A Reformed Theology of Protest

Previously, on A Reformed Theology of Protest…

Luke Bretherton poses the question: what do we do when we meet someone we find strange or, even, objectionable? He offers four suggestions: kill them, cancel them, control them or do politics.

So, let’s say—for the sake of argument—that we aren’t keen on the murder, lying, stealing, and coercive power options, there are still a whole host of strategies available to us under the massive, golf umbrella-sized possibility of “doing politics.” 

This series does not intend to argue that protest is the only—or even the best—way to engage the political process. Rather, protest is one way for us to inhabit Bretherton’s suggestion of “doing politics.”  It is also one way for us to answer another important question, this time from everyone’s favorite neighbor and one of my favorite public theologians: Mr. Rogers. 

What do we do with the mad that we feel?

My almost-three-year-old is figuring out how to be mad. Perhaps more to the point, we are trying to figure out how to let my almost-three-year-old be mad in ways that don’t include throwing and hitting and biting. While we aren’t comfortable with some expressions of anger, we really want him to know it’s human to feel anger and that his anger is telling him something important. That he—and his anger—are worth listening to. 

Enter Mr. Rogers and the wisdom of his song, which asks: 

What do you do with the mad that you feel
When you feel so mad you could bite?
When the whole wide world seems oh, so wrong…
And nothing you do seems very right? 

I was raised at a time and in a religious tradition in which obedience was considered a child’s greatest virtue and biblical counselors dared parents to discipline. Anger was not on the menu of options. I suspect that was especially the case for girl children. (The gendered and racialized perceptions of anger deserve a post of their own by someone with greater facility in the social sciences than I possess.)

Toward A Theology of Anger

As a pastor-theologian, what I can offer is a preliminary sketch of a theology of anger. In Christian circles, we often treat the emotion of anger as a sin. But it isn’t. Or, at least, we should say that the biblical witness regarding anger is complicated.  My working theory is that getting good and mad might be exactly what God uses to make us good in our mad.

On one hand, it’s true that anger often features prominently when epistle writers catalogue the likely vices of their readers (Colossians. 3:5-9). It’s true that the Proverbial fool is often angry (Proverb. 12:16). It’s also true that many of the villains (and even some of the heroes) in the Hebrew narrative are fueled by anger as they engage their misdeeds against God and neighbor (Genesis 4:5).

On the other hand, God is regularly described as angry (Deuteronomy 4:21). In fact, God’s anger at injustice is promised to God’s people as a curse, because our sin places us in enmity with God, but also a blessing, when it comes for God’s enemies (Psalm 18:7-24). The Psalms are a gift to the anger-reticent among us, presenting a shameless witness to the breadth of human anger. Even more, they present a capacious witness to the grace of a God who does not recoil in horror but instead draws near and is glad to hear from us. Jesus, too, was often angry at the stubborn, callous and greedy hearts of the people around him (Mark 10:14).

To make sense of this, I suppose, we turn to verses that exhort us to “be angry without sinning” (Ephesians 4:26). Verses that acknowledge even as God expresses anger, God is fundamentally “slow to anger” (Exodus 34:6), and that we are to demonstrate similar character (James 1:19-20). Unlike silly Jonah, who railed against God for forgiving the Ninevites (Jonah 4:2-3), we are to be angry about the right things: about injustice, violence, the callous disregard of human dignity, the pillaging of God’s good creation… The list goes on.

In summary, we are guided to be slow to anger and, when we are angry, it is 1) at the right things, 2) in the right proportion, and 3) leading to right action.  These caveats should make us slow to anger, indeed: how can we know our own hearts? How do we discern that these are the right things to be angry about?  

In his book, The Word Before the Powers: An Ethic of Preaching, Charles L. Campbell suggests four virtues every preacher should seek to cultivate and channel: truthfulness, anger, patience and hope. That second one is a little surprising! It certainly caught me off-guard upon my first reading.  But Campbell’s thinking is incisive for both preachers and protestors. 

He writes, “The first two of these–truthfulness and anger–are virtues primarily necessary for resistance, while the latter two–patience and hope–focus more on the nonviolent character of this resistance.”

While there is good reason for preachers, and Christians more generally, to treat anger with some suspicion, “once we begin to discern the predatory work of the powers that crush human lives, anger should be stirred up; it is a virtue in the face of the powers of death. Although God is ‘slow to anger,’ God regularly becomes angry over the injustices of the world.”

To love and to respect anything in this world–our neighbor, ourselves, our work, the creation itself–is to be angry when such things are harmed, abused, misused or defiled. “Anger marks an end to the numbness–the demoralization–the powers seek to instill in people. It signals a stirring of the moral sense that the powers want to extinguish in order to maintain their dominion.” In other words, getting good and mad might be exactly what God uses to make us good in our mad.

So what DO we do with the mad that we feel?

In our home, our almost-three-year-old has found an answer that seems to work for now.  He doesn’t throw or hit or bite. Instead, he stands in the middle of the room, fists clenched at his sides, yelling “NO!” for as loud and long as his lungs will allow. As I sat nearby, bearing witness to his anger, it dawned on me that I had seen something similar just a few days earlier.  

On a recent Saturday morning, along with millions of my fellow citizens, we didn’t kill or cancel or control.  Instead, we stood in the middle of our streets, fists clenched around signs, yelling “NO!” for as loud and as long as our lungs would allow. We got good and mad. I think there was something good about that mad.

Header photo by Julien L on Unsplash
Young boy photo by Blake Cheek on Unsplash