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 Art of Memoir

  What rankles me lately, though, is a sweeping tendency to deny even the possibility of truth. During a campus sexual harassment investigation, my department chair said, “There’s her version and his version—there is no truth.” Which infuriated me: someone either assaulted the woman in question, or not. It was binary. Sure, there are major mistakes of interpretation. Two cops beating a black man claim he was reaching for a weapon in his pants. A video shows the victim groping, but it’s for an asthma inhaler. In an off-kilter paradox, our strange cynicism about truth as a possibility has permitted us to accept all manner of bullshit on the page. Or maybe our appetite for the fantastic—fed by Ironman and Gravity and a phalanx of vampire- and zombie-based blockbusters— has eroded all public standards of plausibility, even among perfectly smart people. (Okay, there are some dumb bunnies. Walking out of The Last Temptation of Christ, a friend overheard someone say, “I didn’t know Jesus was so short.”) Our desire for spectacle has led many story-concocting “memoirists” into jacking up their tales, believing that the story with the most gunshots will win the biggest audience. But it’s the busted liars who talk most volubly about the fuzzy line between nonfiction and fiction. Their anything-goes message has come to dominate the airwaves around memoir. Reading that scammer James Frey got on a plane with a bullet hole through his cheek, I deduced that—even pre-9/11—airport security frowned on boarding the gunshot-wounded. And when he alleged that his rehab made him suffer a root canal without a non- consciousness-altering numbing agent, sober people the world over knew the torture session was fake. The bullet hole and unnumbed tooth were absolute tip-offs. Surely other readers, had they paused even for a second to consider the unlikelihood of those reports, would have dubbed the guy a bullshitter. What I’m guessing: many just shrugged past it, because we’ve all chosen to accept that the line between fiction and nonfiction is too subtle for us to discern. That’s what Frey argued on TV, vigorously. He had no reluctance to speak for all memoirists, claiming self-

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

  Milosevic depicted Serbia as “a fortress, defending European culture and religion” from the Islamic world, and Serbian clerics and academics similarly described their nation as a bulwark against the Asiatic hordes. Another radical Serbian nationalist, Radovan Karadzic, had warned the Bosnian Assembly that if it declared independence, it would lead their nation “into hell” and “make the Muslim people disappear.” But this latent hatred of Islam dated only to the nineteenth century, when Serbian nationalists had created a myth that blended Christianity with a national sentiment based on ethnicity: it cast Prince Lazlo, defeated by the Ottomans in 1389, as a Christ figure; the Turkish sultan as a Christ slayer; and the Slavs who converted to Islam as “Turkified” (isturciti). By adopting a non-Christian religion, they had renounced their Slavic ethnicity and become Orientals; the Serbian nation would not rise again until these aliens were exterminated. Yet so deep-rooted were the habits of coexistence that it took Milosevic three years of relentless propaganda to persuade the Serbs to revive this lethal blend of secular nationalism, religion, and racism. Significantly, the war began with a frantic attempt to expunge the documentary evidence that for centuries Jews, Christians, and Muslims had enjoyed a rich coexistence. A month after the Bosnian declaration of independence, Serbian militias destroyed the Oriental Institute in Sarajevo, which housed the largest collection of Islamic and Jewish manuscripts in the Balkans, burned down the National Library and National Museum, and targeted all such manuscript collections for destruction. Between them, Serbian and Croat nationalists also destroyed some fourteen hundred mosques, turning the sites into parks and parking lots to erase all memory of the inconvenient past.23 While they were burning the museums, Serbian militias and the heavily armed Yugoslav National Army overran Bosnia, and in the autumn of 1992 the process that Karadzic called “ethnic cleansing” began.24 Milosevic had opened the prisons and recruited petty gangsters into the militias, letting them pillage, rape, burn, and kill with impunity.25 No Muslim was to be spared, and any Bosnian Serb who refused to cooperate must also die. Muslims were herded into concentration camps, and without toilets or other sanitation, filthy, emaciated, and traumatized, they seemed scarcely human either to themselves or to their tormentors. Militia leaders dulled the inhibitions of their troops with alcohol, forcing them to gang-rape, murder, and torture. When Srebrenica, a UN “safe area,” was turned over to the Serb army in the summer of 1995, at least eight thousand men and boys were massacred, and by the autumn the last Muslims were either killed or expelled from the Banja Luka region.26

• From Bestiary (2020)

  The girl starved for two days as the families argued, before someone said that the girl would die before they ever decided. So they named her Meng Jiang Nu, daughter of both families, daughter of two bloods. This story is wrong, I told my mother. If she was really a daughter, neither family would want her. She couldn’t be milked until she was a mother, couldn’t be bartered until she was a bride. My mother never finished the story. I never asked if she had wanted me, if I was the kind of daughter who doubled as a battleground, who was fought over. Later, my mother would say, Remember, it wasn’t the girl they were fighting over. It was the gourd. Maybe, when the gourd split open, they wept not to celebrate her birth but to grieve their lost gold. They cursed gravity as thievery. I remembered watching families in restaurants fighting to pay a bill, and maybe that was what Meng and Jiang were fighting over: a bill they were too proud to let the other take. To say a daughter is a debt they could afford to pay. _ On Sundays, our mother woke us up with the end of her broom to clean every room, saran-wrapping the sofa and spitting on the windows to lubricate the light that entered them. To keep my language clean: gargle saltwater twice a week. To keep your teeth from leaving you on wings: tally them every night with your tongue. She rinsed the dishes so bright we had to squint while eating; she sang to a knife in the sink as if auditioning to be its blade. We can never be clean enough for this country, she said. Weekly, my father accused her of loving the apartment better than her husband, of kneeling to clean but never kneeling for him. My mother said that keeping a clean home was a sign of wealth and keeping a husband was a sign of stupidity. When my father raised his hand, my mother always raised something else—a vase, a chopstick, a sofa cushion—not to deflect the blow, but to meet it midair, to return it. When my father took off his belt, we held on to the other end to anchor it, give back its gravity. Sometimes he beat us with it just to hear us beg him to stop. This is the only thing I can give you, he said. Not money or a house.

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

  Religious extremism often develops in a symbiotic relationship with a virulently aggressive secularism. One of the Brothers detained in 1954 was Sayyid Qutb (1906–66), the Society’s chief propagandist.56 As a young man, Qutb had felt no conflict between his faith and secular politics, but he had been alienated by the ruthless policies of the British and shocked by the racial prejudice he experienced during a visit to the United States. Still, his views had remained moderate and tentative; what radicalized him was the violence of Nasser’s prison. Qutb was himself tortured and was horrified to see twenty prisoners slaughtered in a single incident. Dozens more were tortured and executed—and not by foreigners but by their own people. Secularism no longer seemed benign but cruel, aggressive, and immoral. In prison, Qutb took Maududi’s ideas a step further. When he heard Nasser vowing to privatize Islam on the Western model and observed the unfolding horror of his prison life, Qutb came to believe that even a so-called Muslim ruler could be as violently jahili as any Western power. Like so many others terrorized by violence and injustice, Qutb had developed a dualistic ideology that divided the world starkly into two camps: one accepted God’s sovereignty, and the other did not. In the career of Muhammad, God had revealed a practical program for the creation of a properly ordered society. First, acting under God’s orders, he had created a jamaat, a “party” committed to justice and equity that held aloof from the pagan establishment. Second, at the hijrah, he had effected a complete severance between the Godly and the Godless. Third, Muhammad had established an Islamic state in Medina; and fourth, he began his jihad against jahili Mecca, which eventually bowed to God’s sovereignty.

• From My Secret Garden (1973)

  SEX ENHANCEMENTIf you like, you can read almost any female sexual fantasy as a cry of frustration. We are all prepared to think of women, any woman, as potentially frustrated simply because it is our historic sexual role. Traditionally, we are the frustrated sex—less experienced, less mobile, and less accepted sexually. We have spent less time at it, and been less informed by art, literature, and commerce (to say nothing of our parents and husbands) as to just what our sexual role is—except usually that of desireless virgin or prisoner. Even the most daring sexual adventuress I’ve talked to admits that her role in her fantasies may still lag behind her real sexual activity: somewhere, even in her wildest, most sexual fantasy, she still plays the inhibited role her mother taught her. In her life she may feel perfectly free to initiate sex, to play the active seducer’s role, to take on a man for a guiltless, one-night stand just for the fun of it, but her fantasy will often still be of the “it is not my fault, he made me do it” type: She was doped, or raped, or subjected to cruel and overwhelming domination. Ideas like these, so deeply rooted in the mind no matter what the relatively free body does, will take another generation to outgrow. But it would be too simple to say that anyone whose sexual imagery conflicts with her sexual reality isn’t getting what she wants, that all sexual fantasy is dominated by real frustration. Some of the happiest, most sexually satisfied women I’ve talked to fantasize, and are all the more sexually satisfying partners because of it. What I am saying is simple: that we women are traditionally prone to and expert at fantasy; that even when we are being fully fucked our minds can imagine the sexual exploration and variables that our bodies are accustomed to do without; that sex itself—and not only lack of it—can inspire fantasy; and that for some women there is almost a chain reaction between sexual fact and fantasy, that the one feeds and stimulates the other. PatriciaPatricia is a tall, blond American beauty who lives in Rome. For the past year she has been separated from her husband and living with Antonio, an Italian. Patricia and her wealthy English husband have an agreement that when they’re tired of their individual adventuring they will leave Rome, that nothing either of them has done there will have counted, and that they will return to New York or London together. Because, as Patricia says, “We really love one another. We simply want to explore now, without guilt.”

• From My Secret Garden (1973)

  But if not Women’s Lib, then liberation itself was in the air. With the increasing liberation of women’s bodies, our minds were being set free, too. The idea that women had sexual fantasies, the enigma of just what they might be, the prospect that the age-old question of men to women, “What are you thinking about?” might at last be answered, now suddenly fascinated editors. No longer was it a matter of the sales-minded editor deciding what a commercial gimmick it would be to publish a series of sexy novels by sexy ladies, novels that would give an odd new sales tickle to the age-old fucking scenes that had always been written by men. Now it was suddenly out of the editors’ hands: Women were writing about sex, but it was from their point of view (women seen only as male sex fantasies no more), and it was a whole new bedroom. The realization was suddenly obvious, that with the liberation of women, men would be liberated too from all the stereotypes that made them think of women as burdens, prudes, and necessary evils, even at best something less than a man. Imagine! Talking to a woman might be more fun than a night out with the boys! With all this in the air, it’s no surprise that at first my idea fascinated everyone. “I’m thinking of doing a book about female sexual fantasies,” I’d say for openers to a group of highly intelligent and articulate friends. That’s all it took. All conversation would stop. Men and women both would turn to me with half-smiles of excitement. They were willing to countenance the thought, but only in generalities, I discovered. “Oh, you mean the old rape dream?” “You don’t mean something like King Kong, do you?” But when I would speak about fantasies with the kind of detail which in any narrative carries the feel of life and makes the verbal experience emotionally real, the ease around the restaurant table would abruptly stop. Men would become truculent and nervous (ah! my old lover—how universal you are) and their women, far from contributing fantasies of their own—an idea that might have intrigued them in the beginning—would close up like clams. If anyone spoke, it was the men: “Why don’t you collect men’s fantasies?” “Women don’t need fantasies, they have us.” “Women don’t have sexual fantasies.” “I can understand some old, dried-up prune that no man would want having fantasies. Some frustrated neurotic. But the ordinary, sexually satisfied woman doesn’t need them.” “Who needs fantasies? What’s the matter with good old-fashioned sex?”

• From Bestiary (2020)

  This is all of them: When Ba calls me by my Jie’s name, or my mother’s name, even though Ma is right beside him, waiting for him to misspeak so she can whip him with the phone cord. When I was still a girlsapling, Ba made whips for the oxen he steered through the fields in summer, drying the cowhide on our laundry line. The whips were made of the same skin they scarred. That’s when I learned: The best thing for breaking skin is skin. Ma says she’s started taking Ba to some doctor. The kind that asks you to swallow a bead and measures how long it takes for it to come out the other end, diagnosing you based on the speed of your shit. I’m a better doctor, I tell Ma. I tell her to send him to me, or I’ll drive down myself and take him home—you’re not the only one who has thought of this. Ma says no, she won’t let him go, and I say, That’s exactly how you’re killing him. Ma says, Killing him? and you wouldn’t know, you aren’t listening, but that question is what tethers us. It’s not that she’s ashamed of having tried to kill us. It’s that she failed, changed her mind, which means she wanted us despite what we made her: a mother. You’ve moved on from jungles. Now you’re all about domesticated animals. Dog-grooming shows, cats caught on home video, rodents that require complex surgery on their raisin brains. You think I don’t know about your tail, but from the day it was born I watched it outgrow you. I saw it that first day when you walked into the kitchen and there was a shadow on the floor, a shadow too slim to match any of your limbs. Even when the tail’s hidden, I can see where the light bends its head to groom it. I tell you the moon is a rabbit. That’s a myth from the mainlander side of you, my ba’s side. Your father’s side, too. I thought I’d married someone the opposite of Ba, a man who drives himself like a plow, a man I could steer anywhere. Now I wake in my bed alone and the sun hits my body like a fist. What do you feel with Ben? Is she someone so literate in need, she makes your body a language for it? You don’t remember, but he cried sometimes, cried when he belted the breath out of us, and later I found him asleep with his head in the toilet bowl. Be Papakwaka, I told him. Be harder.

• From My People (2022)

  Andy Young, an SCLC executive, trying to dispel rumors of disorganization in the camp, said one day: “We are a movement, not an organization. And we move when the spirit says move. Anything outside is God’s business. We are incorporated by the Lord and baptized by all this rain.” While the camp was virtually leaderless from a formal, organizational standpoint (Mr. Abernathy was always off traveling with a large entourage of SCLC officials), it did not lack individual movers and doers. One day, a discussion of the mud revealed such a person. Standing attentively at a press conference on a sunny day, with an umbrella over her head, Mrs. Lila Mae Brooks of Sunflower County, Mississippi, said, to no one in particular, “We used to mud and us who have commodes are used to no sewers.” A tall, thin, spirited woman, Mrs. Brooks talks with little or no prompting. Observing that I was interested, she went on: “We used to being sick, too. And we used to death. All my children [she has eight] born sickly. But in Sunflower County, sick folks sent from the hospital and told to come back in two months. They set up twenty-seven rent houses—rent for twenty-five dollars—and they put you out when you don’t pay. People got the health department over ’bout the sewers, but Mayor said they couldn’t put in sewers until 1972.” She is forty-seven, and for years has worked in private homes, cotton fields, and churches. In 1964 she was fired from a job for helping Negroes register to vote. For a while, she was on the SCLC staff, teaching citizenship. When she had a sunstroke, and later a heart attack, she had to go on welfare. (She is also divorced.) For three years, she got $40-a-month child support, and finally $73. She left her children with her mother, who is eighty, and sister to come to the campaign. “People in Sunflower asked my friends was I sick ’cause they hadn’t seen me. Then they saw me on TV in Washington and said I’d better head back before the first or they’d cut off my welfare check. You go out the state overnight and they cut off your welfare check. But that’s OK. I had to come. When SCLC chose me from Eastland’s County, he met his match. I’ve seen so much. I’ve seen ’em selling food stamps and they tell you if you don’t buy, they cut off your welfare check. And that stuff they sell there don’t count—milk, tobacco, and washing powder. Well, how you gonna keep clean? All the welfare people know is what they need. I ain’t raising no more white babies for them. Ain’t goin’ that road no more. I drug my own children through the cotton fields, now they talkin’ ’bout not lettin’ us go to Congress. Well, I’ll stand on Eastland’s toes. People from twelve months to twelve months without work. People with no money. Where the hell the money at?

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

  At a diocesan synod, convoked by the bishop John of Jerusalem in June, 415,1729 this Orosius appeared against Pelagius, and gave information that a council at Carthage had condemned Coelestius, and that Augustine had written against his errors. Pelagius answered with evasion and disparagement: "What matters Augustine to me?" Orosius gave his opinion, that a man who presumed to speak contumeliously of the bishop to whom the whole North African church owed her restoration (alluding apparently to the settlement of the Donatist controversies), deserved to be excluded from the communion of the whole church. John, who was a great admirer of the condemned Origen, and made little account of the authority of Augustine, declared: "I am Augustine,"1730 and undertook the defence of the accused. He permitted Pelagius, although only a monk and layman, to take his seat among the presbyters.1731 Nor did he find fault with Pelagius’ assertion, that man can easily keep the commandments of God, and become free from sin, after the latter had conceded, in a very indefinite manner, that for this the help of God is necessary. Pelagius had the advantage of understanding both languages, while John spoke only Greek, Orosius only Latin, and the interpreter often translated inaccurately. After much discussion it was resolved, that the matter should be laid before the Roman bishop, Innocent, since both parties in the controversy belonged to the Western church. Meanwhile these should refrain from all further attacks on each other. A second Palestinian council resulted still more favorably to Pelagius. This consisted of fourteen bishops, and was held at Diospolis or Lydda, in December of the same year, under the presidency of Eulogius, bishop of Caesarea, to judge of an accusation preferred by two banished bishops of Gaul, Heros and Lazarus, acting in concert with Jerome.1732 The charges were unskilfully drawn up, and Pelagius was able to avail himself of equivocations, and to condemn as folly, though not as heresy, the teachings of Coelestius, which were also his own. The synod, of which John of Jerusalem was a member, did not go below the surface of the question, nor in fact understand it, but acquitted the accused of all heresy. Jerome is justified in calling this a "miserable synod;"1733 although Augustine is also warranted in saying: "it was not heresy, that was there acquitted, but the man who denied the heresy."1734 Jerome’s polemical zeal against the Pelagians cost him dear. In the beginning of the year 416, a mob of Pelagianizing monks, ecclesiastics, and vagabonds broke into his monastery at Bethlehem, maltreated the inmates, set the building on fire, and compelled the aged scholar to take to flight. Bishop John of Jerusalem let this pass unpunished. No wonder that Jerome, even during the last years of his life, in several epistles indulges in occasional sallies of anger against Pelagius, whom he calls a second Catiline. § 149. Position of the Roman Church. Condemnation of Pelagianism.

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

  To heal this division, the two emperors, Constantius in the East and Constans in the West, summoned a general council at Sardica in Illyria, A.D. 343.1339 Here the Nicene party and the Roman influence prevailed.1340 Pope Julius was represented by two Italian priests. The Spanish bishop Hosius presided. The Nicene doctrine was here confirmed, and twelve canons were at the same time adopted, some of which are very important in reference to discipline and the authority of the Roman see. But the Arianizing Oriental bishops, dissatisfied with the admission of Athanasius, took no part in the proceedings, held an opposition council in the neighboring city of Philippopolis, and confirmed the decrees of the council of Antioch. The opposite councils, therefore, inflamed the discord of the church, instead of allaying it. Constantius was compelled, indeed, by his brother to restore Athanasius to his office in 346; but after the death of Constans, A.D. 350, be summoned three successive synods in favor of a moderate Arianism; one at Sirmium in Pannonia (351), one at Arelate or Arles in Gaul (353), and one at Milan in Italy, (355); he forced the decrees of these councils on the Western church, deposed and banished bishops, like Liberius of Rome, Hosius of Cordova, Hilary of Poictiers, Lucifer of Calaris, who resisted them, and drove Athanasius from the cathedral of Alexandria during divine service with five thousand armed soldiers, and supplied his place with an uneducated and avaricious Arian, George of Cappadocia (356). In these violent measures the court bishops and Eusebia, the last wife of Constantius and a zealous Arian, had great influence. Even in their exile the faithful adherents of the Nicene faith were subjected to all manner of abuse and vexation. Hence Constantius was vehemently attacked by Athanasius, Hilary, and Lucifer, compared to Pharaoh, Saul, Ahab, Belshazzar, and called an inhuman beast, the forerunner of Antichrist, and even Antichrist himself. Thus Arianism gained the ascendency in the whole Roman empire; though not in its original rigorous form, but in the milder form of homoi-ousianism or the doctrine of similarity of essence, as opposed on the one hand to the Nicene homo-ousianism (sameness of essence), and on the other hand to the Arian hetero-ousianism (difference of essence).

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

  On the Interim, comp. the German Histories of Ranke, (V. 25 sqq.) and Janssen (III. 625 sqq.), and the monograph of Ludwig Pastor (Rom. Cath.): Die kirchlichen Reunionsbestrebungen während der Regierung Karls V. Freiburg, 1879, pp. 357 sqq. Calvin’s tract on the false German Interim is closely connected with his criticism of the Council of Trent. After defeating the Smalkaldian League, the Emperor imposed on the Protestants in Germany a compromise confession of faith to be used till the final decision of the General Council. It was drawn up by two Roman Catholic bishops, Pflug (an Erasmian) and Helding, with the aid of John Agricola, the chaplain of Elector Joachim II. of Brandenburg. Agricola was a vain, ambitious, and unreliable man, who had once been a secretary and table companion of Luther, but fell out with him and Melanchthon in the Antinomian controversy. He was suspected of having been bribed by the Catholics.884 The agreement was laid before the Diet of Augsburg, and is called the Augsburg Interim. It was proclaimed, with an earnest exhortation, by the Emperor, May 15, 1548. It comprehended the whole Roman Catholic system of doctrine and discipline, but in a mild and conciliatory form, and without an express condemnation of the Protestant views. The doctrine of justification was stated in substantial agreement with that of the Council of Trent. The seven sacraments, transubstantiation, the mass, the invocation of the saints, the authority of the pope, and all the important ceremonies, were to be retained. The only concession made to the Protestants was the use of the cup by the laity in the holy communion, and the permission for married priests to retain their wives. The arrangement suited the views of the Emperor, who, as Ranke remarks, wished to uphold the Catholic hierarchy as the basis of his power, and yet to make it possible for Protestants to be reconciled to him. It is very evident that the adoption of such a confession was a virtual surrender of the cause of the Reformation and would have ended in a triumph of the papacy. The Interim was received with great indignation by the Protestants, and was rejected in Hesse, ducal Saxony, and the Northern cities, especially in Madgeburg, which became the headquarters of the irreconcilable Lutherans under the lead of Flacius. In Southern Germany it was enforced with great rigor by Spanish soldiers. More than four hundred pastors in Swabia and on the Rhine were expelled from their benefices for refusing the Interim, and wandered about with their families in poverty and misery. Among them was Brenz, the Reformer of Würtemburg, who fled to Basel, where he received a consolitary letter from Calvin (Nov. 5, 1548). Martin Bucer, with all his zeal for Christian union, was unwilling to make a compromise at the expense of his conscience, and fled from Strassburg to England, where he was appointed professor of divinity in the University of Cambridge.

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

  21. A German engraving of 1706 furnishes a group portrait to ornament a pious Lutheran family parlour: Martin Luther, his parents, wife and much-loved daughter Magdalena, who died in Luther’s arms aged only thirteen in 1542. Negativity towards Mary emerged as early as 1520, in Martin Luther’s anger at one recent manifestation of Marian pilgrimage enthusiasm at Regensburg. In winter 1519 the cathedral preacher (Balthasar Hubmaier, ironically a future radical Protestant) incited an anti-Jewish pogrom in Regensburg, after which Our Lady was drafted in to cure a workman badly injured while his team demolished the city synagogue. Fifty thousand pilgrims were reputed to have visited a makeshift shrine chapel to her on the site within a month of its completion on the Feast of her Assumption 1519. Hubmaier’s combination of anti-Semitism and Marian fervour (both of which he later regretted) had a dire effect on Mary’s place in Protestant Europe. Luther saw it as like Johann Tetzel’s indulgence campaign; the year-old ‘Beautiful Mary’ formed the climax in his list of offensive shrines that should be ‘levelled’ as he launched a bitter diatribe against pilgrimage in his Address to the German Nobility, one of his key declarations of war on the old devotional world. [30] As Protestants looked at the Bible with new eyes, seeking its meaning in humanist fashion as an historical text, the curiously negative elements in the Gospel portrayal of Mary became apparent to them after centuries of discreet neglect. The English celebrity preacher Hugh Latimer was a pioneer: during his brief stint as Bishop of Worcester in the 1530s, he relished destroying images of Mary in his diocese, including a cult statue in his own cathedral. Amid quite a few less than rapturous remarks about Mary in sermons, Latimer considered the arrival of Jesus’s family in Matthew 12, and criticized her for ‘interrupting [Jesus’s] sermon, which was not good manners’. Preaching on Luke’s account of twelve-year-old Jesus deserting his parents for three days while visiting the Temple, Latimer further told off Mary for failing to keep an eye on Jesus and then for quarrelling with him for wandering away, ‘like a mother’. [31] That remark might suggest some old personal grievances in Latimer; these did not affect John Calvin, certainly otherwise no friend to Marian devotion. With more human sympathy than he often displayed, Calvin defended Mary’s rebuke to her son in the Temple: ‘The weariness of three days was in that complaint.’ Nevertheless, this was a remark born of attention to the biblical text rather than pious reflection. The ultimate put-down came from the

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

  Was this simply the case of political expediency, or naked tribalism, eclipsing “family values”?9 History, however, makes plain that evangelicals’ tendency to dismiss or deny cases of sexual misconduct and abuse, too, was nothing new. Reminiscent of the 1980s, the 2000s saw a spate of sex scandals topple evangelical leaders. In many cases, the abuse or misconduct stretched back years, even decades. Many of the men implicated in the abuse, or in covering up cases of abuse, were the same men who had been preaching militant masculinity, patriarchal authority, and female purity and submission. The frequency of these instances, and the tendency of evangelicals to diminish or dismiss cases of abuse in their own communities, suggests that evangelicals’ response to allegations of abuse in the era of Trump cannot be explained by political expediency alone. Rather, these tendencies appear to be endemic to the movement itself. Those lamenting evangelicals’ apparent betrayal of “family values” fail to recognize that evangelical family values have always entailed assumptions about sex and power. The evangelical cult of masculinity links patriarchal power to masculine aggression and sexual desire; its counterpoint is a submissive femininity. A man’s sexual drive, like his testosterone, is God-given. He is the initiator, the piercer. His essential leadership capacity outside the home is bolstered by his leadership in the home, and in the bedroom. The responsibility of married women in this arrangement is clear, but implications for women extend beyond the marriage relationship. Women outside of the bonds of marriage must avoid tempting men through immodesty, or simply by being available to them, or perceived as such. Within this framework, men assign themselves the role of protector, but the protection of women and girls is contingent on their presumed purity and proper submission to masculine authority. This puts female victims in impossible situations. Caught up in authoritarian settings where a premium is placed on obeying men, women and children find themselves in situations ripe for abuse of power. Yet victims are often held culpable for acts perpetrated against them; in many cases, female victims, even young girls, are accused of “seducing” their abusers or inviting abuse by failing to exhibit proper femininity. While men (and women) invested in defending patriarchal authority frequently come to the defense of perpetrators, victims are often pressured to forgive abusers and avoid involving law enforcement. Immersed in these teachings about sex and power, evangelicals are often unable or unwilling to name abuse, to believe women, to hold perpetrators accountable, and to protect and empower survivors.10 ONE OF THE FIRST SEX SCANDALS to rattle twenty-first-century American evangelicalism struck at the heart of evangelical power. In 2006, male escort Mike Jones went public with the news that Colorado Springs megachurch pastor Ted Haggard had been paying him for sex for the past three years—the approximate period during which Haggard had been serving as head of the National Association of Evangelicals.

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

  This only identified Khomeini even more closely with the Shii Imams, since like Husain, his son had been murdered by an unjust ruler, casting the shah yet again as Yazid. And at this critical juncture, U.S. president Jimmy Carter cast himself as the “Great Satan.” In November 1977, while Iran was mourning Mustafa Khomeini, the shah visited Washington, and Carter spoke with great emotion of the United States’ “special relationship” with Iran, “an island of stability in a turbulent corner of the world.” 92 He thus entered the unfolding Karbala drama as the shaytan, the “tempter,” who lured the shah to follow the United States to the detriment of his own people. The revolution began on January 8, 1978, when the semiofficial newspaper Ettelaat published a preposterous attack on Khomeini. 93 The next day four thousand unarmed students in Qum demanded a revival of the 1906 constitution, freedom of speech, the release of political prisoners, and the return of Khomeini. Throughout, Iranians showed that they had fully absorbed the modern ethos, demanding the independence, liberty, and constitutional rule that they had been consistently denied by the shah’s secular government and the international community. Seventy of these students were killed. With this massacre, the regime crossed a line. A pattern now emerged. Forty days after the Qum massacre, crowds gathered for the traditional mourning ceremonies for the dead, and more people were shot down. Forty days later there were more ritualized rallies in honor of the new martyrs. Marxists, secularists, and liberals who opposed the shah but knew that they had no grassroots appeal joined forces with the religiously minded revolutionaries. This was not a violent uprising, however. Cinemas, banks, and liquor stores—symbols of the “great shaytan”—were attacked, but not people. 94 By now the jails were full of political prisoners, and the mounting death toll showed the world that the shah’s secular regime, lauded in the West as progressive and peaceful, was slaughtering its own people. The revolution was experienced as a religious as well as a political event. Demonstrators carried placards reading “Everywhere is Karbala, and every day is Ashura,” convinced that they were following Husain in their struggle against oppression. 95 They spoke of the revolution as a transforming and purifying experience, as if they were purging themselves of a debilitating poison and regaining authenticity. 96 Many felt as though Husain himself were leading them and that Khomeini, like the Hidden Imam, was directing them from afar.

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

  In the videotape released on October 7, 2001, he crowed: “Here is America struck by God in one of its vital organs, so that its greatest buildings are destroyed,” 72 buildings that had been carefully selected as “America’s icons of military and economic power.” 73 Five times Bin Laden applied the word kafir (“infidel”) to the United States, though each time it referred not to the religious beliefs of America but to its violation of Muslim sovereignty in Arabia and Palestine: 74 on the same day, President George W. Bush announced Operation Enduring Freedom, a U.S.-led war against the Taliban in Afghanistan. Like the First Crusade against Islam, this military offensive was couched in the language of liberty: “We defend not only our precious freedoms, but also the freedom of people everywhere.” 75 He assured the people of Afghanistan that the United States had no quarrel with them, would strike only at military targets, and promised airdrops of food, medicine, and supplies. Also, just a week following the attacks, Bush had made clear that America’s quarrel was not with Islam: “The face of terror is not the true faith of Islam. That’s not what Islam is all about. Islam is peace. These terrorists don’t represent peace. They represent evil and war.” 76 Like Bin Laden, Bush, in this carefully secular presentation, also saw the world starkly divided into two camps, one good, the other evil: “In this conflict there is no neutral ground. If any government sponsors the outlaws and killers of innocents, they have become outlaws and murderers themselves.” 77 Bush’s Manichean worldview reflected the thinking of the neoconservatives prominent in his administration, who had a semimystical belief that nothing must impede America’s unique historical mission in the twenty-first century. The “ War on Terror” would be waged against any forces that threatened America’s global leadership. Indeed, neoconservatism has been described as “a faith-based system” because it required absolute fidelity to its doctrine, permitting no deviation from its beliefs. 78 And so the politics of the secular nation was imbued with a quasi-religious fervor and conviction. The United States had a mission to promote the global free market, the One True Economy, everywhere. It was not a religious message but one that nevertheless resonated strongly as such with Bush’s base of 100 million American evangelical Christians, who still subscribed to the vision of America as a “city on a hill.” The first three months of the war against Afghanistan, where Taliban gave sanctuary to al-Qaeda, seemed remarkably successful. The Taliban were defeated, al-Qaeda personnel scattered, and the United States established two large military bases, at Bagram and Kandahar.

• From My People (2022)

  When an alternative—not involving the community reconnaissance—was offered, Pie said: “The professor told me, ‘I understand your problem, but sometimes you have to go in the back door.’” Pie went on: “I blew my stack. Then I went to the head of the department and they finally found some Negroes for me in the county. One was a black school principal, who wouldn’t consent to the interview until I shaved my beard off.” Pie subsequently dropped out of the university. He said he “just couldn’t take it anymore.” “The thing about segs,” Bob Benham said to me later, “is that they’re a lot more sophisticated than they used to be when you were a student. Last year, for instance, I belonged to the Demosthenian Society, and I was elected to the office of custodian. It was my duty to procure things for the organization, open up, and so on. One of the members was Albert Saye, a political science professor and one of the most notorious segs around. He responded by proposing that the custodian be paid a salary of twenty dollars a quarter.” Bob says he’s given up “trying to get along with honkies.” Last summer, he, along with several of his classmates, served as an intern in the office of Governor Lester Maddox. He says he enjoyed it, but he doesn’t think he could do it again. “Time was, when a guy slipped and said ‘colored’ you’d consider it an accident and let him slide.” Benham said, “You excused it even when you showed up for class in a shirt and tie and they responded by saying, ‘Hi ya doin’, preacher?’ Or you’d try to study with them, and the first thing they’re talking about was sex and how they’d like a black woman. Then you realize that their attitude toward blacks is still that the majority of them are low-life, slimy dogs, and I’m the exception. Their Booker T.” Although the black students say that what is called a black studies program this year is what the school already had, plus two new courses, and that it doesn’t tell blacks anything they don’t already know, they are at least partially responsible for that much of a beginning. Also, they are responsible for the removal of the segregated bathroom signs. Penny Mickelbury, a striking dark-skinned girl from Atlanta with a Kathleen Cleaver–style Afro, said that she and “a group of the brothers and sisters” went into a university cafeteria “determined that those signs were going to come down.” They walked to the head of the food lines, she said, and simply refused to move. I marveled at the story, even up to this point, since this was a cafeteria frequented by many of the Bulldogs. In my day, Bulldogs were known for their pugnacious character.

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

  Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679) also saw state control of the church as essential to peace and wanted a strong monarch to take over the church and enforce religious unity. A committed royalist, he wrote his classic Leviathan (1651) in exile in Paris after the English Civil War. The disruptive forces of religion, Hobbes argued, must be curbed as effectively as God had subdued Leviathan, the biblical chaos-monster, to create an ordered universe. Hobbes was adamant that pointless squabbling about irrational dogmas had been entirely responsible for the Wars of Religion. Not everybody shared this view, however. In Commonwealth of Oceana (1656), the English political theorist James Harrington discussed the economic and legal issues that had contributed to these conflicts, but Hobbes would have none of it. The preachers alone, he insisted, had been “the cause of all our late mischief” by leading the people astray with “disreputable doctrines.” The Presbyterian divines, he believed, had been particularly culpable in stirring up unruly passions before the English Civil War and were “therefore guilty of all that fell.”113 Hobbes’s solution was to create an absolute state that would crush the tendency of human beings to cling obstinately to their own beliefs, which doomed them to perpetual warfare. Instead, they must learn to recognize the frailty of our grasp on truth, enter into a contractual relationship with one another, elect an absolute monarch, and accept his ideas as their own.114 This ruler would control the clergy in such a way as to prevent even the possibility of sectarian conflict.115 Alas, history would show that Hobbes’s solution was too simplistic; the states of Europe would continue to fight one another savagely, with or without sectarian strife. John Locke’s solution was religious freedom, since, in his view, the Wars of Religion had been caused by a fatal inability to entertain other points of view. “Religion,” he argued, was a “private search” and as such could not be policed by the government; in this personal quest, everyone must rely on “his own endeavours” rather than an external authority. To mingle “religion” and politics was a grievous, dangerous, and existential error: The church itself is a thing absolutely separate and distinct from the commonwealth. The boundaries on both sides are fixed and immoveable. He jumbles heaven and earth together, the things most remote and opposite, who mixes these two societies, which are in their original end, business, and in everything perfectly and infinitely different from each other.116

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

  The controversy had now become so general and critical, that it could be settled only by an ecumenical council. § 138. The Ecumenical Council of Ephesus, A.D. 431. The Compromise. For the Acts of the Council, see Mansi (tom. iv. fol. 567–1482, and a part of tom. v.), Harduin, and Fuchs, and an extended history of the council and the transactions connected with it in Walch, Schröckh, and Hefele (ii. pp. 162–271). We confine ourselves to the decisive points. Theodosius II., in connection with his Western colleague, Valentinian III., summoned a universal council on Pentecost, A.D. 431, at Ephesus, where the worship of the Virgin mother of God had taken the place of the worship of the light and life dispensing virgin Diana. This is the third of the ecumenical councils, and is held, therefore, by all churches, in high regard. But in moral character this council stands far beneath that of Nicaea or of the first council of Constantinople. An uncharitable, violent, and passionate Spirit ruled the transactions. The doctrinal result, also, was mainly only negative; that is to say, condemnation of Nestorianism. The positive and ecumenical character of the council was really secured only by the subsequent transactions, and the union of the dominant party of the council with the protesting minority of Oriental bishops.1581 Nestorius came first to Ephesus with sixteen bishops, and with an armed escort, as if he were going into battle. He had the imperial influence on his side, but the majority of the bishops and the prevailing voice of the people in Ephesus, and also in Constantinople, were against him. The emperor himself could not be present in person, but sent the captain of his body-guard, the comes Candidian. Cyril appeared with a numerous retinue of fifty Egyptian bishops, besides monks, parabolani, slaves, and seamen, under the banner of St. Mark and of the holy Mother of God. On his side was the archbishop Memnon of Ephesus, with forty of his Asiatic suffragans and twelve bishops from Pamphilia; and the clergy, the monks, and the people of Asia Minor were of the same sentiment. The pope of Rome—for the first time at an ecumenical council—was represented by two bishops and a priest, who held with Cyril, but did not mix in the debates, as they affected to judge between the contending parties, and thus maintain the papal authority. This deputation, however, did not come in at the beginning.1582 The patriarch John of Antioch, a friend of Nestorius, was detained on the long journey with his bishops.

• From My People (2022)

  Du Bois’s Souls of Black Folk , of Black Manhattan , by James Weldon Johnson, and of Fine Clothes to the Jew , by Langston Hughes; copies of Jet , Ebony , the Liberator , and Challenge ; and such paperbacks as My Arabic Alphabet Book , Negro Pioneers to Color , The Subterraneans , Pilgrim’s Progress , Cannery Row , Literature and Western Man , Ice Palace , The Spirit of St. Louis , and The H. P. Dream Book . The students also examined pictures of African leaders and distinguished Negroes, among which, for good measure, a picture of Dwight D. Eisenhower and a picture of Franklin D. Roosevelt were prominently displayed. One middle-aged female student, who was carrying a booklet titled A Manual of Intergroup Relations , called several of her classmates over to read a sign on one of the walls: “‘dope knows no color line / What I like about dope / Is that it plays no joke / It knows no color line / That’s why it’s color blind / It does not discriminate / Nor does it segregate’ . . . says Lewis Michaux, Executive Member, Human Rights Political Association.” Michaux, who was wearing slacks and a crisp light blue short-sleeved sports shirt, seemed for a while to be everywhere at once, but soon he went into his office, a tiny, overstuffed back room, and prepared to hold court. He opened a copy of Edmund David Cronon’s Black Moses , the story of Marcus Garvey and the Universal Negro Improvement Association, to a dog-eared page that contained a quotation from Garvey: “A race without authority and power is a race without respect.” Then he called the students into his office. “I’m sorry to say that I’m dissatisfied with this group today, because I don’t see enough black power,” Michaux began with a chuckle. “The black folks and the white folks are fighting every hour about the black man wanting power, but we’ve been neglected for three hundred years, and as much as I hate to see what’s going to happen, I believe that when the Negro knocks this time and nobody opens the door, he’s just going to knock it right in.” He had stopped smiling, and his voice had risen in pitch. He turned to a book that he had marked, and read a few sentences by a white Southerner who, writing at the turn of the century, had used the Scriptures to justify slavery. This book described the Negro as a beast (“not an offspring of the Adamic Family”), and Michaux asserted that many white fathers and mothers still read such books to their children. “That’s why we go to Vietnam and fight and die for this country, and then we’re brought back in caskets and can’t even be buried right,” he said, getting up momentarily from his chair.

• From My People (2022)

  Surely the economic assistance the United States has provided Ethiopia in the past and the $350 million in assistance it is asking for in 2013 gives it some weight in pressing Addis Ababa to live up to the same principles enshrined in their constitution as in ours? Freedom of speech is a crucial cornerstone of democracy. It should not be a death sentence. New Party Urged for World BlacksThe New York Times SEPTEMBER 5, 1970 ATLANTA, Sept. 4—More than 1,700 delegates to the International Congress of African People here were urged to create a World African party. The proposal, on the second day of the four-day parley, was made by Imamu Baraka, the poet playwright, widely known as LeRoi Jones. The suggestion was greeted with enthusiasm by the conferees, for the most part youths, who represent a broad spectrum of black thought both in this country and in predominantly black countries abroad. Many delegates here hailed the key role that Mr. Jones played in the election of Newark’s first black mayor, Kenneth A. Gibson. The slightly built bearded Mr. Jones has emerged, along with Haywood Henry, as a key strategist in this quiet, orderly conference that is attempting to bridge the gap between black and Third World people. There are delegates here from twenty-seven African countries, the Caribbean nations, four South American countries, and Australia. Some of those from the United States include members of the Nation of Islam, and the Urban League. Mr. Henry, the principal organizer of this meeting, is a twenty- seven-year-old lecturer in black studies at both Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “We are controlled largely by the ideas of our oppressors,” Mr. Jones said in one of eleven workshop sessions being conducted throughout the conference. “The political party must build alternative systems, values, institutions that will move us and raise us. How we build alternative forms is what this congress is about.” Mr. Jones suggested that local community organizing would be the base for creating and developing “an international Pan-Africanist party capable of dealing not only with the international problems of Africans by means of international alliances and international exchanges of information and resources but also a party able to function on the smallest level. “If you can’t organize in a two-block area in your community,” he asked, “what can you do to defeat Nixon?” He urged “getting into the homes of the black people, every day, organizing from strictly local to regional, to state, while the Congress of African People superstructure works to create the national and international cohesion and development.” In addition, Mr. Jones argued that the organization must also “run candidates in all elections.” He maintained that local people respond more readily to “the goods and services that can accrue from even the smallest political office,” than other more esthetic appeals.