Two types of equally sickening media appear before me daily: sugary sweet happy videos (often containing cats) and highly inflamed rants. Often the rant is just an ad in disguise. Contrary to ads everywhere in my browsing, President Eisenhower was not murdered in any common sense of the word “murder.” Sappiness sells and this makes sense, but anger sells as well: entire networks are dedicated to rage.
Rants generate anger as a virus infects a computer: you know you should not look, you do, then you are infected, passing the problem on to others.
My mother taught me a simple lesson: get angry in an argument and lose. Anger is a foe to reason and a Christian must be reasonable. The rage of Achilles was unreasoning and destroyed the Greeks. The jealousy of King Saul over the skills of the Biblical David became anger and ended Saul’s dynasty. The angry man often acts contrary to his self-interest because madness has seized him.
Too much anger is dangerous to our Republic and republican values. Demagogues play on our fears transforming it to rage so we do not notice their tyranny. Angry voters are tempted by revolutionary ideologies and revolution is the death of liberty.
And yet anger, like any passion, is not bad in itself. Anger is like pepper: a little is good, a great deal overpowers everything else. The man or woman who is never angry in this broken world is inhuman and probably inhumane. Horrible things produce horror in a sane man: we are not Vulcans. My reaction to the evils being done to people in Nigeria or by ISIS in the Middle East or by racists in America should be anger.
Evil is not something to view with bemused detachment. Injustice is not funny. The horrors of this present age do not exist to give me something on which to write. If my first thought on seeing young women volunteering for ISIS is not anger, but a desire to write an amusing Saturday Night Live sketch, I may or may not be amusing, but I am “funny” in the sense of turned meat .
Anger is the appropriate reaction to evil. It is in this sense that God’s love (always His disposition) can be experienced by us as His wrath. We do injustice and we go to war with Love. Love wins.
The truth does not need our anger to prevail, but anger is the immediate, appropriate reaction to an attack on truth. Christians will be angry, but should not act out of the anger. Having a feeling, even an appropriate feeling, does not tell me what to do. A Christian’s primary motivation for everything must be love. I teach for students. I love life so oppose abortion. I love justice and so oppose racism. I love chastity and so oppose libertine sexuality.
Saint Paul puts all of this best:
Be ye angry, and sin not: let not the sun go down on your wrath neither give place to the devil.
Devils like demagogues enter into a place of sustained anger. Humans are not strong enough to contain anger that is too great anymore than we handle any overly strong passion well. Best to live motivated by love and be angry when I must. May we be defined by our passion for justice and not our anger at injustice, our love of beauty and not our hatred of vice, and our pursuit of the sublime, not our hatred of the craven. Injustice, vice, and cravenness anger us until the sun goes down, when we give our anger to God and sleep secure in His love.
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