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	Anger and Christian Virtue By Rod Dreher Beliefnet July 20, 2009 http://blog.beliefnet.com/crunchycon/2009/07/anger-and-christian-virtue.html The other day I spoke on the phone to an Orthodox monk in connection with my Templeton project. We got to talking about martial arts, and he said he didn't think it was appropriate for Orthodox Christians to engage in them, because to the extent they involve fighting, they call up the passions, which Orthodoxy teaches we are supposed to overcome on the way to holiness. This is a vexing point to me. It makes no sense to me that we are supposed to drain ourselves of all anger, under every circumstance. What was Jesus doing when he overturned the moneychangers' booths in the temple? He was angry, and he was expressing anger. But he did so when confronted with evil. This evidence from the Gospel indicates that anger is not always a disordered emotion, and in fact it is quite natural and appropriate under certain circumstances. That emotion can be used for good or for evil; that it is such a powerful emotion, so easily turned to destruction, should be a warning for us. But is anger always and everywhere bad for Christians? I cannot think so. My Catholic friend Leon Podles writes in the new Touchstone about anger as an aid to virtue. Here he speaks to something that drove me to despair as a Catholic: Any institution tends to preserve itself by avoiding conflict, whether external or internal. In addition to this universal tendency, many Christians have a false understanding of the nature and role of anger. It is seen as something negative, something that a Christian should not feel. In the sexual abuse cases in the Catholic Church, those who dealt with the bishops have consistently remarked that the bishops never expressed outrage or righteous anger, even at the most horrendous cases of abuse and sacrilege. Bishops seem to think that anger at sin is un-Christian. Gilbert Kilman, a child psychiatrist, commented, "What amazes me is the lack of outrage the church feels when its good work is being harmed. So, if there is anything the church needs to know, it needs to know how to be outraged." Mark Serrano confronted Bishop Frank Rodimer, asking why he had let his priest-friend Peter Osinski sleep with boys at Rodimer's beach house while Rodimer was in the next bedroom: "Where is your moral indignation?" Rodimer's answer was, "Then I don't get it. What do you want?" What Serrano wanted Rodimer to do was to behave like a man with a heart, a heart that is outraged by evil. But Rodimer couldn't; his inability to feel outrage was a quality that had helped make him a bishop. He would never get into fights, never rock the boat, never "divide" but only "unify." Rodimer could not understand why he should feel deep anger at evil, at the violation of the innocent, at the oppression of the weak. Emotional Deformation The emotions that are now suppressed are hatred and anger. Christians think that they ought not to feel these emotions, that it is un-Christian to feel them. They secretly suspect that Jesus was being un-Christian in his attitude to the scribes and Pharisees when he was angry at them, that he was un-Christian when he drove the moneychangers out of the temple or declared that millstones (not vacations in treatment centers) were the way to treat child abusers. Conrad Baars noticed this emotional deformation in the clergy in the mid-twentieth century. He recognized that there had been distortions in "traditional" Catholic spirituality. It had become too focused upon individual acts rather than on growth in virtue; it had emphasized sheer naked strength of will. In forgetting that growth in virtue was the goal of the Christian's moral life, it forgot that the emotions, all emotions, including anger and hate, are part of human nature and must be integrated into a virtuous life. Baars had been imprisoned by the Nazis. He knew iniquity firsthand and that there was something wrong with those who did not hate it: A little reflection will make it clear that there is a big difference between the person who knows solely that something is evil and ought to be opposed, and the one who in addition also feels hate for that evil, is angry that it is corrupting or harming his fellow-men, and feels aroused to combat it courageously and vigorously. As Lee avers, there is something morally deformed about bishops, and anyone else, who sees the sexual abuse of children, who has the capacity to stop it, or at least fight it, and who does nothing. Further, there is something morally insane about calling this cowardice virtue. Lee goes on to explain why meekness is not the same thing as passivity. Anger is a difficult thing. As I've written many times before, I became undone by my anger over the sexual abuse scandal, because I didn't know how to handle it. Yet I do not regret my anger; it was the only sane response to this degrading evil perpetuated by churchmen, with the passive support of other churchmen. Still, there had to have been a better way to handle it. Lee, who remains a Roman Catholic, wrote "Sacrilege," a scathing, sulfuric book about the scandal, one that does not pull punches in discussing in detail what abusive priests did to their victims. I have not been able to read the whole thing, because it's too raw for me. I mean to say, the facts Lee reports, and the narratives he uncovered, call up old demons of wrath, ones I know I cannot control and channel productively, and which will consume me. Remember that scene in "The Lord of the Rings" trilogy, when Pippin looked into the Palantir, and it nearly fried his mind? At the risk of sounding melodramatic, that's what "Sacrilege" was like for me, given my experience. But that is my problem. "Sacrilege" is so powerful -- overwhelmingly so -- because it offers "too much reality." Prof. Dan Cere wrote in a review of "Sacrilege": I have encountered a number of devout and orthodox Catholics who have struggled with Sacrilege. They find it deeply disturbing. They are tempted to turn their eyes from it. Sacrilege is a book that goes beyond description, beyond narrative, beyond theory. Just as Gibson's Passion was an icon of the malignant brutality of sin crucifying innocence, Sacrilege is another "stomach-turning" revelation of the vicious malignancy of sin. Sacrilege stirs the same response. Shock, horror, a desire to turn away. And most of us have, in various ways, turned our faces away from this malignancy ... some of us have fled. In some ways Sacrilege hits closer to home than Gibson's Passion. The innocent victims were children in our midst. Those who have brutally crucified them were trusted leaders, "our" shepherds. The authorities who dutifully washed their hands were our bishops. The complacent and approving crowd was the laity ... the crowd was us. And Sacrilege does reveal a malaise within the laity. The laity should be the first line of protection for children. But, we have not been the moral gatekeepers for our children, we have not been protecting them. We have been the crowd, standing aside, retreating, not wanting to see, refusing to intervene. In the end, I don't think I can fully trust a Christian -- clergy, monastic of lay -- who categorically rejects anger. I understand the impulse, and if one wishes to embrace radical nonviolence, to the point of suffering and dying rather than permit anger of any sort to take hold in one's soul, then I can respect that, if not approve of or understand it. But when you have responsibility for others, especially children, to excise the ability to feel anger within oneself is to leave oneself dangerously disarmed -- and to put those for whom you are spiritually and otherwise responsible at unjust risk. Learning how to deal with anger as a Christian is an extremely difficult task. How does one love the sinner but hate the sin, when doing so requires not just rearranging one's emotions and subjective thoughts, but action against the evil? How can you muster the wherewithal to resist evil effectively if you have not first experience anger in its face? Even the nonviolent resisters to evil (e.g., the King-led civil rights protesters) have to have felt initial anger at the evils of segregation before choosing to respond to it peaceably, and to absorb for a higher goal the hatred and violence turned on them. They didn't passively accept the evil in their society; they acted against it, but in a non-violent way. That's genius, and indeed holy. But had they been taught to accept without protest the evil in their society, and told it was Christian virtue, how would evil ever have been resisted? It seems to me that saying it must always and everywhere be refused at the (as distinct from transformed) is not the answer, and in fact opens the door to more evil. Being free from the passion of anger, properly understood, means not refusing it, but rather ordering it rightly, and not being mastered by it. Your thoughts?
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