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)

  The differences may be rooted not just in experience but in the faith itself; in practice, the seemingly neutral “evangelical distinctives” turn out to be culturally and racially specific. Although white evangelicals like to point to the existence of black “evangelicals” to distance their movement from allegations of racism and associations with conservative politics, black Christians themselves have attempted to draw attention to evangelicalism’s “problem of whiteness,” and to white evangelicals’ inability or unwillingness to confront this problem. In the aftermath of the 2016 election, the chorus of those calling out evangelicalism’s problem of whiteness became more difficult to ignore. To many black Christians, evangelicalism had become “a white religious brand.”9 Although foundational to white evangelical identity, race rarely acts as an independent variable. For conservative white evangelicals, the “good news” of the Christian gospel has become inextricably linked to a staunch commitment to patriarchal authority, gender difference, and Christian nationalism, and all of these are intertwined with white racial identity. Many Americans who now identify as evangelicals are identifying with this operational theology—one that is Republican in its politics and traditionalist in its values. This God-and-country faith is championed by those who regularly attend evangelical churches, and by those who do not. It creates affinities across denominational, regional, and socioeconomic differences, even as it divides Americans—and American Christians—into those who embrace these values, and those who do not. In this way, conservative white evangelicalism has become a polarizing force in American politics and society. White evangelicalism has such an expansive reach in large part because of the culture it has created, the culture that it sells. Over the past half century or so, evangelicals have produced and consumed a vast quantity of religious products: Christian books and magazines, CCM (“Christian contemporary music”), Christian radio and television, feature films, ministry conferences, blogs, T-shirts, and home decor. Many evangelicals who would be hard pressed to articulate even the most basic tenets of evangelical theology have nonetheless been immersed in this evangelical popular culture. They’ve raised children with the help of James Dobson’s Focus on the Family radio programs or grown up watching VeggieTales cartoons. They rocked out to Amy Grant or the Newsboys or DC Talk. They learned about purity before they learned about sex, and they have a silver ring to prove it. They watched The Passion of the Christ , Soul Surfer , or the latest Kirk Cameron film with their youth group. They attended Promise Keepers with guys from church and read Wild at Heart in small groups. They’ve learned more from Pat Robertson, John Piper, Joyce Meyer, and The Gospel Coalition than they have from their pastor’s Sunday sermons. The diffusion of evangelical consumer culture extends far beyond the orbit of evangelical churches. Cultural evangelicalism has made deep inroads into mainline Christianity, to the point that distinguishing members of a denomination like the United Methodist Church from evangelicals obscures more than it reveals.

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

  40 Lecture 7: Luke—Jesus the Savior of the World of other ancient historians (1:1–14). He tells us his sources of information, which are written accounts and oral tradition. Luke does not think favorably of his predecessor Gospel writers. He dedicates this work to “Theophilus,” perhaps a pagan Roman administrator of status or perhaps a ¿ ctional recipient whose name means “loved by God” or “lover of God.” Even though Luke did not use Matthew as a source, a comparison of the two can reveal some of Luke’s special emphases. Like Matthew, but unlike Mark, Luke provides a genealogy of Jesus. This genealogy is strikingly different from the one found in Matthew. In fact, in places it is quite literally a different genealogy—all the way from Jesus’ father’s father back to King David. (The attempt to reconcile these differences by saying that Luke’s genealogy gives the family tree of Mary rather than of Joseph overlooks the rather obvious fact that it claims to give the ancestors of Joseph.) More signi¿ cantly, Luke does not stress Jesus’ ties to David and Abraham. Instead, Luke’s genealogy goes as far back as one can imagine: to the progenitor of the human race, Adam (3:23–38). Unlike in Matthew, then, the emphasis here is not that Jesus is closely connected to the Jewish people through the king of Israel all the way back to the father of the Jews. Luke emphasizes that Jesus is closely connected to the entire human race through the father of us all. For this author more than any other we’ve seen, Jesus’ salvation comes to the entire world. This stress can be found throughout Luke at critical junctures, as can be seen by comparing several episodes with those found in Mark. About halfway through Jesus’ ministry in Mark, he goes to his hometown and preaches in the synagogue, only to be rejected by his own people, who can’t understand how a simple carpenter can speak such words of wisdom (Mark 6:1–6). Luke has the account, but changes it signi¿ cantly (Luke 4:16–30). The ¿ rst thing to notice is that in Luke, this episode occurs as the very ¿ rst event in Jesus’ ministry. The story is used, in other words, to set the stage for all that is to come. Moreover, the account is much longer in Luke, who has Jesus read from the prophet Isaiah, then claim that these very predictions are ful¿ lled in him. Unlike in Mark, Jesus likens himself to two prominent prophets of the Hebrew Bible, Elijah and Elisha, who were sent (to the chagrin of their compatriots) to minister to both Jews and Gentiles. The people in the synagogue become outraged at Jesus’ claims about himself and not only

• From The Fixed Stars: A Memoir (2020)

  Every couple fights the same fights over and over, and we too had choruses we’d return to. In an effort to make a life, and to make that life work, we’d assumed particular stances. With him at the restaurant, I did everything at home. When I asked for help, he said I wanted too much. He said I didn’t value how hard he was working. If I pointed out a task he’d forgotten to do, he pronounced me petty: If I was the one who noticed these things, why didn’t I just take care of it? I developed a habit of collecting discontents, sitting on my complaints and hurts like a clutch of bad eggs. He’d dismiss me as “irrational” or “crazy,” which had the logical effect of making me crazy. Once, arguing our way up the steps to our duplex, I pummeled him in the chest with a bundle of mail. Nine weeks pregnant, sitting at our kitchen table as we argued, I lifted a white china bowl of beans over my head and, in the sweaty grip of first-trimester hormones, launched it at the wood floor. It exploded in a confetti of shards and brown goo. I grabbed my keys on the way to the front door and drove loops in the dark while my phone rang, Brandon Brandon Brandon, on the passenger seat. We had flashes of understanding, moments of seeing our patterns and bad habits. I instated a rule: the words crazy and irrational were never to be used in our house. I could see him sometimes fighting to keep them off his lips. The life we’d built seemed to depend, at least in part, on positions we’d assumed long before, and it seemed impossible, and often inadvisable, to break them. [image file=image_rsrc2FK.jpg] In early 2011, the New York Times Book Review published a rant called “The Problem with Memoirs.”4 I was in the thick of writing Delancey, a memoir. The article could be summed up by its snide illustration: the word Memoir typed in bold black lettering, marked up by an unseen editor’s red pen so that the last four letters were deleted and a period fell after the e. The first sentence of the piece was, “A moment of silence, please, for the lost art of shutting up.” I shouldn’t have read the rest, but I did, and to demonstrate how unfazed—indeed, how inspired, how totally nondefensive—I was, I printed it out and pinned it to the wall of my office. There was one line that I highlighted, and I remember it verbatim: “If you still must write a memoir, consider making yourself the least important character in it.” I could do that, and I would. I did. I made Brandon the hero of the story and myself the small, miserly villain. If it’s bad form to be the center of my story, then I should be cast out. I must be punished, and I will do it myself.

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

  were liberalizing their laws; in that year, 90 per cent of Texas Baptists thought the law too restrictive in their state and 70 per cent of Baptist pastors supported abortion ‘to protect the mental or physical health of the mother’. The formidable and popular Republican First Lady Betty Ford roundly declared her support for Roe v. Wade in 1975. Only gradually did the Republican Right complete its jigsaw of support among conservative Christians. [38] In a considerable irony, the turning point was the Presidency of the Democrat Jimmy Carter (1977–81), who was a devout and ‘born-again’ Southern Baptist, but who came from that minority of Southern Evangelical Christians who had enthusiastically embraced Civil Rights. On various issues, such as his openness to Christian ecumenism and his lukewarmness towards ‘faith schools’ that countered the perceived liberalism of public education, Carter alienated conservatives, but in no respect more than the tone of the national ‘White House Conference on the Family’ that the President belatedly convened in 1980. It was an attempt to shore up his vote among Christian conservatives, particularly Catholics, but Carter’s progressive Christian moral instincts defeated his electoral pragmatism. The tone set from the top was of liberal Protestantism in its post-Sixties mode: the organizers pluralized the Conference’s title to ‘on Families’ and made thoughtful statements about gay relationships. Just as offensive to Southern conservatives, though more difficult to express publicly, was the presence on the Advisory Committee of such Civil Rights icons as the Revd Jesse Jackson and Coretta Scott King, the widow of Martin Luther King. [39] Even before the Conference had begun, angry Evangelical leaders met in 1979 and stumbled across a resonant title for an organization to do something about their wrath: the ‘Moral Majority’. By the end of Carter’s turbulent period in office, he had lost the conservative Evangelical constituency. In 1980 they voted for Ronald Reagan and the Republican Party, and have done so ever since, regardless of the religious affiliations (or lack of them) of successive Republican Presidents. They even made common cause with the old enemy Catholics, opposition to abortion and all, for the ‘Moral Majority’ was designed to include them both. The Evangelical leader Francis Schaeffer godfathered this strategy, though he still cautioned in 1982 that ‘we must never forget that this is only a passing co-belligerency and not an alliance.’ The Evangelical televangelist-turned-politician Pat Robertson had declared in the year of Reagan’s election: ‘We have enough votes to run the country...and when the people say, “We’ve had enough” we are going to take over.’ [40] That was premature: no Republican President has allowed his term in office to be dominated by the legislative programme of the Religious Right on family policy generally, and particularly not on measures against abortion until the turn of the century. Nevertheless, in the 1980s conservatives successfully kidnapped the theme of ‘family values’, once the common concern of progressive and conservative American Protestants.

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

  For Rushdoony and his devotees, freedom was found not in individual autonomy, but in proper submission to authority, and he believed that God-ordained authorities in each sphere of life—family, church, and government—should function without outside interference. Churches must be free from government interference, and the family, under the authority of the patriarch, must also be protected from state intrusion. Public schools, too, posed a direct threat to the authority of the family by usurping parents’ role in inculcating values. For this reason, Rushdoony and his followers promoted Christian schools and, even more preferable, homeschooling.1 Like Rushdoony, Gothard believed that most problems could be solved by submitting to the proper authorities in each domain of life. To this end, he advanced the idea of a divinely ordained “chain of command” similar to that of the military. In the family, the father was the ultimate authority. A wife owed her husband total submission, requiring approval for even the smallest household decisions, and children owed parents absolute obedience in both action and attitude. The church was also part of the proper functioning of society, and church leaders were to wield absolute, God-given authority over members. Government, too, administered divinely sanctioned authority, with national leaders exercising authority over local officials, who in turn exercised authority over citizens. Proper authority structured business as well; the employer wielded God-given authority over employees. In this way, proponents of “biblical law” married “traditional” gender roles to unrestrained, free-market capitalism. It was a match made in heaven. For Gothard, those in authority were stand-ins for God and were owed absolute obedience. In his moral universe, the notion of personal rights interfered with the hierarchical structure of authority, contradicting God’s design and provoking only anger and resentment. The meek would inherit the earth; the solution for the aggrieved was not in changing their circumstances, but rather in wholesale submission to the authorities placed over them. For both Gothard and Rushdoony, this order found expression in the authoritarian rule of men. Men who forsook their duty to impose order abdicated their masculinity, allowing women to usurp their power, and Rushdoony eagerly awaited the day when “once independent and feministic women” would be humbled and “seek the protection and safety of a man.”2 To help families navigate conflicts, Gothard offered extensive and inflexible rules. Dating was forbidden, and instead courtship was arranged and supervised by fathers. Girls were ordered to avoid “eye-traps”—anything that would draw attention to their bodies, such as necklines that dropped lower than the collarbone and skirts that fell above the ankle. Domesticity was upheld as women’s highest calling, and higher education for girls was discouraged. When family conflicts proved irresolvable, IBLP offered to institutionalize children until their attitudes and behaviors were rectified.

• From Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence (2014)

  We know very little about its ideology, because the biblical editors favored the smaller and more isolated Kingdom of Judah. But both probably conformed to local traditions. Like most Middle Eastern kings, the king of Judah was raised to a semidivine “state of exception” during the coronation ritual, when he became Yahweh’s adopted son and a member of the Divine Assembly of gods. 83 Like Baal, Yahweh was celebrated as a warrior god who defended his people from their enemies: “When he grows angry he shatters kings, he gives the nations their deserts; smashing their skulls, he heaps the world with corpses.” 84 The chief responsibility of the king was to secure and extend his territory, the source of the kingdom’s revenues. He was therefore in a perpetual state of conflict with neighboring monarchs, who had exactly the same goals. Israel and Judah were thus drawn inexorably into the local network of trade, diplomacy, and warfare. The two kingdoms had emerged when the imperial powers of the region were in eclipse, but during the early eighth century, Assyria was in the ascendant again, its military might forcing weaker kings into vassal status. Yet some of these conquered kingdoms flourished. King Jeroboam II (786–746 BCE) became a trusted Assyrian vassal, and the Kingdom of Israel enjoyed an economic boom. But because the rich became richer and the poor even more impoverished, the king was castigated by the prophet Amos. 85 The prophets of Israel kept the old egalitarian ideals of Israel alive. Amos chastised the aristocracy for trampling on the heads of ordinary people, pushing the poor out of their path, 86 and cramming their palaces with the fruits of their extortion. 87 Yahweh, he warned, was no longer unconditionally on Israel’s side but would use Assyria as his instrument of punishment. 88 The Assyrians would invade the kingdom, loot and destroy its palaces and temples. 89 Amos imagined Yahweh roaring in rage from his sanctuary at the war crimes committed by the local kingdoms, Israel included. 90 In Judah too, the prophet Isaiah inveighed against the exploitation of the poor and the expropriation of peasant land: “Cease to do evil. Learn to do good, search for justice, help the oppressed, be just to the orphan, and plead for the widow.” 91 The dilemma was that this callowness was essential to the agrarian economy and had the kings of Israel and Judah fully implemented these compassionate policies, they would have been easy prey for Assyria. 92 In 745 Tiglath-pileser III abolished the system of vassalage and incorporated all the conquered peoples directly into the Assyrian state.

• From Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence (2014)

  All Hizbollah leaders still attend philosophy classes to develop their capacity to think critically and independently. As the American civil rights activists did, they work with small groups in the villages to discover how each individual can best contribute to the community: they may set someone up in business or train him for an elite militia. Their goal, reminiscent of the Confucian ideal, is to develop a Shii community in which everybody receives and gives a measure of respect and feels valued and needed. Since the 2006 war with Israel, Hizbollah has concentrated especially on anger management: “We want to turn this anger from a destructive course into something politically useful—building resistance, perhaps—or into some socially constructive activity.” 49 During that war, Hizbollah modeled an alternative solution to the problem of asymmetrical warfare. 50 In preparation for such a contingency, it had constructed deep underground tunnels and bunkers, some forty feet below the surface, where its militias could sit out Israeli air strikes, before emerging to mount a prolonged rocket and missile attack. Hizbollah knew that these could not seriously damage the powerful Israeli war machine, but the long duration and unremitting nature of these missile barrages did affect Israeli morale. Hizbollah’s goal was to force Israel to launch a ground invasion, whereupon the well-trained Hizbollah guerrilla forces, with intimate knowledge of the terrain, could effectively assault Israel’s armored tanks with their shoulder-launched missiles. They had also achieved such a mastery of intelligence and public relations that many Israeli journalists frankly admitted that they preferred Hizbollah’s dispatches to the IDF’s. Their victory in compelling the Israelis to withdraw demonstrated that terrorism need not be the only way to repel a militarily superior enemy. As an inspiration for terrorism, however, nationalism has been far more productive than religion. Terrorism experts agree that the denial of a people’s right to national self-determination and the occupation of its homeland by foreign forces has historically been the most powerful recruiting agent of terrorist organizations, whether their ideology is religious (the Lebanese Shii) or secular (the PLO). 51 In Israel, however, we have seen a different dynamic of secular nationalism pushing a religious tradition into a more militant direction: its tendency to make the nation-state a supreme value so that its preservation and integrity permit any form of action, however extreme. In May 1980, after the murder of six yeshiva students in Hebron, Gush settlers Menachem Livni and Yehuda Etzion planted bombs in the cars of five Arab mayors, intending not to kill but to mutilate them so that they became living reminders of the consequences of any opposition to Israel. 52 But this operation was only a sideline. In April 1984 the Israeli government revealed the existence of a Jewish underground movement that had plotted to blow up the Dome of the Rock in order to bring the Camp David talks to an end.

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

  10. A late Roman female bust reveals its recutting from a second-century portrait of Hadrian’s lover Antinous, recognizable by his distinctive hairstyle surviving at the rear of the head. At the same time, one of the early Church’s most significant churchmen and preachers was devoting his considerable powers of oratory to sermons and treatises vehemently denouncing same-sex activity. John Chrysostom (‘Golden-Mouth’) was Bishop first of Antioch and later of Constantinople, though that proved not to be his finest hour. Sexual relations between men were indeed quite an obsession with him; John Boswell comments that Chrysostom ‘probably wrote more about the subject of same-sex sexuality than any other pre-Freudian writer except [the eleventh-century] Peter Damian’. In his angry addresses to city and Church, the Bishop was consciously campaigning against a still-flourishing contemporary culture of Mediterranean older–younger male relationships, even (he claimed) within Antioch’s large Christian community. [14] Chrysostom’s picture of same-sex relations was quite traditional: not an exclusive lifetime sexual identity, but as part of a generalized sexuality that might make adolescents lust after the beauty of women or young men alike. What was not traditional was that Chrysostom was campaigning at all; in doing so he pointed to the sea-change in official mood, as well as to the Bible. He specifically contrasted the customary (and deplorable) Graeco-Roman treatment of the practice ‘not as a vice but something honourable’ with Paul’s strong condemnation of it in Romans 1, but in the same passage he also abruptly shifted his argument away from Paul to parallel the punitive actions taken in Rome in 390: ‘A dog at least is useful, but a male prostitute is good for nothing.’ [15] With such denunciation in the background, emperors in Constantinople successively tidied up inconsistencies in the repression of same-sex activity, one remarkable inconsistency being that the imperial government continued to benefit financially from a tax on male prostitutes, until it was abolished by the Emperor Anastasios (reigned 491–518). [16] During the reign of Anastasios’s soldier-successor Justin, real imperial power passed to a nephew of Justin’s, Justinian. Even before Justinian began his long, hyperactive and transformative reign (527–65), the regime in 521 unleashed a set-piece punitive action against various prominent men accused of same-sex activity; they included two bishops from widely dispersed parts of the Eastern Empire. These were changed times in more than one sense, for such bishops were now part of the political establishment: one of them, Isaiah, Bishop of Rhodes, had previously been the imperial official in charge of security in the city of Constantinople. Whatever the truth of their activities, and whatever political element there was in scapegoating these significant public figures, their fate spelled out Justinian’s Christian values on sex. Bishop Alexander of Diospolis in Thrace and a number of other offenders were taken to Constantinople, sexually humiliated in public with exceptional sadism and then castrated, although Bishop Isaiah merely suffered torture and exile for life. [17] What motivated this brutal political theatre in the name of morality?

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

  [10] Wilberforce and other male abolitionists who echoed him were absolutely correct in their foreboding; they were witnessing the birth of what has been termed ‘first-wave feminism’, the beginning of profound and permanent change in Western culture, in parallel to the feminism of Catholic Europe (above, Chapter 16). If they quoted misogynist scripture, it was adroitly countered by female campaigners who used to feminine advantage all the current commonplaces of separate gender spheres: were not women more open to the voice of God and Christian morality than men, and should they not therefore preach fearlessly? English Dissent and Methodism – and their American denominational equivalents – had already given women guidance in how to push the boundaries of male assumptions about female initiative within institutions. Rhetorical constructs of society for public consumption were always capable of being manipulated within the complexities of private reality. [11] Some abolitionist men, such as the prominent north American campaigner against slavery William Lloyd Garrison, did draw the conclusion that women had earned their place in politics on an equal basis with men. Yet most stayed with Wilberforce, as became painfully apparent in 1840, when the World Anti-Slavery convention convening in London proposed that women should not occupy the platform, nor even the main hall; a fierce row on the first day did not sway the organizers, and women were left as spectators in the gallery. American delegates to the London Convention, outraged, organized their own Convention on Women’s Rights in Seneca Falls, New York, in 1848; it included both female and male delegates, mostly Quakers, and called for women’s full legal equality with men. The veteran English Quaker campaigner Anne Knight also found the London Convention a galvanizing moment towards her wider conclusion about gender equality: she was even drawn into the revolutionary upheavals in Paris in 1848, where the appeal for women’s rights fell on equally deaf male ears. In 1851, back in Britain, Knight (now in her mid-sixties) founded the first organization to campaign for women’s suffrage, the Sheffield Female Political Association, confronting the British House of Lords with a petition on the subject. Among other pioneering consumer gambits were her branded envelope labels in a scheme of bright colours to be displayed on campaigning letters. [12]

• From The Well of Loneliness (1928)

  ‘Oh, no, but you can’t be!’ Violet insisted. ‘I was talking to Alec and Roger about you, and Roger was saying it’s an awful mistake for women to get false ideas into their heads. He thinks you’ve got rather a bee in your bonnet; he told Alec that you’d be quite a womanly woman if you’d only stop trying to ape what you’re not.’ Presently she said, staring rather hard: ‘That Mrs. Crossby—do you really like her? Of course I know you’re friends and all that—But why are you friends? You’ve got nothing in common. She’s what Roger calls a thorough man’s woman. I think myself she’s a bit of a climber. Do you want to be used as a scaling ladder for storming the fortifications of the county? The Peacocks have known old Crossby for years, he’s a wonderful shot for an ironmonger, but they don’t care for her very much I believe—Alec says she’s man-mad, whatever that means, anyhow she seems desperately keen about Roger.’ Stephen said: ‘I’d rather we didn’t discuss Mrs. Crossby, because, you see, she’s my friend.’ And her voice was as icy cold as her hands. ‘Oh, of course if you’re feeling like that about it—’ laughed Violet, ‘no, but honest, she is keen on Roger.’ When Violet had gone, Stephen sprang to her feet, but her sense of direction seemed to have left her, for she struck her head a pretty sharp blow against the side of a heavy bookcase. She stood swaying with her hands pressed against her temples. Angela and Roger Antrim—those two—but it couldn’t be, Violet had been purposely lying. She loved to torment, she was like her brother, a bully, a devil who loved to torment—it couldn’t be—Violet had been lying. She steadied herself and leaving the room and the house, went and fetched her car from the stables. She drove to the telegraph office at Upton: ‘Come back, I must see you at once,’ she wired, taking great care to prepay the reply, lest Angela should find an excuse for not answering. The clerk counted the words with her stump of a pencil, then she looked at Stephen rather strangely. 2The next morning came Angela’s frigid answer: ‘Coming home Monday fortnight not one day sooner please no more wires Ralph very much upset.’ Stephen tore the thing into a hundred fragments and then hurled it away. She was suddenly shaking all over with uncontrollable anger. 3Right up to the moment of Angela’s return that hot anger supported Stephen. It was like a flame that leapt through her veins, a flame that consumed and yet stimulated, so that she purposely fanned the fire from a sense of self preservation.

• From Twelve Steps to a Compassionate Life (2010)

  They are not confined to the fundamentalist or conservative camp, but can also be detected in some so-called liberal discourse. How often do you hear the “principle of charity” at work? Despite our advanced civilization and sophistication, to what extent are we still prey to the mechanisms of the me-first old brain? When you defend something you feel tribal about, take note of the way your threat mechanism has been activated, so that you lose your dispassion and ability to assess the other side fairly and rationally. Notice the way you become “puffed up” with righteous aggression, your anger, disgust, and desire to wound. Do you sense in yourself, or in your friends and fellow countrymen, a tendency to follow the leader blindly during a political, cultural, or social crisis so that you cry, in effect, “My country, right or wrong”? Recall the seventh step: How Little We Know. How much of the confident talk you hear about the backwardness, arrogance, or intolerance of other national, cultural, ethnic, or religious groups is based purely on hearsay? When you or your friends are critical of another nation, how much do you actually know about it? Make a list of what you know for certain about its history, its culture, and its current circumstances. How reliable are your sources? If you feel incensed when people attack your own cultural or religious values, is it ethical to inflict that pain on others? Consider Jesus’s words: “Why do you observe the splinter in your brother’s eye and never notice the plank in your own? 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.

• From The Well of Loneliness (1928)

  She described the eventual cataclysm, when the home had been sold up with everything in it, and she and her father had set out for New York—she just seventeen and he broken and ailing—to rebuild his dissipated fortune. And because she was now painting a picture of real life, untinged by imagination, her words lived, and her voice grew intensely bitter. ‘Hell—it was hell! We went under so quickly. There were days when I hadn’t enough to eat. Oh, Stephen, the filth, the unspeakable squalor—the heat and the cold and the hunger and the squalor. God, how I hate that great hideous city! It’s a monster, it crushes you down, it devours—even now I couldn’t go back to New York without feeling a kind of unreasoning terror. Stephen, that damnable city broke my nerve. Father got calmly out of it all by dying one day—and that was so like him! He’d had about enough, so he just lay down and died; but I couldn’t do that because I was young—and I didn’t want to die, either. I hadn’t the least idea what I could do, but I knew that I was supposed to be pretty and that good-looking girls had a chance on the stage, so I started out to look for a job. My God! Shall I ever forget it!’ And now she described the long, angular streets, miles and miles of streets; miles and miles of faces all strange and unfriendly—faces like masks. Then the intimate faces of would-be employers, too intimate when they peered into her own—faces that had suddenly thrown off their masks. ‘Stephen, are you listening? I put up a fight, I swear it! I swear I put up a fight—I was only nineteen when I got my first job—nineteen’s not so awfully old, is it, Stephen?’ Stephen said: ‘Go on,’ and her voice sounded husky.

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  Through his interest in the Jews and in rabbinical literature, Reuchlin became involved in a controversy which spread over all Europe and called forth decrees from Cologne and other universities, the archbishop of Mainz, the inquisitor-general of Germany, Hoogstraten, the emperor, Maximilian, and Pope Leo X. The monks were his chief opponents, led by John Pfefferkorn, a baptized Jew of Cologne. The controversy was provoked by a tract on the misery of the Jews, written by Reuchlin, 1505—Missive warumb die Juden so lang im Elend sind. Here the author made the obstinacy of the Jews in crucifying Christ and their persistence in daily blaspheming him the just cause of their sorrows, but, instead of calling for their persecution, he urged a serious effort for their conversion. In a series of tracts, Pfefferkorn assaulted this position and demanded that his former coreligionists, as the sworn enemies of Christ, should be compelled to listen to Christian preaching, be forbidden to practise usury and that their false Jewish books should be destroyed.1071 The flaming anti-Semite prosecuted his case with the vigor with which a few years later Eck prosecuted the papal case against Luther. Maximilian, whose court he visited three times to present the matter, Hoogstraten and the University of Cologne took Pfefferkorn’s side, and the emperor gave him permission to burn all Jewish books except, of course, the Old Testament. Called upon to explain his position by the archbishop of Mainz, with whom Maximilian left the case, Reuchlin exempted from destruction the Talmud, the Cabbala and all other writings of the Jews except the Nizahon and the Toledoth Jeshu, which, after due examination and legal decision, might be destroyed, as they contained blasphemies against Christ, his mother and the Apostles. He advised the emperor to order every university in Germany to establish chairs of Hebrew for ten years.1072

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  Piety which should proceed from a living union of the soul with Christ and a consecration of character, was turned outward and reduced to a round of mechanical performances such as the recital of Paternosters and Avemarias, fasting, alms-giving, confession to the priest, and pilgrimage to a holy shrine. Good works were measured by the quantity rather than the quality, and vitiated by the principle of meritoriousness which appealed to the selfish motive of reward. Remission of sin could be bought with money; a shameful traffic in indulgences was carried on under the Pope’s sanction for filthy lucre as well as for the building of St. Peter’s Dome, and caused that outburst of moral indignation which was the beginning of the Reformation and of the fearful judgment on the Church of Rome. This is a one-sided, but not an exaggerated description. It is true as far as it goes, and needs only to be supplemented by the bright side which we shall present in the next section. Honest Roman Catholic scholars, while maintaining the infallibility and consequent doctrinal irreformability of their church, admit in strong terms the decay of discipline and the necessity of a moral reform in the sixteenth century.3 The best proof is furnished by a pope of exceptional integrity, Adrian VI., who made an extraordinary confession of the papal and clerical corruption to the Diet of Nürnberg in 1522, and tried earnestly, though in vain, to reform his court. The Council of Trent was called not only for the extirpation of heresy, but in part also "for the reformation of the clergy and Christian people;"4 and Pope Pius IV., in the bull of confirmation, likewise declares that one of the objects of the Council was "the correction of morals and the restoration of ecclesiastical discipline."5 On the other hand, it must be admitted that the church was more than once in a far worse condition, during the papal schism in the fourteenth, and especially in the tenth and eleventh centuries; and yet she was reformed by Pope Hildebrand and his successors without a split and without an alteration of the Catholic Creed. Why could not the same be done in the sixteenth century? Because the Roman church in the critical moment resisted reform with all her might, and forced the issue: either no reformation at all, or a reformation in opposition to Rome.

• From The Decameron (1353)

  The lady’s brothers, who believed every word of his story, were exceedingly angry, and, calling for torches to be lit, they set forth with Arriguccio and made their way to his house, determined to punish her severely. On seeing how incensed they were against her daughter, the mother burst into tears and began to follow them, pleading with each of them in turn not to be taken in so quickly by everything they heard without looking further into the matter. She pointed out that the husband might have some other reason for losing his temper and knocking her about, and that he might have trumped up these charges against her as a cover for his own misdeeds. Moreover, she was astonished that such a thing could have happened, knowing her daughter as she did, and having brought her up herself from her infancy. And she made a great many more observations, all of them in similar vein. On arriving at Arriguccio’s house, they all went inside and began to ascend the stairs, and Monna Sismonda, hearing them coming, called out: ‘Who is it?’ Whereupon one of her brothers replied: ‘You’ll find out soon enough who it is, you brazen hussy.’ And so Monna Sismonda said: ‘What can be the meaning of this? Good Lord, deliver us.’ And rising to her feet, she added: ‘Brothers, how nice to see you. But what can have brought the three of you here at this hour of the night?’ When they saw her sitting there with her sewing, and without a mark on her face albeit Arriguccio had claimed that he had beaten her black and blue all over, her brothers were somewhat taken aback, and the vehemence of their anger was diminished. But having recovered from the initial shock, they demanded an explanation of the complaint that Arriguccio had laid against her, threatening to deal with her severely if she told them any lies. ‘I don’t know what I’m supposed to tell you,’ said the lady, ‘nor do I know why Arriguccio should have complained to you about me.’ Arriguccio could do nothing but gape at her as though he had lost his wits, for he could remember having punched her times without number about the face, scratched it well and truly, and given her the biggest hiding imaginable, yet as far as he could tell she bore no trace whatever of all this. But to cut a long story short, her brothers told her what Arriguccio had said, mentioning the string and the thrashing he had given her and all the other details, whereupon the lady turned to Arriguccio, saying:

• From The Decameron (1353)

  On realizing that she could see him, Calandrino was filled with anger and dismay, and began to shout: ‘Blast you, woman, why did you have to be standing there? Now you’ve ruined everything, but I swear to God I’ll make you pay for it.’ And having ascended the stairs, he deposited his enormous collection of stones in one of the smaller rooms and rushed upon his wife like a madman. Catching her by the tresses, he hurled her to the ground at his feet and began to pummel her and kick her as hard as he could until she was bruised and battered all over from head to foot, whilst all the time she was pleading in vain for mercy and clasping her hands in a gesture of supplication. Bruno and Buffalmacco, having tarried for a while at the city gate to have a good laugh with the watchmen, slowly set off to follow Calandrino at a distance, and when, on reaching his front door, they heard the sound of the terrible beating he was inflicting on his wife, they pretended they had only just returned, and called out to him. Calandrino appeared at the window, flushed, panting, and covered in sweat, and asked them to come up. So up the stairs they went, scowling all over their faces, to find the room cluttered up with stones and the woman huddled in a corner, her hair dishevelled, her clothes torn, and her face covered with scratches and bruises, crying her eyes out, whilst at the other side of the room Calandrino was sitting gasping for breath as though he were completely exhausted, his clothes in total disarray. Having spent a little time surveying the scene, they said: ‘What’s all this, Calandrino? Are you planning to build a wall with all these stones we can see lying about?’ And so as to add insult to injury, they continued: ‘What’s happened to Monna Tessa? It looks as though you’ve been giving her a beating. Whatever made you do that?’ What with the weight of all the stones he had carried, and the fury with which he had assailed his wife, and his despair over losing the fortune he had imagined to be within his grasp, Calandrino was so fatigued that he couldn’t draw sufficient breath to utter a single word in reply. So Buffalmacco, having paused for a while, began all over again, saying: ‘Look here, Calandrino, you had no right to play such a mean trick on us, just because you were feeling piqued about something or other. You talked us into going with you to look for this magic stone, and then, without so much as bidding us fare you well or fare you badly, you left us standing there along the Mugnone like a pair of boobies, and cleared off home. We’re not exactly pleased with the way you’ve behaved: and you can rest assured that you’ll never do this to us again.’

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

  We do not know enough about its context, or even which member of the House of Lords introduced the draft legislation; it came amid King Henry’s campaign to intimidate the Church authorities into accepting his forthcoming marriage to Anne Boleyn, so it is likely to be a further effort to discredit and demoralize clergy. The Act was too early in the English Reformation to have a Protestant motive, but it formed the first instance of Parliament taking to itself moral regulation previously the responsibility of the Church, and so it was a perfect instance of a monarch following Erasmus’s advice to become ‘abbot’ or moral guardian in his own kingdom. As Henry’s break with Rome morphed into a Protestant Reformation, the buggery statute endured, and it governed national legislation on the subject down to the nineteenth century. [103] The cross-confessional unanimity was unmistakable. The scholarly Jesuit analyst of witchcraft and magic Martin del Rio recorded with fury in his memoirs that, when Dutch Protestants seized the city of Ghent in 1578, they forced four young friars to confess under torture to acts of sodomy with older brethren; the four were burned alive, one chosen from each of the four fraternal Orders. [104] Witnesses later confessed to the falsity of the confessions; but true or not, this was (perhaps consciously) the same penalty that the Spanish Inquisition inflicted on convicted sodomites in its Castilian jurisdiction, in fact around 150 of them between 1570 and 1630. In Rome, Pope Sixtus V burned a priest and a boy together for sodomy in 1586: on this occasion Our Lady did not intervene to save the younger participant as she had in Avignon in 1320 (above, Chapter 13). [105] When Europeans took their ‘culture’ into conquests in other continents, they were equally unforgiving of unfamiliar social customs that they defined as sodomy. In the 1580s, after Spain acquired political power in the East Indies in what are now called the Philippines, the Spanish Inquisition burned alive Chinese men convicted of same-sex acts that were part of Chinese culture, just as it would have done in Iberia; Ricci would approve. [106] When the Spanish conquistador Vasco Núñez de Balboa reached what is now California, in 1513, he encountered ’aqi, people assigned as male at birth now living as females, who might today be termed ‘Two-Spirit’ people. He ordered their execution, seeing to it that they were torn apart alive by hunting dogs. A handful of survivors were forced to dress in what Balboa considered male attire, but quickly fled from the scene of the atrocity. [107] Such cultural clashes continued, as is witnessed by the fourteen men burned together at the stake in Mexico City in 1658. They were selected from 123 individuals ranging from indigenous people to African slaves to Spaniards and Portuguese, rounded up from networks of males some of whom confessed to living as women. [108]

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

  14 The Second Revolution: The Reformation Chasm (1500–1700) Statistically, throughout the world the great majority of modern Christians are spiritual descendants of Western Latin Christianity, which has a double effect on them. Western Christianity today, whether Catholic or Protestant, still lives in the slipstream of the eleventh-century Gregorian revolution; yet the sixteenth-century Protestant Reformation determinedly reversed many aspects of that revolution, in no respect more fundamentally than in marriage and the family. It is ironic that Martin Luther, the friar who sparked that spectacularly successful assault on the Gregorian binary system, was actually a member of the only male monastic Order ever to have been founded by a Pope, the Augustinian Eremites or Austin Friars. The Order was very conscious of that unique distinction and was still making use of it to gain papal favours in the decade leading up to Luther’s confrontation with the Church hierarchy in 1517. The element of parricide has been underestimated in Luther’s Reformation thinking, as he turned the private fury of a university lecturer in the small and undistinguished north German town of Wittenberg into an explosive public defiance of papal authority. [1] Luther the Austin friar was an extreme case of the paradox of early Protestantism: nearly all its leaders were clergy of the old Church. Among them was a high proportion of friars, unsurprisingly since friars were the preachers and ideologues of the late medieval Western Latin Church. [2] They were highly principled, highly educated men, who were now furious to discover not only that they themselves had been cheated by the common and erroneous account of salvation provided by the Western Church, but also that, through their own teaching and preaching, they had shamingly been part of the deception. Anger and a sense of betrayal energized the Reformation and repeatedly made it a violent event, provoking in return violence from angry and frightened Catholic authorities. Naturally secular politics became quickly entangled in the ever-widening disputes – so the word ‘Protestants’ originally described the small group of princes of the Holy Roman Empire who ‘protested’ a majority decision to outlaw all Luther’s adherents, taken at the imperial Diet meeting at Speyer in 1529. It was not a word that Protestants initially embraced – they would have seen themselves as the true Catholics, sweeping aside medieval corruption – but the coinage has endured. The trigger issue for Luther in 1517 was a quite minor part of the late medieval Catholic scheme of salvation: the developed sales industry of money- raising indulgences. An indulgence (free, admittedly, to the very poor) detailed how much its purchase reduced an individual’s time spent in purgatory before the penitential requirements for earthly sin were fulfilled and the purged soul could enter heaven. That suggested a power in the institutional Church to alter God’s purposes in salvation which offended Luther’s immersion in the predestinarian writings of that other patron of his Order, Augustine of Hippo (above, Chapter 9).

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

  from the church.39 In assessing the role of complementarianism generally, some evangelicals argued for the need to separate out more extreme formulations of complementarianism—“hypercomplementarianism”—from a more moderate “biblical complementarianism.” In 2010, for example, Nathan Finn, a professor at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary, complained in the pages of CBMW’s journal that it was unfair to group organizations like CBMW, Together for the Gospel, and Focus on the Family with figures like Doug Phillips and the Duggar family, with “the patriarchs and theonomists of the movement’s far-right extreme.” Though he allowed that “some of the convictions and terminology overlap,” he maintained that “the application is vastly different,” and confusing the two produced nothing but a “complementarian caricature.” Finn did, however, urge CBMW readers to be clearer about their beliefs so that their “normative complementarian” movement would not be lumped in with the wider patriarchy movement.40 Finn was correct to locate Phillips and the Duggars at the edges of conservative evangelicalism. Yet a decade hence, it is the relationship between the centers and the margins that demands scrutiny. Those who occupy what center there is have largely failed to define themselves against the more extreme expressions of “biblical patriarchy,” and there are reasons for this. With the escalation of the culture wars in the 2000s, stronger affinities—both theological and cultural—bound together “normative complementarians” and “biblical patriarchs” than Finn cared to admit, and this was not happenstance. For decades, networks had been forged and alliances secured, linking the center and peripheries. At the same time, a vast consumer market cared little for such distinctions. One no longer needed to attend a Bill Gothard seminar to tap into his extremist ideology; one could buy Phillips’s latest DVD online. Or watch reality television. The Duggars, after all, were a national phenomenon. When it came to evangelical masculinity, the ideological extreme bore a remarkable resemblance to the mainstream. In the end, Doug Wilson, John Piper, Mark Driscoll, James Dobson, Doug Phillips, and John Eldredge all preached a mutually reinforcing vision of Christian masculinity—of patriarchy and submission, sex and power. It was a vision that promised protection for women but left women without defense, one that worshiped power and turned a blind eye to justice, and one that transformed the Jesus of the Gospels into an image of their own making. Though rooted in different traditions and couched in different styles, their messages blended together to become the dominant chord in the cacophony of evangelical popular culture. And they had been right all along. The militant Christian masculinity they practiced and preached did indelibly shape both family and nation. CONCLUSIONI N 2008, THE GAITHER VOCAL BAND, A LEGENDARY southern gospel vocal group with roots in the contemporary Christian music scene of the 1980s, released the single “Jesus and John Wayne.” The song set up a contrast between a mother’s gentle faith and a father’s toughness, between a cowboy and a saint, and the singer found himself somewhere between the two.

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

  And there, standing before the convention audience as patriotic images flashed on the screen behind him, he performed “There She Stands,” a song about the symbol of the nation, the American flag, standing proudly amid the rubble. It was a small rhetorical step to change the feminine “beauty” all men were created to fight for into the nation herself.28 Chapter 11 [image file=Image00000.jpg] HOLY BALLSI N THE YEARS AFTER 9/11, MORE EXTREME expressions of militant masculinity gained traction across American evangelicalism. At GodMen revivals, evangelist Brad Stine challenged men to “kick ass,” to “grab your sword and say, ‘OK family, I’m going to lead you.’” Profanity was encouraged, “liberals, atheists, and the politically correct” were denigrated, and men were called upon to combat “the wuss-ification of America.” Speakers like Paul Coughlin urged Christian men and pastors to be “good,” not “nice,” and warned that in doing so they would surely make enemies. Forget the Jesus who avoids confrontation, who “turns the other cheek”—that “Bearded Lady” Jesus was a bore, just like the men who followed him. Even their wives found them boring. GodMen participants watched video clips of “karate fights, car chases, and ‘Jackass’-style stunts,” offered prayers of thanks to God for their testosterone, and raised their voices in “manly” anthems like “Grow a Pair,” a song lamenting the feminization of men by “the culture crowd,” a song in which men pledged to cowboy up, to join the battle, to jump in the saddle, to grab a sword . . . and, yes, to “grow a pair.”1 Christian mixed martial arts, too, emerged as a new way to minister to men. The goal of groups like Xtreme Ministries, a church that doubled as a Mixed Martial Arts academy “Where Feet, Fist and Faith Collide,” was “to inject some machismo into their ministries—and into the image of Jesus.” James Dobson’s son Ryan was a promoter. “The man should be the overall leader of the household,” the younger Dobson asserted, but we’d “raised a generation of little boys.” Toughening men up in the MMA cage could serve a higher purpose. Some churches hosted fight night MMA viewing parties, others hosted or participated in live events. By 2010, an estimated 700 predominantly white evangelical churches had taken up MMA as a means of outreach. Christian MMA clothing brands like “Jesus Didn’t Tap” appeared, along with Christian social networking sites like anointedfighter.com.2 To be sure, singing about one’s testicles and landing blows to the head for Christ represent the more radical expressions of militant Christian masculinity, but GodMen and Xtreme Ministries only amplified trends that were becoming increasingly common in the post-9/11 era. As militant masculinity took hold across evangelicalism, it helped bind together those on the fringes of the movement with those closer to the center, making it increasingly difficult to distinguish the margins from the mainstream.