leader in college shortly after my grandmother had died. I was told that everything that happened, good or bad, was part of God’s plan, and we are expected to accept it and be grateful at all times. I was told that I needed to think of God as a parent who knows what is best for me and I just needed to accept everything and be thankful. So when my Grandmother died, it was God’s plan. If I couldn’t accept that, it was sinful. God, I was told, picks and chooses who should suffer, and we should be glad about it because that suffering was somehow good because it was in furtherance of “God’s plan.” Is it any wonder, then, that I rejected the idea of a God who was beyond question and ended up an atheist for many years?
CRT – But God’s story, as told through the Bible, doesn’t bear that out. The prophets of the old testament did not accept that the world was the way it was because of God’s plan. The Bible is full of figures who express anger, not just at other people, but even directed at God. Jeremiah says “You will be in the right, O Lord, when I lay charges against you, but let me put my case to you. Why does the way of the guilty prosper? Why do all who are treacherous thrive? You plant them, and they take root; they grow and bring forth fruit; you are near in their mouths yet far from their hearts.” The prophet Habbakuk rails against God, saying “Your eyes are too pure to behold evil, and you cannot look on wrongdoing; why do you look on the treacherous and are silent when the wicked swallow those more righteous than they?” The prophets saw fit to question God and demand justice. Why can’t we? Why do we tell people who are suffering that they should not express their anger and frustration with God? Why do we just accept suffering as the plan and will of a loving God?
CRT – Jonathan Edwards says we have to accept that because we are worthy of nothing but suffering and damnation. God is rightly so disgusted with us that he has to hold his nose and accept us rather than destroy us. Is that love? How is that any different than telling an abuse victim that they deserve whatever their abuser does to them?
CRT – Elizabeth will tell you that the idea that we are all worthless and repulsive in the eyes of God hasn’t gone away. Many Christians hold onto the idea that they are abject sinners and it is only through unearned and unfathomable grace that God deigns to save us from damnation. This leads to harmful rhetoric like “hate the sin, love the sinner” that is used against the LGBTQ+ community like it is supposed to be so gracious and loving to call someone’s God given identity something worthy of hatred.
CRT – I think that there is something to discuss there about how we are told to love our neighbors as ourselves, while at the same time we are told that we are wretched creatures unworthy of love. If we are taught to hate ourselves, then why would we need to extend love to anyone else? But that’s probably a topic for another episode.
CRT – What if we just stop doing that? What if we instead assume that all living creatures are worthy of love, respect, and salvation? Shouldn’t we be allowed to be angry if they are not?
MET – One thing I think it is important to me that we get across today is that it is not wrong for you to feel anger. If you’ve ever been to therapy you’ve probably been told many times that feelings aren’t wrong. We have to feel our feelings. Anger is one of those. But as is often the case, you have to get to the root of that anger.
MET – When we hear people who are angry speaking in public or trying to advocate for themselves, we often react very differently based on who they are. For example, Jasmine Crockett just lost a primary in TX to James Talarico. I’m not here to tell you who was a better or worse candidate, but I can tell you what people said about them. Crockett was seen by many people as ‘unelectable.’ She was too volatile, too angry. Too hostile. It must be noted that Crockett is a black woman.
MET – Okay, we know that does not make a person unelectable because Donald Trump is in office. His whole schtick is that he is mean and doesn’t care about people’s feelings. But the difference between Crockett and Trump is that Trump is an old rich white guy, and Crockett is a young black woman. And we allow old rich white guys to be as angry as they want to be, and we find angry black women to be problematic and abrasive. And this isn’t some liberal, DEI nonsense This is provable and and observable. People like Condi Rice because she is completely moderate in public. People hate Michelle Obama because she has the audacity to be opinionated. Trump isn’t bound by any of the same restrictions because he doesn’t have to worry about the color of his skin changing the way people see his aggressive approach to things. In fact, many people see his aggression as a positive. Whereas for Crockett, it made her unelectable.
MET – This is absolutely a matter of tone policing.
MET – Tone policing is when you tell certain people that they need to watch their tone, usually for the sake of civility, in order for their point to be taken seriously. The idea is that we must all remain calm, unmoved by our emotions, and detached if we are to discuss matters of importance. It’s a classic approach to discourse that supposedly favors democratic republics by allowing for the marketplace of ideas to work its magic. It also makes sure that the people who are not affected by the issues are the ones making the decisions
MET – Because you know what? Sexual assault and harassment make me mad. It infuriates me that 1 out of every 3 women in America will be sexually assaulted in their lives. It infuriates a lot of people. But the people who are most affected by it don’t get to speak about it because they are upset? We’re supposed to just turn this issue over to people who have no connection to the issue because they can calmly talk about it? Racism makes me mad. The school to prison pipeline makes me mad. I’m really mad about trans people being stripped of their rights and identity. But because I am angry about these things I can’t take part in public discourse, I guess, because I might let an emotion show?
MET – That is how oppressors maintain power. By keeping people out of the conversation who have a vested interest in it, those who cause the problems are able to keep it up.
MET – HOWEVER. We are also called to love gently. We are supposed to love our enemies. Blessed are the meek and the peacemakers, right? What is love in a volatile world? Can you seek justice, a process that inherently causes strife, in a way that turns the other cheek?
MET – I’m actually going to turn to the Civil Rights Movement here, for just a bit. I’m actually often prone to think about Malcolm X and Stokely Carmichael in that regard, but when it comes to being peacemakers in an angry world, the folks who were a part of MLK’s portion of the movement were probably the best example. And I’m not going to tell you it’s because they were so peaceful and non-violent. They were non-violent. But that doesn’t mean they weren’t angry. You can’t read the words of these leaders and not feel the frustration and fierce anger .I think about Fannie Lou Hamer and her testimony in Congress. She was very forthright about what happened to her and how she was treated. She was mad she couldn’t vote. And it inspired her to get people to the polls.
MET – So consider the protesters of the Civil Rights Movement – the protesters were peaceful, but anyone who says the movement was is whitewashing it in unhelpful ways. Because the Civil Rights Movement was terribly violent. It’s just that the violence came from the state. We’ve seen the pictures – we’ve seen the dogs and the firehoses turned on protesters. And we know non-state actors went as far as to set bombs in churches and set fire to homes. The Civil Rights Movement was INCREDIBLY violent. But the violence came from white folks who were acting against progress.
MET – So this question of how we can be angry and gentle at the same time is front and center. The Civil Rights Movement was a group of people who were collectively angry on both sides.One worked together to harness their anger to make the world a more whole and loving place. The other side just showed themselves to be monsters.
CRT – I want to go back to the idea of God as the loving parent who knows better than us for a minute. Who among us hasn’t been angry with our parents at some point in our lives? Maybe it was something as simple as we didn’t like the rules they set forth in their household because we felt they were unfair. Maybe a parent hurt us or failed to protect us. Maybe a parent refused to let us live our lives in the way we want without judgement. Whatever the reason, no matter how small or seemingly insignificant, we have all been angry at our parents. Same goes for those of us with children of our own. Every parent has been angry with their children at some point. We get angry because our kids don’t follow our rules. We get angry because our kids make decisions that we feel aren’t in their best interest. We get angry because our kids are angry at us. We can say the same about siblings, spouses, and friends.
CRT – Anger is a part of relationships. In a lot of cases, I think that anger is very much like the anger expressed by God, the prophets, Jesus, and even the Civil Rights leaders Elizabeth just talked about. That anger is rooted in feeling like the deity, person, institution, what have you, hasn’t lived up to our expectations. To the ideal we have. The prophets were angry that their people were oppressed by nations that were more powerful than them. Jesus was angry that the religious leaders were corrupt and enriching themselves rather than caring for the poor and marginalized. The civil rights leaders were angry that our country claimed liberty and justice for all and then refused to provide it based on the color of one’s skin. We’re angry at our parents because they are supposed to be the arbiters and first teachers about love and fairness and protect us. We’re angry at our kids because they are supposed to take the lessons and examples we provide and live them out in a way that we envision for them.
CRT – Anger that someone or something hasn’t lived up to our expectations is rooted in and requires some kind of relationship with whomever or whatever you are angry with. And the question then becomes if that anger is a means to better that relationship or, conversely, a reason to destroy or harm that relationship. But if there isn’t a relationship there and the expectations that come from that relationship to be angry about, then you’re just screaming into the void.
MET – Ultimately, I think anger can be righteous, but for me, the question is, “what are you angry about?” If you are angry about your kid’s tattoo or what they are majoring in – honestly, get yourself together. In no way is that a justifiable thing to be angry about. If you are angry about getting the wrong coffee order or losing the parking space you wanted, honestly, just go home. You are not really fit to be in public at that moment. If you are angry about injustice or inequality – then that is righteous. If you’re angry because of hurt, it’s an opportunity to make a relationship whole.
MET – God is not asking you to put your sense of justice, or even your emotions away. God is asking you to harness them for good.
MET – Thank you for listening to the Priest & The Prof. find us at our website, https://priestandprof.org. If you have any questions or concerns, feel free to contact us at podcast@priestandprof.org. Make sure to subscribe, and if you feel led, please leave a donation at https://priestandprof.org/donate.
MET – That will help cover the costs of this podcast and support the ministries of Trinity Episcopal Church. Thank you, and we hope you have enjoyed our time together today.
DDM – Music by Audionautix.com.
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