Abolishing Anger: A Christian Proposal

Abstract

In recent years, advocates of (so-called) righteous anger have become increasingly vocal and articulate, as is evident from a growing literature defending anger as a moral emotion and tool for social change. Righteous anger has defenders both among secular philosophers—notably Myisha Cherry in her The Case for Rage and Failures of Forgiveness—and Christian theologians and activists, particularly, though by no means only, those drawing inspiration from Thomas Aquinas’s Aristotelian defense of anger. As a Christian theologian writing in the first instance for other Christians, I will argue in what follows that permissive attitudes to anger—even of the “righteous” sort—are fundamentally mistaken, not least because they are inconsistent with the universal obligation to love one’s neighbor as oneself. Christians instead ought to take something approaching an abolitionist approach to anger, as an emotion intrinsically opposed to charity. We can see this most clearly by beginning with the faults of a qualified defense of anger, which I reconstruct from Cherry’s work, and from the work of Thomas Aquinas, whose views on anger are interestingly convergent with hers. (This pairing has at least two advantages: it highlights the essentially traditional character of Cherry’s approach, and illustrates how relatively untutored Aquinas’s Aristotelian treatment of anger is by distinctively theological commitments.) I then sketch and defend the view, with a particular reliance on the Sermon on the Mount, that we ought to seek to abolish anger from our lives and defend that position against three apparent defeaters drawn from the Christian Scriptures.