Anger

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

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• From Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation (2020)

  Liberals proposed a more adaptive family model, one that allowed for single parents and gay men and women. Liberals looked to government to support families. Conservatives opposed government “interference” and sought instead to protect families from moral erosion.24 When it came to marshaling grassroots forces, conservatives had the upper hand. They’d been building networks and refining policy positions for over a decade, and they knew what they were up against. Nationally funded childcare, the ERA, Roe v. Wade , the Domestic Violence Prevention and Treatment Act, feminism, and gay rights—each of these flashpoints had mobilized a “pro-family” movement and fine-tuned conservative Christian talking points. But grassroots activism had its limits; after organizers had selected participants—more than 100,000 citizens engaged in various stages of the process—conservatives began to complain that they were not properly represented. Despite his later protestations that Focus on the Family was not a political organization, Dobson’s overt political engagement can be traced to his urging listeners to write to the White House to request his inclusion in the conference. They didn’t disappoint; 80,000 letters were delivered to the White House. Even then, Dobson only received an invitation to address a preconference event.25 Frustrated, conservatives denounced what they saw as a liberal scheme to hijack the conversation. Fuming that conference organizers had excluded conservatives’ issues—including banning abortion, defending school prayer, and opposing gay rights—from their final recommendations, conservative delegates walked out of the official conference in protest. The next month, they organized their own counter-conference in Long Beach, California, an event that united the forces of the pro-family Religious Right. Dobson, Schlafly, Falwell, and the LaHayes all spoke, rallying the troops. The timing was strategic. With the 1980 election weeks away, they were united in their efforts to unseat Carter. To evangelicals, Carter had been a disappointment on all counts. They denounced the Carter administration for siding with feminists and for “wooing the homosexual vote.” To make matters worse, Carter had overseen what conservatives perceived to be the stunning decline of American strength. On his first day in office he had pardoned draft evaders. He agreed to hand over the Panama Canal and signed a nuclear arms control agreement. He’d allowed the Sandinistas to gain control of Nicaragua and enabled the overthrow of the Shah of Iran. The kidnapping of 52 American hostages at the US embassy in Tehran was an especially humiliating blow. Meanwhile, the president was mired in a “crisis of confidence,” and seemed unable to lead America out of the mess he’d made. On top of all this, he wore cardigans and he smiled too much. Even the national media proclaimed Carter a “wimp,” and the label stuck.26 For American evangelicals who had placed patriarchal power at the heart of their cultural and political identity, Carter’s wimp factor was particularly infuriating, and their sense of betrayal acute.

• From Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation (2020)

  White men had long positioned themselves as protectors of white womanhood—a tradition that cultivated male bravado, and one that could easily spill over into racial aggression. Opponents’ fixation on unisex bathrooms caught many feminists off guard, but it pointed to deeper social anxieties that this new movement for “equal rights” was tapping into. It also prefigured the furor on the Right, and the evangelical Right in particular, over transgender people and bathrooms in our own time.22 A WITTY, BRILLIANT WOMAN , Schlafly infuriated feminists. When she spoke in public, she liked to thank her husband for allowing her to do so just to get a rise out of any “women’s libbers” who might be present. Betty Friedan derided her as an “Aunt Tom,” a “traitor to her sex.” Feminists burned her in effigy. But Schlafly was unflappable. (She once received a death threat while dining in a Houston restaurant; in response she merely smiled and asked for milk in her coffee.) She chalked up feminists’ frustration to the weakness of their arguments: “They’re losing, so they’re irrational and mad.” Her opponents thought she was the irrational one, but she had developed a neatly packaged ideology that seemed impervious to critique. When her adversaries accused her of hypocrisy—she was, after all, hardly the “traditional woman”—she turned that criticism on its head. Look at her! She was proof that women were already free to do what they wanted, without the help of the ERA.23 [image "image" file=Image00009.jpg] Phyllis Schlafly poses with a five-month-old baby at the Illinois State Capitol in Springfield on May 14, 1980, before the House was expected to vote on the ERA. AP PHOTO . Almost singlehandedly, Schlafly sabotaged the ratification of the ERA. In doing so, she also helped put gender at the center of an emerging evangelical political identity. To Schlafly’s supporters, the ERA was a religious issue. As one of her STOP ERA state workers explained, “Phyllis is a religious leader—perhaps the most powerful in the country today. Because it’s women who generally keep the family’s faith and it’s women who support Phyllis.” STOP ERA was “a religious war,” and that’s why they were winning. As women like Marabel Morgan and Elisabeth Elliot helped unify white Christian women around a shared domestic identity, Schlafly converted these women into political activists. Speaking directly to ordinary housewives across the nation, she endowed their quotidian lives with religious and national significance, uniting Catholic, evangelical, and Mormon women, women in the white middle and working classes—the women of the Silent Majority—in a common cause.24 It’s hard to overstate Schlafly’s significance in marshalling the forces of the Religious Right. Years before James Dobson or Jerry Falwell entered the political fray, Phyllis Schlafly helped unify white Christians around a rigid and deeply conservative vision of family and nation. Although her star faded by the end of the century, it wasn’t because her influence had waned. By that time, her ideas had come to define the Republican Party, and much of American evangelicalism.

• From Twelve Steps to a Compassionate Life (2010)

  In many ways, Islam can be seen as an inspired attempt to counter the violence of tribalism, urging Muslims to use their new-brain capacities to control and redirect their aggression. For centuries, Arabs had lived a desperate nomadic life in the inhospitable Arabian steppes, perpetually on the brink of starvation and malnutrition. Their chivalric code was called muruwah, which is difficult to translate succinctly; it meant courage and endurance, a determination to avenge any wrong done to the tribe, to protect its more vulnerable members, to respond instantly to any perceived threat, and to defy all enemies. Each tribesman had to be ready to leap to the defense of his kinfolk at a second’s notice and to obey his chief unreservedly, right or wrong. “I am of Ghazziyya,” sang one of the ancient poets. “If she be in error, I will be in error; and if Ghazziyya be guided right, I will go with her.” Or as a popular maxim had it: “Help your brother whether he is being wronged or wronging others.”74 This loyalty, of course, extended only to your tribal unit: outsiders were regarded as worthless and expendable, and if you had to kill them to protect your fellow tribesmen, you wasted no time on regret. Hence tribal existence was characterized by jahiliyyah, a word traditionally used to refer to the pre-Islamic period in Arabia and translated as “the Time of Ignorance.” But though the root JHL has connotations of ignorance, its primary meaning was “irascibility.” In the early Muslim texts, jahiliyyah denotes aggression, arrogance, chauvinism, and a chronic tendency toward violence and retaliation.75 By the late sixth century CE, when the Prophet Muhammad was born, tribal warfare had reached an unprecedented level, and there was an apocalyptic sense of impending disaster.

• From The New Testament (Great Courses) (1997)

  150 Biographical Notes Paul the Apostle (Saul of Tarsus) Paul was a Hellenistic Jew born and raised outside of Palestine. We do not know when he was born, but it was probably sometime during the ¿ rst decade A.D. Through his own letters and the encomiastic account found in the book of Acts, we can learn something of his history. He was raised as a strict Pharisaic Jew and prided himself on his scrupulous religiosity. At some point in his early adulthood, he learned of the Christians and their proclamation of the cruci ¿ ed man Jesus as the messiah. Incensed by this claim, Paul began a rigorous campaign of persecution against the Christians—only to be converted himself to faith in Jesus through some kind of visionary experience. Paul then became an ardent proponent of the faith and its best-known missionary. He saw his call as a missionary to the Gentiles and worked in major urban areas in the regions of Asia Minor, Macedonia, and Achaia to establish churches through the conversion of former pagans. A distinctive aspect of his message was that all people, Jew and Gentile, are made right with God through Jesus’ death and resurrection and by no other means. The practical payoff was that Gentiles did not need to become Jewish to be among the people of the Jewish God—in particular, the men did not need to become circumcised. We know about Paul principally through the letters he wrote to his churches when problems arose that he wanted to address. Seven letters in the New Testament indisputably come from his hand; six others claim him as an author, but there are reasons to doubt these claims. According to the book of Acts, Paul was eventually arrested for socially disruptive behavior and sent to Rome to face trial. An early tradition outside of the New Testament indicates that Paul was martyred there, in Rome, during the reign of the emperor Nero, in A.D. 64.

• From The Fixed Stars: A Memoir (2020)

  Building restaurants is a twenty-four-hour work cycle. I was used to periods like this, but now we also had June. I didn’t want to help open Dino’s. I would make a different contribution to the family business: I would pick up the slack at home, doing more parenting while Brandon worked extra. That I could do. I would protect myself and June from the chaos of opening a business. But soon I felt stuck: How would I ever be more than the primary parent for our child? He said I was being dramatic, and I knew I was. The restaurant would open, and then we’d find a new rhythm, a new normal. [image file=image_rsrc2FK.jpg] But a question: If this is what lots of marriages look like after children—if this is “normal,” as we’re told it is—does that mean it’s okay? No, this question instead: Is it okay with me? [image file=image_rsrc2FK.jpg] It was okay until it wasn’t. I was angry, and I was often on my own with a three-year-old. When I wasn’t with June, I was with the contents of my skull. I thought of Nora. I thought of the lesbian mothers at June’s school, and every other lesbian-looking woman I saw. The fear that I’d planted that summer in our marriage, I watered it. I was what we were afraid of. I was the one who’d brought this into our house, the credible fear of our undoing. I should be the one to rout it out. That fall and early winter, I devoted myself to the task. I tried to go back to who I’d been before jury duty, to unsee whatever I’d seen in Nora, unfeel what I’d felt. As the months went by, I did manage to stop thinking about her. Thinking about her made me feel crazy, because it had no basis in anything. It was crazy. So I willed myself to stop, and after a while, it worked. I broke the habit. But the ground did not resolidify. It was porous now, and fertile. I watched my desire spread like seeds on a stiff wind, stick to women in coffee shops and on the street and outside school. The seeds bloomed, proliferated like invasives. [image file=image_rsrc2FK.jpg] June was in school each morning from eight forty-five to eleven forty-five. Sometimes after pickup we’d go visit Brandon at Dino’s, and the three of us would have lunch. The place was progressing nicely. It no longer looked like the check-cashing business it had been, with bulletproof glass and a burgundy laminate counter that curled like a question mark. Now the counter was gone and the drop ceiling too, along with the stink of cigarettes that had infused both. In their place was the sweet-sour perfume of sawdust and an airy, tall-ceilinged room trimmed with painter’s tape. There was reason to be proud.

• From The Fixed Stars: A Memoir (2020)

  [image file=image_rsrc2FK.jpg] When we became parents, I needed Brandon’s help. But I had trouble identifying what I needed, putting my fingertip on it. I’d had little practice. Wasn’t I supposed to be a modern, independent woman? Wasn’t that the idea? And now Brandon had little to give. He was our breadwinner. Anyway, I felt lucky: even with Brandon back at work, he would usually be with us until lunchtime. He held June for hours, played music and sang. I did ask for help with a few minor tasks, things I couldn’t seem to get done on my own. I asked him to empty the dishwasher and the diaper pail, replenish the diaper stack on the shelf, and take out the garbage. I listed the tasks on a slip of paper and taped it to the kitchen cabinet. This way he wouldn’t forget, and I wouldn’t have to remind him. The list helped for a few days, and then it stopped working. He said he forgot to look at it. I knew he too was tired, was struggling, overwhelmed. I knew he worried about me and June when he was at work and that he worried about work when he was with us. But I was furious that he couldn’t remember a few measly chores, that he could forget my requests so easily. I was furious that he didn’t notice when the tasks weren’t done. I noticed, because it impacted me. I just never think of it, he said. You know how my brain works. I just don’t notice the same things you do. I need you to start noticing, I said. I need you to try. This is our house. Our baby. I need you to do this. But I’m already doing so much! he cried. You never notice how much I am doing. I see all of it, I said. And I need more. Just for a while. But you’re better at these things, he said. I need you to figure it out, I begged. Get good at them. But these things are more important to you than to me. How am I supposed to remember stuff that’s not important to me? [image file=image_rsrc2FK.jpg] While a woman is taking care, who takes care of her? It’s an earnest question: I want to know. I wanted Brandon to care for me because I cared for him. Admittedly, it didn’t always look like care. When he was worn-out, I would snap, frustrated and bitter. He was bewildered by this and rightly asked why, when he got sick, I got mean. I flailed around like Oz behind the curtain.

• From Twelve Steps to a Compassionate Life (2010)

  18 Leviticus is a legal text, and any talk of emotion would be as out of place as it would be in a Supreme Court ruling. In the ancient Middle East, “love” was a legal term used in international treaties: when two kings promised to “love” each other, they pledged to be helpful and loyal and to give each other practical assistance and support, even if it went against their short-term interest. This should be within the capacity of even the most pragmatic government. In our global village, everybody is our neighbor, and it is essential to make allies of our enemies. We need to create a world democracy in which everybody’s voice is heard and everybody’s aspirations are taken seriously. In the last resort, this kind of “love” and “concern for everybody” will serve our best interest better than shortsighted and self-serving policies. So during this step, we add one final stage to the meditation on the Immeasurables. After you have directed your friendship, compassion, sympathetic joy, and upeksha to yourself, to a person who is neutral to you, and to somebody you dislike, bring to mind an “Enemy” with a capital E , something or someone that seems to threaten your survival and everything you stand for. It may be a state with whom your country is at war or an oppressive imperialism; it could be a religious tradition, or a nation that has injured and terrorized your people, deprived you of basic rights, and seems bent on your destruction. We begin, as always, with ourselves. You may, with good reason, feel deep anger toward the enemy. This is the starting point from which you have to work, so acknowledge your hatred. Take note of your profound reluctance to turn this enemy into a friend. Remember that we can become twinned with an enemy and come to resemble him. Our hatred may become an alter ego, a part of our identity. Reflect on the importance of distinguishing individuals from the leaders who preach hatred, and remember that people do not choose to be born into the situation that seems so inimical to you; it is one of the givens of life. Each member of an enemy nation, each adherent of every religious tradition, has his or her own personal history of distress and may be suffering from the situation as much as you. Does your enemy have a history of oppression, exploitation, exile, or persecution? Has your nation contributed to this? Finally, consider the flaws of your own people: Is your hatred another instance of the splinter and the plank? We are aiming at upeksha , an impartial, fair-minded assessment of the situation in the cause of peace. Try to wish for your enemy’s well-being and happiness; try to develop a sense of responsibility for your enemy’s pain. This is the supreme test of compassion. At first it may seem impossible.

• From Twelve Steps to a Compassionate Life (2010)

  Now that we have reached the twelfth step, we know that compassion cannot simply be a matter of sentiment or emotional tenderness. When Jesus tells us to love our enemies, he is commenting on the commandment in Leviticus “You must love your neighbor as yourself.” 18 Leviticus is a legal text, and any talk of emotion would be as out of place as it would be in a Supreme Court ruling. In the ancient Middle East, “love” was a legal term used in international treaties: when two kings promised to “love” each other, they pledged to be helpful and loyal and to give each other practical assistance and support, even if it went against their short-term interest. This should be within the capacity of even the most pragmatic government. In our global village, everybody is our neighbor, and it is essential to make allies of our enemies. We need to create a world democracy in which everybody’s voice is heard and everybody’s aspirations are taken seriously. In the last resort, this kind of “love” and “concern for everybody” will serve our best interest better than shortsighted and self-serving policies. So during this step, we add one final stage to the meditation on the Immeasurables. After you have directed your friendship, compassion, sympathetic joy, and upeksha to yourself, to a person who is neutral to you, and to somebody you dislike, bring to mind an “Enemy” with a capital E, something or someone that seems to threaten your survival and everything you stand for. It may be a state with whom your country is at war or an oppressive imperialism; it could be a religious tradition, or a nation that has injured and terrorized your people, deprived you of basic rights, and seems bent on your destruction. We begin, as always, with ourselves. You may, with good reason, feel deep anger toward the enemy. This is the starting point from which you have to work, so acknowledge your hatred. Take note of your profound reluctance to turn this enemy into a friend. Remember that we can become twinned with an enemy and come to resemble him. Our hatred may become an alter ego, a part of our identity. Reflect on the importance of distinguishing individuals from the leaders who preach hatred, and remember that people do not choose to be born into the situation that seems so inimical to you; it is one of the givens of life. Each member of an enemy nation, each adherent of every religious tradition, has his or her own personal history of distress and may be suffering from the situation as much as you. Does your enemy have a history of oppression, exploitation, exile, or persecution?

• From Lower than the Angels: A History of Sex and Christianity (2024)

  Mrs Thatcher might have suggested her agreement with the social anxieties that fuelled NFOL or NVLA activism, and both ladies were outraged at what they saw as the elitist liberalism of the Church of England hierarchy, but Mrs Thatcher was much more subtle in her vague deployment of such phrases as ‘common sense’ or ‘Victorian values’. Until the early 1990s, the vagueness paid electoral dividends for her and her party, where a more explicit alignment would have put off many British voters. [24] By contrast with Mrs Thatcher, neither the NFOL nor all Mrs Whitehouse’s skills at self-promotion in the NVLA achieved much. Their problem was

• From Lower than the Angels: A History of Sex and Christianity (2024)

  The question is not just frivolously playing around with words: it seriously concerned a gathering of Latin- speaking bishops at Mâcon, in what is now eastern France, in the late sixth century. Faced with an obtuse colleague who maintained that the description ‘woman’ could not be included in the term ‘man’, they decided, on the basis of Gen. 1.26–27, that Mary’s humanity as a woman (mulier in Latin) must be interchangeable with the ‘Man’ (homo) in ‘Son of Man’. [40] The problem in Christian theology is always how far to push the figurative gendered language of biblical and theological discussion towards precision. Precision is a particularly besetting sin of Christian theology in the Western tradition, which is based on Latin – a language whose exactness is heaven-sent for the theological filing-systems of tidy-minded bureaucrats, as the exasperated discussion at Mâcon reveals. Such questions go to the heart of what Christianity is, and how it functions. There is thus plenty of fuel to ignite the varied bundles of anger that we all bring to thinking of sex, sexuality and gender. All the more reason to embark on a three-thousand-year voyage of exploration through the origins, developments, reversals and unexpected new directions that have brought the Christianities of the present day into their present turmoils. Often those expeditions have been characterized by self-righteous ecclesiastical interference in the happiness and freedom of others. Equally, on occasion, the struggles of Christians with the implications of their tangle of sacred scriptures have brought people genuine liberation and a sense of self-worth. Readers will be forced into their own judgements about the balance between these extremes in particular situations. I aim to provide some evidence for making decisions. As we set out on our travels, it is worth being armed with a quiet reminder from one of Greek Orthodoxy’s greatest scholarly bishops of modern times, Metropolitan Kallistos Ware: ‘Trying to gaze through the keyhole is never a dignified posture.’ [41]

• From Disrupted: My Misadventure in the Start-Up Bubble (2014)

  Uber, the ride-sharing company, saves money by categorizing drivers as independent contractors rather than employees. Uber insists drivers prefer this because they enjoy more freedom. Uber and others in the “share economy” are creating a new form of serfdom, an underclass of quasi-employees who receive low pay and no benefits. As former secretary of labor Robert Reich put it in a June 2015 Facebook post: “The ‘share economy’ is bunk; it’s becoming a ‘share the scraps’ economy.” Tech companies also are pushing the U.S. government to increase the number of skilled foreign workers who can enter the country on H-1B visas. Reich says that too is a way to drive down labor costs. In a 2015 Facebook post, Reich recalls that during his time in office in the 1990s Valley employers claimed they could not find skilled workers in the United States, “when in reality they just didn’t want to pay higher wages to Americans.” Foreign workers are “easy to intimidate because if they lose their jobs they have to leave the U.S.,” Reich says. Why are tech companies so obsessed with cutting costs? Look at their financial results. Many don’t make a profit. The biggest difference between today’s tech start-ups and those of the pre-Internet era is that the old guard companies, like Microsoft and Lotus Development, generated massive profits almost from the beginning, while today many tech companies lose enormous amounts of money for years on end, even after they go public. They need to constantly drive costs down, using things like Halligan’s VORP metric. A more interesting question is why there are so many companies that remain in business while losing money. This seems like a peculiar business model. The point of creating a company is to generate a profit—or that used to be the case, anyway. That changed in the 1990s, during the first dotcom bubble, when Silicon Valley created a new kind of company, one that can lose money for years, and in fact might never turn a profit, yet still can make its founders and investors incredibly rich. A watershed moment occurred on August 9, 1995, when Netscape Communications, maker of the first web browser, pulled off a huge IPO and saw its shares nearly triple in their first day of trading. Until then, companies were typically expected to be profitable before they could sell shares to the public. Netscape was gushing red ink. Mary Meeker, an investment banker at Morgan Stanley, which underwrote the IPO, later recalled to Fortune: Was it early for the company to go public? Sure. There has been a rule of thumb that a company should have three quarters of obviously robust revenue growth. And you also traditionally wanted to see three quarters of profitability—improving profitability, for newer companies.

• From Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation (2020)

  Early in his presidency he announced his intention to open the armed forces to people regardless of their sexual orientation. Facing immediate backlash, he settled for a “Don’t ask, don’t tell” policy. Opposition came from within the military itself and from American evangelicals, and by this point, to be sure, the two groups were not mutually exclusive. Evangelicals in the military used materials supplied by the Family Research Council, Concerned Women for America, Focus on the Family, and Exodus International to oppose opening the military to gay service members. In turn, Dobson hosted Colonel Ronald D. Ray on his radio show, and Ray warned listeners that “military leaders were real naive about the widespread agenda” homosexuals were advancing.14 Evangelicals weren’t just concerned about “gays in the military.” They feared the “feminization” of the military as a whole under Clinton’s watch. In 1994, Clinton signed an order allowing women to serve on combat ships and fighter planes, a move that raised the ire of religious conservatives. This not only went against God-ordained gender difference, but by putting women where they didn’t belong it exposed them to the threat of sexual assault. During the 1990s, a series of sex scandals rattled the military. From the Tailhook incident in 1991 to the adultery of air force pilot Kelly Flinn, it was clear to conservatives that the military was no place for women. Women belonged on a pedestal, not on the field of battle. Making matters worse, Clinton further emasculated the military by sending troops on an array of UN peacekeeping missions. As Schlafly put it, Clinton and “overpaid bureaucrats” seemed intent on establishing the UN as “a world government with its own police force and its own taxing authority,” but she reminded readers that “no man can serve two masters.” Sending US soldiers as “UN mercenaries . . . on phony ‘peacekeeping’ expeditions” to places like Somalia, Haiti, and Rwanda was unconstitutional and un-American. And unmanly.15 Schlafly was right to sense that peacekeeping forces differed from traditional militaries. Decoupled from nationalist agendas, the UN stood as a model of post–Cold War, nonimperialist military force, one that appeared to eschew traditional militarism and patriarchal masculinity. Some members of the military also found this change unsettling. In the aftermath of the Cold War and the Gulf War, marine fighter pilots reported that they were losing confidence in themselves. Two years after their decisive victory in Iraq, without a clear mission, they didn’t even feel “like real marines.”16 IF CONSERVATIVE EVANGELICALS needed one more thing not to like about the Clintons, there was the Lewinsky affair.

• From Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation (2020)

  By 2009, Time magazine was labeling “The New Calvinism” one of “10 ideas changing the world right now.” As Ted Olsen, managing editor at Christianity Today explained, “everyone knows” that the energy and passion in the evangelical world were “with the pioneering new-Calvinist John Piper of Minneapolis, Seattle’s pugnacious Mark Driscoll and Albert Mohler, head of the Southern Seminary of the huge Southern Baptist Convention.”27 What was remarkable was that so many notoriously combative men could find common cause. There were certainly disagreements among leaders on a variety of topics, but they were able to smooth over these differences—including rather significant theological differences— because of a common reverence for patriarchal authority. For instance, one of the most notable theological differences among leaders concerned the question of cessationism—whether the spiritual gifts of tongues, prophecy, and healing ceased with the apostolic age (a view espoused by MacArthur) or continued into the present (a view expressed by charismatics and many New Calvinists, including Piper, Mahaney, and Grudem). Agreeing that “desperate times called for desperate measures,” these men could agree to disagree about speaking in tongues and the gift of prophecy because other issues—including gender complementarianism and church discipline—were more pressing.28 DOUG WILSON PROVIDES an interesting case study of the shifting alliances within the evangelical subculture. When he published Future Men in 2001, Wilson certainly wouldn’t have located himself at the center of evangelicalism. In fact, he was a stalwart critic of mainstream evangelicalism. Although his views on gender and authority aligned in many ways with those of other conservative evangelicals at the time, Wilson often carried those views to extreme, or perhaps logical, conclusions. A woman wearing a man’s clothing was “an abomination.” If a wife was not properly submissive, it was a husband’s duty to correct her. For instance, if dirty dishes lingered in the sink, he must immediately sit her down and remind her of her duty; if she rebelled, he was to call the elders of the church to intervene. In terms of child-rearing, “discipline must be painful.” God required the infliction of pain on those dear to us. Homosexuality must be suppressed, not excluding the possibility of the death penalty, though banishment was also an option. Wilson endorsed the concept of “Biblical hatred,” a form of militant masculine faithfulness exhibited by one of his heroes of the faith, Scottish minister John Knox.29 On issues of race, Wilson’s views were similarly extreme. In the 1990s, Wilson had coauthored Southern Slavery: As It Was , which questioned the supposed “brutalities, immoralities, and cruelties” of slavery. The slave trade might have been unbiblical, he allowed, but slavery most certainly was not. To the contrary, the radical abolitionists were the ones “driven by a zealous hatred of the Word of God.” Horrific descriptions of slavery were nothing more than abolitionist propaganda.

• From Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation (2020)

  Rather than turning the other cheek, they’d resolved to defend their faith and their nation, secure in the knowledge that the ends justify the means. Having replaced the Jesus of the Gospels with a vengeful warrior Christ, it’s no wonder many came to think of Trump in the same way. In 2016, many observers were stunned at evangelicals’ apparent betrayal of their own values. In reality, evangelicals did not cast their vote despite their beliefs, but because of them. Donald Trump did not trigger this militant turn; his rise was symptomatic of a long-standing condition. Survey data reveal the stark contours of the contemporary evangelical worldview. More than any other religious demographic in America, white evangelical Protestants support preemptive war, condone the use of torture, and favor the death penalty. They are more likely than members of other faith groups to own a gun, to believe citizens should be allowed to carry guns in most places, and to feel safer with a firearm around. White evangelicals are more opposed to immigration reform and have more negative views of immigrants than any other religious demographic; two-thirds support Trump’s border wall. Sixty-eight percent of white evangelical Protestants—more than any other demographic—do not think that the United States has a responsibility to accept refugees. More than half of white evangelical Protestants think a majority nonwhite US population would be a negative development. White evangelicals are considerably more likely than others to believe that Islam encourages violence, to refuse to see Islam as “part of mainstream American society,” and to perceive “natural conflict between Islam and democracy.” At the same time, white evangelicals believe that Christians in America face more discrimination than Muslims. White evangelicals are significantly more authoritarian than other religious groups, and they express confidence in their religious leaders at much higher rates than do members of other faiths.4 For evangelicals, domestic and foreign policy are two sides of the same coin. Christian nationalism—the belief that America is God’s chosen nation and must be defended as such—serves as a powerful predictor of intolerance toward immigrants, racial minorities, and non-Christians. It is linked to opposition to gay rights and gun control, to support for harsher punishments for criminals, to justifications for the use of excessive force against black Americans in law enforcement situations, and to traditionalist gender ideology. White evangelicals have pieced together this patchwork of issues, and a nostalgic commitment to rugged, aggressive, militant white masculinity serves as the thread binding them together into a coherent whole. A father’s rule in the home is inextricably linked to heroic leadership on the national stage, and the fate of the nation hinges on both.5 By November 2016, the affinities were clear. A substantial number of white evangelicals shared Trump’s nationalism, Islamophobia, racism, and nativism. They condoned his “nasty politics”: they agreed that injured protestors got what they deserved, that the country would be better off getting rid of “bad apples,” and that people were “too sensitive” about what was said in politics.

• From Twelve Steps to a Compassionate Life (2010)

  How dare you say to your brother: ‘let me take the splinter out of your eye,’ when all the time there is a plank in your own? Hypocrite! Take the plank out of your own eye first, and then you will see clearly enough to take the splinter out of your brother’s eye.” 5 Do we hear enough international news in the media? Are conflicts in other regions reported objectively and their background explained? Do you get to hear both sides of a dispute, or is reporting based on a narrowly national agenda? If you work in the media, consider how we can learn about the plight of our neighbors and adjust to the realities of our global society. Educators should realize that they have a responsibility to make sure that our children are given accurate, balanced, and respectful information about other peoples. If this had been done more carefully in the past, perhaps we would not be having so many problems in the present. We have thought carefully about the way our own suffering affects the way we behave. We have learned that the seeds of our anger are often in our own minds and that it is neither helpful nor accurate to assume that other people are always responsible for our pain. When you see violence in other parts of the world portrayed on the evening news, do you look askance at the rage and hatred in people’s faces, or do you ask yourself about the distress that has inspired this anger? Make a habit of looking behind the headlines to the ordinary people who are affected by a crisis. Remember that they did not choose to be born into that part of the world. Like you, they simply found themselves in a particular situation and may have been forced to conduct their whole lives in a context of violence, deprivation, and despair. We know from our own experience that deeds have long-term consequences. We are all affected, consciously and unconsciously, by the unkindness, neglect, contempt, and violence we have endured in the past. This is also true of whole nations: persecution, chronic warfare, bad governance, exploitation, marginalization, occupation, humiliation, enslavement, exile, impoverishment, and defamation all leave psychic scars that persist long after the event. They affect the way the new generation is brought up and can infiltrate the religious, intellectual, ethical, and social development of a country. People who have been taught to despise themselves cannot easily respect others.

• From Twelve Steps to a Compassionate Life (2010)

  There are of course times when we are required to be assertive. Even when we have gone through this process and understood the context in which a terrorist conceived his idea, we cannot, if we take the Golden Rule as our criterion, condone the course of action he has chosen. We have, however, broadened our horizons by developing an informed understanding of the possible frustration, humiliation, and despair of his situation and can now empathize with the plight of many of his innocent compatriots and coreligionists, who may feel something similar but have not resorted to criminal vengeance. Yet we must still dissociate ourselves from his atrocity. Nor should the “principle of charity” make us passive and supine in the face of injustice, cruelty, and discrimination. As we develop our compassionate mind, we should feel an increasing sense of responsibility for the suffering of others and form a resolve to do everything we can to free them from their pain. But it is no good responding to injustice with hatred and contempt. This, again, will simply inspire further antagonism and make matters worse. When we speak out in the defense of decent values, we must make sure that we understand the context fully and do not dismiss the values of our opponents as barbaric simply because they seem alien to us. We may find that we have the same values but express them in a radically different way. How do we assert a strongly felt conviction with compassion? Saint Paul provides us with a useful checklist in the famous description of love quoted earlier. Charity is “patient and kind”; it “is never boastful, never conceited, never rude,” never envious or “quick to take offence.” Charity “keeps no score of wrongs” and “takes no pleasure in the wrongdoing of others.” 15 If we are quick to take offense and positively smack our lips in self-righteous delight at the wrongdoing of others, we will fail this test. If we speak impatiently, rudely, or unkindly, we may be in danger of bringing ourselves down to the level of intolerance we are condemning. An older translation rendered the phrase “never boastful, never conceited” as “charity ... is not puffed up.” Our critique should not inflate the ego. Sometimes when people are inveighing against an abuse or crime, they seem almost to swell before our eyes with delicious self- congratulation. Gandhi left us a fine example of compassionate assertiveness: advocating nonviolent resistance, he frequently asked people to consider whether they fought to change things or to punish. When Jesus told his followers to turn the other cheek, Gandhi believed, he was urging them to show courage in the face of hostility. This was the way to transform hatred and contempt into respect. But nonviolence did not mean compliance with injustice: his opponents could have his dead body, Gandhi would insist, but not his obedience. During this step, we try to make ourselves mindful of the way we speak to others.

• From Lower than the Angels: A History of Sex and Christianity (2024)

  Moore’s thesis about Catharism, Western Christianity was now intensely bounded, even paranoid. Not only ‘heretics’ were its victims; so were Jews. They first suffered systematic murderous violence from Christians while armed crowds were gathering in Germany for the First Crusade; they have never been entirely free of it thereafter. England, in the twelfth century the leading component in a transmarine empire under the French Angevin dynasty, has some unenviable firsts in the persecuting society: the first European example of the infamous ‘blood libel’ against Jews, in a Norwich Cathedral cult following the supposed ritual murder of a local boy in 1144; the first mass victimization of accused Christian heretics in 1165–66; a particularly ghastly massacre by fire of the whole Jewish community at York as a ‘flagship’ of nationwide massacres in 1190, and finally, exactly a century later, official expulsion of the kingdom’s entire Jewish population, the first such expulsion in the whole continent. [24] Paranoia in the Iberian Peninsula about the large-scale survival of Jewish populations as Christians reconquered regions from their Muslim rulers produced one lasting Catholic peculiarity: a rebranding of an inescapable part of Jesus’s Jewish identity, his circumcision. From early centuries this was a liturgical Christian feast in East and West, to be celebrated around the turn of the year in January, but the Western growth in anti-Semitism stimulated the idea that it represented a Jewish physical assault on the infant Christ, the first shedding of his blood in anticipation of his crucifixion – to be blamed on the Jews just like their supposed murder of contemporary children. There resulted some disturbingly binary depictions of the Circumcision particularly in Iberian church art, ranging Mary and her Son against an ill-intentioned collection of Jews, with Joseph as a helpless spectator. In certain sections of the modern Roman Catholic Church, this is still perpetuated by the notion that the Circumcision is one of the Sorrows of Joseph, in parallel with the more long-standing devotion of the Sorrows of Mary, rather than the reality that it would have constituted a high point in any Jewish father’s life. [25] Victims of suspicion of the ‘Other’ varied over time. A particular moment of social panic throughout France in 1321 drew in all levels of society up to King Philip V himself, in the belief that lepers and Jews had combined together with the external enemy, Islam, to overthrow all good order in Christendom by poisoning wells. Lepers, normally the subject of institutional charity in medieval Europe, were victimized, tortured into confessions and burned at the stake, and the pogroms against Jews were no less horrific. Muslims had the good fortune at this time to be out of reach of French malice. [26] As the association of heretical Catharism with ‘buggery’ demonstrates, it was a very small step to bring same-sex activity defined as ‘sodomy’ into this circle of repression, although curiously, in the panic of 1321 mass hysteria passed the sodomites by.

• From Lower than the Angels: A History of Sex and Christianity (2024)

  16 Revolution and Catholicism Rebuilt (1789–1914) During the eighteenth century, the Enlightenment seemed the ally of princes and even of popes. The Society of Jesus until its dissolution in 1773 was at the centre of scientific discussion and curiosity about the natural world, just as was the Royal Society in Protestant London. As an ‘Enlightened Despot’ the Holy Roman Emperor Joseph II attempted large-scale dissolutions of monasteries in his dominions, but his thoroughly rational Enlightenment plans included redeploying confiscated assets for Catholic reform from a Religious Fund under his control, with such measures as endowing new parishes to meet modern needs. The Emperor was taken aback by the popular fury that he met, particularly in the Catholic Netherlands, where full-scale popular revolt broke out in 1789, derailing his schemes. [1] Yet we do not remember 1789 for this triumphant defence of Catholic Christendom and monasticism in the Low Countries. The Revolution that sprang out of the bankruptcy of the French monarchy became seized by the rhetoric of the most anti-Christian version of Enlightenment in Europe, provoked by hatred of a Church that, despite considerable internal tensions, had seemed one of the most powerful and successful versions of Catholicism on the continent after its victory over French Protestantism in the seventeenth century: it was distinguished by its proud ‘Gallican’ independence of Rome under its ‘Most Christian’ kings. The last of them, Louis XVI, took his name like so many of his predecessors from that King Clovis who in the fifth century turned the Christianity of Francia away from a possible Arian future towards Catholicism (above, Chapter 11). [2] It was only to be expected that the destruction of the Bourbon monarchy and the religious system in which it was enmeshed radically altered European attitudes to sexuality and the family – though not always with the revolutionary effects that we might expect. This chapter explores the resulting complications. THE FRENCH REVOLUTION: A BID TO CRUSH CHRISTENDOM In view of events over the following two decades, it was ironic that the crumbling of royal power in 1789 was provoked by the French clergy’s traditionalist insistence on recalling the States General, the kingdom’s medieval representative body, to tackle France’s financial crisis. As the remaking of the regime moved into a parliamentary monarchy, its inaugural Constituent Assembly pressured the King into accepting a complete reorganization of the French Church, including an extension to all faiths of a royal measure which in 1787, before the Revolution, had tentatively opened toleration for the Reformed Protestant Church. Monasteries were dissolved, Church wealth confiscated for the State, an oath of loyalty to the Civil Constitution required of all clergy. Soon it became apparent that the Pope was bitterly opposed to the measures; as provisions for a Constitutional Church unfolded during 1791, the Church became fatally divided as to whether to accept the new order, while the King was increasingly identified with conservatives opposing the very Church of which he was now nominal head.

• From Lower than the Angels: A History of Sex and Christianity (2024)

  28. St Peter’s Seminary, Cardross (Argyll and Bute) was planned for clergy training in the glory-days of the Scottish Catholic Church in the 1950s, and eventually designed in a self-confident Brutalist architectural idiom. Concrete Quarterly commented in 1967 that ‘the timber-lined bedrooms are comparable with those of a comfortable hotel, and better designed than most.’ The collapse in numbers entering the priesthood rapidly rendered it redundant; it closed in 1980 and is now a poignant ruin. One of the reasons for that long-drawn-out result was the divisive effect of this issue on the theological parties that had emerged worldwide in the nineteenth-century Anglican Communion. Both Evangelicals and Anglo-Catholics now fissured between traditionalists and those sympathetic to change, and that has endured into subsequent fights, notably around attitudes to homosexuality. There has never been an exact transference: it is notable that a few female Evangelical bishops still fail to notice that the same theological arguments propelling them to consecration to the episcopate apply just as much to accepting homosexual relationships on equal terms, while the same inconsistency is perceptible among some gay Anglo-Catholics who still deplore the ordination of women while gratefully accepting the liberalization that has helped them organize their lives as they would wish. Indeed, for obvious historical reasons, conservative Anglo-Catholics have never been as convincing or full-throated opponents of gay equality as conservative Evangelicals, despite usually voting in the same direction when Church legislative bodies have proposed change. Campaigns for gay rights were the logical fulfilment of Bishop Charles Gore’s prophecy on contraception (above, Chapter 18), though not a result he would have sought. The first impulse of gay Christians in the West, like African Americans in eighteenth-century north America or African Independent Churches in subsequent centuries, was to found their own Church communities, free of condescension or worse from the existing Churches. So, in 1968, Troy Perry, a former Pentecostal pastor, gathered a little congregation, at first in his own home in Huntington Park, a low-income suburb of Los Angeles. Perry chose to call his congregation the ‘Metropolitan Community Church’ (MCC). The carefully neutral description additionally reflected a consistent characteristic of the emerging gay liberation movement: as with self-assertions of identity throughout Western history, it was easier to make one’s own choice amid the relative anonymity of an urban setting. The MCC ethos remained Bible-based in a Pentecostal fashion, though from the beginning a diverse sacramental flavour was mixed in by Perry’s insistence on the centrality of a weekly Eucharist. He performed the first public same-sex wedding of the modern age in 1969, and after many difficulties in finding a place to worship, the congregation gained its first permanent building in 1971 – the victim of arson within two years. Conservative Evangelical hostility was predictable and vocal, often wildly misrepresenting the reality of the MCC. Interestingly it echoed the anger that Evangelicals had expressed towards Pentecostalism in general at the beginning of the century, and for a similar reason: the MCC looked too infuriatingly similar to Evangelical revivalism for comfort, so much of the vitriol was directed to alerting those who might have been tempted by its devotional style to the moral dangers that the community offered. Evangelicals had some reason for their alarm: the MCC grew at a rate that Evangelicals or Pentecostalists could only envy, having within five years of its foundation achieved 40 congregations with 13,000 members. Over the following half-century MCC congregations have emerged in hundreds of different contexts, still largely urban, across at least thirty-seven different countries. [11] Just as in the days of slavery in America, other gay Christians were determined to make their presence felt within existing denominations. Roman Catholics, inspired by Vatican II, were pioneers, with pastoral counselling groups founded by clergy that turned into more public witness and campaign organizations: Dignity from 1969 in the USA and, in the UK, Quest from 1973. Hardly surprisingly the Quakers were early pioneers as well, in the UK founding the Friends’ Homosexual Fellowship that same year. The next logical step was to try for a more ecumenical approach, witnessed by the creation of the Gay Christian Movement in 1976. The name was significantly male-centred, and the early ethos of GCM was predominantly Anglo-Catholic or liberal Anglican. In an organization notable for strongly fought internal debate, it took nearly a decade for a renaming as the Lesbian and Gay Christian Movement. Since 2017 the recognition of further complexities in queer identities have brought a name that is a more inclusive as well as theological proclamation: OneBodyOneFaith. [12] A TIME FOR JUDGING

• From Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation (2020)

  For example, Schlafly concluded her book with her “Vision for America.” First and foremost, “The Positive Woman starts with the knowledge that America is the greatest country in the world and that it is her task to do her part to keep it that way.” She must oppose bureaucratic government and creeping socialism (with its “destructive goal of equality”) in order to protect the American family and the greatness of private enterprise. She was a patriot and defender of “Judeo-Christian civilization,” and she supported legislators who did the same. Finally, the Positive Woman must work to keep the military strong. Women shouldn’t think that the problems of military defense were too complex or controversial to engage with. It was up to women to help save their country—God’s country.19 Schlafly didn’t have much to say about race, at least not explicitly. But at a time when racial politics found expression in an array of adjacent issues, her views came through clearly. Needless to say, they were frequently at odds with those of civil rights activists. She defended private schooling and sought to keep the federal government from interfering with parental choice. That she meant white parents went without saying. (She would later oppose immigration and promote English-only schools.) In an era when race was increasingly discussed through coded language, her ideas were embraced by the same communities who opposed civil rights. In fact, the ERA was the first issue conservatives rallied around after they lost the legal battle for segregation. As one politician noted at the time, conservatives didn’t talk about desegregation and busing all the time, but they were “seething inside,” and that anger could erupt in the form of impassioned opposition to the “equality of rights” ensconced in the ERA.20 The very language that critics of the ERA employed mirrored that used by segregationists. They spoke not of “forced” busing but of “forced” women, and they coined the term “desexegration.” Racial anxieties also surfaced in their rhetoric around “the potty issue.” Schools and public facilities had recently been integrated, and now the ERA threatened to turn public restrooms into unisex spaces. This was intolerable. One white woman in North Carolina wrote to her state senator to explain what was at stake: “We will have to use the same restrooms as the men both black and white.” A state legislator, too, made the connection plainly: “I ain’t going to have my wife be in the bathroom with some big, black buck!”21 This blending of racism and the perceived sexual vulnerability of white women had a long history in the South, even if historical evidence irrefutably demonstrates that it was black women who had reason to fear white men’s sexual aggression, not the other way around. But with the civil rights movement ending legal separation by race, white fears of imagined black male aggression reached a fevered pitch. That anti-ERA rhetoric focusing on the vulnerability of women found expression in racist terms is not altogether surprising.