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 Born on the Fourth of July (1976)

  It sticks out like a knife and every few minutes my leg jumps in violent spasms, the bone cutting and stabbing back and forth. The big clumsy cast I have been encased in isn’t doing any good. It is not going to heal. Again and again I wonder why it has happened, why I am back in the same place I fought so hard to leave before. The doctor never seems to be around. When he does show up it is only for a minute to see if I am still alive. He walks in and out, mumbles a few words. Once he calls me by the wrong name. It frightens me. It is like being in a prison. But it is not a prison, it is a hospital. The tall skinny man who brings my breakfast calls me Seventeen. “Seventeen!” he screams, waking me out of a doped sleep. “Seventeen! It’s time to eat.” Up and down the halls the nurses move like programmed robots, pushing their metal carts, giving shots, handing out medication. There is one nurse who always tells me I am crazy. She gives me extra doses of a drug to make me drowsy. It is so easy to lose it all here. The whole place functions so smoothly, but somewhere along the way I am losing, and all the rest of the people whom I can’t see in the rooms around me are losing too. Even if I make it out of this place, I think, even if I heal the leg, I will lose. No one ever leaves this place without losing something. Early one morning the doctor comes into my room and tells me he’s been thinking it might be a good idea to cut my leg off. He tells me that to cut the leg off would be a very simple thing. He makes it sound so easy, like there would be nothing to it. It’s they who are all crazy in here, I think. They are all moving so quickly, all of them in such a fantastic hurry. This place is more like a factory to break people than to mend them and put them back together again. I don’t want them to cut my leg off. It is numb and dead but it still means something to me. It is still mine. It is a part of me and I am not going to give it away that easily. Why isn’t anyone helping me? I think over and over again. Why am I being forgotten in this place? Something is happening to me in Room 17. I lie and stare at the walls of the small green box they have put me in. The walls are almost as dirty as the floor and I cannot even see out of the window. I feel myself changing, the anger is building up in me. It has become a force I cannot control. I push the call button again and again.

• From Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption (2014)

  Michael and I traveled to rural Escambia County and were greeted by the twins. They invited us in, sat us at the kitchen table, and wasted no time. “Did your client kill our baby?” Mozelle asked bluntly. “No, ma’am, I sincerely believe he did not.” “Do you know who did?” I sighed. “Well, not completely. We’ve spoken to Ralph Myers and believe that he and Karen Kelly were involved, but Myers insists that there were others involved as well.” Mozelle looked at Onzelle and leaned back. “We know there’s more involved,” said Onzelle. The sisters voiced suspicions about their brother and about local law enforcement but complained that the prosecutor had disrespected and ignored them. (Vic Pittman was never formally charged for the murder.) They said they were turned away even by the state’s victims’ rights group. “They treated us like we were low-class white trash. They could not have cared less about us.” Mozelle looked furious as she spoke. “I thought they treated victims better. I thought we had some say.” — Although crime victims had long complained about their treatment in the criminal justice system, by the 1980s a new movement had emerged that resulted in much more responsiveness to the perspective of crime victims and their families. The problem was that not all crime victims received the same treatment. Fifty years ago, the prevailing concept in the American criminal justice system was that everyone in the community is the victim when an offender commits a violent crime. The party that prosecutes a criminal defendant is called the “State” or the “People” or the “Commonwealth” because when someone is murdered, raped, robbed, or assaulted, it is an offense against all of us. In the early 1980s, though, states started involving individual crime victims in the trial process and began “personalizing” crime victims in their presentation of cases. Some states authorized the family members of the victim to sit at the prosecutor’s table during trial. Thirty-six states enacted laws that gave victims specific rights to participate in the trial process or to make victim impact statements. In many places, prosecutors started introducing themselves as the lawyer representing a particular victim, rather than as a representative of the civic authorities.

• From Untrue (2018)

  Straight men in our culture have relatively easy access to massages with happy endings, strip clubs, prostitutes, and pornography without much shame if they’re seeking these services from women (because, after all, “Men like to look” and “It’s what guys do”). Skirt Club is the rare tensional outlet for female “infidelity” that maybe isn’t, a pretty extraordinary niche where women can show up, have sex, and then matter-of-factly go home to their heterosexual marriages or partnerships. Granted, they are having sex with women, which men might find less threatening and more titillating and “safe” than their female partners having sex with other men. But it still struck me as meaningful that LeJeune was in some sense evening the score thus. And that there was an outcry about her daring to do so. While her project was at once embraced by women who wanted a piece of the action—Skirt Club now has seven thousand members worldwide, she told me—it has also been derided from all sides. The article I wrote about Skirt Club L.A. garnered dozens of comments, many of them from apparently enraged men who demeaned and devalued the parties in terms that showed their hand: many wrote that they were sure the pictures were doctored and that the women were unattractive, for example. “You can’t exclude me because I wouldn’t want to be there anyway,” they assert. And any woman who would want to do such a thing must, perforce, be undesirable. Meanwhile, other more progressively minded critics have called Skirt Club exclusionary, looks-ist, expensive, a habitus for newbie femmes. It is frequently dismissed as soft-core, male-fantasy-inflected “Victoria’s Secret lesbianism,” a somehow suspect compromise formation for women who are merely toying with same-sex sex rather than really committing to it (a Rolling Stone article called it “a sex party where straight women are gay for a night” as if such a practice is suspect and inauthentic). There is, perhaps, plenty to criticize. But the assertion that it is somehow watered-down lesbianism-lite or “fake” doesn’t mesh with or describe the complexity of what I witnessed—including assumed straight women going at it (with other women) like I’d never seen before within a space designed for them to do so in comfort and privacy from the rest of the world. Their pleasure and orgasms seemed very real.

• From Sin: The Early History of an Idea (2012)

  Thus Paul, midcentury. How had he managed to sustain his conviction of the nearness of the kingdom for almost two decades? Through the constant reinforcement of his eschatological interpretation of Jesus’ resurrection due to the subsequent success of the new movement among pagans. These people—whom Paul refers to quite casually and to their faces as “gentile sinners” (Gal 2.15)—when still worshiping their own gods had been “filled with every kind of wickedness, evil, covetousness and malice. . . . Full of envy, murder, strife, deceit, and craftiness, they are gossips, slanderers, God-haters, insolent, haughty, boastful, inventors of evil, rebellious toward parents. Foolish. Faithless. Heartless. Ruthless” (Rm 1.29–32). It would take a miracle for such people to turn away from their idols—and that is precisely what Paul thought he was witnessing. Paul’s insistence that Christ-following gentiles not be circumcised, in other words, has nothing to do with his personal practice of Jewish ancestral custom, and nothing to do with any supposed antagonism between the ekklēsia and the synagogue. Instead, it has everything to do with his vision of the risen Christ, with his call to be an apostle, and with his sense of his own mission. The very existence of such gentiles who have turned from their idols and who have made an exclusive commitment to the god of Israel is a profound and ongoing validation of Paul’s work. They confirm him in his conviction that he does, after all, know what time it is on God’s clock. They are the reason why he can assert, decades after joining the movement, that “salvation is nearer to us now than when we first believed; the night is far gone, and the day is at hand” (Rm 13.11–12). If he could just bring in their full number, the final events could unwind (Rm 11.25–36). Paul’s furious impatience with the circumcisers in Galatia measures the importance of such gentiles to his entire worldview and to his own sense of self. In ceasing to worship their own gods; in calling the god of Israel “Abba, Father” and, through the Spirit, becoming God’s adopted children (Rm 8.15); and in ceasing to be slaves of sin, Paul’s anomalous, exceptional pagans continuously enacted and reenacted this important end-time event, the turning of the nations to Israel’s god.

• From Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption (2014)

  Walter suddenly recognized the man. At the end of the trial when the jury had found Walter guilty, his family and several of the black people who had attended the trial were in shocked disbelief. Sheriff Tate claimed that Walter’s twenty-four-year-old son, Johnny, said, “Somebody’s going to pay for what they’ve done to my father.” Tate asked deputies to arrest Johnny, and there was a scuffle. Walter saw the officers wrestle his child to the ground and place him in handcuffs. The more he looked at the two deputies driving him back to death row, the more convinced he became that one of them had tackled his son. The van began to move. They wouldn’t tell Walter where he was going, but as soon as they got on the road it was clear that they were taking him back to death row. He had been upset and distraught on the day of his arrest, but he was so sure he’d be released soon. He got frustrated when the days turned into weeks at the county jail. He was depressed and terrified when they took him to death row before trial before being convicted of any crime, and the weeks became months. But when the nearly all-white jury pronounced him guilty, after fifteen months of waiting for vindication, he was shocked, paralyzed. Now he felt himself coming back to life—but all he could feel was seething anger. The deputies were driving him back to death row and talking about a gun show they were planning to attend. Walter realized that he had been foolish to give everyone the benefit of the doubt. He knew Tate was vicious and no good, but he assumed that the others were just doing what they had been told. Now he was feeling something that could only be described as rage. “Hey, I’m going to sue all of y’all!” He knew he was screaming and that it wasn’t going to make any difference. “I’m going to sue all of y’all!” he repeated. The officers paid him no attention. “Loose these chains. Loose these chains.”

• From Saint Thomas Aquinas Collection (22 Books) (2016)

  AUGUSTINE. (Serm. 83, 7.) or God says, Forgive, and ye shall be forgiven; (Luke 6:37.) I have first forgiven, forgive you then after Me; for if you forgive not, I will call you back, and will require again all that I had remitted to you. For Christ neither deceives nor is deceived; and He adds here, Thus will my heavenly Father do unto you, if ye from your hearts forgive not every one his brother their trespasses. It is better that you should cry out with your mouth, and forgive in your heart, than that you should speak smoothly, and be unrelenting in your heart For the Lord adds, From your hearts, to the end that though, out of affection you put him to discipline, yet gentleness should not depart out of your heart. What is more beneficial than the knife of the surgeon? He is rough with the sore that the man may be healed; should he be tender with the sore, the man were lost. JEROME. Also this, from your hearts, is added to take away all feigned reconciliations. Therefore the Lord’s command to Peter under this similitude of the king and his servant who owed him ten thousand talents, and was forgiven by his lord upon his entreaty, is, that he also should forgive his fellow-servants their lesser trespasses. ORIGEN. He seeks to instruct us, that we should be ready to shew clemency to those who have done us harm, especially if they offer amends, and plead to have forgiveness. RABANUS. Allegorically; The servant here who owed the ten thousand talents, is the Jewish people bound to the Ten Commandments in the Law. These the Lord oft forgave their trespasses, when being in difficulties they besought His mercy; but when they were set free, they exacted the utmost with great severity from all their debtors; and of the gentile people which they hated, they required circumcision and the ceremonies of the Law; yea, the Prophets and Apostles they barbarously put to death. For all this the Lord gave them over into the hands of the Romans as to evil spirits, who should punish them with eternal tortures. CHAPTER 19 19:1–81. And it came to pass, that when Jesus had finished these sayings, he departed from Galilee, and came into the coasts of Judæa beyond Jordan; 2. And great multitudes followed him; and he healed them there. 3. The Pharisees also came unto him, tempting him, and saying unto him, Is it lawful for a man to put away his wife for every cause? 4. And he answered and said unto them, Have ye not read, that he which made them at the beginning made them male and female, 5. And said, For this cause shall a man leave father and mother, and shall cleave to his wife: and they twain shall be one flesh? 6. Wherefore they are no more twain, but one flesh. What therefore God hath joined together, let not man put asunder.

• From Born on the Fourth of July (1976)

  No one comes. I am lying in my own excrement and no one comes. I begin shouting and screaming. I grab an ice pack and my water pitcher. I throw them out of the open door into the hallway, splashing water and ice all over the floor. I have been screaming for almost an hour when one of the aides walks by. He sticks his head in the door, taunting me and laughing. “I’m a Vietnam veteran,” I tell him. “I fought in Vietnam and I’ve got a right to be treated decently.” “Vietnam,” the aide says loudly. “Vietnam don’t mean nothin’ to me or any of these other people. You can take your Vietnam and shove it up your ass.” * * * I am in the intensive-care ward. It is so quiet I can hear the big round clock ticking on the green wall. There are mostly old men here. They are all attached to complicated machines. The clock keeps ticking. I look down. There are big stitches on my leg and two plastic tubes—one runs a clear fluid in and the other carries a bright red fluid back out of the wound. There is some kind of machine on the side of the bed that keeps clanking and pumping, keeping everything flowing nicely. I realize I have made it, I have lived through the operation. I am not going to die and they haven’t cut my leg off. They have put a steel plate in. They have screwed in all the screws and sewn the whole thing up. I will be out of this place soon. The leg will heal and I will get out of this hospital. I will get out of it for good and never come back. The pump stops suddenly. An aide comes over and kicks it. He curses at it and kicks it very hard. It still doesn’t work, and I am frightened now that I will lose the leg. “Goddamn thing,” he says. “This hospital doesn’t ever have nothing but old equipment.” He runs to look for a doctor. The doctor who comes in isn’t the one who did the operation. He is a younger man from a big university in the city. He tells me the pump is old and probably will not work anymore. “Well, doesn’t this hospital have another one?” I say. “I can’t believe that a modern veterans’ hospital like this doesn’t have an extra pump.” The young doctor explains in a very matter-of-fact way that this is the only pump they have. It all has to do with the war, he explains. It is all because of the war. “The government is not giving us money for things that we need. It’s really too bad. It’s not fair at all.” “I’ve tried so hard to keep this leg,” I tell him. “I’ve done everything. . . .” I’m trying to be calm, as calm as he is. “Yes,” he says, nodding his head.

• From Tropic of Capricorn (1934)

  You need a messenger, Western Union! You need a messenger! And get off that silly Jewish throne of yours! Send out a man with a good pair of legs on him. Send a boy if you can’t get a man. Send a woman if you can’t get a boy. The old maestro’s dead! Don’t grieve over it. Don’t thump a hole in the bottom of the boat! Find another maestro! Find him while there’s time. Find him! Find him! Find him! Find him! Find him! Find the son of a bitch and then send him to a Western Union and dispatch a messenger fleet of foot—not a cripple or an octogenarian, but a young one! Ask him to find the great work and bring it back. We need it. We have a brand-new museum ready waiting to house it—and cellophane and the Dewey decimal system to file it. All we need is the name of the author. Even if he has no name, even if it is an anonymous work, we won’t kick. Even if it has a little mustard gas in it we won’t mind. Bring it back dead or alive—there’s a twenty-five thousand dollar reward for the man who fetches it.

• From Tropic of Capricorn (1934)

  The finer the caliber the worse off the man. Men were walking the streets of New York in that bloody, degrading outfit, the despised, the lowest of the low, walking around like auks, like penguins, like oxen, like trained seals, like patient donkeys, like big jackasses, like crazy gorillas, like docile maniacs nibbling at the dangling bait, like waltzing mice, like guinea pigs, like squirrels, like rabbits, and many and many a one was fit to govern the world, to write the greatest book ever written. When I think of some of the Persians, the Hindus, the Arabs I knew, when I think of the character they revealed, their grace, their tenderness, their intelligence, their holiness , I spit on the white conquerors of the world, the degenerate British, the pigheaded Germans, the smug, self-satisfied French. The earth is one great sentient being, a planet saturated through and through with man, a live planet expressing itself falteringly and stutteringly; it is not the home of the white race or the black race or the yellow race or the lost blue race, but the home of man and all men are equal before God and will have their chance, if not now then a million years hence. The little brown brothers of the Philippines may bloom again one day and the murdered Indians of America north and south may also come alive one day to ride the plains where now the cities stand belching fire and pestilence. Who has the last say? Man! The earth is his because he is the earth, its fire, its water, its air, its mineral and vegetable matter, its spirit which is cosmic, which is imperishable, which is the spirit of all the planets, which transforms itself through him, through endless signs and symbols, through endless manifestations. Wait, you cosmococcic telegraphic shits, you demons on high waiting for the plumbing to be repaired, wait, you dirty white conquerors who have sullied the earth with your cloven hoofs, your instruments, your weapons, your disease germs, wait, all you who are sitting in clover and counting your coppers, it is not the end. The last man will have his say before it is finished. Down to the last sentient molecule justice must be done—and will be done! Nobody is getting away with anything, least of all the cosmococcic shits of North America. When it came time for my vacation—I hadn’t taken one for three years, I was so eager to make the company a success!—I took three weeks instead of two and I wrote the book about the twelve little men. I wrote it straight off, five, seven, sometimes eight thousand words a day. I thought that a man, to be a writer, must do at least five thousand words a day. I thought he must say everything all at once—in one book—and collapse afterwards. I didn’t know a thing about writing. I was scared shitless.

• From From Shame to Sin: The Christian Transformation of Sexual Morality in Late Antiquity (2013)

  The homiletic corpus of the late fourth and early fifth centuries provides abundant and vivid testimony to the intense war on fornication that trailed the mainstreaming of Christianity. The sermons of Chrysostom were heard by rich and poor, powerful and powerless, free and slave, men and women. He truly hoped that he might transform Antioch or Constantinople into a Christian city through the diligent reform of one household at a time. But prostitution was a particularly formidable challenge to this agenda, even in the late empire. A fourth-century catalog of the urban amenities of Rome still included some forty-five public brothels (listed between the public grain mills and the public latrines); it is telling that prostitution remained part of the official, public face of civic life in the early phases of the Christian empire. It is not surprising, then, that prostitution became a particular preoccupation of leaders like John Chrysostom, and that through his eyes we can see the anger and despair of a Christian preacher working amid a society where prostitution remained a vibrant part of the sexual economy.46 Chrysostom’s sermon is only the tip of the iceberg in his own extensive homiletic corpus and those of his contemporaries. In the moment of Christian triumph, the leadership of the church began to recognize that prostitution was part of an entrenched social system that encouraged the sexual use of dishonored women. The bishops of the later fourth century articulated with unprecedented clarity the structural mechanics of the Greco-Roman sexual economy. Asterius of Amasea could see that the double standard of sexual behavior was rooted in a society where property and legitimacy were transmitted through monogamy: “If men consort with many women, they do no harm to their own hearth, but if women commit sexual sin, they introduce alien heirs into their house and their line.” John Chrysostom was hardly the only bishop to appreciate the role of Roman law in solidifying an alternative set of sexual norms. Augustine explicitly rejected the “law of the forum” in favor of the “law of heaven.” Salvian of Marseilles summarized Greco-Roman sexual policy in the pithiest, and most accurate, formulation on record: forbidding adulteries, building brothels. Prostitution was not simply tolerated—it was viewed as a way of protecting the honor of decent women. Ambrose despaired that his Christians could visit the brothel “as though it were a law of nature.” Christian leaders became desperately aware of the double standard, and the braver among them were perfectly willing to identify its origins. “The laws were made by men, and they are disposed against women.” The acerbic Jerome offered a penetrating reflection on the fundamentally distinct logics of classical and Christian sexual boundaries. “Among them [the Romans], the bridles of sexual restraint are unloosed for men. The Romans condemn only stuprum and adulterium, letting lust run wild through whorehouses and slave girls, as though social status makes an offense, and not sexual desire.”47

• From From Shame to Sin: The Christian Transformation of Sexual Morality in Late Antiquity (2013)

  In late antiquity the discourse of nature was harnessed by movement with a highly motivated opposition to same-sex love. The early stirrings of such a concept of nature should not be allowed to obscure the fact that in the late classical world this change in quantity becomes a change in quality. Setting matters. Musonius spoke to a circle of Young Turks, children of the establishment enchanted for a season by the eccentric philosopher’s moral authenticity. In late antiquity we are in the basilica, where men and women of startlingly divergent status gathered to receive moral lectures. And rather than the passing glances of an eccentric philosopher, we find same-sex love the object of dedicated pastoral ire. Christian preachers like John Chrysostom might dilate on the sinfulness of same-sex desire, indifferent to any distinctions between pederasty, the exploitation of slaves, or even durable forms of companionship. Rooted in Pauline scripture, Chrysostom’s own preaching on same-sex eros is such a spasm of hatred that its logic is not always recoverable. His caustic fourth homily on the Letter to the Romans, possibly a specimen of extemporaneous moralizing, evokes the atmosphere of intense hostility that prevailed in late antique churches. “Look how vividly he [Paul] chooses his words. He did not say they desired or lusted after one another, but burned in their longing for each other. Now, is not all desire born of greed which fails to adhere to its own limits? For all desire exceeding the laws set down by God is desire for what is strange, and not what has been allowed.” The reach of Chrysostom’s claims are startling. Musonius fixed on same-sex “intercourse” as an act against nature; so would most Christian moralists. But on occasion a sense of illicit, abnormal desire begins to find expression. Pre-Christian ideologies treated sexual deviance, even deviance involving same-sex attraction, as a matter of excessive desire and insufficient manliness; there was no “queer desire,” only desire overflowing its proper bounds. In Chrysostom we see how the logic of excess begins to give way to a sense that this excessive desire was, in its very essence, strange.17

• From Untrue (2018)

  Along with life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, the sexual double standard is one our country’s foundational concepts. In The Times of Their Lives, a history of Plymouth Colony, Patricia Scott Deetz and James Deetz tell us that in that place and others where pilgrims first carved out their hardscrabble, pious lives, sanctions against adultery were severe—and severely skewed. In the first codification of the law in 1636, they note, adultery was a capital crime, punishable by death (no one was executed for adultery in Plymouth, but the Massachusetts Bay Colony took a harder line, and three people there were put to death for the offense). In 1658, it was decreed that adulterers could count on at least being whipped and compelled to wear the capital letters AD sewn onto their garments. The Deetzes tell us that when Mary Mendame of Duxbury, wife of Robert Mendame, was accused of having sex with an “Indian” named Tinsin in 1639, she was whipped, compelled to wear an AD on her garments, and told that if she failed to comply, she would get her face branded. (Tinsin was, like Mary, “whipped at the cart’s tail.”) Had Mary been Mark, how differently things would have gone. For in the colonies of this period of the seventeenth century, a man, even if he were married, could have relations with an unmarried woman and be accused of the lesser crime of fornication. This was punishable by either a whipping or three days in prison and a ten pound fine. But having sex with a married woman was adultery: “adultery was viewed as the breaking of the marriage bond by the fact that the woman was married. The husband was not bound by the same constraints.” Having sexual relations with another man’s wife violated not just moral beliefs but his property rights, the Deetzes explain. (While some historians suggest this belief originated in medieval Europe, as we will see, it was much, much older.) As property, women like Mary Mendame were not only their husbands’ concern but wards of the entire community. Their trespass was a trespass against their husbands, God, and law and order itself. And a man trespassing with such a woman was violating more than his individual vow to goodness and to his own wife, if he had one—he was tramping all over his neighbor’s possession while demeaning a social contract. But whether he was married or not, he was somewhat freer to indulge. Mary would have gotten off in more ways than one had there been no double standard.

• From Born on the Fourth of July (1976)

  He had been born on the Fourth of July, he had been their Yankee Doodle Dandy, their all-American boy. He had given them almost his whole being in the war and now, after all that, they weren’t satisfied with three-quarters being gone, they wanted to take the rest of him. It was crazy but he knew that’s what they wanted. They wanted his head and his mind, the numb legs and the wheelchair, they wanted everything. It had all been one big dirty trick and he didn’t know what to think anymore. All he had tried to do was tell the truth about the war. But now he just wanted it to be quiet, to be where they weren’t cursing at him and beating him and jailing him, lying and calling him a traitor. He had never been anything but a thing to them, a thing to put a uniform on and train to kill, a young thing to run through the meatgrinder, a cheap small nothing thing to make mincemeat out of. And somewhere along the way he had forgotten to be polite anymore, and how to be a nice person. Somewhere through it all they had taken even that and he wanted it back so much, so very desperately, he would give almost anything to be able to be kind to people again, but the big machine, the one that had given him the number and the rifle, had sucked it out of him forever. They had made him confused and uncertain and blind with hate. They wanted to make him hide like he was hiding now. How many more, he thought, how many more like him were out there hiding on a thousand other Hurricane Streets? He was a living reminder of something terrible and awful. No matter what they said to him, no matter how much they tried to twist and bend things, he held on to what he knew and all the terrible things he had seen and done for them. They had buried the corporal and the children he had killed in the ground, but he was still sitting and breathing in his wheelchair, and now the last thing he could do for them if he wasn’t going to die was to disappear. He knew too much about them. He knew, goddamn it, like no one else would ever know. They were small men with small ideas, gamblers and hustlers who had gambled with his life and hustled him off to the war. They were smooth talkers, men who wore suits and smiled and were polite, men who wore watches and sat behind big desks sticking pins in maps in rooms he had never seen, men who had long-winded telephone conversations and went home to their wives and children.

• From The History of Christianity II: From the Reformation to the Modern Megachurch (2017)

  248The History of Christianity II õIn 1905, Lenin published an essay describing religion as “spiritual booze” that taught people “to be submissive and patient while here on earth, and to take comfort in the hope of a heavenly reward.” But he called for religion to be treated as a “private affair,” and said people should be able to choose any religion, or none at all. õHowever, the Orthodox Church was an obvious rival to the Bolsheviks for the loyalties of the people. And the Bolsheviks took aim almost immediately. They didn’t officially ban the church, but they seized church property and rounded up any priest or bishop who didn’t profess total loyalty to the Russian Revolution—and even some who did. õSome clergy ended up in prison camps and mental hospitals—and those were the lucky ones. Others were tortured and executed as enemies of the revolution. In the 1920s, as the chaos in the provinces led to widespread famine, the Bolsheviks whipped up resentment against the church by charging that priests and bishops had refused to turn over their valuables to be sold to help feed the people. They capitalized on that long history of church privilege at the expense of ordinary believers. õAs for the dissenters who got a break after the 1905 law on religious toleration: The Bolsheviks put an end to that and turned out to be just as zealous in persecuting religious minorities as the tsars had ever been. Religious minorities f led where they could. RELIGION UNDER STALIN õIn 1929, five years after Lenin died and his successor Joseph Stalin took power, the government enacted the Law on Religious Associations, which set the rules for all religious worship, Orthodox or otherwise. õTo form a religious organization, a group of at least 20 adults had to come together and seek permission from the local magistrate to perform their “cult” in an approved building, and only in that space. No religious festivals, evangelizing, religious education, charity work, or anything else outside the registered building was allowed. 249Lecture 25—The Church and the Russian Revolution õMeanwhile, the Soviet government tried to lure believers away from traditional churches by establishing a rival organization called the Living Church. Clergy of this temple of propaganda preached that the Bolshevik program was essentially the fulfillment of Christianity. The message appealed to some Christian socialists, but the Living Church was so obviously an arm of the state that it failed to win many sincere believers.

• From Branded: Brainwashed Inside NXIVM (2020)

  Money is being stolen left and right. Money is being moved around. The aura of success that these people are putting on, it's a fraud. People who try to leave start being tracked by people, and even worse, people who are still in it realize that Keith is basically sleeping with everybody. He has all these books in his "executive library". He comes off like he's this intellectual person, but it's the library he uses to also have sex with dozens of women. [Narrator] And that's not all the Forbes article lays bare. People close to Keith Raniere will tell you he's pretty lazy. He's a guy that sleeps in during the day. So if you wanna get close to Keith, you have to attend midnight volleyball games, 'cause that's where Keith's gonna be. At the volleyball game, Raniere was the person of power. He's the king. He gets to sit there like the fat lion in the-- you know, in the jungle. At the end of the day, it was his world, and they were all gonna live in it whether they liked it or not. The article starts raising a lot of red flags. Maybe this group that so many people have been a part of... maybe it's a cult. [Robert] Edgar Bronfman's quoted where he says, "I think it's a cult." And that statement absolutely infuriated Keith Raniere. [Narrator] But the most damaging attacks target the validity of the company's classes and methodology. There's very little time to talk to your loved ones. There's very little time to eat enough food, let alone, you know, use the bathroom. It isolates the students from a husband or a loved one. Calling them and saying, I haven't heard from you all day. Are you okay? Is this a cult? Oh, no, no, no, it's not a cult, it's not a cult. We're just really, really busy, you know? We're just so busy. The idea that it was a cult never crossed my mind, because in my head, a cult was Charles Manson, dead chickens and things like that. There's a saying that nobody joins a cult because initially, cults do not present themselves as being cult like. Initially, they will seem very warm, and they have these ideals where they talk about changing the world. And they entice followers to join something that could change humanity. [Dr. Lauch] Yes, it's isolation, it's alienation from people you knew before, because the more and more and more you get enveloped in it, you feel very trapped. And that's when it gets even more difficult to leave, because you--you can't imagine life away from that. [Narrator] While the article turns an ugly spotlight on the group, the damage is limited. [Paige] The world wasn't ready to hear it yet. People viewed it as them voluntarily giving this money. And I'm sorry that you gave your money to a scam, but how is that our problem?

• From Reading the Bible from the Margins (2002)

  Their power and privilege are justified as something earned purely through the sweat of their brow. This rationalization can take the form of ideology. For example, in capitalism the ideology of “the survival of the fittest” dismisses those who reside in the underside of capitalism as not being fit to survive. Their poverty becomes proof of their deserved marginality. The success of the center is attributed to its ingenuity and hard work. If the disenfranchised were not so lazy or were smarter, then they too could earn a slice of the American pie. Ideologies provide simple answers to inequalities by laying the blame of marginality upon the victims of oppressive structures. This type of ideology also contributes to the rise of stereotyping. If the exclusive neighborhoods are predominantly white while the economically deprived areas are mainly composed of people of color, if those who occupy positions in top management and U.S. corporate boardrooms are white males while those who occupy the menial positions are women and people on the margins, and if our prison systems remain disproportionately composed of nonwhite males, the center can only conclude that people on the margins are lazy and so live in the ghettos and barrios , that women and minorities are less intelligent and so occupy servile jobs, and that nonwhite males are dangerous and wicked creatures deserving incarceration. While disenfranchised groups see unjust social structures, those who benefit from those structures fail or refuse to recognize the status quo as oppressive; here lies a major division between U.S. citizens. Yet, when those who benefit from unjust structures are able to make their perspectives normative due to the power of the center, they create a worldview that demands biblical justification in order to avoid any incongruency between what they believe and what they do. The unchecked power of the dominant culture that resides in the center of society provides the privilege of defining and determining how the Bible is read and interpreted. Hence, what develops is an attempt to read the Bible to redefine or to justify the unjust privileges of the center. Reading the Bible to justify one's social location imprisons the text by spiritualizing reality and thus obscuring or hiding it. This results in a culture of silence prevailing where the interpretation of the center is neither questioned nor challenged. The danger for those on the margins is that they will read the Bible through the eyes of elite white males and convince themselves of the justice of their own oppression. Unaware of the reasons for their marginalization, those who are disenfranchised often accept the order of things that relegates them to be exploited. Yet, as those on the margins begin to claim the biblical text as their own, their reading shifts to a social location of the margins. Such a reading threatens what has been constructed by the center as the normative interpretation and threatens the very social structures that create oppression.

• From Reading the Bible from the Margins (2002)

  Fearful that her son's inheritance could be jeopardized by Abraham's firstborn, Ishmael, she connived to have him and his mother, Hagar, forced into exile. Again Hagar found herself in the desert facing death, thrown out as an old used object no longer needed by its owner, a familiar scenario for most domestic servants today. Homeless because of the unwillingness of the father of her child to shoulder his responsibility, she was abandoned, like so many women of color today. Alone in the desert, facing death, and questioning the promise God previously uttered about the multitude of her descendants, she must have wondered about the blindness of the God who sees. Yet, this time, God heard the cry of her son and rescued them. Hagar suffered from classism (a slave), racism (an Egyptian foreigner), and sexism (a woman raped by Abraham). Because of her status, Hagar becomes a lens by which the biblical text can be read, a reading that focuses on the struggle for liberation and survival with dignity. This story of the used and abused woman is a motif that resonates with many women of color. Even natural allies, women of the dominant culture like Sarah, capitalize on her body. Nevertheless, God is found in the midst of the struggle of those relegated to the margins, even when these religious patriarchs of the faith have participated in their marginalization! Because God chooses to accompany those who are disenfranchised, Hagar and her child Ishmael complicated the history of salvation by becoming part of God's promise to make a nation by using Abraham's seed. Women of color continue to “complicate” how the dominant culture interprets God's promises.4 JUSTIFYING HOMOPHOBIA The sin of Sodom is an abomination before God. It is a prevalent sin within our society and undermines Christianity. Its constant practice contributes to the downfall of civilization and leads nations toward barbarism. It is the responsibility of all who call themselves Christian to root out this sin from society and dedicate themselves to abolishing this defiled practice. Because the elimination of this sin is crucial for participating in the abundant life, it is important that we correctly define what the sin of Sodom is. Regardless of how the dominant culture interprets the Genesis story of God's wrath falling upon Sodom and Gomorrah, the Bible's definition of the sin of Sodom is vastly different from what is usually preached from most pulpits throughout the land. According to Genesis 19, two angels sent to Sodom found hospitality in the house of Lot (Abraham's nephew). Later in the evening, the men of the town went to Lot's house, demanding that the two strangers be handed over to them so that they could know them (“to know” being a euphemism for having a sexual relationship). Lot refused, but he offered his two virgin daughters, as discussed above. When the men attempted to take the two strangers by force, the angels struck them with blindness.

• From This Boy's Life: A Memoir (1989)

  Mitchell gave it to them. The smokers turned into brawls. He matched up the hardest cases he could find, and he did not trouble himself overmuch with questions of height and weight. A mismatch could be just as much fun as an even match. More fun. You couldn’t help but be interested in watching some jiggling fatty like Bull Slatter—Full Bladder, as he was known—defend his farflung borders against the malice of a brutal pygmy like Huff. Style wasn’t the issue here. The folks wanted action, and the best action of the night happened in the grudge fights. The grudge fights came last. Mr. Mitchell announced them as such to raise the temperature in the gym, and to remind the fighters that they were honor-bound to try and kill each other. Most of these boys weren’t real enemies. Maybe they’d ragged each other too hard, like Arthur and me, or tried to muscle in front of each other in the cafeteria, or just happened to feel ornery on the same day. The only thing they had in common was the bad luck of getting caught by Mr. Mitchell. Mr. Mitchell kept his eyes peeled for grudge fighters, and when he found a couple of likely candidates he signed them up on the spot. It made no difference how slight their disagreement was, or how long a time remained until the next smoker. Arthur and I were lucky; we had to wait only three weeks. There were boys in the lists who’d been waiting since September, and who would’ve had trouble remembering just what their grudge was supposed to be. But none of them ever refused to fight—it wasn’t conceivable. They kept their enmity alive for as long as they had to, and when the time came they fought as they were expected to fight, viciously, hatefully, as if to erase one another from the earth. Arthur and I steered clear of each other when we could, gave each other evil looks when we couldn’t. It would have been indecorous and unwise for a pair of grudge fighters to let themselves get friendly. We needed to keep our hostility intact for the smoker. I had no trouble doing this. Now that the situation called for ill will, I found I had large stores of it to draw on. We had been close. Whatever it is that makes closeness possible between people also puts them in the way of hard feelings if that closeness ends. Arthur and I were moving apart, and had been ever since we started high school. Arthur was trying to be a citizen. He stayed out of trouble and earned high grades. He played bass guitar with the Deltones, a pretty good band for which I had once tried out as drummer and been haughtily dismissed. The guys he ran around with at Concrete were all straight-arrows and strivers, what few of them there were in our class. He even had a girlfriend.

• From This Boy's Life: A Memoir (1989)

  She still hoped this marriage would work, was ready to put up with almost anything to make it work. The idea of another failure was abhorrent to her. But she may also have dreamed of flight and freedom—unencumbered, solitary freedom, freedom even from me. Like anyone else, she must have wanted different things at the same time. The human heart is a dark forest. After a week or so I announced at dinner that I had decided not to go to Paris. “The hell you aren’t,” Dwight said. “You’re going.” “He gets to choose,” Pearl said, on my side for once. “Doesn’t he, Rosemary?” My mother nodded. “That was the deal.” “The books aren’t closed on this one,” Dwight said. “Not yet they aren’t.” He looked at me. “Why do you think you aren’t going?” “I don’t want to change my name.” “You don’t want to change your name?” “No sir.” He put his fork down. His nostrils were flaring. “Why not?” “I don’t know. I just don’t.” “Well that’s a lot of crap, because you’ve already changed your name once. Right?” “Yes sir.” “Then you might as well change the other name too, make a clean sweep.” “But it’s my last name.” “Oh, for Christ’s sake. You think anybody cares what you call yourself?” I shrugged. “Don’t badger him,” my mother said. “He’s already made up his mind.” “We’re talking about Paris!” Dwight shouted. “It was his choice,” she said. Dwight jabbed his finger at me. “You’re going.” “Only if he wants to,” my mother said. “You’re going,” he repeated. EXCEPT FOR ARTHUR , people didn’t say much about my not going to Paris. They’d probably thought all along that it was just one of my stories. Arthur called me Frenchy for a while, then lost interest as I seemed to lose interest, while in secret I went on thinking of cobbled streets and green roofs, and cafés where fast, smoky-voiced women sang songs about their absolute lack of remorse. Dwight said that he had once seen Lawrence Welk in the dining car of a train. Dwight said that he’d walked right up to him and told him that he was his favorite conductor, and he probably did, for it was true that he loved the champagne music of Lawrence Welk better than any other music. Dwight had a large collection of Lawrence Welk records. When the Lawrence Welk show came on TV we were expected to watch it with him, and be quiet, and get up only during commercials. Dwight pulled his chair up close to the set. He leaned forward as the bubbles rose over the Champagne Orchestra and Lawrence Welk came onstage salaaming in every direction, crying out declarations of humility in his unctuous, brain-scalding Swedish kazoo of a voice. Dwight’s eyes widened at the virtuosity of Big Tiny Little Junior, who played ragtime piano while looking over his shoulder at the camera.

• From Born on the Fourth of July (1976)

  The anger and frustration would build up inside me and I remember several times screaming into my pillow as I lay on my gurney until I was exhausted. I felt so helpless, so lost. During the entire time, in that depressing place, Carol never called or came down to visit me once. I felt abandoned, betrayed, and soon stopped shaving and began to let my hair grow long. I remember looking in the mirror one morning thinking how much I resembled Jesus Christ hanging from the cross. I thought back again to the Bronx VA when I had been stuck in that chest cast for nearly six months after breaking my femur, and how as I had lain on a gurney on my stomach I would paint pictures of the crucifixion with myself as Christ, and how they’d sent the psychiatrist down from the psych ward because they were concerned and I immediately stopped painting, afraid they would have me committed just like my Uncle Paul who had been beaten to death in a mental hospital years before. The weeks and months in the Long Beach VA hospital passed, and I slowly began to adjust to my surroundings. Each morning the aides would lift me out of bed and place me on a gurney, stuffing a pillow under my chest to keep my testicles from squishing and my hips from getting red. They would do the same thing with my legs, placing another pillow under my kneecaps, making sure my bed bag was hooked up, then handing me my two wooden canes. Lying on the gurney on my stomach I’d push around the wards, then down to the cafeteria where I’d get something to eat. I would then go outside on the grass where I’d throw bits of crackers to the sparrows. This became a daily routine for me. In the weeks that followed I began to make new friends. Many, like myself, had been paralyzed in Vietnam, guys like Marty Stetson and Willy Jefferson, Woody and Nick, Danny Prince and Jake Jacobs, or Jafu as he liked to be called, who used to be a bodybuilder before he joined the marines. Jafu, I learned from Marty, was wounded in Operation Starlite on August 23, 1965, while participating in America’s first major offensive of the Vietnam War. He was shot in the chest, paralyzing him from his waist down. From what Marty told me, Jafu’s squad got caught in a horseshoe ambush, and though gravely wounded, Jafu continued to return fire with his M60 machine gun until reinforcements arrived. For this he was awarded a Silver Star and Purple Heart. Nick Enders shares a completely different story, though, telling me Jafu was actually paralyzed while on R&R in Hawaii. Some guy caught him sleeping with his wife and in a jealous rage threw him out of the sixth-floor window of his hotel room, paralyzing Jafu for life.