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 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.

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

  In these writings LaHaye denounced “abortion-on-demand, legalization of homosexual rights . . . the size and power of big government, elimination of capital punishment, national disarmament, increased taxes, women in combat, passage of ERA, unnecessary busing.” For LaHaye, these were all facets of the same project.10 LaHaye strove to arouse Christians’ sense of embattlement. He warned of the “liberal, humanist” media corrupting the nation, evident in “the pornographic indoctrination now masquerading as TV entertainment”—in “anti-moral” programs like Three’s Company , Dallas , and Saturday Night Live —but also in television and print news. Most pointedly, he blamed American news stations for their biased coverage of the Vietnam War, for constantly “twisting” news reports “to make America appear the aggressor,” causing a generation to become disillusioned with their own country. Time and Newsweek were also not to be trusted; he recommended magazines like Human Events and Conservative Digest as alternatives. But what was really needed was a fourth television news network “committed to rendering a conservative view of the news,” along with a conservative wire service and a chain of newspapers, news sources that would defend “traditional moral values, the church of Jesus Christ, a strong national defense,” and other conservative values.11 Like many other leaders in the Religious Right, LaHaye was inspired by Christian Reconstructionism. Citing Rushdoony and those influenced by Rushdoony, he argued that America was founded as a Christian nation, and he advocated for biblical authority in the realm of family, church, and government. Yet LaHaye’s embrace of Christian Reconstructionism is in some ways curious. Like most fundamentalists, LaHaye was a premillennialist. Premillennialists tended to see America, like any other nation, as doomed to destruction. Reconstructionists, on the other hand, were postmillennialists who believed Christians needed to establish the Kingdom of God on earth by bringing all things under the authority or dominion of Christ before Christ returned. LaHaye’s embrace of Reconstructionism demonstrates how theological contradictions could be smoothed over in practice. In adopting Reconstructionist teachings piecemeal, premillennialists patched over a long-standing division within conservative Protestantism. Such quibbles apparently paled in comparison to what they held in common—a desire to reclaim the culture for Christ by reasserting patriarchal authority and waging battle against encroaching secular humanism, in all its guises.12 In addition to helping construct the philosophy of the Religious Right, LaHaye was also instrumental in building its organizational scaffolding. In 1981, LaHaye founded the Council for National Policy, an influential and secretive organization that served as a conservative policy incubator and helped nudge the Republican Party to the Right, and he would have a hand in creating a number of other conservative organizations in the 1980s as well. By generating ideas and networks, LaHaye established himself as one of the most influential evangelicals of the late twentieth century, a status he shared with another key player in the rise of the Christian Right, the Reverend Jerry Falwell.13 JERRY FALWELL ECHOED and amplified themes articulated by Schlafly, Dobson, and the LaHayes.

• From The Fixed Stars: A Memoir (2020)

  Molly, the doctor said, I know you don’t believe me. But someday you will feel better. And when you feel better, you might even be glad this happened. You’ll have a new kind of empathy. You’ll be a different person, a person you might like. [image file=image_rsrc2FR.jpg] 17I’ve been a Stevie Nicks fan since I was a kid, but it wasn’t until June was born that I heard Fleetwood Mac’s Mirage. Brandon bought it for me on vinyl, and I remember listening with June on my chest in the Ergo. When “That’s Alright” came on, I cried until her hair was wet. I heard it as a sad song about love and letting go, about setting a person free and wishing them well. I thought about my new baby, about all I wanted for her, the love I hoped she would go out and find. Now when I listen, it’s obviously a breakup song. Our singer has decided to leave the person she loved. She’s been thinking about it for a while, she says; this ending shouldn’t surprise him. [image file=image_rsrc2FK.jpg] Brandon and I are arguing again. We’re arguing because we cannot stop. I wish for a megaphone. I want a way of saying I need this that will force him to listen. This time I will say something new. I think I might be gay, I say. YOU ARE NOT GAY, Brandon howls. Even as I say it, I don’t know if it’s true. To say “I’m not straight” would be more accurate. But sometimes lately I feel gay. When Nora fucks me, I feel gay. On the bus, I look around at men, trying to find one I want. There are never any. Did you not hear me? I ask. I think I might be gay. He jerks his hands to his ears, sputtering. You don’t get to tell me who I am, I say, and I feel it all the way down, everything about me hot and bristling. There’s a tension between how a character sees herself and how others see her. I wrote that in my notes from the fiction workshop the fall after jury duty. I knew that tension. It powered me like a battery. Now I am screaming: You don’t get to tell me who I am. [image file=image_rsrc2FK.jpg] We’re fighting over the gristle of our marriage, and it twists and buckles in our jaws, an odd substance that won’t snap. I’m tired of pleading. For as long as we’ve been married, the idea of us not being married has seemed to me an almost physical impossibility, like walking off the edge of the earth. I couldn’t imagine our marriage ending—not because of religion, not because of money, not because of children, but because of the pain. This is a good thing, I’ve always thought: the rupture of love should be unimaginable. Let’s do whatever work it takes to keep it that way, to avoid an ending.

• From Twelve Steps to a Compassionate Life (2010)

  For more than a century the li seemed to have worked.26 But by the time of Confucius, the Four Fs had reasserted themselves. In the incipient market economy of the sixth century BCE, people were casting restraint to the winds in headlong and aggressive pursuit of luxury, wealth, and power. Large new states, ruled by erstwhile barbarians unfamiliar with the li, attacked the smaller principalities with impunity, resulting in terrible loss of life. Confucius was horrified. The Chinese seemed bent on self-destruction, and in his view, salvation lay in a renewed appreciation of the underlying spirit of the old rites. The rituals of consideration (shu) ensured that people did not treat others carelessly and were not driven simply by utility and self-interest; these gracious codes of behavior had made people conscious of the dignity of every human being; they expressed and conferred sacred respect; they taught every family member to live for the others; they introduced individuals to the virtue of “yielding” to their fellows, helping them to cultivate the “softness” and “pliability” of ren. Properly understood, therefore, the rites were a spiritual education that enabled people to transcend the limitations of selfishness. In the old days, it was thought that the li conferred a magical power on the recipient. Confucius reinterpreted this: when people are treated with reverence, they become conscious of their own sacred worth, and ordinary actions, such as eating and drinking, are lifted to a level higher than the biological and invested with holiness. The implications for politics were immense. If instead of ruthlessly pursuing his own self-interest to the detriment of others, a ruler would “curb his ego and submit to li for a single day,” Confucius believed, “everyone under Heaven would respond to his goodness!”27 What is ren, asked one of his disciples, and how can it be applied to political life? In exactly the same way as you apply it to family life, Confucius replied: by treating everybody with respect. Behave away from home as though you were in the presence of an important guest. Deal with the common people as though you were officiating at an important sacrifice. Do not do to others what you would not like yourself. Then there will be no feelings of opposition to you, whether it is the affairs of a State that you are handling or the affairs of a Family.28 There would be no destructive wars if a ruler behaved toward other princes and states in this way; the Golden Rule would make it impossible to invade somebody else’s territory because nobody would like this to happen to his own state. It was quite simple, Confucius explained to his outspoken pupil Zigong:

• From Twelve Steps to a Compassionate Life (2010)

  52 In its original context, hesed had meant not “love” but “loyalty”; for Hosea, God had not been speaking of the loving deeds that Jews would perform for one another but of the cultic fealty that Israelites owed to him . The rabbis had seen too much of the horror of warfare to condone the old chauvinisms. Not only had they witnessed the destruction of their holy city in 70, but the Bar Kochba revolt against the Roman occupation in 132–35 CE had resulted in catastrophic loss of Jewish life. Judaism, like the other monotheisms, is not a wholly pacifist religion; warfare is permitted, but only in self-defense. 53 Yet for the rabbis, peace ( shalom ) is one of the highest values of all: shalom was more than a mere absence of conflict; it can also be translated as “wholeness, completion.” Shalom was to be pursued as a positive harmonious principle in which opposites could be reconciled. 54 The rabbis cited the Jewish command “You shall not hate your brother in your heart,” pointing out that it was not sufficient to refrain from cursing or slapping your neighbor, but that enmity had to be extirpated from the deepest reaches of the mind 55 and that hatred of one’s fellow creatures put a man beyond the pale. 56 True power lay not in martial strength but in compassion and reconciliation. “Who is mighty?” the rabbis asked. “He who turns an enemy into a friend.” 57 In their interpretation of the biblical doctrine of creation, the rabbis focused on the fact that all human beings were made in God’s image. To show disrespect to anyone was therefore regarded as a denial of God himself and tantamount to atheism, and murder was not simply a crime against humanity but a sacrilege. 58 God had created only one man at the beginning of time to teach us that destroying a single life was equivalent to annihilating the world, while to save a life redeemed the entire human race. 59 To humiliate anybody—even a slave or a non-Jew—was, like murder, a sacrilegious desecration of God’s image, and to spread a libelous story about anybody at all was to deny God’s existence. 60 Charity was the ultimate test of faith. You could not worship God unless you honored your fellow humans, whoever they might be. Compassion seems also to have been central to the Christian ethos from the beginning. Like Hillel, Jesus taught the Golden Rule—but in its positive formulation.

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

  It also contradicted his reading of the Bible, which he saw as the only touchstone for true belief – sola scriptura, by Scripture alone. The theology of indulgences was presented in peculiarly crass form in 1517 by a Dominican indulgence salesman, Johann Tetzel, backed by Pope Leo X and by Luther’s own Bishop, Albrecht of Brandenburg, for their own revenue-raising purposes. The issue then became one of authority: were the Church authorities justified in ordering Luther to keep quiet on the matter? He thought not, and, with a hitherto undiscovered talent for arousing popular passions through publishing his case in print, he turned this into a rebellion that convulsed all northern Europe, spreading far from Wittenberg and increasingly polarizing the political leaders of the Holy Roman Empire and beyond. [3] Ever more extreme in his defiance of the Pope, theatrically burning the papal bull excommunicating him in 1520, Luther soon proclaimed all the power of the existing clerical order to be a fraud. That included the priesthood’s claim to be an especially holy category of human being, marked out by abstention from marital sex. This was to trigger a new historical departure: the reversal of the Western Church’s unique insistence on universal clerical celibacy, and a reassertion of the primacy of the Christian family. THE FAMILY: TRIUMPH AND TRANSFORMATION Protestantism’s account of its origins has prioritized Martin Luther’s restating of an Augustinian theology of salvation, ‘justification by faith alone’, but more permanently momentous was his repudiation of compulsory clerical celibacy. He untangled clerical ministry from the ascetic vocation to abstain from sex, and that led to the subsequent elimination of the monastic life from Protestant Churches, with a few exceptions in Lutheran Germany that were the result of string-pulling by powerful local families. [4] Otherwise, the long reign of celibacy as the default option for Christian perfection was over. Protestant unity fractured straight away in its first decade, as many leaders of the Reformation considered Luther not radical or clear-headed enough in the work of reform; hence a permanent split developed between ‘Lutherans’ and the rest, who eventually found a constructive label for themselves as ‘Reformed’ Protestants. [5] Yet amid these often bitter theological disputes, and amid the constant splintering of Protestant identities that has continued right up to the present day, no branch of the Protestant religious revolution has ever questioned the rejection of universal celibacy for clergy. For the first time in centuries, the overwhelming majority of clergy became married men. And, therefore, virtually for the first time, theological discussion of marriage and the family was conducted by those with practical experience of marriage: even by some women. An important preparatory contribution to this radical turn away from more than a millennium of monastic triumph in Christianity was from one who never himself became a Protestant: the doyen of Renaissance humanist writers and scholars, Desiderius Erasmus.

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

  [21] The (so far, incomplete) nemesis of Bash Camps was John Smyth, as charismatic as Peter Ball but in a completely different mould as a successful Evangelical lawyer: the conservative Methodist Mrs Mary Whitehouse was among his clients when her moral campaigns reached the law courts. An extrovert family man with easy access to certain public schools, Smyth rose to be chairman of the Iwerne Trust (the sponsor of the ‘Bash Camps’), as well as a trustee of the closely related Scripture Union. Once in contact with schoolboys, he would select some for grooming and work out his own moral chaos on them, particularly through repeated sessions of flagellation, which in some cases he continued into their life after schooldays. Gradually evidence of Smyth’s crimes began to emerge; he was nevertheless not reported to the police, but simply forced to step back from his positions of responsibility, and in 1984 he emigrated to southern Africa. There his pattern of offending continued, including the unexplained death of a young man in Zimbabwe. He himself died in South Africa before he could face trial. At the time of writing, Anglican conservative Evangelical leaders have failed to face up adequately to what happened, nor have they fully addressed the implications of other analogous behaviour in the same circle. One response has been a rebranding exercise, in which the Iwerne Trust has become the Titus Trust. [22] WEAPONIZING SEX FOR POLITICS From the 1960s onwards, the United Kingdom has proved a failure for those trying to hold back the permissive society. Fundamentalism in its original sense has long been a lost cause, but conservative Evangelicals have done their best. Prominent among their campaigning organizations in the 1970s was the Nationwide Festival of Light, which staged rallies and the like defending the patriarchal family as the only means of saving the United Kingdom from moral decay. The NFOL’s Director, Raymond Johnston, stood in the private school and Oxbridge Evangelical tradition; he unhesitatingly proclaimed the Western nuclear family (‘mum, dad and kids’) to be ‘the Christian norm’, despite the difficulty of matching it up to the impressionistic depictions of Christian families that may be extracted from the New Testament. Johnson fulminated against abortion, but, following a significant trend in conservative Evangelicalism generally, he was much more equivocal on artificial contraception. [23] Standing alongside NFOL was the National Viewers’ and Listeners’ Association (NVLA), strongly female in membership and run by Mrs Mary Whitehouse, a schoolteacher armed with handbag and hat in personification of the monochrome 1950s. She concentrated her fury more selectively on the liberal subversion of society in the programme output of the BBC. Mrs Whitehouse came from the same provincial Wesleyan Methodist background as the long-serving Tory Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher: Mrs Thatcher did find it expedient to play on their commonalities when she wished to stress what was, in reality, a manufactured image of herself as an ordinary housewife.

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

  My post is blowing up partly because people enjoy seeing the crazy Fake Steve Jobs blogger guy making fun of his boss in public. “Did you get fired today?” one asks. But I’ve also tapped into a huge well of anger that I didn’t know existed. Apparently, a lot of people have been pushed aside after reaching a certain age, especially in the tech industry. The things Halligan said out loud are exactly what those people suspect their bosses were thinking about them when they shoved them out the door. Officially nobody ever gets fired because of age. Officially, their position no longer exists, or the department is changing priorities. But everyone knows the truth. They’re old, and they get paid too much. As my editor at Newsweek told me, “They can take your salary and hire five kids right out of college.” Now here is some asshole tech CEO who has just blurted that out, in an interview. On Facebook, Spinner chimes in. She writes an angry comment under my Facebook post telling me I am not a team player: “We’re all supposed to be solving for EV,” she writes. EV means enterprise value, and “solving for EV” means we’re all supposed to be doing whatever we can to pump up the value of the company. Then Cranium jumps into the fray. Instead of apologizing for Halligan he doubles down and defends the remarks. “I give Brian credit for being transparent and upfront,” Cranium writes. “A lot of CEOs are hard to read and borderline deceptive. With Brian you know what he is thinking and I think that is awesome.” Yup, it’s awesome all right. Now people really start piling in. It’s a feeding frenzy of angry olds on a Facebook rampage. A fifty-something former marketing executive at IBM dismisses Cranium as a buffoon and a bootlicker, and says HubSpot’s board should be meeting right away to replace Halligan: “A CEO who insults potential clients, employees & shareholders in the NYT. You’re a marketing company? Your VCs should be recruiting by tomorrow.” The post gets hundreds of likes, dozens of shares, nearly one hundred comments. I can’t stop the onslaught. I consider deleting my post, which would also delete all the comments, but that would create the impression that HubSpot forced me to take it down, which could make the company look worse. Besides that, what Halligan said was stupid, and I don’t feel sorry for pointing that out. I leave the post up, and wait for someone at HubSpot to call me to tell me I’m fired. But the phone doesn’t ring.

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

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

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

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

• From Twelve Steps to a Compassionate Life (2010)

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

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

  1 Setting Out ‘To other subjects it is expected that you sit down cool: but on this subject if you let it be seen that you have not sat down in a rage you have betrayed yourself at once.’ [1] A characteristically sharp observation of the Georgian philosopher Jeremy Bentham: the display-case in University College London sheltering his handsomely clothed sedentary skeleton is a secular shrine to the man who talked more common sense about sex than has been customary in the history of Western culture. [2] Bentham was referring specifically only to what we now call homosexuality – although, when he wrote, that particular word did not yet exist. In our own time, his remark applies more broadly to almost any discussion of sex, marriage and gender, particularly when it touches on religious belief and practice. Anyone sitting down to read a history of sex and Christianity in the twenty-first century is likely to have one reason or another for being in a rage. This book will serve as a receptacle for an impressively contradictory range of furies. It will displease those confident that they can find a consistent view on sex in a seamless and infallible text known as the Bible, or those who with equal confidence believe that a single true Church has preached a timeless message on the subject. Others will bring experiences leading them to hate Christianity as a vehicle of oppression and trauma in sexual matters, and they may be dissatisfied with a story that tries to avoid caricaturing the past. We are all participant observers in matters of gender and sexuality, and few topics are more likely than sexual experiences or non-experiences to arouse intense personal memories, for good or ill. They shape our identities and self-esteem, so we are prone in moments of stress to dump this legacy beyond ourselves, often in curiously shaped guises. After a quarter-century and more of fielding the aggression of strangers, in media ranging from (literal) green ink to lengthy emails, I can ruefully second the comment from a fellow scholar analysing emotions in society, ‘the historian’s reminder of things forgotten is hardly ever welcome in the religious sphere.’ [3] Historians should accept this gladly as our fate and our calling. A delightful remark survives from an Indian historian in the days of the British Raj, Sir Jadunath Sarkar, who while chairing a meeting of the India Historical Records Commission in 1937 drily observed that civil servants in the Imperial Record Department were worried that free access to archives would ‘unsettle many settled facts’. [4] That is the inevitable, and welcome, consequence of examining the past properly. Some may feel that the splendours and miseries of sex were ever thus; human nature has not changed in perhaps three hundred thousand years of recognizable Homo sapiens .

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

  Spinner was incensed. She demanded that Barbara change the headline and rewrite the story, because, strictly speaking, Atticus and the other guy were not executives. Barbara argued that they sounded pretty executive to her, and anyway, she was busy and on deadline and she didn’t have time to get into a debate about semantics with Spinner. Trotsky knew that I was friendly with Barbara, and he called me, apoplectic. “Spinner just ruined a good relationship with an important reporter. Barbara has been good to us. Now she’ll never write about us again,” he said. When I called Barbara and asked her about it, she just laughed. Sure, Spinner had been a pest. Maybe she figured that if she just annoyed Barbara enough, Barbara would relent and change the headline, dropping the word executive, if only to make Spinner go away and leave her alone. Barbara tends to dislike PR people in general, but especially so when they start telling her which words she can and cannot use. But to Barbara this was not a big deal. That’s the backstory. The news today, as I sit with my coffee in Topanga, is that Atticus has joined a new company, and the Boston Business Journal has done a story with a headline describing him as a “former HubSpot exec.” Atticus posts a link to this on his Facebook feed. That’s where I post my little wisecrack: “Atticus,” I write, “I’m happy for you, but you’re not an executive. I’m going to demand a correction!” It’s an inside joke, a little wink at a tiny shitstorm that only a half dozen people in the entire world even know about. In my comment I tag Barbara. Other than Atticus, she’s the only person outside of HubSpot who will get the joke. That’s it. That’s all it is. I post my little comment and keep scrolling down through my Facebook feed. Within minutes, a text message pops up on my phone. It’s from Trotsky. We need to talk. Right now. All of HubSpot is on red alert, he tells me. My comment is a huge deal. A grave error. Someone has seen it—he won’t say who—and alerted Spinner and now Spinner is going ballistic. “I’ll just delete it,” I say, and just like that, I zap my comment. It’s gone. All told, the little joke was probably online for thirty minutes at most and could not have been seen by many people. Most people who saw it wouldn’t even know what it meant. Yet Trotsky insists this is a terrible thing that I’ve done. Spinner is livid. She’s making a huge stink. Cranium is also furious. “He told me to tell you that as far as he’s concerned, this is strike two against you,” Trotsky says. Strike one, presumably, was when I criticized Halligan over his comment about gray hair and experience. “You’re not fired,” Trotsky says, “but you’re about as close to fired as you can get. It’s bad.” I’m flabbergasted.

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

  In submission to Gothard’s authority, parents entrusted their problem children to IBLP institutions, sometimes for months at a time.3 The draconian measures of surveillance and discipline Gothard introduced at IBLP, the closed system of authority, and the enforced submission of women and children created a climate ripe for abuse. In 1980, news broke that Gothard’s brother and vice president of the institute had been involved in affairs with seven of the institute’s secretaries. The scandal eventually grew to include fifteen people, and it became clear that Gothard had known of the improprieties for years but had silenced witnesses and covered up the abuse. In 1976, in fact, he had introduced a new teaching based on Matthew 18, requiring staff to promise that they would never “give an evil report but only say good things about other people.” Only later would the full extent of the abuse be revealed.4 Gothard was not without detractors within conservative evangelicalism. Critics charged that his “chain of command” replaced the role of Christ with human mediators. They critiqued his legalistic and authoritarian tendencies, and noted that he failed to put himself under any authority. Some accused him of being a cult leader. Yet to his followers, such criticism only revealed an unwillingness to submit to proper authorities. Many evangelicals were sympathetic to his cause; Gothard and his followers, it seemed, were trying to live faithfully in an increasingly hostile, secular age. He could be forgiven for perhaps taking things a bit too far. Although Gothard remained little known outside of evangelicalism, within conservative circles he exerted significant influence. In 1968 around 2000 people attended his seminars; by 1973 that number had grown to over 200,000. As the author of a popular homeschooling curriculum, he inculcated generations of children in his teachings of biblical law and patriarchal authority. As homeschooling increased in popularity in the 1980s, many families who would not have identified as Christian Reconstructionists nevertheless came to embrace the tradition’s core precepts. In this way, authoritarian teachings infused Christian homes, churches, and the wider evangelical subculture.5 Gothard didn’t engage directly in politics, but others influenced by the ideas he and Rushdoony advanced did. Howard Phillips, a convert to evangelicalism and a key behind-the-scenes operative, came across Rushdoony’s ideas in the mid-1970s, and soon joined forces with Rushdoony to combat “the ‘IRS assault’ on Christian schools.” Phillips’s son, Doug Phillips, would later emerge alongside Gothard as a leading figure in the Christian homeschool movement. Pat Robertson and D. James Kennedy hosted Rushdoony on their broadcasts, helping to meld charismatic and prosperity gospel traditions with Reconstructionist-inspired teachings, and Rushdoony’s work was cited by law school faculty at Oral Roberts University, at Pat Robertson’s CBN/Regent University, and at Jerry Falwell’s Liberty University. Francis Schaeffer, John W. (Wayne) Whitehead, and Tim LaHaye were also among those influenced by Reconstructionism. Rushdoony is often seen as the “crazy uncle” of the Religious Right, and Gothard himself was not viewed much differently.

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

  In this way, Moses explained, “the goat will bear all their faults away with it into a desert place.” 1 In his classic study of religion and violence, René Girard argued that the scapegoat ritual defused rivalries among groups within the community. 2 In a similar way, I believe, modern society has made a scapegoat of faith. In the West the idea that religion is inherently violent is now taken for granted and seems self-evident. As one who speaks on religion, I constantly hear how cruel and aggressive it has been, a view that, eerily, is expressed in the same way almost every time: “Religion has been the cause of all the major wars in history.” I have heard this sentence recited like a mantra by American commentators and psychiatrists, London taxi drivers and Oxford academics. It is an odd remark. Obviously the two world wars were not fought on account of religion. When they discuss the reasons people go to war, military historians acknowledge that many interrelated social, material, and ideological factors are involved, one of the chief being competition for scarce resources. Experts on political violence or terrorism also insist that people commit atrocities for a complex range of reasons. 3 Yet so indelible is the aggressive image of religious faith in our secular consciousness that we routinely load the violent sins of the twentieth century onto the back of “religion” and drive it out into the political wilderness. Even those who admit that religion has not been responsible for all the violence and warfare of the human race still take its essential belligerence for granted. They claim that “ monotheism” is especially intolerant and that once people believe that “God” is on their side, compromise becomes impossible. They cite the Crusades, the Inquisition, and the Wars of Religion of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. They also point to the recent spate of terrorism committed in the name of religion to prove that Islam is particularly aggressive. If I mention Buddhist nonviolence, they retort that Buddhism is a secular philosophy, not a religion. Here we come to the heart of the problem. Buddhism is certainly not a religion as this word has been understood in the West since the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. But our modern Western conception of “religion” is idiosyncratic and eccentric. No other cultural tradition has anything like it, and even premodern European Christians would have found it reductive and alien. In fact, it complicates any attempt to pronounce on religion’s propensity to violence. To complicate things still further, for about fifty years now it has been clear in the academy that there is no universal way to define religion. 4 In the West we see “religion” as a coherent system of obligatory beliefs, institutions, and rituals, centering on a supernatural God, whose practice is essentially private and hermetically sealed off from all “secular” activities. But words in other languages that we translate as “religion” almost invariably refer to something larger, vaguer, and more encompassing.

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

  For decades French knights had been engaged in almost ceaseless warfare and were now economically dependent on plunder and looting. As the French historian Marc Bloch has explained, besides bringing a knight glory and heroism, warfare was “perhaps above all, a source of profit, the nobleman’s chief industry,” so for the less affluent, the return of peace could be “an economic crisis as well as a disastrous loss of prestige.” 24 Without war, a knight could not afford weapons and horses, tools of his trade, and would be forced into menial labor. The violent seizure of property was, as we have seen, regarded as the only honorable way for an aristocrat to acquire resources, so much so that there was “no line of demarcation” in early medieval Europe between “warlike activity” and “pillaging.” 25 During the tenth century, therefore, many impoverished knights were simply doing what came naturally to them when they robbed and harassed the peasantry. This surge of violence coincided with the development of the manors, the great landed estates, and a full-fledged agrarian system in Europe, which depended on the forcible extraction of the agricultural surplus. 26 The arrival of the structural violence that maintained it was heralded at the end of the tenth century by the appearance of a new ordo: the imbelle vulgus, or “unarmed commoner,” whose calling was laborare, “to work.” 27 The manorial system had abolished the ancient distinction between the free peasant, who could bear arms, and the slave, who could not. Both were now lumped together, forbidden to fight, yet unable to defend themselves from the knights’ assault, and forced to live at subsistence level. A two-tier stratification had emerged in Western society: the “men of power” ( potentes ) and the “poor” ( pauperes ). The aristocracy needed the help of ordinary soldiers to subjugate the poor, so knights became retainers, exempt from servitude and taxation and members of the nobility. The aristocratic priests naturally supported this oppressive system and indeed were largely responsible for crafting it, enraging many of the poor by their flagrant abandonment of the egalitarianism of the gospel. The Church denounced the more vocal of these malcontents as “ heretics,” but their dissent took the form of a religiously articulated protest against the new social and political system and was not concerned with theological issues. In the early eleventh century, for example, Robert of Arbrissel wandered barefoot through Brittany and Anjou at the head of a tattered retinue of pauperes Christi, his demand for a return to gospel values attracting widespread support. 28 In southern France, Henry of Lausanne also drew huge crowds when he attacked the greed and immorality of the clergy, and in Flanders, Tanchelm of Antwerp preached so effectively that people stopped attending Mass and refused to pay their tithes. Robert eventually submitted to the Church, founded a Benedictine monastery, and became a canonized saint, but Henry remained active in his “heresy” for thirty years, and Tanchelm set up his own church.