Buddhist Catholic Contemplative Evangelical General Christian Hindu Jewish Latter-day Saint Muslim New Visions Progressive Christian

Beliefs

Topics

Columnists

Resource Library

Research Tools

Video

Podcasts

Thought Readers

Faith In Media Tracker

Newsletters

Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In Subscription Support

Follow Patheos

Home
Progressive Christian
Are You Tired of Being Angry Yet?

Are You Tired of Being Angry Yet?

Last updated on: February 18, 2025 at 7:00 am by Vance Morgan

0 Comments

Are You Tired of Being Angry Yet? 2025-02-17T09:40:30-04:00 Vance Morgan

LOGO Patheos Explore the world's faith through different perspectives on religion and spirituality! Patheos has the views of the prevalent religions and spiritualities of the world.

Do not letthe sun go down on your wrath. Ephesians 4:26

Although I have been largely successful in carrying out my commitment to not getting sucked into the daily black hole of bad news since the November election, the daily barrage of bullshit from Donald Trump, Elon Musk, and their minions is not easy to completely ignore. Anger and hate, two feelings that are not natural to me, regularly threaten to percolate to the surface. My Facebook acquaintances, whom I have culled carefully over the years and are largely of a like mind with me, are in a perpetual state of fear and outrage.

People on all sides of the political spectrum have gotten used to politics and anger going hand in hand. Anger has been a staple of the political landscape for so long that many have concluded that it is the only possible emotion energetic enough to fuel real change. We have historical evidence to support this conclusion.

It’s hard to effect change when the people you need in the trenches of the revolution are relatively satisfied with the way things are going. What if the French peasants and working classes had said “well, things really aren’t that bad” in 1780s France? What if the majority of American colonists had thought “actually, I can sort of see why the British Parliament wants to tax us without representation”? Of such attitudes a revolution is not made. So I’m wondering whether anger might not only be appropriate but also necessary. Must anger and dissatisfaction be the primary driving forces behind meaningful change?

Politically speaking, I hope not. Anger is useful at times, but it is very hard to sustain—at least it is for me. Even in the turbulent 60s that I grew up in, anger was tempered with flower power and love-ins. When people who claim to be angry about everything have used that anger to help elect a completely unqualified racist and misogynist to the most powerful office in the world just to “shake things up”–twice–I worry a great deal. But I am as aware as anyone of the need in our country for significant, meaningful, and permanent change in many aspects of our government, economy, and social structure. If not anger and dissatisfaction, what other possible source of change might there be? My only recourse is to return what I have said and written many times (often to the consternation of my conservative friends and acquaintances)—I am a liberal because I am a Christian. And being a Christian makes it very difficult to engage with politics as usual in recognizable political or even moral terms.

Let’s presume there is such a thing as “righteous anger.” Jesus’ cleansing of the Temple is often pointed to by Christians as the primary proof that sometimes anger is justified and appropriate. But no one ever has suggested that his one-off anger episode changed anything permanently; chances are the money-lenders and sacrificial animal vendors were back on the job the next day. Justified anger is directed, as the phrase indicates, at injustice—something our society and our world is full of. Justice is one of the highest of human virtues, and we seem hardwired to recognize when it is violated.

Revolutions fueled by anger are often aimed at correcting the most egregious of injustices. But such revolutions, even if well-intentioned and successful at first, invariably and predictably replace the corrected injustices with new ones, after a certain amount of time many people (often the same ones) are angry once again, and the cycle continues. Change for the sake of change is one thing, but change that truly establishes lasting justice is something that human beings have little experience with. This requires something greater than justice—something that transcends mere human capacities.

At its root, Christianity is not about justice at all. It’s about something that both transcends justice and opens the door to something altogether different: grace. In her collection of essays The Givenness of Things, Marilynne Robinson’s essay “Grace” explores how William Shakespeare treats this slippery concept in his later plays. One of Shakespeare’s middle plays, “The Merchant of Venice,” is one of the most brilliant explorations of justice and mercy ever written. But, Robinson argues, in his later plays such as “The Tempest,” Shakespeare takes on the more difficult challenge of investigating grace, “something pure and grander than mercy, something that puts aside the consciousness of fault, the residue of judgment that makes mercy a lesser thing than grace.”

Justice is about fairness and mercy is about choosing to treat those who have done injustice as if they had not done so. But grace is something altogether different, an awareness that, in human hands, justice is often a zero sum game, a game whose rules have to be rewritten if we are ever to establish true change. Grace empowers a vision of human reality in which individuals are not lumped into categories, in which justice is not calculated mathematically, in which fairness is energized by a recognition of equal dignity rather than rights and entitlements, and which inspires “the intimation of a great reality of another order, which pervades human experience, even manifests itself in human actions and relations, yet is always purely itself.”

Those inspired by grace rather than justice need, first, to realize that grace cannot be institutionalized. Although a world or society of perfect justice has never existed, most human beings can imagine what such a society might look like—some of the great works of literature and philosophy provide us with glimpses. Grace is of a completely different order, calling for individual persons to bring a transcendent, divinely inspired energy into mundane human activity.

That’s what the heart of the Christian message—Incarnation—means. The gospels are full of this—when Jesus advocates perspectives and actions that make little common sense but are strangely attractive and beautiful, he’s describing grace. We engage with it and come to understand it more effectively and deeply through parables, stories, and examples rather than rules and moral principles. And it cannot be systematized. But the good news is that it is applicable everywhere. If I ever stop letting Donald Trump have the power to make me angry, I can seek to be a vehicle of grace in a world that is crying out for something more than change for the sake of change.

Previous Post

February 16, 2025

Mystical Faith: Finding Unity in Life’s Brokenness

Next Post

February 21, 2025 Joseph, Peter, and Radical Forgiveness

Recent Comments

0 | Leave a Comment

"Mary did have a choice. And she was able to make it before the Holy ..."

madalyn baumstark

Mary Got To Choose

"i cannot read beyond your recommendations for the books since i like to have a ..."

madalyn baumstark

A Doubting Faith

"AI will never be able to utter with honesty, feeling, or humility, the greeting: "Namaste".It ..."

madalyn baumstark

AI and Human Dignity

"They do. I'm sure you could find discussions of the same topic from any of ..."

Vance Morgan

AI and the Life of Faith

Browse Our Archives

Select a Category abortion Advent AI Angels Artificial intelligence atheism attention baptism Baptists beauty belief Benedictines Bible bicycling Big Bird books Bovina Camaldoli hermitage Canada Catholicism cats certainty change Christianity Christmas Collegeville Covid-19 creativity Development of Western Civilization dogs doubt Easter Enneagram Epiphany Episcopal ethics Eucharist evil extroverts Facebook faith family fear flowers forgiveness freedom friends God goodness grace happiness heaven hell history Holy Spirit Holy Week hope human nature humility humor idolatry incarnation introverts irreverence Islam Jeanne Jesus Joe Biden joy Judaism justice Kamala Harris knowledge Lent listen literature liturgy love Marsue Memorial Day miracles movies music mystery mythology NPR Old Testament optimism paradox peace Penguins philosophy piano podcast politics power prayer Protestantism Providence College Religion Rhode Island sabbatical sacrament science seeing silence Simone Weil Socrates soul sports St. John's College stories suffering tattoo teaching technology television theology thinking time tolerance transcendence travel trees trust truth Uncategorized Vermont wisdom wonder writing

Select a Month May 2026 April 2026 March 2026 February 2026 January 2026 December 2025 November 2025 October 2025 September 2025 August 2025 July 2025 June 2025 May 2025 April 2025 March 2025 February 2025 January 2025 December 2024 November 2024 October 2024 September 2024 August 2024 July 2024 June 2024 May 2024 April 2024 March 2024 February 2024 January 2024 December 2023 November 2023 October 2023 September 2023 August 2023 July 2023 June 2023 May 2023 April 2023 March 2023 February 2023 January 2023 December 2022 November 2022 October 2022 September 2022 August 2022 July 2022 June 2022 May 2022 April 2022 March 2022 February 2022 January 2022 December 2021 November 2021 October 2021 September 2021 August 2021 July 2021 June 2021 May 2021 April 2021 March 2021 February 2021 January 2021 December 2020 November 2020 October 2020 September 2020 August 2020 July 2020 June 2020 May 2020 April 2020 March 2020 February 2020 January 2020 December 2019 November 2019 October 2019 September 2019 August 2019 July 2019 June 2019 May 2019 April 2019 March 2019 February 2019 January 2019 December 2018 November 2018 October 2018 September 2018 August 2018 July 2018 June 2018 May 2018 April 2018 March 2018 February 2018 January 2018 December 2017 November 2017 October 2017 September 2017 August 2017 July 2017 June 2017 May 2017 April 2017 March 2017 February 2017 January 2017 December 2016 November 2016 October 2016 September 2016 August 2016 July 2016 June 2016 May 2016 April 2016 March 2016 February 2016 January 2016 December 2015 November 2015 October 2015 September 2015 August 2015 July 2015 June 2015 May 2015 April 2015 March 2015 February 2015 January 2015 December 2014 November 2014 October 2014 September 2014 August 2014 July 2014 June 2014 May 2014 April 2014 March 2014 February 2014 January 2014 December 2013 November 2013 October 2013 September 2013 August 2013 July 2013 June 2013 May 2013 April 2013 March 2013 February 2013 January 2013 December 2012 November 2012 October 2012 September 2012

TAKE THE

Religious Wisdom Quiz